May Day Means: Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution
a href="#Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth">Obam"’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth
a href="#When Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’">When"Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’
a href="#Can’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!">Can’" Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!
May Day Fight Exposes Pro-Boss Union Hacks
Ivan the Nazi Stays, BP Immigrant Workers Jailed
a href="#Spain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day">"pain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day
N.J. Gov. Using Crisis to Rob Workers of $500 Million
a href="#Linking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP">"inking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP
Campus Forum Attacks U.S. Escalation In Afghanistan
a href="#Imperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico">"mperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico
May Day in El Salvador:‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’
a href="#Immigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment">"mmigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment
Letters
Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation
a href="#More Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers">"ore Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers
Skycap Fights Frame-up, With PLP Support
Farmworkers Block Highway, Renewing 30-yr. Struggle
Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers
May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class
May Day Means:
Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution
As we celebrate May Day, the lives of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters worldwide hang by a thread on the decisions of imperialist butchers — including racist U.S. bosses and their politician servants like Obama — who have the power to decide who among us lives and who dies.
They have that power because their capitalist system rules the world. Capitalism is based on production for bosses’ profits, not workers’ needs. The bosses make profits only from workers’ labor. If they can’t sell profitably what is produced, they will destroy it or let it rot. Thus, every year they murder hundreds of millions of our class through starvation, diseases that can easily be prevented or cured, imperialist wars and other capitalist-created evils.
Hundreds of millions of workers worldwide are forced to migrate in search of an ever-more elusive job just to be super-exploited and hounded like criminals. Billions more, unable to migrate, are condemned to a life of brutal poverty and premature death.
Over 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S., plus their three million U.S.-born children, are hoping their dreams of legalization may come true at last. Tens of millions more in Latin America, Asia and Africa who depend for their livelihood on money sent by these workers must be harboring the same hopes and dreams.
But, in times of deep economic crisis, the bosses’ drive for maximum profits requires complete and total control — fascism — over workers intent on rebelling against the mass racist unemployment, and the wage and service cuts devastating their lives. And this drive for maximum profits pits the U.S. bosses, the top world imperialists, against the challenge of rising imperialists in China, Russia and Europe, all fighting each other to capture the planet’s resources and "right" to exploit billions of workers — a dogfight which inevitably leads to world war. These needs driving capitalism — not "humanitarian" concerns — are behind Obama’s DREAM Act and Comprehensive Immigration Reform bills.
World supremacy is decided on the battlefield and requires the fascism and the war economy outlined above. U.S. bosses will need millions to loyally slave in their war industries for low wages and tens of millions in their armed forces to fight and die for U.S. imperialism’s blood-soaked profits.
The proposed immigration bills mirror these U.S. bosses’ war needs. The DREAM Act, hailed as a bill to help undocumented youth, in fact will kindly "offer" a pool of over a million youth the "opportunity" of serving in the rulers’ military to shorten the "path to citizenship" — but more likely a path to the cemetery (see box).
The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill will create another pool of over 12 million undocumented workers to follow a torturous (and costly) path to legalization, at least a 12-year ordeal of slave-like working conditions in the bosses’ war industries. Deportation will always hang over their heads.
Capitalism is the bosses’ system built on racism which both nets them hundreds of billions in super-profits from the lower wages and benefits forced on black and Latino workers (which drag down conditions for ALL workers) while pitting these groups against each other to weaken any united fight-back against the attacks that oppress us all.
The latest wrinkle in this racist divisiveness, backed by the bosses’ lieutenants among black "leaders," is to blame mainly Latino immigrants for the unemployment among black workers — "they’re stealing ‘our’ jobs." But it’s the bosses’ profit system and its latest financial crisis/depression that is throwing millions of black (and white) workers into the streets and out of their homes, not their brother and sister immigrant workers who are also suffering the same attacks, besides fascist government raids and imprisonment. Many of these workers come with a long history of class struggle and can help the working class lead battles against the bosses.
Thus, the unity of the international working class under the leadership of a mass international Progressive Labor Party has never been more urgent. Only millions of students, workers and soldiers armed with our communist ideas can destroy this capitalist-imperialist inferno. Communism will abolish all borders and exploitation. It will use working-class state power to deal racism and sexism a death blow. It will eliminate the bosses, their wage system and money because production will be based on the needs of the international working class. Speed the bosses’ "path to extinction." Join PLP!
a name="Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth"></a>"bama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth
The Obama administration’s latest version of the "DREAM ACT" promises undocumented immigrant youth citizenship in exchange for fighting and dying in U.S. imperialism’s oil wars.
Re-introduced into Congress last month, the Act would grant citizenship if these undocumented youth had lived in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school and completed two years of either college or military service. But the Act does not change their ineligibility for government financial aid for college.
For most working-class immigrant youth, it’s far easier to join the military than to enter college, which is prohibitively expensive. So, in effect, it becomes a recruiting tool for the military. It fits right into Obama’s current aim to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has been a major backer of the DREAM ACT because it would provide 279,000 possible new recruits for the military (the brass is certainly not supporting it to send these youth to college). Furthermore, there are 715,000 additional youth between 5 and 17 who the military could get their hands on in the near future.
Supporters of the DREAM Act hide all this behind a "reform" label, but give undocumented immigrant youth who can’t afford college (the overwhelming majority) the "choice" of deportation or puts them on a path to the cemetery, while killing their brother and sister youth in imperialist war.
Mass Action is The Order of The Day
• Unite citizen and immigrant workers to stop the government raids, and the imprisonment and deportation of undocumented sister and brother workers;
• Organize strikes against layoffs; stop work if co-workers are being laid off;
• Stop foreclosures with a mass fight against evictions;
· Organize in the military to refuse orders to murder other workers;
• Establish union committees to unite those still working with the unemployed, led by rank-and-filers defying foot-dragging by sellout union leaders;
• Win local unions to organize marches on government buildings and mass demonstrations surrounding companies that announce future layoffs;
• Raise demands in unions, community groups, churches, schools and colleges to unite with workers in their areas to protest bosses’ attacks;
• Support striking workers in our areas, such as those at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx, NY and elsewhere, with funds and by joining picket lines;
• Organize students to participate in these actions and to support their parents who are either on strike, face layoffs or can mobilize their co-workers into action;
• Reach across all borders in solidarity with workers internationally who are facing these same attacks, especially auto workers who are in a unique position to unite against the auto bosses who have "globalized."
• Organize workers, soldiers, and youth everywhere to join Progressive Labor Party.
No doubt many rank-and-file workers will come up with additional ideas for action. Communists in PLP and their close friends will inject our red ideas into this struggle, to advance the need for communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven capitalist system that has thrived on unemployment, forcing workers to suffer the losses caused by the bosses’ crisis. These ideas can be spread effectively by the mass sale of CHALLENGE, the expansion of CHALLENGE networks and winning workers to subscribe to the paper.
Who Are the Real Pirates?
The support Obama has received while expanding military attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now killing teenage pirates in Somalia, highlights his value to U.S. rulers as they broaden their war machine’s existing theaters and open new ones. Obama, in his liberal guise, is able to "sell" patriotic militarism to a far broader audience than his predecessor ever could.
Obama’s deadly "humanitarian" rescue of the U.S. freighter captain furthers a U.S.-led NATO mission, begun in March, that makes the strategic Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa a war zone under the pretext of combating piracy. Pirates do indeed threaten commerce. But Obama and his masters’ main goal is to assert U.S. dominance of Mideast oil export routes against greater foes, especially China’s developing "blue-water" navy. The Maersk Alabama incident was a military operation from start to finish. The ship belongs to the Pentagon’s Military Sealift Command, having run thousands of tons of lethal supplies to Iraq. The ship’s officers, graduates of the U.S. Navy-affiliated Massachusetts Maritime academy, deliberately sailed into the pirates’ well-known range. The ship’s captain is the main trainer of anti-pirate tactics at the academy. A Navy destroyer just "happened" to be nearby. Obama’s high seas drama coincides with the Pentagon’s establishment of a new Africa Command, to safeguard U.S. interests — access to energy supplies in particular — throughout the continent.
The pirates of Somalia are being used to mask the real pirates, the big imperialist powers militarizing these waters. All kinds of warships, spy and combat planes, satellites from the U.S., France, Russia, China, India, Japan, the European Union and Spain have been sent there.
While Somalia’s population is of little interest to the major powers, the 1,900-mile-long waterways along Somalia’s shores have great geopolitical importance. Somalia, on the Horn of Africa, is separated from Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula by the Gulf of Aden. About 11% of the world’s seaborne petroleum passes through the Gulf to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
During the 1970s, U.S.-supported Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia waged war against Somalia, then ruled by pro-Soviet strongman Siad Barre. When Selassie was overthrown, and a pro-Soviet military junta seized power in Ethiopia, Barre switched sides and became pro-U.S., which then used the Somalian port of Berbera as a base for operations in the Persian Gulf.
When the Cold War ended, U.S. interest in Somalia waned. After Barre lost power, a civil war among different warlords ravaged the country. In 1992, Bush, Sr., invaded Somalia for "humanitarian reasons," leading to the famous "Blackhawk Down" incident, when a U.S. chopper was shot down after firing indiscriminately into a crowd in Somalia’s capital city. Once Clinton became president, he withdrew U.S. troops from the country.
Somalia had no central government and was ruled by different clans. Then Somalia’s waters became a dumping ground for nuclear toxic waste from Europe, destroying the livelihood of Somalia’s fishermen. This waste became dislodged and washed ashore during the massive tsunami in December 2004. Thousands of Somalis were poisoned.
It was then that local fishermen first began to seize ships they believed were dumping toxic waste. They began to chase away fishing trawlers. This was the beginning of the pirates who are seizing ships today and making millions. In 2006, the Ethiopian army, aided by the U.S., invaded Somalia to topple a pro-Islamist government which had actually stopped the piracy. After killing thousands, mostly innocent people, the Ethiopian army left, leaving the country in an even more chaotic situation.
So the little pirates are from a country where most of the population makes $2 a day and many are unemployed teenagers — like those killed by U.S. Navy Seals snipers — working for "pirate cartels." They’re small fishes compared to the huge imperialist navies, who are using this situation as a prelude to their big fight for control of the important oil routes from Somalia and along the entire Indian Ocean. These imperialists are the real big-time pirates who are fighting among each other to exploit and rob the labor and natural resources of workers in Africa, and have been for centuries.
Somehow the history they teach us does not define that as piracy.
a name="When Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’"></a>"hen Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’
Obama’s liberal aura also builds popular support for the U.S. rulers’ "surge" of 40,000 more troops into Afghanistan. A year ago, the New York Times could not have run the story they did this April 17, "Turning Tables, U.S. Troops Ambush Taliban With Swift and Lethal Results" without provoking an outcry against "warmaker Bush." But today, with Obama waging a "good war," the Times glorified a U.S. platoon that wiped out 13 unsuspecting insurgents. The Obama-worshipping Times saw fit to describe a "brave" U.S. sergeant stabbing a "cowardly" Taliban fighter in the eye. Obama, likewise, gets off scot free as he extends the conflict with civilian-slaughtering air raids into Pakistan.
a name="Can’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!"></a>"an’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!(From NY Times, April 6) "Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union…which helped get her out…after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments…. "In Georgia, poor people who cannot pay off fines — plus a monthly fee to the private company that collects the payments — are often being sent to jail for non-payment….In 2006, the [Southern Center for Human Rights] sued on behalf of a woman who was locked up in Atlanta for eight months…because she could not pay a $705 fine. "Until a few years ago, the police in Gulfport, Miss., regularly did sweeps of the city’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, identified people with unpaid fines and put them in jail. Defendants who could not pay were forced to remain there until they ‘sat off’ their fines. The city ended the practice after they were sued." |
May Day Fight Exposes Pro-Boss Union Hacks
SEATTLE, WA., April 13 — "It’s enough to make someone a revolutionary," concluded a comrade after the last union meeting. "You’re right!" agreed another Machinists’ union member who had just fought for our May Day resolution.
It called for "build[ing] the multi-racial, multi-national unity we so desperately need to answer the worsening attacks on working families" and outlined racist super-exploitation in low-cost aerospace subcontractors, noting that Boeing announced 10,000 layoffs. Joining with immigrant workers during their march on May 1 was a good first step in organizing against these attacks.
That very night the company revealed additional production cutbacks and more layoffs. "Boeing Forced To Park New Jets" [in the Arizona desert because airlines can’t pay for planes they ordered] screamed subsequent headlines. Still another reason why we need working-class unity to fight the bosses’ crisis!
The resolution was introduced at the Executive Board. They agreed to full discussion at the membership meeting. But just before the May Day resolution was to be introduced, the general meeting was abruptly adjourned without a word from the president who had supposedly agreed to this discussion. Some said it was set up; others were mad the leadership broke their word. Even some lower-lever union officers said, "It’s time they [the misleadership] got some balls."
What Are They So Afraid Of?
"It figures," most said back on the shop floor. Over time, with our help, dozens of these discussions raised the question, "What are they [the union misleadership] so afraid of?"
This question drew added weight after many read the CHALLENGE article on the Los Angeles teachers’ union resolution for a 1-day illegal strike on May Day. There the hacks counter-proposal was: a strike on any day in May, but May Day! (See CHALLENGE, 4/22)
The union movement was poisoned by business unionism with the anti-communist purges in the 1950s. Their heirs are dead set against a mass, militant fight-back that refuses to accept the losses for the bosses’ crisis. But class struggle is raging worldwide, and starting here, where the hacks want to control and divert it.
When Yugoslavia established free-market capitalism in the 1990s, it attacked workers mercilessly. Workers organized general strikes and mass demonstrations. Within a year, the bosses turned those struggles into "ethnic cleansing" and war because international, anti-racist class solidarity was sidetracked.
Even now mass actions in Europe play the divisive nationalist card: "French jobs for French workers;" "German jobs for German workers." (See CHALLENGE, 4/22). When Illinois steel workers began demonstrating against layoffs, the union diverted the campaign to "American jobs for American workers."
The sharpening crisis — threatening world wars — means we must strenuously advocate anti-racist, international class-consciousness. "Anything less means war," declared our friend who fought for the resolution. "Now I see why you [PLP] started this fight."
Is It Worth It?
This same friend complained his shop-mates didn’t understand the seriousness of the crisis. "They don’t believe this stuff," he said, a bit astonished. For him the crisis is real: his uncles work for GM and his daughter, a new schoolteacher, may be laid off anytime. Furthermore, he’s aware the bosses’ labor lieutenants are fiercely determined to halt any class-conscious, let alone revolutionary, pro-communist activity. All this raises the question, "Is the [hard] struggle for our politics worth it?"
Our friend’s greater understanding of the logic of revolution and the serious shop-floor discussion of CHALLENGE articles makes it worth it. Out of this struggle, some have bought tickets to our revolutionary communist May Day dinner and agreed to join the Party’s contingent in the immigrant workers’ march on May 1. Building our revolutionary communist forces amid this crisis is winning.
The crisis may press the pro-boss union leaders to fight us even harder, but opportunities to expand our base on the shop floor increase with every fight. Dare to struggle, dare to win! J
Stomping on Scab Cookies
I am a high school PL member in Brooklyn. For the past months I have heard about the Stella D’Oro workers on strike against the bosses’ racist acts towards them. My PL members and I have had many picket lines against the racist bosses. We went to a Stop & Shop supermarket and protested against them selling Stella D’Oro cookies. Doing this made me want to fight back even more. A couple of weeks after the picket line I went into a nearby supermarket where I lived and saw that they were selling Stella D’Oro cookies. Taking action I threw the Stella D’Oro cookies on the floor and began to stomp on them. Nearby a worker saw me doing this and asked me to stop but I didn’t and continued to do so. The manager then approached me and escorted me out of the store. After leaving the store I was proud of myself for taking action against the racist bosses. Taking this action shows that the workers can fight back against the bosses.
Cookie Smasher
Ivan the Nazi Stays, BP Immigrant Workers Jailed
I was outraged as I learned the news that Ivan the Terrible, the former Nazi prison guard responsible for 29,000 deaths at the Treblinka concentration camp, had been granted a stay of deportation. The story jumped out at me because of the work I’ve been doing with the British Petroleum (BP) refinery workers rounded up in an immigration raid a few months ago. My fury was only given more fire when later that same morning, these same BP workers were lured to the Federal Building in downtown Chicago. They were told they would either be getting work permits or having their ankle tethers removed. Instead they were arrested and charged with federal crimes.
The women, all mothers, were then jailed in Hammond, IN, held for hours in a freezing cell, frightened and unaware of what was happening. They have already been arraigned on immigration charges and are awaiting hearings over the summer and early next year.
I rushed to make arrangements for their children to be picked up from school, and was devastated as one school official reported that she was going to suggest the child be turned over to the State. Luckily, while on the phone with her, I learned that the women had been released on new federal charges.
I marveled in disgust at how cleverly the system plays on our sympathies to protect an elderly Nazi war criminal and racist mass murderer, while exploiting capitalist-created racist fears to criminalize workers like my friends at BP.
Under this system, it will always be more of the same. Whether it’s "respecting" the contracts of AIG executives while demanding major concessions from auto workers, or "humanitarian" efforts to spare a vicious Nazi while criminalizing and terrorizing working moms, and possibly costing them their children, workers can always expect the deck to be stacked against them until we unite to fight for Communism.
Red Mom
a name="Spain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day">">"pain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day
SPAIN — Two years have passed since I came to this country, looking for a better job to be able to maintain my family economically. During this time I’ve always asked myself if it was worth it to have made the long journey, to have had to live in the street and put up with the racism that exists here against the "sudacas" (Central and South Americans).
I’ve always maintained the firm confidence that whether I’m here or anywhere else in the world, I have to continue building the PLP, that by organizing the working class we can get rid of this system, regardless of whether I can find a "good-paying job."
May 1st is always our end and our beginning of the calendar and surely I’ll be in the streets passing out CHALLENGES and thousands of leaflets, talking with the people and trying to explain what Communism really is. Friends of PLP, some ecologists, others pacifists, will help us pass out the leaflets.
Millions of people are out of work in Europe and the world. Everyone I speak with always talks with me about the worldwide financial crisis and I try to explain to them that this system has never been nor will ever be in favor of the working class. That the capitalists will always look for their profits and they’ll do it even if it costs the lives of millions of workers, making wars for the control of oil, squeezing the worker so he’ll work more and generate more profits for capitalism.
But all of us who are really part of the working class will work this May Day and try to duplicate the number of leaflets that we passed out last year, all together in spite of the barriers that the capitalist system puts in our path. It’s our duty to keep fighting for Communism and showing the imperialists that the working class is waking up.
The working class has to respond this May Day and we in PLP have to be there to be able to lead with our Communist political line, which is the only weapon of the working class capable of destroying capitalism. Everyone this May Day: go to the streets and demonstrate our true strength: the strength of the working class against the imperialist assassins! LONG LIVE MAY DAY! LONG LIVE PLP!
Comrade in Spain
Thousands Rally vs. Fascist Labor Scheme:
N.J. Gov. Using Crisis to Rob Workers of $500 Million
NEWARK, NJ,April 21 — On March 25, Democratic Governor Corzine was granted emergency powers by his hand-picked appointees at the New Jersey Civil Service Commission (CSC). They accepted Corzine’s argument, presented without proof, that the state of New Jersey is in "imminent peril" as a result of the economic crisis. Their ruling allowed the State to impose mandatory furloughs and a wage freeze without notice and without the pretense of "good-faith bargaining" called for in the bosses’ labor laws. With the furloughs, Corzine wants to take half a billion dollars from the salaries of state workers over the next year.
Hundreds of state workers, along with thousands across the state, rallied in Newark at lunchtime on April 7 to oppose this fascist labor plan. The workers, members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), were angry and militant. Chants of, "They say cut back, we say fight back," and, "The workers, united, will never be defeated" filled the streets.
Unionized workers from other local offices, including legal services workers, joined the line. One of those workers had a sign that said, "Make the bankers and the bosses take the losses, not the working class." Many CWA workers who saw the sign said, "That’s right" and "You’ve got it." The legal services workers were told about a rally to be held at the next meeting of the CSC.
The Civil Service rules also give county and local bosses the right to submit layoff plans. Sixty of these have been submitted already, affecting thousands of government workers. On April 17, an appellate court upheld the "imminent peril" finding of the CSC. Although the furloughs were temporarily stopped by the court, that is no big victory for the workers. Corzine’s Public Employee’s Commission can still decide the state doesn’t have to bargain. Meanwhile, Corzine is holding over workers’ heads the threat of 7,000 layoffs as his "alternative" to the furloughs.
During his election campaign, Corzine posed as a "pro-labor" reformer. But his past stinks of the ruling class. Before becoming governor, Corzine made hundreds of millions as CEO of Goldman Sachs. During Corzine’s reign, Goldman "invented" securities that offered Enron and other companies a new way of shielding their debt from investors. Who were the biggest losers? The workers of Enron and others who were sucked into buying company stock and were left holding the bag as Enron bosses sold theirs off before the company went bankrupt.
The CWA leadership has no answers for the workers. One of their local presidents, Carla Katz, who has since been removed, was literally "in bed" with Corzine during his election campaign. In the face of these attacks, the leadership calls for "shared sacrifice," exactly what President Obama and other ruling-class representatives put forward. It is the capitalist system that is behind this crisis. The biggest bankers and bosses, including Corzine, couldn’t make enough profit off of U.S. industry, so they devised more elaborate speculative schemes. It is these schemes and the anarchy of their competitive, unplanned production that caused this depression. (See page 7) Why should our class have to pay for that?
Communist revolution would end this boom-and-bust nature of capitalism, which always ends up screwing workers. In building for that revolution, we need to spread class solidarity and sharpen the struggle against the bosses’ attacks. These schemes and the anarchy of their competitive, unplanned production led to this depression with its racist sub-prime mortgage rip-off that will leave millions of black and Latino workers homeless. These ideas will help workers see through all politicians, push aside the enemy within our ranks, and seize power for the workers away from the rulers.J
a name="Linking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP">">"inking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP
LOS ANGELES, CA — In the ongoing struggle against teacher layoffs, fighting to make the capitalist crisis central reveals the potential to build PLP. Teacher union leaders, attempting to deflect the tremendous anger at the layoffs and the support for the resolution to strike on May 1, are calling instead for May 1 to be a "day of action" at each school. We encourage students and teachers to rally and march with the PLP contingent in the immigrants’ rights march on May 1 against the layoffs and the crisis-ridden capitalist system. The latter is bailing out the banks by attacking students, teachers and workers worldwide. We’re spreading CHALLENGE and the fight for communist revolution as the only solution to this crisis and building for the PLP Summer Projects.
At one union area meeting, a new teacher who was just given a layoff notice also received a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE for the first time. He underlined parts of the leaflet, and showed it to a fellow teacher, saying "Look, they’re talking about communism." Turning to the teacher who gave him the leaflet, he asked, "Are you a real communist?"
"Yes," was the reply. "We must fight these layoffs, but also see this as a crisis of the whole system. To defeat it, we’ve got to destroy this system; it’s based on expanding war for oil profits and attacks like this on teachers, students and other workers." The new teacher nodded in agreement.
At this meeting, where 95 teachers voted to support a strike on May 1, the teachers told off union President Duffy. He got red-faced when teachers demanded to know why the union wasn’t organizing a strike against the layoffs. They noted that half the teachers in the predominantly black and Latino South Central area got layoff notices — many more than in the Valley. They wanted action.
Duffy answered, "We have to represent the whole union." This racist attack on black and Latino students through more layoffs in South Central LA is an attack on ALL teachers, students and parents. Capitalism stays in power by dividing the working class. Multiracial unity to fight the sharpest, racist attacks like this is fighting for ALL workers!
To prepare for May Day and for struggles like this one, we organized three potluck dinners to advance the politics described above. This helped students to not only understand that the capitalist profit-drive is behind these attacks but also to participate in actions opposing them: marches, picketing before school, walkouts, increasing CHALLENGE distribution to their friends, and at marches and factories.
At one dinner, everyone was invited to come to the PLP Summer Projects to bring CHALLENGE to industrial workers and soldiers. A student who’d been in the last three projects said, "They changed the way I see the world. They’re really great. Everyone should come."
At another dinner, we explained that the drive for maximum profits is the goal of capitalism, not producing for workers’ needs. One worker commented, "I liked the symbolism of Obama, but with the seriousness of this crisis, I see he won’t get us out of it." He questioned how long the honeymoon with Obama would last, since if people say, "Waiting to see what Obama does before fighting racist cuts, layoffs or imperialist wars" just helps the bosses.
When someone said it’s hard to be optimistic in today’s world, others commented that while we’re not optimistic about U.S. rulers resolving this deepening crisis, we are optimistic about the working class. History shows that workers will fight back and fight for communism when communists show the need for it, participate in class struggle and spread CHALLENGE to more workers, soldiers, youth and teachers.
Join with PLP on May Day and for a lifetime of struggle to unite the working class in the fight for a communist society which will produce to meet the needs of the international working class.
Campus Forum Attacks U.S. Escalation In Afghanistan
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, April 14 – Presentations opposing the U.S./NATO Afghanistan war were given by two students and two faculty at a forum sponsored by a campus anti-war group. Some speakers argued that the U.S.’s real aim for the Afghan war is to get access to Central Asian oil and gas, now dominated by Russia. Other speakers showed that if the Obama administration were really trying to "fight terrorism" as it claims, then killing thousands more Aghans and Pakistanis would be the last thing they would do. Others showed that the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Afghan government in 2001 never had any justification in international law. They also denounced the new Aghan law that legalizes rape of wives and forbids them to leave home without a "legitimate reason."
About 60 people came to the forum, and many stayed for discussion afterwards and gave their email addresses for further contact. One person asked the key question: if this is the way the U.S. and other big powers operate and have operated for a long time, what can we do about it?
