How I use CHALLENGE
I’m an immigrant worker from Mexico living in the United States. I have been a member of the Progressive Labor Party for some years. I joined because I learned how to fight back together with the Party. PLP is like family.
For me, it’s important to read and circulate DESAFIO-CHALLENGE. You can learn the communist analysis about what is happening in the world from Brooklyn to Mexico to Colombia. Every issue, I circulate 25 papers to my close friends and family. They ask me questions when they visit me in my home. The rest, I give to people in my laundromat or in the street.
Recently, my sons and family visited me for my birthday. When my nine year old grandson saw CHALLENGE he said, “wow! What is PLP?”
I said, “It’s a communist Party.”
My nine and 14 year old grandsons asked me important questions like why the rich don’t pay taxes and why do they exploit the workers. My grandson said, “I’m reading about this [exploitation] with my father and I don’t like it!”
My PLP club plans to work with young workers and students. I want to ask my family to participate in the fightback. My grandsons agreed to join our study group with their mother. Their father can’t participate because he works six days a week, 12 hours a day.
If you are not reading CHALLENGE, I invite you to read it and join PLP.
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Anti-vaccination is anti-working class
Being anti-vaccination is an anti-working class position. It is also racist since Black and Latin workers are contracting and dying from Covid-19 at higher rates.Since capitalism values profits over workers’ health, there are over 130 countries that still don’t have access to the vaccine and others that only have limited access. It is important that everyone who is medically able to get the vaccine receives it promptly to help slow the spread and stop further, dangerous mutations.
Amid a pandemic, those who recognize that getting vaccinated isn’t a personal choice, but, actually, is a social responsibility to their fellow workers to keep the vulnerable from dying are serving the working class, whether it is conscious or not. This is an early form of political commitment that mirrors the adage “from each according to political commitment and to each according to need.”
The combination of the Big Fascists’ [see Glossary], represented by President Joe Biden, continued mismanagement of the pandemic and the Small Fascists’ gutter racist and anti-science propaganda are serving to divide the working class of the United States. Teachers and nurses who don’t want to get vaccinated because it is “my body, my choice,” — thereby belittling the very real struggle women have over their own means of production — are a danger to their students and patients, as well as their families and themselves.
The history of racist and sexist medical experiments worldwide rightly sows distrust in the medical establishment and the government. However, this vaccine hesitancy ultimately will cause our Black and Latin students and their families to suffer more. The bosses have their own reasons for wanting to get us to sacrifice for the social good, like protecting their profits and building for war, but we need to fight for workers to serve their own interests.
It is not “segregation” to quarantine potential disease carriers during a global pandemic! The Small Fascists want to weaken the terms that represent the brutality of racism that our class has felt for centuries. They want to silence us by turning a rational and scientific response to a deadly disease into a personal choice under the guise of freedom. Freedom is actually the understanding of necessity, so let’s do what needs to be done and help our friends develop a scientific worldview.
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ALL wealth is theft, value comes from labor power
It’s great to hear in the 8/4 issue of CHALLENGE that the Newark summer project discussed political economy and how capitalism is built on the theft of workers’ wealth, but let’s be clear: the end game for the working class is not higher wages or a shorter workday. The article stated that “the labor and pay that an employee receives is not an equal transaction because most of [that worker’s] workday is free labor,” but Marx’s distinction between labor power and labor itself is missing here. Today’s capitalism is based on wage slavery, not chattel slavery, meaning we are all forced to sell our ability, not our actual bodies, to add value to the bosses’ tools in exchange for a wage. That exchange can never be fair or just; it is, by definition, an act of robbery.
Capitalist theft is reliant on one fundamental commodity above all others: workers’ labor power. In Das Kapital, Marx explained how, in capitalist markets, buyers and sellers exchange commodities of the same value by using money, another commodity, to facilitate exchange. Where does exchange value come from? The value of any commodity is equal to the amount of labor time required to produce it. Human labor-power, which is potential energy —our capacity for work–is sold to the capitalists by workers–commonly based on a set amount of time– in exchange for wages.
But wages are ALWAYS theft. Why? Our labor power changes the material that we work on. Workers therefore create value which is added to that material (provided by the capitalist). The value we add rises above the value of what we were promised for our labor-time. Bosses MUST pay us less than the value of our labor power or else they don’t profit. A waiter, an information tech specialist, a delivery person or a public transit worker, “participates” in a business where the collective output of the workers produces wealth for a specific boss or set of bosses who profit from that work. A teacher’s labor power is used to produce ideas that train the working class to stay in their place under capitalism. A soldier’s labor power is used by the capitalist class to protect its class interests in the field of war.
