May Day Means: Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution
a href="#Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth">Obam"’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth
a href="#When Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’">When"Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’
a href="#Can’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!">Can’" Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!
May Day Fight Exposes Pro-Boss Union Hacks
Ivan the Nazi Stays, BP Immigrant Workers Jailed
a href="#Spain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day">"pain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day
N.J. Gov. Using Crisis to Rob Workers of $500 Million
a href="#Linking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP">"inking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP
Campus Forum Attacks U.S. Escalation In Afghanistan
a href="#Imperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico">"mperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico
May Day in El Salvador:‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’
a href="#Immigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment">"mmigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment
Letters
Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation
a href="#More Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers">"ore Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers
Skycap Fights Frame-up, With PLP Support
Farmworkers Block Highway, Renewing 30-yr. Struggle
Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers
May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class
May Day Means:
Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution
As we celebrate May Day, the lives of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters worldwide hang by a thread on the decisions of imperialist butchers — including racist U.S. bosses and their politician servants like Obama — who have the power to decide who among us lives and who dies.
They have that power because their capitalist system rules the world. Capitalism is based on production for bosses’ profits, not workers’ needs. The bosses make profits only from workers’ labor. If they can’t sell profitably what is produced, they will destroy it or let it rot. Thus, every year they murder hundreds of millions of our class through starvation, diseases that can easily be prevented or cured, imperialist wars and other capitalist-created evils.
Hundreds of millions of workers worldwide are forced to migrate in search of an ever-more elusive job just to be super-exploited and hounded like criminals. Billions more, unable to migrate, are condemned to a life of brutal poverty and premature death.
Over 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S., plus their three million U.S.-born children, are hoping their dreams of legalization may come true at last. Tens of millions more in Latin America, Asia and Africa who depend for their livelihood on money sent by these workers must be harboring the same hopes and dreams.
But, in times of deep economic crisis, the bosses’ drive for maximum profits requires complete and total control — fascism — over workers intent on rebelling against the mass racist unemployment, and the wage and service cuts devastating their lives. And this drive for maximum profits pits the U.S. bosses, the top world imperialists, against the challenge of rising imperialists in China, Russia and Europe, all fighting each other to capture the planet’s resources and "right" to exploit billions of workers — a dogfight which inevitably leads to world war. These needs driving capitalism — not "humanitarian" concerns — are behind Obama’s DREAM Act and Comprehensive Immigration Reform bills.
World supremacy is decided on the battlefield and requires the fascism and the war economy outlined above. U.S. bosses will need millions to loyally slave in their war industries for low wages and tens of millions in their armed forces to fight and die for U.S. imperialism’s blood-soaked profits.
The proposed immigration bills mirror these U.S. bosses’ war needs. The DREAM Act, hailed as a bill to help undocumented youth, in fact will kindly "offer" a pool of over a million youth the "opportunity" of serving in the rulers’ military to shorten the "path to citizenship" — but more likely a path to the cemetery (see box).
The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill will create another pool of over 12 million undocumented workers to follow a torturous (and costly) path to legalization, at least a 12-year ordeal of slave-like working conditions in the bosses’ war industries. Deportation will always hang over their heads.
Capitalism is the bosses’ system built on racism which both nets them hundreds of billions in super-profits from the lower wages and benefits forced on black and Latino workers (which drag down conditions for ALL workers) while pitting these groups against each other to weaken any united fight-back against the attacks that oppress us all.
The latest wrinkle in this racist divisiveness, backed by the bosses’ lieutenants among black "leaders," is to blame mainly Latino immigrants for the unemployment among black workers — "they’re stealing ‘our’ jobs." But it’s the bosses’ profit system and its latest financial crisis/depression that is throwing millions of black (and white) workers into the streets and out of their homes, not their brother and sister immigrant workers who are also suffering the same attacks, besides fascist government raids and imprisonment. Many of these workers come with a long history of class struggle and can help the working class lead battles against the bosses.
Thus, the unity of the international working class under the leadership of a mass international Progressive Labor Party has never been more urgent. Only millions of students, workers and soldiers armed with our communist ideas can destroy this capitalist-imperialist inferno. Communism will abolish all borders and exploitation. It will use working-class state power to deal racism and sexism a death blow. It will eliminate the bosses, their wage system and money because production will be based on the needs of the international working class. Speed the bosses’ "path to extinction." Join PLP!
a name="Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth"></a>"bama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth
The Obama administration’s latest version of the "DREAM ACT" promises undocumented immigrant youth citizenship in exchange for fighting and dying in U.S. imperialism’s oil wars.
Re-introduced into Congress last month, the Act would grant citizenship if these undocumented youth had lived in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school and completed two years of either college or military service. But the Act does not change their ineligibility for government financial aid for college.
For most working-class immigrant youth, it’s far easier to join the military than to enter college, which is prohibitively expensive. So, in effect, it becomes a recruiting tool for the military. It fits right into Obama’s current aim to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has been a major backer of the DREAM ACT because it would provide 279,000 possible new recruits for the military (the brass is certainly not supporting it to send these youth to college). Furthermore, there are 715,000 additional youth between 5 and 17 who the military could get their hands on in the near future.
Supporters of the DREAM Act hide all this behind a "reform" label, but give undocumented immigrant youth who can’t afford college (the overwhelming majority) the "choice" of deportation or puts them on a path to the cemetery, while killing their brother and sister youth in imperialist war.
Mass Action is The Order of The Day
• Unite citizen and immigrant workers to stop the government raids, and the imprisonment and deportation of undocumented sister and brother workers;
• Organize strikes against layoffs; stop work if co-workers are being laid off;
• Stop foreclosures with a mass fight against evictions;
· Organize in the military to refuse orders to murder other workers;
• Establish union committees to unite those still working with the unemployed, led by rank-and-filers defying foot-dragging by sellout union leaders;
• Win local unions to organize marches on government buildings and mass demonstrations surrounding companies that announce future layoffs;
• Raise demands in unions, community groups, churches, schools and colleges to unite with workers in their areas to protest bosses’ attacks;
• Support striking workers in our areas, such as those at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx, NY and elsewhere, with funds and by joining picket lines;
• Organize students to participate in these actions and to support their parents who are either on strike, face layoffs or can mobilize their co-workers into action;
• Reach across all borders in solidarity with workers internationally who are facing these same attacks, especially auto workers who are in a unique position to unite against the auto bosses who have "globalized."
