Financial Crisis Puts Schools On Bosses’ Chopping Block

Obama Checks Out While Chicago Workers Die

Racist Budget Cuts Murder Black And Latin Women

a href="#Imperialists’ Wars Worsen Rulers’ Financial Woes">Im"erialists’ Wars Worsen Rulers’ Financial Woes

Rivals Took Advantage of A U.S. Weakened by the Vietnam War

Democrat Carter Began U.S. Build-Up For Mid-East Wars

• Clinton, Obama, McCain: All War Hawks

Industrial Workers Strike Back In The South

a href="#Students, Farmworkers, Vets Get PLP Exposé of Hillary’s War Plans">S"udents, Farmworkers, Vets Get PLP Exposé of Hillary’s War Plans

Airline Bosses Attack So Workers Shut Terminal

a href="#‘Small Schools’ Ploy Part of Bosses’ ‘Creeping’ Fascism">‘Small S"hools’ Ploy Part of Bosses’ ‘Creeping’ Fascism

Electoral-Circus Stirs Intense Debate in Church

Oil, Uranium Sparking Imperialist War Over Chad

Control of Oil Routes, Military Bases Spurs U.S. Destabilization of Pakistan

LETTERS

Ideological Struggle In Our Own Families

Mexico: Patience and Political Struggle with Students

a href="#Obama’s Real Program Angers Teenagers">"bama’s Real Program Angers Teenagers

PL College Forum Links Anti-Racism To Anti-War Movement

Jobless: 7.65 Million Or 20 Million?

Shades of Hitler: Anti-Immigration Pogroms Rising

REDEYE

• Working-class savings near zero
• Loan racket uses class, race, sex
• $ystem produces excess meat

Red Immigrant Underground Whipped Nazis in WWII

Book Review: Shared Work By All Will Free All Workers

---

Financial Crisis Puts

Schools On Bosses’ Chopping Block

When we think schools, we think children, and when we think children our minds turn to the future. CHALLENGE readers know Progressive Labor Party’s view of the rulers’ plans for our class and our children: more fascism and more imperialist war.

Within this context we must examine the budget-cut attack launched against New York City’s schoolchildren. These cuts are racist, plain and simple, following the already existing fundamentally racist patterns in the city’s failing schools. Immediate cuts include "extras" — after-school, summer school and tutoring programs. It is precisely black and Latino youth — comprising 72% of the student population — who are most in need of such "extra" services. Their "future" is expendable.

These cuts are universal and across the board: $504 million over the next two fiscal years (NY Times, 2/1) — the worst in NYC in the last dozen years. Perhaps due to New York’s position as the capital of U.S. finance capital, this city may not have been reduced to Detroit’s school system, the most massively slashed in the country. But the sub-prime mortgage crisis combined with the economic downturn and the hundreds of billions poured into military expenditures put the Big Apple on the chopping block.

However, a broad-based movement opposing these cuts can emerge in the coming period. Several PLP’ers made a call at the last Delegate Assembly for a February 14th demonstration against the cuts. Despite local union leader Randi Weingarten doing all she could to torpedo it, networks and mass organizations across the system have taken up that call. This could be an important first response to "Kleingarten’s" cuts (Chancellor Klein + union president Weingarten).

PLP members will be active in any movements opposing these cuts. Where no movement exists, communists must spark one, within which we can advance our revolutionary ideas front and center.

These movements hold many dangers. The present status quo has been a school system filled with racist patterns of underachievement and widespread indoctrination, especially of anti-communism. The main political content of public education is the myth that "we all get a chance to make it in America" and "if you don’t make it, you only have yourself to blame." This message is central to the ruling class’s use of public education.

The bosses need teachers and schools to produce future soldiers, future workers and — when that fails — future prisoners. But above all else, the rulers need passive ones in their pursuit of fascism at home and imperialist war abroad. The passivity engendered by this "blame-the-victim" mentality is even more important to the ruling class than the shallow patriotic platitudes history courses push on youngsters, many of whom tune out, and rightly so.

Communists must raise this general critique of education among the broad masses through our literature and among our close friends in long-term political struggle. This necessitates a discussion of communism as the only solution.

Phony leftists and reformists will come out of the woodwork and attempt to lead mobilized masses of students, teachers and parents into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party, swallowing up an anti-budget-cut movement into Barack Obama’s contribution to the rulers’ politics — mobilizing a new generation of (mainly young) folks to "believe in America" once again. They want millions in motion for "justice" while marching behind Democratic war-makers like Hillary Clinton. Throw in a terrorist "emergency" and we have a mass base for fascism. This is the grave danger we face.

Yet the opportunities are even greater. The bosses need budget cuts in their current crisis. Tens of thousands can be introduced to our communist ideas in liberal-led movements against these cuts. Amid a passive period, the simple act of organizing a contingent of students, parents and/or teachers to attend a rally can be an important political step forward, but only if communists, fighting side-by-side with these masses, seize the opportunity to make communist politics primary. We can expose the misleaders and train new communist leaders.

Confronting police goons and administration apologists, we can expose the naked force and racist neglect that saturates the schools and the capitalist system itself. We can point out the need for revolution when we show how the bosses will grant reforms when forced to, but take them away as long as they hold state power.

Yet the masses will only draw these conclusions if communists are active. As the communist leader Lenin asserted, communist ideas come to the working class from the outside. PLP dares to follow this road today. There is much work to do and a world to win. Join us!

Obama Checks Out While Chicago Workers Die

CHICAGO, IL February 8 — "My patients are dying! My patients are dying because of your racist cutbacks," declared a Latino health care worker who treats TB patients. "You’re a murderer and I charge you with genocide!" was her "greeting" to fascist Dr. Robert Simon, interim health chief of the Cook County Bureau of Health Services (CCBHS). She stormed out as he, a guest of SEIU Local 20, began to speak at their Town Hall meeting.

Simon said, "I’m not a politician," but another worker shouted from the floor, "You’re a racist murderer." Simon, who once said, "To me, society wastes enormous energy, money and resources on [the homeless]," announced that the County health system was "on the verge of collapse if any further cuts are made." He was supporting SEIU’s push for a tax increase.

The commissioners who approved over $100 million in racist cutbacks during last year’s budget crisis sat on SEIU’s stage then and now. With Simon wielding the knife, they closed half of the 26 neighborhood clinics and laid off 1,000 doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers.

Meanwhile, as Barack Obama tours the country with hypocritical calls for "change" and "healthcare for all," he has done nothing against the racist cutbacks that are killing patients and closing public hospitals in his own neighborhood.

More cuts are threatened for March 1. County Finance chief John Daley said he was proposing 13% cuts ($108 million), closing Provident and Oak Forest hospitals, all remaining clinics and a center that treats one-third of the area’s HIV patients. Only Stroger Hospital and the Cermak clinic that treats County Jail inmates will remain.

A young worker yelled, "Are you saying we have to raise taxes on the poorest people, our patients, in order to give them health care?" "That’s right," Daley replied.

Over 1.2 million people are uninsured in Cook County. Our patients are 85% black and Latino. No one knows how many patients have died, but last year’s cuts cost almost 2,000 jobs. Stroger patients aren’t getting discharge medications and the pharmacy is down to one shift.

Less than 100 people attended the meeting, with only a few from Stroger, even though it’s nearby. Most workers couldn’t come because cutbacks have generated outrageous workloads. Many who could weren’t interested because they have no respect for the union leadership and the local politicians it serves.

PLP members at Stroger organized some workers to confront the racist budget-cutters face-to-face. The bosses and union leaders got a small taste of the workers’ and patients’ hatred for them. Most important, we and our co-workers distributed hundreds of leaflets at work, showing how racist terror and cutbacks are financing the two-BILLION-dollar-a-week war in Iraq.

While we can’t stop the current slaughter in Iraq or Chicago with reforms, by fighting back we can expand the base for CHALLENGE, strengthen our ties to workers and patients and build a fighting PLP that will eventually lead the working class from fascist terror and war to communist revolution.

Charity Hospital in New Orleans and King Hospital in Los Angeles are CLOSED! Grady Hospital in Atlanta is in critical condition. The CCBHS is already more than half closed, and Bush’s Medicare and Medicaid cuts will mean another $60 million cut on July 1! We’re in a fight for our lives. Build PLP and a mass May Day!

Racist Budget Cuts Murder Black And Latin Women

Because of budget cuts and staff reductions, almost 1,000 women with abnormal Pap smears, unusual bleeding, pelvic masses and other symptoms are waiting months to see gynecologists in the Cook County health system. The longer they’re forced to wait, the greater the risk of severe pain, cancers and life-threatening emergencies. A May 2007 report from the Chicago Foundation for Women reports more than 450,000 women in this area are uninsured, and many depend on county hospitals and clinics. The vast majority are black and Latino.

A young West Side black woman had a Pap smear performed at a clinic last April; learned in June it was positive, suggesting possible cervical cancer; and has been unable to get an appointment at Stroger Hospital for follow-up tests and evaluation. Another patient had a positive Pap smear in September and just got word she could see a Stroger gynecologist in April.

Last year, half of the community and urgent-care clinics were closed, leading to even longer waits, patients being harassed by bill-collection agencies and rumored threats of immigration raids. As a result, there were 100,000 fewer patient visits last year than in 2006, when there were 101 doctors, nurses and physician’s assistants providing basic medical services at the clinics. Today there are only 44 medical providers working longer hours, to serve hundreds of thousands of patients.

a name="Imperialists’ Wars Worsen Rulers’ Financial Woes"></">Im"erialists’ Wars Worsen Rulers’ Financial Woes

Imperialist war takes a serious toll on the domestic economy. In fact, as U.S. imperialism enters a period of "persistent" and escalating conflict a chief task of the next president will be forcing economic sacrifices from workers (as usual) but also from capitalists.

Bad "subprime" loans based on the bursting housing bubble only partly explain the current U.S. economic crisis (see CHALLENGE, 2/13). True, the unfolding mortgage fiasco drastically curtails lending and spending. But even while a handful of corporations like Haliburton grab enormous profits, the skyrocketing costs of U.S. rulers’ ever-widening wars act as a brake on profits. Government bonds to pay for the war machine — production for destruction — draw investors away from investing in production for consumption since the government bonds are more secure. That makes it harder for consumer-goods capitalists to find money to invest in their industries, out of which they reap profits from their workers’ labor. Thus, it limits their ability to increase, or even maintain, profits.

The New York Times (2/4/08) reported that the Pentagon’s proposed 2009 budget of $515.4 billion "when adjusted for inflation, will have reached its highest level since World War II....Yet those demands for money do not even include the price of refocusing the military’s attention beyond the current wars to prepare for other challenges." Nor does it include the $200+ billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not a penny of this colossal waste finances productive investment. The rulers’ war spending only destroys. U.S. bosses, meanwhile, seek to make workers pay for both recession and war through massive cuts in jobs, wages, health, education and other vital services.

Rivals Took Advantage of A U.S. Weakened by the Vietnam War

While U.S. capitalists were devoting 9% of gross domestic product (GDP) to genocide in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, their Asian and European rivals were modernizing factories and consolidating financial structures, putting the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. U.S. bosses lost global dominance in auto, electronics and other key sectors and began a permanent, one-way trend of mass destruction of manufacturing jobs. German and Japanese banks became the world’s largest.

Trade and war-related budget deficits ballooned. This, combined with pressure in the early 1970s from French banks that demanded payment in gold rather than paper money (which was losing its value because of war-caused inflation), officially ended the dollar’s "good-as-gold" status. The U.S. had to abandon gold payments because of insufficient stockpiles, so French capitalists and others demanded even more paper money payments to compensate for devalued dollars. This further weakened U.S. economic prestige.

