NEW YORK CITY, July 1 — The most important task for the world’s working class is rebuilding the international communist movement, learning from past successes and failures and advancing the struggle for workers’ power. Crucial to this process is fighting racism and all racist divisions within the working class. We must understand global immigration in this context.

Workers migrate for many reasons: work, hunger, misery, war, repression and persecution. The world is the marketplace where international wage slaves look for work, regardless of capitalist-imposed borders. The world’s capitalists exploit the working class in part based on immigrants, both outside and inside their so-called borders. The lower the wages and the worse the situation for immigrant workers, the better capitalists can create the conditions to exploit the whole working class while building racist ideology and divisions. We must understand how capitalism works, unite across “borders” and fight for our class worldwide.

Bosses Spread Anti-Immigrant Lies

Within capitalist “nations,” the bosses super-exploit undocumented workers, reaping huge profits. Meanwhile, their government and media system blame undocumented immigrants for “stealing” jobs from “Americans”; “taking services away” from “law-abiding citizens”; “committing crime”; “ruining neighborhoods”; and being “terrorists.” These statements are based on racist lies and myths that foster a climate of racist hate and division that masks the nature of capitalist exploitation and builds a base for ruling-class-led fascism.

In the U.S. there are a rash of new anti-immigrant laws, often passed in states with the highest immigration rates, like Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and Utah. The latest law, enacted in Alabama:

• Requires public schools to check students’ immigration status using birth certificates or sworn affidavits;

• Bans undocumented immigrants from attending state colleges;

• Makes it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants;

• Makes it illegal for citizens and documented immigrants to transport or shelter undocumented immigrants; and,

• Makes it a crime to hire undocumented immigrants and forces employers to use E-Verify, a so-called “voluntary” program run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to verify a worker’s immigration status.

Meanwhile Texas Representative Lamar Smith has introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to make the use of E-Verify at workplaces federal law, thus mandatory. (E-Verify is a faulty system with a high error rate, causing many documented workers to be either fired or refused employment.)

Obama Expands Bush Program

Another racist feature is the “Secure Communities” program, a DHS “immigration enforcement” program in which local police share fingerprints with the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and DHS, supposedly to find and deport immigrant “criminals.” The program was begun under the Bush administration in 2008 with the plan to make state participation mandatory by 2013. The Obama administration has expanded the program as a key part of immigration enforcement.

ICE deported 392,862 immigrants in 2010, not including over 400,000 who took voluntary deportation. Projected deportations for 2011 are 404,000. There are currently 350 detention jails in the U.S. More than 77,000 immigrants have been deported through the Secure Communities program; 49,000 had no criminal records or had only minor offenses (like a traffic ticket).

While Texas and other states are expanding Secure Communities, some like Illinois, New York and Massachusetts have “opted out.” But DHS is apparently claiming that once in, you can’t “opt out.” DHS Chief Jane Napolitano defends the program. These three states have been told that fingerprints collected by local police will continue to be sent to DHS. An ICE spokesman has said the program is mandatory and that only the federal government can deport immigrants. The reality is that by 2013 the U.S. government will have merged federal databases so that all fingerprint searches check immigrants’ status automatically.

All these ruling-class attacks reflect a growing fascism which the rulers need to continue to wage imperialist wars, in order to maintain their hold on the world’s resources, especially oil and gas. But within this war drive, the U.S. bosses’ position on immigration faces a contradiction: on the one hand they need to super-exploit and terrorize immigrants for profit and to divide the working class. Yet they also have great need for immigrant youth — through their proposed “Dream Act” — to replenish their war machine with cannon fodder for those very same wars. We must expose this contradiction to show how the rulers’ attack on immigrants is an attack on the international working class.

The working class can’t rely on piece-meal, defensive strategies led by the Democratic Party. We need to take the offensive. Comrades working in an organization in our neighborhood are proposing and organizing for a march in the area around the theme: “Jobs, yes; Deportations, no!”

Comrades have a large CHALLENGE circulation in the organization we’re members of, with plans to expand CHALLENGE networks in the neighborhood and at job sites. We’ve recruited several new members to our PLP club and, with our two study groups, can recruit even more. Our job is to turn our new and veteran members, CHALLENGE readers and close friends into organizers who can mobilize the masses, fight for communist ideas, and lead the class struggle and the long-range fight for communist revolution.

The working class has two choices: unite, reject racist divisions and fight for the needs of our entire class, or fall for racist ideas which divide us and deflect anger from our real enemy under capitalism, the bosses, banks and government authorities. We must demand massive numbers of jobs, not “growing” jobs here and there. Make the capitalists pay! We must lead the working class to fight together against racist profiling and deportations. Immigrants don’t cause unemployment and “insecure communities”; capitalist unemployment, ICE and racist policing do. Working-class consciousness, not capitalist politicians and momentary reforms, build real power.