• Organize workers, soldiers, and youth everywhere to join Progressive Labor Party.
No doubt many rank-and-file workers will come up with additional ideas for action. Communists in PLP and their close friends will inject our red ideas into this struggle, to advance the need for communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven capitalist system that has thrived on unemployment, forcing workers to suffer the losses caused by the bosses’ crisis. These ideas can be spread effectively by the mass sale of CHALLENGE, the expansion of CHALLENGE networks and winning workers to subscribe to the paper.
Who Are the Real Pirates?
The support Obama has received while expanding military attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now killing teenage pirates in Somalia, highlights his value to U.S. rulers as they broaden their war machine’s existing theaters and open new ones. Obama, in his liberal guise, is able to "sell" patriotic militarism to a far broader audience than his predecessor ever could.
Obama’s deadly "humanitarian" rescue of the U.S. freighter captain furthers a U.S.-led NATO mission, begun in March, that makes the strategic Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa a war zone under the pretext of combating piracy. Pirates do indeed threaten commerce. But Obama and his masters’ main goal is to assert U.S. dominance of Mideast oil export routes against greater foes, especially China’s developing "blue-water" navy. The Maersk Alabama incident was a military operation from start to finish. The ship belongs to the Pentagon’s Military Sealift Command, having run thousands of tons of lethal supplies to Iraq. The ship’s officers, graduates of the U.S. Navy-affiliated Massachusetts Maritime academy, deliberately sailed into the pirates’ well-known range. The ship’s captain is the main trainer of anti-pirate tactics at the academy. A Navy destroyer just "happened" to be nearby. Obama’s high seas drama coincides with the Pentagon’s establishment of a new Africa Command, to safeguard U.S. interests — access to energy supplies in particular — throughout the continent.
The pirates of Somalia are being used to mask the real pirates, the big imperialist powers militarizing these waters. All kinds of warships, spy and combat planes, satellites from the U.S., France, Russia, China, India, Japan, the European Union and Spain have been sent there.
While Somalia’s population is of little interest to the major powers, the 1,900-mile-long waterways along Somalia’s shores have great geopolitical importance. Somalia, on the Horn of Africa, is separated from Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula by the Gulf of Aden. About 11% of the world’s seaborne petroleum passes through the Gulf to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
During the 1970s, U.S.-supported Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia waged war against Somalia, then ruled by pro-Soviet strongman Siad Barre. When Selassie was overthrown, and a pro-Soviet military junta seized power in Ethiopia, Barre switched sides and became pro-U.S., which then used the Somalian port of Berbera as a base for operations in the Persian Gulf.
When the Cold War ended, U.S. interest in Somalia waned. After Barre lost power, a civil war among different warlords ravaged the country. In 1992, Bush, Sr., invaded Somalia for "humanitarian reasons," leading to the famous "Blackhawk Down" incident, when a U.S. chopper was shot down after firing indiscriminately into a crowd in Somalia’s capital city. Once Clinton became president, he withdrew U.S. troops from the country.
Somalia had no central government and was ruled by different clans. Then Somalia’s waters became a dumping ground for nuclear toxic waste from Europe, destroying the livelihood of Somalia’s fishermen. This waste became dislodged and washed ashore during the massive tsunami in December 2004. Thousands of Somalis were poisoned.
It was then that local fishermen first began to seize ships they believed were dumping toxic waste. They began to chase away fishing trawlers. This was the beginning of the pirates who are seizing ships today and making millions. In 2006, the Ethiopian army, aided by the U.S., invaded Somalia to topple a pro-Islamist government which had actually stopped the piracy. After killing thousands, mostly innocent people, the Ethiopian army left, leaving the country in an even more chaotic situation.
So the little pirates are from a country where most of the population makes $2 a day and many are unemployed teenagers — like those killed by U.S. Navy Seals snipers — working for "pirate cartels." They’re small fishes compared to the huge imperialist navies, who are using this situation as a prelude to their big fight for control of the important oil routes from Somalia and along the entire Indian Ocean. These imperialists are the real big-time pirates who are fighting among each other to exploit and rob the labor and natural resources of workers in Africa, and have been for centuries.
Somehow the history they teach us does not define that as piracy.
a name="When Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’"></a>"hen Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’
Obama’s liberal aura also builds popular support for the U.S. rulers’ "surge" of 40,000 more troops into Afghanistan. A year ago, the New York Times could not have run the story they did this April 17, "Turning Tables, U.S. Troops Ambush Taliban With Swift and Lethal Results" without provoking an outcry against "warmaker Bush." But today, with Obama waging a "good war," the Times glorified a U.S. platoon that wiped out 13 unsuspecting insurgents. The Obama-worshipping Times saw fit to describe a "brave" U.S. sergeant stabbing a "cowardly" Taliban fighter in the eye. Obama, likewise, gets off scot free as he extends the conflict with civilian-slaughtering air raids into Pakistan.
a name="Can’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!"></a>"an’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!(From NY Times, April 6) "Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union…which helped get her out…after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments…. "In Georgia, poor people who cannot pay off fines — plus a monthly fee to the private company that collects the payments — are often being sent to jail for non-payment….In 2006, the [Southern Center for Human Rights] sued on behalf of a woman who was locked up in Atlanta for eight months…because she could not pay a $705 fine. "Until a few years ago, the police in Gulfport, Miss., regularly did sweeps of the city’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, identified people with unpaid fines and put them in jail. Defendants who could not pay were forced to remain there until they ‘sat off’ their fines. The city ended the practice after they were sued." |
May Day Fight Exposes Pro-Boss Union Hacks
SEATTLE, WA., April 13 — "It’s enough to make someone a revolutionary," concluded a comrade after the last union meeting. "You’re right!" agreed another Machinists’ union member who had just fought for our May Day resolution.
It called for "build[ing] the multi-racial, multi-national unity we so desperately need to answer the worsening attacks on working families" and outlined racist super-exploitation in low-cost aerospace subcontractors, noting that Boeing announced 10,000 layoffs. Joining with immigrant workers during their march on May 1 was a good first step in organizing against these attacks.
