EL SALVADOR, December 16— More than one hundred women working for Florenzi Industries are occupying the building of this business in Soyapango, in the San Salvador industrial area. These workers took  direct action, occupying their workplace since July 2020 when Florenzi closed its doors due to Covid-19.  owner, Sergio Pineda, refused to pay the workers for four months of labor, including benefits and vacation time.
On March 18 President Bukele ordered the shutdown of 152 maquilas for four months. Pineda, the capitalist and owner of Florenzi Industries, took advantage of the presidential decree to close the factory without paying about $500,000 dollars that he owes the workers. Even worse, he did not pay for the forced confinement due to the pandemic. On the contrary, he used the pandemic as an excuse to declare bankruptcy, while offering the workers compensation of an old sewing machine with an approximate value of $100.00 dollars. Of the 209 workers 97 of them accepted what they were offered, which covered only a minimum of what Pineda owes these workers. Since then, 113 workers decided to face the brutal challenges of Covid-19 and the lack of employment that forces them to go hungry and die.
These workers are experiencing capitalism’s cruel exploitation. The capitalists have stolen all the wealth created by the workers through all the years of long hours of labor, and now they are facing unemployment. The international working-class exposed to these persistent experiences, need a new social and economic system. That’s communism where all the wealth created by the working-class is used to satisfy the working-class and their families’ needs, not to enrich the parasite capitalists such as Sergio Pineda, who is part of the El Salvador government oligarchy.
Florenzi Industries is one of the 152 maquilas operating in El Salvador after the civil war. These factories are distributed in 17 free zones, free of taxation and employ 56,000 workers. The majority are women who are paid the minimum salary with little or no benefits.These brave women demanded from the legislative assembly an immediate solution to the problem. Instead the assembly ordered the labor department to resolve it, but the labor minister claimed not to have the legal tools to resolve the issue, relegating the responsibility to the courts. The workers protested asking for the immediate firing of the labor minister, Rolando Castro, accusing him of protecting the boss. During the protest the workers stopped traffic to put  pressure on the government, yet the corporate media was silent because it is part of and serves the elite capitalists. In August, men in police uniforms tried entering the Florenzi Industries building trying to get the equipment and materials without succeeding.
The workers have learned that government institutions are capitalist servants. Their fight is “against the neoliberal capitalist” where “the poor sew what the rich wear”. The historic international working-class experience has taught us that capitalism of any kind, neoliberal, national or imperialist is a dead end for the workers. Therefore, what the working-class needs is to fight for communism.
In a New York Times article about labor abuses in El Salvador in 2001, Steven Greenhouse exposed the most inhuman abuses against the workers. They included no ventilation, poor hygiene, long working hours, forced overtime, and frequent layoffs, especially targeting those who want to organize, or support a union. Under these precarious circumstances of slave wages the apparel industry in El Salvador, just in the year 2000, exported 1.6 billion dollars of production to the U.S.
From the 1.6 billion produced by the workers, less than 10 percent is for the workers while the factory owners keep more than 90 percent of what workers produce.  This is how the workers in the maquilas become victims of international capitalist exploitation.
The majority of the maquila workforce are women who are faced with labor exploitation, gender exploitation, very low salaries, the worse labor conditions, constant sexual harassment and sexual abuse, and unpaid work at home. It is no coincidence that feminist groups are unifying in the fight with the workers.
It is important to acknowledge the international working-class historic experience of women and men fighting together for communism, particularly in Russia and China. They mobilized millions of peasant and city women workers; they made gigantic and significant progress in social, labor, economic and gender equality.
The Progressive Labor Party fights for communist equality, gender equality and against the racial discrimination of the international working-class. We are in solidarity with the Florenzi industry workers.

