It was interesting to hear about healthcare rationing in California and other states overwhelmed by Covid-19 infected patients. I was a respiratory therapist for over 40 years, and I recall healthcare rationing hospitals serving mostly Black & Latin communities on the south and west sides of Chicago for decades.
The main ways rationing is practiced in these working-class neighborhood hospitals is through lack of staff and supplies. In a large medical and trauma center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where most of the patients are white, there were two respiratory therapists in the emergency room (E.R.), 24 hours a day.  In one of the busiest trauma centers in Chicago, on the west side, a therapist would be assigned to cover one or two patient floors, in addition to the emergency room.
Many times, we were busy giving care on the patient floors, when we would have to stop and scurry to the emergency room for a trauma emergency. The patients on the regular floors were short-changed in their care, because we would be unable to be in two places at the same time. On many occasions, treatments could not be given because we were occupied attending to patients in the E.R. Still, in other instances, patients in the E.R. would be waiting for treatment while we attended to patients on the regular floors or other seriously ill patients in the E.R.
Lack of equipment was also a common problem. Many times I had to look for necessary equipment, like a flowmeter, used to deliver oxygen, or other equipment and supplies to set-up a ventilator used to help patients breathe.
The short staffing was not restricted to patient floors and the E.R.  I’ll never forget the night I had to take care of 11  patients who were all on ventilators in the intensive care unit. We had to keep track of our productivity during the 12-hour shift. On that night my productivity was over 20  hours, and this form of speed-up was not unusual.  They stopped requiring us to track our productivity when it was obvious that all too often, we did more than 12 hours worth of work, and it became the basis for  complaints.
The hospital’s deliberate short staffing and lack of equipment serving mostly Black and Latin communities is racist health care. It leads to unsafe working conditions and substandard care or rationing. On the west side of Chicago, life expectancy is 69 years, while six miles away downtown, life expectancy is 85 years. This gap is a result of capitalist oppression of all workers, but especially of Black & Latin workers. Capitalists worship money and profits above workers’ health, and systemic racism is their number one weapon to keep workers divided and keep society unequal.
We fought back with a petition that over 60  people signed, demanding more staff and better equipment. We were forced to use devices that were obsolete (spare parts were not being made for some breathing machines). The hospital bosses started a witch hunt to find the organizers of the petition. Instead being intimidated, many workers spoke up about the racist working conditions. We got more staff and new equipment, but like most reform victories under this system, it didn’t last long.  When workers left, they would not be replaced, and the equipment was not maintained by management.
Rotten healthcare is bad for patients and hospital workers. The Covid-19 pandemic further  exposes capitalism’s public health failures and gross racist inequities. Black workers make up 30 percent of the population in Chicago, but 72 percent of the reported Covid-19 cases.  Black workers are seven times more likely to contract and die from the virus than other workers living in the same city. Structural and systemic racism kills.
We must fight back and build the Progressive Labor Party, because only communism can ensure a healthy future for our class.

