MARSEILLES, FRANCE, January 4 — Nearly 200 workers at the Fralib factory in nearby Gémenos are engaged in a fierce fight to prevent the Unilever company from closing its plant here, which has been producing Lipton Tea for 118 years.

Unilever has just “bought the U.S. company Alberto-Culver for $3.7 billion,” declared union steward Oliver Leberquier. “That’s proof they don’t have any financial worries.”

Last spring, the Fralib workers struck for nine weeks for a 200-euro/month ($260) raise but were forced to accept the company offer of 16-euros/month ($21), although they did win wage payment for three strike days, a week of paid holidays and a 1,200-euro ($1,560) one-time bonus.

Meanwhile, in 2008 then-Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau raked in 4.7 million euros for himself — almost 400,000 euros ($520,000) a month!

The workers have launched a national boycott campaign against the Lipton brand, and are sticking up 15,000 boycott posters nation-wide.

The workers are also thinking of taking over the factory and manufacturing tea bags themselves. They’re discussing a return to a traditional method of flavoring tea and herbal tea, and of buying ingredients from local growers again.

How much effect this campaign will have on the multi-billion dollar company remains to be seen. In October, the Fralib workers sent delegations to the seven Unilever factories where some workers walked off the job to talk to the delegations.

Direct strike action organized with the support of other Unilever workers across Europe might have a better chance of challenging the company, but the reformist unions, operating within the bosses’ system, are hardly inclined to organize such an action.

Unilever plans to transfer Fralib production to its Belgian factory where it can extract even more profits than here, playing off one group of workers against another. Globalization of profits means death to workers.

Actually, said steward Leberquier, “The factory is profitable. The total labor cost, including company social security contributions, amounts to 15 eurocents per box of tea.” Each box retails for two euros. But capitalists always drive for maximum profits, to be gained by moving to Belgium.

Unilever France has been accused of cheating consumers by putting less tea in its teabags, and is cheating on taxes to the tune of 67 million euros a year ($87 million) via a financial set-up in Switzerland. It is an Anglo-Dutch multinational and exploits 163,000 workers worldwide.

Unilever buys palm oil from suppliers that are devastating Indonesia’s rainforests. In Latin America, the company continues to sell detergents containing phosphates, a serious pollutant. Hindustan Unilever uses racist TV ads for its skin-lightening cream. They showed depressed dark-skinned women being ignored by men and employers. After the women lighten their skin, they “suddenly find boyfriends and glamorous jobs.”

Unifying Unilever workers globally against this racist, exploitative boss would be a big step towards organizing for a revolution that would wipe out this oppressive capitalist system. This goal requires communist leadership, quite contrary to the reformist unions who mislead workers into limiting their struggle under the bosses’ rules. 

Join us at the public hearing. Show the racist Department of Education that we won’t take this lying down!
Date: January 11th, 2011
Time: 6pm
Location: John Jay Campus, 237 7th Ave,    
                Brooklyn, NY 11217

BROOKLYN, NY, December 16 — “Segregation means we have to fight back! Scanning means we have to fight back!” were just two of the many chants that rang out on cold, windy Seventh Avenue as over 100 students and staff rallied in front of the John Jay HS campus. This biggest and most energetic rally yet caused many passers-by to stop and congratulate the students for standing up to the racist Department of Education (DoE).
As CHALLENGE has reported in recent issues, the DoE is advancing its proposal to install a new, well-equipped selective school within our building, catering to the mostly-white, middle-class Park Slope neighborhood. All this while the DoE continues to slash the budgets of the “non-selective” overwhelmingly black and Latino schools that already exist.
This anti-racist struggle is uniting students, parents and staff from the schools within the building, directly countering the DoE’s divide-and-conquer policies implemented throughout the city. We’re counteracting its creation of segregated and unequal schools as well as its lies that “lazy teachers” and “neglectful parents” are the main causes of school failures.
The truth is that the racist, capitalist system has no need to provide a decent education for all. Current schooling is geared to supply future soldiers ready to kill or die for Big Oil’s imperialist wars and the next generation of low-wage workers and unemployed youth. These are just some of the lessons learned from our struggle to stop the opening of this new school.
Within this context, the school’s debate team decided to put on a “Know Your Rights” panel discussion. About 200 students listened attentively as the debaters covered topics from “Schools and Prisons” to “Student Alienation” to “Inequalities between SSLJR [Secondary School for Law, Journalism and Research] and the proposed Millennium Brooklyn” school.
The debaters explained that having metal detectors in schools was a racist act because most city schools containing them had predominantly black and Latino students, the highest poverty rates and the highest rates of Special Education and English Language Learners. One student was cheered when he stated, “When students leave school, they may not know math or history but they will surely know how to assume the position.”
The debaters also pointed out that many students felt alienated because they were treated like prisoners — barred from walking around in the cafeteria, required to wear uniforms in one of the schools and not allowed to go outside for lunch while the mostly-white elementary school children were.
Another debater, exposing a new uniform policy in one of the schools, had to pause for clapping and cheers when she explained that “uniforms are an unnecessary exertion of power by administrators who are looking for ways to control the students. But it’s obviously not working since only about ten percent of the school is wearing them.”
Students, parents and teachers have collectively organized these activities. We’re trying to inform as many people as possible about the DoE’s racist disregard for our students and the importance of fighting back. This struggle has involved many new people. CHALLENGE is becoming the paper of the masses in this battle and is seen by many as the newspaper reporting the truth about our school. We’re confronting capitalism’s racism head-on.
Victory in this struggle will not mainly be measured by whether or not Millennium Brooklyn arrives in the fall. That school, as all others under capitalism, will continue to teach the bosses’ ideology. Our victory will be in spreading the idea that we must fight for a communist world, where workers make decisions based on our needs, not the bosses’ need for profit. Only then will educating all for the betterment of workers worldwide become a priority.

