PARIS, May 26 — The fascist National Front (FN) party is the big winner of the European Parliament elections, held yesterday. The French ruling class might opt for fascism in the foreseeable future if its election circus is not strong enough to enforce its economic and political will.
In any case, however, workers have no stake in voting for one or another of the bosses’ electoral parties. Our class can never achieve liberation under capitalism. Only destruction of the profit system and its state through communist revolution can enable the working class to free itself from the oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialist wars of capitalism.
While according to a Harris poll, only 43 percent of the electorate cast ballots, the FN received 25 percent of the vote, the conservative Sarkozy-led Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party got 20.8 percent, and the Socialist Party (PS) 14 percent. Given the low total vote, the FN’s figure represents 11 percent of those eligible. It will send 25 deputies to the European Parliament, ten times the number it previously had.
While the media emphasized the far-right totals as an anti-European Union (EU) vote, it played down the fact that the election in France really represents a groundswell of racist hatred against black Africans and Arabs from the Maghreb (North Africa). It was part of an anti-immigrant, racist and neo-Nazi vote that swept across Europe. In Britain, as in France, the far-right won a quarter of the balloting. In Hungary, the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik party finished second. In Greece, the anti-immigrant neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party won seats in the EU parliament for the first time.
In France, the two “respectable parties of government” — the UMP and the “lesser evil” Socialists — are greatly discredited. Since the Socialist defeat in the March municipal elections, Socialist President François Hollande has made a turn to the right, naming racist Manuel Valls as the new Prime Minister. Valls is infamous for saying, while mayor of Evry, that too many black faces at the municipal flea market gave the town a bad image.
In April, the governing Socialist Party voted an austerity package featuring cuts of 50 billion euros to government programs that mainly aid poor workers, a wage-freeze for government workers and 55 billion euros (75 billion US$) in annual tax breaks and reductions in social security contributions for French corporations — all to help them compete better against rivals in other imperialist countries. So workers no longer believe in the Socialists. The UMP is embroiled in a major scandal and workers do not see it as an alternative either.
According to Joël Gombin, a researcher for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès think tank (linked to the Socialists), while the top fascist leaders, Marine Le Pen and Florian Philippot, based their campaign on hostility to the European Union, trying to make their fascist party “respectable,” the main motivation for FN voters was to express their racism.
According to a May 25 Ifop poll, 88 percent of FN voters said “immigration” was the determining issue. But in 2012, only 193,600 immigrants came to France. Clearly, the issue is not the number of people immigrating to France. Actually, of the country’s 63 million population, 12 million first- and second-generation immigrants live in France (2008 figures) and 8.3 million are citizens. The 4.7 million people who voted for the FN in the EU elections want to expel these people for purely racist reasons.
The Communist Party (PCF) was the largest party in France after World War II. Today, after decades of class collaboration, it is just another election machine run by and for careerists. The Left Front, an alliance of the PCF and other fake left parties, won only 6.3 percent of the EU Parliament vote. The absence of any communist leadership has allowed workers to be won to the racist idea that immigrants are their enemy, not the bosses. Voters over 60, who experienced the 1968 general strike, voted least for FN, only 21 percent.
The ruling class has already experimented with fascist mobilizations, notably two “grass-roots” movements. One was the violent anti-tax “red bonnet” protests in Brittany in February, in which local bosses organized their employees to protest. The other was the anti-gay “Manif pour tous” (Demo for all) protests that began in 2013. They brought out hundreds of thousands of right-wing Roman Catholics, and on Feb. 2, 2014, were infiltrated and manipulated by fascist thugs.
In the near future, it is probable that the extra-legal fascist groups that gravitate around the FN will be emboldened to attack blacks, Arabs and leftists.
So now the French ruling class has two options. Either it can rely on the “respectable parties of government” to impose austerity on the working class — François Hollande has already stated that his government will not change direction. Or, if Hollande’s Socialists and the UMP are too discredited and too weak to enable the ruling class to enforce its austerity, the rulers would drop the mask of democracy and move to out-and-out fascism.
All this could result in a UMP-FN electoral alliance in the 2017 presidential elections. Like Hitler’s Nazi party in 1933, the fascist FN would come to power “legally.” Only the emergence of a true communist party could lead the working class out of this morass of capitalism’s election fraud, smash the fascists and topple the ruling class with communist revolution.
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What’s the Ruling Class? In A Capitalist State, Capitalists Rule
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- 06 June 2014 87 hits
When communists talk of a “ruling class,” many people smugly dismiss it as a paranoid conspiracy theory.
