JOHANNESBERG, SOUTH AFRICA, October 11 — The wildcat strikes and rebellions of 80,000 miners have spread across seven of this country’s nine provinces to include 30,000 truckers and a pending walkout of 190,000 government workers for higher wages. Port workers may soon join in. It is a massive assault on the racist apartheid system that still permeates South Africa in the form of the war between the two opposing classes.

Striking miners have mobilized to stop scabs; truckers have torched scab trucks. The bosses are retaliating with mass firings. When Anglo-American Platinum, the world’s top producer, fired 12,000 strikers after workers refused to attend company “hearings,” and said it would hire scabs to replace them, one worker declared that could happen only “over our dead bodies.” (Associated Press, 10/11) Another warned that, “Those who are dismissed will make sure there will be no operations and that [hiring of scabs] will cause a massacre just like at Marikana” (BBC News, 10/9) where, on August 16, cops murdered 34 miners. (See CHALLENGE, 9/19)

The rebellious Youth League, which is opposing the re-election of African National Congress (ANC) leader, President Jacob Zuma, said of the firing that Anglo-American Platinum “has made astronomical profits on the blood, sweat and tears of the very same workers that today the company can just fire with impunity” which it said is “a representation of white monopoly capital…uncaring of the plight of the poor.”

While workers were on a hill near the company’s Rustenberg mine protesting the firings — and demanding the indictment for murder of the racist police who massacred the Marikana miners —  cops fired rubber bullets and tear gas and murdered still another worker. The strikers have been out since September 12 and are demanding a monthly wage hike of up to 400 percent, from $500 to $2,000.

Bokoni Platinum fired another 2,160 strikers who wildcatted on October 1 and Gold Ore International fired 1,400 more at its Ezulwini operation.

Meanwhile, the original rock-drill operators at the Marikana mine rejected a company offer to return to negotiations which was accepted by the ANC-allied union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The wildcatters have held solid, with 96 percent staying out. (Reuters, 10/9) On October 3, 3,000 marched through the streets near the Lonmin mine, the largest protest since the racist massacre.

Under the current neo-Apartheid regime of the ANC, the country’s unemployment rate is 25 percent while President Zuma urges the miners to return to work, calling the strikes “illegal.” Zuma’s tiny black elite is allied with what the New York Times reported (10/14) is a “white-dominated capitalism [that has] remained in place.” The Times also said there are “reports that the government is paying for $27 million in renovations to Mr. Zuma’s private village home.”

A glaring example of this alliance occurred when miners, fired in June after a wildcat strike, joined those laid off two years ago to try to stop scabs entering the Gold One International mine, formerly managed by the Aurora company. It turns out that Aurora was bought two years ago by a group including Zuma’s nephew and a grandson of Zuma’s predecessor Nelson Mandela. The two allegedly never paid for the mine but stripped it of its assets, while failing to pay tens of thousands of dollars owed to miners thrown out of work. (AP, 10/11) Apartheid of the rich against the working class rolls on. 

Meanwhile, capitalism’s exploitation rules. The Times says (10/14), “Schools in townships and rural areas are a shambles. Hunger and disease still gnaw at the poorest. Unemployment is rife. [25 percent] And the misery is not equally shared: South Africa also has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality. A tiny wealthy black elite has emerged, while millions more remain in poverty.”

Any wonder that truck driver Morris Sello told the Times, “I am very disappointed in this government….They are stealing…and leaving us with nothing.” 

The strikers who have launched this massive movement are threatening the profits of a huge industry netting billions off their exploitation. South 

Africa has proven mineral reserves worth three trillion dollars. It holds the world’s largest reserves of manganese, chrome, and platinum and among the largest reserves of gold, diamonds, coal, aluminum, iron ore and vanadium. (The Examiner, 10/5)

South Africa produces 75 percent of the world’s platinum and is number four in chrome production. The struck Goldfields company is the world’s fourth largest gold producer.

It is our class that produces all this value reaped from our labor but most of which is stolen by the owners of the means of production as their profits. The militancy of these striking workers has shown the world a microcosm of the potential power of the working class to shut down that production and the flow of profits that come from those huge mineral resources. However, the bosses control state power, the government, and in this case have Zuma in their back pocket.