The New Year opens with the U.S. ruling class contemplating expanded wars for profit on many fronts, especially the Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq campaigns — all inherently crimes against the international working class. By drones and other means, U.S. rulers are committing racist atrocities in order to secure Central Asian oil and gas supplies and energy transit routes, as well as positioning themselves strategically against future clashes with China and Russia.
Obama Steps Up Nazi-Style Drone Terror in Pakistan, Targets Civilians
U.S. imperialists “celebrated” New Year’s Day by slaughtering 18 “suspected militants” with CIA-guided drone missiles in Pakistan. Assassin-in-chief Obama okayed the hits from his Hawaiian vacation resort. The killings follow a “record number of 124 attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2010, more than double the number of Predator strikes conducted in 2009, killing 1,184 people, compared with 2009’s death toll of 760 in 53 such attacks.” (The News, Pakistan, 1/1/2011)
Terrorism from the air, recalling the World War II Nazi’s V-2 rocket blitz on London, has joined massacre and torture as part of U.S. rulers’ standard operating procedure. Many of the dead are civilians. According to Britain’s Channel 4 News (12/22/10), “Women and children...have also perished while the sheer number of drone flights has caused panic and terror among ordinary tribespeople. It is clear that a changing strategy has often put villages rather than remote hideouts in the firing line.”
Obama’s escalation of remote-controlled murder reflects several harsh realities. First and foremost, war-making U.S. capitalists have utter, racist disregard for working-class lives.  Second, U.S.-led warfare is rapidly expanding beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, with global ramifications. And third, despite its lethal technological superiority, the Pentagon can’t yet deploy massive ground forces.
This becomes a problem for Obama & Co. when considering potentially necessary invasions of Iran and North Korea, not to mention future war with China. The ruling-class mouthpiece, the NY Times editorialized (1/2/11): “China seems increasingly intent on challenging United States naval supremacy in the Western Pacific….China could soon deploy a ballistic missile capable of threatening American aircraft carriers in the region….Dealing with a rising China could be Washington’s biggest challenge in the decades ahead.”
All of the above would require ground armies which U.S. commanders do not yet possess.
U.S. Rulers’ Afghan-Pakistan Strategy Underlies Road to World War III
Controlling the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route and vast Afghan mineral resources motivates the immediate Obama Afghan-Pakistan killing surge. But defeating, or at least limiting, the Taliban in both countries is essential for U.S. planners focused on a future World War. Robert Blackwill, a senior fellow at the influential Rockefeller-run Council on Foreign Relations think-tank and a national security adviser to Bush, Jr., urged Obama to abandon his fake Afghan pullout rhetoric (Foreign Affairs, January-February/2011):
““[Withdrawal] would lead to the rapid resumption of an all-out Afghan civil war and then to a probable conquest of the entire country by the Taliban. It would draw Afghanistan’s neighbors into the fighting, destabilizing the region and further souring relations between New Delhi [India] and Islamabad [Pakistan]. It would raise the odds of the Islamic radicalization of Pakistan, which would in turn call into question the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It would weaken, if not rupture, the budding U.S.-Indian strategic partnership [against China], undermine NATO’s [anti-Russian] future, and trigger a global outpouring of support for [anti-Saudi, al Qaeda-style] jihadist ideology.”
Without full U.S. mobilization, though, Blackwill can propose only partition, maintaining 35,000-50,000 U.S. troops in key parts of Afghanistan and yielding the outlying mountainous areas to the Taliban, though on a very short leash. If the U.S. caught Afghan Taliban aiding al Qaeda, “The sky over [Taliban-controlled] Pashtun, Afghanistan would be filled with Predators targeting not only terrorist activities but also, if necessary, the new Afghan Taliban government in all its dimensions.”
Air Power Alone Won’t Cut It; Bosses Must Double Army, Marines for Occupying Force
Ex-CIA boss General Michael Hayden said in Bob Woodward’s book, “Obama’s Wars”: “The great lesson of World War II and Vietnam was that attack from the air, even massive bombings, can’t win a war.” U.S. rulers need armies of occupation far larger than their present strength. At a December 22 forum held by the Brookings Institution, another imperialist policy factory, Michael O’Hanlon, military advisor to Hillary Clinton, observed:
 “We do have the capability...to overthrow the Iranian regime. We...would have to have a Marine Corps and Army that would be probably twice their current size to really do an occupation of Iran with its 75 million population correctly over a period of years.” (Brookings website) The Brookings forum also discussed “occupation of North Korea” and “conflict with China.”
Dream Act + Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ = Militarization
How the U.S. war machine can at least double its needed ground troops weighs heavily on Obama and the imperialists he serves. Obama strove mightily, but failed, to get the Dream Act through December’s lame-duck Congress. The Act had the potential of enlisting (back-door drafting) millions of immigrant youth into the military in exchange for the promise of U.S. citizenship. “Passage of the Dream Act is one of its [the Pentagon’s] official goals for helping to maintain ‘a mission-ready, all-volunteer force.’” (NY Times editorial, 9/2010) (The college “option” is a fraud since more and more low-income youth can’t afford the rising tuitions.)
Meanwhile, domestically-focused Tea Party forces are asserting greater control over immigration policy by driving to duplicate the racist Arizona anti-immigrant law in other states, aimed at undocumented workers, but with even harsher penalties. This conflicts with Obama’s imperialist faction which seeks a war-bent policy centralized in Washington.
The Obama camp, however, did succeed in repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” This reopened the door to officer training (ROTC) on Ivy League campuses which had previously restricted ROTC because the Pentagon policy discriminated against gays and lesbians. The Pentagon needs a fresh supply of ROTC-trained officers. The policy had also discharged thousands whom Obama hoped would re-enlist following the repeal.
The horrors of imperialist war are also leading to tens of thousands of GI’s developing post-traumatic stress disorder, limiting their fighting potential and resulting in ever-rising numbers committing suicide after constant re-deployments, still another brake on an expanding military.
The embattled capitalists Obama serves want to raise their killing capacity from merely dozens of drones to invading armies in the millions. PLP must expose the rulers’ renewed efforts to expand their worker-killing war machine through a Dream Act, enhancement of its officer corps through ROTC or any other end-run at militarization that the troop-starved war-makers cook up.
Rulers Bleed Workers to Finance Wars and Create Economic Draft
PLP’ers and militant workers and youth must step up actions we’ve already launched against the ruling class’s massive budget cuts that they’re using to finance their imperialist wars: their raising of fares and job and wage-cuts in mass transit in NYC and California; their increasing tuitions in city and state universities and racist destruction of public education; their attacks on healthcare affecting hospital workers and patients; their cuts in pensions and coming cuts in Social Security; and our fights against racist unemployment.
We can fight to win these battles, but the bosses will eventually reverse them. It is out of these struggles that we can win workers to understand that only communist revolution can end these murderous cuts and the bosses’ imperialist wars once and for all. Such class struggles are truly “schools for communism” which can “graduate” into building PLP to lead the working class towards a worker-run society.

