GARY, INDIANA, October 29 — Today a multi-racial group of nearly 30 demonstrators gathered in downtown Gary, Indiana for the second week in a row to show solidarity with the growing Occupy movements that have been developing all over the world. In a city like Gary, that has suffered racist capitalist oppression and neglect for decades, such a turnout is definitely a step in the right direction.
Despite its political limitations, the Occupy movement has been useful because it allows workers to recognize their collective power. The crowd was multi-racial and included people of all ages. During both demonstrations, there were a number of younger activists involved, several of whom were experiencing their first exposure to working-class struggles. It was also encouraging that activists from other cities in Northwest Indiana attended the Gary rally, because racist stereotypes often keep workers away from Gary.
Several PL’ers and friends attended the rally. Our militant signs and chants were well received by the group and observers. After rallying near a major intersection for over an hour, the group held an assembly, discussing a practical political direction for the group and future actions. Several local reform groups were represented, but when the subject was broached the collective decided to remain separate from MoveOn, the national pro-Obama group and continue to host weekly demonstrations.
Although participation is limited so far with the Gary campaign, we can turn a bad thing into a good thing. For example, while the organizers of Occupy movements in big cities like New York and Chicago put forward goals like “Destroy Wall Street,” the workers coming to the Gary demonstration have a more tight-knit connection and can express more specific grievances against capitalism, such as lack of jobs or health care. This gives us the opportunity to struggle with them over the inherent flaws of capitalism on a useful one-to-one basis.
As with the rest of the Occupy movements, there is still much work to be done to pose a serious threat to capitalism, but with Occupy Gary we have the opportunity to build a base among some of the most exploited members of the working class.
ROXBURY, MA, October 19 — The leaders of the Pizza and Politics student club at Roxbury Community College went down to Occupy Boston and were excited to see that people in the U.S. are waking up to the reality of class oppression. One sign at the encampment said so much: “They call it the american dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”.
Too many of us have been asleep for too long. The students decided to make the next topic for the club discussion “Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, Occupy the World.” They invited some activists from Occupy Boston to come and speak about the goals of the movement. The activists explained the collective way the encampment is being organized and how it sees itself as building a better world. PL’ers raised the idea that in order for that humane community to flourish and spread all over the world the working class needs to seize state power and make the decisions for the society.
Otherwise OWS will either be smashed by the police or co-opted, like the rebel movement was in Egypt. The discussion moved from communism to consumerism to the role of education. It reflected the refreshing openness of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where big questions are being discussed and communist ideas are welcomed by many. However, everything changes, and the Occupy movement will either be won to the left or to the right. It will either become a tool of the Democratic Party or it will move the masses into class struggle — supporting strikes, confronting the police, and fighting foreclosures and evictions. By distributing our literature and raising our ideas, PL’ers and friends of PL are trying to take full advantage of this opportunity to move OWS to the left.
FAISALABAD, PAKISTAN, November 11 — Workers here are calling for solidarity actions and support for six union leaders who have been sentenced to a total of 490 years in jail. They were arrested in July 2010 during a militant strike of power loom workers, and later charged under anti-terrorist laws. To date 13 union leaders are facing charges of “terrorism.”
The U.S.-backed fascist Pakistani government is increasingly using the threat of “terrorism” to try to silence the working class, hoping to crush the rising workers’ movement. But workers are fighting back, in the factories and fields, in the public and private sector (see CHALLENGE, 9/5).
Power loom workers here struck in 2010 after a break-down in negotiations with the bosses, demanding an increase in the minimum wage already announced in the government’s 2010-2011 budget. When government officials, factory owners, local politicians and the media labeled the strikers “terrorists,” it so angered other workers that they ignored a police ban on public gatherings and joined the picket lines.
Over 100,000 workers marched through the streets here, shutting down Pakistan’s third largest city, despite being fired on by the police and armed thugs hired by the textile bosses.
As we work to build strike actions and the solidarity of other workers, we introduce PLP’s ideas into our struggle. Workers are receptive to our idea that militant reform is not enough, that we cannot eliminate this exploitation without getting rid of all the bosses and their capitalist profit system. We are building an international Party to fight for a communist revolution and a communist society where production will be for the benefit of the working class, not for bosses’ profits.
