Workers Still Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chains

When all the mainstream and conservative columnists in the bosses’ press go out of their way to tell you a new book on economics — one that most people won’t even read — is no good and full of lies and all wrong and please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain … well, you know the book must have something going for it. And in this case, it does. The French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century shows that capitalism can never end poverty because capitalism needs poverty. Unfortunately, the author’s idea is to put reins on capitalism, not to end it.
Piketty has angered the ruling class and gotten an astounding amount of space in the business press for a 700-page book dense with statistics. The Wall Street Journal labeled it a “bizarre ideological screed” (4/21). Fox News claimed it was “based on economic lies” (4/15). Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle panned it after admitting, “I have not read it yet” (4/22). Forbes’ Keith Weiner proudly stated, “I didn’t read this book, though you don’t have to in order to understand why it’s mostly wrong” (5/31).
London’s Financial Times has gone the furthest to try to discredit Piketty’s work. In a long feature article (5/23), they claimed to find flaws in the French economist’s assertion that capitalism creates wealth inequality. Soon, however, it was revealed that Financial Times editor Chris Giles had deceptively compared old wealth estimates based on taxes with new estimates based on surveys that understate the wealth of the capitalist class. This data manipulation naturally underestimated the growth of capitalist inequality over time (New York Times, 6/1). Despite this exposure, the business press has continued to cite the Financial Times’ fabrication as if it were true!
 The assertion that has so upset the bosses’ press is that the past 250 years of capitalism in the West has led to a concentration of the world’s wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Only state intervention in the form of progressive taxation and other redistributive policies — a phenomenon that Piketty says starts in 1910, at the beginning of the Progressive Era, and ends with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s — has ever been able to curb this widening inequality, even temporarily. In order to prove his thesis, Piketty marshals an unprecedented mountain of statistical evidence, dating back to the 18th century. His conclusion seems irrefutable.
Capital in the 21st Century exposes the lie promoted by neoliberal market fundamentalists, who have long claimed that deregulation and “free” markets — free for capital while enslaving labor — would lift the living standards of workers everywhere. Of course, most people are aware that the reality of capitalist development has been quite the opposite. Today the poverty rate is growing faster than the population. Millions of workers fall into the ranks of the poor every year.
Piketty’s book has its own problems, however. While many have rushed to call it a replacement for Marx’s Capital, Capital in the 21st Century is anything but Marxist (Economist, 5/3; Time, 5/8; Forbes 5/31). Piketty has actually denied having read Marx’s Capital,  although that has not stopped him from disparaging it and thereby pass as a “responsible” academic (New Republic, 5/5).
It turns out that Piketty is most accurately described as a Keynesian, one who believes in increased spending to stimulate the economy during recessions — much like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and others who have published similar works. At the end of his book he offers ways to fix capitalism, not transcend it. For Piketty, the problem with capitalism is one of inefficiency; its tendency toward wealth inequality creates low growth rates. His solution — which he fairly describes as “utopian”— is for the state to manage capitalism to ensure that workers can buy enough of the product of their own labor to maintain a desirable rate of economic growth, which most economists put at 3 percent per year.
What Piketty misses is the question of politics. Along with pro-capitalist thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx belonged to the 19th-century tradition of political economy, where politics and economics were understood to be intertwined. Piketty considers the period of relatively greater social democracy, roughly 1910 to 1970, as the capitalist ideal. He ignores, or is ignorant of, what brought about reformist policies like progressive taxation and the welfare state in the first place, namely working-class movements.
The early- and mid-20th century had certain particularities. In the U.S. and Europe, in the face of a massive and militant labor movement, highly influential communist parties, and the threat of spreading Soviet communism, the capitalist class was willing to give back some wealth in order to avert what seemed like imminent revolution. But from the beginning, the welfare state was undermined by the capitalist ideologies of racism, sexism and, above all, anti-communism. In the U.S., the New Deal framework was rooted in the maintenance of racial apartheid. The wages of white workers were increased at the expense of black workers. By the 1970s, with the Soviet Union on the capitalist road and communist politics collapsing at home, the U.S. bosses found it easy to pit white and black workers against one another and dismantle the U.S. welfare state. Piketty misses this point because he is interested in reforming capitalism, not destroying it.