"Stagflation" (negligible growth combined with inflation) took hold. Working families’ incomes, which had more than doubled between 1946 and 1973, now grew less than one percent per year against inflation. Today, the income of a young man in his thirties is 12% below what it was for a worker at that same age 30 years ago, working two weeks more annually and "putting in 350 more hours per year than the average European." (Robt. Reich, Financial Times, 1/29)

Democrat Carter Began U.S. Build-Up For Mid-East Wars

The military component in today’s money crunch stems directly from the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Emboldened by the 1975 fall of Saigon, foreign rivals started assailing the cornerstone of U.S. imperialism’s economic empire, its Middle East oil racket. When Islamists (who later befriended Russia and China) seized Iran in 1979, Democrat Jimmy Carter threatened war against any nation with designs on United States’ "vital interests." Having lost both a major source of crude and a military ally in Iran, Carter vowed that the U.S. would deploy its own armed forces in the region.

Carter launched the Rapid Deployment Force which soon expanded into the Pentagon’s Central Command that has now invaded Iraq twice at enormous expense. The U.S. effort to oust the Soviets from strategic Afghanistan in the 1980s has backfired into an open-ended, cash-burning war against the U.S.’s former Taliban allies and their al Qaeda protégés. Even with only 55,000 troops in Iraq by 2013, U.S. rulers admit they will have thrown away $3.5 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2017. ("War at Any Price?" a Congressional Democrats’ report, November 2007)

For the foreseeable future, U.S. rulers’ need to control the Mid-East will saddle them with costly, protracted, Iraq-style wars of occupation. The Army’s newly-revised operations manual "describes the United States as facing an era of ‘persistent conflict’ in which the American military will often operate among civilians in countries where local institutions are fragile and efforts to win over a wary population are vital." (NY Times, 2/8/08) The report on the manual is filled with phrases such as "long, grueling struggles"; "blueprint to operate over the next 10 or 15 years"; "how to prepare for future conflicts."

Eyeing a laundry list of potential hot spots, the liberal Brookings Institution calls for vast expansion of U.S. armed forces. "Even greater increases in the size of the ground forces [than the 65,000 added soldiers and Marines already approved] may be prudent. Highly plausible scenarios involving Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other large countries (such as Indonesia, Congo, and Nigeria) illustrate the need to provide the next President with the capacity to muster large new forces without delay" (Brookings, Independent Ideas for Our Next President).

Growing threats to U.S. rulers from China and Russia, however, stand to push Pentagon expenditures way beyond their current 4% of GDP levels. During the budget debate, phony "anti-war" Congressman John Murtha declared, "We [need]… a military that can deploy to stop China or Russia or any other country that challenges us. I want to be prepared in case there’s a confrontation about energy." (Reuters, 2/5/08) Such a clash would eat up trillions.

Clinton, Obama, McCain: All War Hawks

Make no mistake. Clinton and Obama aren’t calling for higher taxes on the rich to pay for social programs. Both promise to expand U.S. ground forces, Obama by 92,000 troops. Staunch defenders of the profit system, Clinton and Obama are every bit as militaristic as war-hawk McCain. Voting for any one of them will only select the next warmaker. While we have focused on the dollars wiped out by the war machine that all the candidates serve, the cost in workers’ lives has been horrific and will intensify.

Capitalism, which ceaselessly creates economic panics and imperialist wars, will always squeeze and destroy workers’ lives. Don’t vote. Join and build the Progressive Labor Party to achieve the long-term goal of communist revolution, the only answer to the horrors of the profit system.J

Industrial Workers Strike Back In The South

On February 1, about 2,500 members of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2069 struck the Volvo Trucks North America plant in Dublin, Virginia, after failing to reach a new contract. Workers had voted by a 95% margin to walk out. The plant builds all Volvo trucks sold in North America.

Volvo is seeking wage and benefit concessions, and trying to roll back many health and safety protections in the current contract. Layoffs have reduced the workforce by 300 while the strike has put another 650-job cut on hold. A Volvo spokesman told the Roanoke Times, "We’re considering…keep[ing] the plant running as close to full production as soon as possible," but gave no strike-breaking details.

This battle reflects a reaction to a 20-year movement of U.S. auto production to the South, impelled by a massive investment of European and Asian auto billionaires in the highly profitable U.S. market. Historically intense racism, going back to slavery, has created a huge low-wage region in the South. No wonder that, while Ford, GM and Chrysler plants close in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, Mercedes, Hyundai and Toyota plants are opening in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Since 2000, 15,000 parts-supplier plants have opened in Southern states, according to the UAW National Organizing Department.

This example of the inter-imperialist rivalry rages from China to the U.S. as the world’s auto bosses fight for markets, resources and cheap labor. Imperialism inevitably leads to war, and as this rivalry sharpens, wars are spreading globally. Only communist revolution can end imperialism and its wars for good.

As industry increasingly heads south to exploit cheaper, unorganized labor, attacks will intensify and sharpening class battles will be waged by the region’s industrial workers. Just recently six workers were killed and many injured in a sugar factory explosion in Georgia.

Another fight involves the jobs of the Freightliner Five — Glenna Swinford, Franklin Torrence, Robert Whiteside, Allen Bradley and David Crisco, members of UAW Local 3520 — who were fired at the Freightliner truck plant in Cleveland, North Carolina on April 3, 2007. They had led a strike of 3,000 workers. Four were members of the Voluntary Organizing Committee (VOC) that organized the plant in 2003, the country’s largest manufacturer of the big Class 8 heavy trucks. They’re asking for, and getting support from workers worldwide.

The five were on the 11-member union bargaining committee fired by Freightliner. Six got their jobs back, but had to sign agreements requiring them to be "model employees." The other five were not offered their jobs on any terms.

In 2002, Freightliner and its parent company DaimlerChrysler, cut wages an average of $1.15/hr and imposed healthcare cutbacks. Between 2003 and 2006, over 6,000 workers joined the UAW at Freightliner plants in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. Robert Whiteside, a black worker, was elected shop chair, the union leader on the shop floor. He also headed the Local’s bargaining committee.

The bosses refused to meet with him. Daimler and Freightliner demanded give-backs, despite Daimler’s truck group record $2.6 billion profit in 2006. The bosses broke off negotiations, announced layoffs and voided the union contract and healthcare coverage. The workers followed the bargaining committee’s lead and walked out.

The strike was quickly called off by the Local President, claiming it had not been sanctioned by the UAW International. Workers rejected a tentative agreement that excluded the health and safety gains sought by the bargaining committee. But soon afterwards a similar contract was ratified in a vote held on company property, from which the five fired workers were banned.

The Freightliner Five continue to fight for their jobs. Their unemployment benefits are exhausted and they need help to support their families and to continue the fight.

This fight resembles the struggle of the Charleston 5, members of the International Longshoreman’s Association Local 1422 in Charleston, S.C., who were fired and arrested after police attacked their picket line several years ago. Next month marks the one-year anniversary of the strike of over 7,000 shipbuilders in Pascagoula, MS, against Northrop-Grumman, a major war contractor.

Slowly but surely, the red flag of communist revolution is being planted in the South by the PLP. With patience and a long-term outlook, by building ties based on struggle and spreading CHALLENGE, industrial workers will lead the way in building a mass PLP.

For more information about the Freightliner Five, including how to make donations, go to http://justice4five.com.

a name="Students, Farmworkers, Vets Get PLP Exposé of Hillary’s War Plans"><">S"udents, Farmworkers, Vets Get PLP Exposé of Hillary’s War Plans

Ten thousand people lined up around our college campuses to try to hear Hillary Clinton speak at a campaign rally. While they stood in a long single file line we were there with CHALLENGE and a leaflet exposing Clinton’s support for war and exposing the DREAM Act as a preparation for war. The flier quoted her website: "The DREAM Act would also strengthen our nation’s military readiness, allowing these well-qualified young men and women to serve their country with honor." A teacher-comrade explained as she handed out the leaflet: "I know the rulers’ plans for my students — war." Nearly everyone took our literature from her including both the flier and CHALLENGE. We also explained that it wasn’t just about Clinton, but that all the candidates, Clinton, Obama, and McCain, support wider war in the Middle East and war with China in the future. We tried to show that no matter the candidate, it is the system of capitalism that causes and requires war.

At the rally Clinton pushed race and racism as she played up the support she received from the United Farm Workers (UFW) and attacked Barack Obama. She tried to use the UFW to lie that she supports working-class struggles, invoking the name of another union sell-out: Cesar Chavez (he attacked militancy and undocumented workers as the head of the UFW). We made sure to talk with the farmworkers and give them CHALLENGE/DESAFIO as they left. We also had a good conversation with some Iraq war veterans who were there to protest against Clinton and the continued war in Iraq. One vet agreed that it was imperialism that caused war and that we would have to completely change the economic system. He got a CHALLENGE and we got contact information as well.

One important lesson we learned is that appearances can be deceiving. Many seemingly die-hard Clinton supporters or Democrats were just looking for a change and were interested when we argued that change could not come about through elections. We saw that people with Clinton or Obama buttons liked the idea that only communist revolution could create change. This showed many of us the importance of talking to people about our line of communist revolution no matter their T-shirt or button.

Airline Bosses Attack So Workers Shut Terminal

NEW YORK, NY –– Airport workers recently stopped work in response to bosses’ attacks. An understaffed crew of ramp workers, who direct plane movement and load luggage, was given a third flight, above the usual two, within two hours, without any break time. The workers decided to show the bosses who really had the power to move the planes. When the third flight approached the gate before the second had even been finished, one worker called on another to stop the third plane.

"If they’re going to give us this many flights, somebody is gonna have to wait," he told his coworkers.

The second worker signaled to hold the plane in the middle of the taxiway. Soon another plane began to push out, causing a gridlock. The ramp workers brought terminal operations to a halt and demonstrated the power workers acting collectively can seize.

Because of their strategic importance to the domestic economy and the movement of troops for imperialist wars, the airline can’t afford to allow many such angry actions. The airline bosses strategically use racism, sexism and ageism to pay employees less and keep them from fighting back more often.

Workers have different pay scales depending on their job category. Ramp workers start at $10/hour and only reach $18/hour after an exhausting 10-year wage progression. This system is designed to promote high turnover so that the bosses can continually hire new employees at the lowest wage possible. More than half the ramp workers have been on the job for less than 5 years. The seniority system promotes racism and ageism by forcing the younger, mostly black and Latino, workers into undesirable late shifts. The bosses use "part-time," 30-hour-a-week workers for the last shift so that they will not have to pay time-and-a-half if workers stay late due to delays. Most workers on the late shift have another job and must put in 12- and 14-hour days to survive.

For cabin service workers, mainly women, conditions are even worse: $8.50/hour, with no progression and no benefits. The airlines get away with this theft by using a sub-contractor. Bus drivers make slightly better pay but still get screwed by being overworked with no time-and-a-half pay even for 18-hour days to cover for sick coworkers when the airline bosses refuse to increase hiring.

The latest attacks spurred one worker to say to a PLP member that "this is why we need to strike, so they’ll respect us." As long as capitalism exists, workers will never get the wealth they produce. Even if all airport workers obtained better wages, they would still pale in comparison to the thousands in profit generated for the bosses with each flight.

Resistance like this teaches workers valuable lessons about their place in the system: the bosses need workers to produce anything, but the workers don’t need bosses. When workers grasp this idea it is a victory on the road to a new world. For workers to win more than reforms that the bosses will reverse, they need more than anger and spontaneity; they need the communist analysis found in CHALLENGE. More readers of CHALLENGE and more members of PL could take even more meaningful action at this airport. Workers united with soldiers and students under the banner of the communist PLP can smash capitalism to establish a society for all workers.

a name="‘Small Schools’ Ploy Part of Bosses’ ‘Creeping’ Fascism"></a>‘Sma"l Schools’ Ploy Part of Bosses’ ‘Creeping’ Fascism

NEW YORK CITY — In discussions with friends, I’ve often mentioned that the working class is living under growing fascist conditions, but some disagree. They ask, "Are storm troopers kicking down the door to your house? If not, then we don’t have fascism."

