Billions of people cheered the recent rescue of 33 heroic Chilean miners. This outpouring of admiration and sympathy for the workers and their families encourages our revolutionary communist Party. It shows that worldwide class-based solidarity is indeed possible.
But the cheers and tears that filled the world’s media for the miners rescued from the San Esteban Primera Company’s San Jose copper and gold mine occurred amid an orgy of Chilean patriotic nationalism led by billionaire President Sebastián Piñera. It should not obscure the collaboration of profit-hungry mining bosses with Chile’s capitalist government which caused this disaster and many others.
José Rojo, a 20-year veteran miner, charged that the bosses had “turned a blind eye to the San José mine. They told us it was coming down; every so often there were cave-ins. They knew it was going to happen. At times when I was there with the Jumbo drill, I had to stop because I saw that the roof was coming down on me.” (Argentine daily, “Pagina 12”) On the day of the cave-in, he was lucky — the machinery he operated was broken, so he was not at work!
Philippe Sanchez, 51, who worked at the mine between 1987 and 1999 and whose nephew was among those trapped, told a reporter, “It is one of the worst mines in the area. It has always been dangerous. There are accidents all the time and when you are hurt, you had better not complain or you will be sacked — there is a culture of silence.”
Two factors saved the miners: their own courageous working-class egalitarianism and the capitalists’ opportunistic grab at a rare chance to appear benevolent. In the crucial first 17 days, the miners, left for dead by the pit’s owners, selflessly rationed scant food supplies. “They had two little spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours,” said Dr Sergio Aguila, who was part of the rescue team. (London Telegraph, 8/24/10)  They took turns at finding water and trying to get messages to the outside. That’s when the capitalists decided to cash in and launched their nationalistic orgy.
Just like West Virginia’s Massey Coal Company whose illegal unsafe conditions killed almost 30 miners this year and the deaths in the Chinese Wangjialing coal mine earlier this year (an average of seven miners die in China every day; 24 miners die every year in Chile), the capitalists are happy to pay fines rather than paying for more expensive safe working conditions for miners. Less than a week after the drama in Chile, at least 25 miners perished in preventable incidents in China and Ecuador. The yearly worldwide mine death toll numbers in the thousands and doubles with deaths from lung disease.
Under capitalism, we, the working class and its allies, are locked in a death struggle with the bosses that profit-driven mine disasters lay bare. In every case, it’s cost-cutting shortcuts on safety procedures that keep killing workers. With capitalism rampant, concern for the bottom line continues to trump workers’ well-being.
For safety on the job, workers need the power to make it safe. That can only come with communism, when workers rule society and the capitalists and their profit drive at any cost no longer exist.
This San José mine has had 80 “accidents” since 2004 when a miner died after a cave-in. In 2006, a truck driver was also killed in an “accident.” That same year 182 workers were injured, 56 of them seriously. The mine was closed in 2007 after a geologist died in a rock explosion. The owners were charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was dropped after they agreed to pay the family $170,000.
To re-open the mine, the government required that San Esteban construct an emergency ladder that would lead to the surface from the very shelter where the 33 trapped miners huddled together. The miners got only one-third of the way up before discovering that the mine owners had never bothered to finish the ladder to the top! Moreover, one of the trapped miners said that when they reached the shelter itself, “The energy was cut off and there was no ventilation,” forcing them to sleep in the shafts.
Continuing their arrogance, the mine bosses did not pay the miners’ families while their breadwinners were trapped, forcing their families to rely on charity. When a court ruled that the company freeze $1.8 million for future compensation to the miners, the bosses threatened to declare bankruptcy.  Meanwhile, San Esteban is poised to open another mine in the Atacama Desert! The union leadership has proven ineffective in rallying workers to fight these bosses because they’re defenders of the capitalist system and therefore did virtually nothing to fight for the workers during the previous 80 “accidents.”
Chile’s politicians are partners in these capitalist crimes. President Piñera, who has milked this rescue mission for every ounce of patriotic fervor he could mount, ran for president on a platform of privatizing Chile’s copper mines, provoking miners’ strikes against his proposal.
Piñera, a billionaire businessman, is a political descendant of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime his brother Jose served as minister of labor and of mining. Under Pinochet, Jose Pinera pushed through a Constitutional Mining Law in 1981 that privatized much of Chilean mining, leading to more severe declines in safety conditions.
The right-wing president has tried to claim ownership of the rescue effort, appearing at the mine site and attempting to turn the entire operation into an exercise in patriotism. He furthered capitalism’s classless myth that “we’re all in this together” as a nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even more shamefully, Socialist Party Senator María Isabel Allende Bussi, the daughter of former president Salvador Allende (who Pinochet had assassinated with CIA help), embraced Piñera at the mine, responding to Piñera’s call for “national unity.” The revolutionary left of the 1970s that fought the fascists, conservatives and liberals, virtually disappeared during Pinochet’s murderous regime. Now it’s necessary to build the Progressive Labor Party in Chile to take on the Piñera-phony leftist gang-up.
Chile is sharply divided between rich and poor. Chile’s bosses subject the indigenous Mapuche people to vicious racist attacks, driving them off their ancestral land. Currently, 34 Mapuche fighters, jailed under the Pinochet era’s “anti-terror” laws, are continuing a two-month hunger strike, demanding an end to those laws. There has been no media circus around the efforts of these anti-racists.
Chile’s modest 4.1% annual per-capita growth rate over the past two decades has been accompanied by widening social and economic inequality. Fourteen percent of Chile’s population — 2.3 million people — live in poverty, with millions more barely making it above the poverty line.
Lucrative book and movie deals with U.S. media giants, absolving the guilty pit operators, await the traumatized miners. That’s their next form of exploitation under capitalism in this age of weak class consciousness. Not so long ago, however, mine cave-ins helped spur communist organizing. It is our Party’s task today to rekindle that revolutionary working-class spirit.
Communist revolution is the path towards freeing the working class from racism and exploitation, and establishing workers’ power.

