OAK LAWN, ILLINOIS, June 7–The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) once again joined forces with several community organizations tonight to protest at the monthly Oak Lawn Police & Fire Board meeting. We are keeping firm in our demand that the three KKKops who beat Arab teenager Hadi Abuatelah be fired and prosecuted for their vicious assault which resulted in his hospitalization and lingering trauma. One kkkop, Patrick O’Donnell, has been indicted, but we demand all three be fired and prosecuted for this racist attack.  

Under capitalism, racist kkkops are the rule, not the exception. Their role within class society is to harass and intimidate, especially Black and brown workers and youth. They also are tasked with protecting the bosses’ private property. In order to get rid of the police, we must destroy the capitalist system that profits by keeping workers oppressed through unemployment, low wages, and systemic racism and sexism. We need to build a multiracial, revolutionary movement that fights for communism, a worker’s state. And to do all this, we need a mass PLP!

Justice for Hadi, justice for all workers
We are nearing the one-year anniversary of Hadi’s beating (see CHALLENGE, 8/5/22). At the last board meeting, protesters marched out when anti-racist fighters were kicked out by the kkkops. We chanted loudly that we will continue fighting for justice and expose the cozy relationship between the Police Board and the kkkops. Many community members related stories of how the Oak Lawn kkkops have for years targeted Arab workers in the area, particularly workers and families from Palestine.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
At the end of the rally, a comrade grabbed the attention of more than thirty protesters with a rousing speech. He linked the mass antiracist movement sparked by the police murder of George Floyd with the current struggle for justice in Oak Lawn. He said capitalism and racist kkkops go together, and that’s why we need a communist revolution. Everyone was invited to the upcoming PLP summer activities, and several people gave us their contact information to follow-up.

We are pushing to remain consistent in our efforts to fight for justice for Hadi and all other victims of racist police terror and capitalist oppression. We are also working to connect with other plans to protest outside the courthouse where child assaulter O’Donnell is facing charges. With every action that we take part in, we are fighting to win more workers and youth to the need to build the communist movement that connects all these struggles to capitalism and the need to destroy this rotten profit system!

Toxic air plagued much of the U.S. in early June as wildfires raged throughout Canada. On June 6, New York City experienced the worst pollution on record, beyond the “emergency” level set by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly four times the level considered “unhealthy.”. Hypocritical calls by liberal misleaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams, to “stay home if you can'' were too little too late, as smoke darkened orange-hued skies. Most workers couldn’t heed Adams’ call, since no work means no pay–and the capitalist bosses weren’t about to lose profits to protect workers. Black and Latin workers in the poorest neighborhoods suffered the most as the choking air caused emergency room visits to soar, especially for those with asthma and other respiratory illnesses (Gothamist, 6/12). The dirty air crisis piled on the already poisonous effects of living under capitalism.

While wildfire smoke is unusual for New York, breathing toxic air is the everyday norm for much of the world’s working class. South Asia has nine of the world’s ten cities with the worst air and “persistently hazardous” pollution that causes an estimated two million premature deaths a year” (New York Times,, 6/15). Capitalism wreaks devastation on the working class every day. From non-stop deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to the proposed bulldozing of a forest in Atlanta to build a $90 million facility to train more killer kkkops,  the rulers keep spreading the horrors of their toxic system. We cannot rely on a ruling class that kills us daily. We can’t trust our children’s future to the profit-mad monsters who caused  climate change in the first place. Only communism, a system run to serve workers’’ needs, not the profit of a few, can change the conditions that lead to so much death and disease for the international working class!

Capitalist drive for profits = wildfires
“Wildfires” aren’t  the natural disasters that the term might imply. Although lightning was the primary cause of the recent Canadian conflagrations, many of the burning trees were not in natural forests. Much of the devastated acreage was in industrial tree farms. Timber companies cut down forests that had been there for hundreds of years to “make space for commercial tree varieties and eliminate competition”(Earth Island Journal, 4/8/19). As usual, the drive for maximum profits led to the planting of profitable but “less fire-tolerant tree species, [making] it easier for fires to spread” (BBC, 6/12). Rising temperatures worldwide due to the burning of fossil fuels lead to drier conditions, making wildfires more frequent and intense...which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause even more global warming.