But the ruling class doesn’t want to control the working class by kicking down doors all the time (although sometimes it does. see Shades of Hitler, p.7). Some control is more subtle, slowly adding more and more fascist conditions over time so we’re deep in the middle of it before we know what hit us. For communists, it’s important to fight such trends.

Throughout the country there is a rush toward replacing larger schools with smaller ones. Among my friends with whom I work in our school I’ve raised the idea that this move is really "creeping" fascism. In New York City, the Chancellor has mandated the closing of large comprehensive high schools to be replaced by smaller ones, as is happening in my school.

They tell us the large schools are "not meeting students’ educational needs." Although our school was improving somewhat, the bosses say it "wasn’t improving fast enough."

The attack has a distinctly racist character since the majority of the school closings are in predominately black and Latino working-class neighborhoods. Currently the bosses feel they don’t have enough support or soldiers for their wars and think that one way to change this is to win these youth in the schools, and in the classroom, to patriotic support of their imperialist adventures.

I told my colleagues the rulers are closing the large schools to maintain more control, especially in the classroom. The students are their main targets.

Fascism in Schools Has Many Forms

This strategy is fascist for several reasons. These small schools have fewer students (although the same large class size) and so needed staff is also smaller, which is much easier to watch and control than a larger one.

Few veteran teachers are hired at the small schools. Mostly younger, newer teachers staff them. The latter aren’t tenured and usually are on probation, blunting their ability to fight-back against attacks on students and staff. A "55/25" proposal — allowing a teacher with 25 years of service to retire at 55 without penalty — is being dangled before more experienced teachers.

Small-school principals have greater power over the staff. At one Brooklyn school a principal rated 10 of 40 teachers "unsatisfactory." At another school, union meetings are practically forbidden. When some staff did call one, they were ordered into the principal’s office to explain their action. The administration more easily knows everything occurring at these schools, making organizing more difficult.

The greatest fascist danger at these schools is the change in the relationship between the working class and the ruling class. Communists believe that the class interests of teachers, students and parents are opposed to the administration’s (bosses’) interests. These small schools spread a "we" philosophy, the "we" uniting the staff and administration. If one doesn’t follow the principal’s goal for student achievement, that teacher is ostracized from the rest of the staff.

For example, many teachers in these small schools work hours on their own time, without being paid overtime. If teachers refuse, they’re labeled "slackers." Teachers go along with this anti-working-class thinking unwittingly, furthering fascism’s talons in the backs of the workers.

The majority of these small schools are housed — up to three or four — in a structure that used to contain one large school. The building is carved up into different sections to fit each school, often leading to a fight for space. Students who happen to wander down the "wrong" hallway may be considered "trespassers," subjecting them to disciplinary action.

The fight over space forces students to share the little existing space. Gymnasiums and cafeterias that once served one school must now accommodate up to four schools. This not only pits staff members against each other, but also student against student.

School Closing Is Attack on Working Class

The news that our school was closing devastated most of my colleagues. Many have been there 20 years or more. For some, this was the only school at which they’ve taught. The immediate response was depression, then anger (usually toward the principal or other administrators) and then fear — from not knowing where they’ll teach next year, not knowing what will happen next.

Many might not recognize this as growing fascism, but this is how it "creeps" into our lives, with workers concentrating on where to go next rather than on organizing. As workers "adjust" and get used to this level of attack by the bosses, it only enables the rulers to go further. This move to smaller schools is an attack on the working class, not "just another change in the schools."

As we fight it, we must win teachers, students and parents not only to see it as growing fascism, but also to understand why the rulers are resorting to such attacks — the better to control us and win the youth, in preparation for unending wars against imperialist rivals. Ultimately, only communist revolution can defeat fascism because its source: capitalism.J Red Teacher

(Series continues next issue)

Electoral-Circus Stirs Intense Debate in Church

My church youth group has talked a lot about the elections lately. These young adults used to be reluctant to talk about politics, but now there is lots of enthusiasm, especially among the first-time voters. Several waited for hours to see Clinton and reported happily that they had seen CHALLENGE sellers there, too. Many are enthralled by Obama.

This is the savvy "YouTube generation," but their reasons were incredibly superficial: "I just like him" or "She won the debate." Nobody seemed to know the candidates’ positions, other than "she’s for health care, he’s for change," or whether they differ on anything substantial. One older adult was the most enthusiastic, saying that "Obama is inspiring a whole generation of youth to get involved in the electoral process." About half of the young people just listened, and one said later that she "wasn’t really into the elections."

Another adult, known as a radical, was pressed to say who she really wanted to be president. She replied, "We’re on an out-of-control runaway train with no brakes, headed toward a cliff, and you are asking who I want to drive it. I think we should all get off the train, as quickly as we can!" Several young CHALLENGE readers said, "yeah, but communism didn’t work." But they agreed to invite a student comrade to talk with the group later.

One of the sharper exchanges came when someone offered to bet on the return of a military draft within the first term of any Democratic administration. "Why do you think Obama would do that?" someone asked. "Because the main message of his campaign is to get young people to feel that ‘we’re all in this together, part of a liberal multi-racial, anti-sexist America’ and the logical conclusion is ‘everybody should do National Service’ which would turn into a draft" she said. Most looked unhappy with this idea, but nobody argued against it.

In an anti-racism class at the church on election night, almost everyone self-identified as a Democrat and seemed to agree when the minister said whichever Democrat won would be wonderful. But nobody actually claimed that the Democrats would improve things. Instead they talked about how a black or female president would be a "symbol" of change for the better. Several were excited that Internet developments have "democratized American politics." On the other hand, several people pointed out that the constant media talk about the "black vote" and "Latin vote" and the "female vote" builds even more racism.

I was a little surprised when some CHALLENGE readers shared the general hopefulness about the elections, because these good friends are open to the ideas that capitalism can’t be reformed and that we can’t end racism without ending capitalism. But their idea of having a "long-term perspective" is that incremental "gains" made through electoral politics will lead eventually to revolutionary developments.

Now a long-term perspective depends on understanding that small changes can create conditions for a revolution. But what kind of changes? Not winning small reforms but winning people - by ones and twos and in larger groups – little by little, closer to the communist movement PLP is building.

Most of my friends don’t yet fully agree that it’s meaningless to talk about "democracy" when we live under a capitalist dictatorship. And we need to talk more about what real mass participation will be like under a revolutionary dictatorship of the working class.

These conversations have led to a new regular CHALLENGE reader, with plans to show the paper to four more people. Being deeply involved in this church has created wonderful opportunities for sharp, friendly, long-term political struggle over racism, the bosses’ electoral circus and for communism.

Oil, Uranium Sparking Imperialist War Over Chad

Chad is the latest tinderbox to explode in Africa, and the world. Just in recent weeks, bloody conflict has erupted in "stable" Kenya, more war in Congo and continuous armed clashes in Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta region, among others. These fights have something in common: they’re caused by imperialism and local capitalists who have intensifies all the contradictions in the region, while the working masses pay with their lives.

After the Chad government and four rebel groups signed a cease-fire last October, fighting broke out again in early February. Rebel forces attacked N’Dajema, Chad’s capital, trying to oust strongman Idriss Deby. Chad is one of Africa’s poorest countries, but only for the people, not for its rulers and the imperialist corporations raking in big bucks here.

In 2003, after completion of a $3.7 billion pipeline linking its oilfields to Atlantic coast terminals, landlocked Chad became an oil exporter.

The Doba pipeline — operated by Exxon Mobil with partners Chevron and Malaysia’s state-run Petronas — pumps 160,000 barrels a day through Cameroon to the Gulf of Guinea.

Last September, Chad’s national oil refiner signed a joint venture deal with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), parent of PetroChina and China’s largest oil and gas producer. PetroChina says it has discovered at least 100 million tons of oil at a new project in Chad. (Reuters Factbox, 2/3)

Despite the oil revenues, there’s been no real improvement in most Chadians’ standard of living. Chad remains one of the world’s poorest countries, ranked 171 out of 177 in the UN development index, which uses criteria such as average income, life expectancy and literacy.

The rebels, which include some former high-ranking members of the Deby government, have support from Sudan, which sees Deby as backing anti-Sudanese government forces in Darfur. There are actually 300,000 refugees from Sudan and the Central African Republic living in UN camps in Chad. Thousands of Chadian refugees are fleeing the latest fighting.

France is still a leading trading partner of Chad, a former French colony. President Sarkozy claims he’s trying to break with old French policies of using military force to prop up corrupt regimes in Africa’s former French colonies, choosing diplomacy instead. But the military option is still open. France’s 1,500 troops lead the biggest European Union "peacekeeping" force that’s ever been here, as part of MINURCAT (UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad), supposedly to protect refugees from these two neighboring countries in the Chad camps. Small COS (French commando) groups are also operating in the border of Sudan and Central Africa, spying on rebel groups fighting the Chad government. And then Chad’s western neighbor Niger is France’s main source of uranium to fuel its nuclear reactors on which France is totally dependent to produce its electricity.

Thus, the fighting in Chad is becoming another regional war, involving Sudan and the Central African Republic, French and European troops, Exxon, Chevron, Malaysia’s Petronas and China’s CNPC (the main oil company in Sudan). Even Libya’s ruler, Col. Khaddafi, now a darling of Paris, is allowing French military planes operating in Chad to refuel in Libya airfields (Le Canard Enchaine, 2/6). The rivalry among the various imperialists and their oil companies to control the energy supplies of Africa and the world is intensifying the conflict.

All this is a recipe for endless imperialist wars, mass poverty and massacres. Indeed, for Africa’s toiling masses the choice is increasingly between imperialist-capitalist barbarism or uniting to smash these bloodsucking exploiters. It won’t be easy to break the many barriers the imperialists and local rulers use to divide the continent’s workers and peasants, and build a revolutionary communist movement, but it is the only viable solution to this hell.

Control of Oil Routes, Military Bases Spurs U.S. Destabilization of Pakistan

"The Pakistani working class widely believes that the country’s military and ISI (its secret service) is supporting terrorist groups. They see how freely terrorists move about the country with heavy equipment, even rocket launchers," said a community organizer. "Suicide bombers usually attack in crowded working-class neighborhoods. The police and army don’t protect the people living there, they only protect the rich and government officials."

According to a January 15 NY Times report, a former Pakistani official acknowledged that dozens of ISI officers support the jihadis even as others in the ISI and army fight them.

The chaos and terrorism may very well be leading to a U.S.-driven destabilization and break-up of the country, accompanied by U.S. militarization, as happened in Yugoslavia. A 2005 report by the U.S. National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a "Yugoslav-like fate" for Pakistan.

U.S. rulers can hardly support Pakistani president Musharref given his lack of support in the country. With his imposition of a state of emergency and the assassination of U.S.-backed Benazir Bhutto — which precipitated the current crisis — his government has lost even the fig-leaf of a "democratic" state, which could speed the break-up process.

Evidence points to the U.S. destabilizing the country, taking advantage of its history — a Muslim nation carved out artificially by British imperialism. For the Pakistani working class, "Balkanization" means more exploitation and repression and more deaths.

The U.S. is fomenting social, ethnic and religious strife. In Balochistan (one of the country’s four provinces), the U.S. and Britain have been covertly supporting the BLA — the Balochistan Liberation Army — which closely resembles the Kosovo Liberation Army in Yugoslavia. The split-up of — and U.S. military intervention in — Yugoslavia, enabled the U.S. to build one of the world’s largest military bases there.

Militarization of Balochistan to control its potential wealth from other imperialists is critical. Balochistan is strategically important, bordering on the Arabian Sea near the Straits of Hormuz through which passes 30% of the world’s oil. The province also has untapped oil and gas, while pipelines are slated to pass through it from Iran to India. U.S.-backed terrorists are already scaring off Chinese capitalists and workers. Engineers building a deep seaport at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea have returned to China. The U.S. military is already using the area for commando forays into Iran.