Box 1

‘SAVIOR’ CHILE CHIEF PINERA IS U.S. BOSSES’ LACKEY
Harvard-educated Pinera’s close ties to the U.S. ruling class shaped his self-serving, U.S.-boosting crisis management. He immediately put mining minister Laurence Golborne — a former boss at Exxon Mobil’s Chilean subsidiary — in charge. Pinera owes a good part of his fortune to his recent sale of Chilevision TV to Time Warner. Two years ago, Pinera was a keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. (Rockefeller and his daughter serve as its advisors.) Pre-presidential Pinera touted “New Horizons for Opportunities” to potential U.S. imperialist investors.

Box 2

U.S. COVERAGE REFLECTS GROWING SPLIT AMONG BOSSES

Back in the U.S., capitalist rivals for state power in the mid-term elections seek to turn the San Jose “miracle” to their own purposes. Tea-Party booster Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal trumpeted (10/14/10), “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.” That’s because, the Journal says, the drill used in it came from a small, unregulated company in Pennsylvania.
On the other hand, the liberal, Obama-loving Brookings Institution brays, “An Act of People, Leaders and Good Governance.” Brookings just as fancifully insists that the workers survived mainly because of extensive Chilean government regulation. The liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalism that Obama serves needs tighter control of the economy by Washington for its current and future wars. Financing current U.S. military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia and looming conflict with Iran, China, and Russia requires enforced fiscal focus.