Every day the international working class is fighting back. In all our areas — the factories and unions, the schools and college campuses, the churches and community organizations — communists must be fully involved in the class struggle. While illusory reformist/electoral ideas dominate the movement now, the door is wide open to communist ideas, organizing and leadership and, as the Party grows, a communist world.

SEATTLE, June 28 — The court case between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists (IAM) kicked off earlier this month with a judge hearing Boeing’s request to have the IAM’s complaint thrown out. The latter is accusing Boeing of moving part of its 787 aircraft production to a non-union plant in South Carolina in order to punish the union for its 2008 strike. Boeing has denied the charges and wants the case dismissed.

However, the fact that Boeing’s move to South Carolina was made to punish its workers is undeniable. And the fact that Boeing has chosen South Carolina reveals the racism of the company’s move. The state’s history of centuries of racism as a union-busting “right-to-work” area has kept wages much lower than in Washington State and enables the racist bosses to use it as a club against white and black workers in Seattle.

In 2010, Boeing CEO Jim Albaugh told the Seattle Times (4/22/10) that preventing strikes was the key factor in deciding to move to South Carolina. A 2009 conference call with then Boeing CEO Jim McNerney had the company again stating that the move was made to prevent “regular strikes.” More recently Boeing’s chief counsel told a Senate committee hearing that the move was undertaken to prevent further strikes. (LA Times, 6/26/11).

Now Congressional Republicans are attacking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for even hearing the IAM’s complaint. Senate Republicans threatened to kill the appointment of NLRB general counsel Lafe Solomon over the dispute with Boeing. (LAT, 6/26/11)

Obama’s Appointees Solidly Boeing

But workers shouldn’t rely on the government’s NLRB for help. Democrats have mostly sat in quiet approval of the attacks. Obama Commerce Secretary nominee John Bryson, in his recent Senate confirmation hearings, said he thought the NLRB decision to bring the complaint forward was a “big mistake.” (Business Insider, 6/21/11) Bryson is a former Boeing board member, as is Obama Chief of Staff William Daley.

Boeing is so confident it will beat the charge that it hasn’t even bothered to show up for settlement negotiations with the IAM. Indeed in many ways Boeing has already succeeded in breaking the back of the IAM. In a 2010 speech, IAM president Tom Buffenberger condemned the 2008 strike, stating, “It is time to move beyond the old ways of bargaining that have been used since the 1930s… We must find ways to move forward where both the company and the workers benefit together, neither one profiting at the expense of the other in adversarial roles.” (IAM, 1/26/10)

This abject union class collaboration is nothing new. This “strategy” has successfully whittled the membership of the UAW down to one-third of its peak in just a few decades. As only CHALLENGE reported, the IAM did not initially endorse the 2008 strike that began as a worker-led wildcat and actively tried to undermine it every step of the way. (CHALLENGE, 10/1/08)

The sellout of that strike by the IAM leadership and its continued propaganda campaign of pushing cooperation with Boeing has left many workers deeply cynical about their ability to resist Boeing’s attacks on their wages and benefits. Many openly express their pessimism about the future of their jobs and their own ability to change that future. The IAM’s appeal to the NLRB is part of its campaign to protest through the “right” channels (according to the bosses’ laws) rather than striking. As the case stretches out over months and even years until the judge eventually and inevitably sides with Boeing, workers may become even more cynical.

In this era of union sellouts’ surrender and coordinated attacks against the working class by the bosses and its capitalist state, workers need communist ideas more than ever. Following pro-boss union leaders is a dead end. We must win the rank and file to challenge the bosses’ laws and in that class struggle build a mass communist PLP to fight for revolution and the ultimate destruction of the exploitative capitalist system.

TRENTON, N.J. June 23 — The New Jersey Assembly, with the Democratic leadership fully supporting the deadly proposals of their pal Governor Chris Christie, voted for the pension and health “reform” bill here tonight. About ten thousand workers turned out earlier to protest these severe attacks on the working class; at one point, thousands surrounded the statehouse and chanted,  “Kill the bill!” Hundreds of PLP flyers and scores of CHALLENGEs were received positively by the workers.

At the rally, the sorry union leadership held a mock funeral for “the soul of the Democratic Party.” Ironically, a person in blackface joined the New Orleans jazz band walking ahead of the coffin. (The union leadership was apparently ignorant of the racism behind this tradition.)

One after the other, the politicians and union hacks who spoke at the rally claimed to be “true” Democrats. Here is the solution posed by the “most radical” speaker: “Take back the party” in the November election. But these are the “friends” they put in office in the last election.