Protecting the health of the environment and humanity will never be society’s goal until capitalism is destroyed. Under communism, there would be no need to put workers’ lives in such danger. Without money and the drive for profit, all decisions–including environmental decisions–made would be based on the needs of the international working class.

Environmental racism is part of life under capitalism
The smoke that blanketed New York didn't spare wealthy neighborhoods. But like most environmental disasters, the most exploited workers in already neglected neighborhoods are hurt the most. The harm from smoke comes from  tiny solid and liquid particles that are inhaled and trigger respiratory illnesses or worsen existing conditions. With already higher-than-average asthma rates, Black and Latin workers are among the most vulnerable to the hazardous impacts of the smoke. This, too, is not a natural occurrence.

Racist segregation, a criminal abomination created by the capitalist ruling class,  has forced Black and Latin workers to live in neighborhoods cut through by highways and packed with industrial plants. “[B]lack and Hispanic communities in the U.S. are exposed to far more air pollution” and “neighborhoods once shaped by discriminatory housing policies…have more pavement, fewer trees and higher average temperatures — a combination that can lead to deadly heat illness” (Washington Post, June 2020).

During the wildfire crisis, the highest rates of emergency room visits related to asthma were in these areas (Gizmodo, 6/16). Historically Black and Latin neighborhoods–such as New York’s South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley”– have the highest rates of death and disease from asthma in the country. In New York, 80 percent of the people hospitalized with asthma are Black and Latin workers (Columbia University). Capitalism was already killing these workers! This smoke only made things worse.

Capitalism won’t solve climate change
Liberal misleaders like Adams and President Joe Biden would have us think that climate change denial is a new phenomenon pushed by a conservative fringe. But it was oil giant ExxonMobil, a bulwark of mainstream finance capital, that hired the scientists in the 1970s who found that fossil fuels were dangerous, and then paid them to hide their findings and misinform the public. They “were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks” (Scientific American, 10/26/15).

With Canada in the spotlight, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s hypocrisy stands out. In June 2019, Canada declared a national climate emergency. “The next day, it approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion… to move almost 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the port of Burnaby” (mronline.org, 6/23). The bosses’ promises at United Nations climate conferences to cut carbon dioxide emissions mean next to nothing.

As oil profits soar, in large part due to the war in Ukraine, trillions of dollars are being invested worldwide in fossil fuel infrastructure (NYT, 4/6). These plans are making a mockery of the UN’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, never mind their members’  “commitment” at the Paris Agreement in 2015. “Temperature rises over 2 degrees could bring catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts, including pushing three billion people into chronic water scarcity” (CNN, 1/30). As the world’s imperialist superpowers ramp up to the next world war, they will keep doing whatever it takes to protect their profits and power.

Under Biden, laughably called the “first climate president,” oil production has increased to record levels. In March,  “the Biden administration approved a massive drilling project in Alaska that could generate the same carbon emissions each year as adding two million gas-powered cars to the roads” (Smithsonian Magazine, 3/22). This Willow Project praised by oil execs is supposed to “secure energy independence” from Russia–the capitalists’ code for sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.  

The liberal bosses calling for the Green New Deal, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, or other UN climate goals continue to pose them as solutions to the capitalist-created climate crisis. But global bosses have no real plan to “save the planet.””. Their master plan is to prepare for world war. As of 2019, the U.S. military was “the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world” (The Guardian, 11/21). Capitalism can never combat climate change.

Burn down capitalism with communist revolution
Communism is the only system that can! In a system run by and for the working class, the profit-driven causes of climate change will wither away. Unfortunately, the damage caused by capitalism won’t be undone overnight. But we will reorganize the way we work and the way we power our world. We will organize to protect the working class by moving workers away from vulnerable coastlines, increasing green spaces, and converting to clean energy sources. When “natural” disasters strike, our priority will be to save and protect lives. Join Progressive Labor Party and organize for communist revolution to build that world!