That very night the company revealed additional production cutbacks and more layoffs. "Boeing Forced To Park New Jets" [in the Arizona desert because airlines can’t pay for planes they ordered] screamed subsequent headlines. Still another reason why we need working-class unity to fight the bosses’ crisis!
The resolution was introduced at the Executive Board. They agreed to full discussion at the membership meeting. But just before the May Day resolution was to be introduced, the general meeting was abruptly adjourned without a word from the president who had supposedly agreed to this discussion. Some said it was set up; others were mad the leadership broke their word. Even some lower-lever union officers said, "It’s time they [the misleadership] got some balls."
What Are They So Afraid Of?
"It figures," most said back on the shop floor. Over time, with our help, dozens of these discussions raised the question, "What are they [the union misleadership] so afraid of?"
This question drew added weight after many read the CHALLENGE article on the Los Angeles teachers’ union resolution for a 1-day illegal strike on May Day. There the hacks counter-proposal was: a strike on any day in May, but May Day! (See CHALLENGE, 4/22)
The union movement was poisoned by business unionism with the anti-communist purges in the 1950s. Their heirs are dead set against a mass, militant fight-back that refuses to accept the losses for the bosses’ crisis. But class struggle is raging worldwide, and starting here, where the hacks want to control and divert it.
When Yugoslavia established free-market capitalism in the 1990s, it attacked workers mercilessly. Workers organized general strikes and mass demonstrations. Within a year, the bosses turned those struggles into "ethnic cleansing" and war because international, anti-racist class solidarity was sidetracked.
Even now mass actions in Europe play the divisive nationalist card: "French jobs for French workers;" "German jobs for German workers." (See CHALLENGE, 4/22). When Illinois steel workers began demonstrating against layoffs, the union diverted the campaign to "American jobs for American workers."
The sharpening crisis — threatening world wars — means we must strenuously advocate anti-racist, international class-consciousness. "Anything less means war," declared our friend who fought for the resolution. "Now I see why you [PLP] started this fight."
Is It Worth It?
This same friend complained his shop-mates didn’t understand the seriousness of the crisis. "They don’t believe this stuff," he said, a bit astonished. For him the crisis is real: his uncles work for GM and his daughter, a new schoolteacher, may be laid off anytime. Furthermore, he’s aware the bosses’ labor lieutenants are fiercely determined to halt any class-conscious, let alone revolutionary, pro-communist activity. All this raises the question, "Is the [hard] struggle for our politics worth it?"
Our friend’s greater understanding of the logic of revolution and the serious shop-floor discussion of CHALLENGE articles makes it worth it. Out of this struggle, some have bought tickets to our revolutionary communist May Day dinner and agreed to join the Party’s contingent in the immigrant workers’ march on May 1. Building our revolutionary communist forces amid this crisis is winning.
The crisis may press the pro-boss union leaders to fight us even harder, but opportunities to expand our base on the shop floor increase with every fight. Dare to struggle, dare to win! J
Stomping on Scab Cookies
I am a high school PL member in Brooklyn. For the past months I have heard about the Stella D’Oro workers on strike against the bosses’ racist acts towards them. My PL members and I have had many picket lines against the racist bosses. We went to a Stop & Shop supermarket and protested against them selling Stella D’Oro cookies. Doing this made me want to fight back even more. A couple of weeks after the picket line I went into a nearby supermarket where I lived and saw that they were selling Stella D’Oro cookies. Taking action I threw the Stella D’Oro cookies on the floor and began to stomp on them. Nearby a worker saw me doing this and asked me to stop but I didn’t and continued to do so. The manager then approached me and escorted me out of the store. After leaving the store I was proud of myself for taking action against the racist bosses. Taking this action shows that the workers can fight back against the bosses.
Cookie Smasher
Ivan the Nazi Stays, BP Immigrant Workers Jailed
I was outraged as I learned the news that Ivan the Terrible, the former Nazi prison guard responsible for 29,000 deaths at the Treblinka concentration camp, had been granted a stay of deportation. The story jumped out at me because of the work I’ve been doing with the British Petroleum (BP) refinery workers rounded up in an immigration raid a few months ago. My fury was only given more fire when later that same morning, these same BP workers were lured to the Federal Building in downtown Chicago. They were told they would either be getting work permits or having their ankle tethers removed. Instead they were arrested and charged with federal crimes.
The women, all mothers, were then jailed in Hammond, IN, held for hours in a freezing cell, frightened and unaware of what was happening. They have already been arraigned on immigration charges and are awaiting hearings over the summer and early next year.
I rushed to make arrangements for their children to be picked up from school, and was devastated as one school official reported that she was going to suggest the child be turned over to the State. Luckily, while on the phone with her, I learned that the women had been released on new federal charges.
I marveled in disgust at how cleverly the system plays on our sympathies to protect an elderly Nazi war criminal and racist mass murderer, while exploiting capitalist-created racist fears to criminalize workers like my friends at BP.
Under this system, it will always be more of the same. Whether it’s "respecting" the contracts of AIG executives while demanding major concessions from auto workers, or "humanitarian" efforts to spare a vicious Nazi while criminalizing and terrorizing working moms, and possibly costing them their children, workers can always expect the deck to be stacked against them until we unite to fight for Communism.
Red Mom
a name="Spain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day">">"pain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day
SPAIN — Two years have passed since I came to this country, looking for a better job to be able to maintain my family economically. During this time I’ve always asked myself if it was worth it to have made the long journey, to have had to live in the street and put up with the racism that exists here against the "sudacas" (Central and South Americans).
I’ve always maintained the firm confidence that whether I’m here or anywhere else in the world, I have to continue building the PLP, that by organizing the working class we can get rid of this system, regardless of whether I can find a "good-paying job."
May 1st is always our end and our beginning of the calendar and surely I’ll be in the streets passing out CHALLENGES and thousands of leaflets, talking with the people and trying to explain what Communism really is. Friends of PLP, some ecologists, others pacifists, will help us pass out the leaflets.