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The Art of Working-Class Struggle: Teamsters Refuse to Buckle Under to Sotheby’s Attack
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- 18 November 2011 106 hits
NEW YORK, November 9 — A deafening roar met the wealthy patrons as they stepped out of their limousines this evening and were escorted by nervous security guards into Sotheby’s, the famed art auction house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Forty-three art handlers — the workers who protect and transport paintings and sculptures worth millions of dollars each — have been locked out by the company since July. Sotheby’s, which made a profit of $774 million last year and pays its CEO $70,000 a day, is demanding contract concessions from the workers. It wants to replace full-time workers with part-timers, reduce pensions and eliminate seniority in firing.
The workers are refusing to buckle. Tonight was the first evening auction of the season, with impressionist and modern art paintings on sale. About 150 workers and supporters stood behind metal barricades on each side of the entrance, with two giant inflatable rats nearby. Multiracial groups of Teamsters from several locals attended. They blew whistles and loudly chanted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting!”; “We Are the 99%” and “Shame, Shame!” at the rich collectors and dealers who scurried into Sotheby’s lobby.
Truthfully, none of the prosperous collectors seemed at all ashamed, only taken aback that people who work for a living might treat them so rudely and attempt to interfere with their evening of lavish spending. A wealthy collector paid $40.4 million tonight for a landscape painting by Gustav Klimt — more money than all the handlers together will earn in a lifetime! Sotheby’s receives a hefty commission for each artwork sold.
For hours, the workers continued to whistle and chant, while at least 50 security guards and an equal number of NYPD goons prevented the workers from invading the building, confronting the scabs, and stopping the auction. Five workers did get inside, sat down in front of the escalator, and refused to move until they were dragged out and arrested. Some college students came from Occupy Wall Street to support the workers, who are part of the 99%, and to yell at the 1% (more accurately, the one-tenth of one percent) who crossed the picket lines. A class-conscious artist could have vividly captured this stark class divide on canvas.
As the protesters grew hoarse from chanting and angrier and angrier at the rich bastards who the police escorted into Sotheby’s, it struck us that some day there will be no need for art auction houses, because paintings by Van Gogh and Picasso (who, in his earlier years, would have been on the picket line) should be enjoyed by everyone, not stuck on the wall in a private mansion or fancy townhouse.
We can look forward to the day when we build a museum to hold the artifacts of capitalism, a record of the sweatshops, exploitation, inequality, racism, sexism and imperialist wars of this era. Our grandchildren will walk through the halls of capitalism past and wonder how humans could have lived this way, with so much injustice and misery. But the biggest room in the museum will be the huge Hall of Revolution that portrays how we swept capitalism, Sotheby’s and their wealthy patrons into the dustbin of history.
WASHINGTON, November 12 — PL’ers held an Anti-Capitalism Teach-in at Occupy DC in order to sharpen the debate around the movement’s political analysis and strategies for change. Three long-term occupiers had attended a PLP study-action group and encouraged us to do this. Almost all of the fifty occupiers and friends at this event had previously received CHALLENGE.
Presenters stated that capitalism is based on exploitation and racism. They explained how its internal contradictions, due to the impoverishment of the workers by the ruthless drive for profit by the bosses, creates periodic depressions. They also argued that the state (the government) is a tool of the capitalist system. It must be smashed, not reformed.
Smash the State
Capitalism must be replaced, they continued, with a communist system where the international working class collectively runs society, planning production based on workers’ needs and liberating the creativity of the billions of wage slaves on the planet. Presenters noted that communists work strategically in all kinds of mass organizations to bring these ideas to broad groups of people, but that special emphasis is put on industrial workers, like the transit workers in DC. The temporary shutdown of the Port of Oakland, for example, could not have happened without the longshore workers.
There are lots of different views among the occupiers, which came out in the discussion following the presentations. Some argued that campaign reform, especially a constitutional amendment to bar corporate contributions to campaigns, would let the elected representations genuinely represent the people. PL’ers responded that the state is part of the capitalist system and controlled by the bosses, and that no reform could change that fact.
Others argued that withdrawing from the capitalist economy by setting up alternative communities, like the occupy sites, was a sound strategy to create a new society. PL’ers countered that until we gain state power, it’s better to organize on the job to confront the bosses at the point of production.
These debates went on for some time, and will certainly continue at Occupy DC. The validity of our analysis and politics is already gaining traction among some occupiers, and could be demonstrated in the coming period as the crisis of capitalism deepens and the repression and racism by the state intensifies.