The wealthiest top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. controls a larger share of the national wealth (35.4 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (23.3 percent). And their share is growing. Between 1985 and 2010 nearly three quarters of all wealth gains went to the top 5 percent with the bottom 60 percent seeing a net loss. (EPI, The State of Working America)
The current economic crisis is accelerating the funneling of money and wealth to the top. A study by Emmanuel Saez found that between 2009 and 2010 (the first year of the supposed recovery), the top 1percent seized 93 percent of all income gains, validating former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon’s 1929 statement that “In a depression, assets return to their rightful owners” (Striking it Richer, 3/2/2012).
A new study in the forthcoming issue of Perspectives in Politics (Fall 2014) shows that the ruling class shapes public opinion policy. The authors, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, studied 1,779 national policy initiatives pursued between 1981 and 2002 in the U.S. comparing elite opinion with that of the general public and then analyzing which direction policy went. The results are indisputable:
“In the United States… the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose… even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
When the working class does get a policy they generally favor, it is “only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.” Any feeling of political efficacy among individual workers is purely coincidental. Ultimately the policy preferences of the working class “appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Gilens and Page’s study conclusively shows that individual capitalists and business lobbyists (representing organized groups of capitalists) shape the political landscape in the U.S. In short, a ruling class of individuals making up only a tiny segment of the population wield most—if not all—formal political power. This finding is bolstered by a recent report done by Demos, a research and policy center, breaking down support for raising the federal minimum wage. The study found that while 78 percent of the general public (the bottom 99 percent of earners) support a hike in the minimum wage 60 percent of the wealthy (the top 1 percent) oppose it. Thus, when Congress recently refused to move on a bill to raise the minimum wage, they were simply carrying out their mandate to represent the capitalist class.
Of course this is nothing new. In the mid-19th century Marx wrote that all states, no matter what their superficial appearance (democracy, monarchy) are in essence class dictatorships. In a capitalist state, capitalists rule. Those capitalists who wield the most influence make up the ruling class. As the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Jay stated upon the country’s founding, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” It is indisputable that in the U.S., a very small percentage of people own most of the country and they govern it. The ruling class may conspire, but they are no conspiracy theory.
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From Turkey to Nigeria to Iraq... Imperialist Strategy Drives Atrocities
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- 23 May 2014 60 hits
On May 13, 301 miners died in a preventable disaster in western Turkey. Like the girls taken captive this month in Nigeria, or the garment workers killed a year ago in Bangladesh, or the workers slain by U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were victims of capitalism and its relentless drive to maximize profits. For capitalist bosses in the U.S. and around the world, the lives of workers have no value except for surplus value — the difference between the value that workers produce and what they are paid. Since the ruling class holds absolute state power and controls the factories and other means of production, the working class is enslaved by the profit system. This will change only when we smash these bosses, eliminate the profit system, and seize state power. Only under communism will workers become society’s first concern.
U.S. imperialists, the worst mass murderers in history, condemn or ignore atrocities according to their strategic needs. When Turkish bosses killed the miners of Soma, spurring militant protests, U.S. media — serving their ruling-class owners — covered the story in self-righteous detail. After Islamic forces kidnapped more than 250 girls in Nigeria, Michelle Obama took over her husband’s weekly video address to express her “outrage and heartbreak.” But a mounting wave of sectarian bombings in Iraq, where nearly five thousand civilians have been slaughtered so far this year, has received hardly any mention by the rulers or their pressrooms. If anything, they have encouraged violent defiance of the Shiite regime in Baghdad by allowing ExxonMobil to make oil production deals with Kurdistan and the Sunni Nineveh province.
Why the discrepancy in reporting? It’s explained by the sharpening rivalry among the world’s leading powers: a declining but still preeminent U.S. empire; a resurgent Russian ruling class; and a rising Chinese military and economy. Ultimately headed for global conflict, this imperialist dogfight reaches far beyond the hot spots in Ukraine and the South China Sea.
Profits Throw Safety Out the Window
Profit-hungry Turkish coal barons were exposed in the energy industry bulletin OilPrice.com (5/16/14), which reported that mine owner Alp Gurkan “boasted in 2012... that his company had reduced the cost of coal production from $140 to $24 per ton.” Gurkan managed the feat by throwing safety measures out the window. But as the U.S. media plays agonizing images of bodies emerging from the Soma coal pit, their aim is less to blame Gurkan than to undermine Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s president. Although Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, it declined to join the U.S.-led protest against Russia’s annexation of Crimea and even increased its energy imports from Russia. With a faltering Turkish economy and mass protests in the street, U.S. rulers now consider Erdogan’s corrupt regime unreliable.