The vicious racketeering and collusion charges, carrying up to a 12-year sentence, leveled by the Joe Biden administration against abortion rights organizers illustrates how the liberal ruling class is the greater danger to the working class. The antisexists’ crime? Spray painting.

The profit system requires maximum profit at all times. Workers are the ultimate source of profit. Every commodity is produced by a producer. Women workers produce the producers of everything. So, the need to produce workers to be bullet sponges is the context wherein we should understand the rising attacks on our working-class siblings and reproductive rights.

Ruling class in crisis
The first context is the 2007 financial crisis where the subprime mortgage collapse was the final straw. The ruling class bailed themselves out. Like in the Great Depression, the lowest birth rates were hit when the crisis of capital was in full tilt in the mid 1930’s. The key difference being that there was an international communist movement that had taken state power in the Soviet Union facilitating a powerful CPUSA (Communist Party USA) who was organizing among the working class. The New Deal was a direct response to the Red ‘30’s. So, this brings up the question of leadership.

Pacifism is a dangerous ideology to the working class. When one is silent, it makes the bully perpetuating the violence feel that they can continue on with it. The liberal ruling class and their state continues to attack working-class women, as well as undocumented and Black workers. They want us to be passive as groups actively attack workers stocking shelves with Pride merchandise.

The ruling class would like for the working class to believe that these parallels to Berlin in 1933 should be handled by them, because history shows us exactly how a liberal government handles growing fascist movements, so we know we need our own Progressive Labor Party (PLP)-led Red Army to smash them once and for all.

Unfortunately, history also shows us that fascism can be decisively defeated by communists with great sacrifice and still not lead to an egalitarian society, so we need to fight for revolution and not reform.

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) postulates that “Policymakers in some advanced economies will need to tackle this trend [of a declining birthrate] and find ways to encourage women to have children. For example, increasing access to affordable and high-quality childcare, family-friendly labor laws, and tax policies” (IMF Blog, 11/13/18) and/or by actively rescinding abortion and reproductive healthcare.

Reproduction and childrearing, a collective responsibility
Under communism, Marx said that “sensuous human discourse” (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) would be the primary aspect of reproduction. In other words, we would learn how to actively work together to produce what we all need, with children being the responsibility of the whole of society. Instead of any of the identities that are so important to the modern liberal movements, we would struggle to allow for human beings to be who they actually are and love who they choose since there would be plenty of nurturing to go around. The whole human race would be a whole human family.

When the working class takes hold of ideas, they can then turn them into reality. It is the power of the working class being held in the prison of capitalist ideology that allows for the profit system to continue. When the Florida Attorney General points out that she is attacking Antifa and Jane’s Revenge, what she is really worried about is exactly what the Biden big bosses are afraid of, too, and that’s a communist organization being able to actively coordinate and lead attacks on the fascists, and, ultimately, on the bourgeoisie themselves to take hold of the means of production.We need the working class to wake up to the need for communist revolution. This requires patient organizing in mass organizations with the intent of building a mass international Party whose breadth balances being a secret to the bosses while being seen as the bulwark to the working class.

CHICAGO, IL, June 7—“Ummm, it looks like there’s a room full of people behind you?”  The head boss of the local health system sounded surprised and nervous when they saw the numerous supporters who came to the online meeting with U.S. kidney leaders. Getting rid of racist kidney lab tests had proven to be no easy task!

This meeting was supposed to be just the two leaders of our antiracism group and U.S. kidney leadership to explain the struggle in medicine to change decades of racism in biology. The head boss was not expecting us to bring the whole group! We had to show that the number of people determined to remove biologic racism from medicine was large and ready to act outside the usual standards of academia and business.

