a href="#Rivalry Over Gas Pipeline Feeds Ruler’s War Surge">"ivalry Over Gas Pipeline Feeds Ruler’s War Surge
U.S. Pours Fuel on Iranian Fires
a href="#Obama’s Big Beginning:">"bama’s Big Beginning:
a href="#Peru’s Indigenous Indians: Armed Fight Challenges U.S. Imperialism’s Power Grab">Pe"u’s Indigenous Indians: Armed Fight Challenges U.S. Imperialism’s Power Grab
Boston Teachers, Students and Parents Unite to Fight Budget Cuts
a href="#Racist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits">"acist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits
a href="#Stella D’Oro Diary 3: Strikers Continue to Fight">"tella D’Oro Diary 3: Strikers Continue to Fight
Four Years Post-Katrina: A Capitalist Disaster
Korea: From U.S.-Japanese Colony to Pro-Communist Land to State Capitalism
Letters
Luis Castro Inspires Renewed Dedication to Fight for Communism
a href="#Reader in El Salvador Praises PLP’s Exposé of FMLN Swindlers">R"ader in El Salvador Praises PLP’s Exposé of FMLN Swindlers
Testing Protested At H.S. Graduation
a href="#Youth Felt Comrade Luis’s Communist Humanity">"outh Felt Comrade Luis’s Communist Humanity
Communist-led Open Mic Kicks Out the Jams
Transit Bosses Make Workers Pay for Crisis
Comrade Luis Castro: An Internationalist for the Ages
a name="Rivalry Over Gas Pipeline Feeds Ruler’s War Surge">">"ivalry Over Gas Pipeline Feeds Ruler’s War Surge
"The Good War," as the media calls Obama’s mounting slaughter in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has the same imperialist motive as the war in Iraq: U.S. dominance of world oil and natural gas supplies to counter Chinese, Russian, and regional competitors. In 1979, Jimmy Carter declared that the U.S. would regard any other power’s encroachment on Exxon Mobil’s turf as an act of war and backed up his threat with his new Rapid Deployment Force. The Carter Doctrine formalized the United States’ top strategic priority: securing and controlling Mideast and Central Asian energy and export routes.
Last month, with the agreement by Iran and Pakistan to complete a 1,200-mile IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline from the South Pars gas fields in Iran to Karachi, this strategy suffered a grave setback. According to Middle East Energy Strategy, a newsletter from Harvard’s Olin Institute, "What may seem like a standard energy project could have profound implications for the geopolitics of energy in the 21st century and for the future of south Asia, as well as for America’s ability to check Iran’s hegemony in the Persian Gulf" (5/29/09). In retaliation, Obama is sending in his new Afghanistan commander, Harvard-trained General Stanley McChrystal, best known for his command of death- and torture-squads in Iraq and Afghanistan. These ground-based "special operations" will supplement airborne Drone terror strikes in Pakistan. And coming soon: 21,000 more GIs in Afghanistan.
Iran, China, Russia Score Economic, Military Gains
U.S. rivals come out big winners in the pipeline deal. Iran gets steady income to offset losses stemming from U.S.-led sanctions, and also cements political ties with nuclear-armed Pakistan, already a shaky U.S. ally. As for China, "Iranian gas will flow to the Baluchistan province port of Gwadar, in the Arabian Sea [where China is now building a refinery]. And Gwadar is supposed to be connected to a proposed pipeline going north" to China (Asia Times, 5/29/09). Even before it launches a blue-water navy, China will gain the ability to import energy along routes beyond the reach of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. "With IP in place and with multi-billion-dollar, overlapping Tehran-Beijing gas deals, China can finally afford to import less energy via the Strait of Malacca, which Beijing considers exceedingly dangerous, and subject to Washington’s sphere of influence" (Asia Times). For Russia, meanwhile, "IP is a gift-from-above tool in rerouting gas from Iran to South Asia away from competing with Russian gas. The big prize, in this case, is the Western European market, dependent almost 30% on Gazprom [the gigantic Russian gas company] and the source of 80% of Gazprom’s export profits" (Asia Times).
Pentagon Unleashes Ivy League Assassin-in-Chief
By mid-summer, Obama’s deadly Afghan surge will be poised to strike, backed by a new U.S. Marine mega-base in Helmand province, a stone’s throw from the Iran-Afghan border and Pakistani Baluchistan, where the pipeline will run. It’s the ideal strategic base for an extended, tri-border (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan) "counter-insurgency splash," as coined by General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command (Asia Times, 6/4/09). Key to this effort will be Gen. McChrystal’s secret Special Operations killers, "targeted assassination teams working out of Afghan bases in Kandahar and Nangarhar, and allied with wily, local militias" (Asia Times). These militias, cynically manipulated by U.S. war makers, are separatist, nationalist Baluchi tribes. They claim a homeland that spans parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, including the critical Gwadar port.
The imminent Iran-Pakistan pipeline sharply contrasts with its hapless rival, the U.S.-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project. Begun under Clinton and Unocal (now Chevron) in 1995, TAPI’s U.S. backers first courted and then fell out with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. In 1999, when the Taliban favored an Argentine rival builder, Bridas, Clinton pulled the plug on the deal and essentially ended—temporarily—the U.S.-Taliban alliance. Taliban-run Afghanistan soon became a haven for al Qaeda, and its training ground. Washington has repeatedly insisted that its sole objective in invading Afghanistan in 2001 was to defeat Taliban and al Qaeda forces. But of late, pipeline building has reemerged as a chief aim. Bridas, which U.S. rulers now grudgingly support as a hedge against Chinese, Russian, and Iranian interests, has re-opened TAPI talks with Kabul. But while these negotiations remain in the talking stage, Iranian gas is set to flow to Gwadar and Karachi by 2014.
U.S. rivals make significant geostrategic gains with the stroke of a pen and guarantee them with vast numbers of nearby troops. U.S. rulers, on the other hand, can’t enforce deals without transporting their war machine across oceans and continents. Relative U.S. weakness is creating a field day atmosphere among Moscow’s and Beijing’s military planners. "Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated in April that Russia and China would strengthen their military cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and engage in several joint military maneuvers. He implied that these plans were aimed at limiting the U.S.’s presence in Central Asia" (Asia Times, 6/13/09). At the same time, Russia is marshalling former Soviet vassals into a fighting alliance called the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). "The new force would comprise large military units from five countries - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The creation of a powerful military contingent in Central Asia reflects Moscow’s drive to make the CSTO a pro-Russian military bloc, rivaling NATO forces in Europe" (Asia Times).
Phony "peace candidate" Obama is fully on board with the war program that U.S. capitalists require. Today it is death squads and more troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tomorrow it could be a frontal confrontation with China or Russia — a step that will require a full military mobilization of the U.S. This includes disciplining the capitalist class and rebuilding infrastructure (popular media topics) and a restoration of the draft (an as yet unmentionable one).
Obama is no friend of the working class. Despite his Cairo speech to "reach out" to the Muslim world, these are the same people who suffer daily atrocities in U.S. war zones. At home, millions of jobs have vanished under the new president. Poverty and police terror run rampant. Yet despite the decay of material conditions for the working class, Obama enjoys sky-high approval ratings: proof of his value to U.S. rulers. Exposing Obama’s true class allegiance — and his role — in these worsening times is a major priority for our Party.
U.S. Pours Fuel on Iranian Fires
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest last week’s presidential election in Iran. Several things are driving the battles taking place in Tehran. Economic problems caused by falling oil prices are causing attacks on the standard of living. There is a built-up hatred of the ruling class by young people alienated from the fundamentalist movement as well as people who had hoped the 1979 revolution against the Shah would liberate them and were betrayed. Divisions have developed within the Iranian ruling class on whether to deal solely with China and Russia or develop closer business ties with Europe. This is happening as covert operations by the U.S. to build up anti-government movements in Iran have been stepped up in recent years and are exploiting the contradictions in Iranian capitalism.
The anger at the disputed Ahmadinejad election victory is in part a reaction to 30 years of the Iranian ruling class’ brutality. Tehran’s rulers secured power by jailing, torturing and killing many thousands of people who had allied with them to get rid of the Shah. The left-wing and liberal parties who joined forces with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist movement were immediately turned on and attacked once the Shah was ousted. For years the remnants of these movements have been waiting for an opportunity like this.
The U.S. has invested heavily in the weakening of the Iranian ruling class. In his last year in office the Bush administration, under Defense Secretary Gates, began a $400 million program of covert operations in Iran to destabilize the country (New Yorker 7/7/08). While it has never been publicly confirmed, "It is very hard to imagine Obama abandoning covert operations [in Iran]" (Stratfor, 1/12/09). This estimate was strengthened with Obama’s retention of Gates as Secretary of Defense. Unless there is a mass communist movement built in Iran, the current uprisings are leading people into the arms of the U.S. ruling class, just as the movements of 1979 against the U.S.-installed murderer, Shah Reza Pahlavi, led to the installation of the Khomeini-led capitalists.
a name="Obama’s Big Beginning:">">"bama’s Big Beginning:
Wider War, Billion$ to Banks, Jobs Down, Rising Racism, Foreclosures - All in 100 Days!
Millions of workers supported Obama, wanting real change: jobs, an end to the imperialist wars, and, importantly, a victory against racism. However, Obama’s first 100 days hasn’t been the "change" from the Bush administration workers expected.
The day Obama was inaugurated, home foreclosures and racist unemployment were at their highest pace since the 1930s. Defenders of Obama claimed that he ‘inherited’ these crises from the Bush administration. Throughout the Bush years, CHALLENGE argued that the real problem "isn’t Bush, it’s capitalism." It doesn’t matter which president is in office; the ruling class sets the agenda.
Instead of bailing out the working class, Obama gutted the auto workers’ contract, gave billions to his ruling-class buddies and called on workers to sacrifice for the "good of the country." On April 27, Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in the presence of Senator Kennedy and former President Clinton. This will triple the number of U.S. youth volunteering for AmeriCorps, create four new national service corps (three focused on youth) and turn September 11 into a National Day of Service. The building of this volunteer corps takes people’s desire to serve the working class and directs it into service for the needs of the bosses. It will create a free army that can be mobilized as the wars waged by the rulers expand. It is a partial realization of the Hart-Rudman Commission’s report that outline the ruling-class’s plans for confronting rising imperialist rivals like Russia and China, and securing long-term global military superiority.
Obama’s true class loyalties were foreshadowed by his reaction to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. During Bush’s last months, Obama was more than willing to accuse Bush of "mishandling" the economy, and yet didn’t say a word about the thousands of men, women, and children being killed and maimed. His only remark was "we only have one president at a time." Even Ben Cohen, liberal columnist and staunch Obama supporter, commented that Obama’s "silence was deafening" (Huffington Post, 12/29). When Israel destroyed a U.N. school and murdered at least 40 Palestinian refugees, Obama turned a blind eye.
Millions of workers expected and hoped that the Obama administration would improve workers’ lives. Obama staffed his administration with bank executives, former Clinton advisors like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and known torturers like General McChrystal, now in charge in Afghanistan. The Obama-led government passed a $787 billion "stimulus" package, secured a bank bailout and nationalized the auto industry. Obama’s priority has been saving the capitalists. He has no intention of stopping the foreclosures that are leaving thousands of families homeless with each passing week nor of fixing the racist unemployment that grows with each passing month.
As a presidential candidate, Obama promised to bring all combat troops back from Iraq by May 20, 2010. This gave him an edge among workers over Clinton or McCain, who admitted U.S. involvement in the Middle East may stretch a century or more. On February 27, President Obama changed his promise. By December, he plans to remove only two of the fourteen brigades, leaving a so-called residual force of around 50,000 troops. Those remaining beyond the Bush-brokered "Status of Forces Agreement" with the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi government will be merely renamed "advisory training brigades."
Meanwhile, Obama continues authorizing the massive bombing campaign over Afghanistan and missile strikes onto villages in Pakistan. The makers of these weapons, arms industry giants such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have a strong voice in the Obama administration through William J. Lynn III, former Raytheon lobbyist and Obama’s new Undersecretary of Defense, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, one of their favorite campaign contribution recipients. The arms industry is intertwined with the very megabanks like J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup whose former executives now advise Obama’s administration.
Obama, just like Bush before him, has shown his willingness to serve the bankers and bosses at the expense of the working class. No matter how much we hope for change, the capitalists will never allow a president who isn’t loyal to them to occupy the White House. Voting will never bring about a society that truly serves the needs of the workers of the world. Only communist revolution can do that. J
a name="Peru’s Indigenous Indians: Armed Fight Challenges U.S. Imperialism’s Power Grab"></">Pe"u’s Indigenous Indians: Armed Fight Challenges U.S. Imperialism’s Power Grab
LIMA, PERU, June 8 — Massive armed protests by thousands of Indigenous Indians have rocked this country. The fight is over government decrees doling out vast tracts of the farmers’ communal forest lands to corporations for oil and gas drilling, logging, mining, control of water resources and large-scale agriculture. The robbery is being carried out under government decrees directly linked to a Peru-U.S. trade pact that "would bring Peru’s rules for investment in jungle areas into line with the trade agreement." (NY Times, 6/12) The decrees would enable these capitalists to seize 72% of the country’s rain forest for exploitation of natural resources that threatens the survival of the Indigenous peoples.
