Thousands of workers in South Korea protest against THAAD (U.S. missile system) and the capitalist warmakers’ willingness to sacrifice workers’ lives.North Korea’s latest ballistic missile tests have exposed growing tensions between the U.S. and Chinese ruling classes. On March 6, a week before U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson began his tour of Asia to build support in the region, North Korea launched four ballistic missiles that landed within 200 miles of Japan’s coastline. On March 19, North Korea announced the successful test of a new high-thrust rocket engine that “could help with the country’s development of ICBMs—intercontinental ballistic missiles” with the potential to reach targets in the United States (cnn.com, 3/19). Despite pledges to “cooperate” between Tillerson and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in containing North Korea’s military ambitions, recent developments show how these major powers are building toward war (New York Times, 3/19).
U.S. Aim: Defend South Korea or Attack China?
The Korean Peninsula, a historic buffer and invasion route in East Asia, lies at the convergence of vital imperialist interests of the United States, China, Russia, and regional power Japan. The aggressive U.S. response to North Korea’s missile tests represents an escalated threat to a 60-year nuclear balance of power. Stating that “all options are on the table,” including military force, Tillerson made it clear to both North Korea and China, North Korea’s main ally, that the U.S. is moving beyond negotiations and economic sanctions (Bloomberg, 3/17). The U.S. immediately started deploying its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) in South Korea, the U.S. proxy in the Peninsula since 1948.
According to China’s capitalist media, THAAD’s radar capabilities are designed to spy on China’s missile systems and military movements and undermine its self-defense against a potential U.S. preemptive strike (CNN, 3/7). China sees the “defense” system as a provocative “attempt to hem in its strategic position—and as a betrayal of the closer ties it has developed with South Korea over the last five years” (Foreign Affairs, 2/8). As South Korea’s largest trading partner, China has retaliated by attacking the South Korean economy. The Chinese bosses have imposed a travel ban to South Korea, resulting in billions of lost revenue, and have targeted the South Korean Lotte Group, which owns the land where THADD is being built. Citing code violations, China has shut down over half of Lotte stores in China (Bloomberg, 3/8).
Meanwhile, North Korea’s missile test has opened the door for Japan, China’s main regional rival and the main U.S. ally in the region, to participate in U.S.-South Korean joint military drills, which North Korea considers “a rehearsal for invasion” (NYT, 3/5). Japan plans to send its Izumo helicopter carrier on tour for the first time through the South China Sea, the shipping route for $5 trillion in annual global trade and a looming flashpoint between Chinese and U.S. imperialists.
China is also looking to exploit U.S. President Donald Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which had been negotiated by Barack Obama to bolster U.S. economic power in China’s backyard. Predictably, China is moving to fill the void. Both China and South Korea are joining signatories to the blocked TPP in trade talks in Chile. Chinese bosses will be pushing their alternative trade alliance, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (Reuters 3/13). U.S. rejection of the TPP may alienate Japan, which was counting on the partnership to boost its
economy. It could also lead a number of U.S. allies to hedge their bets in the sharpening inter-imperialist competition.
At present, subduing North Korea is in the interest of both Chinese and U.S. rulers. At the moment, neither the U.S. nor China is prepared for a direct conflict. In an attempt to avoid giving U.S. bosses another pretext to increase their military influence in the region, China disciplined North Korea by suspending all coal imports, which account for nearly 40 percent of North Korea’s total exports (NYT, 2/18). But China’s bosses are reluctant to push North Korea too hard and risk triggering regime change and further destabilization on the Peninsula.
South Korean Instability Threatens U.S.
THAAD may not be a permanent fixture. The recent impeachment of South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who welcomed the system, could lead his successor to reconsider it. Already hurt by economic pressure from China, South Korean businesses are weighing their options.
Despite its strength as the 11th-largest economy in the world, South Korea is facing a crisis of unemployment, particularly among its youth. In February, its unemployment rate among 15-to-29-year-olds exceeded 12 percent (Business Times 3/15). According to the South Korean daily newspaper Hanyoreh, sellout unions are willing to agree to lower wages and cut hours to provide more work for youth (3/15).
Thousands of workers in South Korea are protesting in front of Lotte stores against THAAD—and the capitalist warmakers’ willingness to sacrifice workers’ lives. Many are first-time fighters; a large number are women. One farmworker said, “These rallies and such I had never done in my life. I believed that politics had nothing to do with me. All I have to do is vote for someone who can represent my region and country and that’s it…Now my perspective has changed a lot.” (Foreign Policy in Focus, 2/8).
These workers illustrate the ability of our class to fight back and seek class-conscious leadership. Protesting the South Korean government or U.S. imperialism is a good first step. At a time when billions of workers could be threatened or conscripted by the next world war, winning these workers to a communist line is more important than ever.