The questioner was invited to continue participating in the anti-war group. The openness of these students and faculty to anti-imperialism shows that there is a real potential to build up an anti-imperialist movement on this campus. To answer the student’s question about what to do about imperialism, however, we need to increase our CHALLENGE distribution. This will show students and faculty that only international communist revolution can end imperialist wars. J
a name="Imperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico">">"mperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico
MEXICO CITY, April 20 — The international economic crisis has driven the bosses worldwide to increasingly depress workers’ conditions every day. While they lay off masses of workers, and cut or eliminate loans and workers’ rights, they simultaneously financially rescue the big bosses using the wealth only the workers created.
This year 750,000 jobs have been lost in Mexico so far, an average of 6,250 daily. Those still working are forced to produce more while their real wages decline due to the devaluation of the peso and to price increases. The bosses try to threaten workers, saying if they don’t accept these conditions, thousands are waiting to take their jobs.
The sharpening dogfight among the imperialists for the world’s markets and natural resources has led to war, mainly over control of oil. Rising imperialists — China, Russia and the European Union — are challenging U.S. bosses, the top imperialists. This rivalry will inevitably lead to world war (see front page).
Mexico, one of the U.S. rulers’ main allies, is of crucial geopolitical importance. Eighty-six percent of Mexico’s industrial output and all of Mexico’s oil exports go to the U.S. (Mexico is the second biggest provider of oil for the U. S.) These industries, relying on abundant low-paid labor, can easily be converted to war production. Mexico can also become an enormous source of cannon fodder in wars as well as of food supply and other vital natural resources.
That’s why U.S. rulers urgently need to guarantee direct political and military control of these strategic sectors and protect them from their imperialist enemies, including the more nationalist sector of Mexico’s bosses.
So, under the pretext of "fighting narco traffic" (which they have helped promote), U.S. rulers are implementing Plan Merida to militarize the country, and Plan Puebla Panama to guarantee the flow of wealth to the U.S. rather than to any other imperialist. Obama’s recent trip to Mexico was part of this strategy.
Here in Mexico, the bosses allied to the U.S. are fomenting police terror against the workers with mandatory arrests, home searches without legal orders and unjust prison sentences, in addition to approving new laws authorizing capital punishment. Their fascist objective is to squash whatever opposition exists to their genocidal plans.
U.S. imperialism’s excuse to militarize Mexico, in preparation for a future invasion, is the excessive violence this country suffers from drug traffic. In Mexico, there are 5,700 deaths a year from violence. Mexico’s population is about 110,000,000. Meanwhile, in El Salvador there are 4,000 people killed per year because of violence. El Salvador’s population is 7 million. Yet, if El Salvador’s population equaled Mexico’s, the proportional number of deaths would be over 60,000 per year. Nevertheless, the U.S. Plan Merida is investing millions of dollars to fight the "insecurity" in Mexico, not in El Salvador. They talk about "humanitarianism," but the U.S. government’s real goal is control of Mexico’s wealth.
However, the nationalist rulers opposed to Mexico’s president Calderon and his allies are willing to fight for this wealth through their main political leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who’s preparing for the 2012 elections. If necessary, he would lead a civil war to defend the nationalist Mexican bosses’ interests. We workers shouldn’t choose any sides among these capitalist groups. We should organize to turn the bosses’ wars into armed struggle for communism.
The capitalist crisis, with its attacks on workers and fight among the bosses, provides us with great opportunities. By overcoming nationalism, sexism, racism and individualism, we can build international workers’ unity and the fight for communism. During imperialist wars communist-led workers have turned their guns against their class enemies, organizing the most momentous revolutions in human history, in Russia during World War I and in China at the end of World War II. When masses of workers are armed with revolutionary communist ideas, no force on earth can stop them! J
May Day in El Salvador:
‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’
EL SALVADOR — "A system that cannot meet the needs of the working class does not deserve to exist." This is our slogan on May Day 2009.
"This year the march will be a celebration," assured the union leaders in El Salvador who are planning on celebrating "change" in the government. The revisionist (fake leftist) leaders of the FMLN will dominate the new government, which will try to give a better mask to the capitalist system through reforms that will not improve the lives of Salvadoran workers.
El Salvador is considered one of the most violent countries in Latin America. This is the fault of the capitalist profit system. In this country where there is great poverty, unemployment, corruption and repression, there is an average of 12 murders a day, with a population of less than 7 million people.
In the current worldwide economic crisis, the bosses can’t grant any significant improvements and the working class is finding it harder and harder to live. That’s why the only alternative that’s left to us is the struggle for a system that will provide and meet our class’s urgent needs, like food, housing, work and freedom from wage slavery.
This May Day, we denounce the bosses’ system, whether it be neoliberal (ARENA) or state capitalist (FMLN) financed by the imperialists, whether they be from the U.S., Russia or China; both are forms of oppression for the workers. The international crisis of capitalism and the coming inter-imperialist World War III represent an opportunity for the working class worldwide to intensify the struggle to end, once and for all, the bosses’ exploitation.
"What will the Party do to take advantage of this opportunity?" asked a PL’er. Another worker answered, "The Party is us and each one of us has the task of fighting to put an end to this rotten murderous capitalist system."
Let’s all march this May Day, youth, students, war veterans, soldiers, industrial workers from the maquillas, and workers from the fields to distribute thousands of CHALLENGES and leaflets to our fellow workers and for the death of capitalism.
a name="Immigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment">">"mmigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment
ORANGE, NJ, April 8 — Eighty immigrant workers, along with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County, the Family Success Center, PLP and the ACLU, demonstrated against police harassment at the Bravo Supermarket parking lot where hundreds of workers gather to seek day work. At this lot, the racist police drive through, lights flashing, chasing the men from the sidewalks and the lot, onto back streets. On March 11, unprovoked, the police fired pistol shots above the men’s heads.
Obama and the liberals’ talk about "immigration reform" is just a cover to super-exploit immigrant workers even more and, through the DREAM Act, try to win them to join the army and fight in the rulers’ endless wars. These ideas were spread in up to 100 CHALLENGES distributed among these workers here.
Workers have gone to the Family Success Center several times to seek help getting back wages for weeks of work when criminal employers have deliberately cheated them. During meetings, a PL’er has pointed out that this system of layoffs, pay robbery and unemployment is one of the many ways the profit system survives, by dividing us and driving down all our wages.
One of the employers that hires these workers is a former East Orange cop who has been indicted on 22 counts of insurance fraud! The legal system released him to continue his criminal activity.
The signs at the demonstration at the supermarket read, "To Be Human is Not to Be Illegal"; "We Are Workers, We Are NOT Criminals"; and, "We want to be part of the community." Channel 47, a Spanish-language news show, broadcast the demonstration at 6 and 11 pm. As soon as the supporters and media left, two squad cars pulled up and the police forced all the workers off the parking lot. But the workers have already returned to the lot, and so has PLP, with more issues of CHALLENGE, which workers ran to grab and read. Six of the workers have signed up to join PLP’s May Day celebration.
Letters
Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation
In regard to the letter (4/8) from "Red Comrade In Spain," knowing my somewhat similar situation might help you.
I’ve been in PLP for 23 years. I live in North America and work at a major airport among mostly immigrant workers, away from any major political concentration, so I’m somewhat "alone" too. (To paraphrase Marx, "Workers don’t always make history the way they choose to.")
1. Having friends helps avoid political and personal isolation. Seek them out for advice. (Self-critically, I myself could always improve on these points.) Your friends can also "watch your back" against class enemies you’ll encounter during your struggles.
2. Seek advice from Party comrades as often as feasible.
3. Maintain a routine and stick with it to instill discipline.
4. Practice criticism/self criticism. It’s O.K. to make mistakes. From political practice we learn to be good communists. (As Mao said, "Turn a negative into a positive learning experience.")
5. Study dialectical materialism, particularly Marxist classics and Ira Gollobin’s ground-breaking scientific work, "Dialectical Materialism." Also, study science; many dialectical materialist examples can be drawn from scientific concepts.
Study history’s many examples of international working-class fight-backs. Learn from our successes as well as our failures, everything from the Paris Commune to the reversal of workers’ power in the former Soviet Union and China. We stand on the shoulders of giants. History can inspire us to greatness.
A fine autobiography of a Bolshevik revolutionary who experienced political isolation is, "20 Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik" by Celia Babuskya. (If you can’t find this or other books mentioned here, contact the Party.)
I hope some of this is of help. Your letter reveals your heart is in the right place! You’re not alone. Many of us want to help change the world. We have Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the revolutionary practice of millions who came before us as guides. We have a world to win and our potential friends are in the billions!
Airport Red
a name="More Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers">">"ore Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers
CHALLENGE is doing a good job in reporting the struggle of the Stella D’Oro strikers. They are fighting not only a company that puts profits before workers (like all capitalists) but one fighting to survive during the newest crisis of capitalism. Brynwood Partners (BP) owns Stella D’Oro. BP is an investment fund. It mainly gets money (capital) from investors like large public-employee pension funds (including the largest — CALPERS of California — and the Pennsylvania State Retirement System), venture capitalists and other private investors. Without capital, BP cannot acquire other firms or "turn around" the ones they’ve already acquired.
BP brags on its website that it specializes in making profit from "underperforming" companies like Stella D’Oro. "Underperforming" means that the bosses haven’t squeezed out the last bit of profit off the workers’ labor. So they lower wages and reduce or eliminate benefits. This is why they can brag of how an investment of $175 million makes an annual return of 28.8%! They tell investors that when they sell a company they make three times the capital invested!
A Dow Jones newsletter says: "Brynwood Partners has pulled off a rare feat as it gears up to market its sixth fund, returning money to its investors via a dividend recap." In a dividend recap[italization], a company borrows money to pay a special dividend to its investors — almost always a small group of private investors. This puts downward pressure on wages, as a portion of the company’s profits must go to pay off the loan.
BP’s website lists eight managing partners. Most of them have experience with big Wall Street firms, such as Merrill Lynch or Paine Webber, or with Nestlé, a mega food producer. Nestlé was the leading company, according to Wikipedia, in which the "promotion of infant formula over breast-feeding has led to health problems and deaths among infants in less economically developed countries."
The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco, Grain Millers Union (BCTGM) talks about boycotting Stella D’Oro products but does not tell workers the role their bosses play in the capitalist system or the connections their strike has with other workers. BP owns a number of food companies such as DeMet candies, makers of Turtles; Flipz Pretzels, and Richelieu Foods (pizzas). Just as Stella D’Oro workers are getting the shaft from BP, we can be sure that workers at their other companies are also getting screwed.
BCTGM has union locals in food companies like See’s Candy, Nabisco, Keebler, Interstate Bakers (Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, Columbo) and Nestlé. These companies have many plants; some are in NY, Chicago, and southern and northern California, all areas where we can help reach out for support from other BCTGM workers. Nestlé workers might especially be receptive as DeMet, Stella D’Oro and other BP companies were at one time owned by Nestlé. Seems that BP bosses use their connection with Nestlé to pick up companies to plunder.
I hope that this information helps the Stella D’Oro strikers. The better we are able to make the connection of workers’ struggles to the workings of capitalism, the more they will value our communist ideas and analysis.
A Comrade in LA
Skycap Fights Frame-up, With PLP Support
I am a skycap worker at LaGuardia Airport and have been so for nine years. Last November, I was at work doing my normal duty of helping passengers with their luggage from the baggage carousel to their taxi.
When we reached the taxi line it was long and after waiting 25 minutes only two people had been placed in cabs. So I was asked to call a private taxi for the family I was with. After doing so I went to the pickup island to wait for the taxi. When it came I went on my way to get the passengers and out of nowhere a man in plain clothes viciously grabbed me and slammed me on the side of a bus. Then came another plain-clothes man who lifted me up from the ground, cuffed me and took me to jail without ever identifying himself as a police officer!
I was held in jail for over 36 hours. I was charged initially with "trespassing" and "soliciting." Later the charges were changed to resisting arrest and soliciting.
A few days later, I returned to work and was fired without a reason. When I filed for unemployment — for being fired without cause — my boss claimed I was "hustling" passengers. At an unemployment hearing to review my case, several friends from PLP accompanied me; the judge threw out the case since there was no proof (he also said that in 18 years he had never seen someone bring supporters to a hearing and kicked them out of the room because he was suspicious).
I have been to criminal court over four times trying to free myself from the charges. Thanks to friends from PLP and those who have been helping me, at my last court date around 25 people showed up with me and we shocked the whole courtroom. The bailiff asked why they were there and a supporter said they were there to support me.
When we walked out of the courtroom everyone started talking and there was a lot of noise because more than half the room stood and left together.
Friend of PL
Farmworkers Block Highway, Renewing 30-yr. Struggle
In the decade of the 1980’s, the farm workers who grew coffee in Merced del Potrero, a rural community on the coast of Mexico near the isthmus of Tehuantepec, organized a massive violent struggle to form a cooperative to directly administer the cultivation of coffee. They did this to confront the exploiters and landlords of the area who maneuvered to buy their coffee for a very low price.
Now, after almost thirty years, forced by marginalization and poverty generated by the bosses and their capitalist system, this group of workers have again risen up in struggle. They are now blocking the Administrative Center in the city of Oaxaca. Earlier they blocked the Coast highway to Huatulco near the Pacific Ocean, to pressure the fascist government of Ulisis Ruiz Ortiz (URO) to give them economic aid to pay for the needs of their community.
In order to divert them from a more effective struggle, the workers of these localities have been bombarded with electoral politics from the bourgeois parties coordinated by the State Electoral Institute with seductive speeches about progress, equality and democracy. With their goal of tying the population to the fraudulent trap of capitalist elections, the PRI Governor threatens the needs of the poor by offering crumbs with their Firm Floor Program. They give away supplies like cement in hopes of gaining votes and to win seats in the upcoming federal delegations for Congressional elections and to prepare the ground for the Presidential election in 2012.
The bosses’ parties and their elections will never solve the problems of the farm workers, city workers, students or the rest of the marginalized and exploited population. The only real solution is the destruction of this capitalist system of constant crisis which attacks our class every day. We need to join together in one party of the international working class, the PLP, to take power and build a communist society that will guarantee the well-being and equality of all.
Comrade from Mexico
Back Fired Unionists in Haiti
Eight employees of the National Archives of Haiti have been fired for union organizing, and their union COSEANH (Union of the Employees of the National Archives of Haiti) has asked U.S. friends for help. The fired unionists have also received death threats against themselves and their families. Eighty percent of the Archives employees have been kept on one-year contracts, since reduced to six months.
There is a long history of racist U.S. imperialist invasion and domination of Haiti, where slave workers led the first revolution in the New World. Let’s come to the aid of the threatened Archives workers. Haiti today is occupied by a UN armed force led by a Brazilian contingent. Their flashy white SUVs lord it over the capital city as the U.S. marines and the Tonton Macoute did before them, but they will go the way of the macoutes.
Would CHALLENGE readers please send letters protesting these firings and death threats against COSEANH unionists to Jean Wilfrid Bertrand, Director General of the National Archives of Haiti, at
Compère Général Soleil
Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers
The bosses’ media has pointed fingers at various causes of the current economic crisis: seedy mortgage brokers, "deadbeat" homebuyers, "stupid" investment bankers, greedy and arrogant CEOs, Ponzi schemers like Madoff, and now AIG executive bonuses. They claim the root cause is the "subprime mortgage" fiasco, the housing market collapse, the financial industry crisis and the freezing of credit. Except for workers trying to keep and/or buy homes, all the above characters are part of the problem. And all of the above crises have contributed to what increasingly looks like a Depression,
But all these explanations don’t really explain what’s at the heart of this worldwide debacle for capitalism: fundamental laws governing the inner workings of the system itself. Over 140 years ago after decades of struggle by workers against capitalist exploitation, Karl Marx, in his work "Capital," revealed important laws of capitalist development. In that and other important works, Marx described two: the tendency of the overall rate of profit to fall, and the occurrence of periodic crises of overproduction as the necessary result of a competitive and unplanned system of production. Communists say that only revolution to overthrow capitalism can end this system’s "boom-and-bust" nature.
Real Wages Falling Since ‘73
The rate of return on capitalist investment (rate of profit) in the "developed" economies (U.S., France, Britain, Germany, etc.) has been falling since the end of the 1960s (see interview with Robert Brenner in "Asia-Pacific Journal," 2/7/09). This happened despite the fall in real wages since 1973, which should have caused the rate of profit to increase. The profit rate fell because emerging capitalist economies in Europe and Asia began producing "the same goods that were already being produced by the earlier developers, only cheaper."
Bosses in the more developed economies tried to hold on to their dominant positions by pouring money into new technology. However, this only made the problem worse, for two reasons. Firstly, more high-tech upgrades led to even greater overcapacity in industry, with goods flooding the world market. Secondly, the higher the percentage of total capital invested in plant and machinery, the further the rate of return on capital investment tends to fall. Profit can only be made off of human labor power, not from machinery (see box).
As their economic position worsened, U.S. and Western European bosses cut real wages, increasing racist exploitation to attack ALL workers. They used their control of the government to cut back "social wages", i.e. social service benefits for workers paid for from taxes. But these attacks on their income meant workers were less able afford the products that the bosses had to sell in order to realize their profits.
Fed’s Policy Led to Toxic Assets
The solution? The U.S. bosses’ state, particularly the Federal Reserve, encouraged the massive use of public and private credit. Government budget deficits increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, the Fed deliberately kept interest rates very low. This induced a huge increase in private borrowing and encouraged investment in financial assets like stocks, bonds and more exotic instruments like bundles of mortgages (see CHALLENGE, 12/08). Prices of these assets soared. In addition, workers bought more and different products using borrowed money, credit cards and refinanced mortgages.
A succession of asset "bubbles" — first the dot com/technology stock market "bubble" of the late 1990s, then the housing and credit "bubbles" of the 2000s — were basically speculation sanctioned by the government and Fed. But these bubbles only temporarily postponed the day of reckoning. Again, only labor creates actual value under capitalism, not writings on pieces of paper, or computer entries. The huge increase in speculative investment pulled U.S. and other "developed" capitalisms further away from the labor-created method of wealth accumulation.
Thus, the two laws of capitalism revealed by Marx interact with each other. Both contribute to the inevitability of crises as long as capitalism exists. It’s the anarchy of capitalist production and the system’s competitive nature that generate these built-in problems, which are always taken out on the backs of the working class. Communism, a planned, cooperative system of production based on our class’s needs, not bosses’ profits, would abolish these capitalist relations.
The above Brenner interview estimates that capitalism can solve the global economic crisis without major imperialist wars, including World War III. He argues that "[t]he world’s elites want more than anything to sustain the current globalizing order, and the U.S. is key to that." The Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote that inevitably rival imperialist powers settle their economic competition by war. This is proven by the history of capitalism — one war after another, and now world wars.
Bosses’ Solution for Disputes: War
Thus, thinking the bosses can peacefully solve their disputes produces deadly consequences. Rising rivals of U.S. imperialism like Russia, China and their allies will not, and cannot, stop short of trying to take down the top dog. The fight to control oil and to use that control to keep or gain number-one status continues. Wider war plans are being prepared right now.
Meanwhile, the bosses are casting the weight of the economic crisis onto us. As we unite unemployed and employed to fight these attacks, remember: the bosses need our labor, but we don’t need the bosses or their crisis-ridden, exploitative system. The working class under the leadership of a mass PLP will put an end to this sordid chapter in the history of humanity. J
May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class
On this May Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of inter-imperialist rivalry beat louder and millions are slaughtered in widening war. World capitalism is pushing its economic crisis onto workers’ backs with mass racist unemployment and wage-cuts, and throwing hundreds of thousands of workers out of their homes.
We can’t be misled by Obama’s promise that the stimulus package will help workers survive this crisis. Capitalism doesn’t work for the working class and cannot be reformed to change that. Masses of workers are fighting back around the world. From general strikes and militancy against the bosses across Europe to strikes in Guadaloupe and Martinique to the fight against budget cuts in Los Angeles and the ongoing 9-month-long Stella D’Oro workers’ strike in the Bronx, workers are saying "make the bosses take the losses."
May Day (May 1) is the working-class’ international holiday. This year, millions of workers around the world will march to commemorate this important day. It is the day when the world’s working class "holds a review of its forces, mobilized for the first time as One army, [under] One flag...[to] make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united."
May Day was born in the heroic struggle for the 8-hour day when 350,000 Chicago workers went out on a general strike on May 1, 1886 and shut down the city. On May 3 the cops murdered six McCormick Reaper Works strikers. The next day thousands of workers marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent, killing four workers and seven cops, and wounding 200 workers in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre. Nine demonstration leaders were framed for "instigating a riot." Four were hanged. In 1891, the then Illinois Governor freed those still imprisoned, declaring they had been convicted unjustly.
At the 1889 meeting of the Second International -— a working-class organization patterned after the First International led by Karl Marx — the world’s workers decided to honor the Chicago strikers and martyrs by mobilizing as "one army, with one flag." May Day had begun. Ever since, with communist leadership, it has symbolized workers’ demands and class interests, united in the fight against capitalism.
Capitalism creates a world in which workers and youth, infants and the elderly, are dying in unprecedented numbers from hunger, poverty, curable disease, war, death squads, police terror and a poisoned environment. Poverty, racism and war do not spontaneously lead workers to communist revolution, or the red flag would fly over most of the world. Communist revolution can only come about when millions of workers are politically conscious of how the world works and how to change it. This can only be accomplished by the efforts of a mass, international, and revolutionary communist party.
In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red banners of May Day in the U.S. It has organized May Day marches and activities in many countries for 39 years, to unite workers around their universal demands, regardless of capitalist-created borders. These include opposing imperialist war, racism, the special oppression of women, wage slavery and fascist police terror, while championing unity of all workers — immigrant and citizen, Asian, Latin, black and white.
This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class. On this May Day, international workers’ solidarity must meet the bosses’ assault head-on.
With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students we can fight the bosses’ racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world’s workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.
PLP is marching to win workers, soldiers and youth to realize our great potential to overthrow the war-makers and build a communist world based on serving the needs of the international working class! Join the march and join PLP! J
Assemble with PLP:
NY- May 2, 11 am, Linden Blvd. & Flatbush Ave.
LA- May 1, 11 am, Olympic & Broadway
Seattle- May 1, 3:30 pm, Judkin Playground
- Worldwide Fight vs. Crisis Needs Communist Leadership:
- Huge March Against Fascist Berlusconi
- Obama Ups ‘Body Count’: Afghan Deaths, U.S. Jobless
- White House Job No. 1: Wars to Save U.S. Oil Empire
- Rival Rulers Draw Daggers at G-20 And NATO Summits
- World War III Needs Spur U.S. Infrastructure Schemes
- ‘Scabs in Blue! Scabs in Blue!’ Stella D’Oro Strikers Face Bosses’ System and Its State
- May Day Brings Communist Politics to LA School Struggle
- Building for May Day Amid Capitalist Carnage in Detroit
- ‘DREAM Act’ is Attack on Immigrant Youth
- Salvadoran Bosses’ ‘Lesser Evil’ Preserves Profit System
- As Economic Crisis Looms Over Contract Fight: Forging Communist Base Among LA Transit Workers
- LETTERS
- Union Turf War Leaves Workers Hanging
- Black Youths Jailed; Real Criminals Go Scot-free
- Obama’s Plan ‘Stimulates’ Bosses’ Attack on Workers
Worldwide Fight vs. Crisis Needs Communist Leadership:
Workers in Europe Seize Factories, Bosses
General Strike in Greece
France: Caterpillar Workers Seize Bosses, Continental Workers Burn Tires in Paris
• March, 2009 — The boss of Sony France was forcibly held at the Pontons-sur-Adour plant.
• Workers seized the industrial manager of the 3M factory at Pithiviers near Orléans.
• Riot police had to rescue the billionaire chief executive of the retail and luxury group PPR after workers protesting 1,200 job cuts blocked his taxi for over an hour as he left a meeting.
• Union delegates at the FCI plant near Paris held two directors in the meeting room until police intervened. They were supported by striking workers who have been picketing around the clock for six weeks against layoffs and plant closings.
Visteon Workers Occupy Factories from London to Belfast
Huge March Against Fascist Berlusconi
Obama Ups ‘Body Count’: Afghan Deaths, U.S. Jobless
White House Job No. 1: Wars to Save U.S. Oil Empire
Rival Rulers Draw Daggers at G-20 And NATO Summits
World War III Needs Spur U.S. Infrastructure Schemes
‘Scabs in Blue! Scabs in Blue!’
Stella D’Oro Strikers Face Bosses’ System and Its State
May Day Brings Communist Politics to LA School Struggle
Building for May Day Amid Capitalist Carnage in Detroit
‘DREAM Act’ is Attack on Immigrant Youth
Salvadoran Bosses’ ‘Lesser Evil’ Preserves Profit System
As Economic Crisis Looms Over Contract Fight:
Forging Communist Base Among LA Transit Workers
LETTERS
Anti-Communism: Bosses’ Key Weapon vs. Workers
Boston, MA: Thousands fight school cutbacks
Capitalism Can’t Crush Memories of Collective Struggle in East Berlin
Union Turf War Leaves Workers Hanging
Black Youths Jailed; Real Criminals Go Scot-free
Obama’s Plan ‘Stimulates’ Bosses’ Attack on Workers
The Path Towards Wider War Among Imperialist Rivals
The Revolutionary Path Workers Must Take
‘Renewable Energy’ Subsidy for Profiteers?
a href="#All Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs">"ll Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs
a href="#PL’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies">"L’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies
a href="#Russian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses">"ussian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses
Iraq Vets Stand Against Imperialist War
a href="#PLP Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’">PL" Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’
HS Debate-Club Coaches Back Anti-Racist Fight
a href="#Anti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight">"nti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight
a href="#Haiti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs">Ha"ti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs
a href="#150th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry">"50th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry
Defend Framed-Up Airport Skycap
a href="#France: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis">"rance: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis
a href="#El Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers">"l Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers
LETTERS
a href="#Raúl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model">R"úl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model
Camping Trip Brings H.S. Student Step Closer to PL
Rulers Use Fear; Answer: Fight Back!
a href="#Spain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity">"pain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity
Spain: Students and Immigrant Workers Fight Back
a href="#Obama, Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War">Obam", Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War
a href="#Ex-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?">"x-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?
