Los Angeles — The new film Cesar Chavez is a distorted testament to one of the best friends the agribusiness bosses ever had. Like virtually all movies made under capitalism about class struggle, the movie mangles history. It celebrates the life of a self-serving individual whose legend was created by the ruling class he served. It mostly overlooks the collective contributions of thousands of honest and courageous farmworkers in the militant labor reform fights in California and Texas in the 1960s and ‘70s. And it is a reminder that communists have an obligation to the working class to call out sellout misleaders like Chavez!
Almost a dozen workers from my clinic went to see a prescreening of the film. The event was sponsored by the organization we work for, a “not-for-profit” that collects huge revenues from sales of pharmaceuticals and by intimidating workers attempting to unionize. In a marketing move to make inroads in the Latino community, the company invited Hilda Solis, Barack Obama’s Secretary of Labor, as the keynote speaker. Solis emphasized her connection to Delores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW) with Chavez, and the reactionary Latino nationalist movement. But she somehow never once mentioned the word “union.” Nor did she acknowledge her complicity with the Obama administration’s record-breaking, racist deportations of more than two million undocumented workers, the overwhelming majority of them Latino and Filipino.
Pacifist Thugs
The rulers’ admiration for Cesar Chavez shouldn’t be surprising. Like his hero, Mahatma Gandhi, he subscribed to pacifism when it came to confronting the bosses. But in dealing with workers whom Chavez thought might undermine his power, the UFW routinely resorted to coercion and violence. The union actively collaborated in the expulsion of undocumented workers: “One of [Chavez’s] strategies during the lettuce strike was causing deportations: he would alert the immigration authorities to the presence of undocumented workers and get them sent back to Mexico” (“The Madness of Cesar Chavez,” The Atlantic, July 2011).
Epifanio Camacho, a farmworker and later a communist who joined and developed as a leader of Progressive Labor Party, was one of the early leaders of the group that became the UFW. Many undocumented workers, Camacho said, had “hope of finding protection in the union in exchange for their participation in the long struggle.” But from early on, these workers were barred from union membership. They were confronted with a huge sign over the hiring hall that read, “No workers without legal residence papers in the United States may work where there are (UFW) contracts.”
But that was just the beginning, Camacho said, of a ferocious campaign that Chavez waged against undocumented workers. The union established an “Illegals Campaign, a central piece of strategy which saw the UFW direct members to report the presence of undocumented immigrants in the fields and turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service” (Latin Times, 3/28/2014). By 1973, Chavez had established a “wet line” near Yuma, Arizona. His cousin, the notoriously corrupt Manuel Chavez, directed three hundred UFW thugs in assisting federal agents and stopping anyone trying to cross the Mexican border into the U.S. without papers. Dozens of immigrants were brutally beaten. According to one ex-UFW organizer, three men from Queretaro got caught by Manuel’s vigilantes and were never seen again (Village Voice, 8/21/84).
Chavez, Bosses’ Agent
Throughout the movie there were shouts of “Huelga!” (Strike!). But like the UFW itself, the film diverts its attention from class struggle and picket lines in the fields — at the point of production, where workers’ real power lies — to mostly futile boycotts that relied on the support of Chavez’s liberal capitalist patrons. It highlights Chavez’s trip to France to boycott a wine producer, showing scenes of frustrated bosses. This builds the capitalist illusion that one lonely, exceptional man can shepherd the masses and change their lives.
Michael Pena, the actor who portrays Chavez, persuasively conveys the supposed saint-like figure — especially during his famed hunger strike. Still, one young healthcare worker said that Chavez “really didn’t know what the workers were going through on the picket line because he wasn’t a worker,” and that “his hunger strike was selfish and all about him.” While Chavez worked in the fields as a teen, as a young man he was groomed to become an “organizer” by the anti-communist Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation. Alinsky had a long history of channeling workers’ anger into electoral politics and pulling them away from challenging capitalism. (He also mentored Barack and Michelle Obama.)
The movie culminates with Chavez and the bosses shaking hands as the workers won the right to collectively organize and formed the UFW. Shortly thereafter, Chavez dedicated himself and his Latino following to Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Liberal unions and many community-based organization still use the same tactics to mislead workers and build class collaboration with the capitalist rulers, a hallmark of fascism. Chavez’s legend was cemented by a two-part 1969 profile in The New Yorker, and later a full-scale biography, by Peter Matthiessen, who’d been recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency by a professor at Yale.