But the people are not taking this corporate grab lying down. After sporadically blocking roads, waterways, state-owned oil pipelines and airports since April 9, violent clashes erupted on June 5. Government troops opened fire on unarmed protesters from helicopter gunships, tanks and the tops of buildings killing them while they slept alongside a road. Over 250 protestors were slain, "disappeared," burned and/or thrown in rivers. Hundreds more were wounded in the massacre. The protesters say there is a cover-up: "The government is trying to clean the blood off its hands by hiding the truth," declared Andrés Huaynacari Etsam, an Awajun student who said five relatives were killed and three are missing. (NYT, 6/12)
Insurgents Turn the Guns Around
A thousand Indians then killed 25 cops and abducted 38 as hostages. In one battle the insurgents wrestled guns away from the cops. Two hundred Mahiguenga Indians occupied an oil pipeline valve station in the Southeast, where the rebellion had spread from the North. Although the Army re-took it, the Indians said they would try again.
A general strike on June 11 brought thousands out into the streets in Iquitos, the largest Peruvian city in the Amazon, and spread to cities as far away as the capital and Arequipa on the Pacific coast.
The militant struggle forced Peru’s Congress to temporarily suspend the decrees, Said 24-year-old Wagner Musoline Acho, "The government made…[a] condescending depiction of us as gangs of savages in the forest…. They think we can be tricked by a maneuver like suspending a couple of decrees for a few weeks and then reintroducing them, and they are wrong." (NYT, 6/12)
President Alan Garcia has declared a "state of emergency" and imposed a curfew, but that has only escalated the rebellion which has spread to the strategic South. Garcia has ordered the arrest of one of the leaders, Alberto Pizango, on "sedition" charges and has suspended the constitution in four provinces. The protestors have charged the government with violating both the country’s constitution as well as international law for failing to obtain the Indigenous peoples’ consent before any of their land and resources can be given away.
The Peruvian Jungle Interethnic Development Association which has organized the protests represents over 300,000 people from dozens of Indigenous groups. Their leaders have charged the government with genocide for the killings of their people. Daniel Marzano, an Asháninka leader from Atalaya Province, declared: "We want an immediate halt to every project that was conceived without consulting those of us who live in the forest." (NY Times, 6/6) They vow that their protests will continue until their demands are met. They have derailed a plan by Brazilian-controlled Electrobras to erect five hydroelectric plants on the Indigenous people’s lands at a cost of $10 billion.
A Duke University scientists’ study reported that, "At least 58 of the 64 areas secured by multi-national companies for oil exploration overlay lands titled to indigenous peoples." (NYT, 6/5) Contracts for oil and gas exploration cover 72% of Peru’s rain forest.
While the government hands over billions of dollars worth of resources to these corporations, 40% of the country’s population — half of whom are Indigenous — live in poverty. (NYT )
Meanwhile, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist and a former lieutenant-colonel in Peru’s army who was defeated in the last presidential election, has sided with the insurgents to prime himself for the 2011 election. President Garcia, who also held the position in the 1980s, is the very butcher who suppressed a prison rebellion in 1980 and murdered over 100 inmates as "suspected guerillas." (NYT, 6/7)
The rebellion exposes the role of the capitalist state. The constitution is not worth the bosses’ paper it’s printed on. If it endangers the multi-nationals’ aim to exploit the workers’ and farmers’ claim to the country’s rich resources, the rulers’ government simply voids it. And when the exploited classes rebel to assert their rights, that same government comes down with the full weight of its state apparatus, army, air force and police, to crush them.
The rebels must not rely on the bosses’ laws or elections of a nationalist ex-army officer like Humala to protect them. A revolutionary communist leadership is needed to combat these attacks and forge a movement for a communist society with an armed struggle for working-class ownership and distribution of the wealth of resources that are being stolen by Peru’s bosses and their international capitalist backers. J
Boston Teachers, Students and Parents Unite to Fight Budget Cuts
BOSTON, MA, May 19 — Chanting "Bail out schools, not banks" and "Money for schools, not war," Boston teachers, students, parents and supporters rallied at the State House and marched to City Hall. We demanded no cuts in public school programs and full funding for community colleges and public education.
This was the first mass action of Boston teachers against budget cuts since layoffs were announced in December. Teachers attacked cuts in their own schools. A Haitian community leader spoke against cutbacks, pointing to rising immigrant dropout rates. A Roxbury Community College student attacked underfunding at state colleges. A parent explained how cuts in inner-city schools are racist. A school bus driver opposed the Superintendent’s plan to further segregate the Boston public schools by creating five zones and restricting school choice to within these zones.
A PLP speaker called for an end to the system of capitalism that created the economic crisis. PLP leaflets calling for communist revolution were distributed.
To organize this rally inside the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), teachers had to fight the BTU Executive Board for months. The Board overturned the vote of the BTU membership to sponsor the rally, disgusting many members. The Board is calling for more taxes on working people, and for lobbying "friends" in the government. But many teachers followed the call to hold the rally anyway!
Teachers are skilled workers. But, like all workers, they are under attack by the bosses. Therefore, they must unite with working-class parents and students to fight against the bosses and their budget cuts. Otherwise, other workers may view teachers as "greedy and selfish." By fighting to improve the education of working-class students and against racism, imperialism and war, teachers can fight for the needs of the whole working class.
The Progressive Labor Party tries to give leadership to the anger of the hundreds and thousands of teachers, parents and students and turn the fight against cutbacks into the fight for communist revolution.
a name="Racist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits">">"acist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits
LOS ANGELES, June 15 — Students at high schools across this city walked out against racist budget cuts, carrying picket signs teachers had put up on their classroom doors, to protest the rulers’ Board of Education’s layoffs and increase in class size.
Obama called for "shared sacrifice" in his inaugural address, and lauded "the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job." On May 27, LA Mayor Villaraigosa said, "Given the unprecedented economic downturn in California, everyone must share in the responsibility and sacrifice to bridge this budget deficit." But neither of these bosses’ servants said the bankers must share their profits.
This idea isn’t new. For years, autoworkers were told a pay cut would avoid job losses. They’ve taken pay cut after pay cut, and then lost their jobs as well. That’s the way a profit system works.
Given the state budget crisis and virtual collapse of the union leadership in the wake of the May 15 injunction, teachers may be forced to take a pay cut "to save teacher jobs and class size," but will probably wind up with both a cut and layoffs.
The fight continues with picket lines, community camp-outs and other actions. But the reluctance of teachers to strike against the injunction indicates our class must gain the confidence to defy the union leadership. The teachers and students fighting together against the cutbacks has been an inspiring example of working-class unity. Most important is the increase in CHALLENGE readers, five youth joining PLP, more meeting with the Party and distributing CHALLENGE. In this crisis, the working class’s main victory is the growth of the communist movement.
We communists believe in sharing scarcity as well as abundance, and we believe that the working class can be won to this communist idea. While the willingness of many teachers to take a pay cut in the belief they will save jobs and prevent class size increase might be an example of the collective spirit of the working class, under capitalism "shared sacrifice" is a lie and a trap.
Workers’ militancy should be used not to negotiate their wages and conditions down but to fight to up the ante of class struggle. The hypocrisy of a system that gives $750 billion of workers’ taxes to super-rich bankers while they squeeze predominantly black and Latino students into larger and larger classes must be exposed. Then they cut teachers’ wages to boot! In this capitalist class society, it’s always the working class who sacrifices and the rich who live off that sacrifice.
The German poet Bertholt Brecht wrote in "A German War Primer" in 1938:
Capitalism is in a deepening crisis. The U.S. is isolated internationally, fighting an imperialist war on at least two fronts, leading the international global market into decline and attacking workers to pay for this crisis. Millions are losing their jobs and homes. The only government expenses not being cut are their war expenditures, the police and the prisons — the infrastructure for the war and fascism which is the capitalists’ main hope of surviving this crisis. Clearly capitalism cannot provide a decent life for the working class. It must and can be overthrown and replaced by a communist system based on collective work, collective planning, and real equality (not socialism which retained money, banks, and wages, with the latter’s differentials splitting the working class). Eliminating the exploiter class which lives off the profits it squeezes from workers’ labor will release the potential for workers to reap the full fruits of the value that they, and only they, create. Every struggle must have the long-term strategic goal of building the communist movement that can seize power from the bosses. The class struggle has crucial lessons to teach us how to get there. Three wildcat one-hour work stoppages built the unity, militancy and resolve of teachers, students and parents, independent of the union leadership. Student walkouts throughout the district, fighting for their own and their siblings’ education, build their potential to fight for the working class. This is a victory the Board of Education can’t take away — the unity of parents, teachers and students; the experience of confronting the district, the Mayor and the banks; seeing our potential to unite against the bosses and their racist system; and the growth of PLP. Read CHALLENGE. Participate in our PLP Summer Project, where students and teachers, soldiers and industrial workers will reach thousands with our newspaper and spread communist ideas.
|
a name="Stella D’Oro Diary 3: Strikers Continue to Fight">">"tella D’Oro Diary 3: Strikers Continue to Fight
Bronx, NY, June 17 —
For the wife of J.F. \
En la vida todo es ir /
In life everything is goingA lo que el tiempo deshace./
towards what time is undoing.Sabe el hombre donde nace/
Where we are born we know,Y no dónde va a morir./
not where we’re going to die.
This dialectical poem by the revolutionary Juan Antonio Corretjer1 captures the experience of Puerto Rican workers’ migration to New York, and treats life itself as an endless migration from our birthplace into unknown time. It speaks to the poignant experience of time in any migrating worker’s life. We heard that in the memorial tribute by his brother to Marcelo Lucero, the Ecuadoran immigrant worker murdered by racists in Long Island last year. And we hear it in the strike of the Stella workers, 97% of whom were born outside the U.S.. The strikers tell us that not knowing how a long strike will end is a hard thing to live through.
If you ask them what is the worst thing about their strike many speak of the dragging, endless time waiting on their corner of north Broadway for the strike to be resolved. "Ten months! In two months it’ll be a whole year!" "We started in summer… into the fall… winter… spring… and now it’s summer again — another summer!" They shake their heads, put their hands on your arm and ask "Are all strikes this long? How long are other strikes?" Where is it going? Is all this time undoing their lives? Is everything coming undone because of the boss’s heartlessness and refusal to listen to them even when they speak in the chants of a thousand supporters?
Sitting near us in the courtroom last month, while the Brynwood lawyer and the hated manager Dan Meyers droned on with their racist contempt for the workers, an older woman from Africa looked so sad we asked her what she was feeling, and she said she was thinking about her life ending this way, destroyed by these people. That’s one ending to the strike people are thinking about, that it might be the end of their working lives, the death of their common life together in the factory which, exploitation and all, was nevertheless a life where they shared good feelings as well as hard times, and had pride in their collective strength as unionized workers who had struck twice already for their demands. Will they ever go back to that time?
The Brynwood bosses, snug in their Connecticut suburbs, of course count on a strike wearing down the workers, but the strikers say grimly that Brynwood has underestimated them all along and that they will never give in. And strike time is not all unrelieved waiting. It is punctuated by a big rally that lifts their spirits; the last was twice the size of the previous one and they see they are gaining momentum. Every day other workers come with coffee and they know they are not alone. Yesterday a TWU busdriver blasted his horn going by and yelled through the window "Down with the scabs!" Those scabs walk brazenly past and they get up from the crates they’re sitting on and yell at them, competing to make up witty insults.
They see their fellow workers step up and develop as leaders growing in political knowledge and skill (one man on her shift bought one of these new women strike leaders a bullhorn of her own, as testimony to her fighting for all the workers). They know they are being talked about by radical workers in Germany and Guatemala and Spain and France and wherever CHALLENGE is read around the wide world they come from. Some come to meetings with PLP and discuss it all at length, as we make it possible for them to know one another, and speak together, in new, politically informed ways. But others sit there on their crates. A striker’s time drags and drags and drags towards its unknown end.
People are getting tired and worn down; they get sick again and again. (It’s good that tomorrow some doctors are coming to the line to do free checkups.) Some are thinking about bankruptcy or looking for other jobs — will another job be the end of their time at Stella? A spouse’s grave illness removes one of the most militant workers from strike activity and we don’t see him for more than two months. A woman speaks of how hard it is to answer her five-year-old grandson’s question, "Where are you going? Is that strike still on?" The strikers don’t know the end of the process, but they know the way, their struggle is making the road by walking. All of a worker’s struggling life is going, going forward, and starting from their political "birth" place at Stella D’Oro some of these workers may die as revolutionaries. We, and they don’t know where we individually will end, but we and they do know that the working class itself will never die.