Ultimately, Piketty’s work is positive in that it once and for all disproves the myth that capitalism can end poverty. But while Piketty reveals one aspect of capitalism — its intrinsic tendency toward growing inequality — he fails to examine how the system actually works. His book is an interesting piece of the puzzle. But if you want to understand the fundamental dynamics of capitalism as a political-economic process, Marx’s Capital remains required reading. And the struggle Marx called for, a communist-led revolution of the world’s working class, remains what we in Progressive Labor Party are fighting for.

“One Newark,” Superintendent Cami Anderson’s blueprint for the city’s schools, comes straight from the tiny minority of super-rich profiteers who rule the U.S. While some Democratic Party politicians have criticized how Anderson imposed her plan on Newark’s students, parents, and teachers, there is general agreement about its objectives. One Newark aims to educate the children of the largest and one of the poorest cities of New Jersey to better serve the needs of the ruling class. The beneficiaries will be JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and ExxonMobil.
Anderson’s plan will close a number of elementary and high schools over the next three years, lay off one-third of the staff, and destroy the concept of neighborhood schools. Families will now be forced to apply to all schools, beginning in kindergarten, with students as young as 8 forced to ride public transportation. As in many other cities, this will also accelerate the invasion of privatized charter schools, that stress conformity, strip teachers of union protections, and give the bosses more direct control over curriculum.
The education system in any society is vital to the interests of the class that rules. The Progressive Labor Party stands with students, parents, and teachers in fighting against One Newark while also organizing for a working-class revolution that will smash the entire capitalist system.
No matter how hard we fight, schools under capitalism will never serve working-class youth. Even if the schools were to “work,” they would work only for the capitalist bosses. From their content (like the U.S. ruling class winning World War 2, rather than the Soviet workers’ Red Army) to their “hidden curriculum” of keeping students obedient and passive, the job of these schools is to keep workers mentally enslaved. This explains the Newark schools’ metal detectors, the “no-tolerance” policies and the emphasis on standardized tests.
The working class needs a different kind of education. We need schools that will train our youth to see the world objectively and struggle for a communist society based on equality.
The Struggle Sharpens
The fightback is growing. The Newark Student Union — born out of the 2013 budget cuts that slashed after-school programs and funding for the arts — is one new force organizing against Anderson. Another is the Newark Parent Union. Teachers and administrators are increasingly vocal in their outcry, and local clergy and community leaders have joined the fray. From sit-ins at the Board of Ed to street rallies of hundreds of activists, the struggle has surely sharpened.
But Anderson has done well by the state education officials who renewed her contract on June 27 for another three years, beginning at $251,500 annually. The bosses are clearly pleased with her iron-fisted rule. After four principals spoke out against the superintendent’s school closure plan, they were immediately suspended from their jobs. Another principal was suspended after the head of the school’s parent organization posted an agenda critical of the superintendent and then had an altercation with two of Anderson’s assistants. The parent is now barred from entering all Newark public school buildings.
At the end of May, the entire administration of University High School was fired for failing to file enough computerized data on their teachers for the central office to see. More than 200 students walked out of University High School the next school day.
Students the Main Targets
In Newark, as in many other cities with mostly black and Latin workers, this racist system has hit especially hard. The unemployment rate is double the state average. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of children living in Newark below the poverty line increased by 28 percent, and the number living in extreme poverty (under $11,525 for a family of four) increased by 38 percent!  In 2012, 44 percent of Newark’s children lived in poverty, nearly triple the state average. To deflect workers’ anger at capitalism, the system that creates these savage inequalities, the bosses scapegoat the schools and education workers.