- No free lawyers for immigrants
- Sexist military hides rapes
- No safety net for illegal work
- Spraying hits poor, not coca
- Franco ‘disappeared’ leftist kids
a name="All Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs">">"ll Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs
BRONX, NY, March 11 — A multi-racial and international group of several hundred Stella D’Oro workers and strike supporters chanted "workers united will never be defeated" as plans for more massive and aggressive picketing were carried out today. A loud and determined human blockade met scabs who tried to cross the picket line. Several scabs were stopped. One was turned away before cops arrived to protect the bosses and their scabs.
This was a good day for the Stella D’Oro strikers. Rank-and-file strikers are showing greater leadership. Several workers spoke during a rally ending today’s action. Prior to the strike, they probably never would have imagined that they would ever speak at a street-corner rally. Workers have played a part in the strike-support committee, planning today’s activities and carrying them out. They have gone out to meetings of other labor organizations to build solidarity and support for their strike.
A large proportion of the strikers are lower-paid women and immigrant workers. They are receiving great support from all the strikers, reflecting a fight against anti-immigrant racism and sexism.
Some strikers believe that positive rulings by the labor board around issues of unfair labor practices will be decisive in winning the strike. PL’ers have pointed out that none of the members of the labor board ever worked in a factory. They know that if they rule against the bosses’ interests, they wouldn’t be on the labor board for long! We have pointed out that workers’ power, unity and understanding of how the capitalist system functions is what is truly decisive. One chant that expresses this idea was often heard as we picketed today. "Who has the Power? We have the power. What kind of power? Workers power!"
On the picket line, workers discussed how the Stella strike mirrors what is happening to the workers all over the U.S. and around the world. Their fighting spirit is a beacon to all workers suffering under the oppression of bosses everywhere. PLP urges our friends and members to do what they can to increase strike support. You can arrange for strikers to speak to your union, community or church group. Raise money for the strikers from these organizations. If Stella D’Oro products are being sold at a store in your neighborhood, demand that scabs products not be sold. Picket the stores that continue to sell scab products!
PL’ers are trying to make the Stella-D’Oro strike into a school for communism. That means not only bringing CHALLENGE and our communist ideas to the striking workers but also learning from the strikers on how to have ongoing class struggle.
a name="PL’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies">">"L’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies
BROOKLYN, NY, March 16 — Today a group of PL’ers went to a neighborhood Stop & Shop supermarket that was selling scab-made Stella D’Oro cookies. We marched into the store and began a picket line around the cookie shelves while distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES. Everyone in the store stopped and took notice.
The store manager quickly ran to notify the guard to call the cops and kick us out. We were then ushered out while chanting in front of the supermarket. When the cops showed up we chanted, "The cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan." Taxi drivers outside the store joined our picket line and chanted with us. As we left we shouted, "We’ll be back!"
This was only the start of more protests at local businesses selling scab cookies around the city. Next time we’ll up the ante in militant actions against scab-made Stella D’Oro cookies.
a name="Russian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses">">"ussian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses
Russia’s rulers, capitalizing on their U.S. rivals’ troubles, are shifting their own imperialist plans into high gear, taking more seriously preparations for future wars. On March 17, President Dmitri Medvedev announced to top Russian generals "large-scale rearming" in 2011 in response to "continuing threats to the country’s security." (NY Times, 3/18/09) The move advances the Kremlin’s drive to dominate the states of the former Soviet Union.
Key to the Putin strategy are: establishing pro-Russian governments in Eastern Europe; asserting military control of Russian gas and Caspian oil exports, the "energy weapon;" and supporting U.S. enemies like Iran.
Putin puppet Medvedev, however, couldn’t wait for 2011. Two days after announcing rearmament, he "formalized agreements that allow for a permanent Russian military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, territories... the United States considers to be part of Georgia" (NYT, 3/21/09). Russia’s 2008 invasion of these regions shut down a U.S.-backed million-barrel-a-day Caspian oil pipeline (Asia Times Online). And weeks earlier Russia had strong-armed satellite Kyrgyzstan into shutting its air base to U.S. supply planes bound for Afghanistan.
Russia-China Military Bloc Aimed at U.S.
Russia and China are conducting joint military maneuvers. The Moscow-Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization is meeting in Moscow and inviting Iran and India as "observers." RIaNovosti, a Russian news agency, said Venezuela has offered an air base on the island of Orchila to be used by Russian TU 160 strategic air bombers in their long-range patrolling flights. The TU 160 is considered the world’s most powerful strategic bomber, superior to the U.S. B-1 Lancet.
That development might provoke another missile crisis similar to the one in Cuba in1962 that nearly led to a nuclear World War III.
Russian navy ships have also recently visited ports in both Venezuela and Cuba.
Circumstances limit U.S. bosses’ immediate response to the Russian build-up. The bulk of U.S. ground troops are mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rising joblessness boosts enlistment only marginally. Public opposition to restoring the draft remains adamant. In addition, U.S. rulers must get their economic and political house in order before mobilizing against a power the size of Russia and its allies (to say nothing of China.)
Wall Street’s meltdown has put U.S. finance and industry in serious disarray, hindering war planning. Citigroup and GM, once pillars of U.S. imperialism, may not survive. And Congressional Republicans, locked in anti-tax ideology, try to block the massive outlays Obama needs for both the Treasury and the Pentagon.
So U.S. rulers seek to buy time with Russia. Last week Obama dispatched a geriatric diplomatic "dream team" to Moscow. It included Henry Kissinger, Vietnam-era war criminal; George Schultz, advisor to the oil-soaked Saudi monarchy; and James Baker, Exxon and J.P. MorganChase heir and architect of the first Gulf War genocide. The first two focused on reopening talks on nuclear arms, where the U.S. still has the upper hand. Baker begged Russia’s oil ministry to keep Caspian routes open.
U.S. Backing Down On Missile ‘Defense’?
A Harvard-sponsored report by liberal strategist Gary Hart urging temporary concessions to Russia found its way into a March 19 Senate hearing. It said Washington should "take a new look at missile-defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic and accept that neither Ukraine nor Georgia is ready for NATO membership."
But any U.S.-Russia "détente" only masks future conflict. Anticipating the Kremlin’s March 17 battle cry, Team Obama leaked its long-range war plans days earlier: "The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time." (NYT, 3/15/09) Obama’s not-so-subtle implication is that the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts may not be resolved before it’s time to take on Russia, China, Iran or any combination thereof.
Putin’s imperialist Russia, though less than half the population of the U.S., enjoys certain advantages. For one, it has military conscription. While some reports say draft-dodging and desertion mean that only 11% of eligible conscripts actually serve, U.S. recruiters would be thrilled to snag one in nine 18-27 year-olds.
Then there’s Russia’s more advanced fascistic streamlining of the state. Carrying out a 2004 Putin edict, on March 21 Medvedev simply fired and replaced a dissident regional governor. Compare that to the partisanship that often stymies Congressional action on legislation aimed at more central control of the economy. The Rockefeller wing of the U.S. ruling class aims to save its collapsing system. It must discipline the bankers and CEOs whose short-range profit goals hamper their long-range needs.
Workers Suffer From Russia-U.S. Imperialist Rivalry
These U.S. rulers would want to impose the economic discipline that Putin did when Yukos, a pro-U.S. Russian oil company, challenged the state’s Lukoil company. He jailed Yukos’s chief and legally bankrupted the firm. Public protest has been minimal.
Of course, workers have been suffering from Putin’s capitalism, increasing fascism and war preparations — unpaid wages and pensions, disastrous health "care," unemployment and racist neo-Nazi attacks on non-Russians and Putin opponents — all of which are fundamental to profit systems everywhere.
U.S. rulers will drive to catch up to their Russian rivals in winning the masses here to war and fascism, which means lowering workers’ living standards (Obama labels it "shared sacrifice") and increased racist — especially anti-immigrant — attacks.
Today, U.S. media giants openly question whether the popular wrath they have stirred up against Bernie Madoff and AIG’s bosses could be better directed, say, at a foreign foe. But the proper target for workers’ anger these days is the profit system itself that generates endless wars and economic disasters. Only communism can eliminate these horrors.
Iraq Vets Stand Against Imperialist War
BERKELEY, CA., March 23 — To mark the 6th year of the invasion — and now permanent occupation — of Iraq, and Obama’s shift towards Afghanistan, the Bay Area chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) recently held a Winter Soldier forum to a packed auditorium here. Each vet had a unique experience in the military, related in powerful testimonies. (This article is part of a long-term dialogue with rank-and-file IVAW members regarding communist politics and military organizing.)
Army’s Not For Millionaires’ Children
Soldiers join the military for many reasons, some out of necessity. Prior to joining, a number of young vets from the panel had tough situations, making attending college difficult and job prospects rare. The military’s offers of money for college and job opportunities disproportionately attract working-class youth. As most soldiers are plucked from the working class, they have a high potential to ally with the workers against the common enemies of the entire working class: the ruling class and its capitalist system.
Other vets on the panel joined out of a genuine and noble desire to help. They wanted to go on humanitarian missions and distribute aid packages. However, once in the military, it became evident that imperialism cannot afford to be gentle, either to the vets or to the Iraqi and Afghan working class. Distributing aid was secondary to combat missions. To the U.S. military — running on what one vet in intelligence gathering called "educated" guesses — "helping" meant sweeping invasions of Iraqi homes. It meant fighting a few insurgents among large local populations, causing staggering civilian casualties and unnecessary damage to both U.S. and Iraqi working-class life.
In The Belly of Imperialism
The vets’ honest testimonials included graphic accounts of war, violence, invasion and atonement. One vet was infinitely glad to have disobeyed the orders to shoot an Iraqi child on sight. Another vet intensely remembered friends that died protecting oil fields for U.S. corporations. Another vet recounted the surreal cultivation of extreme violence among his Marine troop. Intense anti-Muslim racism and an attempted frame-up drove one vet out of the service. Sexual assaults against female soldiers are also increasing.
Being placed at a point of physical, psychological and political contradiction, our vet friends’ experiences culminated in a breakthrough of consciousness and firm opposition to the war. It was not an easy journey, and it is to their great credit that these vets speak out against injustice. Upon returning to the U.S. and requesting counseling aid, many in the vet community are neglected, being forced to wait months to see an army doctor who will be dismissive of their situation. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is prevalent. Among vets, suicides climb as does unemployment. Homelessness encroaches. To the soldier as much as to the civilian casualty, as well as to the entire working class, imperialism is the enemy.
Fighting the War Machine
That these vets are survivors and can be won to fighting for pro-worker politics is evident from paraphrased statements such as, "I’m not anti-war. I’m anti-war for profit. I’m anti-war for oil. I’m anti-wars of occupation and aggression."
One vet joined the military as an anti-war activist. Through this, information was gathered, enriching the vet’s understanding of how the military operates within imperialism. This was particularly inspirational, and joining up while already being anti-war and anti-imperialist is something CHALLENGE readers, comrades and anti-war activists should seriously consider.
Issues of class struggle, armed struggle, revolution and the construction of a just and egalitarian society become tangible if, and only if, masses of soldiers and vets, along with workers and students, develop revolutionary class consciousness and take part in the organizing to smash imperialist war with communist revolution. This gives life to a new society. Soldiers can end the war, but soldiers can also speed up the beginning of the end for capitalism. As has been said before in CHALLENGE, there can be no communist revolution without revolutionary communist soldiers.
Bay Area Vet
a name="PLP Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’"></">PL" Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’
NEW YORK CITY, April 22 — A multi-racial group of PLP members, including a young new member and a Party friend, traveled yesterday with a local anti-war group to the anti-war march on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The marchers were predominantly white.
A PLP’er spoke, explaining that the war’s root problem was capitalism and that we must fight back as workers against the racist ruling class that Obama represents. We distributed CHALLENGE to the small but spirited crowd of a few thousand. The marchers’ anger was strong as we chanted, "They got bailed out, we got sold out!" and "Fight Back!"
For PLP’ers, veterans of previous national demonstrations, it was obvious that the mass anti-war movement was essentially an anti-Bush movement led by Democrats. Previous national demonstrations organized by, or with, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) — a national anti-war coalition tied to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing — drew hundreds of thousands.
Obama, the supposed "anti-war" candidate, is just as imperialist as Bush — he’s keeping combat troops in Iraq, expanding the war in Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan. But after Democratic victories in Congress and the White House, UFPJ has effectively declared, "Mission accomplished."
PLP efforts were modest. We need to struggle even more within our mass organizations to oppose Democrats’ leadership of the anti-war movement. In our local group we realized that as we took leadership in organizing for this march, more people chanted anti-capitalist slogans and discussed more class-conscious politics than at past actions of our group. The more people we bring, the greater our influence.
It was the first national anti-war march for the new young PLP’er. She saw lots of division among the various phony "left" groups but thought we could have been more effective if we all united around a revolutionary working-class line. But most fake left groups, like the march organizers, shouted "Iraq for Iraqis," instead of calling for workers of the world to unite against both local and foreign bosses. The "radical" socialists who controlled the protest avoided working-class neighborhoods and marched to the Pentagon past mostly empty corporate buildings instead.
Veteran PL’ers explained to our new comrade that only PLP organizes to smash capitalism with communist revolution. We vigorously participate in reform movements — against certain wars or to win economic gains from the government or bosses — but our goal is to build a PLP of millions.
We know that the bosses can strip away any reform victories with their control of state power but a mass party of millions can smash their state and build workers’ power. So-called socialists may appear "left" but they mis-lead workers to support lesser-evil capitalists and build dead-end reform movements. PLP uses CHALLENGE to sharpen class struggle and win workers to our communist politics.
To build a mass party we must do much more to challenge liberals and fake leftists. Based on our revolutionary outlook, our group returned home more motivated to intensify class struggle in our anti-war group, schools, jobs and families.
HS Debate-Club Coaches Back Anti-Racist Fight
I am a NYC high school teacher who has been active in coaching debate for some time. Over the years PLP members have helped to play a leading role in spreading CHALLENGE, organizing mass debates in the schools and in raising anti-racist, anti-imperialist and pro-working class ideas in our league.
Last weekend, at our coaches’ meeting, we were able to put two very important items on our agenda. The first was the racist arrest and incarceration of two Baltimore youths, Cedric Forte and Gregg Hill, a well-known debater in our region (see next CHALLENGE), and the second was an upcoming budget cuts speak-out in Brooklyn.
I was overwhelmed by the sentiment of the coaches and judges who responded to our call for action. They wanted to raise money, find lawyers, contact the Baltimore Debate League and start a mass letter-writing campaign in their classes. They wanted to post specific ways to help on the debate website. It was truly inspiring! They clearly understood the nature of racism and the prison system, and also that we must always be fighting back and taking action, even as we are involved in debates and discussions.
We had a brief speak-out on the budget cuts later in the afternoon, and some coaches really encouraged their students to take leadership. Many students were angry about how the schools will be hit by the bosses’ economic crisis and made plans to get their schools involved in a citywide conference, April 2nd.
Comrades who have been involved over the years, both students and teachers, have provided a strong foundation for our ideas. We must continue organizing in our league with students, parents and teachers.
Brooklyn High School Teacher
a name="Anti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight">">"nti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight
BROOKLYN, NY, March 17 — As the capitalist economic crisis deepens, producing hospital closings and millions laid off, nurses at Methodist hospital here conducted informational picketing yesterday demanding increasing staffing to enable them to deliver safe, quality care to their patients.
The nurses are currently negotiating a new contract so they took to the streets to win support from the community and from patients. Thousands of leaflets were distributed detailing a recent scientific study that reported:
The likelihood of patient deaths increases 31% if a nurse cares for eight patients instead of four;
Inadequate nursing staff is related to 24% of unanticipated patient deaths and permanent loss of functions;
Higher registered nursing staff significantly lowers pressure sores, pneumonia and post-operative and urinary tract infections.
On the picket line, a CHALLENGE reporter another health care worker interviewed one of the nurses and found there is one nurse to ten patients here. "We’re overworked," she said. "We have to go to the lab and pharmacy to deliver blood samples and pick up medications. Sometimes we have to go to the basement to pick up linen, since the hospital bosses have subcontracted the laundry services and that’s where the clean linen is delivered."
Questioned about nurse technicians in the hospital, she replied, "The nurse techs also have a heavy workload. There is one tech for fifteen patients or more. At the end of every shift we feel overwhelmed."
Noting that there weren’t many nurse techs on the picket line, the nurse said the nurses union hadn’t reached out to the 1199-SEIU members to join the line." "That was a mistake," she declared, "because every worker at this hospital is involved in patient care, from environmental service, food service and other departments. This would have had a greater impact on the hospital bosses."
Asked about Obama’s health care plan, she said, "I know he wants everyone to have health care insurance, but the plan does not call for building more hospitals and hiring more nurses."
When it was time to return to work, a PLP member gave the nurse a CHALLENGE, reminding her that all workers need a united plan of action against the hospital bosses and for quality care. This is especially necessary given increasing layoffs such as that of 250 workers at Brookdale hospital and the recent closing of two Queens’ hospitals.
The 1199-SEIU workers are mostly black and Latino and the nurses’ union is multi-racial, but when a leaflet was submitted to the 1199-SEIU headquarters calling for unity between the two groups, the union leadership rejected it. Rank-and-filers will have to by-pass these sellouts and organize this unity in the fight against racism and the bosses’ attacks.
Capitalism depends on racism and these divisions to reap super-profits. Workers don’t need these bosses, their union lieutenants and the system that sends workers to the scrapheap.?
a name="Haiti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs"></">Ha"ti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs
[The writer is corresponding with a PLP member in the U.S. — Editor]
Thanks for your letter. I hope this correspondence will begin the long journey we must make together in the struggle for a just and equal world.
There is a void in the union movement in Haiti: the swindlers who’ve taken the movement hostage, gangster-like pro-capitalist "unionists," have nothing to do with unionism. They’re only there to steal money from the government and international organizations. The only "union" they represent is their own briefcase or computer.
Some of us are trying to restart real unions. But when we denounced the structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the new unions were hit with state repression, including firing nearly all our leaders. We also have problems of organization and training, so we’re organizing forums and training workshops, but not forgetting actions like sit-ins, strikes and street protests.
I’m very pleased to get the PLP newspaper and am open to it, especially on the question of the expansion of war. In Haiti, people tend to consider your president (the new one) a messiah who will set about resolving all the problems of humanity, when in fact he enters a system in crisis, a system by-passed by time which can supply not a single serious, lasting solution, but on the contrary could make the crisis worse.
So mustn’t we become a unified force to supply an alternative?
How can we work to make the voice of our peoples heard, instead of the multi-nationals? We need to deepen our discussions of ideas on the left, because Haiti does not have a serious left party.
The already-rich want to corner everything in Haiti by privatizing all enterprises. To do that, they’re hounding us, trying to shut us up. So your solidarity is very important.
A Union Militant in Haiti
a name="150th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry">">"50th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry
October 17, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the John Brown/Harriet Tubman raid on Harpers Ferry (Tubman is usually left out, but she was a key planner of the raid, and missed the raid because of severe illness). We are calling everyone to join us in Harper’s Ferry that day. We have obtained permits from the National Park Service and the town of Harper’s Ferry, so a big demonstration will happen.
Thirty years ago in 1979 we held a similar bold march in both Harper’s Ferry and Lawrence, Kansas to celebrate the fight against slavery. Since then, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore PL’ers have held at least 10 rallies at the site to link the anti-slavery struggle to today’s battle against racism.
Back in 1979, the National Park Service had no exhibits either on John Brown or on Storer College, a historically black college that opened in 1865. The only recognition of Brown was a private, horrible Wax Museum that demonized Brown (and terrified children with a scene of his hanging). Six years later, when we returned to Harper’s Ferry, the Park Service had set up exhibits and a movie about John Brown and the raiders. Perhaps it was the 500-strong antiracist workers and students marching through Harper’s Ferry that made the Park Service realize that the reason for Harper’s Ferry National Park was the raid, and that it should be honored!
We hope that mass organizations including unions, church group, school clubs, and community groups will join in this event and learn about the role of multiracial unity and militancy to fight all forms of racism. The march will celebrate the raid as a critical step in abolishing slavery, along with slave rebellions and the Underground Railroad, and will encourage everyone to "finish the job" undertaken by Brown, Tubman, and the raiders.
We are encouraging all antiracist readers of CHALLENGE to organize in their areas and bring busloads to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia on October 17!
D.C. Red
Defend Framed-Up Airport Skycap
QUEENS, NY – Last November, a black immigrant skycap worker at LaGuardia Airport was assaulted and arrested on the job. A week later, when he returned to retrieve his paycheck, he was fired.
The skycap was performing his normal functions, helping passengers with their bags to and from their vehicles. After waiting for about ten minutes with a family of passengers in the taxi line the skycap was asked to call a private car service. When the private car arrived the skycap went to identify it, but before he could return to the family he was thrown against an airport bus. "You’re going to jail!" screamed a man.
Bystanders said it appeared the skycap was being jumped, because the cops were wearing plain clothes. The police claimed the skycap had violated airport policy by hailing a private (black) cab off the street. When he showed them his phone, which proved he had called the car service, the cops confiscated it and took him away. After initially mixing up the charges, the skycap was charged with soliciting, and resisting arrest.
In the months that followed, the fired worker went to preliminary hearings regarding his case along with a few PLP members and friends. He agreed that it was important to fight this case and that it reflected a larger attack on all workers. Despite numerous attempts to force the skycap to settle, he refused to do so. "Why should I settle, when I didn’t do anything wrong?" he argued.
While he is fighting this racist arrest, the state and skycap bosses have launched another attack on him. After filing for unemployment and receiving two checks, the worker was cut off and told he would have to pay back the $800 he had received. His employer had contested the claim, saying that he was ineligible since he had violated company policy and was terminated, not laid off. This sort of attack is happening to industrial workers everywhere who are fired for minor offenses so that bosses can avoid contributing to the growing unemployment rolls.
Meanwhile, the fight against the bogus criminal charges continues. The judge refused to dismiss the absurd case of being arrested for calling a cab, even though there is no evidence against the worker besides the lies of the cops. This should come as no surprise since under capitalism the courts work hand-in-hand with the police to defend the bosses’ interests. Now the case will go to trial, and if convicted the worker could face as much as a year in jail. PLP is planning to pack the court with supporters for the trial in April and support our friend who is under attack.
a name="France: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis">">"rance: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis
PARIS, March 20 — Yesterday’s general strike and demonstrations of three million people — 500,000 more than the January 29 action — saw 350,000 marching in Paris and 300,000 in Marseilles. Workers are reacting violently to rising unemployment and to French president Sarkozy’s attacks on social reforms won over the years. They are angry at the joblessness in a crisis triggered by financial speculators, while French bosses are reaping record profits and top executives are getting fat bonuses and golden parachutes.
Following the union-organized demonstrations, fierce confrontations with the police erupted in Paris (300 arrests), Marseilles, Toulouse, Nantes, Saint-Nazaire and other cities. Before the general strike, workers took several militant actions:
• On March 12-13, Sony-France workers held its chairman, Serge Foucher, overnight until he agreed to pay at least 45,000 Euros each ($60,000) to the 311 workers losing their jobs from the closing of Sony’s Pontonx-sur-l’Adour factory.
• In Evreux, workers occupied the GlaxoSmithKline drug factory on March 11, demanding a 10,000-euro bonus (over $13,000) for "mental suffering" for its 2,000 workers following announcement of 798 layoffs. The workers settled for a permanent 5,000-euro yearly bonus, starting this year. (The company calls it a "performance bonus.")
• After the Clairoix Continental Tire factory boss announced its closing in 2010, the 1,150 workers immediately struck. On March 12, 500 workers ambushed him inside a tire warehouse and bombarded him with eggs.
Finally, yesterday, the working class again demonstrated its ability to halt production — and profits. Half the trains were not running, one-third of Orly airport’s flights were canceled, no national newspapers were printed and the radio stations were forced to play only music all day long.
Overall, the strike included railroad, telephone, electricity, state radio and TV, weather service, postal, pharmaceutical, chemical, banking, telecommunications, Airbus, glass and building material workers, along with primary and secondary school teachers. For the past seven weeks, teachers and students have partly or completely shut down half the universities, forcing Education Minister Xavier Darcos to "give up" some planned changes in recruitment of primary and secondary school teachers (Liberation newspaper; see below).
‘Danger Of Uncontrollable Social Unrest…’
For the bosses, their government, and their lieutenants among the labor leaders, both the January 29 and today’s general strikes were carefully-scripted theater. Rémi Barroux spilled the beans in France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde (2/18): "In times of crisis and social torment ... [French President] Sarkozy needs the trade unions more than ever. Without them, and in particular the five so-called ‘representative’ union confederations, there is a real danger of uncontrollable social unrest."
According to Le Monde journalist Barroux, the government mainly wants the unions to "help…transform…the French social model," meaning dismantling the welfare state. Union membership has declined 50% over the past 25 years, down to 8% — unable, Barroux says, to obtain an increase in the minimum wage, much less follow the example of the militant workers of Guadeloupe (see CHALLENGE, 2/11, 25, and 3/11,25). But "for all that, the unions cannot abandon their protest activities, as they risk losing out to more anti-authority unions, like Solidaires."
Government Pretends To Grant Concessions
Thus, with widely-spaced one-day general strikes, the major unions pretend to be militant and the government pretends to give in. On February 18, the government reacted to the January 29 action, announcing 2.6 billion Euros (over $3.4 billon) in social measures: a one-time 150-euro bonus to the poorest families; a 500-euro payment for 12 months to unemployed workers who don’t qualify for jobless benefits, and "encouraging" companies to pay workers on short-time 75% of their normal salary, with the government paying two-thirds of the cost.
