WASHINGTON, D.C., August 28 — PLP boldly confronted tens of thousands of lily-white Tea Partiers streaming into a rally led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. We challenged the racists, haranguing them on a loud bullhorn for two hours and individually in their faces as they walked by. Speakers exposed the Tea Party as tools of big business, especially Koch Enterprises, a multi-billion dollar energy company that organized and funds the Tea Party with millions of dollars. (Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” New Yorker, 8/30).

PL’ers called for multi-racial unity to fight against racism and for jobs, affordable housing, and against  the wars for oil. Some speakers called for the unity of all workers to fight for communism, a society run by the working class without profiting from anyone’s work, and condemned the racially-divisive message of the Tea Party.

We distributed over 400 CHALLENGES and 700 leaflets (including 300 the night before at an anti-racist gathering) explaining the fascist nature of the Tea Party. Our numbers grew when other anti-racists looking for a protest showed up. Our friends were furious at Glenn Beck’s attempt at hijacking the symbols of anti-racism by holding his rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

This location is associated with the end of slavery and was the site of Marian Anderson’s famous concert in response to the racist banning of her performance in Constitution Hall in the 1930s. The rally was called on the anniversary of the anti-racist March on Washington in 1963. Beck even got Martin Luther King’s niece (a right-winger who is estranged from her family) to speak favorably at the rally.

The Tea Party crowd was overwhelmingly white, middle class, and older. Most vigorously denied they were racist, while some were openly racist. Most wanted to “take back the country” and “return it to its roots,” a thinly-veiled call to return to segregation and even slavery. Almost all of them viewed undocumented workers as a major cause of the problems in society.

Other Tea Partiers were vague as to what the rally was about. Several said that they had voted for Obama, but were furious that he had sold out to the Wall Street banks during the crisis, and so had switched to the Tea Party. Capitalism in crisis drives people to take sharper positions, either to the left or the right. We have to be there to win increasingly angry workers to revolutionary politics, not fascism! We cannot abandon any workers to the demagoguery of fascism.

We struggled successfully with our coworkers, friends and neighbors and comrades from out of town to join us and not be intimidated by this emerging fascist movement. Our greatest victory was that the workers we brought with us got to see the danger of the beginning of a mass fascist movement up close and personal, which gave a sense of urgency for building PLP and the revolutionary movement.

Greater Dangers

The Tea Party and its allied Freedom Works support policies to enrich big business, especially aggressive southwest capitalists challenging the eastern Wall Street capitalists within the ruling class. The Tea Party and Freedom Works want to privatize social security, eliminate welfare, charge for currently free Internet services, eliminate environmental protections to control global warming, and restrict unionization. The longer-view liberal capitalists generally oppose these policies as unnecessarily disruptive, but they are moving in the same direction.

The Tea Party may have mobilized fascist foot soldiers, but the main danger remains with the liberal bosses currently led by Obama. They are the leaders of imperialist wars, massive cutbacks in services, and ongoing fascist repressive measures that in some ways have exceeded those of the Bush administration (for example creating a list of “terrorist” enemies and giving the green light to assassinate them anywhere in the world, not just on the battlefield).

These forces have mobilized labor unions and the NAACP for a mass march on October 2 to shore up the political power of their faction of the ruling class. We must be there to expose their efforts to mislead angry workers into the bosses’ election charade. What is called for is sharper class struggle in the streets and in the workplaces.

The Tea Party is similar to the movements that grew in Germany and Italy in the 1930s. We have started a fight-back movement, but we have to grow larger quickly to derail the fascist Tea Party through more vigorous struggle, similar to our campaigns against the Klan and Nazis.

With the economy going deeper into recession, more workers are looking for answers, and the Tea Party offers other workers as scapegoats. PLP can show workers that capitalism is the cause and that revolution for communism is the solution. Let’s bring that same message to the bosses’ demonstration on October 2.

NEW YORK CITY — “The racists are freely demonstrating in front of the mosque right now! And we’re the ones fenced in three blocks away by the NYPD,” a PL’er said to 150 demonstrators. They were assembled to counter-protest 500 racists opposed to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” a mosque that an Islamic association is hoping to expand into a community center.

The mosque has made headlines in the bosses’ press worldwide. Liberals like Obama have questioned the “wisdom” of its location two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, and right-wingers have declared it a haven for “terrorism.”

Our PLP club and several friends from Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and West Africa participated in the counter-demonstration and raised our internationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics. We distributed CHALLENGE and encouraged the crowd to picket and confront the racists, in spite of the fears of confrontation by the socialist group that officially organized the event.

One PL’er climbed the ladder to speak, and pointed out that the racist demonstration occurring in front of the mosque is part of a U.S. ruling-class-sponsored intensification of racism against Muslims, particularly Arabs, Persians, and South Asians. Their goal is to build momentum for even larger wars in the Middle East/ South Asia.

The PL’er concluded with the need to confront the racists by marching directly to them to picket, so as not to repeat the mistake of ignoring racism the German working class made during the rise of fascism. A leader in the socialist group warned the crowd not to break away from the steel fences, instead inviting everyone to a meeting the following week to “discuss” the day’s events. In the end about two or three dozen went to the mosque, where we were forced to picket the racists from across the street, because of the heavy NYPD presence.

The U.S. bosses may be divided amongst themselves for the moment, but in the long term they will need Nazi-like soldiers who won’t hesitate to butcher more of our Middle Eastern working-class brothers and sisters for control of oil. Equating Islam with Bin Laden’s terrorism is only a first attempt to build the racism they need to win workers here to become those butchers.