The U.S. also has several military bases in Pakistan; controls the country’s airspace; and is carrying out bombings from the Afghan side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Those attacks, plus Pakistani Army helicopter gunship bombings, suicide bombers and fighting between Islamic radicals and soldiers all have killed thousdands of civilians. Meanwhile, since 2003 the U.S. military has more than doubled its troop strength in Afghanistan, from 9,000 to 22,500.

Another part of the U.S. "Balkanization" plan is to send U.S. troops into Pakistan. Washington is pressuring the Pakistani government — in the name of the "war on terrorism" — to allow U.S. Special Forces to pursue the Taliban from Afghanistan into Pakistan – a move, incidentally, backed publicly by presidential aspirant Barack Obama. So far Pakistan’s army has agreed to a small number of Special Forces to work alongside the 100,000 Pakistani soldiers deployed in the border regions. A deal is underway for the U.S. to train 60,000 additional Pakistani soldiers in the "war on terror."

"Don’t underestimate the Pakistani masses," declared the community organizer. "The Pakistani army, 60% from the Punjab ethnic group and 40% Pathan, has lost more soldiers since 2001 than the U.S. has lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Already some soldiers are refusing to fight. In both ethnic groups soldiers see that they are killing other working-class families and may very well come to understand they must turn the guns on their own commanders and on the imperialists.

There are Pakistani workers who agree with PLP that nationalism is not the solution. That is only a fight for a different boss — a Balochistani boss will replace a Punjabi or a Pathan. Workers have no borders. "The answer to "Balkanization," concluded the community organizer, "is for all workers in all the provinces as well as those in neighboring India, Iran and Nepal to build one single party that takes them successfully on the road to communist revolution."

LETTERS

Ideological Struggle In Our Own Families

Recently, a reporter on TV talked about workers in Haiti who are forced by poverty to eat cookies made from mud and sugar. He said that Haiti is very poor and that we don’t have to go as far as Africa to see such horrendous conditions.

I talked with some family members who heard the reporter; one said that we have to pray for god to help these workers resolve their situation; another person said that we should eat less to feel their pain; another said that this was their problem and that we shouldn’t give too much importance to the situation, adding that we can’t change things and things will always be like this. At this moment it was hard to carry out the ideological struggle since people were starting to get mad and from experience, I knew a conversation now would be unproductive.

I waited until later and then spoke to my brother about it, saying that none of these statements were correct, explaining the world situation, wars for oil profits, racism, exploitation, the situation with immigrants, and the U.S. debt, which is forcing many people into the streets even in the U.S. itself. He started to ask me about society’s problems and the origin of the bosses’ wealth, asking how we could get rid of all that. I replied that only a revolution can get rid of all the bosses and worldwide poverty, a revolution that must be communist. I’ve given him three editions of CHALLENGE and we’ve discussed some articles.

I understand that all this is a process, and that it’s not only in the classroom that we can carry out the ideological struggle and win more people to join the Party. We can find revolutionary potential in our own families. For communist revolution, let’s unite workers and their families of the world!

Red Sister in Mexico

Mexico: Patience and Political Struggle with Students

In our university when we question our friends’ concept of reality the ideological struggle begins to intensify. Some choose to change the subject in order to keep things friendly. But, others become more interested and continue to question the status quo more deeply. The minute the conversation becomes more political, the most important thing for us is how to bring these people closer to the Party.

Sometimes, the obstacles set up by capitalism make us feel disappointed, thinking that our friends won’t ever join the Party. We have made the mistake of not making a plan to recruit the people close to us. This happened with a couple, who regularly gets CHALLENGE-DESAFIO but the woman ended joining another group while her boyfriend remained on the margin of our political work.

We’re growing modestly; three new friends are attending study groups and we are talking to our friends about the Party and inviting many more to our study group. We understand that it’s a long-term struggle, which requires patience and urgency, ideological struggle and organization. Even though we’re youth, we know that for revolution there’s no age. Youth of the world, let’s join the revolutionary struggle for communism!

Red Students, Mexico

a name="Obama’s Real Program Angers Teenagers">">"bama’s Real Program Angers Teenagers

A high school student told us about his discussions in a Government class focusing on the election. Over time, we have talked about how capitalism works for profit, not to make things better for everyone, who really rules by controlling the government, and U.S. competition with other capitalists causing attacks on workers domestically and wars around the world for control of oil.

This student said that listening to Obama’s speeches "I hear a lot of vague things about health care and hope, no specific plans or reforms. Most people at my school see Obama as the anti-Bush…this amazing orator who promises great things and an end to the war…he has something in common with us…he’s black…I’ve noticed that my friends don’t have an alternative to looking just at the individuals, not at the system."

He took a copy of Foreign Affairs to his Government class in which a featured article described Obama’s foreign policy: redeployment to "protect American facilities and personnel, . .refocus on Afghanistan and Pakistan… so that we are confronting terrorists. . . revitalize the military, 92,000 expansion. . . I will not take the military option off the table." (July/August ’07)

The student told us that when Obama’s supporters looked at the article, "they got pissed off…felt he let them down…Some were just surprised when they read the specifics."

The teacher had taken students to hear Obama but had not read the article or promoted discussion of this information in the class! He did tell the class that he would be happy to sponsor a young Democrats or young Republicans club on campus. At this, our friend told us "my friend and I joked to ourselves, why don’t we have a "young revolutionaries club?"

This is certainly a jumping off place for the observation that the ruling elite needs elections to limit thinking on what "ending the war" means. Or questions: Why do the rulers need Obama to give young people who want change some hope in the existing system? What is the likelihood that Obama will fundamentally change the system? Whether they vote or not, a clearer understanding of class rule is one step towards considering armed revolution as a needed alternative for making change. Youth who are joking around about a young revolutionaries club are already looking beyond elections!

Red Transit Worker

PL College Forum Links Anti-Racism To Anti-War Movement

New York, NY, Feb. 5 — Recently, some 30 professors, teachers and students attended a PLP forum on racism. In preparation each person was asked to read a packet of articles reprinted from CHALLENGE on the Jena 6 case and the PL History series about the 1975 struggle against the racist ROAR organization in Boston.

The first speaker gave an extensive explanation of the Party’s position that the concept of "race" and racist ideology were created by the capitalist system to divide the working class and maintain power. It was also pointed out that profits capitalists gain from super-exploiting black and Latin workers are essential for survival of their system.

The next presenter led us in discussion about the bosses’ need to win workers to racism in order to get workers to fight in their endless imperialist wars. The student presenter explained that when soldiers enter the U.S. military they are bombarded with racist ideas: "Those people are different from us. They have no respect for human life. They are inferior." Without this racist brainwashing, workers would balk at orders to massacre non-combatants and torture prisoners.

One of our friends remarked that if racism had a brother it would be nationalism. He said that racism, nationalism and religion were all divisive and that our task was to unite the international working class.

A lively discussion followed about many of the manifestations of racism in education and on the campuses. Not only must we confront military and CIA recruiters when they come to campus, but we must investigate and expose how the university is involved with research that helps the military and promotes racism.

In addition we must increase our efforts to bring the anti-racist struggle into the anti-war movement. Campus anti-war committees should discuss racist issues such as the Jena 6. In our unions we must address racism as well as opposing the war.

After the discussion we saw a documentary film "Another Brother" which deals with the racism faced by black soldiers in Vietnam and upon their return home. Our next planned forum is entitled "For a World Without Borders: A Communist Perspective on Immigration."

This electoral year, more HS and college youth are being won to vote. Because of the dangerous illusion that Obama and to a lesser extent Hillary represent "change," it is important to demonstrate more openly our revolutionary alternative to these politicians. Their only "change" will be to expand the current wars and make us pay more for the capitalist economic meltdown. Being involved in mass organizations, using CHALLENGE and having frequent party-building events are necessary to make our Party grow.

Jobless: 7.65 Million Or 20 Million?

While the U.S. government announced a 17,000 job-loss for January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also said the unemployment rate has actually declined to 4.9% based on 7.65 million jobless. What fraud! The government’s definition of an unemployed worker is one who has looked for a job in the last four weeks. This, of course, does not include:

• 4.8 million working part-time who want full-time jobs;

• 5.0 million who haven’t sought employment in the last four weeks or longer, including "discouraged" workers, those who’ve stopped looking for non-existent jobs (above figures from NY Times, 2/2/08);

• 1.6 million in prison (of the total 2.4 million) for non-violent crimes, mostly on drug possession charges — who are not imprisoned in rehabilitation-oriented Western Europe — and being among the least skilled would probably add to the jobless figures.

Add those to the government unemployment figure and the total becomes 19 million, or approximately 2½ times the reported 7.65 million! This still does not include unemployed youth who seek "jobs" as part of the 1.4 million in the military, nor several million still on welfare who would want to work if child-care were available. (Welfare recipients forced into Workfare in New York City replaced 20,000 unionized workers on the municipal workforce, according to a March 2001 report from the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.)

So the number of U.S. workers denied full-time civilian jobs has certainly passed 20 million. Because of racist discrimination, the jobless percentage for black workers (9.2%) is more than double that of whites (4.4%). But even those figures are under-estimates since that 9.2% figure excludes the greater percentage of black workers trapped into prison and onto welfare.

There never has been full employment under capitalism, nor can there be. As bosses compete against each other for maximum profits, especially globally, their first cost-cutting measure is laying off workers, constantly searching for the lowest wage-rates. Now, especially during economic crisis, mass layoffs are the order of the day, as the bosses try to shift the burden of that crisis onto the backs of the working class.

But basing profits on non-productive sources only worsens the crisis. Schemes like subprime mortgage fiascos and hedge funds do not produce new value; only manufacturing workers can do that, and U.S. manufacturing is constantly declining. The trillions in credit and trade debts, and the borrowing to pay the $1.7 trillion cost of their imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will deepen the economic crisis still further.

So no matter who becomes the next President, Hillary, Obama or McCain, the bosses will need more of a fascist police state, to make workers pay even more for their wars and crisis and to try to stop any working-class rebellions against this squeeze on their jobs and wages. And this is why workers need a system that is free of all bosses and profits and the stealing of the value we workers produce — a system in which all this value is shared according to need — and need a party, PLP, which fights for that system: communism.J

Shades of Hitler: Anti-Immigration Pogroms Rising

ARIZONA, Feb. 12 — The Giants-Patriots championship game was one of the most exciting Super Bowls in recent history. In the U.S, almost 100 million watched it on TV. But there’s another side to this game, almost ignored by everyone. It had a touch of the racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics when in the middle of another sporting event attracting millions, Hitler put forward his racist "master race" garbage. But the black runner Jesse Owens upset Hitler’s applecart by winning four track events.

Somewhat similarly, while millions were enjoying the Super Bowl in Arizona, the same state’s politicians who were hosting the championship game were — along with their cops — in the forefront of pogroms against immigrants occurring nationwide. The NY Times (2/12) reports about the situation in Arizona: "The signs of flight among Latino immigrants here are multiple: Families moving out of apartment complexes, schools reporting enrollment drops, business owners complaining about fewer clients."

The Sherrif’s Department runs ads asking people to report on undocumented immigrants. Local politicians are behaving like the Minutemen. "It’s like a panic here," said Ms. León, a daycare worker. "This is all having an effect on the community, mostly emotional."

But Arizona is not alone with these pogroms. Last week, there were protests in Danbury, Conn., because local cops can now legally behave like immigration agents. On February 7, ICE (Immigration cops) raided a plant near Salt Lake City, Utah, arresting 50 workers. Virtually simultaneously, ICE raided Micro Solutions Enterprises, a Van Nuys, California plant making parts for copier machines, and arrested 120 workers.