"Answering" yesterday’s actions, Sarkozy merely announced speeding realization of the above measures and promising to add more measures "if needed."
On education, minister Darcos gave up changing the content of recruitment exams while maintaining the core of his reform, giving students teacher training without recruiting them. (Presently, most teachers are recruited by competitive exams first, and afterwards get a salary while receiving teacher training.) This would enable the recruitment of large numbers of lower-paid temporary teachers. These "concessions" are a government maneuver to get university teachers to accept the principle of its reform and then ram through its entire program.
Bosses’ Leader Plays ‘Bad Cop’
While the government pretends to give workers crumbs, Laurence Parisot, head of the bosses’ organization, does a "bad cop" routine. She denounced the general strike’s cost to the economy, saying it was "an easy way out,… [not] an answer." She attacked the CGT union as guilty of "demagogy and creating illusions," holding it responsible for companies going bankrupt, hoping to split the eight confederations. And by talking tough she lets the Sarkozy government appear "uninvolved" in the conflict, hoping workers will view Sarkozy as the "lesser evil," or even the neutral arbitrator between labor and management.
The union confederations met but couldn’t agree on a future plan of action, other than looking into making future mobilizations more effective, agreeing to plan for May Day and to meet again on March 30. The obvious course would be to take inspiration from the 44-day general strike of the workers in Guadeloupe.
Need For Communist Leadership
The one factor that could upset this shadow-boxing by the union leaders, bosses and government is the workers’ class anger and ability to stop production and defend themselves violently. One vital element is the fight against racism, mostly missing during the strike, as was solidarity with the now-ended militant strikes of black workers in Guadaloupe and Martinique. This is where communist leadership is crucial, forging the multi-racial unity and developing the communist class consciousness necessary to win the real prize — not merely reforms that the bosses take away but seizing state power, abolishing capitalism and running society in our interest. J
a name="El Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers">">"l Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers
EL SALVADOR, March 23 — "I identify more with the Brazilian model than the Venezuelan one," said President-elect Mauricio Funes of the FMLN party. He added, "For me President Lula and his government are part of the ‘Democratic Army’ of a government that can send signals of confidence to the foreign and national investors."
Lula has promised Funes technical and economic cooperation, financing social projects and infrastructure through the National Bank of Brazil. This is one more leap in Brazilian capitalists growing political influence in Latin America.
Even though thousands of workers celebrated the FMLN victory, having the illusion of a change to a better life, the reality is revealed in the above statements and plans of Funes and FMLN leadership: guarantee the profits of foreign and national capitalists and therefore the exploitation of workers. This is not a victory for the working class; instead it continues the monster of capitalism with the face of a "red" government,
The open fascist capitalists of ARENA (the governing party for the last 20 years) and the murderers in the armed forces quickly accepted the victory of Funes because they know they’ll continue being the ruling class that will keep exploiting the workers.
Funes has not hidden his great admiration for big capitalists like Mexico’s Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest capitalists. He also felt greatly honored" that Obama and Hillary Clinton, representatives of history’s most vicious imperialists, congratulated him on becoming one more capitalist leader.
We workers shouldn’t have the illusion that Funes will make conditions better, that he’ll combat the effects of the worldwide economic crisis or halt the imperialists’ preparations for world war. In Funes’ first post-election speech, he said, "Tonight we should have the same feeling of hope and reconciliation that made possible the signing of the peace accords in our country," he said in his first speech after winning the Presidency. But he didn’t say the "peace" accords have only brought more poverty, unemployment, repression and death to workers and their families.
A real communist revolution is still the only answer to capitalism and the bosses’ crisis, to "21st Century Socialism" 1or phony leftists like Lula, who keep oppressing workers. Our struggle continues to be organizing the workers using the Party’s ideas and practices through class struggle, the distribution of CHALLENGE and the growth of the revolutionary communist PLP — fighting for a communist world without exploitation, money or capitalists.
LETTERS
a name="Raúl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model"><">R"úl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model
I would like to add to the letter (CHALLENGE, 3/25) on the Perestroika of Fidel and Raúl Castro. Big changes are indeed taking place in Cuba, besides their national baseball team not reaching the finals of an international baseball championship for the first time in decades. It wasn’t just the former foreign Minister Pérez Roque and the Prime Minister Carlos Lage who were forced to resign but also the entire top hierarchy of the Foreign Trade, Fishing, Steel and Labor ministries.
They were replaced mostly by military men linked to Raúl. Many see this as a triumph of the "Chinese Road" which Raúl and his group are taking to develop capitalism in Cuba. Those who were forced to quit were labeled as "Talibans," or roadblocks to a Chinese-style modernization of the economy, despite their backing the more open capitalist reforms since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its subsidies to Cuba. They are even identified as too "Chavistas," since Raúl and his faction want to break with dependence on Venezuelan oil so as not to fall into the same hole following the end of Soviet subsidies.
Raúl wants to diversify while building the "Chinese model" of joint ventures between the state and foreign companies. And, like in China where the army plays an important role in many of the key economic sectors, Cuba’s military is already the biggest manager of enterprises there, involved in over 800 companies of all types, many linked to foreign investors.
While Raúl and his group don’t necessarily want to break with Venezuela’s Chávez, they’re emphasizing their relationship with Brazil, whose huge Petrobras oil company has many investments in Cuba. Brazil can also help Cuba with biofuels, like ethanol from sugar.
Brazil’s President Lula is also on very good terms with Obama. He recently visited Obama in Washington and advocated ending the U.S. embargo on Cuba. (The Obama administration just eased travelling restrictions to Cuba.) The Raúl group also wants to make more deals with Russia and China.
Raúl and his group realize the Cuban economy is being heavily affected by the world’s economic meltdown. Relying on Venezuela is shaky since its oil-based economy is being hit hard by the drop in the price of crude.
The price of nickel, Cuba’s main export, has declined 30%. Tourism, another big source of foreign currency, is also down. Worst of all was the huge losses Cuba suffered from the hurricanes sweeping the entire island in 2008.
Raúl and his group have opted for the only road they know, more capitalism. That’s what’s behind Cuba’s Perestroika.
Red Che
Camping Trip Brings H.S. Student Step Closer to PL
The PLP camping trip in February was wonderful. I met some old friends and made some new ones. The conversations were interesting and the recreation was excellent. It was truly a communist affair.
I don’t know how life in a communist society is, but this trip felt like it was a small taste of communism. There was a strong sense of community among the people. I like that tasks were given to different individuals or groups. Each task, in the end, benefited everyone. No one had any problem sharing their belongings.
There were a few faults with this trip. We did not get to talk about dialectics. The main focus of the workshops were the budget cuts, foreign policy, and Obama. Another fault was that the groups did not stay on topic. Some conversations were so good that it took a while before anybody brought them back to the original question.
This trip has brought me a step closer to the Party. The more I read CHALLENGE, talk to other comrades about what is going on, and hear about workers’ struggles against the bosses, the clearer it becomes that this capitalist society is no good and needs to be eradicated. This trip showed me that the struggles in the world give revolution a chance. The chance of a revolution may be small right now, but it is definitely not zero.
High School Comrade
Rulers Use Fear; Answer: Fight Back!
In discussing the article in the last CHALLENGE, The Seven Deadly Scenarios, one in our group commented that the army has been forced to recruit on an individualist basis (An Army of One), which makes it harder to marshal the patriotism they need. However, once soldiers get sent to Iraq, they can either be disgusted by what they observe and open to communist ideas, or can justify the horrors of war by allowing themselves to believe the patriotic lies they’re told.
As CHALLENGE frequently points out, there is a connection between war and fascism. In the U.S., the government has fostered street gangs to the point where, in many cities, more young people are killed at home than in Iraq. The bosses use the fear engendered by their gangs to justify metal detectors in schools, cameras everywhere and heavy police presence in working-class black and Latino neighborhoods. The average teenager believes that metal detectors and police in the school are "for our protection," not to intimidate us. As the article pointed out, the rulers will use fear of epidemics as an excuse to control the movement of people out of their neighborhoods. This is reminiscent of the Nazis who used the lie that "all the Jews have typhoid" as an excuse for locking them up in the ghettos. The U.S. government has been getting many victims of fascist policies to accept or promote those policies.
Because of the weaknesses and small size of the communist movement, it is easier for the bosses to use fear to promote passivity. For example, some teachers would not fight school closings because they thought they’d be more likely to get another job if they kept quiet. On the other hand, there are many examples of the working class fighting back, which we read in the pages of CHALLENGE.
However, we are not working hard enough to strengthen the side of the contradiction that promotes fighting back and fighting for working-class control — communism. Sometimes we put too much stock in what the ruling class is doing and don’t think clearly enough about the ways we can make a difference by winning enough people to the communist side, so that we can smash the lying, murderous capitalist class.
CHALLENGE Reader
a name="Spain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity">">"pain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity
Some time ago when comrades here drifted apart — vacations, changes in work for some, and others returning to their countries of origin — I felt disillusioned with the political work we were doing in Spain. I was too mechanical in just counting the number of people that we had around us, rather than trying to understand that we’ve been doing positive work to build PLP internationally.
CHALLENGE and much of the communist political line of PLP has been distributed and discussed with many workers from Italy, France, Ireland, Turkey, Portugal, India and other parts of Europe. Some of these workers have emigrated back to these areas of the world.
Currently I count on two other people who are close to us but are still studying PLP’s documents and practice. I’m trying to expand our communist activity and we are all working to increase our commitment to the communist ideas of PLP.
PLP’s work is not simple, though it should not be necessary to say this. The working class is bombarded by capitalist ideas that try to divert workers’ minds away from the reality of oppression in the world. But people now are thinking about the economic and social crisis which gives us the opportunity to take the initiative to explain that what’s really happening is the owners of all the wealth want even more as they prepare for a third world war.
I’m proud to be a member of PLP and I want to dedicate myself to serve the working class, though it’s hard not having a comrade with the same ideas to work with. I struggle to continue the work of fighting for a better society, a communist society. I get up every day thinking of ways to talk to people and tell them about the Party’s ideas, but a visit from a PLP comrade to Spain wouldn’t hurt!
I hope where it’s possible that there are at least two who are thinking, planning, and building the Party. The working class needs the ideas of PLP and we have to continue figuring out how to win more workers to join the ranks of the PLP. Long Live Communism.
Red Comrade in Spain
Spain: Students and Immigrant Workers Fight Back
MADRID, March 23 — Students in Spain have been protesting the Bolonia plan to privatize public universities. Last week, the Barcelona cops viciously attacked students supporting the occupation of fellow students at the university there. The local "socialist" authorities fully supported the cops’ attack.
Yesterday immigrant workers marched in Madrid and other cities against the subprime fraud. Spain, like Britain, the U.S. and Ireland, were among the hardest-hit by the subprime collapse since their economies relied increasingly on speculation by bankers and real estate swindlers. The marchers complained about the lack of help they’re getting over what they call "real estate fraud and garbage mortgages."
The marches were organized by the National Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages and by the National Coordination of Educadoreans in Spain. The said they were sold overvalued homes and apartments and were charged four times as much as other customers. Again, racism is part and parcel of capitalism worldwide.
The marchers demanded a moratorium on their mortgage payments and other changes. But these workers shouldn’t expect much from capitalism in such deep crisis. Indeed the best lesson they can learn from this disaster is that a system which can’t satisfy the housing needs of millions worldwide must be destroyed.
March on May Day!
May Day (May 1st) is the working-class’s international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, a general strike that spread to workers nation-wide. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.
It’s the day when the world’s working class "holds a review of its forces, mobilized for the first time as One army, [under] One flag...[to] make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united."
Ever since, with communist leadership, it has symbolized workers’ demands and class interests, united in the fight against capitalism. But by the 1950’s, most "communist" parties had abandoned these principles. Union leaders became lieutenants of the bosses, and either renounced May Day or stripped it of its revolutionary character.
In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red banners of May Day in the U.S. It has organized May Day marches and activities in many countries for 38 years, to unite workers around their universal demands, regardless of capitalist-created borders. These include opposing imperialist war, racism, the special oppression of women, wage slavery and fascist police terror while championing unity of immigrant and citizen workers and the only solution to all these attacks facing the international working class — communist revolution. J
Assemble:
N.Y.- May 2, 11 am at Linden Blvd. & Flatbush Ave.
L.A.- May 1, 11 am at Olympic & Broadway
a name="Obama, Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War"></a>"bama, Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War
In preparations for wider, global war to maintain their world domination, Obama and U.S. rulers need liberal fascism: to sharply attack workers while trying to win us to their side. Domestically, they need slave labor for their war industries and tens of million of soldiers for their imperialist battlefields. Spurred by the deepening economic crisis and stiffer competition from other imperialists and regional bosses, they want to pass a Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill to achieve these aims, using millions of undocumented workers.
They’ve been pursuing two roads simultaneously: terroristic immigration raids and a lengthy road to legalization. Fascistic raids can terrorize immigrants into accepting super-exploitation, driving immigrants into the arms of the rulers’ politicians, patriotism and elections as a "solution."
A NY Times editorial (2/1) attacked "Nativists" or open anti-immigrant racists: "Americans want immigration solved, and they realize that mass deportations will not do that." Meanwhile, they praise the "rule of law" (bosses’ law), a call which liberal immigrants’ rights leaders adopted, accepting fascist immigration reform rules making legalization a long, expensive process, as the lesser evil to open racism. But they’re really two sides of the same coin.
The top imperialists’ "we-love-immigrants" line means low wages and cannon fodder for war, along with U.S. citizen workers. Another NY Times editorial attacked the Minutemen and called for "accepting" immigrants. A series on immigrants notes the growing numbers of immigrants and the importance of schools in teaching them "American" values.
So, despite the economic crisis, these bosses in their media champion this Bill, while portraying the 12 million undocumented workers and immigrants in general in a favorable light. They also use their past and present high-ranking fascistic officials and politicians to echo this call.
Obama and Biden toe the bosses’ line on immigration "reform." They "Support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens." (Whitehouse.gov, 1/21, 2009)
Janet Napolitano, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary and new chief of ICE (immigration police), said (2007 Washington Post op-ed) : "Don’t label me soft on illegal immigration…. [I] supervised the prosecution of more than 6,000 immigration felonies [as Arizona Attorney General] and I govern a state where, in 2005, there were 550,000 apprehensions of ‘illegal’ immigrants." In 2006, she sent the National Guard to the border to attack undocumented workers.
Meanwhile, Napolitano has criticized construction of the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and urged Congress to pass the June 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill. In January 2008, Napolitano called for enhanced border security and said the U.S. should crack down on employers who hire "illegal" immigrants. She also advocated a path to citizenship for "illegal" immigrants now here.
Michael Chertoff, Former Homeland Security Secretary — who, as head of ICE, terrorized the immigrant community, deporting 350,000 undocumented workers nationwide in 2008 alone — also lobbied Congress in 2007 for the immigration reform bill that failed to pass. In a recent interview on the impact of the economic crisis on immigration reform, he said it’s needed to be ready when the economy becomes vibrant again because the U.S. will need "some more workers coming from other parts of the world…" (CFR.org, Council on Foreign Affairs website, 3/16/2009).
With Chertoff’s remarks about a "vibrant economy" and the media’s platitude about "hard-working undocumented workers," these liberal bosses try to hide their "covenant with death" in preparation for global war and fascism.
The slave-labor conditions imposed on immigrant workers are becoming widespread in industry as the bosses also force citizen workers to accept layoffs, lower wages and more fascistic working conditions. PLP fights for unity of citizen and immigrant workers against racist unemployment, immigration raids and laws that mean indentured servitude and a military draft. We also fight harassment, speed-up and slave-labor working conditions.
Racism against immigrant, black and Latino workers is the cutting edge of the bosses’ attacks on all workers. We fight to unite the working class against racism, to abolish the bosses’ borders with communist revolution. In a communist society, all workers will be welcomed and needed to work and fight for the interests of the international working class.
a name="Ex-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?">">"x-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?
There’s much to learn from ex-CIA agent Robert Baer’s latest book, "The Devil We Know, Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower." Baer (the guy who George Clooney played in "Syriana") lays out Iran’s interests and policies in the Middle East, aiming to reform U.S. policy in the region. However, his analysis of the area’s dynamics, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, is very insightful and by-and-large correct.
He says Iran is a very complex society, poorly understood in the West. Although a police state, its population is becoming more liberal and modernized. However, Baer ignores the fact that 30 years ago Iranian workers and youth, going beyond liberalism, could have overthrown both the pro-U.S. Shah as well as capitalism. Unfortunately, misled by the fake left, the revolution was co-opted by the reactionary Islamic mullahs who rule today.
The U.S. sees the bombastic President Ahmadinejad as the center of power, but control really lies with the religious and security leadership. Likewise, Iran’s influence in Iraq, western Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza, through indirect proxies and policies, is much greater than is understood by Westerners. Much of this power has been inadvertently handed to Iran through the disastrous policies of the U.S. and its allies.
After a costly eight-year war with Iraq (1980-1988), lran was unable to topple Saddam Hussein, but U.S. rulers did it for them in 2003. The U.S. fiasco in Iraq allowed Iran to increase its control. Iraq’s Shia majority, long oppressed by Saddam’s Sunni Baath Party, welcomed the help of Shiite Iran. Washington’s first choice to run Iraq was Chalabi, a double agent working for Iran. In 1980, the Da’wa party, which now holds the major share of power, fled to Iran for protection from Saddam Hussein and remains heavily indebted to it. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (now the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council), was founded in ’82 sponsored by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Iran also co-opted the most militant Shiite nationalist, Muqtada al-Sadr, who fled there when the U.S. defeated his forces in 2003. After the invasion, the British supposedly controlled Basra, the large city in southern Iraq, which contains most of its oil. But the Iranians have controlled it politically, their adherents winning the elections and administering charities and leading mosques. The petroleum-export facilities are supplying 600,000 barrels a day to Iran despite supposed British management. Thus, Iran controls or heavily influences many of Iraq’s main players without sending its own forces into the country.
Western Afghanistan has also long been an area Iran seeks to control. The destruction of the Taliban was another gift from the U.S., leaving a vacuum Iran rushed to fill. Herat, a 40% Shiite city, had a governor friendly to Iran. NATO removed him but made him energy minister! Central Asian gas must pass through either Iran or Afghanistan via Herat to get to Pakistan, and Iran intends to control either route, thus wielding influence over that country. Iran also has the power to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow exit from the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world’s daily oil supply passes, to a degree holding the whole world hostage.
Iranian influence in the Mid-East is also growing. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, the PLO fled in disarray. Then Iran organized the many angry young Lebanese men into Hezbollah. With patience and secrecy, they built Hezbollah into an effective military and political force, able to defeat Israel and dominate Lebanese politics.
Long anxious to gain a foothold with Hamas but unable to access Gaza, Iranians were waiting when, in 1982, Israel stupidly expelled the Hamas leadership to Lebanon. Since then they’ve influenced Hamas to de-emphasize terrorism and become a serious military organization.
The Iranians have also been gaining a foothold in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. Militant Sunni leaders are now willing to unite with Shiite Iran because no Sunni leaders have fought Israel and many, like the princes of Saudi Arabia, are known for corruption and self-indulgence. Extremists like Al Qaeda promote useless isolated terrorist attacks. Iran has been incorruptible, reliable and successful in building a political and military network of all Muslims in the region.
Baer warns U.S. rulers that Iran cannot be contained by force. That would require hundreds of thousands of troops that are indefinitely in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, a U.S. attack on Iran would probably fail even if invaded by a huge army. And Iran would almost certainly close Hormuz and/or destroy the Gulf’s oil facilities.
Thus, Baer says, the only realistic option is negotiations. He suggests guaranteeing Iranian internal security and ending the embargo in exchange for Iran ending its support of Hamas and Hezbollah. He would also acknowledge Iran’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan and establish an international body to monitor oil supplies and nuclear arms, including Israel’s.
This book is very informative, but even if the U.S. ruling class were to follow Baer’s prescriptions for U.S. imperialism’s survival, all its contradictions would still remain. Obama is expanding the war in Afghanistan, is maintaining a large presence in Iraq and supporting Israeli apartheid.
Whatever the exact pathway, massive war looms over the region for the control of resources. The U.S. will almost certainly fare badly in this conflict, while killing untold numbers of soldiers and civilians. Our job is to turn the guns around on these imperialist murderers and begin to build an international society based on anti-racism, anti-nationalism and egalitarianism — communism.
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
No free lawyers for immigrants
NYT, 3/3 – In the heart of Manhattan, amid one of the greatest concentrations of legal muscle in the world, hundreds of New York’s immigrant poor are locked up with no access to a lawyer as they fight deportation.... In the immigration court system no defendant has the right to a court-appointed lawyer, and some of the most vulnerable end up in the hands of fly-by-night operators who bungle cases wholesale…." Justice should not depend on the income level of immigrants,".…many should not have been placed in deportation proceedings by the government in the first place… While money for judges, clerks and free legal services is short, the Department of Homeland Security has been very well-financed…"They have tons of new lawyers who are raring to go, and now they’re just arresting lots of people and shoveling them into immigration court." Meanwhile, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said immigrant communities must learn to stop hiring bad lawyers.
Sexist military hides rapes
NYT, 3/2 – She was raped when she was in the Navy. "He was very rough," she said…."My military career ended. My assailant’s didn’t." The truly chilling fact is that, as the Pentagon readily admits, the overwhelming majority of rapes that occur in the military go unreported, perhaps as many as 80 percent. And most of the men accused of attacking women receive little or no punishment. The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious.
There is no real desire in the military to modify this aspect of its culture. It is an environment in which the overwhelming tendency has been to see all women civilian and military, young and old, American and foreign — solely as sexual objects.
No safety net for illegal work
NYT, 3/22 – Many Americans who lost jobs are turning for help to the government’s unemployment safety net, with job assistance and unemployment insurance. But immigrants without legal status, by law, do not have access to it. They are clinging to low-wage jobs, often working more hours for less money, and taking whatever work they can find, no matter the conditions.
Despite the mounting pressures, many of the "illegal" immigrants are resisting leaving the country. After years of working here, they say, they have homes and education for their children. "I’ve got my family, my wife, my kids. Everything is here."
Spraying hits poor, not coca
MinutemanMedia.org, 3/5 – In July 2007, Teresa Ortega stood solemnly in a field of wilting corn and pineapple crops as tears streamed down her cheeks. She had taken it upon herself to start a farm with 100 widows — women who had lost their husbands and children to Colombia’s war and were fighting against poverty. Now — after a plane sprayed chemicals over their farm — all was lost. Between 2000 and 2007, the U.S. government spent over half a billion dollars spraying a chemical defoliant on approximately 2.6 million acres of land in Colombia. Half a billion dollars bought U.S. taxpayers not the promised 50 percent drop in coca production, but rather a 36 percent increase. And now there is "credible and trustworthy evidence" that fumigations are harmful to human health.
Franco ‘disappeared’ leftist kids
NYT, 3/1 – For 65 years, Ms. Girón, a Spanish mother of seven, ached to know what had become of her son Jesús. The story is part of a dark and long-overlooked chapter of the repressive decades under Franco: the "disappearance" of children taken from left-wing families as part of an effort to purge Franco’s Spain of Marxist influence.
Hundreds, there could be thousands, of children were taken from families suspected of ties to leftwing groups….Children led a life of fascist doctrine, harsh discipline and Catholic ritual.
Communist Response to Racist Unemployment: Employed and Jobless, Unite to Fight the Bosses
a href="#Rulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers">Rule"s’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers
a href="#Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?">"raq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?
Fighting Racist Deportations Can Build PLP
a href="#Calif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts">"alif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts
a href="#Oaxaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress">"axaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress
50,000 Rally in NYC: Cut the Bosses, Not the Budget
Union Leaders Have No Real Answer to 30,000 Layoffs
AFL-CIO Hacks Deflate Angry Workers
a href="#Katrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery">Katr"na Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery
Germany: Patriots, Socialists, Union Fakers, Neo-Nazis Thwart Workers
Obama-Bosses-UAW Gang-up Mugs Ford Workers
Letters
Hero of Salvador War Is Reborn in PLP
a href="#Airport Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down">Ai"port Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down
Castro Brothers Continue Perestroika
a href="#Anger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker">"nger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker
Bangladesh Army Mutiny, Sri Lanka Civil War Tied to Oil Dogfight
a href="#Working Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women">"orking Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women
a href="#France’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops">"rance’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops
- Marx got no respect, but now…
- Old-time reds built China’s base
- Asbestos poisoning for a profit
- For Arab public, US is terrorist
Communist Response to Racist Unemployment: Employed and Jobless, Unite to Fight the Bosses
World capitalism has produced an economic earthquake that is throwing tens of millions of workers onto the streets. U.S. unemployment is approaching 30 million (see box). In China, 26 million jobless migrants are seeking work (which is not even the total unemployment figure) provoking protests at factories and riots at government offices. Hundreds of thousands are being laid off in Europe, and if GM goes under, it’s curtains for another 300,000 there.
In The U.S., ‘These Jobs Are Not Coming Back’
The current crisis is leading to a "wrenching re-structuring of the American economy." (NY Times, 3/7) "These jobs are not coming back," says Wachovia’s chief economist. "Many companies are abandoning whole areas of business."(NYT) With U.S. car sales having plummeted nearly 50% since 2007 — an annual pace of 17 million down to 9 million — which would "leave a lot of unneeded auto factories."(NYT)
This is exactly what Karl Marx analyzed as the fundamental contradiction in capitalism causing such crises: a planless system in which each capitalist tries to capture as much of the market as possible, resulting in the overproduction (over capacity) of the means of production. All the capital investment in hundreds of factories is lost as they close. Laid-off workers can’t buy the tremendous amount of products manufactured in these "unneeded factories," leading to more layoffs and home foreclosures, which in turn depresses house values, aggravating the crisis still more.
