NEW YORK CITY, June 1 — John Laje, a very rich businessman and owner of a dozen car washes in New York City, has never wanted to meet with his workers who have asked him on various occasions for a better contract including a paid vacation, paid sick days, salary raises for a year and protection against unfair layoffs.
The car wash workers face extreme exploitation that is typical of capitalism. They work 72 hours per week making $5.25 to $5.50 per hour. The workers have to put up with extreme temperatures and using dangerous chemical products without proper equipment or protection.
Management has stolen their tips and sent them home without pay when it rains. Exploiter Laje has doled out a measly 25 cents-an-hour raise to pacify workers.
Laje’s move backfired; the workers went into the streets to protest in front of “LMC CARWASH AND LUBE,” one of his car washes in Harlem. They were joined by workers from community organizations and unions.
This protest was led by members of a fighting organization in Brooklyn supporting the car wash workers in Manhattan. The purpose of policies and union leaders is to demand that the laws and “rights” of workers are respected. It is very emotional seeing that group yelling militant PLP chants such as: “This fist is seen, power to the workers”.
In a meeting a few days before the protest, the group of workers who led this protest proposed celebrating a new conference in which the main theme would be racism, a social construct that directly affects our comrade workers. With the introduction of the Secure Communities Law throughout the U.S. — a racist anti-immigrant law that targets and deports thousands workers through mass arrests), we’re going to see more attacks on and terrorization of immigrants. More than 50 of the present members approved of this protest and we are now organizing this conference for the month of September.
This entire struggle shows us the importance of uniting and creating class consciousness. Capitalism is the root of all evil and it must be destroyed with a revolution. By broadening our base and building the Progressive Labor Party, we can build a new society where power is in the hands of the workers: a communist society.
BROOKLYN, NY, June 1 — Workers and patients at Downstate’s three hospital campuses face the fight of our lives as Governor Cuomo’s consultants and our administration make plans to “Right Size” the institution.
These racist plans will likely involve hundreds of layoffs and cuts in services in central Brooklyn. A year ago, as Downstate Medical Center “saved” Long Island College Hospital from closing, we felt secure in what we thought was an economically sound, indeed growing, institution in a sea of troubled Brooklyn hospitals. But the appearance belied the essence of what was going on. How could this happen?
To understand this and how to fight back, we need to take a step back and grasp what is driving the changing capitalist health care system in 2012. Change is caused by the interplay of contradictory or competing forces. What are the forces at play in healthcare?
Some, like insurance companies, medical technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and providers (hospitals) must make profits from health care to survive in the capitalist game. Others, like employers paying for health insurance and governments, are out to limit their costs for health care.
The major capitalists take a broader view. They want to minimize the resources put into health care (as well as other services for the working class) so that resources can be focused on world domination (wars). Cuomo with his presidential aspirations represents the latter — and they are winning.
Where are the patients and healthcare workers in all this? The various bosses try to divide us and/or win us to their side. Cuomo, whose main financial backers are insurance, finance and real estate, tells New Yorkers that State workers are just too privileged and greedy. The beginning of the 2011 State of the State address put blame for budget woes on our pensions ($6 billion out of a $132 billion budget). Now we have a sixth pension tier. Downstate Hospital President LaRosa echoed his words when he whined to the press that our pay and benefits are the source of his money problems. Cuomo pits upstate against the city, implying that the problem is mismanagement of inner-city hospitals. But these hospitals have been set up to fail by years of Medicaid cuts.
Let us become a true force in the development of healthcare by uniting patients and workers to fight against the attacks. Our union leaders blunt our efforts. Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) leaders tell us not to worry because there is no-layoff language in the contract. But that expires in January. The Public Employees Federation’s expires in April. Think you can get all your furlough days in by then?
They divert our anger into writing and calling legislators. They caution us that going to our patients could scare them away and make Downstate more vulnerable. We are the human face of the hospital to our patients. We should not leave them in the dark to be surprised when a service disappears. Rather, we should have confidence that we workers and patients have the same enemy and the same fight. If mass layoff notices come out, we should gather that very day in the lobby to take action!
PLP says that workers’ needs cannot be met under capitalism. We fight for a workers’ revolution for communism. What will be the conflicting forces in the development of health care under communism?