MEXICO, December 16—In Mexico, like the rest of the world, the coronavirus has exposed the weakness and chaos of capitalism. Officially 1.3 million people have been infected and 130,000 have died. Unofficial reporting has the numbers up to three times higher.  This health crisis shows the inability of the capitalist system to meet the needs of the working class. The wealthy have been weathering the storm in relative security while the working class has been dying. Clearly it is not Covid-19, but capitalism that is the biggest threat. The government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), like the rest of the capitalists, are paralyzed by the system they rule over. Only a communist society will provide the kind of care the working-class needs. Simply feeding people so they could stay home instead of working would have saved countless lives and stopped the spread of the disease. Instead paralysis and confusion has been the response of the ruling class.
The Mexican ruling class has followed the pattern of the rest of capitalism by putting business first and having the poorest go to work. As Covid-19 inevitably spread, the AMLO government has been reduced to placing all the blame on previous governments for dismantling the healthcare system. While healthcare has been devastated over the last 20 years, the current government has failed to take any forceful action to contain the disease and protect the working class. Instead it has preferred to allocate resources to megaprojects around the country while blaming people who “leave their homes” for the spread of the virus, knowing full well that 50 percent of the population lives in the informal economy and has no choice but to leave their homes to work.
Liberal Mexican bosses leave working class to die
AMLO's response is indistinguishable from the conservative governments he claims to fight. The AMLO government's health cabinet committed criminal negligence by not providing sufficient and adequate quality protective equipment on time to health workers fighting the pandemic. Protests and complaints have not stopped since the first cases. Millions of workers in Mexico live day to day; if they do not work, they do not eat and for them there is no support. The factories, maquilas and small workshops continued their activities and in those places there were outbreaks and deaths of many workers. All the industrial zones of the country continue as hot spots of infection and deaths.
The development of a vaccine is further exposing the chaos of capitalism. While the wealthy imperialist countries are struggling to build the infrastructure to get the vaccine produced, distributed and given to the population, Mexico, like most of the countries that have been gutted by the big imperialists over the last century, are struggling to buy just a minimal amount of the vaccine (Aristegui 12/11). The government announced the pre-purchase of enough to vaccinate at most 17.2 million people, between December 2020 and December 2021 in a country of 130 million.
Health under the capitalist system is a commodity. The competition to have a vaccine for Covid-19 will translate into huge profits for pharmaceutical companies and geopolitical rearrangements for the imperialist countries they represent. Technological advances in medicine are focused on obtaining maximum profits, which is why thousands of workers still die from diseases for which there is treatment, but that they cannot buy. The working class has many of the underlying conditions that make them vulnerable to coronavirus, such as poor diet, unhealthy conditions, the lack of recreation or physical activity and of course, the lack of preventive health. All this is due to the need for capital to exploit the workforce to the maximum.
The epidemic is capitalism
Economically, the loss of almost a million jobs in the last nine months (elfinanciero.com), exacerbates the economic crisis. The most affected have been the 60 million workers who live off the informal trade, who lack social security and for whom staying home is unthinkable. Others seriously affected have been flexible or outsourcing workers who do not have regulated working conditions. This includes many health care workers, who face strenuous hours of work every day,and who  lack the materials and resources to attend to their patients. On the other hand, the workers who have been able to protect themselves by working from home, either virtually or by bringing home the materials for product assembly, are living in a hell of overexploitation. Many have tripled their work hours. They are pressured by their employers to be available at all times and to carry out many more tasks, under the assumption that they don’t have to travel to work. They are also continually attacked by their employers and accused of not working hard enough (Forbes, 6/30).
As a comrade teacher summed up well in one of the Progressive Labor Party's study circles in Mexico, two epidemics actually occur, one for the poor and one for the rich, one for the workers and one for the capitalists. Mexico is one of the countries with the greatest inequality in the world, so this difference cannot be hidden. In private hospitals between 5 and 15 percent of patients who are intubated die, but in a public hospital half or up to 8 of every 10 die. That criminal panorama cannot be changed by any politician like Lopez Obrador or the rightists of other parties like the PRI, PAN or PRD. It can only be achieved with a communist revolution that establishes a society with a health system based on the needs of the working class.

Huge portions of today’s protests (see editorial, page 2) have been dominated by red flags of the Indian Communist Party (CPI). But if communists of the 1940s had been able to win a communist future, the misery leading to the 2020 protests would not exist. Where did India’s communist movement go wrong?  