________
1
Corretjer left the revisionist Puerto Rican Communist party to found the Liga Socialista, which for a time in the 1960s was a fraternal party of the young PLP. You can find on the internet Roy Brown’s musical setting of this poem in decima style sung by him, the group Haciendo Punto, and the Catalán singer Joan Manuel Serrat.
Four Years Post-Katrina: A Capitalist Disaster
Because of inherent racism, capitalism turned Hurricane Katrina into a destructive disaster for working people, a result which could have been prevented. Four years ago this coming August, Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, causing damage from central Florida to Texas and displacing over a million workers.
The majority of destruction was in New Orleans where 80% of the city was flooded and 1,836 workers’ lives were lost. The federal flood protection plan failed in 50 places and almost every levee was breached. Working-class people were stranded in flooded neighborhoods as the police and National Guard pulled guns on them, preventing them from entering the Superdome.
The areas in New Orleans affected the most and suffering the highest death rate were those in black and Latin communities. The local and federal governments did nothing to protect these communities, which were poverty-stricken even before the hurricane.
The news media painted a racist and anti-working-class picture of the city’s residents. While levees were breaking and police were preventing residents from crossing bridges to non-flooded areas, the media focused on attacking people that were "looting" food from local grocery stores. People who had been stuck on roofs and in flooded areas had no other choice but to take food to survive.
The violence, which the media skewed, was mainly by cops and the National Guard against the people in the affected areas. The media, a ruling-class tool, is used to slander working people. However, from the beginning CHALLENGE exposed the bosses’ neglect of the working class and the media’s lies.
Today, we see little change in the politicians’ and government agencies’ response to problems stemming from Katrina. Of the 1,859 public housing apartments in the St. Bernard and Lafitte Housing developments, only 10 have been replaced. Only 11% of families have been able to return to the Lower 9th ward, one of the poorest and most devastated communities. There are 25% fewer hospitals in New Orleans than before Hurricane Katrina hit. Almost the entire school system, formerly public, has been privatized and has left teachers without a union.
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was scheduled to give $2.6 billion to the state of Louisiana and $1.9 billion to New Orleans, neither of which has been delivered (San Francisco Bay View, 11/09/08). But the government has no problem spending $750 billion dollars to bail out U.S bankers.
On June 1, FEMA was set to evict thousands of residents from their FEMA trailer homes, but after militant protests, the government was forced to sell the trailers to the residents for $1. Here, four years after the hurricane, workers are still living in trailers, many of which were poisoned with toxins and poor construction, sickening many people.
The rulers have used this disaster to gentrify New Orleans and profit off the reconstruction in the tourist and rich neighborhoods. Undocumented workers have been hired at poverty wages, sometimes going unpaid, to work in unsafe conditions to rebuild the city. What was a disaster for the people of New Orleans has been turned into a gold mine for the ruling class.
Cuba has created a hurricane emergency system which, even as a remnant of the system that existed before Cuba gave up on fighting for the interests of the working class, has consistently kept death tolls to a minimum during hurricane season. Cuba assigns people to distribute medication to those in need and prepare food for times of natural disaster so people won’t have to "loot."
PLP has gone to New Orleans every year to stand with our working-class brothers and sisters to help rebuild homes and work with groups to spread revolutionary ideas. A communist society will plan in advance how to handle natural disasters, which will minimize loss of life and provide food, clothing and housing to those who may suffer losses.
That’s why we need to build a society that values workers above all, abolishes profits and destroys racism. Join the struggle to fight for communism!
Korea: From U.S.-Japanese Colony to Pro-Communist Land to State Capitalism
On June 12, the U.S. had trade sanctions placed on North Korea to punish it for testing a nuclear bomb. This conflict is part of a rising one between the U.S. and China, one where the U.S. tries to marshal anti-communism to win U.S. workers to support increasing military action worldwide.
North Korea is repeatedly presented as a mystery, a place impossible to understand, with a crazy, untrustworthy leader, likely to irrationally attack the U.S. or Japan or other "play-by-the-rules" nations. Ironically, U.S. imperialist urge workers to trust them — the only ones who have experience using these "weapons of mass destruction" in war!
Modern Korea began with Japanese and U.S. imperialism, and the wars they fought to gain control of the region. In 1905, Japan "won" Korea as a colony after a war with Russia. Teddy Roosevelt received a Nobel Prize for brokering "peace" between the two imperialist rivals, one that included Japan’s acceptance of U.S. control of the Philippines. In 1945, after 40 years of brutal exploitation and resistance to Japanese imperialism by Korean workers, the U.S. occupied southern Korea. As part of its World War II victory, the U.S. took what is now called South Korea as both an economic beachhead and a potential garrison for containing the Soviet Union and the communist-led, anti-imperialist movements of northern Asia.
Initially, a pro-U.S. government was staffed by Koreans who had served in the hated Japanese army and police force, but it couldn’t shut down the people’s committees that had been formed during the anti-Japanese resistance.
In June, 1950, after months of border skirmishes, most often initiated by the South Korean government, the U.S. demanded UN permission to attack North Korea for what it alleged was a foreign "invasion" of South Korea. Plagued by guerrilla resistance to landlords, to former collaborators and to U.S. rule, the U.S. hoped to "roll back" the northern communist regime that it blamed for civil war in the south.
The resulting Korean War demonstrated the lengths to which U.S. butchers would go to destroy communism and defend imperialism. As control of Korean territory passed back and forth between U.S. and North Korean forces, U.S. officials adopted a scorched-earth policy aimed at wiping out every city in North Korea.
By August 1950, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons of bombs per day over North Korea, many of them pure napalm. Every city in North Korea was damaged, with most experiencing 75-80% destruction. U.S. bombers targeted dams and shot farmers in their fields. The goal: to starve the population into submission. The U.S. also threatened to use atomic bombs, moving them into Asia, and ran practice atomic bomb drops over the North.
As a result of this aerial bombardment, 4 million out of a population of 30 million died during the Korean War: 2 million North Korean civilians, 1 million South Korean civilians, and 500,000 North Korean troops. A million Chinese soldiers (who had joined in the defense of Korea just as Koreans had fought in their revolution) and 56,000 American soldiers were also killed. Like the Vietnamese a decade later, Koreans know from personal experience that U.S. imperialists have never valued the lives of the worlds’ working class.
A 1953 truce — officially the war has never ended — left Korea just as divided as before. The Korean communist party (the Workers’ Party) of Kim Il Sung governed the North. A fascist, pro-U.S. government ruled the South, aided by a permanent garrison of some 40,000 U.S. troops armed with nuclear missiles and tactical nuclear weapons. North Korea defied the U.S. military assault, but its own political weaknesses turned this victory into a defeat for the international working class.
Founded in 1925, the Korean communist party grew out of the resistance to Japanese occupation in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. Part of an international movement, thousands of Koreans served in the Chinese Communist army during the resistance to Japan.
In 1946-47, the Korean communist party initiated land reform, made education and health care free for all, liberated women, and nationalized the large number of Japanese and U.S. factories in the North. But these socialist reforms did not move Korea toward communism. The Korean party focused on building "socialism in one country" which, over time, led to nationalism becoming its primary ideology.
In modern North Korea, no slogans call for workers’ power or internationalism. Banners proclaim "Long Live the Great Juche idea!" "Juche," calls for national (Korean) independence in politics, economics and defense; the term is linked to monarchist ideologies that meld the people and the nation into the person and family of the ruler, now Kim Jong Il, the son of Kim Il Sung. Glorified images of Kim Il Sung — reminiscent of the cult of the individual that weakened the Soviet Union and China — replaced the internationalism and the fight for communism that were once part of Korean practice.
Within its nationalism, North Korea retained wage differences and operated within the broad international economy. From the 1950s to 1980s it traded with the USSR and China for raw materials (oil) and manufactured goods. In the 1990s, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the intensification of capitalism in Russia and China, North Korea began to suffer the problems of all capitalist economies. Russia wanted hard currency for oil, and Korea had to find more markets for its goods.
The North Korean government had two responses to these economic problems, both reflecting state capitalism, not communist goals. One offered its workforce as low-wage labor by setting up free trade zones where South Korean and Japanese factories employ highly-skilled North Korean workers at low wages.
The other was to enhance its exports. In the 1990s, the trade in weapons became an increasingly important source of petroleum and foreign currency, and North Korea became a major supplier of SCUD missiles to countries such as Iran who are linked to China, Russia and other rivals of U.S. power. North Korea’s push to develop nuclear weapons is a tool to gain economic benefits and to manipulate the intensifying imperialist rivalries.
None of this benefits the working class. We can draw two lessons: One- no matter what sweet words the latest U.S. ruler coos, imperialism is a dead-end and a death trap for the working class. Second- there are no shortcuts to communism, to a society without wages, run by the working class. Nationalism has repeatedly been offered as a path to change, and it has repeatedly led workers back to capitalism and to death, whether in the Middle East, Asia, or the U.S. Only an international communist movement to smash capitalism worldwide can end war, racism and exploitation once and for all. J
Letters
Luis Castro Inspires Renewed Dedication to Fight for Communism
A group of comrades and friends of the Party in Los Angeles met to remember happy moments of political discussions about the communist movement, about entertainment, and the strengths and weaknesses of Comrade Luis Castro, editor of CHALLENGE for more than 30 years. Luis died on June 3, 2009.
His love and commitment to the international working class were enormous, as was his reading and infinite knowledge about liberal groups, nationalists, revisionists [fake leftists] and obviously, about the Russian and Chinese revolutions and the line of PLP. This same love was reflected in his love and tremendous commitment to his family.
A comrade said, "For decades, Luis was the symbol of CHALLENGE, from the time when we sent articles by telephone and he had to type them while we read them to him, asking questions or adding points to make it more political, until recently with the era of the internet. His knowledge about editing and his communist line were transmitted to many comrades, young and old, in many places."
Other participants in the meeting noted, "For years, Luis was the paper’s main translator. But when it came to simultaneous spoken translation during a meeting, that was something else. Once in New York, we, a group of garment and farm workers, were to have Luis as our translator (from English to Spanish). After a few minutes in which someone was giving a report, we asked Luis, "What is he saying?" He answered, "He says we have to fight for communism." Another two minutes passed. "Luis, what’s he saying?" Luis responded, "He says fascism is bad." That’s how Luis was.
Remembering Luis brought tears, laughter and calls to dedicate our lives to fight with greater vigor for what millions around the world dream of so much, true communism. We ended the evening singing Bella Ciao and Venceremos — We will win, the PLP version.
PLP Comrades, Los Angeles
a name="Reader in El Salvador Praises PLP’s Exposé of FMLN Swindlers"><">R"ader in El Salvador Praises PLP’s Exposé of FMLN Swindlers
I’ve been reading CHALLENGE for more than 10 years. I’m 76 years old and I’d like to take this opportunity to write something my conscience pushes me to write.
I want to deeply congratulate the Progressive Labor Party for the clarity that you’ve shown through the liberating principles of your communist literature. I say this because in reality there’s no other way of life — only communism can offer us what we need and tell us: with capitalism all of humanity faces the abyss.
It’s time to discover new horizons and with the help of PLP we will go forward. Before I read CHALLENGE, I lived with the hope that a government formed by the FMLN would change our system of life, not thinking that they are manipulated by the dictates of merciless capitalism and never in their path conform to communism, and thus they’ll swindle all the workers of the world. Long live communism.
A CHALLENGE reader
Testing Protested At H.S. Graduation
On June 6, residents of my Texas town prepared to witness their children graduate as the Class of 2009. Sadly, some students were barred. Though having completed all their credits, they had failed one of the required Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests. At a special meeting the students requested to walk in the graduation ceremony as state law permitted. But this was denied. Students were threatened with arrest if they defied the ban.
At the ceremony, extra police lined the entrances and facilities. The protesting students came in their caps and gowns and sat together where their protest would be visible. When their class exited the stadium, they walked together with locked arms behind their class and threw their caps in the air with their class. No arrests were made.
Thinking back, I remember debating how to react if my daughter did not pass her exit level and TAKS exams. I figured that if she didn’t try hard enough, then maybe she didn’t want or deserve a diploma. She would just have to attend summer school and miss the family vacation. When I learned that she had not passed one TAKS exam and that the school board would not allow her to walk on their graduation day, I felt I had disappointed her. But the more I thought about it, and the more I talked to her, the more I realized that "it’s just not fair." My daughter has never repeated a grade and, like many others, has overcome many obstacles.
Under "No Child Left Behind," high school kids must discontinue their regular curriculum to prepare for a four-part TAKS test and exit exams to receive a high school diploma. Not only has the government given school districts the tools to discriminate but also the power to destroy. As more schools give up on kids, they don’t tell parents that a child may fail or not graduate. I got a phone call two weeks before school was out. The school has NEVER shown students their test results. And no one knows how many students were forced to drop out before graduation.
Kids are accountable to the state for test performance, and schools receive government funds to improve programs, but are the schools and states held accountable to the children? Our town has cancelled summer school, and students who need to make up credits must go to a different district, 30 miles away, with no transportation provided. Yet the school is building a new indoor football practice field.