One force will be the organized power of the working class led by its communist party to overcome scarcity, inequality and other obstacles. The opposing force will be the old capitalist ideas of pacifism, individualism and defeatism. There will be no money or profit to get in the way of health care — from each according to commitment, to each according to need.
TEL-AVIV-JAFF, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, May 8 — Thousands of Jewish and Arab workers, many of whom live in public housing apartments, marched today to protest the racist policies of the public housing companies. The marchers demanded housing for all (regardless of ethnicity) and an end to the evictions of Arab workers from their homes by the “Amidar,” “Amigur” and “Halamish” companies. Chants also called for a revolution and for an egalitarian society. A speech by a PL’er linking the racism in housing to the bosses’ financial interests and calling for a workers’ revolution was welcomed by loud applause.
Exploiting Jewish Workers
Israel’s public housing companies, at least partially state-owned, were established in the 1950’s and 1960’s to house the masses of Jewish immigrants brought from all around the world to serve as a labor force for the Zionist regime and its capitalist backers. Construction was shoddy at best, but the apartments were very cheap and affordable for most Jewish workers.
The public housing companies are also responsible for administering the homes confiscated from Palestinians who were deported in the 1948 war. Many of the lands on which Palestinian-Arab workers live today inside the “Green Line” (in the western part of Israel-Palestine) are officially owned by these companies.
Since the “Monetary Reforms” (neo-liberalism) of the 1980’s, the bosses cut the funding for public housing, leaving the apartments to rot and crumble on the heads of their impoverished working-class residents while the public housing company bosses and officials draw fat salaries. Workers who cannot pay the rent to a regular landlord can no longer rely on public housing. Indeed, getting a public apartment is nearly impossible. Some workers were forced to squat in public-owned apartments to have a roof over their heads.
Recently, there’s been a wave of attacks by the public housing companies on residents in general and Arab residents in particular, trying to milk these poor workers for money and to forcefully evict them, typically under racist excuses. For example, one lawyer in the employ of the “Amidar” Public Housing Company said in court that “this land belongs to us [the Jews] and the Arab residents should be grateful to us for allowing them to live there [on their own land] for decades.”
Real Estate Bosses Profit from Evictions
The real reason for these evictions is to sell off the land to real-estate tycoons who will reap profits from its development. Many of the lawyers employed by these tycoons are former public housing officials who have kept information about the residents with them when they switched to the new, well-paying private-sector jobs.
The marchers have shown these racist vultures that, despite all this racist crap, thousands of workers from all nations, ethnicities and creeds can unite and fight against these bosses. The slogans marked the way forward for the struggle - a struggle for an egalitarian society free from racism, exploitation and homelessness. We in the Progressive Labour Party have a name for such a society - communism. And the only way to bring that about is for workers to unite, struggle, have a revolution and smash all bosses!
WADI AL-NAAM, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, March 30 — Hundreds marked the Land Day in memory of violent land theft engineered by the Israeli government since 1976, in this “unrecognized” Bedouin village in southern Israel-Palestine. Eight thousand working-class families live in this village, with no basic infrastructure such as electricity, running water and proper roads.
Another village in southern Israel-Palestine is al-Arakib, also not recognized by the Israeli government. Its residents hold title for their lands since the days of the Ottoman Empire. This does not bother the Israel Land Administration, which makes fiery speeches about “the right of private property” but hypocritically forgets this “right” completely when it comes to the rights of workers in general and Arabs in particular.
Racist War vs. Bedouin Workers
The racist Israeli regime attacks the Bedouin workers in the south in “unrecognized” villages and violates their right, despite the fact that this government collects full taxes from them and even drafts them into the military. This is a violent war of attrition waged against workers considered second-class citizens for racist reasons, in the name of spreading the jewish population in the South.
What stands behind this Zionist rhetoric? The financial interests of the NYC billionaire Ronald Lauder, who greatly profits from building an exclusive town for wealthy religious Jews called “Hiran” on the lands of al-Arakib.
The women of al-Arakib chanted: “al-Arakib is in our hearts and we will stick to it!” Since July 2010, this village was demolished again and again, and always re-built by its residents. Arabic, Jewish and international activists came to show solidarity with the villagers and fight against the eviction of these Bedouins from their ancestral lands.