The Obama Administration: Of, By and For the Bosses
Obama’s bank-bailout program only serves the capitalist class which he and all U.S. presidents represent. They will use fascism to discipline their own class to toe the line; to counter workers’ rebellions against the bosses’ attacks; and to promote their oil wars which Obama is expanding in South Asia. Their class interest is to save the profit system at the expense of tens of millions of workers, employed and unemployed, and cannot solve the crisis for us. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who suffer racist unemployment, double the jobless and home foreclosure rates. This is based on centuries of racist discrimination and super-exploitation which nets super-profits for the bosses, a foundation for their system.
In the Great Depression of the 1930s — which this deepening downturn is fast approaching — communists led millions of jobless workers into the streets demanding jobs and unemployment benefits and organized hundreds of thousands in sit-down strikes in the mass production industries for unionization and the 8-hour day. But unfortunately they did not point out to workers that these crises are built into the system. Unless there is a communist revolution to overthrow these bosses, the control of production and state power will always be used to take away any reforms — which is exactly what happened.
U.S. union leaders are defenders of the system and therefore are in the bosses’ hip pockets. They have demoralized workers and have sunk union membership from 35% of the private industry workforce to 7%. When these hacks are forced by rank-and-file pressure to do something about these attacks — like the March 5, 50,000-strong march in New York City — it is to deflate the anger of the workers. After decades of betrayals and anti-communism by the union hacks, workers’ anger is slowly growing. To channel this anger into fighting capitalism, the real cause of their misery, instead of looking for other "saviors" (be it a liberal fascist á la Obama or a conservative fascist), communists must build a base for our politics while involved in any fightback — using CHALLENGE as our ideological tool. This fightback could include any or all of the following:
Mass Action Is The Order Of The Day
• Organize strikes against layoffs; stop work if co-workers are being laid off;
• Establish union committees to unite those still working with the unemployed, led by rank-and-filers defying foot-dragging by sellout union leaders;
• Win local unions to organize marches on government buildings and mass demonstrations surrounding companies that announce future layoffs;
• Raise demands in unions, community groups, churches, schools and colleges to unite with workers in their areas to protest bosses’ attacks;
• Support striking workers in our areas, such as those at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx, NY and elsewhere, with funds and by joining picket lines;
• Organize students to participate in these actions and to support their parents who are either on strike, face layoffs or can mobilize their co-workers into action;
• Reach across all borders in solidarity with workers internationally who are facing these same attacks, especially auto workers who are in a unique position to unite against the auto bosses who have "globalized."
No doubt many rank-and-file workers will come up with additional ideas for action. But it is the job of communists in PLP and their close friends to inject our red ideas into this struggle, to do what was not done in the 1930s: advance the need for communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven capitalist system that has thrived on unemployment, forcing workers to suffer the losses caused by the bosses’ crisis. These ideas can be spread effectively by the mass sale of CHALLENGE, the expansion of CHALLENGE networks and winning workers to subscribe to the paper.
By upping the ante of class struggle around the issue of mass unemployment, we can raise the level of understanding within the working class to the question of capitalism’s inability to provide a decent life for workers everywhere. This leads to the need to destroy it and put in place a communist system within which workers receive the full benefit of all the value we, and we alone, produce.
U.S. Unemployed Soars to 30 Million
Behind the phony government unemployment rate figure of 8.1% is the fact that this represents "only" 12.5 million. It doesn’t count the 5.6 million who have given up looking for non-existent jobs nor the 8.6 million underemployed who are forced to work part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs. (All figures from the NY Times, 3/7)
Add to that 26.7 million total the 1.6 million in prisons for non-violent, mostly drug "offenses" (of the total 2.4 million inmates in the U.S.) who never should have been jailed in the first place, plus several million on welfare because there are no jobs, plus the hundreds of thousands who joined the military because they couldn’t find jobs (and are continuing to do so during this depression) — all told the real unemployment figure is easily 30 million, or 20% of the labor force.
Even the government’s monthly figures are distorted. They just admitted that the jobless figures for December and January were under-reported by 161,000, which means that the latest February figure of 651,000 will probably increase to well over 700,000 a month from now.
Figures don’t lie, but liars can sure figure.
a name="Rulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers"></a>"ulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers
As imperialist rivalry, now aggravated by economic crisis, keeps intensifying, potential bloodbaths far deadlier than Iraq or Afghanistan are emerging globally. Andrew Krepinevich, a Defense Department strategist has just written "7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century." (Krepinevich is no armchair pundit; see box at right for his résumé.)
Publicity for the book identifies as plausible cataclysms: "(1) the unraveling of the state of Pakistan; (2) a nuclear attack on the United States with materials covertly transported across borders; (3) a pandemic influenza sweeping across the globe; (4) escalation of an Arab-Israeli conflict toward a nuclear showdown; (5) a U.S. standoff with China over Taiwan; (6) the crippling of an increasingly fragile global economy; and (7) a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq gone bad." Any one could cause massive loss of life and provoke an all-out U.S.-led war.
(An influenza pandemic scenario has produced bosses’ plans to use cops and the military to prevent any movement of large segments of populations to go to their jobs, in or out of the country or anywhere else without permission. A future CHALLENGE article will detail this fascist scenario.)
Though things can change rapidly, the first and last cases seem the most immediate. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is already inflamed by the Taliban and a military bent on war with nuclear-armed India. But additionally, Foreign Policy Magazine, an arm of the liberal Washington Post (March/April 2009), says: "Pakistan’s small but politically powerful middle class has been slammed by the collapse of the country’s stock market. Meanwhile, a rising proportion of the country’s huge population of young men is staring unemployment in the face. It is not a recipe for political stability."
a name="Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?">">"raq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?
The murderous efforts of 147,000 regular U.S. troops and an equal number of allies and mercenaries in Iraq can’t stop frequent bombings. On March 8, a suicide attack killed 28 people at Iraq’s police academy, and 33 more the next day. Obama’s proposed shift of U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan can only embolden Islamic militants in Iraq. GIs may be back in Baghdad sooner than expected.
Scenarios Four and Five, standard Pentagon doctrine for years, take on enhanced urgency in the current economy. The U.S. counter-threat to Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel over Palestine dates back to the Clinton administration. Checking the growth of a Chinese blue-water navy that can dominate Mid-East/Far East oil-supply routes was one reason President Jimmy Carter began his Persian Gulf Rapid Deployment Force. The latest financial crash only increases U.S. rulers’ needs to forcibly control the world’s cheapest — and thus most profitable — fuel supplies.
Item Six concerns a more belligerent Russia. Oil at $140 per barrel enabled Putin to buy off his population with jobs and other material incentives. Now he must resort to whipping up the warlike empire-rebuilding spirit that brought him to power a decade ago. As Foreign Policy (March-April, 2009) says, "He stirred dormant nostalgia for the lost Soviet empire...." Now Putin faces "an imploding economy, expanding economic hardship, and an increasingly desperate Russian state that must rely on repression and nationalism."
Rulers Preparing for Two Simultaneous Wars
Krepinevich’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) says the Navy must "prepare to fight and win two overlapping conflicts" against a continental-sized adversary [China or Russia] and a mid-sized nuclear-armed regional adversary [Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, or India]. It urges the Navy both to cut costs and to fire all its bullets before they rust. "Exploit ships now in production to greatest extent possible. Reduce total number of different ship types. Reduce crew sizes." (CSBA website). CSBA reports underlie an ongoing series of New York Times editorials on restructuring the military.
Workers Need to Take the Offensive
Two scenarios are missing here. One is the kind of mass anti-war organizing in the Vietnam era (led most militantly by our Party) that has made restoring the draft politically unacceptable. The CSBA considers conscription an "extreme measure" even in a deepening depression with sharpening challenges to the U.S. rulers’ empire.
But the rulers sorely need to beef up their forces. They’re not giving up on an expanded military. That’s why they’re organizing a "back-door" draft — Obama’s National Service, with pumped-up patriotism and loyalty (to the bosses) to induce millions of youth to join the military in exchange for college tuition or, for undocumented immigrant youth, U.S. citizenship.
This leads to the most important scenario of all, the need to fight for communist revolution. Because of the demise of the old communist movement rulers worldwide have been able to channel workers’ anger down dead-end nationalist, ethnic and religious paths.
That’s why communists and other militant workers need to up the ante of class struggle against the profit-driven ruling class, hell-bent on imperialist wars. We must mount an offensive on racist unemployment (see front page), win soldiers and sailors to join their brothers and sisters in other countries to rebel against the common enemy: the capitalist warmakers. We must organize strikes against the rulers’ attacks on workers’ living standards, against their wars and their attempt to implement fascist measures in the workplace.
In all this, we must unite the working class — black, Latino, Asian and white, men and women — against the rulers’ crises that worsen workers’ misery exponentially. All this will move us towards our Party’s long-term goal, rebuilding revolutionary class consciousness to prepare our class for communist revolution.??
CEO For Murder, Inc.
Andrew Krepinevich has a 20-year career as an Army officer, teaching at West Point and serving in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and Quadrennial Review, the Pentagon’s top long-range planning bodies. He participated in Clinton’s 1997 force review that set the stage for U.S.-led mass murder in Serbia and Iraq. Today Krepinevich runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an outfit studying which hardware and troop configurations can give the U.S. war machine its "biggest bang for the buck" in coming wars.
Fighting Racist Deportations Can Build PLP
CHICAGO, March 8 — "La lucha obrera no tiene frontera!" ("Workers’ struggles have no borders!") As the chant filled the banquet hall, hearts swelled with pride. Workers and youth, citizen and immigrant, especially the wonderful BP oil refinery workers swept up in a racist immigration raid last December, celebrated the unity we have found in fighting back. After a PLP member delivered her message of solidarity, salsa music filled the air.
On only a week’s notice, a small grassroots community center organized a fundraiser to help the BP workers meet their daily needs. They had worked for a contractor cleaning the giant BP refinery in East Chicago, Indiana, when they were arrested last December. At a meeting to discuss "parking in the lot," doors were locked and ICE agents swarmed in, arresting 11 women and four men. Since then, they’ve been fighting courts, cops and crooks.
One crook, their priest, held a fundraiser that collected over $14,500, reflecting the support the workers’ enjoy. But most of the money has gone to a politically-connected lawyer the priest hired to represent only a few workers. This lawyer doesn’t speak Spanish and comunicates only through the priest.
Most workers are seeking their own legal representation with community center help, but are being denied funds for attorney fees. Those who found other attorneys see their cases moving much more quickly than those going with the priest’s lawyer, leading many to suspect they’re dragging the cases out to drain more money from the funds raised for the workers and their families.
Workers are outraged over their trust being abused. Those families the fund was created to help continue to struggle to pay legal fees. Because the BP workers, many single moms, are unable to work, rent, utilities and grocery bills are mounting, causing tremendous stress. The community center has taken women to food pantries and assisted them in finding discounted or free legal aid, but that has done little to ease the incredible economic burden.
PLP members donated time and money to make this event possible. But the largest contribution was our revolutionary communist politics and our message of internationalism and multi-racial, working-class solidarity, delivered by our comrade’s talk and evidenced by our example. Three tables of comrades and friends of all colors, immigrant and citizen, were among the first to arrive, took tickets at the door and picked up garbage before leaving.
A vigil has been organized for the 9th of every month, to show support for the BP workers. While it is difficult to win many away from being under their priest’s manipulative thumb, we’re sharpening the contradiction. Our dedication stands in contrast to this opportunist priest.
Through disciplined work, spreading CHALLENGE and patiently building strong ties, we must help the BP workers day-to-day, and remind them capitalism will never solve their problems, a system in crisis and headed to fascist terror and wider wars. Only communist revolution can defeat the bosses who profit from our misery.
We steel ourselves for the long haul, but fighting for a communist world, with no borders and based on equality, is the solution. Out of this struggle we can win BP workers and others to march on May Day under the red flag of PLP! ?
a name="Calif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts">">"alif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts
PASADENA, CA, February 27 — Hundreds of students from fourteen community colleges rallied to fight the budget cuts that are devastating their campuses. College administrators tried to divert their anger into praise for the state legislature, but PL members and friends helped to organize chanting that disrupted the official event and led to a short breakaway rally.
"I thought we changed the vibe overall," commented a student. "Our group felt good leaving there. I had so many comments of empowerment, courage, and fight unlike anything I have ever seen before."
A rift between students and administrators broke out before the rally when an administrator scolded students from Rio Hondo College for carrying signs that read "WTF: Where’s the funding?" A student challenged her and a brief confrontation ensued. Ironically this same administrator later praised the emcee, a foul-mouthed comedian, as "the perfect representation of the community college mission."
The emcee declared, "this is a thank-you rally, not a protest rally." This was news to the hundreds of students that came out and are battling with class cancellations, disappearing tutors, overcrowded classrooms etc, as a result of the latest round of budget cuts. "What are we supposed to be thankful for?" one student asked angrily.
The rally went from bad to worse when the emcee launched into a half-hour "comedy" routine. Like many stand-up comics, his act was an unfunny mix of racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism. Many students were disgusted. "We didn’t come here to be entertained," one said, "they just brought us here to use us."
One delegation of students met briefly and then started chanting: "They say cutback, we say fight back!" The comedian responded by insulting the group of mostly black students. They chanted louder disrupting his act. He asked the audience to applaud if they wanted him to continue. Some did, but most didn’t. Shaken, he quickly ended his routine and a brass band started to play, signaling the official end of the rally. Then the entire delegations from three colleges — almost fifty students — moved to the sidewalk and started their own rally!
While most students bought into the rally theme that community colleges are "the key to the California economy" and that a college education was their key to the future, many took PL leaflets, CHALLENGE and talked with Party members about the nature of the capitalist crisis. Our leaflet attacked these illusions, stating, "Students need to ally with industrial workers and soldiers who are the key to bringing down this capitalist system..." We also explained, "the alternative is communism a classless society where workers hold power."
Earlier discussions about the economic crisis, and a video showing mass communist-led protests in Detroit during the Great Depression, helped to prepare students politically for the rally. By ones and twos, more are reading and distributing CHALLENGE, and thinking seriously about joining our Party. The struggle against cutbacks will continue on our campuses and on buses to Sacramento and open more doors as we build for more class struggle leading up to May Day 2009 and the Industrial Summer Projects in Seattle and LA. ?
a name="Oaxaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress">">"axaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress
OAXACA, MEXICO, Feb. 21- 22 — The 3rd Congress of APPO (Popular Assembly for the People of Oaxaca), met here with over 700 delegates — teachers, farm workers, indigenous communities, workers, students and others — on a reform agenda: popular democracy, against privatization, freedom for political prisoners and the firing of Governor Ulises Ruiz, among others.
During the two days, a few dozen members and friends of PLP distributed 1,000 CHALLENGES (asking for voluntary donations) and 300 leaflets among the participants and our friends in Oaxaca. A comrade who was active inside the Congress brought 100 CHALLENGES to the participants.
It was impressive to see how many people sat reading our revolutionary newspaper, especially the article that specifically exposed the APPO leaders’ reformist, opportunist line while also calling on the masses to join us in the fight for a real communist revolution. We expected to be attacked verbally since the article above sharply criticized opportunists in APPO for trying to use the movement to obtain elective office. But, on the contrary, people read the article and leaflet with great interest. And then the majority of the Congress decided that all those who want to belong to APPO must renounce participating with the capitalist politicians, and that APPO leaders can’t use their position for electoral careers. We believe that was partially due to our Party’s position, showing that our presence had a big effect, even though we’re not the only group in APPO against the bosses’ elections. We were very inspired by this and our other activities there.
In the afternoon, PLP had its own communist school with 28 people attending. We discussed the international situation, the CHALLENGE article about the militarization of Mexico and the PLP document on Democratic Centralism.
The discussion was comradely but sharp, mainly on democratic centralism, which was used to discuss the best way to present the Party, communist ideas and our hatred of the rotten capitalist system during the May Day marches. Some thought it was important to consider the fascist militarization and its relation to the Party’s long-term life and development. Others thought about the moral need and anger to show that the Party, its red flags and communist ideas are alive and well.
One comrade said, "We have to vote" on this issue, but the majority disagreed, saying we must use democratic centralism and more discussion to come to an agreement that benefits the whole Party and the international working class. The responsibility lies with the collective, not with one person.
Part of the event included visiting an organic products co-op. One of the partners explained that previously it had been a big ranch, terribly super-exploiting the farmworkers, but now they had taken it over. Some comrades explained that unfortunately, because of their high prices, these products are not accessible to people with little money. They’re for an elite market. In this area we had a friendly get-together.
This weekend was one more step in the development of the political understanding of each Party activist, in developing personal relations where the essence of our lives, the fight for communism, unites us struggle by struggle, reaffirming that our road is communist revolution and our life is one of struggle.??
50,000 Rally in NYC: Cut the Bosses, Not the Budget
NEW YORK CITY, March 5 — "Students and Labor: Shut the City Down" chanted hundreds of City University of NY students and teachers blocking traffic as they marched into a City Hall rally of over 50,000 workers and students demonstrating against multi-billionaire Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts. The rally included members of the United Federation of Teachers, the Hotel Workers Union, 1199-SEIU and several other major unions. The cuts fall particularly hard on black and Latino workers who, because of racism, suffer double rates of unemployment and whose communities are especially hard hit by the cuts in services.
The usual suspects of union misleaders and politicians dominated the speakers platform, including Congressman Anthony Weiner who’s running for mayor declaring that "too much" is being paid to city workers.
PL high school teachers and students had planned to rally at one location and then march into the demonstration chanting and holding a banner. Throughout the day they urged their co-workers and friends to join their contingent. They arrived at the rally holding their banner on a metal fencing, and then formed a picket line within the rally while chanting on bullhorns, "Make the bosses take the losses," calling on all workers to strike against the budget cuts. Workers joined our chants, raising their fists and taking CHALLENGES and leaflets. Many of the students felt it was a positive experience, militantly expressing communist ideas and helping the Party’s growth.
Hundreds of CUNY students from Hunter College, joined by a number of professors and staff, including PL’ers, had walked out of their classes to protest tuition hikes, layoffs and the budget cuts. They were chanting, "They say cut back, we say FIGHT BACK!" and "money for schools, not for war!" They then joined a rally of another several hundred college students from CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College condemning the budget cuts and marched to the larger rally at City Hall.
The proposed 600-dollar per year tuition hike will push thousands of CUNY’s mostly black, Latino and international students out of the university. Speakers angrily described how there already aren’t enough resources to meet Hunter College student needs; most are already stretched thin by working and attending school. Several condemned the bank bailouts and tied the current struggle to the history of CUNY students’ fight for free tuition, against racism, layoffs and imperialist war.
One hospital worker led a contingent of 70 from his workplace on the very day that two hospitals shut their doors for good in Queens. Many workers wanted to participate and take action but the union mis-leaderships limit them to supporting liberal Democratic Party politicians, refusing to organize strikes against the cuts.
The ruling class is pushing workers to the wall to take the losses from the bosses’ worldwide economic meltdown. The hundreds of billions Obama’s plan is siphoning off to the banks and spending on expanding the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is coming out of workers’ hides. This is all testimony to the failure of capitalism to provide for workers’ needs and intensifying their oppression. It opens the door to win millions to communist revolution as the only solution to the hell created by the profit system, with its bosses, bankers, racism and imperialist war.
Union Leaders Have No Real Answer to 30,000 Layoffs
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, March 6 — Workers from several public-worker unions picketed La Fortaleza, Governor Luis Fortuño’s building, protesting his March 3 announcement threatening possibly 30,000 layoffs among public workers here. The new governor claims this is the only way to deal with the island’s enormous budget deficit. This is another example of the bosses and their politicians trying to make workers pay for capitalism’s crisis.
Unfortunately, the union leaders here have themselves helped the bosses. In exchange for some crumbs, they agreed to accept Law 45 which basically bans public-worker strikes. During last year’s militant mass teachers’ strike, unions like those here that are part of the SEIU-Change to Win federation sided with then governor Acevedo Vila against the teachers. (Dennis Rivera, a former pro-independence activist here and now a big-time hack in SEIU was behind this). So this history of sellouts has left workers with still another obstacle in fighting the latest wave of attacks — one reason why today’s protest was smaller than expected.
But nothing lasts forever. Workers are beginning to realize that playing nice with the bosses doesn’t pay. Workers need to build a revolutionary communist leadership to learn that a system that cannot provide jobs and services for workers must be destroyed. ?
AFL-CIO Hacks Deflate Angry Workers
CHICAGO, February 17 — It was hard not to be moved when you first entered the Plumbers Union Hall at the rally to pass the Labor Free Choice Act (union certification based on a majority of signed union cards, not on a vote). Thousands of workers stood shoulder to shoulder wearing T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts and carrying signs reading, "Strength in Unity," and "UNITE for Power." Men and women, young and old of all colors, speaking all languages, greeted friends and introduced themselves to strangers.
The energy and enthusiasm was electric. It was easy to see how unions seduce workers. On one level, parts of their message is somewhat similar to ours. But as the rally proceeded, it became clear that the similarities are barely skin deep.
The AFL-CIO fat cats got the crowd "in the mood" with a black youth gospel choir singing "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful." Every time a misleader said it was "time for action," and "the City runs on our backs," workers cheered and exchanged high fives.
But enthusiasm waned as speaker after speaker praised Barack Obama and told the workers to call their Congresspeople and tell them to vote for the Free Choice Act. Soon, the room emptied; the remaining speakers spoke to less than half the original crowd. Momentarily, teachers and machinists, auto, transit, healthcare and buildings trades workers and more were united in one place, ready for action, waiting for direction on how to express their power. It seemed almost everyone but the "leadership" felt the potential in that room, and that "calling your Congressperson" fell way short. The very life of the city sat within those walls.
One was both inspired and outraged, and couldn’t help but wonder what a difference if our message linking capitalist crisis and imperialist war, fighting racist terror and cutbacks, and organizing a general strike and moving on the banks and centers of power for communist revolution were blaring from the stage. I could imagine the cheers becoming a roar as workers greeted the truth finally ringing from the stage.
AFL-CIO President Sweeney told everyone to "call and vote." I told a worker beside me, "imagine if he had said, ‘STRIKE!’" (Which, of course, he never would.) The worker looked around the room, smiled and said, "We’d run the city." Exactly!
As the economy spirals into a deeper crisis, workers are growing increasingly weary and frustrated with a system that bails out billionaire bankers and closes factories and health clinics. Some already realize Obama is not the "change" we need.
Capitalism will do what it will; fall into crisis, reinvent itself, and fall into crisis again. We must resolve more firmly than ever to take advantage of every opportunity to bring our revolutionary communist politics to the masses, organize workers and develop new communist organizers for PLP.
The 75 CHALLENGES distributed at the rally was good, but only a drop in the bucket. Without new soldiers in this battle, the bosses will dig themselves out of this mess by burying the workers even deeper into oppressive pits. Now is the time to act. We’ve been exploited long enough. The world runs on our backs. It’s time workers ran the world. Win workers to the only solution — communist revolution!??
a name="Katrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery"></a>"atrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery
Last month, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the Decatur Hotel chain owed not one penny to 300 immigrant workers from Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic who each paid contractors $3,000 to $5,000 for the "privilege" of coming to the New Orleans to be super-exploited. In one more sign of growing fascism in the legal system, the Court OK’d these slave labor conditions on the grounds that the workers couldn’t prove that Decatur "required" or "approved" of these payments.
These workers were recruited to come to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city in August 2005. New Orleans’ hotel bosses like Decatur saw a big chance to lower the already rock-bottom wages of the mostly black hotel workforce there. Conniving with other local bosses, recruiters promised the workers 60-80 hours work per week, time-and-a-half for overtime, free food and rooms in hotels with swimming pools.
The recruiters lied through their teeth! The hotel bosses jammed four workers into each room, charging $50 per week per worker, plus $8 per meal. The workers only got 24-40 hours per week at $6.39 per hour. Of course, as "guest workers," termination or leaving the job could result in immediate deportation. And their every move was under the watchful eye of the hotel bosses.
Despite this racist and fascist set-up, these workers organized against their slave-like working conditions. Unfortunately, the leadership of this struggle fell into the hands of opportunists, including Saket Soni, now head of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Soni and his fake-leftist friends convinced the workers that they should mainly rely on the bosses’ courts to win this battle. He and others viciously attacked PLP members when we tried to expose the workers to a real communist view of how to fight these bosses’ attacks with class struggle.
Immigration laws, like all bosses’ laws, are designed to insure that U.S. employers reap maximum profits from the labor of the working class. The liberal Southern Poverty Law Center exposed this collaboration of the government with the bosses in its report "Close to Slavery." In order to legally hire guest workers, it was necessary to show that attempts to hire local residents failed. U.S. citizen workers would most likely have told Decatur where to stick their $6.39 per hour. However, Decatur’s obviously false statement that they had tried to recruit workers from among "hurricane evacuees" was accepted by the U.S. Department of Labor, no questions asked.
This gave Decatur the green light to go ahead with its plans. They let the contractors handle the dirty work. This separation allowed them to claim that they "didn’t know anything" about the recruiters’ extortion. This gave the courts all they needed to legalize this workers’ slavery.
Communists will never promote confidence in this bosses’ system of "justice." Instead, we call for class warfare against the whole capitalist system and its attacks on workers. We encourage anti-racism and internationalism to win citizen workers to support the struggles of their immigrant brothers and sisters. Most importantly, we organize for a communist revolution. In a communist world, the bosses’ national borders would be abolished, and none of our working-class brothers and sisters would endure slave-labor conditions in order to survive. ?