The 2011 New Jersey budget represents an avalanche of cutbacks and take-aways from employed and unemployed workers and give-aways to millionaires. Last year’s budget had $3 billion in interest allocated to New Jersey bondholders. Of course they didn’t mention who these “bondholders” were: the same banks that have profited from the current economic crisis.

The Democrats in the state legislature put up some token opposition, but in the end provided the necessary votes to pass the biggest blows against organized workers in New Jersey history.

The solution to these massive cuts lies far outside the capitalist system. While it is easy to hate Christie, with his arrogance and disdain for the working class, “austerity” programs are being pushed all over the U.S. and the world. All politicians are falling in line. Enforcing their class dictatorship through the police, the courts, and the media, the capitalists in all countries are shifting the burden of their crises onto the wage slaves.

In the process, they are taking away the gains that tens of thousands of militant fighters worldwide died to achieve over a century and more. This points up the fleeting nature of reform under capitalism. The bosses giveth when they need to stop revolutions or buy the workers off; they taketh away when, as now, the workers are politically weak and lacking communist leadership.

In every struggle, PLP strives to bring the bigger picture into focus by linking the attacks on the most oppressed sectors of the working class to the bosses’ need to drive down wages and benefits. As in Nazi Germany, this is rulers’ standard fascist labor policy. It helps them prepare for the inevitable next war against their rivals. We fight for unity in opposition to the bosses’ plans to turn private against public workers, employed against unemployed.

Organizing to bring to light the true impact of these devastating cuts, including the racist demolition of the General Assistance (GA) program, is the first step toward mounting a united struggle. PLP members are already involved in that process. Within that fight, we will try to learn from our fellow workers while leading them forward. With our active participation, this crucible of struggle can make real the communist ideas workers so desperately need to take down all the capitalists and their puppet politicians.

The recent revelation that 70% of the guns seized by police and the army in the Mexican drug war are in fact from the United States (Christian Science Monitor, 6/15) has infuriated people on both sides of the border. But for those who have followed the drug trade since the 1980s, the revelations of U.S. officials fueling the drug trade were nothing new.

The transfer of guns from the U.S. to Mexico was largely orchestrated by the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agency in an operation codenamed “Fast and Furious.” Now that disgruntled ATF officials have leaked the story to the press, the Justice and State Departments have moved quickly to deny involvement and lay the blame at the feet of the ATF. However, in the wake of the ATF’s bungling of the 1994 Branch Davidian standoff, it is hard to believe that they would have undertaken such an operation without Bush and Obama administration support.

Indeed the U.S. ruling class has a long history of supporting the drug trade in Latin America. In 1982 the CIA linked up the Medellin Cartel in Colombia with the anti-communist death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua and built the cocaine pipeline between Colombia and the United States. The 38% increase in cocaine users in the United States and the ensuing crack epidemic covertly funded the anti-communist wars in Central America. Drugs flowed north from Colombia to El Salvador and Nicaragua and then through Mexico into the U.S. Southwest or over the Gulf into Florida. Then guns and money for the death squads flowed south through the same channels. (See Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury, 8/18-20/1996).

Even after the scandal broke that the CIA had been nurturing and building these drug pipelines, the CIA continued to operate its Latin American drug-running operation (Washington Post, 3/17/1998). It is therefore not surprising that along with fueling wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia, the U.S. is also fueling the Mexican drug war.

The only real question left is that of the U.S. ruling-class’ motive. U.S. capitalists, who have always viewed Mexico as their backyard, have long resented Mexico’s 1917 Constitution that limited the ability of foreign powers to exploit Mexico’s labor and resources. Finally, in the 1980s, after decades of U.S. pressure on the Mexican state, the U.S. ruling class was able to exacerbate (some say create) a series of economic crises that began in 1982. Conditions attached to the U.S.-led “bailout” loans were used to begin to dismantle the 1917 Constitution. Mexico’s laws protecting against U.S. exploitation then took another tremendous hit with the 1994 passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The use of the drug war to further destabilize the Mexican state is a continuation of the U.S. ruling-class’ drive to re-subordinate Mexico to U.S. imperialism (La Jornada, 3/26/2009). With U.S. guns flowing to both the drug cartels and the Mexican military, which has been given expansive policing powers, violence has predictably skyrocketed and it is the working class that has found itself in the crosshairs; 34,612 people have died in the last four years of the drug war in Mexico (AP, 1/12). The vast majority were poor workers in no way associated with the drug trade.

And that’s the point: the “drug war” has not been about drugs at all, but rather about terrorizing Mexico’s workers. The facade of the drug war hides the massive maquiladora slave-labor empire the U.S. has built in Mexico. It hides the fortunes that Mexican capitalists like Carlos Slim have made stealing public utilities and goods. It justifies the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border and the ratcheting up of anti-immigrant racism that makes U.S. capitalists rich. Stopping the flow of drugs is about the only thing the drug war doesn’t do.