"No Child Left Behind" left many kids behind. How did so many go unnoticed for nine months? They are not troubled kids, not in alternative or special ed classes, not gifted or homeless. So I wonder, where was the tutoring, letters of concern, or phone calls requesting parent involvement?
A Reader
a name="Youth Felt Comrade Luis’s Communist Humanity">">"outh Felt Comrade Luis’s Communist Humanity
When Luis Castro, former editor of CHALLENGE, passed away I could not believe it. My feelings about his death weren’t and still aren’t pleasant. However, the experiences I shared with him were happy and educating ones.
Luis left a legacy and I will sorely miss him. He taught me, a young person, a lot about current events and history. Being late to the memorial, I didn’t see him in the casket at full view, which would have provoked tears, making it even more difficult to carry on. He was easy to talk to and a very good person.
Westchester Comrade
New Highways Pave the Way To War
From South America to Alaska, new highways are ready to go to create pathways for transportation and communication. These roads will ease the ruling class’ access to oil and natural gas, manufactured goods, minerals, iron, biodiversity, water and other natural resources and cheaply made goods. The goal is to maximize profit, guarantee security and control, to try to keep these resources away from the rivals of U.S. imperialism, and to prepare for the third world war. Since 2001, Robert Pastor (the founder of Harvard’s Center for North American Studies), has put forth the proposal regarding "deep integration", which was spurred on by the Alliance for Security and Prosperity in North America (ASPAN) and Chamber of Commerce of North America (CCAN) projects.
The CCAN is a subsidiary of The Chamber of Commerce and Council of the Americas (founded by Rockefeller), the Mexican Institute for Competition (financed by the international and national private sector), and the Canadian Council of CEOs.
The executive committee of CCAN is formed by Chevron, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Procter & Gamble and its subsidiary PUR Water Purification, Mittal Steel, etc. From Canada the committee includes: Power Corporation of Canada, Suncor Energy, Linamar, Home Depot, etc. And from Mexico: the Business Coordinating Council, Mexican Council of Businessmen, Confederación de Camaras Industriales, Grupo Posadas, Modelo, Kimberly Clark Mexico (US), Grupo CYDSA, etc. (Delgado, n.d.)
Mexico, one of the North American "allies", has received financing through Plan Puebla Panama, and has been upgrading the Highway of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the tourist highway of the Caribbean and the inter-oceanic logistical highways of Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama, as well as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and the Mesoamerican Coralline Corridor, which have been implemented through them.
One of the most important highways is CANAMEX which crosses the American states of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana. It connects to Alberta, Canada and the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit and Jalisco.
At the same time, the Super Highway of North America extends from Canada to the center of Mexico. It is estimated that it allows the movement of merchandise worth billions of dollars. The highway is widened from Mexico City to the north, passing through Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi (multipurpose land ports) where the rail lines and highways from the Pacific ports connect. The outer zones connect to the corridor as sources to transport petroleum and petrochemicals.
The U.S. ruling class wants to secure these corridors and merchandise, and, under the excuse of drug trafficking, its national security. The bosses want to be ready to put down any signs of discontent as well as their rival imperialists, and have militarized the country. That’s why it is important for us to unite and fight for a society where the pathways to communication do not serve the economic interests of the bosses, but as paths to form internationalism among the working class. While bosses are constructing their web of highways, we will fight and use these paths to construct one Party around the world, under one same flag and the sole struggle, the struggle for communism!
Young Mexican Comrade
Communist-led Open Mic Kicks Out the Jams
The capitalist education system maintains divisions between teachers, students, and parents behind their petty administrators who carry out the bosses’ orders. The schools function as the ideological production centers that indoctrinate our youth with rotten capitalist ideology drenched in patriotism and elitism that poisons the necessary aspects of the learning that we know our youth need. PLP has been struggling to create unity through class consciousness and collective action in one high school. Through distribution of 100 CHALLENGES, we’ve recruited and consolidated students and teachers, and built an organization that attempts to create communist culture.
Several student PL’ers facilitate CHALLENGE networks while struggling with their fellow students to attend protests and PLP study/action meetings. The Culture Club proposed at a PTA meeting that an open mic would be a great way for the two organizations to have a fundraiser.
The Open Mic was a success. Parents provided hot food, teachers rapped and jammed with the students, and the students performed dance, poetry, music and stand-up comedy. The event was a clear illustration of PL’s idea to build solidarity between workers (parents and teachers) and students. By creating a communist culture within the school, communist social relationships take seed and develop between the students that read CHALLENGE, distribute the paper, and/or are interested in fighting the budget cuts.
A year of struggle culminated in an Open Mic that had parents and students moving to heavy metal that blared out of angry guitars strummed by students was an inspiration. Asian, Latin, black, and white students expressing, working, and socializing together with staff and parents is a brief glimpse of how communist entertainment will be both participatory and exciting. The PLP continues to gain ground by developing communist consciousness through cultural work. "Everything you do counts."?J
Transit Bosses Make Workers Pay for Crisis
LOS ANGELES, June 15 — With the bosses cutting bus hours, health benefits and jobs, transit workers are under attack as the rulers try to solve their crisis on the backs of our class. But this is a capitalist disaster — not an act of nature. This crisis was created by those who profited hugely. Now that the capitalist economy is in decline, these same bosses and bankers demand to be bailed out. Workers are doing the bailing. With a salute to their commander-in-chief, the labor union executives have stepped in line behind Obama’s call for "shared sacrifice" to save their system. But instead of sacrificing, the richest of the rich are taking $2 or $3 trillion for the banks while workers suffer cuts in wages, benefits and vital social services.
The entire goal of the capitalist system is competition to produce maximum profits for a tiny group of capitalists, not to produce to meet the needs of the workers. In times of crisis, hard wired into the capitalist profit system, more goods are produced than people can afford to buy. The greedy bosses would rather destroy products than give them away to people who desperately need them. They take food, jobs, benefits and bus service away from us so they can pay huge amounts to keep their banks solvent. We don’t need their banks; we need to survive.
That’s why the main victory in this contract fight and in our coming struggles against their attacks will be unity and understanding that the source of these attacks is capitalism. We need to unite to fight for a system in which we produce to meet the needs of our families and our class, not to bail out the banks and to keep profits high for these blood suckers. We need to build a mass PLP to fight for workers’ power through communist revolution.
These attacks are coming home to MTA workers but the majority of the 9,000 mechanics, clerks and drivers know next to nothing about what’s going on with negotiations. The union leadership tries to keep the membership in the dark, only calling on us when it needs our votes to legitimize its murky deals. The last thing they want us to do is to unite against the capitalist system and to fight for a communist society without bosses, profits, banks or union hacks!
An independent strike committee is forming to call on transit workers to fight the union leadership as well as the company’s attempt to impose "shared sacrifices." CHALLENGE readers will be active. A lack of leadership leaves many workers feeling defenseless.
We can learn from our fight for contract issues how the apparatus of the bosses’ government is used against us. From a strike, political lessons always become clearer. Our unity strengthens when we realize that the only solution to the constant attacks is to build workers’ revolution. This can never succeed without increasing the size of our communist party, PLP, among drivers and mechanics.
Why rescue a system that, in the name of profit, forecloses and empties thousands of houses while families live in camper shells? The LA Times reports cuts of more than 400,000 bus service hours since 2007 at a time when even more workers must rely on public transit. The madness and greed of the racist profit system must end.
If transit workers are against these foreclosures, layoffs, cuts and the job freeze at Metro, if we’re against bailing out the banks at our expense, we must understand that we’re against capitalism itself. To guarantee the future for the working class, we should unite against the coming war contract, build for a strike against any and all cuts and deepen that unity. We must build the long-term fight to get rid of the profit system and for a communist society where all workers will work and produce to meet the needs of our own class, not the bankers!
- Winning Means Destroying the Profit System: Stella D’Oro Strikers Fight for All Workers
- Long-range U.S. Oil-War Plans vs. Russia, China Shadows Iran Crisis
- Chicago Transit Workers Protest Bosses’ Retiree Health Cuts
- Persist, Persist, Persist... Exposing Nationalism Opens Door for Red Ideas
- No More ‘Happy’ Talk Boeing Workers: Prepare To Fight For Our Class
- Mexico’s Elections: Voting for Bosses’ Pols = More Repression of Workers
- Honduras Coup: Workers Have No Side in Bosses’ Dogfight
- Racism, Music Industry Profiteers Killed ‘King of Pop’
- U.K. Oil Strikers Need Intern’l Unity, Not Attacks on ‘Foreign’ Workers
- LETTERS
- Cytec Strikers See Need for Unity with Non-Union Workers
- Anti-Racists Pack Courtroom to Back Black Youth
- Red Eye
- Reformers so phony they can’t win
- Democrats selling out on health
- Far-right shifts focus of media
- Maybe U.S. really in it for oil?
- Immigrants graduate — to what?
- Pro-worker laws not enforced
- We tapped your phone? Oops!
- Grads, welcome to the working class
- Bail $ for bank jobs, not auto jobs
- Spraying hits poor, not coca
- Franco “disappeared” leftist kids
- Banks con relatives
- Irish crystal workers sit in
- Do English-learners move up?
- Profit-Hungry D.C. Transit Bosses Try to Blame Crash on Workers
- Build A Worker-Student-Soldier Alliance — Fight for Communism
Winning Means Destroying the Profit System:
Stella D’Oro Strikers Fight for All Workers
Fighting Bosses’ Racist and Sexist Divisions
Profit System = Bosses’ Robbery
Long-range U.S. Oil-War Plans vs. Russia, China Shadows Iran Crisis
Fearing Iran Explosion, U.S. Rulers Tone Down “Green Revolution “Hype...
...As Pentagon Takes Long-Range Aim At Teheran
increasingly exploitive police state that wages ever wider wars. Our Party must serve as an internationalist eye-opener both to the capitalist sources of workers’ misery and to its revolutionary, communist solution.
Carter’s 1980 Doctrine Basis for Current Oil Wars
Iran: Missing Cornerstone of U.S.-U.K. Energy Empire
Chicago Transit Workers Protest Bosses’ Retiree Health Cuts
‘The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!’
Persist, Persist, Persist...
Exposing Nationalism Opens Door for Red Ideas
No More ‘Happy’ Talk
Boeing Workers: Prepare To Fight For Our Class
Deadly Insanity
The Sane Alternative
Industrial Workers Crucial to Battle vs. Exploitation
Mexico’s Elections:
Voting for Bosses’ Pols = More Repression of Workers
Honduras Coup: Workers Have No Side in Bosses’ Dogfight
U.S. Rulers’ Hand Seen in Honduras Coup
Racism, Music Industry Profiteers Killed
‘King of Pop’
U.K. Oil Strikers Need Intern’l Unity, Not Attacks on ‘Foreign’ Workers
LETTERS
Proposing PLP Student Club in Tanzania
BBQ Raises Dough for LA Summer Project
Food and Politics for Strikers Who Won’t Scab
Haiti: Need World Support for Workers’ Fight vs. Starvation Wages
Cytec Strikers See Need for Unity with Non-Union Workers
Anti-Racists Pack Courtroom to Back Black Youth
Red Eye
Reformers so phony they can’t win
Democrats selling out on health
Far-right shifts focus of media
Maybe U.S. really in it for oil?
Immigrants graduate — to what?
Pro-worker laws not enforced
We tapped your phone? Oops!
Grads, welcome to the working class
Bail $ for bank jobs, not auto jobs
Spraying hits poor, not coca
Franco “disappeared” leftist kids
Banks con relatives
Irish crystal workers sit in
Do English-learners move up?
Profit-Hungry D.C. Transit Bosses Try to Blame Crash on Workers
What Happened?
More of Same Negligence by the Bosses
Build A Worker-Student-Soldier Alliance — Fight for Communism
- North Korea Joins China’s Nuclear Club: ‘Nuke-free’ Scheme Impossible in Imperialist World
- ‘What’s good for Obama’s GM is death for workers...’
- Shining Example for U.S. Working Class: Mass March Backs Stella D’Oro Strikers, Defies Cops
- “El Gran Mantel”/“The Great Tablecloth”
- LA Students, Workers Fight Capitalist Storm Hitting Calif. Colleges
- Derail CTA Racist Health-Care Rip-Off!
- France: Anti-Racist Unity, Red Leadership Could Sack Sellouts
- Immigrant Airport Workers Resist ‘Homeland Security’ Attack
- LETTERS
- Haiti May Day: Cops’ Tear Gas Fails to Stop Workers’ Protest
- Resistance Rising in Guadeloupe vs. Capitalism’s Misery
- ‘Liberalism 101’ Masks Class Exploitation
- As Bosses Push Us, Airport Workers Must Push Back
- Colombia May Day Marchers Mark Workers’ Bloody History
- Need Revolutionary Communist Politics
- Karl Marx Scores Again...