No vaccine for the virus of capitalism
I read this article “Fighting Covid-19 with vaccines and communism” in the Dec 28, 2020 issue of CHALLENGE and discussed it with Progressive Labor Party healthcare workers in Chicago. I thought it was a good article but wanted to add some additional points.  
Public health issues require a comprehensive response. The vaccine is just one piece of a larger response, but it is being promoted as the only solution to the pandemic. This isn’t by accident.  This framing of the vaccine as the only savior is purposeful to absolve the ruling class of responsibility. The government would rather frame the solution as a vaccine because it desperately wants to avoid getting to the root of the issue.  
The inadequate public health infrastructure, poverty, racism, and capitalism all play a role in the pandemic. Workers will continue to be vulnerable to another pandemic if these issues aren’t tackled. As the vaccine rolls out, the government and the bosses’ media will praise the scientists but will also expand their praise to include capitalism. They’ll try to claim that the free market has brought us the vaccine and saved us all. However, it was always capitalism that pushed the spread of Covid-19 by forcing people to work, gutting public services, and providing no safe alternatives to workers.  
The state wants to limit the response to the pandemic to the narrowest terms possible.  It wants to avoid giving people a stimulus, increasing spending on social services, mortgage/rent freezes, letting people out of prison, housing the homeless, etc.  By only focusing on the vaccine, they get to avoid any responsibility in addressing these other issues. The effects of Covid-19 have touched every aspect of our lives and will continue to do so. Workers have lost jobs, been kicked out of their homes, and found themselves in a much more precarious situation because of the pandemic. A vaccine won’t make up for lost time. Workers who have to bear the brunt of this pandemic may spend years trying to lift themselves back up even though they bear no responsibility for the inadequacies of the state. We should all be happy that there is a vaccine coming, but we can’t let it become the sole focus of addressing the pandemic.  
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Working-class women gave leadership alongside Marx & Engels
I would like to add a few points to the recent article in CHALLENGE on Friedrich Engels' bicentennial.
Mary Burns, Engels' companion for 20  years until her death, was an Irish factory worker in Manchester who helped Engels research his 1845 book, The Condition of The Working Class in England, a brilliant expose of the terrible working and living conditions of the city’s many factory workers. (Because of awful pollution and high infant mortality, the life expectancy for people born in Manchester was half that of those born in the nearby countryside.)
It’s true, as the article says, that Engels did considerable reading for the book, but Mary Burns was his essential link to the lives of workers and their families, especially to Irish workers, who were the most exploited workers in England. It’s doubtful that Engels’ book would have been as powerful as it was without his being able to tour the working class slums and talk with people who lived there, with Mary as his guide.
Mary Burns died at the age of 41, probably of stomach cancer. Engels then lived for the next 15 years with Mary’s sister, Lizzie, who he married on her deathbed. Engels said of Lizzie:
My wife was a real child of the Irish proletariat and her passionate devotion to the class in which she was born was worth much more to me – and helped me more in times of stress – than all the elegance of an educated, artistic middle-class bluestocking.
All the women in the families of Marx and Engels were politically active: Marx's wife Jenny and his three daughters Eleanor, Jenny, and Laura. Eleanor Marx, for instance, translated her father’s books, co-wrote a book on the Paris Commune, and became a leader of the Socialist League.
A couple of years ago, the movie The Young Karl Marx came out. I watched it with a couple of friends who knew a lot about that history. We thought it was a very good movie. It covered the period from a little before Marx and Engels met until the completion of The Communist Manifesto. It shows their relationships with their loved ones and friends and their intense involvement in the working class struggles of the period. It has high production values and very good acting. I thought the film was accurate, politically instructive and fun! I highly recommend
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Christmas a capitalist invention
Christmas is a religious holiday in which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25. It comes from the Latin nativitas, nativa les, which means birth. In 1903, the academic F. G Kitton, stated in a writing that Charles Dickens was the one who really invented Christmas in 1843, and that he attracted the aristocracy and the middle class to that holiday.
Originally, the day is about pagan festivals that commemorated the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. But in general after several generations it has become a culture for almost everyone meaning abundance, prosperity, fraternity, and solidarity.
In reality this is far from the truth. On the contrary, because capitalism is in crisis, the poorest workers cannot afford their ornaments, lights, gifts and tree. Although billions can barely eat for some years the Christmas fervor has grown stronger, and as early as November in many homes the ritual begins. The media at the service of the capitalists are in charge of rooting on this phenomenon and incite the workers to consume, and thereby the racist capitalist system has been able to profit by billions of dollars every year.
And it is that in the absence of class consciousness and a method of dialectical analysis that allows for analyzing phenomena, the working class will continue to be easy prey for any lie disguised as truth like this one.
It is up to the PLP to make every effort to clarify the truth of this phenomenon, extending dialectical materialism to our fellow workers as a tool of analysis so that we better understand this farce.

 The weakness of the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class was on full display as Donald Trump’s terror militia invaded the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and temporarily blocked the U.S. Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. As armed pro-Trump racists trashed offices and congressional leaders cowered under their seats, the entire world witnessed the decay and disarray of U.S. finance capital, the ruthless imperialist gang that not so long ago sat atop the globe. 