Fighting Fear and Cynicism
Most of my co-workers seemed to like the movie overall, and in particular the way it showed the growers’ racism. In the early scenes, as “strike” and “union” blared across the screen, many snickered because they knew I was trying to unionize healthcare providers and that our company was actively trying to halt the process by disciplining me and other providers. They recognized the company’s hypocrisy right away. There was one decent scene in the movie that described the farmworkers’ fear of losing their jobs and how they overcame it. Many healthcare workers share the same fear and have been reluctant to join the unionizing struggle here.
While the young worker said, “I’m not scared and I’m down to try and fight back,” she acknowledged the fear of others. She has read CHALLENGE and helped me with this article. Another young worker said he was reluctant to join our union campaign — not out of fear, but because he thought the UFW was an example of how unions in general have sold out to the bosses. While I agreed with him, I also tried to make the point that a union struggle could expose these contradictions and offered a different solution: the PLP and the fight for communism.
Both of these workers have been invited to our annual May Day Dinner. Although worker cynicism and misleaders abound, what we do matters, especially in the bosses’ unions, their community organizations, and on the job. We must use mass organizations to build the Party and turn cynicism into class-consciousness. In this difficult period, growing the Party by ones and twos will make all the difference down the road to revolution.
Brooklyn: April 26 at 11 AM
Location: Ocean Ave and Parkside Ave
Los Angeles: May 1 at 10 AM
Location: Cesar Chavez and Broadway
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In U.S.-Russian Rulers’ Fight Over Ukraine, All Workers Lose
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- 10 April 2014 57 hits
U.S. and Russian imperialists are engaged in an all-out struggle for control over the territories of the former Soviet Union. U.S. rulers have gained a foothold in Eastern Europe, up to the border of Ukraine. But Russia’s vital oil and gas pipelines run through Ukraine to European Union (EU) countries, netting Russian bosses huge profits and a stranglehold on EU energy supplies.
In the short run, Russian bosses appear to be winning. But this is just one battle in a long war, and U.S. bosses will not willingly surrender to the emerging Russian power grab. Given the stakes, the conflict between these imperialist rivals could easily escalate into a broader, open conflict.
Russian-Backed Rebellion in Ukraine
Putin has massed 40,000 Russian potential invaders on Ukraine’s border. According to U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, supreme NATO commander, the Russian force includes “support for planes and helicopters as well as military hospitals and electronic warfare equipment.” These troops, the general said, “could accomplish a major incursion into eastern or southern Ukraine ... in between three and five days” (Wall Street Journal, 4/2/14).
Putin’s nationalist strategy is to oppress the Russian working class while rebuilding the Russian empire for the profits of Russian capitalists. Having overrun Crimea, Putin and his oligarch cronies now aim to grab other strategic parts of Ukraine. In addition to threatening a future invasion, they are fostering an armed rebellion among pro-Russians inside the country. The imperialists’ ultimate goal is to absorb all the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Mikheil Saakashvili, the anti-Putin politician who became president of Georgia with the backing of U.S. billionaire George Soros and the CIA in the 2003 Rose Revolution, has first-hand experience with resurgent Russian militarism. In 2008, Russia overran Georgia and carved out “independent” states in Russia-leaning South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In an April 5 opinion piece in Foreign Policy headlined “War is Coming,” Saakashvili wrote:
Russian strategists are talking about a ‘weekend of rage’ that could involve some kind of armed siege of government buildings in southern and eastern Ukraine. If these local provocateurs and ‘self-defense forces’ manage to hold these buildings as they did in Crimea, it might serve as a basis for further military intervention.
Events on the following day, April 6, lent further credence to Saakashvili’s scenario:
Crowds of pro-Russian demonstrators stormed government buildings Sunday in two major cities in eastern Ukraine. In Luhansk, 20 miles west of the Russian border, hundreds of people surrounded the local headquarters of the security service and later scaled the facade to plant a Russian flag on the roof. In Donetsk, to the southwest, a large group of people surged into the provincial government building and smashed windows. A gathering of several hundred, many of them waving Russian flags, then listened to speeches delivered from a balcony emblazoned with a banner reading “Donetsk Republic.”
U.S. Bosses’ Weak Counterpunch
NATO’s response to Kremlin aggression has been muted and rear-guard: a couple of U.S. warships dispatched to the Black Sea, increased air policing over the Baltics, Romania and Poland.