Millions of people are out of work in Europe and the world. Everyone I speak with always talks with me about the worldwide financial crisis and I try to explain to them that this system has never been nor will ever be in favor of the working class. That the capitalists will always look for their profits and they’ll do it even if it costs the lives of millions of workers, making wars for the control of oil, squeezing the worker so he’ll work more and generate more profits for capitalism.
But all of us who are really part of the working class will work this May Day and try to duplicate the number of leaflets that we passed out last year, all together in spite of the barriers that the capitalist system puts in our path. It’s our duty to keep fighting for Communism and showing the imperialists that the working class is waking up.
The working class has to respond this May Day and we in PLP have to be there to be able to lead with our Communist political line, which is the only weapon of the working class capable of destroying capitalism. Everyone this May Day: go to the streets and demonstrate our true strength: the strength of the working class against the imperialist assassins! LONG LIVE MAY DAY! LONG LIVE PLP!
Comrade in Spain
Thousands Rally vs. Fascist Labor Scheme:
N.J. Gov. Using Crisis to Rob Workers of $500 Million
NEWARK, NJ,April 21 — On March 25, Democratic Governor Corzine was granted emergency powers by his hand-picked appointees at the New Jersey Civil Service Commission (CSC). They accepted Corzine’s argument, presented without proof, that the state of New Jersey is in "imminent peril" as a result of the economic crisis. Their ruling allowed the State to impose mandatory furloughs and a wage freeze without notice and without the pretense of "good-faith bargaining" called for in the bosses’ labor laws. With the furloughs, Corzine wants to take half a billion dollars from the salaries of state workers over the next year.
Hundreds of state workers, along with thousands across the state, rallied in Newark at lunchtime on April 7 to oppose this fascist labor plan. The workers, members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), were angry and militant. Chants of, "They say cut back, we say fight back," and, "The workers, united, will never be defeated" filled the streets.
Unionized workers from other local offices, including legal services workers, joined the line. One of those workers had a sign that said, "Make the bankers and the bosses take the losses, not the working class." Many CWA workers who saw the sign said, "That’s right" and "You’ve got it." The legal services workers were told about a rally to be held at the next meeting of the CSC.
The Civil Service rules also give county and local bosses the right to submit layoff plans. Sixty of these have been submitted already, affecting thousands of government workers. On April 17, an appellate court upheld the "imminent peril" finding of the CSC. Although the furloughs were temporarily stopped by the court, that is no big victory for the workers. Corzine’s Public Employee’s Commission can still decide the state doesn’t have to bargain. Meanwhile, Corzine is holding over workers’ heads the threat of 7,000 layoffs as his "alternative" to the furloughs.
During his election campaign, Corzine posed as a "pro-labor" reformer. But his past stinks of the ruling class. Before becoming governor, Corzine made hundreds of millions as CEO of Goldman Sachs. During Corzine’s reign, Goldman "invented" securities that offered Enron and other companies a new way of shielding their debt from investors. Who were the biggest losers? The workers of Enron and others who were sucked into buying company stock and were left holding the bag as Enron bosses sold theirs off before the company went bankrupt.
The CWA leadership has no answers for the workers. One of their local presidents, Carla Katz, who has since been removed, was literally "in bed" with Corzine during his election campaign. In the face of these attacks, the leadership calls for "shared sacrifice," exactly what President Obama and other ruling-class representatives put forward. It is the capitalist system that is behind this crisis. The biggest bankers and bosses, including Corzine, couldn’t make enough profit off of U.S. industry, so they devised more elaborate speculative schemes. It is these schemes and the anarchy of their competitive, unplanned production that caused this depression. (See page 7) Why should our class have to pay for that?
Communist revolution would end this boom-and-bust nature of capitalism, which always ends up screwing workers. In building for that revolution, we need to spread class solidarity and sharpen the struggle against the bosses’ attacks. These schemes and the anarchy of their competitive, unplanned production led to this depression with its racist sub-prime mortgage rip-off that will leave millions of black and Latino workers homeless. These ideas will help workers see through all politicians, push aside the enemy within our ranks, and seize power for the workers away from the rulers.J
a name="Linking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP">">"inking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP
LOS ANGELES, CA — In the ongoing struggle against teacher layoffs, fighting to make the capitalist crisis central reveals the potential to build PLP. Teacher union leaders, attempting to deflect the tremendous anger at the layoffs and the support for the resolution to strike on May 1, are calling instead for May 1 to be a "day of action" at each school. We encourage students and teachers to rally and march with the PLP contingent in the immigrants’ rights march on May 1 against the layoffs and the crisis-ridden capitalist system. The latter is bailing out the banks by attacking students, teachers and workers worldwide. We’re spreading CHALLENGE and the fight for communist revolution as the only solution to this crisis and building for the PLP Summer Projects.
At one union area meeting, a new teacher who was just given a layoff notice also received a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE for the first time. He underlined parts of the leaflet, and showed it to a fellow teacher, saying "Look, they’re talking about communism." Turning to the teacher who gave him the leaflet, he asked, "Are you a real communist?"
"Yes," was the reply. "We must fight these layoffs, but also see this as a crisis of the whole system. To defeat it, we’ve got to destroy this system; it’s based on expanding war for oil profits and attacks like this on teachers, students and other workers." The new teacher nodded in agreement.
At this meeting, where 95 teachers voted to support a strike on May 1, the teachers told off union President Duffy. He got red-faced when teachers demanded to know why the union wasn’t organizing a strike against the layoffs. They noted that half the teachers in the predominantly black and Latino South Central area got layoff notices — many more than in the Valley. They wanted action.
Duffy answered, "We have to represent the whole union." This racist attack on black and Latino students through more layoffs in South Central LA is an attack on ALL teachers, students and parents. Capitalism stays in power by dividing the working class. Multiracial unity to fight the sharpest, racist attacks like this is fighting for ALL workers!
To prepare for May Day and for struggles like this one, we organized three potluck dinners to advance the politics described above. This helped students to not only understand that the capitalist profit-drive is behind these attacks but also to participate in actions opposing them: marches, picketing before school, walkouts, increasing CHALLENGE distribution to their friends, and at marches and factories.