The working class needs to smash that state power and the profit system along with it. This can only happen if workers join and are led by their own revolutionary communist party whose goal is to do just that. We will establish a society run by and for the working class, without bosses, profits, racism, sexism and imperialist wars. That is the aim of the Progressive Labor Party which is establishing itself on five continents and must be brought to these miners and to all workers fighting the horrors of capitalism.

Workers at Wal-mart have spread their strikes and protests against the world’s largest private-sector employer — 1.4 million workers — to at least 28 stores in 12 states and counting, over the issues of poverty wages, exorbitant hours, wage theft, uncertain schedules, arbitrary firings, physical threats, unhealthy working conditions and lack of healthcare coverage.

The workers are planning a massive strike and protest for the biggest shopping day of the year, “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.

Immigrant workers have led the way, sparking the nationwide actions when they began a strike last June in the small town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, against C.J.’s Seafood, a Wal-mart supplier. They were “guest workers” from Mexico who were paid much less than the minimum wage, forced to work shifts up to 24 hours with no overtime pay, and threatened with beatings if their breaks lasted more than five minutes. Twice they were locked inside their workplace to force them to work from 2:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. without overtime compensation. And if they challenged any of these horrors, they were threatened with deportation. C.J.’s Seafood brings in an annual revenue of up to $50 million and sells 85 percent of its production to Wal-mart.

Soon the strikes spread to Wal-mart stores and warehouses throughout California. In early September, 30 workers at a warehouse in Mira Loma, Ca., walked out for 15 days to protest unsafe working conditions, reporting temperatures up to 120 degrees, no access to clean water or regular breaks and faulty work equipment. Another 60 walked out in L.A. on October 4, and 250 in Pecora, followed by workers striking or protesting in San Diego, Sacramento and Pico Rivera.

Workers vs. the SWAT Team

Meanwhile, workers at a Wal-mart contractor warehouse in Elmwood, Illinois, the company’s largest distribution center struck in mid-September seventy percent of all imported products Wal-mart sells in the U.S. move through that facility. When a mass protest of 600 blocked the warehouse, a Chicago SWAT team was called in and arrested 17 demonstrators. Those workers had sued for non-payment for all hours worked and for overtime and for being paid less than the minimum wage. They cited work-days varying from two hours to 16 hours, inhaling dust and chemical residue, enduring extreme temperatures, forced to lift 250-pound boxes with no help, and discrimination against women workers.

Workers have walked off the job since then in Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Hallandale Beach, Florida, Orlando and Washington D.C., and in Minnesota, Maryland and Kentucky. In Massachusetts, 300 protesters picketed 30 stores, demanding a $25,000 annual minimum wage plus healthcare coverage. The demonstrators were equally divided among union members, students and churchgoers. Two hundred Wal-mart workers descended on a company investor meeting at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, advancing their demands.

While Wal-mart has been claiming these workers’ charges were false and were a “publicity stunt,” saying that it involves just a tiny group of disgruntled employees, they are actually taking the movement very seriously, having distributed a secret memo to all managers on how to handle the strikes and protest. (Huffington Post, 10/14)

Wal-mart’s Reaps Super-profits From Workers’ Labor

Wal-mart’s profits are based on all this super-exploitation. It had an “operating income of $10.2 billion through July 3 of this year” and “expects to generate $9 billion in on-line sales alone in 2013. The heirs to founder Sam Walton rank among the richest people in the U.S. with a combined wealth reportedly matching 42 percent of the country’s population.” (Home Media Magazine, 10/12)

While many of the strikes and protests have been led by the rank and file, organizations such as the National Guestworker Alliance, “Our Walmart,” the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, “Making Change at Walmart” and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union all have been involved.

However, none of these groups have pointed out the real source of the workers’ oppression: capitalism. They are all trying to reform the profit system, an impossibility. Wal-mart is driven by the same force that drives all bosses — maximum profit. That’s why Wal-mart exploits workers in China and other low-wage countries, and uses the same methods in the U.S. Profits are the name of the game, and it’s an international operation. There are no borders when it comes to accumulating profit.

The Bosses’ Government is NOT Neutral

Moreover, governments are there to enforce this system, whether in Beijing or Washington, D.C. They are not neutral. That Chicago SWAT team was not called in to force Wal-mart to accede to the workers’ demands; they were ordered in to arrest them.