As anyone who has marched in D.C. knows first-hand, anti-racist protesters would have been gassed, bludgeoned, and shot long before getting inside the heart of the bosses’ law-making apparatus. But in this case, the Capitol Police, a federal agency, passively watched the chaos unfold. The Trumpers had openly planned their violence for weeks on domestic terrorist websites; Trump himself incited them at a nearby rally before the attack. Yet the police presence at what the rulers call “a sacred civic space” was nearly invisible. The vicious split between finance capital and the Fortress America capitalists (the ones fronted by Trump) has disrupted and exposed the rulers’ most cherished institutions, from their killer kkkops to their dead-end electoral circus. 

For the liberal bosses, the debacle is a case of chickens coming home to roost. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the finance capitalists used racist dog whistles to mislead white workers while blaming Black workers for the profit system’s racist inequalities. The resulting white grievance movement was seized upon by small fascists like the Koch and DeVos families, and subsequently mobilized by Trump into his personal base. 

While no one knows how this will play out, what’s clear is that we are entering volatile, unchartered territory. Will the institutional collapse spiral? Will the main wing bosses enact fascist measures to regain their grip? Will they accelerate their drive toward global war against arch-rival capitalists in China? As a class and a communist party, we must understand both the danger and opportunity of this period. The danger is that a fear of these small-time terrorists will drive some workers into the arms of the biggest terrorists of all, the state terrorist gang to be led by Biden. The opportunity is to build a mass revolutionary communist movement to destroy capitalism once and for all. Join Progressive Labor Party!

On December 20, in suburban Indiana, Dr. Susan Moore, a Black woman, died of racism after doctors dismissed and refused to treat her Covid-19 symptoms and severe pain. Meanwhile, in South Africa, a factory is producing millions of doses of lifesaving vaccines for the U.S. and other wealthy nations in Europe, but none for the poor Black people who work and live there—and who have been hit harder by the pandemic than in any other country on the continent. With racism and exploitation as its lifeblood, this capitalist profit system infects and sickens everything it touches. Progressive Labor Party calls for workers to vaccinate our class against the contagion of capitalism with the only medicine that really works: communist revolution (see box below). Build the fight to build a need-based and collective system! Join Progressive Labor Party!
Capitali$t healthcare: pay or die
Because big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer are driven by their need for maximum profit, they won’t suspend “intellectual property rights” to their vaccine. As a result, “most people in low-income countries will be waiting until 2024 for Covid-19 vaccinations if high-income countries keep engaging in what some are calling “vaccinationalism” (Duke Global Health Institute, 11/9/20).
After centuries of looting workers in Africa, Asia, and South America, the imperialist countries have cleared the shelves. “Over half (51%) of the doses reserved will go to high-income countries, despite the fact those countries only represent 14% of the world’s population” (Forbes, 12/15/20).
In falling-in-a-frenzy powers like the U.S., vaccines have been trapped in a muck of anti-scientific skepticism, money-mad competition, and individualism. The bosses’ allergy to science reflects broader capitalist decay. Finance capital, the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class, is using the vaccine to attempt to buy back workers’ trust in its failing institutions—a must as they prepare for global war against China and perhaps Russia.
Medical apartheid, global scale
The international working class is justifiably mistrustful of medical science. There is a long racist history of Black, Latin, and Asian workers being forced or coerced into dangerous mistreatment. White workers are also hurt because racism weakens the health of the entire working class:
•    Jamaica, 1760s: British doctor John Quier experimented with smallpox inoculations (a precursor to vaccines) on 850 enslaved people, including pregnant women and sick infants.
•    Alabama, U.S., 1830s: Enslaver J. Marion Sims, “father of gynecology,” operated on enslaved women without anesthesia. He shared the racist belief that Black people didn’t experience pain like white people, a myth that infects doctors to this day (The Washington Post, 7/11/2020)—as Susan Moore attested before they killed her.
•    Namibia, 1900s: In line with his call to ban “mixed marriages,” Eugen Fischer sterilized the descendants of European-born fathers and Black mothers. He later joined the German Nazi party and performed medical atrocities in the fascist death camps.
•    Alabama, U.S., 1930-1970s: In the infamous Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis, 600 Black men were left to sicken and die, even after a cure was found.
•    Puerto Rico and Massachusetts, 1950s:During a period of eugenicist legislation and forced sterilization, two Harvard professors tested a birth control pill in the slums of Puerto Rico and asylums in Massachusetts. Women’s uteruses were sliced to “understand the drug’s effect on ovulation” (The Crimson, 9/28/17).
•    Côte d’Ivoire and Thailand, 1990s: HIV treatment was withheld from men, women, and newborns.
•    India, 2005-2017: Nearly 5,000 mainly low-caste workers died in drug trials and research (The National, 9/17/18).
Covid-19 has once again exposed medical racism. It’s no accident that deaths are highest among Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous, undocumented, imprisoned, indigenous, and poor workers. They are the most vulnerable to exposure and infection from racist inequalities in healthcare, jobs, housing, and food quality. Because of capitalism, they are the most likely to have underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease.
Ruling-class chaos breeds skepticism
Under outgoing Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump, anti-scientists seized control of nearly every corner of U.S. policy, from the environment to public health. But the main wing finance capitalists also bear responsibility for many workers’ lack of confidence in the new vaccines. Chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci initially cautioned against wearing masks—an outright lie to cover for the bosses’ shortage of protective equipment—before calling for their mass use. Before endorsing the vaccine, President-elect Joe Biden initially sounded warnings against it as politically motivated and rushed to benefit Trump (NYT, 9/16/20).
The latest polls say that more than a quarter of the U.S. population remains hesitant to get the vaccine. Skepticism is highest among Republicans at 42 percent, followed by Black adults at 35 percent (KFF.org), though these numbers may be decreasing as more people get vaccinated. From the data we have so far (see box below), it seems clear that the vaccine is safe and effective—if only because the capitalist bosses need a healthy working class to stem their economy’s hemorrhaging of billions of dollars. Ultimately, the U.S. empire is at stake.
Collectivity over individualism, science over subjectivity
The Kaiser Family Foundation poll also monitored workers’ attitudes toward collectivity. Half of those questioned believe that getting vaccinated is “part of everyone’s responsibility to protect the health of others.” But the other half believe it is “a personal choice.” This is the virus of individualism, the mythology of capitalist “freedom” that acts against workers’ own interests. The collective comes first. Our decisions must be based on the needs of the entire working class.
For communists and their friends and comrades, it is necessary to educate ourselves on how vaccines work and why they are crucial to the well-being of our class. Just as we approach strikes and reform struggles as schools for communism, we must fight for the health of our working-class brothers and sisters while exposing the rulers’ racism and profiteering.
As long as we live in a capitalist system, pandemics are inevitable. But herd immunity is a step toward communism. Workers must be healthy and fit to battle against the racist and sexist atrocities to come. We must fight for a communist revolution that will make workers’ collective health primary.