At one dinner, everyone was invited to come to the PLP Summer Projects to bring CHALLENGE to industrial workers and soldiers. A student who’d been in the last three projects said, "They changed the way I see the world. They’re really great. Everyone should come."
At another dinner, we explained that the drive for maximum profits is the goal of capitalism, not producing for workers’ needs. One worker commented, "I liked the symbolism of Obama, but with the seriousness of this crisis, I see he won’t get us out of it." He questioned how long the honeymoon with Obama would last, since if people say, "Waiting to see what Obama does before fighting racist cuts, layoffs or imperialist wars" just helps the bosses.
When someone said it’s hard to be optimistic in today’s world, others commented that while we’re not optimistic about U.S. rulers resolving this deepening crisis, we are optimistic about the working class. History shows that workers will fight back and fight for communism when communists show the need for it, participate in class struggle and spread CHALLENGE to more workers, soldiers, youth and teachers.
Join with PLP on May Day and for a lifetime of struggle to unite the working class in the fight for a communist society which will produce to meet the needs of the international working class.
Campus Forum Attacks U.S. Escalation In Afghanistan
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, April 14 – Presentations opposing the U.S./NATO Afghanistan war were given by two students and two faculty at a forum sponsored by a campus anti-war group. Some speakers argued that the U.S.’s real aim for the Afghan war is to get access to Central Asian oil and gas, now dominated by Russia. Other speakers showed that if the Obama administration were really trying to "fight terrorism" as it claims, then killing thousands more Aghans and Pakistanis would be the last thing they would do. Others showed that the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Afghan government in 2001 never had any justification in international law. They also denounced the new Aghan law that legalizes rape of wives and forbids them to leave home without a "legitimate reason."
About 60 people came to the forum, and many stayed for discussion afterwards and gave their email addresses for further contact. One person asked the key question: if this is the way the U.S. and other big powers operate and have operated for a long time, what can we do about it?
The questioner was invited to continue participating in the anti-war group. The openness of these students and faculty to anti-imperialism shows that there is a real potential to build up an anti-imperialist movement on this campus. To answer the student’s question about what to do about imperialism, however, we need to increase our CHALLENGE distribution. This will show students and faculty that only international communist revolution can end imperialist wars. J
a name="Imperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico">">"mperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico
MEXICO CITY, April 20 — The international economic crisis has driven the bosses worldwide to increasingly depress workers’ conditions every day. While they lay off masses of workers, and cut or eliminate loans and workers’ rights, they simultaneously financially rescue the big bosses using the wealth only the workers created.
This year 750,000 jobs have been lost in Mexico so far, an average of 6,250 daily. Those still working are forced to produce more while their real wages decline due to the devaluation of the peso and to price increases. The bosses try to threaten workers, saying if they don’t accept these conditions, thousands are waiting to take their jobs.
The sharpening dogfight among the imperialists for the world’s markets and natural resources has led to war, mainly over control of oil. Rising imperialists — China, Russia and the European Union — are challenging U.S. bosses, the top imperialists. This rivalry will inevitably lead to world war (see front page).
Mexico, one of the U.S. rulers’ main allies, is of crucial geopolitical importance. Eighty-six percent of Mexico’s industrial output and all of Mexico’s oil exports go to the U.S. (Mexico is the second biggest provider of oil for the U. S.) These industries, relying on abundant low-paid labor, can easily be converted to war production. Mexico can also become an enormous source of cannon fodder in wars as well as of food supply and other vital natural resources.
That’s why U.S. rulers urgently need to guarantee direct political and military control of these strategic sectors and protect them from their imperialist enemies, including the more nationalist sector of Mexico’s bosses.
So, under the pretext of "fighting narco traffic" (which they have helped promote), U.S. rulers are implementing Plan Merida to militarize the country, and Plan Puebla Panama to guarantee the flow of wealth to the U.S. rather than to any other imperialist. Obama’s recent trip to Mexico was part of this strategy.
Here in Mexico, the bosses allied to the U.S. are fomenting police terror against the workers with mandatory arrests, home searches without legal orders and unjust prison sentences, in addition to approving new laws authorizing capital punishment. Their fascist objective is to squash whatever opposition exists to their genocidal plans.
U.S. imperialism’s excuse to militarize Mexico, in preparation for a future invasion, is the excessive violence this country suffers from drug traffic. In Mexico, there are 5,700 deaths a year from violence. Mexico’s population is about 110,000,000. Meanwhile, in El Salvador there are 4,000 people killed per year because of violence. El Salvador’s population is 7 million. Yet, if El Salvador’s population equaled Mexico’s, the proportional number of deaths would be over 60,000 per year. Nevertheless, the U.S. Plan Merida is investing millions of dollars to fight the "insecurity" in Mexico, not in El Salvador. They talk about "humanitarianism," but the U.S. government’s real goal is control of Mexico’s wealth.
However, the nationalist rulers opposed to Mexico’s president Calderon and his allies are willing to fight for this wealth through their main political leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who’s preparing for the 2012 elections. If necessary, he would lead a civil war to defend the nationalist Mexican bosses’ interests. We workers shouldn’t choose any sides among these capitalist groups. We should organize to turn the bosses’ wars into armed struggle for communism.
The capitalist crisis, with its attacks on workers and fight among the bosses, provides us with great opportunities. By overcoming nationalism, sexism, racism and individualism, we can build international workers’ unity and the fight for communism. During imperialist wars communist-led workers have turned their guns against their class enemies, organizing the most momentous revolutions in human history, in Russia during World War I and in China at the end of World War II. When masses of workers are armed with revolutionary communist ideas, no force on earth can stop them! J
May Day in El Salvador:
‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’
EL SALVADOR — "A system that cannot meet the needs of the working class does not deserve to exist." This is our slogan on May Day 2009.
"This year the march will be a celebration," assured the union leaders in El Salvador who are planning on celebrating "change" in the government. The revisionist (fake leftist) leaders of the FMLN will dominate the new government, which will try to give a better mask to the capitalist system through reforms that will not improve the lives of Salvadoran workers.
El Salvador is considered one of the most violent countries in Latin America. This is the fault of the capitalist profit system. In this country where there is great poverty, unemployment, corruption and repression, there is an average of 12 murders a day, with a population of less than 7 million people.