- Exploited Subcontractor Workers Need Sharper Class Struggle
- Mandela’s Nationalism Fronts for South African Capitalism
- PL’er Helen Jones Dies; Led ‘Rolling Thunder’ Through Boeing Plants
North Korea Joins China’s Nuclear Club:
‘Nuke-free’ Scheme Impossible in Imperialist World
China Calls North Korea’s Dictator ‘Our Loose Cannon’
China’s Rulers Expanding Their ‘Nuclear Club’
‘World’s Only Superpower’ Spurs Nuclear Upstarts
‘What’s good for Obama’s GM is death for workers...’
• A wage freeze (after having cut wages in half for new hires);
• Allowing GM to close 14 more factories and lay off another 21,000 workers without a fight.
Shining Example for U.S. Working Class:
Mass March Backs Stella D’Oro Strikers, Defies Cops
Marchers Stand Up to Scabs in Blue
Only Communist Revolution Can Destroy Capitalism
“El Gran Mantel”/“The Great Tablecloth”
Let’s sit down soon
with all those who haven’t eaten,
spread the great tablecloths,
shake salt on the lakes of the world,
planetary bakeries,
and a plate like the moon
from which we all will eat.
than the justice of eating.
LA Students, Workers Fight Capitalist Storm Hitting Calif. Colleges
Disasters Are ‘Natural’ Under Capitalism
Students, Teachers: Unite With Industrial Workers
Derail CTA Racist Health-Care Rip-Off!
France: Anti-Racist Unity, Red Leadership Could Sack Sellouts
Immigrant Airport Workers Resist ‘Homeland Security’ Attack
LETTERS
Haiti May Day: Cops’ Tear Gas Fails to Stop Workers’ Protest
Resistance Rising in Guadeloupe vs. Capitalism’s Misery
‘Liberalism 101’ Masks Class Exploitation
As Bosses Push Us, Airport Workers Must Push Back
Colombia May Day Marchers Mark Workers’ Bloody History
Need Revolutionary Communist Politics
Prior to World War I workers had class-consciousness in Germany and France, but only the Russians had a revolution. Also, prior to the rise of the fascist powers there were powerful workers’ movements in Germany, France, Britain and the US, but how come only the Soviets and Chinese fought against fascism and not for empire?
The answer is that class-consciousness is not enough. Workers need revolutionary politics in order to escape the horrors of capitalism. In the U.S. during the 1930s the Communist Party stopped advocating communist revolution and fell in behind Roosevelt’s New Deal fascism. As the CPUSA became more involved with the reform struggles they moved further away from revolution until finally sellout leader Earl Browder declared in the 1940s that “communism was 20th century Americanism.”
Today, too, workers find themselves struggling for their very survival. But it is not enough that we bring them class-consciousness; we must also bring revolutionary communist politics. Union misleaders push the slogan, “American jobs for American workers” and the Obama Administration tells us, “It is a time for shared sacrifice.” Each claim to be for workers and against greedy bankers, all the while wrapping themselves in the flag of U.S. capitalism. Class anger can just as easily be turned into fascist nationalism unless there are revolutionary politics to guide it.
At the immigrants rights march on May 1 here in Seattle, many groups came out to support workers’ “interests,” but only one proclaimed that communist revolution was the only solution — PLP. As members of PLP and readers of CHALLENGE we need to push these revolutionary politics on the campuses, on the shop floor and in the military barracks.
Karl Marx Scores Again...
Exploited Subcontractor Workers Need Sharper Class Struggle
Mandela’s Nationalism Fronts for South African Capitalism
PL’er Helen Jones Dies; Led ‘Rolling Thunder’ Through Boeing Plants
Of what PLP’s about
Look around
What have you found?
Cop’s brutality
School Fallacies
Friends are in distress
Lift your voice
The Party is on the way
The summer of 1999
You stood out on the line
Is now part of history
Etched in your memory...
Rulers Use Obama to Widen Afghan-Pakistan Ground War
Obama Flip-Flops on Torture Photo-Op to Protect New War Leader
Killer McChrystal in Ivy League Club Helping Obama Carry Out War and Fascism
Students Say ‘Professor of Torture’ Must Go!
CUNY Students, Stella Strikers Allies in Struggle
LA Teachers, Students Walk Out Against Layoffs
Racist Unemployment Is Capitalism’s Executioner
Again… Figures Don’t Lie But Liars Can Figure
PL’ers Bring Red Ideas to Colombia’s May Day March
Workers Storm Steel Bosses’ Meeting
Colombia’s TV ‘Reality Show’ Ponzi Scheme and Other Capitalist Evils
Why Are TV Shows So Important For The Bosses Right Now?
- The Fight Against Sexism is Vital to Defeating Capitalism
Letters
Turning Shop Struggle into Class Consciousness
May Day Youth ‘Were On A Mission’
Fight Racism with Multi-racial Unity, Not As ‘White Allies’
‘Liberal’ N.J. Mayor: ‘Who, me racist?’; ‘Yes, YOU!’
Oaxaca May Day Marchers Defy Gov’t Flu Panic
30 Generations of Racism =Billion$ for Bosses
Rulers Use Obama to Widen Afghan-Pakistan Ground War
The dominant imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists is pressing Obama to emphasize ground warfare over air strikes in the widening Afghanistan-Pakistan battleground. The shift spells higher death tolls on all sides and even more U.S. troops than Obama’s surge of 21,000. Current U.S. strategy targeting al Qaeda and the Taliban with pilotless "drone" aircraft is unintentionally swelling enemy ranks.
The May 17 New York Times, the rulers’ leading mouthpiece, published an op-ed piece, "Death From Above, Outrage Down Below," by Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). It warned, "Over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians....Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased." Over one million Pakistanis have been forced from their homes into refugee camps because of groundwarfare.
Bankrolled by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Exum and Kilcullen’s CNAS served Obama’s 2008 campaign as a "Pentagon-in-waiting." CNAS’s president, Michele Flournoy, is now an Undersecretary of Defense.
Obama Flip-Flops on Torture Photo-Op to Protect New War Leader
Consequently, Obama’s dramatic replacement of General David McKiernan with torture expert Stanley McChrystal as top general in Afghanistan launches a more effective killing campaign that implicitly criticizes Bush’s efforts there. Not since President Truman booted General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War (1952) has a president removed a warzone commander this way. The big switch — along with the White House christening of a new "Af-Pak" theatre of war— makes Afghanistan-Pakistan "Obama’s War."
McChrystal’s expertise lies in the quintessential U.S. ground force, "Special Operations." Early in his career he trained anti-Soviet forces in the CIA operation based in Pakistan that helped oust the Russians from Afghanistan, an effort that produced Osama bin Laden and later al Qaeda.
McChrystal also trained the Afghan warlords in a joint campaign to chase the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, forces he must battle once more, now that they’ve staged a come-back in several Afghan provinces.
He most recently oversaw Delta and Seal Special Operations units. These units train fascist armies and are used to torture and murder "enemy suspects" in prison camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, seldom distinguishing actual insurgents from innocent civilians.
Obama abruptly broke his promise to release pictures of the U.S. military abusing prisoners to avoid embarrassing appointee McChrystal, who gave the orders. [For an account of the war crimes committed under McChrystal’s command, see Esquire magazine, 5/7/09.] The CNAS’s Exum told MSNBC (5/12/09) that U.S. and Afghan casualties "are likely to go up" once McChrystal takes over.
Obama: Ruling-Class Hero
For the war-bent rulers, Barack Obama is proving the most effective leader since Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s, transformed his popularity during the Great Depression into mobilization for World War II. Obama hopes to accomplish something similar, as the rulers plan for conflicts far bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan, against China and Russia. Aided immensely by the rulers’ main ideology-shapers, the liberal media and universities, Obama enjoys sky-high approval ratings.
Meanwhile, the war machine he presides over slaughters more and more civilians in his escalating Af-Pak war. He has reopened Bush’s Guantanamo Military Tribunals, which deny all rights to anyone they care to label "enemy combatant," validating "evidence" extracted by torture. And Obama is prolonging the Iraq war he promised to end.
The rulers’ media constantly urges us to vote for the "lesser evil" (usually a Democrat) in their electoral circuses. Since millions are disgusted with both parties, the rulers use liberals to spread the illusion that they will "reform"the system’s more brutal nature and won’t be as "bad"as reactionary Republicans. As a "lesser evil" who carries out the rulers’ war aims, Obama tops all his warmonger predecessors — Johnson in Vietnam; Carter in the 1979 CIA Afghan war cited above; and Clinton in the Yugoslavia air-war massacre and bombings of Iraq.
Since ultimately only communist revolution can forever halt these endless imperialist wars, we must strive in our shops and unions, in strikes and mass protests in our schools and on our campuses, in churches and all mass organizations, to expose Obama’s regime as an unprecedented, all-out assault on the working class.
Within this class struggle we must show how the super-exploitative, racist capitalist system is the source of this constant assault, and that the elimination of the profit system — replaced by a communist society in which the working class reaps all the value it produces — is the only road to workers’ emancipation.
Building the revolutionary PLP is the key to that goal.
Killer McChrystal in Ivy League Club Helping Obama Carry Out War and Fascism
For the bosses, Obama favorite McChrystal’s ties to U.S. imperialism’s main faction round out his resumé as mass murderer. The liberal Brookings Institution calls him a "superstar." Just before he won his general’s stars, he served as military fellow at the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations, the rulers’ most influential think-tank.
McChrystal did a year-long stint at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. Belfer, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, boasts a long roster of members aiding the Obama regime, not only in military matters but also in his anti-working-class economic "restructuring" laying off tens of thousands of auto workers. This includes Defense Under-secretaries Ashton Carter and CNAS boss Michele Flournoy, banking czar Paul Volcker, Mid-East envoy Dennis Ross, National Security aide Samantha Power (who, while working for Obama in 2008, revealed his pledge to leave Iraq as a phony campaign promise), NATO ambassador Ivo Daalder, economic advisor Martin Feldstein, Homeland Security guru Rand Beers and others.
Students Say ‘Professor of Torture’ Must Go!
NEW YORK, May 7 — Students at Columbia University held a small protest today against torture and oil wars, and called for the firing of Professor Philip Bobbitt. Bobbitt is a Columbia law professor, former director of intelligence for the National Security Council and associate counsel to three presidents. He has written that the law should be changed to allow harsher interrogations, that juries should acquit officials accused of torture who are doing it to "save lives," and he was one of the leading ideological advocates of the invasion of Iraq and the need for the U.S. to fight a "long war" in the Middle East. Members of PLP went to the protest to sell CHALLENGE and expose the role of capitalism in breeding imperialist war.
CUNY Students, Stella Strikers Allies in Struggle
NEW YORK CITY, April 22 — Chanting "Education Is A Right, Fight, Fight, Fight!" and "Education Is Under Attack, What Do We Do? Stand Up! Fight Back!" more than 300 students and supporters rallied at City College in Harlem today, the 40th anniversary of the 1969 City College strike and sit-in that brought Open Admissions and integrated the lily-white senior colleges of CUNY. At the administration building where police blocked entry they presented their demands to a Vice-President of the college.
The demands included no tuition hikes, budget cuts, or layoffs of campus workers; free tuition, open admissions, and quality childcare; and pay-cuts and a salary cap for the administration. Twenty striking workers from Stella D’Oro in the Bronx joined the students to offer their support, and were loudly cheered as they marched down the hill into the rally.
Teachers and students in PLP from CUNY and another college explained that capitalism in 2009 means deep economic crisis, global wars, and ecological catastrophe. The pay-cuts and tuition increases demanded of Stella D’Oro workers and CUNY students is a sign of what capitalism has in mind for our class. Our response to these racist attacks that fall most heavily on black and Latino workers and students must be to unite workers and students to organize for communist revolution.
The best feature of this rally was the collaboration of students with workers, who met jointly to plan a double rally: first at City College with the workers coming down, then at the struck plant with the students coming up. From the administration building, we marched, fifty or sixty strong, chanting "Workers and Students Will Never Be Defeated!" to the subway, and, still chanting and singing "Which Side Are You On?" and "Solidarity Forever," occupied a couple of subway cars on this "protest train."
From the elevated train we marched down the long iron staircase to the picket line, chanting all the way, greeted with smiles and cheers from the workers there. About forty students and workers spoke at the two rallies, many of them women taking leadership in both struggles. The MC at the plant site encouraged CUNY and other students to speak, and after a pause seven or eight came up, many for the first time, including one from New Jersey who had heard the strikers speak at her campus last week.
Our friends, both at Stella and at CUNY, understand that PLP fights like hell for our immediate needs, but is also organizing a Party to bring state power to the working class, so that we can use the value we create to benefit all workers internationally in a communist society. One worker at the CCNY rally told the students that the company’s demands for pay-cuts and their use of scabs was a "great social crime," which wouldn’t be punished until large numbers of students and workers united to fight for change. Another told the students that they had to struggle now so that "the capitalists won’t take hold of your lives and wreck them." Students told the workers with passion how much they appreciated their support, and how difficult it was for them to be a student and to work many hours every week to pay for rising tuition.