Germany: Patriots, Socialists, Union Fakers, Neo-Nazis Thwart Workers
DRESDEN, GERMANY, February 26 — The capitalist economic crisis has reached here, hitting the auto industry particularly hard. Today, GM workers demonstrated in Germany, Sweden and Russia against GM’s mass layoffs worldwide. GM is seeking 3.3 billion Euros (over $4 billion) from European rulers and has offered a restructuring plan that will close three assembly plants and cut production capacity by 30%. With the global financial crisis deepening, GM cannot get any bank loans, making government bailouts the only alternative to a shutdown that would put roughly 300,000 European workers on the street.
The major weakness holding autoworkers back is their union leaders’ patriotism and nationalism. In the U.S. the UAW pushes, "Buy American." In Germany the IG Metall union hacks push the old fascist line of "German jobs for German workers." It’s no wonder that this "Day of Action" was smaller and less militant than past ones.
Big troubled companies like Opel or Nokia, which closed its Bochum factory, line up with politicians to promise "patriotic" workers they will rebuild German industry "together." They used socialists like Thomas Jurk to calm angry workers in Saxony when Quimonda, Dresden’s biggest firm, closed.
Jurk’s friends who run the huge IG-Metall trade union join him in this Big Lie. But the working class here can punch back by discarding these misleaders’ nationalist ideas and the racism that feeds on patriotism.
Workers in Germany, the world’s leading export economy by value, are starting to feel the scourge of the crisis. The government, a coalition between the bosses’ two "alternating" parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, already approved a plan to rescue the most important banks, like Germany’s second-biggest, Commerzbank.
But every sector is reporting big losses: auto, shipbuilding, iron and steel, other manufacturing, and the media. The bosses are using plant closings, wage-cuts, layoffs unemployment and longer working hours to "solve" the crisis by directly attacking the working class. But this is not just "a German problem."
In early February, 2,800 workers demonstrated against the Quimonda shutdown, Dresden’s largest employer, with 4,600 workers, amid an already economically struggling Saxony region. Saxony’s Socialist economic minister Thomas Jurk, along with the IG-Metall union hacks, tried to calm the protesters’ anger with typical ruling-class rhetoric: "we will make new investments and secure new jobs in the city."
But Quimonda has another plant in Vila do Conde, Portugal, where it notified 1,800 workers that it’s shutting down. Such circumstances demand not economic patriotism but a worldwide class struggle of internationalist workers allied across borders, from Portugal to Saxony.
However, Germany’s government and its trade union lackeys here are spreading national "optimism" in order to divide the working class and hold back militancy. Instead, workers here and everywhere need to turn this current financial crisis into an overall political crisis for capitalism. For that they need the ideas and organizing power of an international revolutionary communist party like PLP.
On February 14, 6,000 neo-Nazis gathered here, trying to divert workers’ anger into super-patriotism and racism against immigrant workers. They were marking the 64th anniversary of the terrible World War II U.K. /U.S firebombing of Dresden.
A counter-rally of 10,000 was soon organized behind the slogan "No pasarán" ("They shall not pass") used by anti-fascist fighters to stop Franco’s troops and his German allies from entering Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The anti-fascist demonstrators sought to prevent the new Nazis from marching through Dresden. But the cops protected the Nazis’ march, clearing away blockades and clashing brutally with the anti-fascists.
Once again an exhibition of truly ruling-class politics: protecting Nazis while attacking an alliance of workers and students. As the socialists and fascists push their lies, the situation in Dresden gets worse. Now anti-fascist militancy against these racist super-patriots needs to be turned on the big capitalists who sponsor and protect them, using them as tools to divide and hold workers back. ?
Obama-Bosses-UAW Gang-up Mugs Ford Workers
DETROIT, MI, March 9 — The new concessions the UAW granted to Ford are much more than the loss of benefits, break-time and retiree health care. They reflect that a new stage of fascism is needed to help the bosses survive 2009 and the global financial crisis that has brought the U.S. auto industry to a halt and threatened the survival of GM and Chrysler. Negotiators had to figure out how to meet targets imposed by Obama’s auto oversight committee and the finance capitalists that stand behind them. We should expect more of this where the state and bosses impose fascist conditions on workers.
But, if we aggressively bring communist leadership workers will turn to revolutionary politics to counter these attacks.
We can also expect more auto workers to turn towards revolutionary communist leadership if we more aggressively offer it. At one Ford UAW local hall, more than 150 CHALLENGES were distributed along with hundreds of PLP fliers urging workers to reject the concessions and march on May Day until panicked local thugs stopped our comrades from reaching the workers.
Ford lost a record $14.6 billion in 2008 and conditions have only worsened. Ford U.S. sales dropped almost 50% in February. The new agreement eliminates a holiday, cuts break-time and suspends cost-of-living increases and performance bonuses, offers more buyouts and allows Ford to fund the retiree healthcare trust fund with 50% worthless stock instead of cash.
Pro-Boss Union ‘Leaders’ Have Saved Nothing And No One
These new concessions are "modifications" of the 2007 agreement that cut wages and benefits in half for new hires and gave away more than 100,000 jobs, before the current crash. Since the 1979 Chrysler bailout, the UAW leadership lost two-thirds of our members and the majority of the auto industry. They’ve saved nothing and no one. Now we’re in a worldwide crisis of capitalism, shackled by a generation of pro-capitalist union leaders who refuse to fight back and who haven’t sacrificed a dime.
We’re facing a new Depression, with tens of millions jobless and losing their homes. In Detroit, Buffalo and Milwaukee, more than 50% of black males, 16-64, are unemployed, not to mention Flint, Chicago’s West Side, Gary and Hammond. Capitalism’s racist nature is evident as every measure of poverty, unemployment, and police terror hits black and Latino workers first and hardest. The bosses, the union and the Obama administration have ganged up to force us to pay for their crisis.
Ultimately, the bosses "solve" their global crises with fascist terror and more war. That’s where this new sellout is leading. The war in Iraq is spreading to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with no end in sight.
We need to build a revolutionary communist movement, led by industrial workers, that can eventually lead the working class to power. We need to follow the example of the Republic Windows workers who sat down in their factory last December; build unemployment committees in our local unions to unite the employed and unemployed and fight evictions, hunger and for jobs. Most of all, we need to vote with our feet and bring a contingent of Ford workers to march on May Day! ?
Letters
Hero of Salvador War Is Reborn in PLP
During the 1970s, a group of us peasants, workers and students worked in the eastern part of El Salvador, where nobody charged for their work. We were labeled communists, even by the parish priest. I built homes without being paid a single penny, but my family never lacked food. The others in the group supplied me. We shared everything with the conviction to do what is correct. We practiced working-class solidarity. We worked in communities collectively. This influenced the rest of our lives, preparing us for the armed struggle, unfortunately sabotaged by our organization’s mis-leadership.
The National Guard kidnapped me on August 2, 1977. I was building a home when they blindfolded me and took me with two other friends to the military barracks, where they began torturing us, tying our feet and hands to an iron post.
They later turned us over to the National Police in San Salvador where the horrible torture continued, to force us to confess we were communists. They put 220-volt electric shocks through me; my ears ruptured in blood. I fainted and dreamt that my mother, who had died three years before, visited me and dabbed camphor oil on my head because I was in deep pain. The moment she did this I felt no pain. I spent 11 days in pure torture at the police station. I had nothing to eat or drink, only blows and psychological torture.
On the 11th day I was transferred to the Santa Tecla prison. On my third day there I couldn’t eat — my jaws were stiff, I felt no stomach. There were many interrogations. They told me if I took responsibility for why I was there they would give me 500 "colones" (money) and free me. They told me not to associate with communists, saying there would never be communism in El Salvador because the army would combat it. They said I could not be a communist because they were atheists and I was Catholic (as they were). I asked what kind of Catholics are in the assassins’ army who kill everyone indiscriminately.
I was freed on August 29 because the communities and friends pressured the government of Colonel Molina. At that time partners in struggle seized 10 transmitters from the national radio in Morazán, despite being well-guarded by the army. They confronted soldiers in the Gotera barracks, but ultimately our forces captured it and issued a communiqué demanding my liberation.
All this pressure led to my release, but I was let out on the street like an animal out of a cage. Not knowing the area I hailed a taxi and told the driver what had happened, that I had no money. He drove me to the central market in San Salvador where my cousin worked. Both he and my cousin were glad to have helped me and happy I was alive, because most political prisoners were disappeared or murdered.
My cousin took me to her home to recuperate. The next day there was a workers’ protest in San Salvador and she wanted me to stay home. But I went to San Miguel and found a friend who took me by bus to the Torola river. But before arriving at a bridge where the National Guard — the same ones who had imprisoned me — had been carrying out a big inspection, I got off.
For years I organized many workers who later became commanders and combatants on different FMLN war fronts. Today, much later, we have re-connected in the ranks of Progressive Labor Party. CHALLENGE/DESAFIO has been our greatest discovery of true communist philosophy. I’m being reborn in working-class politics, overcoming my disillusionment in believing there was no other party for the proletariat. But now that I’ve found PLP I feel I’m starting anew, with the memory of my four children fallen in combat.
Communist Comrade from El Salvador
a name="Airport Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down"></">Ai"port Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down
At an airport where PL is organizing, workers have taken some political leadership in a reform struggle against the union mis-leadership around bogus health insurance. The company has been blatantly racist in giving the mostly immigrant workers an extremely bad medical insurance plan which has cost workers thousands of dollars.
The SEIU mis-leadership has been dragging its behind in helping resolve this issue. They have mostly been undermining the workers’ efforts to fight back because the union does not want to cause problems for the racist bosses since contract negotiations start at the end of the year.
The union went so far as to try to prevent the re-election of an anti-racist shop steward because of previous confrontations with union misleaders around anti-immigrant racism at the airport. They failed. He was reelected by the workers! The union mis-leadership stopped visiting our shift to avoid questions from workers. In one case a misleader hung up on a worker asking about insurance. The airport workers had enough!
The PL’er got together with some coworkers who all read CHALLENGE and came up with a collective plan to force the SEIU misleaders back to the airport. The B.S. leadership was sent an open letter from the workers detailing the complaints, especially about their union rep. They were given a deadline to respond to complaints, and workers threatened to go over their heads to the national SEIU in Chicago if there was no reply. It worked! A meeting was set up and the union official was forced to talk about medical insurance. This is by no means over.
An African American worker told the shop steward, "The threat made in the letter forced them to come to the airport!" There were workers from the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia who either helped proofread, and distribute the open letter or gave statements regarding the medical insurance to the union. This shows the absolute necessity of workers’ anti-racist collective action against the bosses’ racist actions.
There were many political discussions with airport workers regarding this action. Workers took a step in learning why reforms under capitalism are limited and that eventually workers need communist revolution to solve our problems. The class struggle goes on and workers, soldiers, and students need PLP for communist revolution.
Airport Red
Castro Brothers Continue Perestroika
The latest shifts among top Cuban government officials show that Cuban "Perestroika" (capitalist reform) continues. Capitalism needs these changes to thrive and to show European, Chinese and even U.S. imperialists that some "changes" are being made in Cuba.
From the sidelines, Fidel himself pushes these reforms. He admitted he was consulted about the removal of Felipe Pérez Roque as Foreign Minister and Vice-president Carlos Lage. But in reality it appears that Fidel and Raul are not fighting each other but rather both are promoting those who agree more with their scheme, while eliminating those who might oppose their economic reform plans. Neither represent any real left alternative. In February 2008, Raúl announced these reforms, which just deepen the Cuban Perestroika.
The official report from the Cuban "Communist" Party says these latest changes in leadership followed deep discussion inside the Political Bureau of the Cuban ruling Party. Then Fidel in his "reflections" writings in the Cuban press accused those demoted, his former protégées, of being "ambitious" and that "the enemy outside of Cuba had illusions about them." Even though Fidel is not officially in power, his justifications of the power shift hide the real power struggle probably occurring inside the Cuban "red" bourgeois bureaucracy.
The coming economic and political measures will show even more clearly the kind of capitalist road Cuba will take, possibly State Capitalism as what they call socialism now existing in Cuba, or following even more the example of China’s capitalism. But these reforms are bound to fail for workers, particularly since capitalism in any form — especially in this age of international economic meltdown — has proven unable to satisfy their basic needs.
Friends in Peru
a name="Anger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker">">"nger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker
PASADENA, CA, February 19 —Leroy Barnes, a 38-year-old black worker, and father of three, was shot by Pasadena cops, killing him on the spot. The cops had pulled Barnes over for a traffic stop. At first, the cops lied about what happened. They said that Barnes shot at them but he did not shoot at all. They said he was outside the car, but he never stepped out of his car. Witnesses saw the police shoot him four times while he was inside his car, then pull him out of the car and shoot him seven more times as he lay on the street! As a crowd of angry people gathered, the racist cops shot into the air, to intimidate people protesting the murder. Even so, some people threw rocks at the cops. Many people in the neighborhood, as well as friends and family, are furious at the racist killer kkkops.
PLP members have taken leaflets and CHALLENGES to the neighborhood where Leroy Barnes was killed, to a nearby shopping center, and to area schools. Many people were glad to have the Party there. Recently an Oakland transit cop murdered Oscar Grant, also a black man and a father. Since this was caught on tape, the racist killer is being tried for murder. In the killing of Leroy Barnes, even the police tape is not being released!
Racist police terror, and anti-immigrant terror, are on the rise as official unemployment in California is over 10% (it’s about double that if you count people in jail and people who have stopped looking for work). Obama and the capitalist system’s answer to this crisis is to put even more racist cops on the street to terrorize workers, especially black and Latino workers, because the bosses fear rebellion.
They’re right to be afraid! A system that can’t provide decent jobs but only racist terror should be destroyed! PLP invites angry workers and youth to protest this killing, come to our May Day Dinner and march with the PLP contingent on May First, International Workers’ Day, against racist terror, unemployment, imperialist war, and for communist revolution.
Bangladesh Army Mutiny, Sri Lanka Civil War Tied to Oil Dogfight
Nothing is safe in the oil pipeline dogfight among the world’s imperialists and Indian-Pakistani rulers. The terrorist attack against the Sri Lanka national cricket team is one example. The rulers of India and Pakistan blame each other’s intelligence services for the attack. The Sri Lanka team replaced the Indian national team which pulled out after the recent Mumbai terrorist attack blamed on the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service).
Just a few days before this attack, a mass mutiny by Bangladesh’s border guard (the BRD) killed 74 army officers, almost the BRD’s entire top brass. Years of corruption by their officers — sent from the regular army — frustrated the soldiers, who were mistreated and starved while making a miserable $70/month and seeing the officers selling their rations on the open market.
The mutiny began in BRD headquarters in Dhaka, the country’s capital. Initially the military brass tried to storm the mutineers, but then the rebellion spread nation-wide, forcing the brass to negotiate with the rebels and even agree to their demands. After the rebellion ended, the army and the government began the arrest and hunting of over 1,000 rebel soldiers.
The BRD dates back to the 18th century when the British colonialists established the "Ramgarh Local Battalion." In 1971, East Pakistan, helped by India, went to war and broke with Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh. The BRD was used to patrol over 3,000 miles of border with India and Burma (Myanmar). The BRD, like the rest of South Asia’s armies, retained all the class divisions of the old British colonial armies. Officers came from the ruling class while rank-and-file soldiers came from the working class and poor peasantry.
Unfortunately, in the absence of any real communist leadership, when these soldiers turned their guns against their officers, they were open to being misled by pro-Pakistani Islamists. The collapse of the old world communist movement reflected itself in the opportunism of the pro-Soviet and Maoist groups in Bangladesh — which supported "progressive-lesser evil" bosses and disarmed workers and their allies politically. This created illusions about "reforming" capitalism and prevented a fight for workers’ power.
Early in January, after several years of military rule, a civilian government — considered to be pro-India — took power in Bangladesh. The mutiny was reportedly supported by forces within and outside the military who supported the country’s recent "Talibanization." The new army chief, appointed by the civilian government, is considered "too secular" and pro-India and was clamping down on fundamentalists inside the military which are influenced by Pakistan and even by China.
Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan Sunday Times reported (3/1) that a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force might be sent to northern Sri Lanka under the guise of evacuating refugees from the civil war in that island nation. Thus, the U.S. could help the Sri Lankan army in its bloody "mop-up" operations against the nationalist Tamil guerrillas holed up in the island’s northern tip and fighting the government. U.S. rulers consider the Tamils terrorists.
However, it’s not the Tamil guerrillas that really worry the U.S. and India, but rather it’s China’s growing economic and military presence in Sri Lanka. China has supplied Sri Lanka with modern military hardware, including fighter planes, and is helping build a modern port at Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka, near one of the world’s most important oil-supply sea lanes.
All these bloody conflicts occur in a capitalist world wrecked by an economic tsunami. The Indian economy, supposedly an example of what free-market globalization could achieve, is now reeling from this crisis. Bangladesh is already one of the world’s poorest countries and has lost a lot of markets for its exports of textiles.
Workers and their allies in all of South Asia must break with all these bosses, their imperialist backers and all the Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists, and build a revolutionary communist leadership as the only way out of this hell.??
a name="Working Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women">">"orking Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women
March 8 marked International Women’s Day, inspired by the 1908 New York City march of 15,000 women demanding better pay and shorter hours. Throughout the history of class struggle every major movement that made progress for the oppressed class has had women as leaders. From the fight against slavery, to the Paris Commune and revolutions in Russia and China, from the mass strikes of 1848 in Europe to the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960’s women workers around the world have joined with men in the struggle against capitalist oppression.
Today these battles continue. In India, Hindu women and men fought back against brutal attacks against women in cafes by groups trying to build a society where women are kept in their homes. In New York, the Stella D’oro strike has united men and women workers on the picket lines in the cold of winter. They are fighting back against the wage and benefit cuts that are being forced on them by their factory’s owners. These militant struggles are an important inspiration for all of us.
With a black woman as First Lady, more female role models to idolize than ever and a new law that seems to help women get equal pay, it appears the only limit to women advancing is imagination. But the boss-worker relationship is the fundamental one under capitalism — bosses own and control their workers and workers fight to get as much they can from their bosses. If we peel back the appearance of upward mobility, women are suffering more than ever and no amount of media spin will cover up the horrible conditions all workers must deal with.
Sexism and Capitalism go Hand in Hand
According to the International Labor Organization, 22 million women around the world are expected to lose their jobs in 2009 as the bosses shift the burden of their financial crisis and wars onto the backs of the working class. The ruling class uses the special oppression of women the same as they use racism and nationalism – to oppress the entire working class. Besides lowering wages for all workers by increasing competition, sexism politically weakens the working class by dividing women and men on the job, in our homes, and during the class struggle. Black and Latino, women suffer triple exploitation from racism, as women, and as workers.
PLP fights sexism by taking on attacks against women, developing women leaders of our movement and spreading communist consciousness. The struggle against sexist ideas cannot be separated from the struggle against this system that is breeding it.
Sexism increases oppression through economic, cultural and social forces. Women make less, are treated worse on a political level and have less access to social mobility than their male counterparts. Early class oppression was seen as long ago as ancient, pre-capitalist, slave society, where women were captured and enslaved, then forced to produce more slaves. Today, with sexism as a tool, billions of dollars in profit are funneled into the coffers of today’s capitalists.
Sexism is not just the attitude of chauvinism from a couple of right-wing men and women on a personal level or the result of a brutal regime like the Taliban. It is a rampant aspect of the capitalist world. In England the unemployment rate for women is at 33%. In the U.S., where women are consistently paid less than men, the best "solution" Obama could come up with for women’s rights is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which extends the statute of limitations, to a mere 180 days, for a woman to sue if she is being paid lower wages on the job. This law is just a stop-gap to placate workers into thinking Obama is doing his best, since he’s got so much on his plate waging profit war in Afghanistan and asking for more bailouts for the ruling class.
Sexist Culture Fuels Attacks
As long as this system exists, where economic exploitation makes women a commodity, women are going to be abused and disrespected in big and small ways. The abuse inflicted by teen icon Chris Brown on singer Rihanna was another revolting example of the kinds of sexist beatings that happen to millions of working class women regularly but are never publicized.
The beauty, fashion and music industries that portray women as property to be owned and displayed drive this sexist culture, which reaps billions in profits. Women and men workers not only suffer living with this culture, but end up giving back hard fought for wages trying to chase the bosses ideal of beauty by paying for make-up, "fashionable" clothes, and beauty treatments.
Attacks on women are on the rise around the world. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, many hundreds of young women have been murdered in the last few years. While these killings have received some publicity, in other countries woman are being murdered in even higher numbers. In Guatemala the murder rate for women is twice as high as Ciudad Juarez.
Sexism is pervasive in day-to-day discourse, within romantic relationships and friendships. Women are used as sexual objects. Female workers have to contend with unequal pay and an attitude that women are either overtly sexual beings, prim, proper ladies, or something in between – assertive as long as they "look good" doing it. This mechanical portrayal of female identity keeps capitalism alive and well by keeping the working class focused on how men and women are unequal.
All workers need to fight the inequality that is endemic to capitalism. Attacks on women keep their working class brothers in chains as well. Divisions between men and women workers help the bosses slash our wages. Sexist ideas weaken our class as men and women fight each other instead of the rulers. It inhibits the needed leadership of women workers, and inhibits men from being better fighters and stronger leaders for our class. Victory for the working class demands that we break down this division by uniting as equals in the struggle to smash the rulers system. The working class needs to smash sexism to defeat capitalism and build a communist revolution that will eliminate the oppression of all workers. ?
1971 Temple U. Strike Won Equal Pay
The power of working-class unity among women and men was demonstrated in the 1971 Temple University strike of black and white male janitors and female maids. Both men and women struck for equal pay for equal work for women workers and won. This unity also broke Nixon’s 3.2% wage freeze. An important element in this struggle was the worker-student alliance. When the college Administration attempted to use scabs to clean up the campus (which couldn’t function with all the uncollected waste strewn about), the PLP-led SDS chapter dumped all the garbage back onto the campus. After two weeks, the bosses gave in.
a name="France’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops">">"rance’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops
POINT-A-PITRE, GUADALOUPE, March 9 — Mass protests continue in this French Overseas Department and in the neighboring island Department of Martinique even after the United Against Profiteering coalition (LKP) reached a deal winning some of their demands. The French government will provide 100 euros ($120) of the monthly wage hike for three years and the local government 50 euro for one year. But the local bosses’ group, MEDEF, has refused to sign the deal. The strikers’ original demand was a 200-Euro increase.
In Martinique, where a similar partial deal was reached, the February 5 Collective leading that strike refused to end the strikes, picketing and roadblocks because prices have not been cut (prices in both islands are much higher than in continental France).
On March 6, cops clashed with youth and workers attempting to block a bosses’ back-to-work motorcade, which drove provocatively into the capital, Fort de France. Four cops were injured as shots rang out and Molotov cocktails exploded. Ten people were arrested and the cops injured many.
A similar mass strike is developing in La Réunion, a French colonial possession in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the French labor movement has yet to express real solidarity with these struggles, showing the need for workers and students in all of France to fight the racism and nationalism of their labor mis-leaders, behind the slogan: Same enemy, same fight, workers and students of the world, unite!
RED EYE on the NEWS
Below are excerpts from mainstream newspapers that may be of use for our readers. For more, go to challengenewspaper. wordpress.com. Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times,
GW=Guardian Weekly, LAT=Los Angeles Times
Marx got no respect, but now…
NORTH STAR GROUP – Poor Karl Marx. Never got any respect. Not in the U.S.A., anyway. Seldom in the course of human events has one man been so derided, so reviled by such a great herd of ignoramuses, virtually none of whom have even the faintest notion what the object of their derision actually said, thought or stood for…. In light of current events… his insights concerning capitalism’s structural defects were spoton…. Marx wrote that in the end, capitalism’s fate would be sealed… by its internal rot…. If Marx were around, he’d be laughing his head off, but there are going to be plenty of tears to go around for [his deriders].
Old-time reds built China’s base
NYT, 3/8 – In the early 1950s, shortly after the Chinese Communist revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong set into motion one of the largest peacetime mobilizations in modern history…. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps built roads, canals, bridges and dams, turning wasteland into fields of cotton, maize and rice. They built entire cities in the desert…. A survivor of the force… recalled…. "At that time there was nothing I couldn’t bear…" she was honored at the time as a "Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought."
Sun’s recollections of Communist Party zeal, sacrifice and staggering economic transformation are among the personal narratives assembled by Xinran, a Chinese journalist now a resident of Britain, in "China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation." Many of the older Chinese Xinran meets still take a glossy view of the Communist Party.
Asbestos poisoning for a profit
NYT, 2/19 – At least 200 deaths and thousands of illnesses are known to be related to the town’s exposure to the mine….
The mine’s owner, W.R. Grace & Company… and its managers knew as far back as the 1970s that asbestos… posed a risk to their workers, but they conspired to continue releasing it into the air and to misrepresent the peril….
More than 30 years ago Dr. Teitelbaum, a retired toxicologist… was sent hundreds of chest X-rays of Libby workers and of workers at [a non-tainted] mine in South Carolina….
"At the end of the study, I wrote a letter saying that 30 percent of the miners in Libby have asbestosis, and nobody in South Carolina has asbestosis…. "They said thank you very much and did nothing with it."
For Arab public, US is terrorist
NYT, 2/26 – A battle over the term terrorist has become a proxy for the larger issues that divide Washington and the Arab public…. In Gaza… most Arabs came away certain who the real terrorists were.
"Public opinion views what happened in Gaza as a kind of terrorism…. They see Hamas and other such organizations as groups who are trying to liberate their countries…."
The case may be even more tangled with Hezbollah…. "If Obama thinks these organizations are terrorists, there will never be peace…." In this region… the invasion of Iraq is often referred to as a terrorist act.
- Obama Steps Up Afghan, Iraq Massacres
- Rockefeller Think-Tank Helps Biggest U.S. Capitalists Wield State Power
- Bosses’ Stimulus Package: Force Workers to Bail Out Bankers
- Worker-Student Alliance Fights Budget Cuts at Howard U.