Regardless of the future of THAAD, it is clear the U.S. will push back against China in this pivotal region. From the Caribbean to the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, it is becoming harder for the bosses to conceal their buildup to war. As they advance in their preparations, we must continue to prepare as well—for communist revolution.
*****
North Korea: No Friend to Workers
At the end of World War II, in the wake of its occupation by the defeated Japanese fascists, the Korean Peninsula was “temporarily” divided into North and South. Former fascist collaborators controlled the South in alliance with the Japanese, who were now protected by U.S. rulers. The North was led by anti-fascists who had fought these collaborators.
In June 1950, a war erupted between North and South. The U.S. said the North invaded, a claim open to dispute. On June 25, the early editions of the New York Times ran an Associated Press dispatch reporting that the South’s troops had crossed into North Korea. But later editions dropped that story and launched a full-scale media offensive claiming the North had initiated the clash.
Whatever actually happened, the conflict became a proxy war between the Soviet/China-backed North and the U.S.-backed South. For three years, the Cold War became hot; one million Koreans lost their lives. The U.S. drove the North’s army toward the Chinese border. Commanding General Douglas MacArthur wanted to cross into China, but the tide turned when massed Chinese volunteers drove the U.S. forces back into the South. U.S. President Harry Truman fired MacArthur, and eventually the U.S. ruling class decided it had no choice but to settle the conflict at the original North-South dividing line. That line stands to this day, with 30,000 U.S. troops still massed in the South.
By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union—having kept many capitalist features, including the wage system—abandoned the struggle for communism and regressed into a state capitalist regime. The North Korean leadership, caught up in the Cold War against the U.S. and its South Korean puppet, became a Soviet puppet. Following the Russian example, it developed into its present state.
Workers throughout the Korean Peninsula, on both sides of the bosses’ line, are suffering under the capitalist yoke. Only communism will free them from exploitation and the constant threat of imperialist war.
- Information
Haiti: International Working Women’s Day and Class Struggle
- Information
- 23 March 2017 63 hits
Haiti, March 8—Progressive Labor Party organized a conference and cultural activities on the occasion of International Working Women’s Day in a city in Haiti. Despite driving in rain and flooded streets, several dozen people participated: high school students, women, men, children, and women from many local women’s organizations.
A worker at the Ministry of Women’s Rights and the Status of Women gave an overview of the situation and the struggle of women, pointing to both progress and limitations of women’s movements since 1950 when women in Haiti won voting rights and since 1986, with the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship.
One of the leaders of a women’s organization remarked several times how extraordinary it is for a non-feminist organization to organize such an activity to mark this date.
Feminism Is A Ruling-Class Assault on Working Women
The other speaker, a PLP member, exposed the main cause of sexism: the capitalist system which is based on social inequalities and social division. They made it clear that in order to have equality among all workers, we must end the current economic/political system. They gave examples that prove that the feminism was invented and fueled by bourgeois ideology.
There was a lively debate on the necessity of fighting to end the super-exploitation of working class women in the context of class struggle. One person denounced hypocrisy in the feminist organizations in which there are inequalities between the women members. A young leader of a women’s group agreed when a comrade pointed out that the struggle for the liberation of women should not be reduced to asking for mercy from the bourgeois state.
At the end of the conference, she said: “I agree with what you are saying, we can do things together.”
Several proposals were put forward to continue discussions for further action.
The PLP comrade called on the participants not to be fooled by the idea that all women have the same experiences. “The conditions of existence of rich women are not those of poor women, and peasants. Therefore, they do not have the same consciousness and the same vision of the world.”
Indeed, class struggle is primary. As the speaker pointed out, the entire working class has the same interest. Our fight must be for equality in all aspects of life, from home to school to work. Women must fight against their exploitation alongside their class brothers, and men must welcome women as fighters and leaders of their common struggle.
Let us join PLP to build for communist revolution so that everyone, women and men, can fight side by side for the liberation and well-being of our class. Onward to May Day!
I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary about prominent Black author James Baldwin, directed by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. It opens with James Baldwin’s notes about the influential lives of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin then describes himself, detailing who he is not; he is not a militant Black Panther. He is not a Muslim nor a Christian, who have their segregated churches. He says he doesn’t hate all whites for he had a white teacher who took him to plays and concerts. He isn’t in the NAACP, for “shoe shine boys like himself are repelled” from that organization and its elitist, pro-capitalist Black membership base.
That however is the closest we ever get to a class analysis, and the rest of the film shows “whites” as a general mass, without class distinction, to be the oppressors. The film cuts back and forth through history. The history of school integration portrays crowds of angry white youth, who Baldwin says represents the vast, unthinking cruel “white majority.” In one scene, the U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s brother and Attorney General at the time, Bobby Kennedy, is asked if he will urge his brother to accompany a Black student to school. Kennedy says that’s a “meaningless moral gesture,” and the screen shows crowds of racist white workers chanting “Keep Alabama White.”