The ICE cops arrested over 7,000 immigrant workers last year just raiding workplaces, and they plan to arrest even more this year. It’s no coincidence that these fascist-like raids are occurring amid an economy meltdown and rising unemployment. The bosses, their politicians and cops want workers to blame other workers (undocumented immigrants) for the problems caused by capitalism itself.

Undocumented immigrants didn’t run scams like subprime mortgages, stealing billions from working-class families, and are not in charge of the endless wars spurring this capitalist meltdown. Workers who fall for these racist pogroms scapegoat undocumented immigrants are cutting their own throats. These Gestapo-type raids will also be used against any workers fighting cutbacks, layoffs, plant closings, etc.

We in PLP believe that a divided working class is the best weapon the bosses have to make ALL workers pay for their crisis and wars. Now more than ever, our slogan must be, "Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world, unite.

REDEYE

Working-class savings near zero

Between 1983 and 2004, the average wealth of the top one percent of households grew by 78 percent, reports Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University. The bottom 40 percent lost 59 percent. In 2004, 1 out of every 6 households had zero or negative net worth…. That’s before the mortgage crisis hit. (MinutemanMedia.org, 2/16)

Biofuels profitable, but not green

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account, two studies published Thursday have concluded. (NYT, 2/8)

Troops to be used against rallies

…At every year’s end a media research group at Sonoma State University compiles a list of the most important and least reported stories – you know, the sutff that affects your life….

Not surprisingly, much of what made the new top-25 least reported stories per significance in 2007 had to do with the "war on terror." Basically, those three words mean, "Whatever constraints you placed on your government, they’re off."

Story…No. 2 is about the Defense Authorization Act.... It lets the president station troops "anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to ‘suppress public disorder.’"

You ask, what amounts to "public disorder," triggering this de facto form of martial law? Don’t bother…. In any case, you won’t be consulted. (NYT, 1/17)

Loan racket uses class, race, sex

Testifying about how she targeted her sub-prime products a former loan officer confessed: "If someone appeared uneducated, inarticulate, was a minoritiy or was particularly old or young, I would try to include all the [additional costs] CitiFinancial offered…."

"We believe this represents the greatest loss of wealth for people of colour in modern US history," the report concludes.

…Among black and Latina women the discrimination was even more amplified….

Black women earning double the area median income were nearly five times more likely to receive sub-prime mortgages than white men with similar incomes. Latinas were four times more likely. (GW, 2/8)

$ystem produces excess meat

Meat production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases –– more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms… if America were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan –– a Camry, say –– to the ultra-efficient Prius….

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens….About two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption… (NYT, 1/27)

Red Immigrant Underground Whipped Nazis in WWII

Throughout the history of capitalism, immigrants around the world have played an important part of the fight against the ruling class. One great example is the Communist-led Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d’Oevre Immigree (FTP-MOI) a group of about 100 fighters from all over Europe who carried out practically all acts of armed resistance against the Nazis in the Paris region between March and November 1943. In one of their most noted actions they killed the SS General Julius von Ritter, one of the main organizers of the Service d travail obligatoire (STO) (forced labor). After this, twenty-three of the group were arrested, tortured, and murdered. The Nazis distributed a famous poster calling them a criminal army rather than an army of liberators – they were responsible for 56 armed actions against the Nazis, 150 Nazis dead, and 600 wounded. This attempt to build anti-Communism backfired on the Nazis; the poster was defaced and flowers placed below it.

The group fought the Germans as part of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) pre-war organization for immigrant workers, Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée. Their actions at the beginning of the occupation consisted of carrying out sabotage against factories working for the Germans, and aiding in the return of immigrant Communists to their occupied homelands to join the Resistance. By summer 1941 (and the invasion of the Soviet Union), armed struggle became the order of the day. The FTP-MOI was at the heart of it in Paris. Arson at factories producing for the Germans; derailing of trains; attacks on German soldiers, all were carried out by these anti-fascists. Bomb factories were set up, false papers were manufactured; clandestine presses operated in Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Armenian and Romanian.

The Parisian branch of the FTP-MOI Iearned a reputation for daring through such large-scale actions as the attempt to kill von Schaumburg, commander of German troops in Paris, and the successful execution of SS General Ritter. An idea of the extent of their activities can be gathered from just one day’s activities, those of September 8, 1943 (only weeks before the group’s capture): Derailing of a train on the Paris-Reims line; the execution of two Nazi police in Argenteuil; two Nazi soldiers killed at the Porte d’Ivry; a sergeant killed on the rue de la Harpe; two other Nazis shot at an undisclosed location.

But by the summer of 1943 the group was in trouble. The Nazis and their French auxiliaries were hot on their trail. The PCF removed most of the non-immigrant resistance, the FTP, from Paris, but left the FTP-MOI behind. There is some question about why the FTP-MOI was left in Paris while other groups were removed. Some historians have suggested that the PCF knowingly abandoned these fighters to be captured by the Nazis. Another analysis is that the PCF had political reasons to keep them in Paris. It was becoming clear that the Allies would eventually win the war and they needed their most effective fighters in Paris. The FTP-MOI had proven through action that they were a politically and militarily reliable force. As proof, in the last months before their capture, they carried out 40 actions in Paris and its surrounding region.

This great historical example of armed struggle against fascism should give us optimism for our current struggles against the ruling class. Even during one of the darkest periods for communists and the working class, these heroic fighters created an internationalist militia that helped to bring down the Nazis and their "Thousand Year Reich." Although they were small, communist dedication and politics gave this meager band a great advantage. Thus, the example of the FTP-MOI should always remind us that when the international working class is organized under the banner of PLP, no force mustered by the ruling class will be able to defeat us.

Shared Work By All Will Free All Workers

Book Review: How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice, by Paul Gomberg, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2007.

The book "How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice" makes a major contribution to the fight against racism and to the Marxist theory of working-class revolution. In it Paul Gomberg, an active member of PLP for 35 years, argues two main points. The first is that in order for all workers to have an equal opportunity to do thought-provoking complex work, everyone must also do some routine work. The second point is that a meaningful definition of justice and equality lies not simply in equal distribution of goods and services (distributive justice), but rather in equal opportunity to contribute to the collective good of humanity (contributive justice).

People need food, shelter, and love. Another need that is rarely discussed is self-esteem and esteem from others (which actually depend upon each other). As long as routine and complex labor are performed by different groups of people, people who do routine work will necessarily suffer — from boredom, wear and tear on bodies, and, most important, lack of esteem from themselves and others. One requirement for a just and egalitarian society is that this work be shared by all. Then no one suffers from lack of esteem from restriction to routine labor, and opportunities to do interesting labor can also be done by all.

Capitalism forces specific groups of workers to do routine work, often using racism.White male workers who find themselves having to do routine labor also suffer a lack of esteem, but a greater proportion of the Black, Latino and women workers are forced into routine jobs. The ruling class favors false theories that undervalued workers are innately incapable of more complex work. However, there is nothing innate about it — capitalist schools both create and reinforce this outcome. Racism intensifies the suffering by disproportionately consigning particular groups to this hell.

Unfortunately, as Gomberg argues, even if there were no racism or sexism under this system, some workers would still end up in this hell of devalued social contribution. Only by ending competition and opening up unlimited opportunities, can all workers develop complex skills and engage in complex labor, by having everyone do the necessary routine work.

We are taught that some workers simply don’t have what it takes to become a doctor or teacher or engineer or physicist. Given the current society in which the search for maximum profit limits the opportunities for most workers to develop those skills, there is no way of proving this. Indeed there is much evidence that esteem from teachers encourages self-esteem in students, which, in turn, encourages them to learn and develop. Positive feedback produces success, while negative feedback produces failure. The schools are designed to provide positive feedback for a chosen few and negative feedback for most, to mirror the capitalist division of labor.

Gomberg discusses why people work, and proposes the communist ideal that each person should work based upon their commitment to society and receive based upon their needs. He then anticipates the question, why would someone work harder for no extra monetary or material gain? He answers that social esteem can be valued far more highly than material gain, and refers to anthropological studies of societies in which this is true. Esteem takes the place of money, with the essential difference that esteem comes in unlimited supply.

As long as capitalist division of labor is permitted to exist racism will thrive. Under capitalism, no amount of struggle by the working class can permanently defeat divisions off which the bosses profit. Only in a society that completely transforms the division of labor — so that all share the routine work and all have unlimited opportunity to develop complex skills — can we end racism and all class oppression. This is the kind of society that PLP fights for and that requires armed working-class revolution. It’s called communism.

1. Obama's `Change':
   Be All You Can Be For U.S. Imperialism
   1. The Danger of Elections
   2. Militant Struggle, Not Elections, Led to Change
2. Red GI Challenges War At Platoon Meeting
3. Rulers' Subprime Fiasco Slams Workers, Spurs Fascist Solution
   1. RULERS `GIVE' WORKERS $1,200 TO SPEND, THEN DEMANDS MOST OF OUR PAY FOR WAR
   2. MAIN CLINTON FACTION WANTS POLICE STATE FOR BOSSES, TOO
4. Clinton, Obama Advisors: All War, All the Time
5. Big Bosses Back Barack
6. Black Students Lead Action Vs. Racist Minuteman Honcho
7. Multi-racial Protestors Drive off Border Watch KKK
8. Defend Anti-Racists Who Disrupted Fascist Anti-Immigrant Vigilantes
9. Exposing Bosses' Politicians Builds Support For PLP
10. From El Salvador's Horrors PLP Politics Shaped a Young PL'er
11. French Labor Hacks Put One-Day Limit on Million Strikers
12. Gazans Break Out of Their Prison
    But Nationalism Foils Mid-Eastern Workers
13. Africa, Part II
    Imperialists' Profits Behind 5.4 Million Congo Deaths
14. LETTERS LETTERS
    1. Paraguayan Friends of PLP Disrupt Rulers' Political Rally
    2. Howard Students Fight Campus Militarization
    3. Soviet Reversal Wasn't All Stalin's Fault
    4. Angry Tenants Unite to Fight Slumlord
15. Striking Writers Undercut By Scabbing, Bosses' Culture
16. Puerto Rico Teachers Defy Strike Ban
17. Good Riddance to an Anti-Communist Mass Murderer
18. REDEYE REDEYE
    1. Stimulus for poor? Dems say no
    2. Class war behind `tribal' wars
    3. Marxist students active in Iran
    4. Food prices up; world-wide riots
    5. Disasters built into capitalism
19. Economic Collapse Burying Workers; Will Spark Wider Wars
20. The Demon Is Capitalism
    1. Spiral to Hell
    2. Workers Create All Value

---

Obama's `Change':
Be All You Can Be For U.S. Imperialism

This year the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, Black History Month and Barack Obama's presidential run are combining to create a lethal brew for U.S. workers. Every year on King's birthday we hear how racial harmony is just around the corner if we workers can only be true to his pacifist legacy. Black History Month, while highlighting great contributions made by black writers, scientists and artists (although notably excluding working-class heroes), also builds the illusion that capitalism provides unlimited opportunities for black workers.

These events combined push the lie that racism is declining in the U.S. However, the media blitz can't hide the fact that racism is alive and well in the U.S. and worldwide.

Now Barack Obama's bid is pushing two big lies: (1) simply voting for a politician or law can reform capitalism; and (2) the working class, especially black workers, will be better off with a black President.

Yet the reality is that even in the Democratic primaries themselves "race" and racism have emerged front and center, with Clinton and Obama trading barbs about it and appealing to black and white constituencies. And anti-immigrant racism plays a major role in the Republican primaries as well.