BOSTON, MA, December 15 —  Two students at Roxbury Community College (RCC) took immediate action by organizing a protest against the brutal attack on a black youth by Boston police on Oct 22 (see, CHALLENGE 12/15/10). Some members of the RCC faculty took a different approach to the racist attack. They responded to the militancy of the students by organizing a symposium on urban violence.
A local judge, police lieutenant, and a youth advocate from “Street Safe” (all black) were guest speakers on the panel that tried to convince predominantly black and Latino students to trust in the racist justice system. The symposium shifted into a therapy session instead of a political discussion on the systemic racism of urban violence. The panelists purposely ignored political questions raised by students. One student asked “When will the boy who was brutalized by the police get justice.” The question went unanswered.
The lack of consciousness from the crowd gave the panelists some advantage over the symposium. They focused on pushing people to rely on the police as a solution. “You guys know who the killers and drug dealers are, so pick up the phone and call the police.” However, some people did not fall for this statement because they distrust the police who routinely harass and attack workers in the community. 
The solutions the panelists gave were more like the problems working people already faced: police harassment and intimidation. Realistically, urban violence will never end as long as we live in a capitalistic society in which the rich exploit the  working class. 
 When the discussions became more political, the moderator dismissed students and faculty early for lunch. They blamed students for being apathetic and passive on the issue of urban violence to distract students from discussing the issues of poverty and class.
The only way we can eradicate such violence in our neighborhoods is to confront the source. The justice system is used to terrorize workers into not fighting back against the increasing misery and exploitation caused by the economic crises of capitalism.
Since the panel, we have built a real base for the spread of communist consciousness among RCC students. We now have a regular student PLP study group which is learning about capitalism, fascism, and racism.  We have distributed CHALLENGES and PLP leaflets at RCC. We are planning a one-day school on political economy and developing a plan for RCC students to distribute leaflets against racist school closings in Boston.