The film jumps forward to the Ferguson fightback. We see frame after frame of white riot cops and national guard with heavy weaponry. The footage doesn’t focus on the hundreds of militant Black and white workers and youth fighting back. Victims of police murder—Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Jones and other youth are named, but Baldwin says that white people, like the response to the Black children killed in the Birmingham church firebombing in 1963, are “astounded” by such murders. He states that whites surround themselves with merchandise and fantasy movies to try to celebrate their own captivity in mindlessness. At the same time, they imprison one part of their own humanity—the Black people.
He talks about the two faces of America: the first face is of actor John Wayne. At the height of U.S. imperialism in the twentieth century, Wayne was the capitalist media’s personification of “white manhood” for his movies where he is most famous for his roles as a heroic “cowboy” on the U.S. frontier. In these films, set in the 1800s, the genocide against the indigenous are ignored, they are portrayed in racist stereotypes, and are even played by other white actors. The other face Baldwin contrasts against this racist capitalist mythology is the reality of the U.S. government’s massacre of hundreds of indigenous members of the Lakota Sioux tribe at Wounded Knee in 1890. The only “way out”, says Baldwin, is that the two “faces” within all American whites have to confront one another. To do this, whites must face their own fears and need for superiority.
Capitalists Push Privilege Politics
A liberal movement called “Beloved Conversation Training”—often held in churches nationwide—shares Baldwin’s view of ignoring the fundamental class opposition between white workers and white capitalists. Instead, capitalism is ignored almost entirely, and they treat “whites” as a giant oppressor group that shares the “dominant culture,” implicitly affirming that white workers as well as white capitalists benefit from the oppression of Black workers. Thus, white workers have “white skin privilege.” The training costs $350, and proposes that white workers examine their own “micro-racism,” or micro-aggressions, and how they participate in maintaining the systemic racist and genocidal oppression of Black workers.
These schools last an entire weekend and are followed by an eight week curriculum.
It’s no mistake that this documentary on Baldwin dovetails with this ideology of “white skin privilege.” Neither the film’s subject, James Baldwin, nor white skin privilege theorists discuss the history of white and Black strikers gunned down side by side by the police. They don’t talk about the relationship between Black unemployment and unemployment for the entire working class. They leave out the wage differentials between the northern U.S. states and the south, and the point that the lower the bosses can get away with paying Black workers, the lower the standard of living is driven for all workers, until everyone is hit with massive layoffs and outsourcing of jobs to workers in even lower wage countries for the capitalists to maintain their profit margins. I Am Not Your Negro repeats the same propaganda as the capitalist class: racist institutions, from banks to local Boards of Education that reinforce school segregation, are the fault of all “whites,” and all “whites” rest on the oppression of “Blacks.”
Both viewpoints ignore the real history of racism. The ruling class in the 18th century of plantation owners and others invented race because, following periodic rebellions like Bacon’s Rebellion that threatened their rule, they feared the power of Black-white unity. From that time on as capitalism matured in the U.S. and grew in its lethal genocidal power, race served as a necessary tool by the capitalist ruling class to keep down all wages.
Background to Baldwin’s Era
James Baldwin lived and wrote during a sharp era of antiracist struggle, when Black working class fighters such as W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Claudia Jones, and many, many others fused their art and, especially in Jones’ case, cultural work, with calls for multiracial working class unity against capitalism and racism, sexism and imperialism. These fighters knew their real enemy was not white workers, it was the capitalist class that created racism itself.
The impression one gets from I Am Not Your Negro was that Baldwin was somewhat of an outsider from these struggles, with frequent name-dropping of major figures of the 1960s like Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Baldwin participated in several marches, including the 1963 March on Washington (which Malcolm X sarcastically labeled the “Farce on Washington”), yet maintained his personal “independence” from the movement. In philosophical terms that frequently manifest as literary themes throughout his writing, Baldwin, like Richard Wright before him and Ralph Ellison as represented in the 1952 novel, Invisible Man, isolated himself from international working-class struggle. In this way, through physical presence but mental aloofness, Baldwin misrepresents his true enemy: capitalism.
The struggles ahead will reveal our class enemy more clearly, and it is up to communists to struggle to build a mass working class movement and party, PLP, for communism. Unlike Baldwin’s unscientific belief that “whites” are generally oppressors, we fight for workers all over the world to face that the struggles of Black workers are the struggles of their sisters and brothers.
Then, and only then, can a new world be built through violence of a communist revolution forged in the unity of the whole, united international working class.
LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA, March 18—Today, this southern town known primarily for the college started by arch-racist Jerry Falwell, held its first protest over the next imperialist war! Over 50 Lynchburg residents marched against Trump’s proposed budget that would slash environmental protection and education funding and add over $52 billion to the U.S. war budget.