So why do we “agree” to sell our labor power, no matter the wage? If we don’t, we starve. Capitalism’s true freedom for the working person is the freedom to starve. The capitalist is free to decide what is done with our labor power, and in the process our class, as a whole, is enslaved into a series of jobs and tasks that ultimately serve the purpose of making the capitalist class wealthy rather than contributing to the social, political, economic and cultural progress of the human race and planet.
Even though workers no longer have our physical bodies bought and sold on the slave market (barring human trafficking), we must now reach the point in history where we use our labor power to smash this system rather than selling it to the bosses for a wage—any wage!
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Capitalism, a social disease
I was listening to news broadcasts about how “human induced” climate change was causing irreversible world damage and that the governors of Texas and Florida were banning masks for school children and advocating loss of pay for teachers who permit them. Then I tuned in to a radio talk show where a psychologist was describing that capitalism causes social mental diseases, describing Trump as a sociopath. The moderator asked for discussion of how capitalism relates to mental disease.
I called in and luckily got on to say, “We must realize that we are living in a capitalist world that creates people who are no longer human, because they put profits before people's lives.” I said that the discussion of the idea that capitalism causes social mental disease is correct and that a working class revolution for communist equality and collectivity was needed.
The real big lie is that capitalism masks itself as the champion of “democracy” and “human rights” to cover the fact that it is creating an environment that will accept the destruction of humanity for personal gain and privilege. This ‘what’s in it for me’ environment is destroying true world humanity.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombed to save U.S. Imperialism
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- 27 August 2021 107 hits
This August marks the 76th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.
The racist U.S. rulers launched this heinous attack as a political warning to the then-socialist Soviet Union, signaling U.S. imperialism’s launching of the Cold War. Capitalists will stop at nothing when their domination is at stake. This is the natural outcome of a system rooted in the violence of exploitation. The working class instead needs to build a world based on human need. For that, we need millions worldwide to organize under an international communist party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP,) to turn the next capitalist atrocity and war into a class war for communism.
The lies and the reality
For over seven decades, U.S. rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:
• According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
• A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled those numbers out of the air to justify the bombings” (LA Times, 8/5/2005).
• By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”
• General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II).
A genocide aimed at the USSR
If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped?
The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:
• With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “mastercard”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).
• In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Leo Szilard, creator of the the idea of a nuclear fission reactor said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”
The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time (see editorial, page 2). It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.
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‘Profiled’ screening: anti-police fightback raises class consciousness
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- 27 August 2021 86 hits
NEW YORK CITY, August 13—“Why do police killings, especially of Black and Latin youth, continue despite mass protests and uprisings? Is it even possible to stop these murders without also getting rid of the system of capitalism, which depends on racism to exist?” More specifically, capitalism needs racist cops. They enforce all the racist inequalities that capitalism needs from wage and income inequalities to mass incarceration. These were some of the ideas discussed by more than 70 people at a screening and discussion of the documentary film Profiled. The film tells the stories of families and friends of youth killed by police, and the multiracial struggles they continue to lead against these racist killings (See Page 8).
Come to “Hoops for Justice”
Two of the organizers featured in the film spoke at the screening about becoming antiracist fighters. One of the fighters, Natasha, was outraged by the way the media portrayed her sister Shantel Davis as a criminal when police dragged her out of her car and murdered her in 2013. She turned her anger into organizing the “Justice for Shantel” campaign, supported by growing ties and friendships with members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Natasha invited everyone to the 6th Annual “Hoops for Justice” 5-on-5 Basketball Tournament on Saturday, August 28, to fight racism and honor the legacy of Shantel and Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old Brooklyn youth also killed by police in 2013.
The other organizer said a key turning point in her understanding of why police killings continue to be rampant was when a PLP member introduced her to Lerone Bennett’s essay, “The Road Not Taken.” This essay outlines how the “race problem was a deliberate invention of plantation owners who systematically separated Blacks and whites in order to make money.” Plantation owners who enslaved Black workers passed laws to separate European, African, and Indigenous workers who intermarried, lived together and united to rebel against their common enemy. This was crucial to her being optimistic about the possibilities of defeating racism.
A lifelong struggle against racism
These stories demonstrate how developing personal ties with communists in PLP helps keep antiracist organizers positive even when the possibilities for change seem dim. Attending May Day marches, study groups and witnessing firsthand the dedication to the long term struggle against capitalism and racism points to a communist future where workers run society. Building these close personal ties while fighting racism was a key takeaway from this screening of Profiled. Racism is crucial to capitalism. In particular, cops are the racist thugs that protect the capitalists from rightfully angry workers.
During the several months of planning this screening of Profiled we made new friends who share our antiracist views. Organizers also reached out to high school and college teachers, including some in PLP who have been deeply involved in building ties with family members who are organizing antiracist campaigns against police violence. More than a dozen high school and college students participated in the discussion.