- Battle D.C. Transit Layoffs, Service Cuts
- Debate Highlights Need for Class Analysis of Palestine-Israel
- Mexico’s Militarization Crucial to U.S. Rulers’ War Plans
- Homicide or Genocide?
- CORRECTION
- ‘Good Bosses’ are Deadly for Workers
- Solidarity with Guadeloupe General Strikers Spreads to Mainland France
- ‘Better’ Boeing Bosses Mean More Fascism On The Job
- Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling
- Shatter Capitalism’s Double-Edged Sword
- Book Review: During World War 2, Communists Led Women’s Revolutionary Fight Against Fascism
- Movie review ‘Frozen River’ — System Fails Working-Class Women
- LETTERS
- RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Obama Steps Up Afghan, Iraq Massacres
On February 18, U.S. air strikes killed 13 civilians in Afghanistan’s Herat province, and Obama’s Afghan surge is just starting, with the first 17,000 troops on their way. The country’s non-combatant death toll, already up 40% from last year, is bound to skyrocket as Obama adds the 30,000 extra troops he promised, and then some.
Candidate Obama had told a war-weary U.S. public that shifting some forces from Iraq to Afghanistan would stabilize the latter country and finally help defeat al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban warlords there. Now that he’s in office, it’s the needs of the most powerful U.S. capitalists, rather than public opinion, that steer Obama’s deployment of the war machine. To counter Russia’s strengthening sphere of influence, rulers are demanding a far greater Afghan build-up. And since Iraq is crucial to U.S. rulers’ profit-pumping oil racket, U.S. troops must remain there permanently, awaiting an all-out Mid-East war.
U.S. Bankers and Oil Barons Demand More GIs and More GI and Afghan Deaths
On February 12, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations think-tank [see box], testified before Congress on U.S. rulers’ escalating requirements in the war zones. Biddle told House members that combating Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan called for a massive, drawn out, Vietnam-style campaign with “around 300,000 counterinsurgents.”
He warned that the corrupt Karzai regime wasn’t up to the job. Thus, hundreds of thousands of GIs would be in it for the long haul. “[T]here is reason to doubt that the Afghan government will ever be able to afford the necessary number of troops. If any significant fraction of this total must be American then the resources needed will be very large. And the commitment could be very long: successful counterinsurgency campaigns commonly last ten to fifteen years or more.”
And that’s the “best” of scenarios. Unintended consequences, as in Iraq, could dwarf the Vietnam debacle in a never-ending war.
Biddle coldly calculated “acceptable” body counts. Among GIs, “fatality rates of perhaps 50-100 per month could persist for many months, if not years.” As for Afghans, Biddle assured the lawmakers that U.S. butchery of the innocent has yet to reach a tipping point where the U.S. appears as the main enemy. “In objective terms, violence in Afghanistan, though increasing, is still very low by the standards of most such conflicts,” Biddle says. “The death count for 2008 was under six per hundred thousand.”
He recalled that British imperialists killed at twice that rate during their “successful” 1950s crackdown in Malaya.
Possible All-Out Mid-East Oil War Keeps U.S. In Iraq Indefinitely
Biddle, a mouthpiece for Exxon, Chase, and Citibank has greater worries over Iraq. Further destabilization there “could eventually produce irresistible pressures for Syrian, Jordanian, Saudi, Turkish, or Iranian state entry into the war....The result could be a region-wide version of the Iran-Iraq War sometime in the next decade, but with some of the combatants (especially Iran) having probable access to weapons of mass destruction by that time.”
An event the U.S. can’t control might “plunge one of the world’s most important energy-producing regions into chaos.” So, says Biddle, at least 60,000 U.S. troops must remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future, no matter what candidate Obama promised.
Biddle, his billionaire bosses, Obama and the rest of the rulers’ politicians all well know the lessons of the last century’s wars: Military conquest entailing massive loss of human life is capitalism’s only sure-fire cure for depressed profits. But history teaches workers something else: Our class, organized in revolutionary communist parties can defeat the profiteering killers. During World War I and shortly after World War II, workers triumphed for a time in Russia and China, although grave political errors led to the restoration of capitalism and imperialism in both. Our goal is to build a party that will someday wipe out the war-makers for good.
Rockefeller Think-Tank Helps Biggest U.S. Capitalists Wield State Power
The nation’s top private foreign policy factory, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) represents the wealthiest bankers and industrialists, centered around the Rockefeller family’s billions. The CFR’s leadership intertwines with imperialist giants like J.P. Morgan Chase and Exxon Mobil. The former, with about half its business overseas, is one of the handful of megabanks the U.S. will save at all costs.
Hampshire College Professor Michael Klare, expert on resource wars and author of “Blood and Oil,” explains “that the U.S. military is being transformed into a global protection service whose primary mission is to defend America’s overseas sources of oil and natural gas, while patrolling the world’s major pipelines and supply routes” (“Is Energo-fascism in Your Future?”). This enables Big Oil to run what amounts to a worldwide energy extortion ring (now challenged by Putin’s Russia), holding entire nations hostage. Last year Exxon Mobil recorded the highest profits in the history of capitalism, despite the current depression’s onset.
The owners of these and similar companies run the CFR through deputies, who in turn advise the White House. For example, former Citigroup boss Robert Rubin (who took the fall for his firm’s role in the banking crisis) is CFR co-chairman, was a Clinton Treasury Secretary and advises Obama on the bailout mess. A CFR director, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, served on now-defunct Lehman Brothers and bailed-out AIG’s boards.
Virtually all of Obama’s leading foreign policy advisors belong to the CFR, whose initiatives have a “habit” of becoming official policy. The concept of using the weapons-of-mass-destruction lie to invade Iraq and seize its oilfields (not Bush’s bungled execution of the war) originated as a major CFR study, as did the Iraq surge.
Never mind massacres like Herat, Biddle implies. Truly, to U.S. rulers, workers and soldiers are simply cannon fodder used to protect their profits.
Bosses’ Stimulus Package: Force Workers to Bail Out Bankers
Obama’s new economic stimulus package just passed by Congress is a hodgepodge of government spending and incentives to force the working class to pay for bailing out the bosses. It will slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, cut wages, undo Social Security and Medicare, and destroy pensions. When the plan fails to improve the economy, the Obama camp will look to blame something other than capitalism.
The fight over how big the bill should be, how to spend it, and whether or not to nationalize the banks and bankrupt auto industries are all signs of intense conflicts among the bosses. The U.S. ruling class disagrees not only about how to get out of this crisis, but about just how deep the crisis is. So the question becomes, how will they steer the ship?
One way they are doing this is with intensified racism as the bosses try to shift the blame for capitalism’s failure onto the backs of the working class. We’re seeing the prison population swell as black workers continue to be sent away and Latino workers now comprise 40% of all Federal prisoners because of the racist immigration raids. There is also growing anti-Arab racism as the ruling class attempts to justify their worldwide war for oil.
These fascist attacks still won’t save the capitalists. Their “stimulus” doesn’t have a shot. The $787 billion plan, includes a series of tax cuts and credits for individuals and businesses totaling $282 billion. This includes incentive programs aimed at inducing people to buy homes, and banks to restructure loans. Additionally there is $4 billion for hiring more cops and expanding racist community policing programs; and $120 billion for infrastructure.
As history has proven, tax credits don’t stimulate the economy; they simply concentrate wealth at the top. Tax credits for house and auto purchases will simply encourage sellers to inflate prices. During the last major recession under the Reagan era, the auto industry was bailed out, and then laid off tens of thousands while Chrysler was restructured.
The money set aside for infrastructure is supposed to create 3.5 million low-paying jobs, but without any guarantee. History shows that in tough economic times the bosses don’t hire
more workers; rather they use their tax credits to shore up their capital reserves. Most importantly, even if the plan could create 3.5 million jobs, which it can’t, it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the loss of jobs plus the new workers coming into the workforce as the population grows.
In a New York Times article, Maureen Dowd (2/13/09) criticized Obama for kowtowing to Republican demands, when he should have pressed forward with his plans and left the Republicans to explain to their constituents why they had “ignored their needs.” This is exactly what President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) did in his Depression fireside chats, trying to bring more power to the executive.
Capitalism’s ‘Public Works:’ Make War, Kill Millions
But all of FDR’s New Deal programs did little for the economy. It was only World War II—the “largest-ever Public Works Program” (NYT 2/17/09) –– that bailed out U.S capitalism. This current crisis has put U.S. bosses in a similar jam. Only this time, instead of being the rising capitalists, U.S. bosses are the aging power, whose empire is being challenged globally.
Russian bosses have built an oil and gas empire while rearming their decaying war machine. They used this military might to challenge U.S. oil interests this past summer in Georgia and intimidate Eastern Europe and the EU (European Union) by cutting off oil and gas supplies.
Despite its own economic woes, the EU has continued its economic expansion into Latin America, a traditional U.S stronghold, taking advantage of the U.S. being forced to concentrate its attention on its oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of anti-U.S. nationalists like Chávez, Evo Morales and Raúl Castro. On world markets the EU has offered up the Euro as an alternative to U.S. dollar hegemony, enticing Iran to break the dollar stranglehold on the international oil trade.
China has been the most active in its challenge to U.S. power. Chinese involvement in the race for African oil had Obama discussing direct military intervention in Sudan multiple times during his campaign. China has also pentrated Latin America, offering its huge markets to exports from Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, among others.
The U.S. is increasingly finding itself backed into a corner. China’s recent announcement that it will purchase less U.S. debt mirrors a general trend of rival imperialists turning away from the U.S. economy and looking inward. The international crisis that was tipped off by U.S. economic weakness is leaving international bosses with increasingly few options other than a move towards wider wars.
Rulers Seek Fascist Unity
Increasingly rising cries about Congress’s inefficiency in dealing with the inter-imperialist and financial crises mirror those heard in Germany, Italy and the U.S. in the ’20s and ’30s. Hitler dissolved the Reichstag to “bring about German unity” in the face of crisis. Mussolini’s corporatism was designed to circumvent the inefficiencies of Italy’s parliament.
The U.S. ruling class toyed with fascism in the 1930’s as FDR sent Hugh Johnson, the architect of his New Deal, to Italy to study Mussolini’s corporate state. The U.S. Congress effectively put aside its differences for the first two years of FDR’s presidency so the ruling class could deal with the economic and political crisis. This is how fascism works; it is not born from strength but rather is the ruling class’s call to unite itself amid chaos and disunity.
U.S. rulers cannot extract themselves from this crisis peaceably. New Deal ruling-class unity, along with Italian and German fascism, did not solve the Great Depression. Fascism was simply the means by which the imperialist powers mobilized their nations for war.
Just as Hitler, Mussolini and FDR couldn’t get out of the Great Depression without war, neither can the U.S. or Obama now. We must see the build-up of fascism as leading to wider war. Our only solution is not to rely on innately flawed stimulus plans but to organize the working class to fight the bosses’ attacks with communist-led strikes and demonstrations, spread PL’s ideas through the distribution of CHALLENGE, organize soldiers, workers and students to rebel against our masters and fight for communist revolution.
(For an analysis of how the falling rate of profit and the crisis of overproduction are behind the current crisis, see CHALLENGE 12/10/08, “Falling Rate of Profit Hits Workers in The Head”)
Worker-Student Alliance Fights Budget Cuts at Howard U.
WASHINGTON, DC, February 13 — Howard University students rallied against a15% tuition hike over two years that the Board of Trustees adopted with no public discussion. Students demanded that no campus worker be laid off or lose benefits, arguing that workers and students are natural allies while the administration and Board of Trustees were on the other side of the struggle. The students condemned John A. Thain as a multi-tasking exploiting boss. He’s both CEO of Merrill Lynch AND a member of the Howard University Board of Trustees!. He recently used $1.22 million of federal bailout money to redecorate his office as he picked the pockets of working-class taxpayers and students alike (see box).
A student leader from the nearby University of the District of Columbia (UDC) spoke at the rally, telling Howard University colleagues that the UDC Board approved a plan to double tuition at this working-class school, driving many students out. Over 1,000 UDC students noisily rallied to protest this racist anti-working-class plan.
At the picket line outside the administration building, the university showed its true colors by placing a line of campus cops between the students and “their” administration building! The Howard University Provost has declared that the university is undergoing “structural adjustment” due to a $15 million deficit.
“Structural adjustment” is precisely the term used by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund when it lends money to less-developed countries and demands that they privatize health care and water supplies and orient their economies towards exports and away from producing food needed to feed local workers. “Structural adjustment” at Howard
University means that workers and students will pay the price of the financial crisis that has engulfed the university with layoffs, cutbacks, and tuition hikes, just like structural adjustment has meant poverty and starvation for workers in the developing world.
Workers and students have a different strategy—to fight back! Under a program called “A Different Howard University Is Possible,” students are mobilizing in dorms and classrooms to oppose the capitalist character of the University and to insist that the students, workers, and neighborhood residents all have the same interest in revolutionary change.
Within this struggle, many different political views have surfaced. We are discussing with some urgency such key issues as what the alternative to capitalism is, what went wrong in previous revolutions, what strategy is needed to build a mass movement against capitalism, what do we think about the Palestinian struggle and the changes in Venezuela under Chavez and Bolivia under Morales, and can communism work? Dozens of students are reading CHALLENGE regularly and some are participating in a PLP study group. Many more need to read CHALLENGE and other revolutionary literature to strengthen these discussions so that the revolutionary impulse these students feel will turn into militant revolutionary activity with PLP.
Thain’s Top 16 Outrages
16) $2,700 for six wall sconces. 15) $5,000 for a mirror in his private dining room. 14) $11,000 for fabric for a “Roman Shade.” 13) $13,000 for a chandelier in his private dining room. 12) $15,000 for a sofa. 11) $16,000 for a “custom coffee table.” 10) $18,000 for a “George IV Desk.” 9) $25,000 for a “mahogany pedestal table.” 8) $28,000 for four pairs of curtains. 7) $35,000 for something called a “commode on legs.” 6) $37,000 for six chairs in his private dining room. 5) $68,000 for a “19th Century Credenza” in his office. 4) $87,000 for a pair of guest chairs. 3) $87,000 plus $47,000 for two area rugs. 2) $230,000 to his driver for one year’s work... And last but definitely not least... 1) $800,000 to hire celebrity designer Michael Smith, who is currently redesigning the White House for the Obama family for $100,000.
Battle D.C. Transit Layoffs, Service Cuts
WASHINGTON, DC, February 19 — Metro workers rallied today outside company headquarters to demand that Metro stop its plans to close its $154 million deficit on the backs of drivers and riders. Several workers, led by a communist PL’er, boldly testified at the first of a series of hearings, along with several supporters from Howard University and the broader community. All resoundingly demanded that the proposed layoffs, which could go as high as 15% of the active unionized workers, be dropped, that fares not rise, and that service routes not be cut. In short, the demand was to make the bosses take the losses.
The hearing dealt with the contracting out of one bus route to the DC Circulator, a privately-owned bus line. The D.C. government wants to expand it, at the expense of Metrobus. Why? Metro workers make about $25 an hour with health and pension benefits, while DC Circulator workers are paid only roughly $14 an hour, with fewer benefits.
The Chairman of the Board of Metro, a local city councilman named Jim Graham who pretends to be a progressive, was shaken by the twenty workers who surrounded him after the formal hearing. He slinked away, muttering that he had always been a supporter of labor and that he would convey their views to the Board. But we will never rely on his promise. Instead, this skirmish is the opening salvo of the next round of class struggle at Metro.
It is critical that workers remember the power they felt in 1978 when they wildcatted and closed the city down for several days to resist the bosses’ attacks. Even more importantly, workers must strengthen their commitment to revolutionary politics and the PLP in order to better lead the entire industrial working class and its allies to the goal of communist revolution and workers’ power.
Debate Highlights Need for Class Analysis of Palestine-Israel
QUEENS, NY, February 18 — First Student: “I’m Israeli and I thought the speaker’s presentation was completely inaccurate and one-sided.”
Second Student: “I lived in the West Bank – you haven’t – and I know that what the speaker presented is the truth.”
Third Student: “Your presentation completely misses the main point: Israel is struggling against Hamas and terrorism. We can only have peace once the terrorists are defeated.”
Fourth Student: “I am Palestinian and I don’t support Hamas. But the Israeli occupation of our lands preceded Hamas. You’re using Hamas as an excuse to justify the occupation and the mistreatment of Palestinians.”
These were just a few of the passionate exchanges between members of the audience at Queens College following an informative talk from a doctor who visited the West Bank in 2005 and 2008 with a group called American Jews for a Just Peace. They met with Physicians for Human Rights/Israeli and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society and together documented the terrible conditions that residents of the West Bank and Gaza have been forced to endure as a result of the Israeli military occupation.
Over 50 students and faculty, including a number from Palestine and other Arab countries, heard how the Israeli occupation has made it difficult for Palestinians to receive proper health care, go to school or, in the case of Gaza, be able to buy basic foods. Palestinians suffer from high unemployment, disastrous health problems and have difficulty just visiting relatives in another West Bank town because of the many military checkpoints and the Israeli construction of a border wall that cuts through Arab lands.
After the forum a PL’er gave out copies of two articles that the Party published recently: “A History of Middle-East Nationalism” and “A Class Analysis of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.” These articles explain how both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism have historically been promoted and used by various imperialists for their own ends, and how they offer no solution for the vast majority of the people who live in the Mid-East.
One friend of the Party asked, “Why is the Israeli occupation such an important issue for PLP? What does it have to do with communism since Palestinians seem to be nationalist and not communist?”
This is a class question since events in Palestine are tied to the current global situation of endless imperialist oil wars affecting millions worldwide. As communists we fight for the class interests of all workers exploited and oppressed by capitalism-imperialism, whether killed by Pentagon bombs in Baghdad and Kabul or by racist cops in Chicago or Stella D’Oro strikers fighting a union-busting boss. About 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in 1948, and millions today live under armed occupation or are in impoverished refugee camps.
We support their struggles just as we expose Hamas and the Palestine Authority as ruling-class elites that want to monopolize for themselves the exploitation of Palestinian workers. At the same time, Israeli rulers use anti-Arab racism to solidify their control and exploitation of Israeli workers.
As communists, PLP must show those millions who are seeing the true murderous nature of U.S. imperialism and capitalism in general that the only real solution is to unite all workers under the red flag of a communist movement to smash capitalism.
Mexico’s Militarization Crucial to U.S. Rulers’ War Plans
Facing their worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the capitalist-imperialist vultures — desperately fighting each other for their survival — are preparing for wider wars and eventually World War III. For this, the U.S. butchers must consolidate their backyard, building Fortress-North America — militarizing Canada and Mexico under U.S. command.
Using the cover of the “war on terror,” the U.S. and Mexican presidents and the Canadian Premier secretly met in 2005 and organized the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). In turn, the SPP created the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) which further consolidates U.S. domination over the Canadian-Mexican economies, a process spurred in 1994 by the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
While Canada’s bosses are not 100% behind the U.S. — they have signed oil deals with China and are building a gas processing plant with Russian money — Canada has supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is linked to U.S. arms companies as subsidiaries or sub-contractors and 87% of its exports go to the U.S.
Bosses’ Dogfight Over Oil Could Ignite Mexican Civil War
Since U.S. prosperity and security rest on imported energy, one of NACC’s main goals is privatizing PEMEX, Mexico’s state-run oil company. Last October, the PRI and PAN, two Mexican political parties supportive of SPP, voted for reforms that set up PEMEX for privatization under a “threeyear agenda” to make the required constitutional changes. But those Mexican rulers opposing privatization, represented by the PRD’s Lopez Obrador, have organized a national mass movement against it. This bosses’ dogfight could flare up into a full-scale civil war.
U.S. Assumes Military Control Over Canada-Mexico
In 2002, the Pentagon created the Northern Command for defense of the continental U.S., declaring it geographically responsible for the U.S., Canada, Mexico and parts of the Caribbean.
Now, to accelerate U.S. military plans, in May 2008 the U.S. Congress approved Plan Mexico or the Merida Initiative, allocating $1.4 billion to militarize Mexico under the guise of “fighting its drug trafficking.” In a global war, militarization will prove crucial to seize the country’s oil and its industries to produce for war and to win — or force — its youth to fight for U.S. imperialism.
A 1994 Pentagon briefing paper, declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, hinted at a U.S. invasion of Mexico if “... the country became destabilized or the government faced the threat of being overthrown because of ‘widespread economic and social chaos’...,” caused by a civil war between Mexican bosses for or against privatization, or by workers’ rebellions against the deepening economic crisis.
U.S. Militarization of Mexico Under Way and More Urgent
Mexico’s gang violence is being escalated by the U.S.-Mexican bosses to further their militarization plans. After thousands of Mexican troops were deployed in the cities, the violence is worsening; killings have more than doubled each year, with over 5,700 deaths reported in 2008.
Based on this scenario, the U.S. Joint Forces Command — with 1.6 million troops in the continental U.S. — reported last November that Mexico’s widespread violence could turn it into a failed state, “endangering U.S. security” and possibly triggering a U.S. invasion. Anticipating events, U.S. security agencies are training their Mexican counterparts. Some U.S. military elements already operate inside Mexico.
In the 1970s, the U.S. plan for world war included Fortress America, with almost the whole continent marching to U.S. imperialism’s war drumbeat. No longer. South America is forging ever stronger economic-military ties with U. S. rivals Russia, China and Europe. Central America and the Caribbean are not far behind.
This endangers U.S. strategic military bases in the region and access to its oil and other vital raw materials. With its war machine consuming almost one barrel of crude per day per soldier, controlling Mexican and Canadian oil is crucial. U.S. subsidiaries already own 33% of Canada’s oil and gas industry. The failed state forecast for Mexico is an excuse to speed up U.S. invasion preparations when it’s necessary.
Turn Imperialist War into Class War for Communism
During World War I, when Germany and Russia were at war, Russia’s communists led its working class to seize state power. Following their example, our slogans should be, “Down with capitalism! Power to the working class! Fight for communism!”
Nationalization or privatization — whether Obrador, Calderon or any politician — only serves the interests of Mexico’s bosses and their imperialist allies. Only workers’ power can guarantee that the world’s resources and production will serve the needs of the international working class. Our survival as a class dictates the destruction of this profit-thirsty capitalist system with a communist revolution, led by a mass international Progressive Labor Party of millions of workers, students and soldiers!
Homicide or Genocide?
OAKLAND, CA, February 23 — Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit cop who killed Oscar Grant, has been charged with murder. Seen as an isolated incident, the charge fits the crime. However, the murder of Oscar Grant is not an isolated incident. In Oakland, young black men are murdered at the rate of 186 per 100,000.
This is a near genocidal rate of murder. It’s a genocide that almost every politician in the Bay Area has learned to live with (Richmond and San Francisco have similar statistics). For a week after the murder Mayor Dellums was silent, until he appeared in the streets trying to subdue the protesters. The City Council and the Chief of Police said nothing. Now they act as if their silence was a “mis-judgement.” It wasn’t. It was capitalist business as usual.
A system that tolerates genocide, or near-genocide, is one that tolerates the development of fascism. Its institutions and politicians are incapable of organizing any sort of justice. Such a system must go!
In fact, rather than raise awareness of the genocide, the whole system steers public opinion away from even seeing it. Although the media reports all the murders in Oakland, it does so only as “homicides.” Likewise the Courts, as in the case of Oscar Grant, only look at “homicides.” By and large, homicides are committed by individuals, or small groups. It takes a government to commit, or be complicit in, genocide.
The media’s refusal to examine this narrows our understanding and limits our actions. CHALLENGE is the only newspaper reporting this genocidal murder rate.
Last year there were 124 murders in Oakland. Over 70% of the victims and suspects were black. Black-on-black crime is an element in this trend. Over 70% were unemployed.
Unemployed-on-unemployed crime plays an even bigger role! Add to that the racism involved in black workers’ double jobless rate; the politicians’ silence over Oscar Grant’s murder; and the failure of the bosses’ media to even print the actual murder rate of young black men, and together it’s a picture of government complicity in the genocidal situation and the vital importance of CHALLENGE, the communist newspaper.
If this year follows previous ones, the pattern will continue. As the pre-trial and then trial of Johannes Mehserle drags on, the murders of young black men will climb — to 25, 50, 75 and so on, marking a genocidal, or near-genocidal, record in the lives of young black men.
PLP has responded by increasing CHALLENGE sales. We will popularize the slogan that if Mehserle walks, we all walk out and call for similar protests as each and every genocidal milestone is reached. We will organize our May Day contingent here under these banners. It could be taken up nation-wide as well.
CORRECTION
In our previous issue (2/25), the headline on the article on page 4 from Gary, Indiana, should have read: “Gary Protestors Keep Heat On Racist Killer Kop” (not “Kop Killer”). Similarly, the headline on the first letter on page 6 should have read: “From Oakland to Athens: Solidarity vs. Killer Kops” (not “Kop Killers”).
‘Good Bosses’ are Deadly for Workers
The Bavaria brewery here in Colombia fired a former co-worker for “breaking down a machine.” He was denied severance pay although it was proven that the company’s failure to properly maintain the machine caused the breakdown. The chief of personnel told him all he could do was sue the company. A snowball in hell has a better chance than that.
Bavaria was bought by the multi-national imperialist conglomerate SAB-MILLER, one of the world’s biggest breweries. Under the guise of “job security” the company won many concessions from the workers due to the weakness of the union leadership and the workers’ lack of political consciousness. At first many workers believed SAB-MILLER was a “good boss.” Everything seemed great; the company offered bonuses, promotions and even parties. In exchange, they gave up all their labor rights, agreeing to a totally sellout contract.
But reality hit fast. The bosses’ dictatorship imposed its will on the workers. The “paradise” promised workers has now turned into a living hell. The bosses demand total submission. Any sign of dissent is punished with firings, even if workers are injured because of the bosses’ own slave-labor conditions.