From Michelle Rhee in Washington to Arne Duncan (now Obama’s Secretary of Education) in Chicago, school reforms have done nothing to improve the education of working-class students. The template for One Newark was Duncan’s Chicago plan, “Renaissance 2010.” Its main components were school closures, teacher layoffs, and a move to charter schools. The plan devastated working-class communities. Six years after its implementation, even the bosses’ paper, the Chicago Tribune, admitted it had failed to improve the skills of working class youth.
Education workers feel under assault, and they should. The reformers’ attack on tenure, teacher layoffs, ballooning class sizes, and overwhelming paperwork has changed the way workers function in these schools. But the main targets of Anderson’s administration are the students. Under capitalism, schools are designed to discipline the next generation of workers.
Anderson is moving to force administrators and teachers to discipline students to better prepare them to serve the bosses. At the end of this school year, the principal at Science Park High School, one of the top 500 high schools in the U.S., was slammed with an evaluation of “partially effective.” The reason? Most of the Newark Student Union’s leadership came from this school, and the administration and teachers had failed to discourage them from fighting back.
Students, and particularly black and Latin youth, are no strangers to the attacks now faced by education workers. By joining together in fighting back for better conditions, students and teachers can create “schools of struggle” to prepare us for the larger, longer-term fight against the bosses’ profit system, capitalism.
“One Newark” Fits Rulers’ Plans
We all know the public schools have been “failing” for years. Why the urgency now? As CHALLENGE has often noted, it has everything to with the decline of U.S. imperialism. China, Russia, and other rivals are threatening U.S. capitalists’ status as the top superpower. To protect their position, U.S. bosses need a skilled and docile working class. They need workers, especially black and Latin workers, willing to work long hours for poverty wages and to fight and die in imperialist wars. How can they do that?  By promoting fascist ideas: obedience to the state’s leaders, sacrifice for the “homeland,” and a vicious, blame-the-victim mentality toward all who do not “succeed.”
To win workers to these reactionary ideas, the rulers must condition children from a young age. They need to mold students to see greedy business leaders as heroes and education workers as “selfish.” They need to train young workers to accept cutbacks in social services, a necessity to fund the bosses’ next war and line the capitalists’ pockets. The education reform movement is bankrolled by super-rich financial and technology billionaires. It’s the creature of right-wing think tanks and Wall Street boardrooms, using a phony humanitarian cover to mask their real purposes.
The vultures behind the school reform movement are out to smash teacher unions and tenure protections. They are imposing business-style “accountability” on school employees. They have friends in very high places. The Obama/Duncan “Race To The Top” initiative is designed to promote charter schools and “performance-based” rating of teachers.
Cami Anderson’s One Newark represents one of the bosses’ most ambitious efforts to reorganize the public schools to meet the pressing needs of U.S. capitalism. A recent New Yorker article shows how U.S. Senator Corey Booker, the former Newark mayor, allied himself with this racist movement. In 2010, Booker teamed with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to devise a secret reform plan for Newark schools. Since “real change has casualties,” Booker and Christie decided it was necessary to exclude parents and teachers from the discussion. Instead, the goals and details of the plan would be worked out in advance with Mark Zuckerberg, its billionaire backer of Facebook fame.
 Meanwhile, the .01 percent who actually rule the U.S. understand the true goals of the school reform movement. Joel Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, war criminal under George W. Bush, led a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force on “U.S. Education Reform and National Security.”  Their 2012 report makes the bosses’ concerns clear: “Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.”  It continues, “Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security.”
A number of recommendations in the CFR Report, including school choice and common core standards, are the centerpiece of the school reorganization plans in Newark and other big cities. We need to escalate our fightback against Cami Anderson and One Newark. But we cannot forget that the root of these anti-worker reforms is the capitalist system.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 — “We’re sick of them treating us like scum!”  That’s how one bus operator explained the massive three-day sick-out at the MTA (mass transit) that kept two-thirds of city buses parked in the garage.  On June 2, MUNI bus operators, members of TWU Local 250-A, showed tremendous unity and their potential power.  This was the biggest service disruption since the strike in 1976.  