Last year, Foreign Affairs, the arch-imperialist journal representing U.S. finance capital and its Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, complained that Turkey made “a fateful decision to choose a Chinese HQ-9 T-LORAMIDS missile defense system over Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin’s Patriots” (5/15/14). Erdogan also cancelled a NATO-sponsored naval modernization drive. In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs (and its main backers, ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase) worried that Turkey had “no reassuring plan to counter Russia’s expansion of the Black Sea fleet.”
Turkey’s loyalty to NATO is of huge importance to U.S. strategists. Shortly before Chuck Hagel was named Secretary of Defense, as head of the Atlantic Council think tank he published a 2013 report that named Turkey, Brazil, India and Indonesia as “democratic” military counterweights to Russia and China in coming decades. In other words, Turkey fills the Middle East slot on the Pentagon’s roster for global war.
Finance Muslim Millionaire,
Attack Muslim Immigrants
There’s a reason why images of an Erdogan aide kicking a Soma protester played endlessly in U.S. newspapers and on television networks. Yet U.S. cops beat working-class black and Latino youth hundreds of times a day with no media attention. Cop attacks on Muslim immigrants, amid the rise of anti-Muslim racism, is ignored. But with U.S. rulers possibly readying to oust Erdogan, Turkey is a different case. According to the Economist, Erdogan’s critics, “now led by Fethullah Gulen, Turkey’s most influential Muslim cleric, who commands an empire of schools and media outlets from self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, will seize on the Soma tragedy” in Turkey’s presidential election in August (5/17/14).
U.S. bosses have patiently nurtured Gulen’s movement as a pro-U.S., moderate Islamic force. CIA bigwigs got Gulen his green card; a former high-ranking Turkish intelligence official described the movement as a CIA front that sheltered more than one hundred U.S. agents in Central Asia in the 1990s. Today the U.S. Department of Education pours millions in grants into Gulen’s vast charter school network. Back in Turkey, Gulenists have infiltrated the security apparatus. Meanwhile, undercover police are sent into mosques in New York and New Jersey to terrorize Muslims into becoming informants for the bosses’ fraudulent “war on terror.”
Africa Command Humanitarian?
Who’s Kidding Who?
In Nigeria, U.S. rulers are manipulating the Boko Haram kidnap crisis with similarly cynical motives. The mass abduction opens the door for military action in Africa’s most populous and oil-rich nation. The U.S. imperialists’ hidden agenda is to plant Africom, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, in a country that has been reluctant to embrace it. Africom military “advisors” arrived in Nigeria in mid-May to “save the girls,” even as they launched drone strikes in other Muslim countries and killed innocent children.
Of course, U.S. rulers hide the fact that their Middle East allies are financing Boko Haram: “The French intelligence services pointed out last week that their reports have long since ‘pointed out that...Boko Haram had received the backing of the oil monarchies.’” (le Canard enchaîné, 5/21).
The bosses’ public relations crusade in Nigeria is at odds with their exploitation of women in the U.S. and worldwide. Women are paid less than men for comparable work. They are treated as sex objects in the popular media and in the U.S. military, where sexual attacks are epidemic. U.S. companies freely exploit women garment workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. And the U.S. government uncritically backs Middle Eastern oil kingdoms that not only oppresses women citizens, but also force women migrants from Asia into virtual slavery as domestic workers, creating a multi-fractured working class entrenched in sexism.
Africa is vital to U.S. imperialist interests. In March 2007, just after President George W. Bush authorized Africom, Foreign Affairs called its creation “long overdue in light of U.S. dependence on Africa’s oil, its concern over radical Islamist groups targeting the region, and the continent’s identity as an arena for intense diplomatic competition with other states with global ambitions, like China” (5/3/07). The command was conceived as a blueprint for an imperialist task force.
In short, U.S. bosses’ crocodile tears over murdered miners and kidnapped teenagers are a cover for their incursions into Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. (While the U.S. has launched thousands of killer drones, the Pentagon has barely flown a single search mission over Nigeria.) With little U.S. working-class support for the rulers’ so-called War on Terror, they need workers and especially the youth — their prospective soldiers — to buy into this humanitarian sham and back a pro-imperialist movement.
Remember the “humanitarian” U.S. mission in Yugoslavia that bombed and killed tens of thousands and devastated the region’s infrastructure? It also established a permanent military base in Kosovo with 14,000 troops on hand for future forays to protect U.S. bosses’ profits. Or how about the two wars for “democracy” in Iraq that killed or displaced more than five million Iraqis? The payoff was control for Exxon
Mobil over the vast West Qurna oil field.
Build an International PLP
Progressive Labor Party is fighting to build an international communist movement that will build solidarity with the victims of imperialism in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and throughout the world. Fighting to destroy the profit system is the way to show real concern for exploited workers and their children, from the mines of Turkey to the forests of Nigeria.