Under the leadership of the Seven Hills Progressive Society, marchers started at the African American Legacy Museum and marched through the neighborhood to the circle. This action built on an earlier rally (CHALLENGE 3/8) that protested Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants and his fascist wall to keep out Mexican workers.
Friends and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) helped ensure the success of the march with leaflets, chants and stirring music pumped through the bullhorn. The music of Bob Marley and Phil Ochs helped the marchers up the Virginia hills. A range of chants against war and racism energized the march, “System Change— Not Climate Change” and “Health Care is a Right—T hat is Why We Fight!” Drivers honked their horns in support of the militant calls for workers to fight back while pedestrians eagerly reached for leaflets. Workers here are woke and ready to fight. We can reach workers everywhere!
Marchers also circulated a petition to the Governor demanding that the Virginia Prison System re-institute “parole” to reduce the racist impact of mass incarceration. In the mid-1990s, the Virginia government abolished parole, meaning that all incarcerated people, disproportionately Black, had to serve their entire time, even for minor drug offenses.
The protest, made up of mainly white workers, many of them retired, reached out to Black workers to ensure multi-racial unity in the fight against the bosses. PLP members discussed the upcoming May Day March in New York City on April 29 with many marchers. It seems likely that we will have a Lynchburg contingent at that march.
Dare to struggle, dare to win! The entire working class can move forward to revolution!
The Donald Trump administration’s move to replace Obamacare is a move to replace a severely weakened and inadequate healthcare system with an even worse one. The inability of the wealthiest country in the history of capitalism to provide healthcare for the working class exposes that healthcare for profit is incompatible with providing for the needs of the working class.
Healthcare, A Profit Industry
Health insurance cannot be both comprehensive and profitable. The health insurance companies make money by signing up young healthy people to buy policies, while limiting the costs they spend on care for the sick who require more services. This formula has been extremely profitable. United Health, one of the five largest insurers in the country, announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare plans because they made less money than anticipated. Their profits for the year were “only” $11 billion, record breaking, but $850 million less than expected, with the bulk of the difference coming from losses associated with policies linked to the Obamacare plans. (Consumer Affairs, 11/1 2016).
If a company making that much profit won’t provide care to people, it is futile to expect health insurers to provide comprehensive healthcare to the working class.
Healthcare Was a Hard Fought Gain
A system of employer-paid health coverage emerged in the U.S. out of mass struggles. As the working class fought to build unions, healthcare became part of the struggle. Union membership in the U.S. reached its peak in 1954 with about 35 percent of the workforce unionized. In the late 1950s and into the 60s, the ruling class attacked the unions, mainly using anti-communist McCarthyism to divide and terrorize workers.
The trend to de-unionize the workforce was accelerated under Carter and then Reagan to the point where now only about 10 percent of the U.S. working class is unionized (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1/26).
Ruling Class Smash Unions and Healthcare
The percent of people having health insurance rose and fell in an almost identical way as the rate of unionization. Health coverage reached a peak of about 80 percent in 1968. It remained stable until 1980 when it began a steady drop. What was needed was a plan to provide bare-bones coverage and place the cost on the backs of the working class. An imperialist power needs its part of its population to receive enough healthcare to fight wars. That’s when Obamacare came in.
A combination of moving more people onto Medicaid and forcing young healthy people to buy expensive insurance with high deductibles increased the amount of people with insurance. This year, the average cost of the Obamacare Bronze plan (the cheapest) is $311/month for an individual 30 year old. The plan includes over $6000/year in deductible or out of pocket costs. Which means if you are sick, you will be paying thousands more on top of your premiums (Healthpocket.com 10/26/2016). This high cost, low coverage health insurance is nothing like the virtually free coverage unionized workers fought for at the height of the union movement. Obamacare was part of the thrust of reversing social gains won by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle. This is indicative of how important it is to build a mass fighting movement against capitalism, and to build a society based on need and commitment rather than money and exploitation.
Further Decay
As expensive as Obamacare is, it is scheduled to get worse next year with increases in premiums and more out-of-pocket costs. But the deterioration of healthcare under the Obamacare plan is not fast enough for some members of the ruling class.
The United States empire is weaker than at any time since World War II. Healthcare is one arena of struggle that reflects this weakness. The Trump administration is now fronting for the insurance companies and the faction of bosses who want to attack the working class even faster. The new healthcare bill “would eliminate the mandate for most [people] in favor of a new system of tax credits to induce people to buy insurance on the open market. It would also eventually roll back the expansion of Medicaid that has provided coverage to more than 10 million people in 31 states” (NY Times, 3/7). Medicaid serves the poorest section of the U.S. working-class children and parents, as well as many older and disabled workers.
The race to the bottom in healthcare coverage is a symptom of a profit system that cannot provide livable existence for the working class.