In the current worldwide economic crisis, the bosses can’t grant any significant improvements and the working class is finding it harder and harder to live. That’s why the only alternative that’s left to us is the struggle for a system that will provide and meet our class’s urgent needs, like food, housing, work and freedom from wage slavery.
This May Day, we denounce the bosses’ system, whether it be neoliberal (ARENA) or state capitalist (FMLN) financed by the imperialists, whether they be from the U.S., Russia or China; both are forms of oppression for the workers. The international crisis of capitalism and the coming inter-imperialist World War III represent an opportunity for the working class worldwide to intensify the struggle to end, once and for all, the bosses’ exploitation.
"What will the Party do to take advantage of this opportunity?" asked a PL’er. Another worker answered, "The Party is us and each one of us has the task of fighting to put an end to this rotten murderous capitalist system."
Let’s all march this May Day, youth, students, war veterans, soldiers, industrial workers from the maquillas, and workers from the fields to distribute thousands of CHALLENGES and leaflets to our fellow workers and for the death of capitalism.
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ORANGE, NJ, April 8 — Eighty immigrant workers, along with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County, the Family Success Center, PLP and the ACLU, demonstrated against police harassment at the Bravo Supermarket parking lot where hundreds of workers gather to seek day work. At this lot, the racist police drive through, lights flashing, chasing the men from the sidewalks and the lot, onto back streets. On March 11, unprovoked, the police fired pistol shots above the men’s heads.
Obama and the liberals’ talk about "immigration reform" is just a cover to super-exploit immigrant workers even more and, through the DREAM Act, try to win them to join the army and fight in the rulers’ endless wars. These ideas were spread in up to 100 CHALLENGES distributed among these workers here.
Workers have gone to the Family Success Center several times to seek help getting back wages for weeks of work when criminal employers have deliberately cheated them. During meetings, a PL’er has pointed out that this system of layoffs, pay robbery and unemployment is one of the many ways the profit system survives, by dividing us and driving down all our wages.
One of the employers that hires these workers is a former East Orange cop who has been indicted on 22 counts of insurance fraud! The legal system released him to continue his criminal activity.
The signs at the demonstration at the supermarket read, "To Be Human is Not to Be Illegal"; "We Are Workers, We Are NOT Criminals"; and, "We want to be part of the community." Channel 47, a Spanish-language news show, broadcast the demonstration at 6 and 11 pm. As soon as the supporters and media left, two squad cars pulled up and the police forced all the workers off the parking lot. But the workers have already returned to the lot, and so has PLP, with more issues of CHALLENGE, which workers ran to grab and read. Six of the workers have signed up to join PLP’s May Day celebration.
Letters
Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation
In regard to the letter (4/8) from "Red Comrade In Spain," knowing my somewhat similar situation might help you.
I’ve been in PLP for 23 years. I live in North America and work at a major airport among mostly immigrant workers, away from any major political concentration, so I’m somewhat "alone" too. (To paraphrase Marx, "Workers don’t always make history the way they choose to.")
1. Having friends helps avoid political and personal isolation. Seek them out for advice. (Self-critically, I myself could always improve on these points.) Your friends can also "watch your back" against class enemies you’ll encounter during your struggles.
2. Seek advice from Party comrades as often as feasible.
3. Maintain a routine and stick with it to instill discipline.
4. Practice criticism/self criticism. It’s O.K. to make mistakes. From political practice we learn to be good communists. (As Mao said, "Turn a negative into a positive learning experience.")
5. Study dialectical materialism, particularly Marxist classics and Ira Gollobin’s ground-breaking scientific work, "Dialectical Materialism." Also, study science; many dialectical materialist examples can be drawn from scientific concepts.
Study history’s many examples of international working-class fight-backs. Learn from our successes as well as our failures, everything from the Paris Commune to the reversal of workers’ power in the former Soviet Union and China. We stand on the shoulders of giants. History can inspire us to greatness.
A fine autobiography of a Bolshevik revolutionary who experienced political isolation is, "20 Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik" by Celia Babuskya. (If you can’t find this or other books mentioned here, contact the Party.)
I hope some of this is of help. Your letter reveals your heart is in the right place! You’re not alone. Many of us want to help change the world. We have Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the revolutionary practice of millions who came before us as guides. We have a world to win and our potential friends are in the billions!
Airport Red
a name="More Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers">">"ore Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers
CHALLENGE is doing a good job in reporting the struggle of the Stella D’Oro strikers. They are fighting not only a company that puts profits before workers (like all capitalists) but one fighting to survive during the newest crisis of capitalism. Brynwood Partners (BP) owns Stella D’Oro. BP is an investment fund. It mainly gets money (capital) from investors like large public-employee pension funds (including the largest — CALPERS of California — and the Pennsylvania State Retirement System), venture capitalists and other private investors. Without capital, BP cannot acquire other firms or "turn around" the ones they’ve already acquired.
BP brags on its website that it specializes in making profit from "underperforming" companies like Stella D’Oro. "Underperforming" means that the bosses haven’t squeezed out the last bit of profit off the workers’ labor. So they lower wages and reduce or eliminate benefits. This is why they can brag of how an investment of $175 million makes an annual return of 28.8%! They tell investors that when they sell a company they make three times the capital invested!
A Dow Jones newsletter says: "Brynwood Partners has pulled off a rare feat as it gears up to market its sixth fund, returning money to its investors via a dividend recap." In a dividend recap[italization], a company borrows money to pay a special dividend to its investors — almost always a small group of private investors. This puts downward pressure on wages, as a portion of the company’s profits must go to pay off the loan.
BP’s website lists eight managing partners. Most of them have experience with big Wall Street firms, such as Merrill Lynch or Paine Webber, or with Nestlé, a mega food producer. Nestlé was the leading company, according to Wikipedia, in which the "promotion of infant formula over breast-feeding has led to health problems and deaths among infants in less economically developed countries."
The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco, Grain Millers Union (BCTGM) talks about boycotting Stella D’Oro products but does not tell workers the role their bosses play in the capitalist system or the connections their strike has with other workers. BP owns a number of food companies such as DeMet candies, makers of Turtles; Flipz Pretzels, and Richelieu Foods (pizzas). Just as Stella D’Oro workers are getting the shaft from BP, we can be sure that workers at their other companies are also getting screwed.