But while Russian boots cross Crimean soil, NATO, by its own admission, stands unprepared to deploy its foot soldiers beyond their barracks:
The trickiest question may be whether NATO should move troops into Eastern Europe, where the alliance currently has few installations. Countries like Poland are pushing hard for such a shift, but it would almost certainly be seen as highly provocative by Moscow. While NATO’s air and sea options are fairly clear, Gen. Breedlove said, “Frankly…we have work to do on what the ground options would be” (Wall Street Journal).
U.S. capitalists, and especially Big Oil, recognize the political advantage they gain from controlling the flow of gas and oil to maintain their top dog status among the world’s imperialists. For them this is an absolute necessity, not some breakable addiction to profits. Their long-term strategy is to counter the Kremlin by flooding world markets with newly found shale gas and free Europe from its dependence on Russian energy.
But for the foreseeable future, the U.S. bosses have neither the infrastructure nor the unity in Congress they need to export gas. Resources expert Michael Klare warned that “increased U.S. oil and gas output have provided White House officials with no particular advantage in their efforts to counter Putin’s aggressive moves.... the prospect of future U.S. gas exports to Europe is unlikely to alter his strategic calculations” (OilPrice.com, 4/5/14).
The bosses also understand they need to ramp up militarism within the U.S. to protect those interests. One step in that direction is the ENLIST Act, now being debated in Washington. A more nightmarish version of the DREAM Act, it aims to draw undocumented youth into the Pentagon’s war machine with the promise of citizenship.
But like the DREAM Act, ENLIST is likely to fail. It lacks bipartisan backing in Congress, and — most important — has failed to win mass working-class support, a problem for the capitalists since the Vietnam War.
Workers’ Power Can Triumph
From Ukraine and Russia to Western Europe and the U.S., workers have nothing to gain from a war between the rival imperialist camps. Meanwhile, we suffer from the cyclical capitalist crises that cause mass unemployment, wage cuts, widespread poverty, reductions in healthcare, and increasing racist attacks on black, Latino, Asian, Muslim and Arab workers. The rulers use this racism to reap super-profits from super-exploited workers and also to divide the working class, weakening its ability to fight back.
The answer for our class is to destroy the capitalist system, the source of all our problems, and create a communist society free of bosses and profits, run by and for the working class. This can only be achieved through the leadership of a communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. Our goal is a communist revolution to smash the capitalists’ state power and replace it with worldwide workers’ power. A revolution means the overthrow of one ruling class and its replacement by the rule of the formerly oppressed class, the working class, which produces everything of value in society. This was never the aim of the bosses’ phony “color revolutions,” which merely replaced one set of bosses with another.
Capitalist society oppresses us today and will drive us into broader wars tomorrow, to kill our class sisters and brothers for the rulers’ greater profit. But a united, communist-inspired working class, led by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party, has the power to combat the bosses and ultimately to destroy their parasitic system. Join us!
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PLP’s Ideas Spreading: 'Cutbacks No!’ Students Take to the Streets
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- 10 April 2014 62 hits
Newark, NJ, April 7 — “If Cami Anderson thinks that putting me in jail is going to stop me as a parent, then she is sadly mistaken,” said a PTA President who is banned from entering any Newark public school and was arrested after he spoke out against the Newark schools superintendent’s plan called One Newark. He went on to say, “I have to keep it real, if (U.S. Education Secretary) Arne Duncan came here, then we have to go after him and Obama. Anyone that makes money off the backs of our kids, whether it be a pastor, elected official or whoever. So going to jail is not going to stop me.”
This fight is against the racist cutbacks on the students, mainly black and Latino. They suffer from the ruling class’s drive for superprofits. The bosses track these students into low-wage jobs, racist unemployment, or into the military to kill Arab, Muslim, and Asian youth on behalf of U.S. imperialism.
The education struggle has intensified as students, workers and parents took their fight to the streets with two big demonstrations over the past month. On March 18, more than 300 students and workers marched to protest the cutbacks in store for us. On April 3, more than a thousand students walked out of school to protest against the cuts and the Foundation for Newark’s Future, the group that administers the $100 million grant to the city’s schools by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The March 18 demonstration, organized by the Newark Education Workers, or NEW (a caucus within the Newark Teachers Union), Newark Student Union, and NJ Communities, reflected a growing anger among those in the struggle.