We must build PLP into a force that can destroy capitalism and erect a communist society free of bosses and profits, of racism and sexism and imperialist wars that murder millions. This is the road to ending the murder of miners and the kidnapping of schoolchildren. Join PLP and the fight for our lives and our future generations!
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Invade Hospital, Hit Bosses’ Attack on Retirees’ Funds
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- 23 May 2014 60 hits
PHILADELPHIA, PA, May 7 — “Here we go again!” Venetta said as 50 Local 1199C Hospital Workers Union retirees marched spontaneously to Jefferson Hospital demanding the hospital bosses stop their attacks on our union Benefit and Pension Funds. We’re older now so we marched a little slower, several with canes, several with oxygen tanks.
Forty years ago Venetta and many of these workers broke the law and filled up buses headed to jail to bring in this union and its benefits. Now retired, Venetta and the rest of us don’t want to give up pension and health benefits that we worked for and that help keep us alive and out of complete poverty. But as many of us see it, the capitalist economic crisis is deepening and all the small wars promise to become bigger ones.
Because the capitalist class rules the government, no matter who’s in the White House, all the improvement Venetta and our class fought decades to achieve are being taken back. Here we go again! What could be more important or a more organic part of this fight — not an outside issue — than PLP’s call for the working class to get off the capitalist merry-go-round and fight for communist revolution, where the working class runs the government for an equal society?
Our initial plan was to confront a Jefferson boss from Personnel. However, Personnel relocated to a more secure building away from the hospital. Its previous location was easily accessible and the target of many past marches. Is that why Personnel’s now on the ninth floor of a guarded building? Personnel refused to allow the 50 of us up to their office and refused to come down to meet us. So, we held a meeting in the lobby.
Then we decided to march to Jefferson Administration in the main hospital building, enabling 1199C members at work to see us. Apparently Jefferson security is a little rusty because as slow as we moved — and although we had to wait while everyone went to restrooms (remember we ain’t young!) — we still beat Security to the Executive Administration offices and filled the waiting area and hallway outside.
A Jefferson Vice-President came out to reprimand us but quickly regretted that decision. The retirees shouted him down. One retiree in particular, Jewel, all five feet of her, simply yelled in his face, “I need my medicine! I need my medicine!” repeatedly and loudly until the over-six-foot Vice-President actually seemed about to cry. When another Security Lieutenant rushed into the office, Jewel spun around and yelled, “I know your mother! I know your mother!” The security officer retreated. After a period of yelling and screaming, the Vice-President promised to arrange a meeting and took contact numbers for the retired shop stewards who led the march.
The stakes in this fight are dire. Our union is multi-racial — black, white, Asian and Latino. We’re all hurting. But this attack is particularly racist and sexist because this union is predominantly black and women, who suffer the worst health and healthcare under this system. If Jefferson and the other hospital bosses succeed in destroying our Benefit and Pension fund it will kill many union members and amount to outright murder.
Venetta’s declaration of “here we go again” demands that we get out of capitalism’s losing game. The capitalists run the government, they hold state power with a dictatorship of the bosses. We need a workers’ government, a dictatorship of the working class. Our future actions in this fight must have the long-term goal of workers joining PLP to build for communist revolution, for a society that abolishes wage slavery. We need a society where older workers, all workers, don’t suffer poverty and starvation, where workers get the medicine they need simply because they need it! (To contact PLP call 267-319-3515.)
NEW YORK CITY, May 7 — More than 1,000 low wage workers and their supporters jammed into Riverside Church tonight, in a “Service for Low Wage Workers.” The service was billed as “We Are All Workers!” The very integrated and international crowd of women and men were in high spirits, feeling their unity and ready for a fight. The speakers included fast food, airport, retail and car wash workers. Challenge was sold.
The rally was mainly organized by SEIU, United NY, and the various unions involved in the different organizing drives. The idea was to rally 25 clergy from around the city to give “moral authority” to the campaign to raise the minimum wage. The low wage workers who spoke were given two-minutes each, and if they went over, someone was there to tap them on the back. The clergy, on the other hand, preachers, rabbis, priests and imams, couldn’t shut up when given a microphone and a big crowd. Throw in the head of the NY Central Labor Council and the Speaker of the NY City Council and workers were eager to get out of there and on the buses taking them home.
The class struggle may be heating up a bit, and the unions and Democratic Party are looking to increase their numbers by targeting low-wage workers. In the process of organizing them, they are leading workers away from communist revolution and into the arms of the imperialist war-makers and their religious lackeys. We have to do better at fighting for the political leadership of these workers. The union leaders want to win mostly black, Latino, Asian and women workers to settle for a wage that might put them just above the poverty line. PLP wants to abolish wage slavery with communist revolution.