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The mRNA Covid-19 vaccine explained

The Progressive Labor Party hails the development of vaccines and urges workers to take what is demonstrating to be a safe and effective shot against Covid-19.
Unfortunately, the racist, profit-driven capitalist medical system heightens our fears and mistrust even when scientists get it right. In fact, research on mRNA (short for messenger RNA) vaccines began in the early 1990s. Scientists have tested these vaccines in both animals and people for SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and rabies (Harvard Health Publishing, 12/10/2020). The Covid-19 vaccine is not the result of speedy experiments.
In a nutshell, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines mimic a part of the surface of the Covid-19 virus called the spike. A harmless fragment of viral spike proteins primes our immune system to attack and ward off the disease in the event of exposure. There is no virus in the vaccine. Together, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines tested nearly 30,000 people. They’ve demonstrated 95 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19, with virtually no serious side effects aside from a few cases of rare and treatable allergies. For a video explaining how the vaccine works, go to www.tinyurl.com/asapsciencecovid    
The subjects in clinical trials have been mainly white men; only 5 percent are Black (Healthline, 8/9/20). In fact, community outreach groups have reached out to Black volunteers to make the study more inclusive and representative of the population. Fighting for equitable research is part of the antiracist fight.
Since Covid-19 has had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latin workers, from death rates to unemployment, they should have priority for vaccination. Fighting for equitable distribution is also part of the antiracist fight.
Judging from the long history of vaccines, long-term ill effects are unlikely. Local reactions at the injection site are common. Fatigue and fever are more common after the second dose. Most people experience sore arms and little or nothing more.
No medication is 100 percent safe. But with 82 million Covid-19 cases and over 1.8 million confirmed deaths worldwide (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 12/30/20), the vaccines’ benefits far outweigh their risks.