The question is of immediate concern. As workers across the globe continue to face lose-lose electoral choices like the 2020 U.S. presidential election there is a constant pressure to side with ‘lesser evil’ capitalists. A brief look at the history of the Indian Communist Party shows us the deadly error of seeking unity with any capitalists.
The 2020 farmers’ protest movement involves many older workers whose parents lived through the harrowing passage of the 1943-44 famine, a little-known holocaust wiping out three million Bengali workers and peasants engineered by British imperialism. Indian communists did not organize mass anger around the famine into a revolutionary movement for communism because, having been forced into war against the Nazis in 1940, even British imperialism, desperate to squeeze life from its colonies to the very end at the cost of Nazi-scale atrocity, was the “lesser evil” capitalist!  How could this be?
Failure of the united front strategy
In 1935, the world communist movement, based in the Soviet Union, adopted a strategic shift away from revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat to a “United Front” against fascism. In effect, this position offered a deal to capitalists – “if you unite with us to defeat Hitler, we promise not to organize a sharp class struggle leading to revolution.”
For the record, all the big liberal democratic imperialists rejected this deal because they preferred the deal offered by Hitler and the fascists – “invest in our growing fascist economy and look the other way as we expand and we will smash the Soviet Union.”
As it turns out, the fascists were the ones smashed in the war, smashed by the remnants of Soviet communism. After the war the Soviet-led communist movement did not break with the search for ‘lesser-evil’ capitalists to unite with (The Chinese communists were a bit better on this for a time and in the early 1960s Progressive Labor Party was born from U.S. communists following Chinese leadership who split away from the Soviet-affiliated Communist Party USA).
Another bankrupt strategy
In the case of India, after the war ended and independence was won India’s communists pursued the bankrupt strategy of leading a “peaceful transition to socialism” which mired them in electoral politics.
Through the Cold War there was a split in the Indian ruling class: some elements were content to continue the semi-feudal arrangements of exploitation dating back to the era of British imperialism while another element was seeking to cut out British capitalists.
They saw a “comprador bourgeoisie” who continued to serve the interests of British imperialism and a “national bourgeoisie” that was more committed to keeping the profits squeezed from the labor of desi workers and peasants in the hands of Indian capitalists, with minimal land reforms to placate the masses. It is those land reforms that are under attack today.
The tens of millions of workers on the subcontinent who have cast votes for Communist Party candidates since the 1950s have been dragged into the doomed quest to find some “progressive” portion of the bourgeoisie with which to ally.
This strategy leads, always, back to the monstrous disregard for the lives of workers that has been at the core of the capitalist social order since its birth in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. Workers, and especially communists, must remain completely clear-eyed on this matter.
In this connection the old adage of the Scorpion and the Frog is worth keeping in mind:

A scorpion, which cannot swim, asks a frog to carry it across a river on the frog's back. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion argues that if it did that, they would both drown. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion.
Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both.
The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature

The working class of India, of the larger subcontinent, and of the world needs an armed struggle for communist revolution. There is no peaceful transition of power or a lesser evil set of bosses. The Progressive Labor Party strives to build a mass international communist party. Join us.

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Old communist movement fell for “lesser evil” politics
By 1951, the politics of the Communist Party of India (CPI) led them to make a fatal error in its analysis of splits within the Indian ruling class.
The CPI asserted that the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was led a "[g]overnment of landlords and princes and the reactionary big bourgeoisie collaborating with the British imperialists" (Wikipedia). Yet, they saw a national bourgeoisie that could play a progressive role in Indian politics. The strategy of the CPI became one of fighting for leadership of trade unions and mass organizations and winning public office with the aim of influencing the Congress Party and unifying with the national bourgeoisie for a stronger state-controlled economy. (The Congress Party is the same party that the pedophile and anti-Black racist Mahatma Gandhi belonged to.)
The arrangements protecting small farmers under attack today date from land reform policies that date to this era of higher communist influence. By 1953, the path of legal struggle over armed struggle had won out.