BCTGM has union locals in food companies like See’s Candy, Nabisco, Keebler, Interstate Bakers (Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, Columbo) and Nestlé. These companies have many plants; some are in NY, Chicago, and southern and northern California, all areas where we can help reach out for support from other BCTGM workers. Nestlé workers might especially be receptive as DeMet, Stella D’Oro and other BP companies were at one time owned by Nestlé. Seems that BP bosses use their connection with Nestlé to pick up companies to plunder.
I hope that this information helps the Stella D’Oro strikers. The better we are able to make the connection of workers’ struggles to the workings of capitalism, the more they will value our communist ideas and analysis.
A Comrade in LA
Skycap Fights Frame-up, With PLP Support
I am a skycap worker at LaGuardia Airport and have been so for nine years. Last November, I was at work doing my normal duty of helping passengers with their luggage from the baggage carousel to their taxi.
When we reached the taxi line it was long and after waiting 25 minutes only two people had been placed in cabs. So I was asked to call a private taxi for the family I was with. After doing so I went to the pickup island to wait for the taxi. When it came I went on my way to get the passengers and out of nowhere a man in plain clothes viciously grabbed me and slammed me on the side of a bus. Then came another plain-clothes man who lifted me up from the ground, cuffed me and took me to jail without ever identifying himself as a police officer!
I was held in jail for over 36 hours. I was charged initially with "trespassing" and "soliciting." Later the charges were changed to resisting arrest and soliciting.
A few days later, I returned to work and was fired without a reason. When I filed for unemployment — for being fired without cause — my boss claimed I was "hustling" passengers. At an unemployment hearing to review my case, several friends from PLP accompanied me; the judge threw out the case since there was no proof (he also said that in 18 years he had never seen someone bring supporters to a hearing and kicked them out of the room because he was suspicious).
I have been to criminal court over four times trying to free myself from the charges. Thanks to friends from PLP and those who have been helping me, at my last court date around 25 people showed up with me and we shocked the whole courtroom. The bailiff asked why they were there and a supporter said they were there to support me.
When we walked out of the courtroom everyone started talking and there was a lot of noise because more than half the room stood and left together.
Friend of PL
Farmworkers Block Highway, Renewing 30-yr. Struggle
In the decade of the 1980’s, the farm workers who grew coffee in Merced del Potrero, a rural community on the coast of Mexico near the isthmus of Tehuantepec, organized a massive violent struggle to form a cooperative to directly administer the cultivation of coffee. They did this to confront the exploiters and landlords of the area who maneuvered to buy their coffee for a very low price.
Now, after almost thirty years, forced by marginalization and poverty generated by the bosses and their capitalist system, this group of workers have again risen up in struggle. They are now blocking the Administrative Center in the city of Oaxaca. Earlier they blocked the Coast highway to Huatulco near the Pacific Ocean, to pressure the fascist government of Ulisis Ruiz Ortiz (URO) to give them economic aid to pay for the needs of their community.
In order to divert them from a more effective struggle, the workers of these localities have been bombarded with electoral politics from the bourgeois parties coordinated by the State Electoral Institute with seductive speeches about progress, equality and democracy. With their goal of tying the population to the fraudulent trap of capitalist elections, the PRI Governor threatens the needs of the poor by offering crumbs with their Firm Floor Program. They give away supplies like cement in hopes of gaining votes and to win seats in the upcoming federal delegations for Congressional elections and to prepare the ground for the Presidential election in 2012.
The bosses’ parties and their elections will never solve the problems of the farm workers, city workers, students or the rest of the marginalized and exploited population. The only real solution is the destruction of this capitalist system of constant crisis which attacks our class every day. We need to join together in one party of the international working class, the PLP, to take power and build a communist society that will guarantee the well-being and equality of all.
Comrade from Mexico
Back Fired Unionists in Haiti
Eight employees of the National Archives of Haiti have been fired for union organizing, and their union COSEANH (Union of the Employees of the National Archives of Haiti) has asked U.S. friends for help. The fired unionists have also received death threats against themselves and their families. Eighty percent of the Archives employees have been kept on one-year contracts, since reduced to six months.
There is a long history of racist U.S. imperialist invasion and domination of Haiti, where slave workers led the first revolution in the New World. Let’s come to the aid of the threatened Archives workers. Haiti today is occupied by a UN armed force led by a Brazilian contingent. Their flashy white SUVs lord it over the capital city as the U.S. marines and the Tonton Macoute did before them, but they will go the way of the macoutes.
Would CHALLENGE readers please send letters protesting these firings and death threats against COSEANH unionists to Jean Wilfrid Bertrand, Director General of the National Archives of Haiti, at
Compère Général Soleil
Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers
The bosses’ media has pointed fingers at various causes of the current economic crisis: seedy mortgage brokers, "deadbeat" homebuyers, "stupid" investment bankers, greedy and arrogant CEOs, Ponzi schemers like Madoff, and now AIG executive bonuses. They claim the root cause is the "subprime mortgage" fiasco, the housing market collapse, the financial industry crisis and the freezing of credit. Except for workers trying to keep and/or buy homes, all the above characters are part of the problem. And all of the above crises have contributed to what increasingly looks like a Depression,
But all these explanations don’t really explain what’s at the heart of this worldwide debacle for capitalism: fundamental laws governing the inner workings of the system itself. Over 140 years ago after decades of struggle by workers against capitalist exploitation, Karl Marx, in his work "Capital," revealed important laws of capitalist development. In that and other important works, Marx described two: the tendency of the overall rate of profit to fall, and the occurrence of periodic crises of overproduction as the necessary result of a competitive and unplanned system of production. Communists say that only revolution to overthrow capitalism can end this system’s "boom-and-bust" nature.
Real Wages Falling Since ‘73
The rate of return on capitalist investment (rate of profit) in the "developed" economies (U.S., France, Britain, Germany, etc.) has been falling since the end of the 1960s (see interview with Robert Brenner in "Asia-Pacific Journal," 2/7/09). This happened despite the fall in real wages since 1973, which should have caused the rate of profit to increase. The profit rate fell because emerging capitalist economies in Europe and Asia began producing "the same goods that were already being produced by the earlier developers, only cheaper."