At the start of the march, a member of Newark Student Union told a member of Progressive Labor Party that she overheard a teacher telling another teacher to avoid the rally because communists were going to be there. She said she interrupted that teacher and told him she was going and that he should stop being an anti-communist.
Energy at the demonstration was high, as the group of over 300 shut down the center of the city, Broad and Market, during rush hour. After one or two speeches, the students marched down Broad Street and took over the intersection of Raymond Boulevard and Broad. Despite the cops’ demands to clear the area, the streets remained blocked for about 15 minutes.
At that time, several people spoke passionately about the need to address the bigger picture: imperialism and capitalism. “This is about power,” said a member of the People’s Organization for Progress, a community group in Newark that holds anti-racist rallies. “This is about social control. This is about a decaying imperialist system.”
Another teacher from the NEW Caucus spoke about the need to understand capitalism and how it really works.
While this rally showed a growing militancy within the working class as well as PL’s influence in winning workers and students to our world analysis, it still reflected many of the bosses’ ideas. This included supporting one politician over another and nationalism: falling into the illusion that a black politician will serve the interests of Newark’s largely black and Latino working class. Superintendent Anderson and Governor Chris Christie were the main focus of the event, with most of the chants reverting to “Cami Must Go!” Many demonstrators held “Baraka” signs in support of Newark mayoral candidate Ras Baraka, whose group has considerable influence in this struggle.
The same contradictions were on display during the April 3 walkout. The students defied pushback from their administrators and an attempt by Newark police to intimidate them by standing outside the school. Many students chanted, “They say cut back, we say fight back!”
Newark Student Union President Kristen Towkaniuk acknowledged that the problem was bigger than Superintendent Anderson: “Even if we get Cami Anderson out, even if we stop the One Newark Plan, somebody else will come in and continue doing what she is doing.” While this is correct, there weren’t any broader critiques of the proposed budget cuts or the capitalist system. The demonstration stuck to the same chants and political content as before, in tune with speaker Ras Baraka.
As this battle sharpens, the fight to win workers to the idea of running the world rather than depending on politicians or a “better” superintendent is essential. While we are making some headway in bringing workers and students to our study group on Vladimir Lenin’s What is To Be Done?, we need to win others to put forward a communist analysis in the rallies, walkouts, and everyday struggles that workers are engaged in. We are optimistic that over time more workers and students will be won to our ideas.
WASHINGTON, DC, April 5 — Today over 400 workers and students marched over three miles from D.C.’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood to the White House, condemning President Barack Obama as the “Deporter-in-Chief.” Demonstrators called for a halt to all deportations. Several individuals whose families had been separated by deportations pledged to camp out on Obama’s doorstep until deportation orders for family members were reversed.
A local planning committee led by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network included students from area universities, immigrants’ rights organizations, and a PLP member. Several PL’ers participated in the march, distributing 400 May Day leaflets as well as copies of the 2013 May Day issue of CHALLENGE containing some sharp articles on immigration. They called on marchers to join the upcoming May Day march on April 26 in New York. PL’ers made many new contacts. Afterwards several marchers came to a dinner at the PL’ers’ home to discuss continuing the struggle.
The march was inspiring. It created a spirit of solidarity and power that determined fightbacks can build. It overcame the fear and isolation that we often experience. But the march also reflected the ongoing challenge of divisions within the working class over racism. The march included mainly Latinos with a few whites and fewer blacks. Despite an effort to reach out to black workers and youth, the march failed to include a significant group outside the Latino community, a weakness that must be overcome.
Fortunately, there is also a surging multi-racial, anti-racist movement led by PLP that clearly points out that all forms of racism hurt all groups of workers by destroying the solidarity needed to fight and defeat the capitalist class. Racist divisions in the working class also give capitalists the maneuvering room afforded by super-profits reaped from the super-exploitation of black and Latino sections of the working class.
The strategic insight that racism hurts all workers has not yet penetrated the mass movement adequately in the U.S. or elsewhere. Consequently, the bosses still hold the trump cards in the class struggle. But this can be reversed!
PLP will bring ALL workers together on May Day to fight back as a class against racism and the capitalist system as a whole. This approach must be reflected in all organizing efforts. Bring black and white people to immigration rights events; bring Latinos and whites to fights against racist murders by the police, and unify the working class to topple capitalism, the root of all modern oppressions.