While workers may be urged to resort to help from the U.S. Department of Labor to enforce so-called labor laws, that agency’s Wage and Hour Division employs a meager staff of 1,038 investigators to cover more than 135 million workers in over 7.3 million companies, leaving each inspector responsible for one and a quarter million workers! Most of these workers will have died before an inspector reaches their workplace. Neither Obama nor Romney will change that since their job is to enforce the profit system.

PLP calls on all workers to support the Wal-mart strikers and protesters in their efforts to achieve their demands and to join their picket lines, to raise this need for support in all their unions, mass organization, communities where Wal-mart exists, churches, schools and on college campuses. But we should have no illusions — as long as capitalism exists, Wal-mart and all their profit-making competitors will refuse to give up their drive for maximum profits. That is the essence of capitalism.

Progressive Labor Party must bring this dual message to the rank-and-file Wal-mart workers, and win them to join a revolutionary communist party, PLP, which fights for the only real solution to their abominable conditions, a communist society, without bosses and profits, run by and for working class which produces all value.

Additional sources include the New York Times, Salon.com, Nation of Change, ABC News, Boston Business Journal, Florida Sun Sentinel.

PARIS, October 11 — Over 4,000 retirees demonstrated here, and hundreds more in Marseilles, Lyons and other cities nation-wide demanding an immediate across-the-board 300-euro-a-month increase ($387) in pensions, guaranteed access to health care, aid for those unable to live alone and an increase in the minimum monthly pension to 1,425 euros ($1,838). A trade union coalition organized the demonstrations.

“Retirees are neither rich nor privileged!” shouted the crowd in La Roche sur Yon in the conservative Vendée in western France. 

“We won’t be the laughing stock for the suckers!” the protesters in Lyons chanted, mocking the bosses who say they “won’t be suckers” and bear any tax increase.

“Retirees are not privileged, it’s the financiers who should be taxed!” the Paris protesters chanted. Today’s protests were sparked by government plans to tax pensions 0.15 percent next year and double it in 2014. The tax is supposedly to pay for care for old people who can’t live alone but in reality, it’s to help ensure that France pays off its $1.9-trillion sovereign debt (2011 estimate) to the world’s finance capitalists.

Ten million retirees will have to pay the new tax while only the poorest 30% will be exempt. But from experience they know they’re next.

The Paris protesters also chanted, “Hollande, can you hear? the retirees are in the street!” This echoed a chant from 2010, when then-President Nicolas Sarkozy upped the retirement age, triggering massive protests. This has exposed current President Hollande and his “lesser-evil” Socialists as every bit as evil as the right-wing UMP party.

Raising the retirement age has increased the number of people aged 55-64 having to work by 3.8%. But the bosses’ economic crisis has spiked that group’s unemployment rate from 4.6% in 2008 to 6.5% in 2011. 

“I can’t afford meat or fish,” said Josiane Bardot, 82, who lives on a 900-euro-a-month pension ($1,161), while paying 300 euros for rent. Francis, 87, lives on 1,200 euros a month ($1,548), but can eat meat only one day a week after paying 300 euros for rent plus a steep heating bill. “If I had an extra 100 euros a month, I could eat in a restaurant once in a while,” he said sadly.

An estimated 1.5 million retirees live below the poverty line (964 euros a month — $1,243 — in 2010). Some 8.6 million people — 14 percent of the population — live in poverty. Some retirees live alone in the slums on 600 euros a month. 

Victims of Racism and Sexism Suffer Most

In 2010 the Alerte collective said retirees would face increasing impoverishment, especially those who’d experienced periods of unemployment. Because of racist discrimination, black people and those of Arab origin suffer the most unemployment. In old age, they suffer disproportionately from poverty. The same is true of women, who often leave work or work part-time while raising children.

Many retirees no longer have complementary health insurance and are skimping on health costs. Some have to choose between food and health care. More need help to pay their heating bills.

Meanwhile, the Socialist government has just decided to maintain special social security provisions that pump up the profits of private-sector retirement homes. That’s no surprise: Luc Broussy, the Socialist advisor on the issue, headed the private retirement-home lobby for twelve years.

Thus the “lesser-evil” Socialists maintain the system that impoverishes the poor and enriches the rich. Between 2004 and 2007, the income of the richest 0.01 percent rose steadily, by 40%.