The regime’s goal, attempted through the Jewish National Fund (JNF), is to “forest the Land of Israel and make the Wilderness Flourish” and “Judaize” the South. These are code names for land theft by real-estate tycoons. This is why peasants, who make a meager living from small-scale agriculture (olive trees and sheep), are being evicted from their land in favor of trees which would soon be up-rooted and replaced with fancy houses for the rich.
A million trees, which will “bring about the Second Coming,” as the U.S. evangelical donors claim, are more important than people who have lived there for over a century! Each tree costs $25, totaling $25,000,000, not including the money spent by the Israeli government on demolishing the village multiple times with heavy police support.
For such a hefty sum they could’ve connected al-Arakib with electricity, running water, paved the roads, built a school and a medical clinic. This is the essence of capitalism: the bosses and their regime prefer to invest in trees to grab prime real-estate and in racist evictions from this land than to invest money in the lives of poor workers and peasants.
The spokesperson of al-Arakib’s Popular Committee, Awad abu-Farikh, was once interrogated for three hours at the Rahat Police Station on charges for “inciting violence.” This meant fighting for the rights of his Bedouin people. We ask: why don’t they interrogate the riot cops and their masters for violence and racist slander? Or is a worker who defends his home from demolition “inciting violence,” while racist thugs who “enforce the law” can practice violence against workers? This is capitalist “justice!”
The war plan of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Minster of Internal Security Aharonovich — a colleauge of politician Libermann who preaches deporting all Arabs from Israel-Palestine — is to send hundreds of riot cops to demolish villages, starting from al-Arakib. They have invested vast sums of money in a new unit of 200 cops, which will be organized in August, tasked solely with enforcing eviction and demolition warrants in the South.
Meanwhile, a worker who goes to the police for protection from crime gets a sleepy response at best and is ignored at worst, under the excuses of “manpower and resources.” This is an example of how, under capitalism, the role of the state apparatus, including the cops, solely serves the capitalists and their profit interests.
This is a colonialist policy aimed at robbing Arab workers, destroying their sources of income and social fabric. The Isreali state is trying to force this dispossession in order to make way for “Pioneers” (rich Zionists) from the U.S. and Western Europe who will be brought there by the JNF. Prime Minister Netanyahu even says that “changing the South to an area without a Jewish majority is a real threat [to national security]” (Yisrael HaYom, July 25th, 2010).
The same paper, owned by the U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a big supporter of Netanyahu, reported on June 23, 2010, that “the nation goes to war against the takeover [by Bedouins] of its lands.” How can people “take over” their own land? This is also the opinion of Knesset (parliament) member Michael Ben-Ari. Netanyahu and Aharonovich want to “defeat the Bedouin takeover of lands in the Be’er-Sheva regeion as a first stage” and then implement the same program of racist land grab in the entire country.
This is reminiscent of dark times in history when minorities were put in ghettos by fascists. This, of course, prepares the ground for a second “Nakba” (ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948), this time a “creeping Nakba” under the guise of planning and land-ownership laws.
This is apartheid, pure and simple. Netanyahu, an open racist, wants to prevent something he calls “land grab by minorities and criminals.” Meanwhile his administration hands out lands and building rights to the criminal capitalist minority (19 big capitalist families in Israel — far less than 1% of the population — as well as their super-wealthy friends in the U.S.).
Faced with this racist robbery by Zionism, we, the workers and unemployed of all nations, ethnicities and religions in historical Palestine, must unite and fight back. What happens today to the Arab worker will happen tomorrow to Jewish workers as well; and, indeed, starts happening to them even today, especially in the public housing sector. The growing fascism has already showed its hostility to workers, both Arab and Jewish, such as the brutal arrest of “Zochrot” activists on Israel’s Independence Day last month. They “dared” to try and hold a vigil reminding the residents of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa about all the Palestinian villages which were destroyed to make room for the city; of the violence against Jews and Arabs who protested against the apartheid in Silwan, East Jerusalem; and of the arrests and harsh violence against Jewish and Arab workers who showed solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike in front of the Ramle jail.