NEWARK, NJ, October 15 — So what do you get when you put Oprah Winfrey, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a stage to talk about how to reform the Newark public schools? Another attempt by the U.S. ruling class to make schools more efficient warehouses, producing capitalist ideas and maintaining class inequality and racist divisions of the working class. Especially in a place like Newark, where the “official” unemployment rate is well over 14%, and over 70% of students can’t pass state tests, the bosses need to cover up their racism with a U.S. nationalist “We are all in this together” mentality. This is where Zuckerberg comes in.
On September 24, Zuckerberg announced that he is setting up a foundation, like fellow billionaire Bill Gates, to focus on the improvement of education in the U.S., and particularly Newark.
Along with his $100 million “matching grant,” Zuckerberg also gave suggestions on how to reform schools: “So we should close schools down that are failing, get a lot of good charter schools and figure out new contracts for teachers so that better teachers can get paid more money,” he said during an interview on the techcrunch website1. After the Oprah show, that comment was deleted from the site.
All the hoopla on Oprah couldn’t cover up the backroom deal between Christie, Booker and Zuckerberg that would leave Newark parents out in the cold. Although it seems dishonest, this is how education under capitalism has been operating since the founding of this country. Public education has always been controlled by the ruling class: from early factory owners, who built the movement for mass public education as a means to control immigrant workers, to today’s corporations giving  millions to school systems to run things their way.  Only a communist revolution could put workers in command of the policy and practice of education.
One example of capitalist control of the schools is in Washington, D.C., where private groups like the Walton Family (owners of  Wal Mart) Foundation have the right to take back $64.5 million if the D.C. political leadership changes2. Zuckerberg’s latest “donation” with strings attached comes at a time when the Newark public schools face devastating cutbacks from Christie totaling $56 million and eliminating around 200 positions. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends over $1.5 billion per month to secure gas pipelines and key minerals in Afghanistan and gives the bankers billions in interest on government debt.
While it seems that the billionaires are in a much stronger position than the workers, things are changing, even if not as fast as we would like. Last week around 100 students from Barringer High School, one of the most neglected schools in Newark, staged a walkout to protest the terrible conditions there. In the first month of school, there were many students still without a schedule, one young girl was sexually assaulted in a classroom and there were fights every day. This symbolizes what many black and Latino students go through — the worst of the worst from the bosses’ racist system.
In the teachers’ union, a study group has formed where teachers and parents from all over the city will read about the history of the union (including the past role of communists), study the role that racism has played in keeping parents, teachers, and students from uniting and analyze the results of the cutbacks and corporate-backed “turn-around schools.”
On October 13, over 200 Newark parents, teachers and students held a community forum to talk about how we can build an alliance to ensure that our students benefit from any increase in funds. While many parents still believe that public schools can solve students’ problems, PLP was there to get to know more of these fighting parents and spread our ideas: that even if these schools had all the technology and good teachers around, they would still be controlled by the ideology of the ruling class. Even the “best” schools reproduce unequal class relations and win young people to patriotic ideas. Some of the parents agreed and took CHALLENGE, but many believe that “community control” of the schools is still the answer.
We in PLP both have a lot to learn and a lot to give to this movement. Only through our consistent base-building and involvement in the struggle will we win thousands of workers in the city to our revolutionary communist ideas. The bosses are giving us plenty of opportunities; let’s run with them.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/tech              crunch-interview-with-mark-zuckerberg-on-          mn     100-million-education-donation/
2. Turque, Bill Washington Post, April 28, 2010