Another operator reported that one of the bosses’ negotiating team “threw the union proposals in the garbage can.”  Another said, “They are trying to do away with pensions...”  Once the job action started it spread like wildfire.  As another operator pointed out, “Racial or ethnic divisions don’t work. We are all brown.” [referring to the brown MUNI uniform] A sick-out of 70% only happens when everyone participates.”
The job action followed a 96% rejection of the SFMTA’s rotten, take-away contract offer on May 30; 1028-“NO” to 47-“YES.”  The bosses are trying to cut wages, make us pay more for a shrinking pension, and want to speed up full-time operators and the growing part-time labor force.  They also want racist cuts in off-peak and community service to transit isolated neighborhoods. The MTA temporarily backed off demanding mandatory arbitration and agreed to restart mediation with the union.
Fear turned to anger as operators took matters into their own hands.  PLP has a long fighting history in this vital workforce. A new generation of operators may be picking up the torch as MUNI workers are standing up to a sickening contract and rejecting powerless negotiations.  We have confidence that the working class can and will fight back. It is our job to make sure that when they do, that more of them choose the road to communist revolution.

SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. capitalist class is competing for domination and control of energy, basic resources and cheap labor worldwide. Meanwhile, they own trillions of capital (money) which they refuse to invest until they’re guaranteed the higher rate of profit resulting from the devastating cuts in the cost of labor. Mass transit, roads and bridges are falling apart, workers are unemployed, and yet there is “no money for infrastructure.”
Monopoly of power and money determines the policies of local government agencies like the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority (SFMTA) governing the city’s mass transit and its political apparatus. This is the driving force behind the attacks on the whole working class, both public and private sectors. The capitalist class uses its control of the social, political, police, courts and mass media apparatus to rule and make the working class pay for its rule through taxes, interest on public debt, credit and low wages). Communists call this the state apparatus. The local Mayor and SFMTA implement these attacks.
Transit Worker Power Can Halt City
Globally, transit workers have the power to bring capitalism’s daily functioning to a screeching halt. This is the irreconcilable conflict between transit workers’ and riders’ needs on the one hand and the MTA budget-cutting dictated by the downtown big businesses (i.e., capitalism). This conflict produced an explosion on June 2 when two-thirds of MUNI operators called in sick, crippling normal business and profits. (See above article.)
Populations and production are more concentrated in congested urban areas. Therefore, transit workers are a vital link in the profit chain of the big corporations, finance capitalists like banks, and big retail. SFMUNI alone moves over 700,000 people a day in a city with a population of 826,000. SF Muni’s infrastructure helps make San Francisco the “Gateway to the East.”
In addition, transit labor indirectly produces profits for real estate owners. It’s estimated that SF MUNI adds up to $35/per square foot to rental or sale prices of downtown commercial property. Big buildings have no value if no one can get to them.
The same corporate/financial groups also control the state apparatus. In transit here, their mass media, their electoral process and their court system have not only attacked Muni operators’ wages and working conditions but have reinforced institutional racism.  A series of take-away contracts and arbitration has destroyed work rules and benefits won over the past 40 years. Inaction of Transit Workers Union Local 250a leadership has sealed the deal.
For example, a media campaign financed by two billionaires — recipients of big tax breaks — put so-called pension reform (i.e., cuts) on the ballot spreading lies that “transit workers are overpaid” and “fail to provide on time, reliable transit”; that “bloated pensions are bankrupting the Pension Fund and endangering SF’s financial health.”
A group of the SF’s wealthy 1% used the ballot initiative process to pass Proposition G, installing arbitration with no right to strike. It guaranteed that the MTA can cut labor costs because it represents “the public interest” and removed all past practice precedents.
The press was full of thinly veiled racial profiling to fan the flames against the mainly black, Latino and immigrant workforce. The ruling class is trying to force this vital group of workers to work for less and to isolate and marginalize them in order to undermine their potential power.
Again, a sickout led by the rank and file has now shown a way to challenge the deal.