Soviet influence was toward legal orientation, Chinese influence was toward armed/peasant struggle orientation. In 1956, the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union settled on the “peaceful transition to socialism” as its main strategy. One right faction of the CPI saw Nehru as anti-imperialist and independent while the left faction of the CPI saw him as a defender of old feudal interests.

PAKISTAN, December 16—High inflation of wheat and sugar; low wages and factory closures. The working class has been forced into the streets, chanting against the brutal capitalist system which is producing poverty, unemployment, nationalism, and other horrors. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is spreading class-consciousness among workers associated with different trade union organizations, government employees’ organizations, student unions, and more. We are striving to bring communist politics in practice.
Economy spirals into chaos
Pakistan’s economy is dependent upon the financial support of lending mafias and capitalist monetary institutions. Under prime minister Imran Khan, the economy is crashing. It has nothing to deliver except unemployment, starvation, chaos, political instability and social destruction to the working class masses. Capitalist bosses are hungry of profit, so they are making the lives of the working class more miserable by increasing prices of basic commodities. Right-wing capitalists, mafias and corporations financed the election campaign of the ruling party and are now extracting more than what they spent during the last elections in 2018. They are super-exploiting the working class.
Recently we were involved in a struggle to unite different trade unions and groups of working class people against all aspects of capitalist exploitation—unemployment, low wages, price hikes, poverty, and workplace harassment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dictated policies. Thousands of workers across more than 61 labor organizations and trade unions united under the umbrella of the All Pakistan Employees, Labor and Pensioners Movement (APELPM).
This APELPM brought thousands of workers to Islamabad, the federal capital of Pakistan.  Participants in this demonstration protested against the capitalist bosses’ vicious policies. The protest is a message to the bosses that workers are united. However, the protests in Islamabad have set a new precedent in the history of the country in terms of worker’s joint struggle. Last time such overwhelming workers unity was demonstrated in 1968-69.
Protesters sat in front of the Parliament House, while chanting, “No To IMF, Long Live the Workers’ Union, Go Imran Go.” They were demanding raises in their salaries in proportion to the recent price-hike due inflation. Active and retired workers were angry that the government failed to raise salaries and pensions for government employees in the current fiscal budget presented in June 2020.
Police used water cannons, batons, tear gas shells, cruelty and other fascist tactics to stop the working class from demonstrating in front of the Parliament house. But after a vigorous face-to-face fight with police, workers defeated the police. Bosses used all their power to empty the area from demonstrating workers but failed. Finally the government decided to sign an agreement with the demonstrators. They accepted the demands and begged the protesters to vacate the area. Next, the workers need to move beyond economist demands and join the political fight for the whole working class’s liberation.
A system in crisis makes workers pay the price
Workers cannot get medicines for themselves or their families from hospitals. They cannot afford to send their children to schools, so they send them to work as beggars or to work at automobile workshops, restaurants or bakeries, earning very little. All the subsidies on wheat, flour and some other basic items have been withdrawn by the government. This makes basic items that used to be subsidized beyond the reach of many working class people.
So-called leftists here in Pakistan, and also all over the world, are afraid of talking about communist revolution. These so-called progressives are using terms like nationalism, secularism, democracy, equality, and to some extent socialism, but never communism. They are hiding the truth that only a communist society can serve humanity. But we in PLP are talking about communism, the creation of a society and the need of an international revolution led by the international communist Progressive Labor Party.
PLP is consistently and enthusiastically participating in different activities of working class people wherever we are active. We are bringing revolutionary communist ideas to workers around us to challenge the bosses and their capitalist system. We always try to play an active political role while organizing sit-ins, strikes, protests and rallies.
We are not hiding the truth that only an international communist revolution under the red banner of PLP can bring prosperity and peace to the lives of the working class.
We emphasized that the bosses are making agreements just to get demonstrators out of this sensitive area. They may give some reforms to the workers to avoid their struggle in the near future, but it’s very true that the working class cannot achieve their goals of equality, justice and prosperity under capitalism. We must establish a communist society through an international communist revolution under the leadership of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Join us.