An Argentine filmmaker was at the rally with a new film on the Zanón ceramics factory that was seized and run by workers — the syndicalist dream of "a factory without bosses." Some of the Stella D’Oro workers were inspired by the film, and they all realize that they could, and should, be running Stella D’Oro without the owners and their agents. Workers can run the factories and students and teachers can run the schools, but only when they control the levers of power — the government and the military — with a communist Party. Today on the protest train, workers and students united had a brief glimpse of the world that is struggling to be born.
Stella D’Oro Strikers Pit Workers’ Unity vs. Bosses’ Wealth
GREENWICH, CT, MAY 11 — Two busloads of over 100 striking Stella D’Oro workers and supporters rallied in front of the headquarters of the private equity firm that owns Stella D’Oro, Brynwood Partners, demanding that the company rescind its plans for drastic cuts in the workers’ wages and benefits. One of the striking workers said, "The owners of Stella D’Oro have their fortunes, their tremendous wealth, their fancy homes and cars. But we have our numbers and our solidarity and our determination to fight and not give up." Worker after worker spoke of his or her determination to keep on fighting and not accept the company’s demands.
Workers and students told the strikers how their unity — not a single worker has crossed the picket line — and courage has inspired them and how they’re providing a stirring example of how to respond to the attempts to force workers to pay for the economic crisis.
Increasingly, more Stella D’Oro workers are viewing their strike as not just important for them but for the working class. Chants at the rally ranged from "The WORKERS united will never be defeated," to "Boycott Stella D’Oro," to "Same Enemy Same Fight, All WORKERS Must Unite."
The strikers have traveled all over NYC — to union meetings, to campus rallies, to high school classrooms — to spread news about their struggle and what it means for everyone today.
On the two busses every worker received CHALLENGE and read it, particularly the articles that featured their fellow strikers attending PL events.
LA Teachers, Students Walk Out Against Layoffs
LOS ANGELES, May 15 — About two months ago, Reduction in Force (RIF) notices were given to over 8,000 teachers in our school district, in essence laying them off for the next school year. About a month after that at a union meeting, PL’ers introduced a resolution for teachers to strike on May Day (May 1st). The union hacks suggested that we strike on any day BUT May Day. They said it would "distract from our issues" to march with the rest of the working class. (see article, page 4)
At one school, there was a "new teacher meeting" a few days after this union meeting. Almost all the new teachers had received RIF notices and were not interested in what the principal had to say about next year. They weren’t even sure if they would have a job next year! They wanted to know why the union wasn’t truly fighting for them. The union chair gave the company line, saying the union "had to think of all the teachers in the district" and not just those at one school. Of course, that school is majority working-class black and Latino students and almost a third of the staff got RIF’ed, while the rich schools only had two or three teachers laid off!
A PL teacher stood up and said that teachers didn’t have to rely on the union; we could do our own wildcat action on May Day, like the original resolution had proposed. The new teachers loved the idea! One said that the PL’er should be their spokesperson, not the union rep. They shamed the union rep so much that she had the teachers at the school vote whether or not they wanted to stay out for one hour on May Day, and 90% of the teachers voted yes!
May Day 2009 saw teachers (not to mention quite a few students) marching in front of the school for the first hour of the school day, chanting "The teachers united will never be defeated" and "Maestros luchando también están enseñando (teachers in struggle are also teaching)." There were quite a few political discussions amongst teachers about the system and the historical importance of May Day, especially those new teachers. One conversation centered around a recent murder/suicide committed by a laid-off worker at a local hospital who not only shot his boss, but also his boss’s boss before he shot himself. One teacher commented that if he was going to do it, he should have gotten the people at the very top. "And the system," was added. She agreed completely. She, and about five other new teachers are now getting CHALLENGE regularly.
The teachers went back inside the school after 9 am, but during 3rd period the students walked out in support of the teachers! They held up signs, marched around inside the school and even tried to march around the outside of the school before being threatened with tickets and having to come back inside the campus. About 200 students walked out. "Next time," they promised as they came back into class, "the walkout will be even better." What a day! What a May Day full of class struggle! Now we must make the rest of the year full of communist class struggle.
Racist Unemployment Is Capitalism’s Executioner
How sick is the capitalist profit system? When the loss of 540,000 jobs in one month is considered "a good sign"!
That’s how the economic pundits reacted to the government’s jobless figures for April, since they were allegedly lower than job losses for the previous two months. But even that figure is suspect (see box).
The fact is real unemployment — reported figures plus "hidden unemployment — has passed 30 million, over 20% (not the government’s phony 8.9%). The latter figure represents 13.5 million jobless. Then add the 8.9 million part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs, plus 5.8 million "discouraged" workers who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, plus at least two-thirds of the 2.4 million imprisoned for non-violent crimes, plus the hundreds of thousands of jobless youth who joined the military, plus those on welfare who are forced onto Workfare who are not counted among the unemployed. Add it all up, and it easily exceeds 30 million.
This is "the longest, most punishing recession since the Great Depression." (NY Times, 5/9; all statistics from that edition)
How sick is this latest capitalist depression? Consider:
• Nearly 10 million jobs will be needed just to get back to the "normal unemployment" at the start of the "recession" in 2007: the 5.7 million jobs already lost, plus the over 2 million jobs needed just to keep up with population growth, plus at least another 2 million jobs that will be cut before the economy may start growing again;
• Children in poverty will rise from 18% to 27.3% by 2010;
• Over 27% of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, the highest on record;
• Wages have been stagnant, while millions have lost their homes and millions more are behind on mortgage payments;
• "The employment picture for…men and women with four-year college degrees or higher is the worst on record," now being labeled the "recession generation."
Racism’s Special Toll
As has existed for generations among the last hired and first fired, racist discrimination takes a special toll on super-exploited black and Latino workers. If the "hidden unemployment" cited above is included, joblessness among black workers is at 30% and among Latino workers it’s 22.6% (doubling the "official" figures). Poverty among black children (39.5% in 2007) will exceed 50% when the "official" unemployment rate hits 10%.
The brutal fact is that, "There are a lot of people who lost jobs [that] …are not coming back," according to Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, especially in manufacturing industries like auto and steel. Many "are going to be economically desperate for many years" (Economic Policy Institute), especially when unemployment benefits run out (and only 40% of the jobless are even eligible at all), when tens of millions of workers with no health insurance fall sick, and when millions more who’ve lost their homes become homeless.
A 1971 Congressional study reported that for every 1.4% rise in unemployment, 30,000 workers die in the following five years. Amid this skyrocketing jobless rate, that means capitalism’s mass, racist unemployment will kill hundreds of thousands of workers in the near future. Truly the profit system is guilty of mass murder.
And this is in the "most advanced" capitalist country. Unemployment worldwide is in the hundreds of millions. Several billion try to survive on a dollar or two a day. This is besides the millions slaughtered in imperialist oil wars which will occur as long as imperialism exists.
No matter who’s in the ruling class’s White House, whether Republican Bush or Democrat Obama, unemployment and its gruesome consequences will go on and on, recession after depression….
Only the overthrow of the capitalist system by communist revolution, only a system without bosses and profits and racism and super-exploitation — communism — can free the world’s working class from the horrors of the murderous profit system.
Again… Figures Don’t Lie But Liars Can Figure
Even the "official" figure of a "lower" amount of lost jobs in April is suspect. The government hired 72,000 people last month, mostly temporary workers to gather the 2010 census. When much of that is added into the reported 540,000 newly-unemployed, the total is well into the 600,000s. Moreover, the figure for March of 663,000 has now been revised to 699,000 and the one for February was upped from the initially-reported 651,000 to 681,000. So what will this April figure become when it is revised in a month or two?
And none of these figures included the "hidden unemployed." So much for the "good news."
PLP Ties Communist Politics to Teachers’ Anti-Layoff Fight
LOS ANGELES, May 18 — "Teachers at three schools have already held illegal wildcat job actions protesting layoffs. The union leadership fears following the leadership of rank-and-file teachers," declared a PLP teacher at the May 6 House of Delegates meeting. On May 12, a judge, acting for the bosses, granted an injunction prohibiting a teacher strike, threatening fines and revocation of teachers’ credentials.
"We should have no illusions about the power of the state apparatus," another PL’er said. "The government is a weapon of capitalist rule against the working class. They’ll bring their full power against us by imposing an injunction, but we must be prepared to defy it."
Such speeches exposed the union president’s fear tactics. He warned that an injunction against a planned illegal one-day job action and potential fines of $1,000 per teacher would break the union. Teachers in PLP had joined with others to fight for a one-day strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day. Although we won support for this in many areas of the city, the union leadership, appealing to anti-communism and anti-immigrant racism, pushed through a counter-motion for a one-day strike on any day in May except May Day. Teachers voted by 75% for a one-day walkout on May 15.
But even this was too much for the mis-leaders. They caved in to the injunction, blocked the strike and instead organized civil disobedience. The union president and 40 teacher activists sat in at an intersection, were arrested and spent the day in jail, hoping to diffuse the anger of the teachers at being sold out. Many teachers called this "just theatrics."
The LA Times reported the union president’s proposal that teachers suffer a pay cut in exchange for retaining the jobs of the 2,600 laid-off teachers, while throwing 2,500 non-teaching employees to the wolves.
Instead of leading workers in a life-and-death struggle against the bosses’ system, the union leaders’ role is "negotiating" the attacks on public employees, trying to convince them that there’s no alternative to capitalism, fascism and imperialist war. As the bosses’ crisis deepens, they must bail out the banks and expand the war, leaving teachers to face huge layoffs.
The layoffs are racist, increasing class size and disrupting mostly black and Latino working-class schools, as are the cuts in the non-teaching staff, many of them black and Latino new-hires.
After layoffs were announced in March, teachers and students at three high schools held unsanctioned one-hour job actions against them, two of which involved over 90% of the faculty. Students in CHALLENGE readers’ groups gave leadership in forums, demonstrations and in the PLP May Day contingent.
Since teacher layoffs are not part of the contract, job actions are illegal. The union leadership failed to prepare the members for this and caved in to the injunction, provoking tremendous district-wide anger and frustration. The injunction claimed leaving students unsupervised for a day constitutes "irreparable harm." This implies a blanket prohibition of all teacher strikes.
Like Obama’s forced bankruptcy of the auto companies and the attacks on autoworkers’ jobs, wages and pensions, this is a fascist attack. As UAW mis-leaders help the bosses slam autoworkers, the teacher union leaders are doing the same by refusing to defy the fascist injunction.
While Obama counts on these mis-leaders to pacify workers and win them to patriotic sacrifice for the (bosses’) nation, communists prepare and call on workers to take the fight outside the bosses’ laws, with wildcats and non-union job actions, aiming to build forces for revolution.
The union leadership called for picketing before school and civil disobedience at the Board of Education. Teachers and students at many schools picketed in the morning, angry at the Board of Education, the judge, and the union leadership. All three — plus the bankers and bosses’ courts — represent the dictatorship of Capital, the capitalist class, attacking the working class to save a system which can’t meet workers’ needs but must use fascism and world war to preserve their blood-soaked profits.
We distributed CHALLENGE on the picket lines. This led to many important discussions with fellow teachers — who read the paper — about growing fascism, the bankruptcy of the union leadership, the dead-end liberalism of civil disobedience and the need for political leadership whose goal is communist revolution.
We rely on the working class, including teachers, students and parents. Our goal is to increase youth and workers’ understanding and hatred of the system, to build the long-term struggle to take political power from the capitalists. Our aim is a communist world, a workers’ dictatorship, where nobody starves and there no bosses, living in luxury off workers’ sweat. The victory is more CHALLENGE readers, militant study-action CHALLENGE groups, the Summer Project (see page 7), and a growing commitment to destroy this fascist system.
PL’ers Bring Red Ideas to Colombia’s May Day March
In Bogota, at one of the biggest May Days in recent years, thousands of workers marched down the main streets shouting their fierce rejection of fascist police, unemployment, low wages, budget cuts to social services, corruption and the rottenness of the whole Uribe government. The vast majority of marchers, while chanting against the genocidal President Uribe Velez, did not identify him as one of the many puppets used by this capitalist system, instead blaming him personally for the misery that Colombian workers endure.
Social democrats, liberals and opportunists, some disguised as communists, offered false promises and took the platform, not to bring a message of working-class solidarity and the need for communist revolution, but for their electoral speeches. Other groups of workers denounced the violation of human rights and the privatization of public institutions like the District University, the National University, and the telephone company.
These workers are honest and earnest in their desire for a better life, but they were missing a key point: the capitalist system is the real cause of all of our problems and only by destroying it can we hope to improve the lives of workers. The PLP supplied this missing ingredient by consistently denouncing capitalism and its degenerate, genocidal, corrupt leaders like Obama, Sarkozy and Uribe and their war policies against the working class in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world.