PLP, the real alternative
This event was organized primarily by members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party active within the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), a fake left organization whose leaders serves the main liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class. Thousands of primarily young people have joined DSA since the 2016 Presidential election because they want to see more progressive change, and saw no other alternative. But the capitalist ruling class and their bought-and-paid for politicians cannot and will not abolish the kkkops. The DSA promotes the circus of electoral politics and leads us into working within the capitalist system.
They helped to elect Joe ‘Jim Crow’ Biden president, calling him a “lesser evil” but he is in fact a greater evil. Biden, a longtime archracist in Washington, helped push then-President Bill Clinton’s crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of mainly Black workers. Now he’s trying to do a better job than Donald Trump to organize for war against China and Russia (see editorial, page 2). In other words, the DSA is part of growing fascism within the U.S.
These young people have another alternative—the communist PLP. Party members call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Let’s fight for communism where the working class rules. As we develop personal ties with people who want to fight racism, we find they are often open to communist ideas.
Since the Profiled screening, we are organizing to continue to raise the struggle. From the annual Hoops for Justice to fighting to to keep cops out of schools, these antiracist fightbacks help deepen our personal ties, as we build the Progressive Labor Party to fight for a communist world.
As Japan sets daily records for Covid-19 cases, the Tokyo Olympics is exposing an anti-worker system in crisis. The International Olympic Committee’s cynical new motto—“Faster, Higher, Stronger—Together”—can’t hide the vicious lies the capitalists use to keep workers loyal to “their” nation and “their” bosses. “National pride” is built to suppress class consciousness. In a period marked by a declining U.S.-led order and a rising China, imperialists need intensified nationalism to prepare the working class for world war.
Workers in Japan and everywhere need a society organized around the needs of the working class, not the exploitation of the many by the few. Join Progressive Labor Party to build one communist world!
Japan’s profit over workers’ needs
Once a poster child for an efficient capitalist democracy, Japan now reflects the decay of the U.S.-led liberal international order. In the wake of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, a trio of disasters all caused or made far worse by capitalism, the Tokyo Olympics were sold first as “The Recovery and Reconstruction Games” and then as a symbol of “peace.” The reality was something else: the eviction and displacement of 300 families (Washington Post, 7/29), a spike in Covid-19 cases, and steadily worsening conditions for local workers. Since 2013, when Japan was named the Olympic host, the city’s bosses have attacked homeless workers by locking and lighting up public spaces.
Tokyo is currently in its fourth state of emergency of the pandemic. While Japan boasts about its universal free healthcare, less than 13 percent of the country is fully vaccinated (CNBC News, 7/5). The unvaccinated include thousands of workers at an Olympics that cost $25 billion (AP News, 12/22/2020). A ruling class that spends billions on games and robs workers of their health does not deserve to exist.
The working class in Japan is not having it, with 83 percent against the Games (New York Times, 7/23). In fact, six of ten workers in the country rate the Japanese rulers’ response to the pandemic as poor, the most negative assessment of any nation (Pew Research Survey, 7/20).
Working-class rage is clear in Tokyo. Chants of “Go to Hell, Olympics!'' could be heard from inside the nearly empty opening ceremony (NY Post, 7/23). The week before, hundreds marched by the Olympics Village Plaza to the headquarters of the Tokyo Olympics Committee to denounce Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for gutting social services. A banner read, “Olympics Kill the Poor.” These protests contain the seeds of communist ideas to organize society around working-class health and needs. To make these ideas a reality, our class needs an international communist revolution.
Rich people’s games exploit workers
Capitalism has perverted the positive striving for physical health and fitness into a two-tiered system of winners and losers. It’s no coincidence that the top five winners of gold medals are among the wealthiest nations: China, the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Russia.
Before every imperialist world war, the capitalists set the course by revving up nationalism, racism, and sexism—all anti-worker ideologies promoted by the Olympic Games. Japan’s entrenched racism, from school policies to public harassment, cannot be hidden by their few Black Olympians (Washington Post, 7/31). China’s a win-at-all-costs policy takes thousands of children away from their families for gruelling training in government-run “sports schools” (Daily Mail, 5/19/16). The Chinese bosses’ world-leading pile of gold medals reflects their rise as an imperialist power now challenging the U.S.
Conditions for U.S. Olympians are no better. Children are funneled into intensive, specialized programs at a young age, leading to social isolation and psychological damage. Sexism is rampant, with women gymnasts starved into eating disorders and serial rapists enabled as coaches and—in at least one case—the team doctor.
The remarkable athletes on screen—pushed to perform amid a pandemic that has killed more than 4 million people worldwide and the surging Delta variant—are a sad reflection of the hollow promises of a capitalist system in crisis. Under the profit system, superstars are chewed up and spit out once they can no longer build TV ratings. Even the winners are losers.