We can count on the bosses not missing an opportunity to try and mobilize workers into the streets around their imperialist agenda. We can’t miss our own opportunities. We must use CHALLENGE to build the mass international working-class movement that will stop these racist bosses in their tracks

JOHAR BARU, MALAYSIA, Aug.16 — Today, more than 5,000 migrant workers tore down a guard tower that monitored the “company-town” housing they were forced to live in, in this industrial city. They rebelled after a worker died because of the bosses’ racist healthcare system. The workers are undocumented migrant workers from all over the world — Nepal, Myanmar, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India. They united based on their needs as workers and did not let racism defeat their struggle.

The fighting was sparked after an injured staff member died when employers delayed sending him to the hospital. The 20-year-old Nepalese man had contracted a high fever on Sunday. After he became unable to hide how sick he was, the bosses allegedly refused to send him for treatment until it was too late. He died at 7 am the next day. The workers are calling for reforms: the establishment of a mini-clinic at the electronics compound as well as pay increases. Following the rebellion, the managers, now fearing the violence that the workers used, agreed to meet a workers’ representative to discuss problems at the plant in the Tebrau Industrial Area.

Recent reports from NGO Amnesty International have been highly critical of the lack of legal protections and conditions for the migrant workforce in Malaysia, noting: “Migrant workers are critical to Malaysia’s economy, but they systematically receive less legal protection than other workers. They are easy prey for unscrupulous recruitment agents, employers and corrupt police…Migrants are forced to work in hazardous situations, often against their will, and toil for 12 hours a day or more. Many are subject to verbal, physical and sexual abuse…

“Most pay recruitment agents substantial sums of money to secure jobs, work permits and training. Once they arrive, they often find that much of what their agents told them about their new jobs is a lie — the pay, type of work, even the existence of those jobs or their legal status in the country…Most workers have taken out loans at exorbitant interest rates and simply cannot afford to return to their home countries. Nearly all employers hold their workers’ passports, placing workers at risk of arrest and in practice preventing them from leaving abusive workplaces.”

Militant actions like this illustrate the potential that workers have to fight back against the bosses and the ideologies of capitalism such as racism and sexism. Despite the use of force by the workers, the lack of a revolutionary communist party will ensure that the struggle is forced down the dead-end path of reform. The bosses will continue to squeeze as much profit as they can from each worker in order to stay competitive. Even if these workers temporarily “win” these reforms, they will eventually be reversed.

Workers lives will never be improved by the
“legal” system. Laws are written and enforced by the ruling class to protect the “rights” of the bosses to exploit workers.

That is the nature of capitalism, the system of profits we live under today. Capitalism has not met and can never meet the needs of the world’s working class. Though we must be inspired by such uprisings as happened in Malaysia, we have to recognize that these struggles will be for naught unless PLP is built from them.

This is why we need to organize to fight for communism; a society built upon workers’ needs, where the workers lead every aspect of society. Under communism our needs wouldn’t be ignored because of bosses’ needs for profit. There will be no bosses or profits

MEXICO CITY, September 4 — About 17,000 workers in the Mexican Union of Electricians (SME) continue fighting to win back their jobs. Ten months ago President Calderón ordered the police and army onto their worksites to advance the move towards privatization which would leave over 44,000 workers in the street and 22,000 retired workers in poverty.

“When I was born I was already part of the union; my father was an electrician and I took his place,” declared a worker at a Party meeting. “We can’t allow them to defeat us.”

This exemplifies the spirit that encourages thousands to keep fighting. Another worker responded, “His resistance is admirable, but won’t end the exploitation and attacks on workers. For this we need a revolutionary party and a communist revolution.” He invited the electrician to get to know the Party and our paper. He said he would. 

A young transportation worker thought some struggles like at SME can succeed. In the Atenco region, the farmers were able to prevent the rulers from taking their lands to build an airport. We all refused the ridiculous paltry amount they offered for their lands. A young teacher commented, “The Party must be part of these struggles, to unify the workers’ struggle for their jobs, which is part of the fight towards communism.”

Young students and workers from those areas also attended the meeting. We all saw the importance of studying CHALLENGE collectively and individually to better our understanding of what happens in the world, of the workers’ struggles and the task the Party carries out to win them to our ranks.

This important discussion reflected our debates to help resolve the contradiction between reform and revolution. The Party will lead towards the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a communist society. The unions almost always side with the bosses, while saying they’re fighting so that workers can live a little better under capitalism. However, this spreads the illusions that this system can be reformed. But in these organizations there are thousands of workers who can be won to destroy capitalism. Communists must fight alongside them to win them towards revolution, not reform. This is a long process but is the essence of our struggle.

Until now we’ve made modest advances in building a base for communism. The areas of this work change daily. Workers’ conditions here worsen rapidly. Unemployment is increasing. The few jobs that do exist mostly have no benefits or are jobs as street vendors.

Under the guise of the “war against drug-trafficking,” the army, police and paramilitary groups saturate entire cities. A small number of billionaires openly control the political parties and government, helping to reveal their fight amongst themselves. Inequality, racism, repression, sexism and exploitation intensify. Conditions are changing rapidly towards fascism.   

To make the struggle for communism a priority for workers, we must advance from a modest struggle to a major dedication to liberate the working class from the capitalists’ yoke. Our key tasks are massive circulation and hand-to-hand distribution of CHALLENGE and our active presence in the class struggle to build a base for communism.