Workers and students, employed and jobless, men and women, all gave revolutionary leadership protesting militantly with our PLP sign and flags. Before and during the march we enthusiastically distributed 3,000 fliers and sold CHALLENGE, showing communism as the only true solution. "It’s May Day, not a carnival!" and "Paramilitarism and racism hold Capitalism afloat!"; "Long live communism and down with capitalism!" and many other chants were shouted by our forces throughout the day, in a disciplined fashion. Many joined our chants while other passer-bys were astonished and asked for our literature. We explained our revolutionary line and how to stay in touch with us and asked how we could continue to send them CHALLENGE.
As we entered the plaza, singing the Internationale, we were attacked with tear gas by the fascist police. As in most years, this ended the march. Later there were confrontations with the police and several businesses were destroyed. These lasted several hours, and some were hurt while 117 were arrested. Here we have another example of the chaos that capitalism creates for workers.
The international working class urgently needs new revolutionary leadership to unify, organize and prepare the working class for its immediate needs and its future goals to destroy this bosses’ system and build the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a long, difficult struggle, but opportunities abound. We must take advantage of the economic crisis of this rotten, stinking capitalist system to bring a communist message to our working-class brothers and sisters. Everything we do counts! The future is bright for the working class!
Workers Storm Steel Bosses’ Meeting
LUXEMBOURG, May 13 — Angry steel workers attacked the Luxembourg headquarters of ArcelorMittal, world’s biggest steelmaker, during the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting yesterday, setting off smoke bombs and breaking through the front door, protesting 9,000 layoffs. Buses brought 1,000 workers from plants in northern France and southern Belgium. Some hurled cobblestones and steel fencing, smashed windows and tore off a steel molding from the ornate 1920s exterior as riot police lined up to protect the head office.
Colombia’s TV ‘Reality Show’ Ponzi Scheme and Other Capitalist Evils
We know the importance of television and media in modern life as a communication tool. We can also see the how the bosses, conscious of the risks of using it excessively as a tool of repression, use it in a much more subliminal way now. In one case, they are doing this through "Reality TV".
Recently, a new TV show entitled "Inversiones el A.B.C." ("The ABC Investments") has been aired on a local Colombian TV network. The TV show is based on the real life story behind the David Murcia Guzmán (DMG) group. The DMG group is a controversial company disbanded in November 2008 by the Colombian government under suspicion of money laundering and using a Ponzi scheme. Essentially, they got people to spend 100,000 pesos on pre-paid cards they could use to buy various things distributed by the DMG group. They would then get their money back for buying the cards (and maybe even make a profit) only if they got others to buy a lot more cards.
Strangely enough, the majority of the working class here in Colombia did not feel robbed by the DMG group. They felt, rather, that the government robbed them when it precipitated the bankruptcy of the DMG group (acting under pressure from bankers and the U.S. Embassy). The government is now working hard to twist the necks of an important sector of the working class by using the media to show the incident from their perspective.
Why Are TV Shows So Important For The Bosses Right Now?
There are a lot of reasons why the government needs good publicity right now. Lately, the housing problem in Colombia has been getting much worse. According to figures from the Supreme Judiciary Council, the number of foreclosures in 1999 was 550,000 and 347,000 in 2003. According to figures from the organizations of victims of the financial system, there are over 500,000 families that have been evicted by the banks and 400,000 more arein the process of eviction. According to the World Bank, Colombia is the second largest country in concentration of wealth in the world, and five groups control 92% of the financial sector.
The pressure is mounting on this capitalist system, especially when it comes to the local systems. They act as a shield and protection for the global financial system. Because of this, the debt can be maintained even as the dollar falls. Here things happen with this very special formula: when the consumer price index (CPI) falls, the debt remains, but when the CPI rises, the debt rises.
For example, if you go to the bank and give them 100 pesos, hoping to have 105 or 110 if you save it, then the bank says that because of management expenses, card balances and taxes now you only have 80 pesos. Where is the motivation to save? There is none, and if another site, DMG namely, tells you that if you put those same 100 pesos in their pyramid scheme you can expect to get 200 back, then you’ll do it because you have to take the risk.
A survey of the International Youth Organization 2008 says: 120 million young people between 15 and 24 years of age in Latin America suffer an unemployment rate of 12.5%. In Colombia almost 30% of the youth are unemployed. This rate is increasing because of the bosses’ crisis. "It is said that only about 48% of children have access to Preschool. Also, teen pregnancy rates continue to increase reaching more than 20.5% in women 15- to 19-years-old and 16% of poor households living in precarious positions."
The Fight Against Sexism is Vital to Defeating Capitalism
PLP combats sexism, opposing the attacks against women and developing women leaders in our movement. We also continue to spread our communist analysis of sexism: that it is necessary for the bosses because it divides the working class and makes revolutionary struggle that much more unlikely. The fight against sexist ideas cannot be separated from the struggle against the system that creates them.
In a study of the Public Defense Organization and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Pasto, capital of Nariño, 43.3% of women reported having been the victim of physical violence and 70% did not report it or ask for help. Likewise, 19.7% were forced into sex acts or sex against their will. Sexual violence appears as a central strategy of territorial control. The attacks against women around the world are growing. While this system exists, where economic exploitation turns women into a commodity, women will be abused and disregarded both on a small scale to a much larger scale.
When asked: "Has a member of your family ever been physically forced to have sex or sexual acts unwillingly?," 11.1% of the population answered in the positive; 17.9% declared that sexual assault was the determining cause for moving away. Sexism increases oppression through economic, cultural and social means. Women earn less and are treated worse on a political level.
Sexism is not only the personal male chauvinism of a few right-wing and backward men and women or the outcome of the deployment of paramilitaries in the city. In Bogotá, the process of the exploitation of women is reflected in key areas of the formal economy (large projects) or the informal economy (drug trafficking).
For example, trade in San Andresito, money laundering in the neighborhood of Santafé, and other financial activities downtown all use the super-exploitation of women to make a profit. The steps they take are clear: infiltrate, control, prevent acceptance by the population or the institutions that have a presence in the area; create extensive networks in the neighborhoods, proliferate fear; execute the "Undesirable," and attempt total domination of the area. This practice is not new but now it is being done systematically against women workers.
All workers need to combat inequality as an integral part of capitalism. Attacks against women also keep their brother workers in chains. The divisions between men and women help employers cut our salaries. Victory for the working class requires that we break these divisions and join in the fight for equality by destroying the capitalist system. The working class needs to destroy sexism in order to defeat capitalism and build a revolutionary struggle for communism to eliminate the oppression of all workers.
Letters
Turning Shop Struggle into Class Consciousness
I work for a non-union auto subcontractor in the South. As car sales have fallen, the company has cut about half its workforce. Recently, the rest of us have been put on half-time. We work forty hours every two weeks and collect some unemployment. Many have had to pick up extra minimum-wage, under-the-table jobs.
Recently we received another reminder of what capitalism is when we lost eight of our 40 hours to a company "maintenance day." Managers and supervisors were paid to plan how to get even more work out of us, while the production workers were given an unpaid day off and left with a big hole in their paychecks. This became an opportunity to move my friends in the factory to higher levels of class consciousness.
I expressed my anger to another auto worker who works a part-time job with me. I suggested that we stop work, stage a kind of sit-down protest, to force the bosses to give us back our hours. After all, I pointed out, they still have a market for the trucks we make, and they can’t make them without us. My friend agreed, and argued that at this point "we might as well go out fighting." So we made a plan, and the next day we both talked to others at the factory to see where they stood.
People’s opinions were quite divided. Many were down for doing something. Some worried that if too few people agreed to the action that the managers would just step in and run the line. They pointed out that it had to be all of us or none of us.
Another close friend, who had helped write a letter of support for the Boeing strikers, criticized me for being "ungrateful" for the hours that we still had. I told her that "we can’t just be passive and let things get worse." Since she and I talk a lot about relationships, I used marriage as an analogy. When things are wrong there, she doesn’t just say, "Well, at least I have a relationship." For the same reason, we can’t just say "well at least we have jobs" since if we took such a passive approach, the problems for the working class would get worse.
A day later, the bosses announced that everyone who had gotten cut would be able to make up the lost days. We don’t know if they had heard of our plans, but that isn’t the main point.
Key were the discussions about how one can fight, about our role as workers, all of which are part of the struggle to build up a fighting class-consciousness. Some of my friends receive CHALLENGE, and this struggle helped me understand and push the limits of their understanding of what we mean by worker’s power, of a communist society without bosses. We still have a ways to go. Many of these workers were invited to May Day. Two came to a study group to consider our ideas more, and then came to May Day and helped prepare food. These are small steps, but they are the essential first steps on the road to communism.
As we fight for the loaves of bread to eat today
We can’t forget who built the factory,
Grew the grain and who bakes the loaves of bread for tomorrow,
The workers do.
Subcontractor Comrade
May Day Youth ‘Were On A Mission’
The following are excerpts from letters written by youth who marched with the PLP contingent in the Los Angeles immigrant rights march on May Day. Five of them joined PLP and many more subscribed to CHALLENGE, agreed to distribute CHALLENGES and/or be in a study group:
We stood together and stood out for the working class. Our red flags stood tall and angry, against the racist exploitation and mass deportations…. I, in red, stood for my immigrant parents, for my unemployed uncle, my little sisters’ future education and for my friend who was brutally assassinated when the cops didn’t decide to protect but to terminate. I stood for many.
The difference between our groups was that we were all one, like a big red flag. This May Day I was marching, holding a flag and chanting my lungs out. It was hard work, but you feel better about who you are and happy, because it’s not just for your benefit but many others as well…. I was glad that I went out to march on the street to support everyone, not just my Mom.
Our group was the most organized by far. As we walked down the street people could tell that we were on a mission and that mission was a revolution. We had our chants and vision set. We were organized and the most motivated group on the march.
The drums beating, the chants screaming and the red flags flying — there was no denying it, PLP.
The May Day march was amazing to me because I felt that I had a purpose to fight. I was there for workers and what we came for was to unite the working class together to overthrow the bosses and work together for each other and the things we need… The reason we stand out from the rest is because we didn’t get misled. We knew the true meaning of a May Day March; we held the red flag, not the U.S. or the Mexican flag. We marched in red; we told the truth about the people who died for their rights long ago in Chicago. Long Live May Day. Long live PLP.
We let people know the march was about the working class. We talked about CHALLENGE and we were the only ones with the red flag.
The working class has no bosses’ flag and no country. We fought for the red flag that represented all of the working class. It meant that we are all one and that we should unite to fight for a communist society where there is no poverty. I was on the security committee. My job was to keep the shape of our group — we organized how we should march.
From all the multiple crowds we were the ones popping out, the only ones with the red flag, which stands for revolutionary communism. I thought the march was really exciting and a really nice experience.
My friends and I joined together and got to the spot where the march was going to start. We helped distribute CHALLENGE and leaflets to explain the real reason for May 1st. When the time came to start marching, we started chanting. We all sounded like one. We were all organized. To me it was awesome that we were able to speak our minds and scream our lungs out. I’m happy I could assist the march and I really hope I would be able to go next year.
Red Youth
Fight Racism with Multi-racial Unity, Not As ‘White Allies’
I have worked with Jobs with Justice (JwJ) for several years and recently attended their class "Building Unity between Brown and Black." What a disappointment! There were segregated breakout sessions — "Black, Brown in the Workplace," "Black, Brown on Housing Issues" and "White Ally." I commented that this was very divisive and patronizing. The leader’s response was that JwJ was "trying something different." Racial segregation isn’t so "different" in America!
In the "white ally" session, I said I wasn’t comfortable with the separation. We’re all in the working class and need to fight racism together, especially in the unions! This emboldened some others to voice their concerns about this term. The facilitator argued that "white allies" couldn’t lead any anti-racist struggles, and should essentially be a cheerleader on the sidelines.
At lunch, two women union organizers for United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 400 (one black and one Latina) told of how they helped workers win the union election at the Smithfield Ham Plant in Tarheel, NC. Last year Immigration, Customs and Enforcement raided the plant for immigrant workers. Five hundred Smithfield workers of all ethnic groups protested this deportation raid! I asked the organizers how they showed workers that solidarity was in their best interest. They canvassed union workers from Richmond, VA, down to Tarheel, NC, and many workers sent letters of support. Smithfield workers realized they were part of a larger group and gained strength from it.
A "white ally" in the audience asked the organizers about the role of "white allies" in the union struggle. They were baffled by the question and didn’t know how to respond. I spoke up and said that in union organizing, you don’t have white workers on the sidelines. One of the organizers explained that workers need to work together to achieve their goals. Afterwards, I thanked the union organizers for their presentation, and when I told them I had to get back to my "white ally" breakout group, they looked at me in disbelief. I told them about the John Brown/Harriet Tubman March in Harpers Ferry planned for October, and that we wanted to organize unions to go. They told me to keep in touch with them.
Later, I discussed the JwJ conference with two fellow union members who meet with me regularly to discuss CHALLENGE. Both agreed the "white ally" strategy made no sense. One said, "How can white workers fight racism by only talking to whites?" Both said it was important to have multiracial unity among workers to win anything from the bosses. I explained that when PLP talks with workers, we always try to go as an integrated group.