As inter-imperialist competition intensifies, these Games are a prelude to a more lethal rivalry: the next global war. A U.S. Senate committee just approved a bill to require women to sign up for a draft (Military.com, 7/22).
Capitalist disregard for workers’ health
The capitalists’ dictatorship funds sports for a handful of athletes while ignoring the basic needs of billions of workers. For every Simone Biles, the U.S. superstar gymnast forced to choose between her own mental health and the pressure and rich rewards of winning gold, countless children are deprived of nutrition, physical activity, and basic healthcare.
Even before the pandemic, the bosses’ system denied access to essential health services to half the world's population (World Health Organization, 2017). The stark inequalities in health and fitness have nothing to do with individual failures. They’re caused by an abysmal healthcare system; a lack of facilities, infrastructure, transportation, and childcare; low wages, superexploitation, pathetic union benefits, budget cuts, and more. In a word, they’re caused by capitalism.
Athletics for all
Instead of competitive sports for a few, the dictatorship of the working class will have athletics for all. Progressive Labor Party organizes across five continents for communism, drawing inspiration from the first communist revolutions. In the Soviet Union, workers fought the “win at all costs” mentality by building fizkultura (physical culture). Every factory in every industry gave its workers access to physical education and activity. This was an integral part of Soviet life, an intentional way of rallying masses of workers to engage in social and political activity.
In the 1960s, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, leftist workers and students fought for mass participation in sports under the slogan, “Friendship first, competition second.” They emphasized the fundamental unity of our class over the temporary rivalry of competition.
But because these workers’ states failed to abolish all capitalist relations, anti-worker ideas crept back into every aspect of society, including sports. When the Soviet Union and China began making international competitions primary over mass athletic participation, their standards of health began to decline. The reversal of the old movement is illustrated by China’s and Russia's emphasis on Olympic medals and rivalries over workers’ wellbeing. When the working class settled for less, we lost in every way.
Physical culture for communism
Communists fight for a world where all workers can reach their full potential in body and mind. Where the capitalists hope that every worker waving a national flag is a potential soldier for imperialism, we have one world and one class: the international working class.
While the road to communism is a marathon, PL'ers and friends must respond with urgency by organizing for multiracial unity and internationalism. That's the spirit of communism, where “winning” for the working class means seizing state power and building a communist world. Fight for communism! Join PLP!
CHICAGO, July 21—Today, communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined organizations #FreedomForMohawk, #NoMore Foundation, and #DefundCPD for the spirited “From Mohawk, With Love” Anniversary Rally (see CHALLENGEs from 12/3/20). The event, which brought almost 40 people out, was created to highlight the struggles and triumphs of Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson in the first year since his arrest in August of 2020.
Workers, students, and community organizations banded together in a show of support and solidarity for Mohawk’s case, while sharing donated food, clothing, household items, and literature. Those of us in PLP helped set up tables and supplies, lead chants, give speeches and distribute over 200 copies of CHALLENGE newspaper.
Throughout the last year, we have helped organize within a citywide defense committee to maintain a militant presence in front of the Cook County jail and courthouse, a bedrock of the capitalist bosses’ racist and sexist legal system. But this time we opted for a change in tactics, taking the fight right to the office of Scott Waguespack, the alderman (city councilman) who represents the city ward where Mohawk currently lives.
Predictably, Waguespack has done nothing to assist in getting the charges against Mohawk dropped, despite our appeals. But given politicians’ role in maintaining this racist profit system that thrives off state terror and incarceration, this should come as no surprise.
The abolition of oppressive class structures and the liberation of the international working class necessitates mass revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the communist PLP. The fight to free Mohawk is intertwined with the broader fight to smash deportations and imperialism, in order to establish an egalitarian communist world.
Put capitalism in its grave, join PLP
During one of her many speeches given while leading the rally, Mohawk’s close friend and former roommate spelled the situation out clearly: “They (the bosses) are never gonna stop.” It’s true that we cannot have any illusions that we can appeal to the bosses’ “moral sensibilities;” their use of state terror against our class will only sharpen as capitalism spirals deeper into crisis.
That is why we must continue to stand with, not only Mohawk, but all of our fellow workers within the prison and court systems that continue to be tortured, abused, and murdered by the capitalist state. Mohawk has been on EHM this long because the courts want us to forget about him so they can just throw him in prison, but we will not let that happen.
We will rally in front of every alderman’s office, court house, and street corner until Mohawk’s charges are dropped. We are committed to fighting with our entire class against a racist capitalist system that can never serve our needs, and building the international Party that will one day put that system finally in its grave!