What’s needed is overthrow of the capitalist system which exploits workers while they’re young and relegates them to poverty when they’re old. This can only be accomplished through communist revolution — the goal of the Progressive Labor Party.

Washington, DC, September 22 — Today, over 300 anti-racists confronted a dozen Nazi/Klan white supremacists. Only their 500-strong police escort saved them from severe beatings that would have discouraged them from future events. Protesters nevertheless drowned out their racist filth with militant anti-racist chants. 

These racists rode into Lincoln Park on the anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. This apparently deliberate attack on anti-racism echoed the 2006 KKK rally at Harper’s Ferry, the site of John Brown’s raid against slavery. Ironically, they arrived on a bus with a black driver and labeled Haymarket (the location of the 1886 protests that gave rise to May Day, the international working-class holiday). 

PLP members distributed over 100 CHALLENGES and talked to anti-racist marchers about communism, free speech and the role of the police and capitalist state in perpetuating racism. Most agreed with a sign that declared “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.” White supremacists use such rallies to recruit members to carry out violent attacks on blacks, Arabs or Latinos, but the militant opposition of multi-racial groups like this crowd make racists think twice about joining such racist gangs and slows their growth.

The crowd drowned out the Nazis’ feeble efforts to speak over their bullhorn. Then mounted park police, supported by regular DC police and motorcycle cops, led the Nazi parade down East Capitol Street. The anti-racist crowd would have none of that, and by consensus formed a human barricade across the street. We stopped the mounted cops, forcing the Nazis to stand in the horse manure behind them. 

The top brass of the DC police began threatening arrests, and just before the arrests began, the protesters dissolved the barricade and re-formed it a block away. A PL’er gave a bold communist speech via the human mike (the crowd signifies agreement by repeating the speech) in the middle of the confrontation. The barricade scenario happened again, but this time, a brave young black man declared that he would not move, that he had lived in this neighborhood since he was three, and that no Nazi would march down his street.  

PL’ers called on the protesters to come back from their next barricade and support this bold fighter, and they did. At this point, the mounted police used their horses as battering rams against the crowd of furious anti-Nazi protestors. The Nazis were able to continue marching, but protesters continued to harass them all the way to the Capitol building, drowning out their message with chants of “Death, death, death to the Nazis; Power, power, power to the workers!” The Nazis rallied briefly behind a phalanx of fully-equipped riot police serving as their personal bodyguards and then scurried off to their bus and left town.

Smash Racists

Stopping the most extreme racists is critical in an atmosphere of intensifying racism and oppression in the U.S. and around the world. Any hint that extreme racism can function openly and boldly will encourage meeker racists to step up and bolster the ranks of the white supremacists. The result of such a process can only be racist murder and intimidation. We must strike first, and hard.

Despite the overall boldness of the rally, we missed the opportunity to stop the march and beat the Nazis senseless. This time we did not have a sufficient plan and were unprepared to attack (and risk arrests.) However, this was a learning experience for many of our newer comrades and our friends from the Occupy movement, who turned out in large numbers. PLP has an impressive history of bold physical confrontations with Nazis and the Klan. In fact, Klan leader Bill Wilkerson publicly declared in the 1980s that PLP was the main barrier they faced in building their movement. We will study the history of the ruling-class support for these Nazis and PL’s staunch opposition. Next time, we will be ready and the Nazis will be lucky to escape with their lives.

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More War, More Racism

We should recall that the organized white supremacist movement in the U.S. in the 1930s included hundreds of thousands and was supported by the ruling class. When the U.S. ruling class wanted to win workers to fight fascism in the 1940s, they reduced their support for such racist groups to build a façade of anti-racism. Fighting Hitler at that time had become extremely profitable for U.S. bosses. 

However, before World War II, Hitler had received support from U.S. companies such as Ford, GM and IBM in building his tanks, trucks and technologies — a fact omitted from history textbooks. 

Today a veneer of anti-racism is part of the ideas pushed by U.S. bosses. But the deeper they lead us into wars around the world, the more racist terror they unleash both in the U.S. and worldwide. Arab workers locked up without trials after 9/11 and immigrant workers rounded up on the job and deported away from citizen children can attest to that.

As the economic crisis deepens we may see even more blatant racist attacks from both the state and gutter racists like the neo-Nazis, Klan and Minutemen. We must not let them get away with it. We have a world to win.