The bosses use racism to divide the working class and extract even more profit from our labor. By nearly every measure -- employment, incarceration rates, healthcare, education, poverty levels, wages, the Katrina horror, racist police murders and frame-ups like the Jena Six and anti-immigrant raids -- black and Latino workers are victims of a brutal racist system. According to 2006 U.S. Census statistics, the poverty rate for blacks was 24.3% compared to 3.5% for whites. (The federal poverty rate is set at a level -- $20,650 for a family of four -- that is horrendously low. This means that tens of thousands of families are living in poverty conditions, even if they aren't counted as such by the government.) The U.S. prison population (the highest in the world) contains 2.4 million people, 70% black and Latino, with millions more on probation, parole or awaiting trial, much of it due to racism.

The fact is, capitalism cannot exist without racism. The concepts of "race" and racism were developed as an ideology just as capitalist economies began to dominate world markets. Then, as now, it was used both to divide and weaken the working class, and to justify paying lower wages to black and Latino workers.

Under capitalism, workers must compete for jobs. On average, according to the Census Bureau, black workers are paid about 70cents in wages for every dollar paid to white workers. (For Latino workers it's about 60cents.) Bosses use this differential to threaten white workers not to ask for higher pay or be replaced by lower-paid black and Latino workers. White workers are thus forced to accept lower wages based on the racist exploitation of black and Latin labor. This historical analysis has led PLP to consistently make the fight against racism central to the struggle against capitalist oppression. As Karl Marx said, "The labor in white skin can never be free so long as the labor in black skin is branded."

The Danger of Elections

Along with the usual lies about how capitalism can be reformed to eliminate racism, the presence of the first legitimate black contender for president, Barack Obama, makes this a particularly dangerous year for workers. Since his break-out speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama has become another face of the liberal wing of the ruling class, along with Hillary Clinton (see editorial page 2). This Rockefeller-led faction pushes a "friendlier" capitalism, where the war in Iraq would be fought with more allies, Guantanamo Bay would be reformed or closed, and "civil liberties" would be protected ("liberties" which are revoked whenever the ruling class feels threatened). Even if these changes are made, however, it will not lead to a system that satisfies the needs of workers. In reality, the liberals are attempting to use these ideas to build even greater patriotic loyalty to their imperialist aims worldwide.

Obama neatly fits another part of the liberals' strategy. He talks about "change" and "hope" and other wonderful-sounding ideas. And as the higher (though limited) voter turnouts in Iowa and New Hampshire demonstrate, his ideas (along with the other candidates') are inspiring many more people to get involved in capitalist politics. Yet Obama has clear ties to the ruling class and has proven that he will place the goals of the U.S. imperialists over the needs of the working class (see box below for his links to the bosses):

* He voted billions more for the war in Iraq and has threatened military action against Iran;

* He supports expanding the murderous war in Afghanistan;

* He voted for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, to make it even more dangerous for super-exploited Mexican workers trying to enter the U.S.

(CHALLENGE has leveled these criticisms at Hillary Clinton, who is just as much an enemy of the working class as Obama. (See editorial page 2) Workers will not benefit from an Obama presidency any more than from Clinton or McCain or any of the others.

Militant Struggle, Not Elections, Led to Change

In fact, workers have never won real social, political and economic changes through voting. The so-called "examples" of voting bringing reforms ignores the intensive militant, violent struggles that preceded the vote. The anti-slavery Thirteenth Amendment passed only after years of fight-back by abolitionists, more than 400 slave revolts and a Civil War in which 600,000 soldiers, mostly workers, died. The 40-hour work-week and labor reform followed a decade of sit-down strikes, often pitting armed workers, led by communist organizers, against the army, cops, National Guard and other bosses' agents. Even the Voting Rights Act resulted from years of bloody struggle against the KKK and Jim Crow racism. History clearly shows that the bosses only make concessions to the working class when forced to do so by mass, militant action.

But the bosses use their state power to reverse these reforms. And current economic conditions show this is especially true during times of intense inter-imperialist rivalry. As U.S. rulers struggle to solidify control of Iraqi oil and contain their imperialist rivals in Europe and Asia, workers increasingly feel the squeeze. For more and more workers, the 40-hour work-week is a distant memory. The Labor Department recently reported that in 2007 inflation was 4.1% while real wages dropped 0.9%, making necessities such as food, energy and healthcare more expensive. Due to racist discrimination, all this disproportionately affects black and Latino workers.

Capitalism is a system with laws that cannot be changed by electing a black or woman president or through reforms. These laws dictate that racism will always be used to extract super-profits from the labor of workers and that any reforms the working class does win will eventually be taken back. Only revolutionary communist change will emancipate the working class from capitalist wage slavery which is the basis of racism. Only with communism will all aspects of society meet the needs of the working class, while the profit-driven bosses are destroyed. Progressive Labor Party constantly and consistently works toward this goal.

Red GI Challenges War At Platoon Meeting

I'm currently in a unit with soldiers who openly express resentment towards unfair demotions, long work days, and an upcoming deployment to Iraq. For many soldiers this will be a second trip to the Middle East. This means that for a second time we will see how unproductive and vicious the occupation is. These conditions offer fertile ground for communist politics to spread, so my political conversations have recently reached a new level of importance. Although my conversations range from complaining about our working conditions to imperialism, I haven't yet shown CHALLENGE to anyone in my current unit. But this is about to change because of one specific incident I want to share with CHALLENGE readers.

Recently my unit has been merged with other units to "strengthen" deployable status, a very common occurrence with military units. This means that new relationships are created among soldiers. Leaders, therefore, are quick at attempting to build a "teamwork" atmosphere. So our platoon sergeant had everyone gather in a room to introduce themselves to each other. When it was my turn, I decided to announce something, which I knew many would agree with. After giving a brief introduction, I told everyone that I "wholeheartedly disagreed with this war." I said that "even though we wear this uniform, it doesn't mean we can't openly disagree with the government."

But the courage to say this out loud didn't occur spontaneously. It came about through the collective base building of our Party. I knew that at least three soldiers would agree with me because of political conversations with them. It turned out that more agreed as well. Plus, a leaflet was distributed outside my base calling soldiers to be more critical and to create an alliance between workers, soldiers, and students. When I spoke about the leaflet to one specific soldier, who is also in my platoon he let me know that he agreed with what was essentially part of our Party's line.

What is to be done? While the ruling class uses soldiers and the military as their tool to gain imperial hegemony, it's time for us to use CHALLENGE as our tool to win more soldiers to PLP. Clearly the next step is to show our newspaper to more friends. From this, more intense conversations will emerge. The ruling class will wage its wars in the Middle East; therefore. workers, along with soldiers and students should wage our ideological struggle with the working class. I find myself in a stronger political position in our unit. Reading in CHALLENGE about other soldiers' struggles in the military inspires me to move forward. In any case, political base-building is the foundation that will pave the way to our success in reaching our ultimate goal, and our newspaper will aid me in building for a communist revolution.

Red Soldier

Rulers' Subprime Fiasco Slams Workers, Spurs Fascist Solution

The subprime mortgage fiasco has highlighted a huge problem for the U.S. ruling class, even as it comes down like a sledgehammer on the working class. Since January 1, in the firestorm roaring through stock markets worldwide, capitalists have destroyed $5 trillion worth of value created by workers' labor power. As the subprime cancer spreads, workers in the U.S., where it began, face mass foreclosures, layoffs and wage and service cuts, with black and Latino workers hardest hit because of racist discrimination.

U.S. rulers, on the other hand, while trying to make workers at home pay for the crisis, have fears going far beyond the domestic lending and spending crunch. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the rulers' leading think-tank, worries about "the geopolitical and geoeconomic effects a U.S. downturn might bring, particularly at a time that finds other powers [ruling classes -- Ed.] on the rise, the price of vital commodities spiking and U.S. prestige in question." (CFR website, 1/18/08) The threatened recession makes U.S. imperialism and its war machine all the more desperate for cash.

"War at Any Price?" -- a report released by Congressional Democrats in November -- shows that Iraq and Afghanistan will have cost $1.6 trillion by the end of 2008. It says that even with a drawdown to 55,000 troops in Iraq by 2013 (indicating a long-term occupation) the price tag will reach $3.5 trillion by 2017.

The rulers' huge problem stems from the fact that they have nowhere near prepared the U.S. for all-out imperialist war. During World War II, the Roosevelt-led capitalist class mounted such an all-out mobilization by: (1) drafting 14 million youth into the armed forces (in a population barely one-third of the present 300 million); (2) instituted rationing of gas and food (each family had to present coupons at the store to buy meat -- limited to 4 oz. per person daily -- sugar, butter, etc.; (3) decreed a government-imposed wage freeze and price controls; and (4) banned all strikes. Not one new car, washing machine or radio was manufactured in the U.S. for four years -- all the factories were producing tanks, bombers and weapons of war. Tax rates topped out at 94%! (It's 35% now.)

Compare this to Bush's "war on terror." His advice: "go shopping; don't let the terrorists win."

U.S. rulers approached the war against Nazi Germany and fascist Japan with total reality. While the Democrats decry the Iraq-Afghanistan price tags mentioned above, they don't mention the fantastic sums a Middle-East re-invasion or war with China would require.

To prepare for World War III and endless imperialist wars against rising rivals in the European Union, China and Russia, U.S. rulers must exercise all-out control not only over the working class -- fascism -- but also over those members of their own class who guard their own short-term profits at the expense of the long-range survival of their system as a whole, as they did in World War II.

While Obama's camp has been slow in divulging its fiscal program, it can't be far removed from Hillary Clinton's who claims to have the solution. She intends to use the state apparatus to force reluctant capitalists to give up some of their profits to meet the main bosses' war needs -- the "sacrifice" of "treasure" called for in her husband's Hart-Rudman Commission reports. Clinton told the New York Times (1/21/08) she would immediately raise the top income tax rate from 35% to 39.6%.

She also seeks to slash exorbitant executive pay, which would steer more profit to the ruling-class billionaires and banks that own companies. Hillary decries "professional corporate managers who are not the creators of the corporation." She'll protect billionaires like George Soros, the Rockefellers, Warren Buffet and others, who see the need to discipline their class to save their system's top-dog status. Bill Clinton robbed the poor -- by dismantling Welfare -- to finance the Pentagon. Hillary would continue that crime, and the racist super-exploitation of black and Latino workers, intensifying Workfare to lower wage levels of all workers.

RULERS `GIVE' WORKERS $1,200 TO SPEND, THEN DEMANDS MOST OF OUR PAY FOR WAR

Given actual military expenditures, proposed bipartisan "economic stimulus" packages, topping out at $1,200 per household, come off as a cheap election-year bribe, with each side trying to take credit for a paltry payoff. In reality, the rulers' oil wars are robbing workers blind, while they slaughter working-class youth by the hundreds of thousands. The Democrats' report cited above admits, with anti-Bush dismay, that from 2002 to 2008, "The total economic cost of the war in Iraq [and Afghanistan] to a family of four is a shocking...$20,900.".... The future impact on a family of four skyrockets to...$46,400 for Iraq and Afghanistan when all potential costs from 2002 to 2017 are included."

MAIN CLINTON FACTION WANTS POLICE STATE FOR BOSSES, TOO

Clinton plans to clean up the subprime mess with a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a freeze on subprime mortgage rates. Her purpose is more political than economic. She wants to impose police-state control over finance and industry. She's following Franklin Roosevelt's severe disciplining of U.S. capitalists in the run-up to World War II. Clinton promises "the toughest regulatory scrutiny of any president in a generation."

It was financial deregulation, prompted by inter-imperialist rivalry in the 1980s and 1990s, which set the stage for the subprime debacle. At that time U.S. banks needed to consolidate and grow in order to compete with giant European and Japanese counterparts. Citibank led the charge against regulation and in 1999 succeeded in shattering the main regulatory obstacle to bank expansion, the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which had kept commercial and investment banks separate. Today Citi is perhaps the world's biggest bank but holds yet untotaled billions of worthless subprime debt.