NEW YORK CITY, October 16 — TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 representing most of NYC’s transit workers sent 20 buses to the October 2 “one nation” rally in Washington, D.C. However, many buses were largely empty. The international TWU “contingent” of mass transit, airline and railroad workers was nothing more than a distribution point for lunch, T-shirts and temporary tattoos. Many Local 100 members, including recently laid-off transit workers, were motivated to go to fight for jobs and against MTA bosses. But the rally was nothing more than a big pre-election photo-op for Democrats.
Preparing for the rally, in September PLP protested at two of five MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) public hearings on fare hikes, confronting the MTA Board face to face. Along with a few spirited transit riders and workers, PLP pointed out that layoffs, service cuts and fare hikes hit the city’s mainly black, Latino and immigrant workers the hardest.
PLP’s goal on October 2 and in confronting the MTA Board was to build mass, anti-racist class struggle for communism among students, workers and soldiers internationally. We knew that the rally was a scam to persuade U.S. workers to vote for agents of super-rich Wall Street capitalists and that the MTA board’s mind was made up on fare hikes. But PLP struggles to influence workers and riders towards uniting for international communist revolution.
Speakers confronting the Board enabled more and more workers and riders to learn about the role of Wall Street banks in causing the budget gap, service cuts, layoffs and fare hikes.
At the hearings crowds chanted, “Fire the MTA”; “Cut the banks, not the buses”; “No cuts, no war, the cuts are for the war”; “They got bailed out, we got sold out. Make the bosses, take the losses.” Speakers defied the three-minute time limit. The crowd demanded more time for speakers who attacked the MTA Board. The unions had none of that energy in D.C. on October 2.
At the Bronx MTA hearing on fare hikes, PLP distributed transit supplements tying U.S. mass transit cuts to the bosses’ need to finance their wars against other imperialists, the richest most powerful capitalist ruling classes. Blind and wheelchair-bound speakers cited the Board’s disgusting disregard of disabled passengers.
One wheelchair-bound woman testified she had to call the fire department to get carried out of the station in the middle of the night because laid-off station agents were not there to assist her.
Nearly every speaker exposed the hearings as an MTA scam to pretend the MTA “listens to the people.” One pointed out that although some local politicians spoke against the hikes, capitalist money backs both the MTA Board and the politicians.
Another speaker, a one-time real estate lawyer and urban studies expert, admitted that real estate developers calculate exactly how much property values rise from being close to mass transit. He proposed that instead of hiking fares the government tax landlords based on their proximity to mass transit.
In both hearings and at the October 2 rally PLP made contacts with transit workers. While we failed to organize as many workers as we wanted to attend the hearings or the October 2 rally, we did not sit out the struggle.
The working class may not win reform struggles for jobs, higher wages or lower fares, even with militant fight-backs. But the recent battles against these transit layoffs show that unions organize only lawyers and politicians, not workers. The recent MTA lawsuit to overturn Local 100’s legally-binding 2009 arbitration award reveals that when bosses break their own law, they get away with it because they, not workers, hold the dictatorship of state power.
Only a May 4 break-away rally that surprised both Local 100 leaders and cops delayed station-agent layoffs. It was a short-lived victory but only mass class struggle achieved anything at all. On May 4, only hours after the break-away demonstration, a judge placed a temporary injunction against layoffs until the MTA held public hearings on station-booth closings.
PLP struggles consistently to use all these struggles as schools for communist ideas and actions.

BROOKLYN, NY, October 12 — “What’s the purpose of these schools? Is it for you to get educated OR to keep you under control?” This is what one PLP member asked his class last week in response to this schools’ administration harassing students about their participation in the October 2 March for Jobs in Washington, D.C. Many students attended this event, sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers, with family and friends, as well as staff members.
The administration has pursued campaigns of intimidation before when students and staff members have attended various events together, such as when teachers and students worked alongside each other in helping to rebuild New Orleans. This effort to create a climate of fear and hysteria has backfired on them before and will again. The Washington rally was attended by politicians as well as thousands of students from all over the East Coast.
This witchhunt is another racist attack by the administration. Who is investigating the students from mostly white specialized schools who attended the rally? Nobody. Is anyone investigating the private school students who attended? Why investigate the black and Latino students and their teachers who went? Who is investigating the New York City Comptroller, who brought a busload of students as well?
Better yet, let’s investigate the administration. Year after year they program Haitian students to take history classes with uncertified teachers from other departments. Then these students face the State Regents Test with no preparation.
Parents plan to take this to the Parent-Teacher Association. As one parent said, “These students should be in D.C. fighting for jobs — this is exactly what the young generation should be doing!” When teachers passed out fliers announcing the rally at the last parent meeting, all the parents were supportive. Because of growing unemployment (in one community near the school the unemployment rate is 20%) many parents encouraged their students to attend the protest. Some even attended it themselves.
This attack on students and teachers is part of a citywide attack on public education. While the Mayor continues to scapegoat both the union and teachers, it is increasingly crucial that we fight back. Students are the main targets of these attacks — whether it’s overcrowded classes, lack of textbooks or rising transit fares. The school administration, while failing miserably to provide a decent education, gets an A+ for harassment and intimidation. Communists have always led and must continue to lead the fight-back.
Students are plenty angry about being interrogated about what they do on their own time. They are getting a real education in fight-back as they take leadership in planning a mass campaign against the administration. This will include everything from petitions to demonstrations. The school bosses want to frighten teachers and students with their investigations.
We must take the offensive, put the administration on trial and be bold in our defense of the October 2 marchers. Capitalist education teaches all of us to be docile and passive, but with the leadership and support of communists in the PLP, we have confidence that young people will conduct “investigations” of their own and come to the right conclusion about the need for a communist society based on egalitarianism and dignity!