A brief history of biologic racism
Capitalism and racism go hand in hand, and at this stage of capitalism are so intertwined that it is impossible to imagine one existing without the other. Because the economic benefits of slavery were so great, the U.S. ruling class (especially slave owners) created and codified the idea of race and racism into laws. As historian Lerone Bennett describes in The Road Not Taken (link), the development of racism in the U.S. can be traced through laws deliberately created to separate and control workers. He notes that when Black and white workers united in an uprising against their masters in 1676 in Virginia (Bacon’s rebellion), the laws separating workers by race were dramatically strengthened. To justify their brutal system, they couldn’t tell the truth: “we need free labor to become rich and it is easy to identify the enslaved workers by the color of their skin.”  Racist thinking thus permeated every facet of life including the science of medicine.

And so biologic racism was born. The ideas that there are biologic or genetic differences between races, and that the white race is superior, are lies. Biologic racism was used to justify slavery. Thomas Jefferson said that Black workers had “a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus.” This falsehood was used to justify slavery because such forced labor was a way to “vitalize the blood” of supposedly deficient Black workers.

The false idea of biologic racial differences persists despite the fact that the human genome studies show that there are more genetic similarities between racial categories than differences. Antiracist doctors and other health workers including Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are leading struggles against this biologic racism.

The fight against biologic racism in kidney tests
A PLP member developed a lecture on biologic racism for her coworkers and students. The ensuing discussions led to a proposal to get their hospital to remove race from analyzing laboratory tests for kidney disease. The Covid-19 pandemic put everything on pause--until the George Floyd uprisings by workers against his murder by the kkkops! The ripple effect of militant antiracist struggle moved people at the hospital to form a multiracial antiracism committee that was led by the PLP member.

Race has been included as a component of kidney testing in the United States since 1999. The data to support such inclusion was weak and the biologic claim to support the idea—that Black people have more muscle mass—is racist. Still, this is the way that kidney function has been calculated for over two decades and has resulted in Black patients being diagnosed with kidney disease later than whites and judged not eligible for transplant until they were sicker than their white counterparts.

The PLP member guaranteed that the meetings of this antiracist committee would be more collective than usual staff meetings. Every meeting began with a discussion of an article so that the team built a common base of knowledge. They struggled together to come to mutual understanding and agreement so that all committee members could give leadership to the campaign. The team wrote a paper on removing race from kidney tests, gathered signatures in support, gave lectures on the topic, and emailed their coworkers and friends. By the time this group had started collecting signatures, we knew more about how and why race was included in kidney testing than many kidney specialists!

The local hospital committee voted in support of removing race from kidney function, but this decision was then scrapped by kidney specialists who disagreed and/or wanted to wait for national kidney organizations to okay such a change. The hospital leadership called for a meeting with the two chairs of the committee. Secretly we organized to make sure every member of our antiracist committee and coworkers would attend this meeting. When the camera was turned on at the beginning of the meeting to show 20 people in attendance, the bosses were not happy. When they tried to steer the meeting to the topics they wanted to discuss, we did not let the meeting proceed until our questions were answered. We had to be bold and confrontational backed by our 20 committee members. This meeting was a turning point. It showed the strength we had in numbers and our commitment to this change. When the national guidelines changed to be race-neutral one month later, our hospital was one of the first to apply them due to the work we had done.

Throughout this struggle, the PLP member challenged coworkers to understand the connection between racism and capitalism. There were many times the committee was tested by external forces and internal struggles, but PLP training in prior struggles helped advance this antiracist struggle. The antiracism committee is still fighting today and has gone on to succeed in removing race from lung testing, which previously has kept Black mine workers from getting compensation for Black Lung disease.

The fight continues but needs to be broadened and sharpened
The embedded nature of racism in healthcare will not be eliminated by making every medical test race-neutral. The structural racism built into capitalism to keep the working class divided and weakened is a much larger contributor to worse health outcomes for Black and brown workers. White workers suffer because a working class divided by race cannot fight back effectively for the health and health care they need.

The only way to end structural racism is to destroy capitalism. The billionaire bosses will never give up their wealth to create an equal society. They use structural racism and state violence to grow and maintain their wealth by any means necessary. We need to build a mass communist movement to lead a revolution to seize state power, also by any means necessary. Through communist revolution, we can end the structural racism and poverty that keeps the working class sick. Join PLP!