Capitalism by its very nature must create economic boom-and-bust cycles as well as imperialist wars in its insatiable competition for maximum profits. In the current era, it must impose fascism on the working class as well as discipline its own class to be able to preserve its system. Clinton, Obama and the rest of the candidates are dedicated to promoting and defending this bosses' dictatorship over the working class. Supporting any one of them would be a serious mistake. Rather we should join and build the Progressive Labor Party, which has the long-term goal of communist revolution, enabling the working class to collectively decide how to apportion, according to need, the social value it alone collectively produces.

Clinton, Obama Advisors: All War, All the Time

With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama falling all over each other posing as "anti-war" candidates, take a look at their pro-war advisors.

Clinton has:

* Madeleine Albright, Bill's Secretary of State, the main force behind her husband's Iraq sanctions that the UN says killed up to one million Iraqi civilians (half of them children). When asked about those sanction-caused child deaths, Albright told "60 Minutes,": "We think the price was worth it."

* General Wesley Clark, architect of the bombing of Serbia, who publicly stated the U.S. would bomb civilian targets regardless of "collateral damage" -- civilian casualties.

* Richard Holbrooke, a Jimmy Carter aide, oversaw weapons shipment to dictator Suharto's Indonesian military (see page 7) during the latter's invasion and massacre of 200,000 people in East Timor.

Obama has:

* Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Advisor, who boasted responsibility for the $3 billion CIA creation of the Afghan jihadist movement in 1979 which produced Osama bin Laden. When asked about its "negative consequences," he replied, "What's a few riled-up Muslims?"

* Anthony Lake, a Bill Clinton aide who played a key role in the U.S. invasion of Haiti.

* Sarah Sewall, author of the introduction to Bush's General Petraeus's Army Counterinsurgency Manual which U.S. troops use worldwide in imperialist oil wars.

Such is the motley crew that will spread wider wars no matter who's elected president. They're all defenders of U.S. imperialism.

Big Bosses Back Barack

Barack Obama portrays himself as a servant of the working class, but his ties to the biggest capitalists are clear. Among Obama's top contributors are :

[[section]] Wall Street financial houses, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan-Chase, and Citigroup, the world's largest bank, all of whom undoubtedly liked his Senate vote against capping credit-card interest rates at 30% ;

[[section]] Exelon Corporation, the nation's leading nuclear-power-plant operator and Obama's fourth largest patron, have donated $74,350 to his campaigns.

[[section]] A leading corporate law firm, Skadden Arps -- which defends major financial firms against consumer class-action suits -- is one of Obama's leading career patrons;

[[section]] Rich Tarplin, a lobbyist for Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers, is one of his biggest individual donors.

Black Students Lead Action Vs. Racist Minuteman Honcho

SOUTHWEST -- Chris Simcox, founder of the racist anti-immigrant Minuteman Civil Defense Corps recently returned to a university in the Southwest.  He previously visited the campus in April (see CHALLENGE, May 9), and was shut down by a multi-racial coalition of about 700 students and workers led by friends of PLP members.  It was the largest demonstration in campus history. 

This semester, the same conservative student group brought Simcox to campus again. Because of the success of the last protest, the police attempted to crack down on any further show of multi-racial protest. This time, instead of five cops, there were 15. The event was held inside an auditorium rather than outside in the "free speech" zone. Also, to get inside the auditorium, you had to show a valid photo ID and write your name on a sign-up sheet. Although it seemed problematic to get in, many students wanted to do some sort of protesting to counteract and hopefully shut down his racist speech.

In order to stop this event, we needed a plan. So, before the protest started at 2:00, we passed out 500 flyers that showed the ties between the Minutemen and white supremacist groups and called for all students and workers to unite to shut Simcox down. A group of about 30 black students were outraged to hear that Simcox was at their campus again. One student said, "I remember him from last semester, isn't he that racist guy who got booed off stage?" Another stated his anger toward Simcox because he is "no better than the Klan." They all seemed to be right-on with forcing him to leave their campus.

We then planned for everyone to meet near the entrance of the auditorium early and all but two people were going to go inside to shout Simcox down. When it got to be 2:00, the whole group of black students got out their ID's and walked together towards the booth where they had to give their information. The doors suddenly closed and the cops denied them access. The cops explained that they were ordered not to let anyone inside the auditorium past 2:00. It was 2:02. The group of students was even more outraged...especially after witnessing the cops granting access to a white person at 2:04! My friend and I talked with them about options to act against the blatant racist actions of the school and police. One student suggested, "We should have an old-fashion sit-in." My comrade and I explained how silent or peaceful protests would not show the school that we are not going to tolerate them allowing a racist to speak on our campus. So we all picked up posters and started chanting, "Minutemen, Nazis, KKK...Racists, Fascists, Go Away!"

Inside, about 15 anti-racists sat together and when Simcox came out to speak, they all stood up and started chanting for him to go home. After a few minutes, they were forced to leave by the cops. When they walked out of the auditorium, they were greeted by dozens of black students chanting "Hitler rose, Hitler fell, racist Minutemen, Go to Hell!" The police made several attempts to shut us all up by taking away our posters and trying to separate us, but we remained together and stole our posters back. We demonstrated collectively and when the cops tried to tell us that we were not in a "free speech zone" we just chanted louder.

After Simcox left, we were able to speak with all the students who had protested. We got their phone numbers and invited them to a student meeting in which we were going to talk about what happened and relate it to the capitalist system as a whole.

The fact that so many black students showed up to oppose Chris Simcox was an important step in breaking the ideology that claims the Minutemen only affect the Hispanic community. We want to replace this idea with and understanding of how racism against one "race" hurts all workers. Our experience showed us the possibilities of working together in opposition to ruling-class ideology. It solidified for us the reality of needing to attack racism as one class: the working class against the ruling class.

Multi-racial Protestors Drive off Border Watch KKK

Chanting "Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!" ("The workers' fight has no borders!"), a multi-racial group of workers, documented and undocumented, sent the racist vigilante U.S. Border Watch packing.

The Border Watch, like many such anti-immigrant groups, has recently been expanding its "operations." They're notorious for harassing day laborers waiting for work at pick-up sites.

Just two days prior to the event, our PLP club heard of the Border Watch's plan for an anti-immigrant demonstration in our city. We quickly called friends and supporters and together wrote a leaflet exposing racist anti-immigration policies, from France to the U.S., urging all workers to stand united against racism and the capitalist bosses who profit from it.

The day of the event (and prior to our arrival), many fearful migrant workers went into hiding as the Border Watch thugs bullied their way around. However, our arrival on the street emboldened many day laborers, who then joined our anti-racist ranks.

Because the Border Watch Klan was just across the street, one day laborer, unsure of whose side we were on, approached us to ask if we were with the Border Watch or not. I explained we were opposing them and stood united with the workers.

At first he could not believe that students and workers would stand with them against the Border Watch Klan, but he soon joined in our anti-racist chants.

We quickly outnumbered the Border Watch, who feared our counter-attack. Together the crowd chanted, "Obreros, unidos, jamas seran vencidos!" ("Workers, united, will never be defeated!") and drove the Border Watch racists down the street, away from the day-labor site.

As our numbers grew, it became clear that the racist capitalist system favored the Border Watch thugs when a row of police cars barricaded the workers on one side of the street, protecting the Border Watch Klan from harm's way.

As the demonstration wore on, misleaders from LULAC (a Latino political action group) and organizers of the Cesar Chávez March Committee appeared to try to steer our anti-racist militancy into a display of liberal patriotic nationalism. This can be just as dangerous as the nationalism of groups like the Border Watch. The bosses employ both ideologies in order to win workers on both sides to fight and die for U.S. imperialism at home and abroad.

By the close of the demonstration, many workers were won over to PL's militant anti-racism. They were eager to meet with us afterward to plan future actions. We made many new contacts and will continue to struggle with other workers as we fight against the racist capitalist system. Only communist revolution will free workers from racism and nationalism.

Defend Anti-Racists Who Disrupted Fascist Anti-Immigrant Vigilantes

MORRISTOWN, N.J., January 28 -- Two anti-racist protestors who were arrested last July for militantly disrupting a fascist anti-immigrant rally will be put on trial February 13 here on charges of "disorderly conduct" and "defiant trespass." A conviction in this frame-up could lead to jail time.

On July 28, 2007 in this town with a growing immigrant population, several hundred anti-racist protestors gathered to oppose the latest in a series of fascist groups rallying and spreading their racist, anti-immigrant venom. Billed as an "anti-illegal-immigrant rally," and including groups with names such as the "ProAmerica Society" and "You Don't Speak for Me," the anti-immigrant racists were welcomed to the steps of City Hall with open arms and the use of the city's electricity for their sound system by Donald Cresitello, the Democratic mayor of Morristown. KKKresitello had recently made national news by applying to have his police force deputized as immigration cops, over the objection of most people who live in Morristown and even of the town's police chief.

The prosecutor is pressing to bring the two brave anti-racist fighters to trial. It is critical that as many people as possible attend the trial to show the defendants that we support their courage and to show Morristown officials and anti-immigrant fascists throughout the U.S. that we will not be intimidated and that we will confront them wherever they dare raise their murderous heads.

While anti-immigrant groups claim to only want enforcement of immigration laws, they are truly the new face of the Ku Klux Klan. Since that day in Morristown, immigrants all over the U.S. have been the victims of laws enacted to criminalize the act of hiring or renting apartments to undocumented immigrants. There are growing numbers of physical attacks on those perceived to be immigrants by racists such as those who came to Morristown.

These gutter fascists are only one side of the coin. Terroristic raids by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) immigration police have also spread. Some of the most vicious immigration raids have been conducted in Morristown itself, including one in which the ICE cops questioned a 5-year-old child about the whereabouts of her uncle, while holding a gun to her mother's chest. And in Mount Kisco, NY, a town cop has been charged in the murder of Rene Perez, an immigrant town resident. An audio tape was recently released on which Mount Kisco cops can be heard mocking the death of Mr. Perez to the lyrics of an old song "Walk Away Renee."

The Republican presidential candidates are now trying to outdo each other in who can be the most disgustingly anti-immigrant in their proposals. Any act or policy of one candidate that can be described as "pro-immigrant" is immediately pounced on by all the others. The Democrats are slicker. They are clearer about the ruling class' need to enlist many young immigrants into the military. The DREAM Act and proposed "legalization" programs are schemes to win immigrants to patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice for the rulers in imperialist oil wars.

One group of protestors in Morristown that day last summer decided to show its opposition by gathering and praying in a church parking lot on the other side of town. But most anti-racists knew that protesting from a distance would do nothing to stop these virulent anti-immigrant racists. PLP led a spirited group of protestors who knew that only by confronting these groups directly and refusing to allow them to spew their hatred unchallenged can we hope to bring a stop to their racist movement. Come to Morristown on Feb. 13 and support the anti-racists facing these phony charges!

Exposing Bosses' Politicians Builds Support For PLP

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, January 26 -- During a regular CHALLENGE sale we encountered the student government on our campus urging students to register to vote as a way to stop the tuition increases we're facing. We were distributing a leaflet exposing Clinton, Obama and the whole lie that voting would end the war and the cutbacks, leading to good conversations about the elections. We also explained to some that the tuition increases were caused by the loss of tax money resulting from the capitalist crisis and the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During that sale, a professor invited us to her class where an Obama campaign organizer was speaking. Because of previous discussions in the class, it became clearer to many as he spoke that electoral politics would not produce the social change many students sought. A more fundamental change from the system that is inherently racist, exploitative and imperialist was needed.

When students asked how to end segregation and racism, even the organizer couldn't explain how electing Obama would help stop school segregation or racism generally. Clearly Obama and electoral politics are incapable of solving the problems the working class faces every day -- racism, lack of healthcare and widening wars.

Even the speaker emphasized that change would come from grassroots organizing, that there was little Obama himself could solve alone. When a student said change would stem from us, the working class, the organizer had no reply. He couldn't challenge the power of the working class, which the Clintons and Obamas try to manipulate on behalf of the ruling class.