This is a worldwide lesson for workers. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen U.S. auto workers make huge concessions to their bosses, with complete collaboration from the union sellouts, in exchange for “job security.” But this didn’t stop the bosses’ attacks in their boom years and have sharpened the current economic meltdown. Now GM and Chrysler have announced tens of thousands more job- and wage-cuts, following hundreds of thousands of past job losses.
There is no such thing as a “good boss.” Their only interest is reaping maximum profits, and they have the support of both the pro-capitalist union leadership and the entire bosses’ state apparatus to achieve that.
The tragic lesson workers at Bavaria and globally are learning is that being nice to the boss won’t help our class interests in the short- or long-run. PLP must win these and all workers to fight for a new system, one based on the interests of the international working class, not on the profits of SAB-MILLERs or GMs. What you do counts. Join PLP!
Red Worker, Colombia
Solidarity with Guadeloupe General Strikers Spreads to Mainland France
POINTE-A-PITRE, GUADELOUPE, February 21 — Workers and youth here are showing the world’s workers how to fight the bosses’ plans to make us pay for their international economic meltdown. Fearing that the militant two-month general strike here will spread to mainland France, French rulers have added 300 cops to the 1,000 already here. They are notoriously racist and used to repress the mostly black workers and youth here, who are beginning to rebel.
Already, D.A. Jean-Michel Prêtre has falsely accused young rebels of shooting at Jacques Bino and Peter O’Brien, two strikers driving home from the picket line. As Bino was turning his car around at a roadblock, a bullet pierced his chest, killing this husband and father, a tax worker and member of the General Confederation of Labor of Guadeloupe (CGTG) trade union.
His real killer is the French government and its strategy of stonewalling until the workers surrender.
On February 19, the government’s “new proposal” offered a 35-to-120-euro monthly bonus (paid by local bosses) to workers making under 1,850 euros a month. But bosses would not have to pay any employer’s social security contribution on the bonus for two years.
The LKP collective of unions leading the strike is demanding 200 euros a month. Under a complicated proposal, the government is offering to kick in 80 euros a month — beginning in 2010, for one year only — claiming 25,000 workers would get the bonus. But actually fewer than 5,000 would really be eligible. The proposal just drags out negotiations, hoping workers will give up.
On February 20, French Prime Minister François Fillon said it’s now up to the Guadeloupe bosses to offer a wage increase. Then Elie Domota, an LKP leader, declared, “The offers made by the bosses are very inadequate; we are continuing the mobilization.” Negotiations are to resume February 23.
The bosses and their media have emphasized the wage hike, just one of the LPK’s 120 demands. Guadeloupe poet and playwright Gerty Dambury denounced this, saying: “How many points have not been mentioned! .... Evictions from public housing projects,...youth who experience excessive unemployment and are cut off from the rest of the population by drugs and violence,...violence against women,...education — ...19 primary school classes have been without a teacher since September — ...the handicapped, whose prostheses cost 50% more than on the mainland....The list is indeed long.”
By focusing on wages, the bosses and their government hope to prevent workers from realizing low wages are integral to capitalism. With red leadership, this realization could lead workers to the only real answer: revolution to destroy capitalism. That would turn this general strike into what the bosses fear most — a school for communism.
Build Anti-Racist International Unity from the Caribbean to France!
According to a February 15 opinion poll, almost two-thirds of the French believe the Guadeloupe general strike might spread to mainland France.
On Feb. 18, a collective of associations and trade unions called for a demonstration in Cayenne, Guyane (French Guiana), for “lower prices and more purchasing power.” (Guyane is a key center for France’s space program).The trade unions on Corsica are demanding the opening of talks on the price of staple goods, “like on Martinique.” A three-month general strike by public workers paralyzed Corsica in the spring of 1989.
Various “fake leftist” groups are also calling for workers in France to follow the lead of Guadeloupe workers — but it is basically on the basis of “dump Sarkozy and vote for me” instead of “dump capitalism.”
In Paris, immigrants from the overseas départements are beginning to organize, setting up an association calling for a support demonstration. The “apolitical” Collectif DOM lobby planned to join the protest to prevent people from the overseas départements from becoming radicalized — 757,000 workers from the overseas départements live in France, according to Cabinet Solis Conseil, a market study company.
Workers in France and worldwide should follow the lead of these militant workers in the Caribbean. Anti-racism is key here since the French government is counting on racism to keep workers and youth in France from supporting and following the lead of their brothers and sisters overseas. Contrary to reformists, electoral fake-leftists and union leaders, we in PLP say racism hurts ALL workers.
The specter of May ’68 still haunts the French bosses. In order for this struggle not to be sold out like the ’68 worker-student general strike (betrayed by the French “Communist” Party), the main lesson workers must learn from it is to build an international anti-racist communist movement to smash capitalism once and for all.
‘Better’ Boeing Bosses Mean More Fascism On The Job
SEATTLE, February 23 — A 33-page rant entitled “Unacceptable,” first posted on the web, is being circulated throughout Boeing plants. Authored by a retired manager, it blames the current bosses for serious, systematic problems on every new and derivative plane development program, resulting in long delays and lost market share. The author demands Boeing bring back its pre-McDonnell Douglas merger management style.
Although initially popular because it blames the current management, this paper hides dangerous illusions. Essentially, it proposes more fascist “accountability” and speed-up as an “answer” to layoffs.
Union president Wroblewski backed-up this idea in a recent letter sent to every Machinist. After vowing to build a “positive relationship with Boeing,” he calls for management to “recognize the true value of our members.” He asks us to believe we can avoid the carnage ahead if only management would see the light.
It’s Not Bad Management, It’s Capitalism
The federal government forced the takeover of McDonnell-Douglas (MD) in 1996 when it became apparent the company’s weakened economic position was driving it to “give away the keys to the kingdom.” MD tried to preserve capital by giving 40% of its new commercial jet development to Taiwan. From the ruling class point of view, the biggest crime was trading key aerospace technology (with military applications) to the Chinese for future market share.
Then President Clinton’s economic council chief Laura D’Andrea Tyson testified this could not be allowed to continue. It would eventually weaken Boeing and the rest of the U.S. aerospace industry. The government denied McDonnell Douglas a key military contract, starving the company of capital. Boeing swooped in to pick up the pieces.
The newly-merged Boeing-McDonnell Douglas enjoyed a brief period of hegemony in the late ‘90s abetted by the collapse of the old Soviet bloc. But now the company faces competition from EU’s Airbus and a half dozen new rivals nipping at its heels, including the Brazilians, Japanese, Russians and Chinese.
Inter-imperialist rivalry is forcing Boeing to implement many of the same measures McDonnell-Douglas used more than a decade ago like seeking cheap labor. Boeing is shifting production to low-cost subcontractors which largely employ black, Latino and women workers while out-sourcing development and production of key sections of its new Dreamliner. The intensified racist and sexist exploitation in subcontractor factories was inevitable under this system as it continues to drive down wages for ALL workers for maximum profits.
Need Communist Revolution To ‘Repeal’ Laws Of Capitalism
The “falling rate of profit,” brought on by automation, leads each company and country to increase production. Too many firms produce too many planes for the market to bear. Each company is forced to attack its own workers as the crisis of overproduction spreads worldwide. Ultimately, the only way out for the capitalist is to destroy or steal his competitor’s productive capacity. In short, this means war and world war.
“Better” bosses can’t repeal these laws. In fact, better capitalists more quickly attack workers and start wars attempting to ensure their survival. Rather than plead for better management, we must reject their system and meet every attack with escalating fight-back.
One way we are doing this is with “recession pot-lucks.” We just had one to discuss the economic stimulus plan and are planning to have another in a month about immigration. These potlucks are a way for us to gather our base for not only political discussion, but to plan to up the ante against the Boeing bosses and union misleaders. We will also plan for May Day and demonstrations against layoffs during the PL Summer Project.
Communist revolution is the only way to “repeal” these laws. Under communism, we will produce for the needs of the working class, not the bosses’ profits. We will be able to welcome helping hands, distributing the fruits of our labor to the world’s workers according to need, not ability to pay. The periodic destruction of what took millions of generations to build will be relegated to the trash bin of history. The sooner we smash this dog-eat-dog capitalist system the better.
Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling
DUBLIN, IRELAND February 21 —
Some 200,000 workers and their families marched today here against a “levy” on public workers’ pensions. The size of the march — the Irish Republic population is only 4 million so it would be like 15 million marching in the U.S.— shows the anger of workers who refuse to pay for the capitalist crisis, particularly since the government has just bailed out local banks while attacking workers more. The march was headed by a pipe band of firemen and included workers of Waterford Crystal, involved in an occupation of their plant, and those from SR Technic aircraft maintenance whose 1,100-strong plant face closing. Unemployment is expected to reach 500,000.For a while Ireland was known as the Celtic Tiger, but its growth was based on speculation, construction and exports to Britain. It could now go into bankruptcy just like Iceland did.
The ICTU union leadership, forced by rising workers’ anger to call the march, is talking tough now but in the past has colluded with the bosses and government. The speech by ICTU President, Patricia McKeown, asked the workers to use the vote to change the government, instead of calling for a general strike.
The working class from Dublin to London to Guadaloupe needs to see that capitalism can never serve their interests. We must turn our anger into a revolutionary storm to get rid of all these bosses.
Shatter Capitalism’s Double-Edged Sword
Capitalism’s current worldwide crisis forces workers to work harder for less. In one industrial factory workers were told to take a $3 hourly cut or be fired. They were mad, but felt they had no choice — for now. In other factories, while overtime is cut and layoffs threatened, production quotas are being raised, with increased harassment to meet them.
Many workers are reacting to these pressures and safety hazards by slowing down production, finding ways to make fewer parts. This is growing from small spontaneous actions to more planned larger ones. One worker said, “If they’re going to be all over us, then we’ll just take our time,” a sign of more to come!
With the highest unemployment in decades many workers have to accept wage-cuts and watch their savings vanish in the crashing stock markets. We know nine-member families living in two-bedroom apartments while thousands of houses sit vacant. Anger is growing. When will enough be enough?
Competition for Maximum Profits, Falling Rate of Profit Caused this Crisis
The bosses need to make ever more profit or face rival take-overs. When fewer people are buying their products they maintain profits by squeezing more value out of the workers, and making war to destroy their rivals’ capacity to produce.
Their motto is to outdo the competition by selling more for less. One way is by spending more on technology and less on workers’ wages and benefits. Their rate of profit tends to fall because they make profit not from machines but by stealing the value we workers produce. This is a contradiction of capitalism — all profits come from workers’ labor so with more investment in technology comes a lower rate of profit.
China developed advanced manufacturing with the help of the U.S. and other imperialists so companies could invest in a super-exploited, low-wage workforce to increase profits. But with higher U.S. unemployment and lower wages worldwide, workers cannot buy all the products manufactured.
With one edge of their sword, capitalists cut jobs and wages by developing machines in which one operator can produce the work of ten. With the other edge they need us to sacrifice our wages and lives to save their profit system.
U.S. bosses blame the 3.8% decline in Gross Domestic Product on “consumer belt-tightening” (LA Times), but workers don’t have the money to spend because of these attacks. In turn, the government prints money for stimulus packages, further reducing the dollar’s value and our real wages.
Obama Can’t Change This World
The bosses hope Obama can help them climb out of this recession by shifting the blame from this capitalist crisis of overproduction to the Bush administration’s mismanagement. For this he needs workers’ support. As one worker from a sub-contracted aerospace shop said, “This is just a strategy to seduce the workers. We will still have to come to work like slaves just to pay all our bills.”
Revolution Is Our Answer!
Workers are starting to challenge speed-up, increased production quotas and unsafe conditions. In this struggle, the lasting victory is for workers to recognize that a racist, super-exploitative system that can’t provide a decent life for the people who produce for and sustain society must be destroyed, replaced by a communist system where production and all activity will be for workers’ well-being and safety. CHALLENGE’S communist ideas in these struggles help our base grow.
The anger and slowdowns show workers’ potential to act in our class interests over the long haul. We must unite to take the double-edged sword of the bosses’ exploitation out of their hands, take control of our children’s education and produce for the needs of the international working class instead of bosses’ profits.
The Progressive Labor Party consists of workers, students, soldiers and professionals who know that with time and struggle we can create a world without bosses or borders. Join us.
(For more on the falling rate of profit see CHALLENGE, 12/10/08, “Falling Rate of Profit Hits Workers in The Head”)
Book Review:
During World War 2, Communists Led Women’s Revolutionary Fight Against Fascism
March 8 is International Women’s Day. Communists say that working class women are key to fighting capitalism and all the ways it oppresses the entire working class. Ingrid Strobl’s book “Partisanas: Women in the Armed Resistance to Fascism and German Occupation (1936-1945)” shows just that. It uses original source material to explain well the important role of the Communist movement in the worldwide struggle against the Nazis.
The book focuses on the role of women in the armed struggle against fascism, dispelling the myth that women were only auxiliary forces. Women did not just clean the clothes, cook the food or tend the wounded, but picked up arms, from guns to light bulbs filled with hydrochloric acid, in fierce battles with the Nazis. They derailed trains, blew up Nazi cafés, assassinated German officers, carried secret packages and information to the underground, robbed banks to fund the underground, went hungry and cold and helped Jews hide or escape from Europe. Many risked torture and death to journey back to the occupied territories to help rescue families, loved ones and perfect strangers.
Strobl is very sympathetic to the Communist Party’s organizing of the women. She explains how many of the women “modeled themselves ... upon revolutionaries in the protracted struggle for a life of dignity for human beings upon this earth, and involved in the fight underway in Russia. And when a ... girl ... tight-lipped and head held high... gazed upon all the pictures of socialist students, those open, serene faces and closed mouths; was it perhaps not inevitable that they would make this resolution in their hearts: I undertake to live that life and do my damnedest to be that way, too?”
Many of the myths about the fact that the Nazis’ victims “went like lambs to the slaughter” are dispelled in this book. It is an invaluable resource for history teachers to teach about the international struggle against fascism, led and organized by the USSR under Stalin’s leadership. She attacks the historians who portray all of fascism’s victims as helpless and passive in the face of oppression. Confronting the world with those “who did something ... raises the issue of the Aryans who did nothing. And gets us used to the idea that we need not accept things as they are, that fighting back is possible.”
“Partisanas” advances the maxim that “it is always necessary to question who recognizes what actions as resistance and why.” We are introduced to the heroic struggle of undocumented immigrants, young Jewish men and women and others like them within the international communist movement and the Red Army that defeated fascism. Strobl really does a good job of showing how much of a force of liberation the Red Army was and how the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian nationalist forces played a counter-partisan role as they would rather shoot the Communists and the Jews than help the resistance against the Nazi occupying forces.
These women and men who fought fascism are our heroes. We in PLP firmly believe that all workers eventually, given communist leadership, will fight to destroy capitalism, the creator of fascism. We will learn from the achievements of our movement in the past and from their errors of not destroying capitalism in all its forms.
(The book is available for $21.95 on www.AKpress.org and may be available in various left-leaning book stores.)
Movie review
‘Frozen River’ — System Fails Working-Class Women
The vast majority of Hollywood movies push greed, individualism, racism and hopelessness. The movie Frozen River, which received a limited national release last year and is currently available on DVD, is a rare exception.
This is an anti-racist movie with strong female, working-class leads. This was the directorial debut for Courtney Hunt who also wrote the screenplay. Ms. Hunt was nominated for an Academy Award in the screenplay category. The star, Melissa Leo, was nominated for a best actress Academy Award. The movie has won many international awards.
Leo’s character, Ray, is a struggling dollar-store cashier, trying to raise two sons in a trailer home in upstate New York. The story begins a few days before Christmas, during a brutal winter. Ray’s husband, a chronic gambler, has already left with what little money they had. Ray has been saving to move her family into a doublewide trailer, but now is unable to pay what is owed on the new trailer. While searching for her husband, she crosses paths with a young Mohawk woman Lila (Misty Upham), who has “borrowed” Ray’s car. Ray quickly learns that Lila is involved in a smuggling operation, driving immigrants from Canada to the U.S. across the frozen St. Lawrence River. Like Ray, Lila has faced hard times: her infant son was taken from her and she is trying to raise money to get him back.
Ray joins Lila in smuggling and the two women, while hostile to each other, realize that they can make more money working together. The contradiction of workers exploiting fellow workers is never explored. The film implies that the women are caught in a bind created by the capitalist system. While Ray isn’t an outright bigot, we do sense she has some anti-Native American attitudes, and her teenage son is heard making racist remarks about Indians. Lila quickly acknowledges that whites have it a lot better than Indians. However, the audience can see that both these woman have more in common than not — the system has failed both of them.
At first, Ray is completely consumed with making enough money to pay for the larger trailer. She is rude towards Lila and doesn’t care at all about the immigrants she is smuggling across the border. However, an incident causes her to question whether her tough times have caused her to lose some humanity. Both women begin to learn more about each other and start to realize that they are both screwed by the system. Towards the end of the movie, Ray makes a huge sacrifice for Lila and Lila agrees to help Ray take care of her sons.
The movie’s plot makes it clear that the women need each other and their differences are trivial compared to what they have in common. It portrays class-conscious Native Americans who are forgiving towards Ray and her son despite their negative experiences with whites.
While this movie offers no political solutions to the plight of these people, it does make the profound point that all working people need each other and can rely on each other for support. The writer of this review also liked the fact that these women were portrayed as strong individuals, who are capable of compassion. You could see a thousand Hollywood movies and not run into one as good as this.
Friend of PLP
LETTERS
Co-Worker’s Communist Attitude Inspires PL’er
I work in a hospital in southern California. In the year I’ve worked there, I developed a friendship with a Filipina coworker who is 73 years old. She was a nice person and a really hard worker. She would walk in to work every day with her cane. She taught the new employees everything they needed to know about their job.
I asked her once why she didn’t retire. She told me that if she did retire, she couldn’t afford the medicine she needed to keep her alive. She passed away of heart failure recently, having worked until the day she died. She worked at the hospital for a little over 40 years. Capitalism sucked all her productive value her whole life. I think wanting to work, to do a good job and to teach others is what kept her going.
In the Party we believe in “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need.” She had outstanding ability to teach, but capitalism couldn’t provide her with what she needed to live...medicine. She had to be exploited in order to receive it.
There are a lot of older people working at this hospital. There are a lot of people around the world that work until they die. My co-worker is my real-life example of all these workers around the world, of my comrades’ future and my own under capitalism. I’m tired of being exploited, tired of the exploitation all around me. The only solution to this exploitative environment is to destroy the system that creates it, capitalism, and build a society that promotes the health and well being of all. I hope to learn from my co-worker’s attitude and dedicate my time to teaching my fellow workers about revolution. Sell CHALLENGE, participate in study groups and join PLP.
Red Cyclist
Priest: No Passing Marks for Belief in Marxism
Karen is a 14-year old student at a Catholic school run by priests who always preach love, tolerance, understanding and respect. But, like any other bourgeois institution, the representatives of the Vatican don’t practice what they preach.
During the school year, her parents went to many parent-teacher meetings where they were told she was doing well in her classes and in the school in general. But at the end of the year they were told that Karen didn’t pass her courses. Startled by this, they made inquiries and finally discovered why she failed: because Karen didn’t believe in God. In the same class, several students who were found drunk in class passed to the next grade. When the parents confronted the priest in charge, he said that the drunk students believed in God and therefore they were being given another chance. But Karen, a young CHALLENGE reader, was denied that second chance.
Karen and her family have always been very analytical, critical and rebellious against the inequalities of capitalism. Karen has debated many times with fellow students and teachers about aspects of PL’s line on the fight against sexism, nationalism, low wages paid to workers, police brutality, etc. This was the real reason she was attacked by the priests.
The racist, fascist double morality preached by the Church and all bourgeois institutions will continue as long as there is wage slavery. This and many other attacks just reinforce our commitment to build PLP as an international communist party to fight for a society where religion and all other reactionary ideas won’t be the opiate of the masses. Our work among young students and workers is ensuring that that day comes sooner rather than later.
A Comrad, Colombia
Postal Bosses’ Speed-up Stamping on Workers’ Jobs
The United States Postal Service (USPS) workers are under attack by the bosses in this capitalist depression. Mass lay-offs and retirement buy-outs are in the works as the union misleaders sit back and watch. The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), which represents thousands of mail carriers, meekly accepts these conditions.
I recently attended the only 2008 union meeting for NALC members in my area. The union misleader explained how every second of the carriers’ time was recorded to show how long it takes to deliver mail throughout the route. This data is then used against workers when we take as little as five minutes longer to finish the route. Capitalists always try to maximize profits by pushing workers to work more within less time, and when we don’t comply we’re threatened with write-ups and eventually termination.
The union leaders’ solution to preventing the bosses from “punishing” carriers was to fill out time-extension forms with reasons why the carrier would need an extra five or ten minutes! We were also informed of major delivery route changes and extensions that will make it possible to cut some routes and extend others while also laying-off thousands of workers.
The carriers desperately need PLP’s communist ideas to challenge the union’s passivity and unfortunately I have to keep a low profile for now because my temporary employee status gives me no job security. Some solutions we should be fighting for are shorter routes with more time to spend delivering and more full-time job openings for the many unemployed workers. But the best solution is communist revolution led by PLP so I’ll be hard at work struggling with my brothers and sisters at USPS!
Red Mail Carrier
PL Youth ‘Retreat’ Shows Big Advance
I went to the PLP retreat February 13-16. The level of the understanding of the youth is very high. They are about to become people who make up PLP, or already are members, who already understand the reform vs. revolution debate — the need to fight directly for communism.
However, I believe that we didn’t talk about anti-racism enough, but maybe that was a product of the event’s integration, or multi-racial unity. There was no racism there to speak of so maybe people forgot that it exists on such a large scale in society.
I gave my club leader $100 for the event, but he gave me back $40, saying that if I don’t need it, give it back to the Party. I am sending $20 to CHALLENGE. I know it’s not enough but it’s what I can give.
Also, I would like to see a CHALLENGE article about the NPA in France, an anti-capitalist party which says they have signed up over 9,000 people ready to move on a moment’s notice to violently overthrow the current French government. What’s up in France? An article I read by Ted Rall says they are moving to the left, even criticizing the “Communist” Party for not being left enough.
Red Worker
CHALLENGE Comment: Once the French Socialist Party blew its “left-wing” cover — resolutely
pursuing neo-liberalism, deregulation and privatization, both in power (1997-2002) and out — French bosses needed a new “left-wing” electoral party to keep workers in France tied to the election circus. Of the parties jockeying for the role, the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) wants to become the front-runner. Any NPA talk of revolution is exactly that — talk. In 2003, the Trotskyite LCR, NPA’s forerunner, stopped pretending its goal was establishing workers’ power (the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat) and has moved more openly to the right ever since. As the NY Times reported (9/12/08) in profiling Olivier Besancenot, one of the NPA leaders, he “guides his comrades towards France’s mainstream,” i.e., to the right.
Forum About Armed Insurrection
Recently our Party club in LA had a forum in which we discussed the question of armed struggle. Before this forum we had one on the elections, followed by another on the economic crisis. The idea for the most recent forum came from workers who attended the previous forums and were interested in knowing more about how the working class can take power and run society.
Much of the information for the forum came from the article, “Armed Insurrection,” written in PL Magazine in 1972. During the presentation we acknowledged the history of past revolutions and the achievements of the working class in these revolutions. We explained that armed struggle will not occur from one day to the next, and that such a process will take a long time. We explained that first we need to win people to our political line and to engage in class struggle and that revolution requires winning the masses at our work sites, schools, army bases and other sectors of society. We analyzed the failures and successes of the Communards, Bolsheviks, Chinese and Vietnamese Communists.
Workers have attended the forums because they like the information and it is helping them understand our political line. Furthermore, the workers gave money in support and took extra copies of CHALLENGE to distribute.
LA Comrades
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
World’s workers in a stir
NYT 2/15 — Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009... High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France... In emerging economies like those in Eastern Europe, there are fears that growing joblessness might encourage a move away from free-market, pro-Western policies.
Like old times, fighting eviction
NYT 2/18 — Instead of quietly packing up and turning their homes over to banks, homeowners are now fighting back. ...A broad civil disobedience campaign is starting in New York and other cities to support families who refuse orders to vacate their homes. ...Through phone trees, Web pages and text-messaging networks, the effort will connect families facing eviction with volunteers who will stand at their side as officers arrive, even if it means risking arrest.
Obama keeps US line on Israel
NYT 2/8 — We saw Mr. Obama as a symbol of justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza... This massacre killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians. (I don’t know what you call it in other languages, but in Egypt we call this a massacre.) We... wanted Mr. Obama... to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation. But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out. I imagine the same holds true for much of the greater Muslim world.
Dems continue Bush detentions
NYT 2/18 — In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials.
It’s really a war on workers
NYT 2/22 — The main problem is not that the country is catching too few undocumented immigrants. It is catching too many. Latinos now make up 40 percent of those sentenced in federal courts, even though they are only about 13 percent of the adult population. The numbers might suggest we are besieged by immigrant criminals. But of all of the noncitizen Latinos sentenced last year, the vast majority 81 percent—were convicted for unlawfully entering or remaining in the country, neither of which is a criminal offense. The country is filling the federal courts and prisons with nonviolent offenders. It is diverting immense law-enforcement resources from pursuing serious criminals—to an immense, self-defeating campaign to hunt down ... workers.
Who is La Migra arresting?
NYT 2/11 — To the Editor: When congress allocated millions of dollars to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the [stated] goal was not to lock up women who scrub toilets in courthouses after 5 p.m.; or cooks and waiters who serve authentic ethnic food; or seamstresses who work double shifts without overtime to turn out high-quality back-packs under government contracts; or meatpackers who work in hazardous conditions. But all these people were targets of ICE enforcement. Arresting these people won’t improve this country’s national security. It only terrorizes hardworking families and devastates stable communities...