Capitalism means repression, poverty and fascism on the backs of most workers in order to enrich the tiny ruling class. We, the workers and unemployed, must take charge of our destiny, overthrow the capitalist regime and replace it with communism, both in Israel-Palestine and in the rest of the world. Workers of the world unite!
“Liberals” and “conservatives” both tell us that the U.S. Constitution is there to protect the working class and middle class from oppression. As Jerry Fresia’s Toward an American Revolution — Exposing the Constitution and Other Illusions shows, nothing could be further from the truth. In a word, the Constitution was intended to be and always has been an instrument of the capitalist class to protect its wealth from former slaves and the rest of the working class. It ensures power over the propertyless. Initially it protected the slaveowners from the northern bankers and manufacturers. The book is now almost a quarter century old, but is still very relevant and an easy read.
Today, there are numerous executive orders and laws, that pretend to protect us from terrorism. They permit increased wiretapping and electronic surveillance. They allow anyone the government chooses to be held in extended arbitrary detention without trial. They carry out military tribunals with no rights of appeal, and many other forms of governmental oppression.
Constitution’s Purpose: Protect Profits
But workers cannot appeal to the Constitution for protection from these orders and laws, since, as Fresia shows, they are all completely consistent with it. He shows that the very intentions of the men who wrote the Constitution were to protect owners of profit-making property from the working class.
Furthermore the Constitution was sneaked through by the slavocracy over the anticipated objections of certain state legislatures whose populations, fresh from a war of liberation against the British aristocracy in 1787, were up in arms over the even greater oppression that they faced at the hands of domestic property owners.
The first 10 amendments of the Constitution adopted in 1791, the Bill of Rights, is often touted as a guarantee of freedom from oppression by the government. The Bill of Rights, however, does not even address the right of participation in government, only protection from it, and only for capitalists at that. And there is nothing that protects us from our bosses. This “afterthought” to the Constitution took four years of arguments in Congress before it was even passed. Lincoln’s famous claim that this is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” was then, and continues to be, a bald-faced lie.
Fresia gives detailed proof that supports Marx’s and Lenin’s demonstration that all states (governments) serve only the interests of the class that rules. Meanwhile they drown the interests of the oppressed and exploited (literally, in the case of New Orleans Hurricane Katrina). For example, the authors of the Constitution, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison (first, third, and fourth U.S. presidents), owned vast amounts of property, including hundreds of enslaved Africans. He shows how they designed the Constitution to protect themselves from rebellion by those workers who slave to generate the profits — whether through chattel or wage slavery.
Racism: Bosses’ Insurance Policy vs. Rebellion
Each U.S. President, including Obama, belongs to a long and dishonorable line of accumulators of wealth who display total contempt for workers — most particularly, black and Latino workers — generated by a fear of losing this profit-making property. Murderous racism is no accident. It was and is designed as an insurance policy against united rebellion by the oppressed and exploited.
In order for the ruling capitalist class to avoid having to resort to armed force on a daily basis to maintain this oppression, as they have done on many occasions in the past, they inserted a deceptive Preamble to the Constitution, that all U.S. school children are forced to memorize. It starts with “We the people,” a term that lacks class consciousness and links workers to their oppressors.
Fresia brings it all up to date with the secret operations of the CIA and private mercenaries who assassinate, train in torture techniques, and otherwise blaze a trail throughout the world to secure profits for U.S. corporations. He shows how the Constitution encourages and protects the rights of these secret operators to carry out this world-wide terrorism, and protects the rights of the government to wage war for oil and gas in the Middle East and kill millions in the process.
Pacifism: An Achilles’ Heel for Protest Movement
He also shows, significantly, how the non-violent and peace-directed approach of most modern protest movements prevents effective opposition to the ruling class.
In summary, the book helps destroy the illusion that somehow things have gone drastically wrong in the last 200 or so years. The fact is that things have been drastically wrong for the great majority of us right from the start. The major weakness in the book is that Fresia never addresses the fact that the only solution to this problem is a revolution of the working class for an egalitarian communist system all over the world. But for the alert reader this conclusion is all but inescapable. PLP is organizing just such a movement of workers worldwide. Join the fight!