Apparently JwJ thinks that "black and brown" workers won’t be able to play a leading role in the struggle if there are any white workers involved. That notion itself strikes me as "white supremacist" thinking! Black and brown workers have often led class struggle, and white workers unified with them give the working class the greatest punch against the bosses.
D.C. Red
‘Liberal’ N.J. Mayor: ‘Who, me racist?’; ‘Yes, YOU!’
Donald Cresitello, mayor of Morristown, NJ, is a face of the growing fascist attack on undocumented workers. Two years ago, Cresitello hosted the anti-immigrant Pro-America group on the steps of city hall. The Party, many of its friends and even some townspeople, shut them down.
Several weeks ago, the American Friends Service Committee hosted a "Conversation with the Mayor on Section 287g," the federal law which allows local cops to be deputized as ICE (immigration) agents. Cresitello, a Democrat running for reelection, has long advocated that Morristown cops act as immigration cops. At this event, he tried to pose as a liberal, proclaiming that he wasn’t anti-immigrant, that he supported providing undocumented immigrants with a "path to citizenship,"that there would never be racial profiling in Morristown. He even claimed not to "care"about section 287g.
One audience member pointed out that racial profiling and section 287g are inseparable. She also described Cresitello’s effort to promote anti-immigrant racism in Newark. There, after three college students were murdered by a suspected undocumented person, Cresitillo asked to speak at the memorial service. Knowing his anti-immigrant rhetoric, the family refused to let him come, and told him that his racist ideas were not welcome. The immigration status of the murderer was irrelevant.
Cresitello quickly exposed himself. He jumped to his feet to denounce the story as false, and threatened that the speaker had better not tell this story in public again. But his red face, bulging eyes, and yelling made it clear to the audience that he was the liar and the same racist he always had been. After the forum, a number of people in the audience came up and thanked the speaker for what she had said.
An important lesson was learned that day. We must never let these racists pretend to be something other than what they are. We must be sure to confront them whenever possible and make sure that we in the working class are not fooled by slick lies. And we must never forget that communist revolution is the only way to end capitalism and its racist exploitation of, and terror against, of undocumented workers.
N.J. Comrade
Oaxaca May Day Marchers Defy Gov’t Flu Panic
OAXACA, MEXICO, May 18 — Just before May Day, Felipe Calderon’s reactionary Mexican government unleashed a nation-wide media campaign about the swine flu epidemic, generating a somber atmosphere and severe anxiety among the population. It appears the government has exaggerated the effects of this disease to divert attention away from the financial crisis and the bosses’ fascist measures to overcome it, which are deepening attacks on workers’ living conditions.
About 10,000 education workers from Section 22 of the Oaxaca teachers’ union and activists from organizations comprising APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca) marched on May Day. They defied the government and overcame its pandemic panic.
A group of 100 members and friends of PLP including farm workers from La Merced del Portrero marched wearing shirts saying: "We fight for a better world against wage slavery." In the five-kilometer (three-mile) march our group stood out with our militant chanting of our revolutionary communist slogans, despite the teachers’ union leadership pushing for a silent march wearing masks covering their mouths.
Slogans resounded through the city’s streets: "The crisis of the system has no solution, the only solution is revolution!"; "Fight, win, workers to power!"; "The flu, capitalism, the bosses — the same garbage!"; "Advance, Advance, Communism will triumph!"
Slogans on our banners and signs stood out: "The virus...and worst pandemic in the world is Capitalism — destroy it with Communist Revolution!"; and "Workers’ Struggles have no Borders!" The 5,000 leaflets and 300 CHALLENGES we distributed were well-received by the marchers and the public who watched.
Afterwards we had a very warm intense discussion, recognizing strengths and weaknesses in this experience. We could have been better organized, and didn’t explain the demands of the farm workers, among others. But our most important strength was our commitment to continue advancing the political work of PLP.
Only Red Politics Can Dump Dead-end of ‘Reforming Capitalism’
PLP members are often asked why we bring in communist politics into every working-class struggle. Why can’t we just fight for higher wages, getting U.S. troops out of Iraq or against racist police brutality? Why should we be concerned with the ideas that are motivating and leading these struggles and not just be content that workers are engaged in struggle against the capitalists and their governments?
There can be no advances for the working class without mass struggle, but recent events in Pakistan show that reactionary pro-capitalist ideas can make that struggle a dead-end for workers. Landless tenants are justifiably rebelling against wealthy landlords and the high taxes and corruption of the U.S. puppet Pakistani government (NYT 4/16/09), but the struggle is being led by Taliban forces that are using the workers’ anger to establish their own religious-fascist rule.
Politics and ideas are a matter of life and death for the working class. Even when communist or left movements have led struggles for state power, if the movements were based on reforming the system, all the gains of the workers were eventually reversed. The Vietnamese working class heroically fought and defeated U.S. imperialism under the leadership of the North Vietnamese communists. The movement focused on economic reforms instead of changing the underlying politics of society. Now, Ford and Nike super-exploit Vietnamese workers and full-blown capitalism with all its misery has returned.
In South Africa, communists led millions of black workers to overthrow Apartheid. The Mandela-led African National Congress (ANC) chose to share power with the old apartheid capitalists. The working class went along with this because the movement had promised that an ANC victory would improve conditions for the country’s black workers as opposed to defeating capitalism and its ideology. With a black-led government in power the shantytowns remain, health care is non-existent for millions of people, and black workers toil for the same minimal wages they had under Apartheid. Still the capitalists rake in billions in profits.
In El Salvador, many tens of thousands who considered themselves communists or leftists fought against the U.S.-backed government fascists. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the decades long civil war. But eventually the working-class forces went along with the FMLN becoming part of the government. Now the former guerilla leaders are sanctioning the exploitation of the working class. The seeds of this betrayal were sown by the movement building itself on making economic reforms as opposed to a political transformation of society.
These defeats of the working class were the result of reformism in the communist movement, the opportunist winning of workers to fight the bosses based on the idea that the communists would provide more than the capitalists. We are fighting for a society that will share scarcity and abundance based on communist politics, not material incentive.
Socialism in Russia and China had many communist aspects but they focused on material benefits and retained the money-based wage system. Eventually the individualism of a system based on wages led society back to capitalism. Even the Cultural Revolution in 1960s China, that moved workers closer to communism than ever before, was undermined by its failure to break free from capitalist ideas.
Red Guards in China attacked privilege and inequality. But these advanced communist ideas that have so inspired our Party were undermined by the Red Guards’ inability to cast aside the "cult of Mao." Relying on an "all-knowing" leader rather than a mass communist party gave capitalist forces in the army and government a free hand to crush the Cultural Revolution.
These hard lessons show why communist ideas are essential to every struggle. Fighting against racism, nationalism, sexism, individualism, and selfishness, are necessary to build working-class unity and ultimately build a society without wages. Learning from the leadership of black, Latino and women workers, and showing that we don’t need the ruling class, are essential to our class gaining confidence in itself and in communism. To win in the long run our movement must have leaders today who are in the forefront of the class struggle and are self-critical about their weaknesses. Communist leaders must fight for the interests of the working class, take risks, and not seek personal gain from the movement.
Communists understand that the government’s "state power" is a weapon of the capitalist ruling class. This understanding is necessary to keep our class from relying on "lesser-evil" politicians whose job is to sabotage workers’ struggles. Armed revolution for communism to smash capitalism is the only lasting solution to workers’ oppression from a capitalist treadmill where reforms are given and taken back. From this the bosses bank their profits and shed workers blood in endless imperialist wars.
The movement we build today will shape the society we build tomorrow. There are no shortcuts. The only road to victory is winning our class to communism.
The movement we build today will shape the society we build tomorrow. There are no shortcuts. The only road to victory is winning our class to communism.
30 Generations of Racism =Billion$ for Bosses
For years, CHALLENGE has been reporting that the U.S. ruling class needs racism and its resulting discrimination because it nets hundreds of billions in profits from the lower wages paid to black workers (including Latino workers in the last century), dragging down the wage levels of ALL workers. Institutional racist inequality has spanned 30 generations — from slavery to post-Civil War legal segregation, enforced by KKK terror — to current racism. Now reports reveal this generational racism means that for every dollar of assets accumulated by white families (home and auto ownership, government subsidies, savings, pensions, among other factors), black families have only 10 cents worth of assets!
This doesn’t mean that white working-class families are so well off. The average in the above comparison includes upper-income white families, far more numerous than upper-income black families. Actually, the Federal Reserve’s "Survey of Consumer Finances" reports that overall the net worth of the average U.S. family today is less than it was in 2001. (Washington Post, 3/23/09) However, racist discrimination enables the bosses to net super-profits from the differential in income and assets denied to black families as compared to white families.
The biggest single factor in accumulating assets is home ownership. Historically, black families have been far less able to "reap the benefits of government support and tax-paid subsidies, which help...build assets. During the Depression [of the 1930s]…the Home Owners Loan Corporation was established "to rescue families from home foreclosures, but not a single…loan went to a black or Hispanic family….
"The black section of Detroit was simply excluded. After World War II, GIs received government-subsidized home mortgages….Of the 67,000 mortgages issued under the GI Bill in New York and northern New Jersey," only 100 went to black veterans! (Washington Post)
This discrimination is just as marked today as revealed in the home foreclosure swindle. "Payday lenders and other shady financial dealers…have preyed on [black and Latino] people fueling the economic and foreclosure crisis. African Americans…were more than three times as likely as white borrowers to be steered to high-interest loans, even when they qualified for a prime loan."
Moreover, U.S. tax-code rules, "Have strengthened…those who already have assets. You can get a tax deduction for interest on home mortgages of up to $1 million….But if you own a home and make too little to itemize [on one’s tax return], the mortgage interest doesn’t help you at all."
Concludes the Washington Post writer Meizhu Lui, "The over-hyped political term ‘post-racial society’ becomes patently absurd when looking at these economic numbers." The super-profits accumulated from this racism helps the ruling class pay for imperialist oil wars abroad, and they use racism to justify attacks on Arab and South Asian workers at home and worldwide.
The depressed assets of black and Latino families make it more difficult for them to obtain health insurance and therefore access to adequate healthcare, as well as to avoid bankruptcy from uninsured medical bills. This lack of assets lessens their ability to gain legal assistance when needed and to pay the rising tuition of their children’s education.
This generational racism keeps their children in a downward spiral. "The biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child is the net worth of the child’s parents." But as indicated above, historically black families have received less "government support and tax-paid subsidies for their asset-building activities." The GI Bill sending veterans to college after World War II was overwhelmingly denied to black vets, stemming from their discriminatory position in the then segregated armed forces.
This gap in assets or net worth is widening. The 10 cents referred to earlier was 12 cents in 2004. "These African American losses appear near-permanent, the result of the deindustrialization of the United States — the destruction of the black blue-collar workforce." (Black-White Wealth Gap Continues to Widen in U.S., by Joshua Holland, posted on AlterNet) This is especially true of the mass layoffs in basic industries like auto and steel.
As CHALLENGE has reported, the bosses are shifting their profit-making production from higher-paid, formerly unionized plants to non-union subcontractors spread across the South, Southwest and California, paying black, Latino and immigrant workers less than half the wages of the older plants, with no benefits. Given this drive for super-profits, especially based on racism, the wages and conditions of the entire working class are suffering. Racism hurts ALL workers, even as it hurts black and Latino workers the most — just as the bosses’ economic crisis hurts all workers, while oppressing black and Latino workers even more.
Since black households "earn less than 60 percent of median white income," says the above AlterNet posting, "At the pace of catch-up since 1968, according to a report issued…by United for A Fair Economy, ‘it would take 581 years’ [for black families] to achieve income parity." But that will never arrive; it will only help to reduce white family income.
It is only through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist profit-driven society and its state apparatus, and the establishment of communism — without bosses, profits, a wage system and racism — that the entire working class, which produces all value, will receive the full fruits of our labors according to need.
That’s "communist parity."
Scenario In 2006...
Bosses Push Pro-War Obama
As ‘People’s Savior’
Stella D’Oro Strikers
Strikers, Defy Cops
for Local Party
ideas to the dozens of co-workers and friends of all ages — students and teachers, junior high to retirees — who joined in the celebration of comradeship and internationalism. The range of nationalities was very broad, with at least nine countries, including Mexico, Germany, Japan, Kenya, and Cuba represented. More than a few sang the Internationale for the first time. As we broke up, a worker from Kenya, a friend of a friend, for whom this was the first encounter with PLP, told me, “I really liked this. These are my kind of people.”
Contingent
The Ground
I and II and the capitalist “solution,” whether fascism or today’s “Obama Mania.” Crisis then world war: eerily familiar to today.
Red Grandma
Friends in Peru
Marcher Picks Up Red Flag
on May Day
AIDS Epidemic
- Teo
Bankers Profit, Workers Pay
New Profiteers
Speed-up, Welcome CHALLENGE