Bosses in the more developed economies tried to hold on to their dominant positions by pouring money into new technology. However, this only made the problem worse, for two reasons. Firstly, more high-tech upgrades led to even greater overcapacity in industry, with goods flooding the world market. Secondly, the higher the percentage of total capital invested in plant and machinery, the further the rate of return on capital investment tends to fall. Profit can only be made off of human labor power, not from machinery (see box).
As their economic position worsened, U.S. and Western European bosses cut real wages, increasing racist exploitation to attack ALL workers. They used their control of the government to cut back "social wages", i.e. social service benefits for workers paid for from taxes. But these attacks on their income meant workers were less able afford the products that the bosses had to sell in order to realize their profits.
Fed’s Policy Led to Toxic Assets
The solution? The U.S. bosses’ state, particularly the Federal Reserve, encouraged the massive use of public and private credit. Government budget deficits increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, the Fed deliberately kept interest rates very low. This induced a huge increase in private borrowing and encouraged investment in financial assets like stocks, bonds and more exotic instruments like bundles of mortgages (see CHALLENGE, 12/08). Prices of these assets soared. In addition, workers bought more and different products using borrowed money, credit cards and refinanced mortgages.
A succession of asset "bubbles" — first the dot com/technology stock market "bubble" of the late 1990s, then the housing and credit "bubbles" of the 2000s — were basically speculation sanctioned by the government and Fed. But these bubbles only temporarily postponed the day of reckoning. Again, only labor creates actual value under capitalism, not writings on pieces of paper, or computer entries. The huge increase in speculative investment pulled U.S. and other "developed" capitalisms further away from the labor-created method of wealth accumulation.
Thus, the two laws of capitalism revealed by Marx interact with each other. Both contribute to the inevitability of crises as long as capitalism exists. It’s the anarchy of capitalist production and the system’s competitive nature that generate these built-in problems, which are always taken out on the backs of the working class. Communism, a planned, cooperative system of production based on our class’s needs, not bosses’ profits, would abolish these capitalist relations.
The above Brenner interview estimates that capitalism can solve the global economic crisis without major imperialist wars, including World War III. He argues that "[t]he world’s elites want more than anything to sustain the current globalizing order, and the U.S. is key to that." The Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote that inevitably rival imperialist powers settle their economic competition by war. This is proven by the history of capitalism — one war after another, and now world wars.
Bosses’ Solution for Disputes: War
Thus, thinking the bosses can peacefully solve their disputes produces deadly consequences. Rising rivals of U.S. imperialism like Russia, China and their allies will not, and cannot, stop short of trying to take down the top dog. The fight to control oil and to use that control to keep or gain number-one status continues. Wider war plans are being prepared right now.
Meanwhile, the bosses are casting the weight of the economic crisis onto us. As we unite unemployed and employed to fight these attacks, remember: the bosses need our labor, but we don’t need the bosses or their crisis-ridden, exploitative system. The working class under the leadership of a mass PLP will put an end to this sordid chapter in the history of humanity. J
May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class
On this May Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of inter-imperialist rivalry beat louder and millions are slaughtered in widening war. World capitalism is pushing its economic crisis onto workers’ backs with mass racist unemployment and wage-cuts, and throwing hundreds of thousands of workers out of their homes.
We can’t be misled by Obama’s promise that the stimulus package will help workers survive this crisis. Capitalism doesn’t work for the working class and cannot be reformed to change that. Masses of workers are fighting back around the world. From general strikes and militancy against the bosses across Europe to strikes in Guadaloupe and Martinique to the fight against budget cuts in Los Angeles and the ongoing 9-month-long Stella D’Oro workers’ strike in the Bronx, workers are saying "make the bosses take the losses."
May Day (May 1) is the working-class’ international holiday. This year, millions of workers around the world will march to commemorate this important day. It is the day when the world’s working class "holds a review of its forces, mobilized for the first time as One army, [under] One flag...[to] make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united."
May Day was born in the heroic struggle for the 8-hour day when 350,000 Chicago workers went out on a general strike on May 1, 1886 and shut down the city. On May 3 the cops murdered six McCormick Reaper Works strikers. The next day thousands of workers marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent, killing four workers and seven cops, and wounding 200 workers in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre. Nine demonstration leaders were framed for "instigating a riot." Four were hanged. In 1891, the then Illinois Governor freed those still imprisoned, declaring they had been convicted unjustly.
At the 1889 meeting of the Second International -— a working-class organization patterned after the First International led by Karl Marx — the world’s workers decided to honor the Chicago strikers and martyrs by mobilizing as "one army, with one flag." May Day had begun. Ever since, with communist leadership, it has symbolized workers’ demands and class interests, united in the fight against capitalism.
Capitalism creates a world in which workers and youth, infants and the elderly, are dying in unprecedented numbers from hunger, poverty, curable disease, war, death squads, police terror and a poisoned environment. Poverty, racism and war do not spontaneously lead workers to communist revolution, or the red flag would fly over most of the world. Communist revolution can only come about when millions of workers are politically conscious of how the world works and how to change it. This can only be accomplished by the efforts of a mass, international, and revolutionary communist party.
In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red banners of May Day in the U.S. It has organized May Day marches and activities in many countries for 39 years, to unite workers around their universal demands, regardless of capitalist-created borders. These include opposing imperialist war, racism, the special oppression of women, wage slavery and fascist police terror, while championing unity of all workers — immigrant and citizen, Asian, Latin, black and white.
This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class. On this May Day, international workers’ solidarity must meet the bosses’ assault head-on.
With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students we can fight the bosses’ racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world’s workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.
PLP is marching to win workers, soldiers and youth to realize our great potential to overthrow the war-makers and build a communist world based on serving the needs of the international working class! Join the march and join PLP! J
Assemble with PLP:
NY- May 2, 11 am, Linden Blvd. & Flatbush Ave.
LA- May 1, 11 am, Olympic & Broadway
Seattle- May 1, 3:30 pm, Judkin Playground