Afterwards, we had useful conversations with a few students; some expressed interest in communist politics and a fresh perspective instead of the failing reformist politics presented by the speaker and politicians. One student wanted to join a study group and subscribe to CHALLENGE. Another student invited us to an event later that day where he wanted us to explain our ideas about alternatives to voting. We were welcomed at the event, given time to speak and we invited everyone to read our paper. About 20 CHALLENGES were gladly accepted. We exchanged phone numbers with several students we knew from previous classes who are interested in discussing politics and to plan activities against the cuts.

Between the class and the evening film and discussion, we sold over 30 CHALLENGES and distributed 50 PLP leaflets. We realized how important it is to expose the deceitful electoral campaigns, be they for Obama, Clinton, McCain or Ron Paul.

From El Salvador's Horrors PLP Politics Shaped a Young PL'er

EL SALVADOR -- In 1980 I was among a group of people from El Salvador who went into exile in Honduras. I traveled in my grandmother's arms, while my father and a sister stayed in El Salvador.

The "orejas" (snitches that spy for the police and army) murdered my mother and one of my brothers. When I was in Colomoncagua, Honduras, I remember Honduran soldiers massacring people in the camp where we lived. When the soldiers came, the people went out to yell at them. Once all of us children were locked in a house for safety, while the adults confronted the soldiers with machetes, sticks and rocks.

In 1990, when we returned to El Salvador, I was 11. The war was still on; before that I had never heard the sound and terror of bullets and mortars in full battle. One day around 4 A.M., I awoke to the sounds of shooting; during the night the soldiers had broken into our encampment in Morazán. For two days we heard the sounds of guns and mortars. Someone said that all the people had to go to the mountains.

By that time, the fascist army had murdered three brothers and my mother. My father was still alive along with myself and another brother; he joined the ranks of the guerillas with many of the youth from the encampment. Many who I knew died.

One night we saw a helicopter shooting and launching lights with flares. My father said, "I wonder if my son is there." Until then, I still didn't know the reason for the war.

After the 1992 peace accords, I always talked to veteran guerillas, asking them the reason for the war. After those 12 years of armed conflict, I was still only 13. These veterans taught me the history and I came to identify myself with the left.

I firmly believed that revolutionary politics meant power was won through elections. Given what I had been taught, I became a reformer in the FMLN, which capitalism turned into an electoral party. Many veterans and commanders have become capitalists or small bosses. Nevertheless, I thought that was moving the revolution forward.

Then a long-time friend began reading CHALLENGE to me. He spoke about the PLP, gave me the paper and invited me to a meeting in his house. Others there talked to me about the international situation.

When the question of ideology arose, I described my electoral party (the FMLN) thinking that was the course to follow. After several meetings, I was thrilled with the PLP, and was invited to meet with international comrades to discuss the Party's work. Most important to me was how we analyzed reality. Meeting PLP has meant learning about a true revolution.

While the FMLN held sway in my infancy, now in the PLP I consider myself the fruit of those who spilled their blood defending me during my childhood and made it possible for me to fight for communist revolution through the international Progressive Labor Party.

A Young PLP member

French Labor Hacks Put One-Day Limit on Million Strikers

PARIS, Jan. 25 -- Amid capitalism's world economic meltdown, some one million public sector workers struck for one day yesterday across France while many strikers were among the 400,000 who joined protest marches in Paris and other cities nationwide. Private sector workers from General Motors, Airbus and Bugatti were among the marchers.

But yesterday's strike was smaller than the one on November 20. While half the school teachers and 20% of the postal workers walked out, the strike was less successful elsewhere, in particular in rail transport.

Public workers' demands included a 1,500-euro ($2,200) per month minimum wage, a 300-euro ($450) per month wage-hike for all public workers and higher retirement pensions and welfare and unemployment benefits.

Among healthcare workers, five emergency healthcare unions today called for emergency room workers to continue their month-old strike following the "total failure" of negotiations with the health ministry. Demands include shorter hours, higher pay for night work and compensation for the stress their jobs entail.

In November, nearly two million workers struck and 700,000 demonstrated, creating the real possibility of building a strike movement linking all public and private sector workers with workers of African and Arab origin. But the union misleaders frittered away the opportunity by limiting the strike to a single day. After two months of calm, it became more difficult to re-launch the movement.

Due to the weakness of yesterday's strike, budget minister Eric Woerth was able to merely promise "announcing" a wage measure on Feb. 18, adding that the government would establish "a mechanism to guarantee individual purchasing power" -- i.e., merit pay to pit workers against each other.

Still, there was more public support for yesterday's walkout than for November's. Polls showed 77% of public sector workers and 51% of private sector workers felt the strike was justified. The bosses' massive attacks that will surely come to force workers to pay even more for the world's economic crisis demand a break with all pro-capitalist forms of leadership.

Workers need communist leadership to unite all our struggles in a movement aiming to destroy capitalism, the source of all workers' problems. For example, the struggle against the deportation of undocumented immigrants is one the labor movement needs to take on board.

In December, over 100 undocumented workers in three detention camps began a hunger strike to protest conditions in the camps and to demand their liberation. On January 19, the European Day Against the Confinement of Foreigners, 12,000 demonstrated nationwide, with 3,000 at the biggest protest, in Paris.

But as one trade unionist remarked after the Lyons demonstration, "The composition of the demonstration does reveal the fact that this movement's mobilization is not anchored in trade unions'...practice." That is, the major unions never advance the class analysis that undocumented and "legal" workers are members of the same working class. Consequently, these unions now have a hard time overcoming the bosses' racist and nationalist propaganda, making it harder to mobilize in defense of immigrant workers' rights.

Workers could take their cue from the young rebels who militantly fought the rulers' cops in protesting the latter's racist attacks on Arab and African youth. Multi-racial unity of the unions and these rebels could strike a real blow against the ruling class's attacks on both groups.

Gazans Break Out of Their Prison
But Nationalism Foils Mid-Eastern Workers

On January 23, Palestinians in Gaza blew up a section of the wall that separates them from Egypt and poured out of their prison -- created by Israeli rulers -- to buy desperately needed goods in Egypt. The flood of people seeking food, medicine and fuel was there for all the world to see, and neither Israel nor Egypt has dared to rush in to stop it.

After 38 years of occupation and settlements, Israel pulled out of the Gaza strip in September 2005, claiming to have ended its occupation and any responsibility for the 1.4 million Palestinian residents. In reality, Israeli rulers turned Gaza into a giant concentration camp, controlling all passage of goods and people, money, access to the sea and air space.

Before the "disengagement," 65% of Gazans lived in poverty and 35% were unemployed. Since then conditions have deteriorated markedly, with the cutoff of all trade and severe limitations on the import of fuel, medicine and other necessities. Sanitation, housing, public health and all public services are now at a disastrous level.

Palestinians' anger at Israel and the corrupt Palestinian Fatah party allowed the electoral victory of Hamas, an Islamic nationalist party, and its takeover of Gaza in 2006. Israel used this event and the abduction of an Israeli soldier as the excuse to launch a constant air bombardment of Gaza, killing over 400 Palestinians, militants and civilians alike. Gazans have fired homemade rockets into Israel border towns, killing less than 20 Israelis. However the Western capitalist press and politicians have branded "Palestinian terrorism" as the reason a "peaceful solution" cannot be reached.

However, the real reason there's no solution is that since 1948 Israel has seized more than 80% of Palestinian land, expelling 750,000 Arabs from their homes and subjecting them to 60 years of brutal occupation. Israel has been able to maintain this oppression only because of massive U.S. military aid, more than sent to any other country. This helps the U.S. control the flow of oil, and its profits, in the Persian Gulf area, using the powerful Israeli military to deal with any rival bosses who might threaten Exxon-Mobil's empire.

Within Israel the status quo is justified by bitter anti-Arab racism which is drilled into all its citizens, who seem not to have learned the lesson of the holocaust about racism's evil and murderous nature.

Unfortunately currently there is no leadership in Israel or Palestine which champions the unity of Palestinian and Jewish workers and students and recognizes the need to oppose both imperialism and nationalism. Neither secular nor religious nationalism will deliver either Jewish or Palestinian workers and youth from the grip of leaders who use them to benefit one or another group of power- and wealth-seeking ruling classes. In the recent past such multi-racial groups have existed, some with the help of our Party. We must strive to rebuild the fight for multi-racial unity and communism in this region.

Africa, Part II
Imperialists' Profits Behind 5.4 Million Congo Deaths

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation." (Karl Marx: "Capital," Volume One, Chapter 31; Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist)

For over a century and a half the Congo has been ravaged by this bloody accumulation of capital. Belgium's King Leopold became one of the world's richest men by turning the Congo into his private fiefdom, murdering 10-15 million. The imperialists and local capitalists who took over after Congo's independence from Belgium in 1960 have continued this genocide. Now a "peace deal" was signed to settle the fighting in the eastern Congo which has created 400,000 new refugees. (See CHALLENGE, 1/30) But since the causes of the conflict have not really changed, little can be expected from this latest truce.

According to the International Rescue Committee's (IRC) latest report, (Reuters, 1/22), 5.4 millions people have been killed in the Congo since the war began in the region in 1998, causing more deaths than any other conflict since World War II. "Congo's loss is equivalent to the entire population of Denmark or the state of Colorado perishing within a decade," stated IRC president George Rupp.

The shootings between the warring factions have not been the main cause of these deaths. Malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition, aggravated by the war, were the Congo's top killers, said the survey. "Most of the deaths are due to easily treatable and preventable diseases through the collapse of health systems and the disruption of livelihoods," said IRC director of global health programs Richard Brennan, one of the survey's authors. Congo has the lowest spending on health care of any country in the world, averaging just $15 per person annually.

The latest fighting before the January 22 truce came after Congo President Kabila met Condoleezza Rice in Ethiopia in September 2007. Rice also secured the support of the rulers of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. In November, Kabila was flown to Washington in the private plane of an Israeli mining magnate with interests in the Congo, to meet Bush. Then, with U.N. support, Kabila sent a large military force to fight rebel general Nkunda. But it was a disaster. The Congolese army was routed, forcing the government and its militia allies to reach a truce with the rebel forces.

The current fighting is labeled a "tribal conflict" between Tutsis and Hutus (continuing the one that led to the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s), but capitalist and imperialist thirst for profits are the real causes. General Nkunda is backed by Tutsi bosses and the Rwandan government who seek to control the mineral wealth of the Eastern Congo.

U.S., Canadian and European companies have monopolized the exploitation of diamonds, cobalt, gold, coltan and other mineral wealth in the region. They use local militias and bosses as subcontractors who impose slave-like conditions on those working in the mines. But now, China, India, Spain and even Russia are entering the operation, which is why the U.S. and European bosses want to ensure their lackeys are in control.

Huge oil deposits have been discovered in Lake Alberta, on the border between the Congo and Uganda. British Heritage Oil is now involved (its CEO has links to British military companies like Executive Outcomes and Sandline). Chinese and Spanish oil companies are now interested in exploring for oil there.

Besides Washington and Europe, Kabila is also being courted by China, which is giving his government $8 billion for infrastructure projects and mining operations. This will lead to Chinese companies' control of several important copper and cobalt mines.

(Future articles: how imperialist and local bosses reap huge profits from gold and other resources while African workers starve and die.)

LETTERS LETTERS

Paraguayan Friends of PLP Disrupt Rulers' Political Rally

Friends of PLP involved in the Party of the Movement Towards Socialism (P-MAS) boldly challenged a rogues' gallery of corrupt politicians, including outgoing Colorado Party (the right-wing ruling party) Governor Antonio Quiñonez of the Cordillera Department and his partner in crime, President Nicanor Frutos. When Nicanor appeared on-stage, 15 bold activists interrupted his fascist speech with chants of "Out with Nicanor!"

Predictably, the police attacked the youth, and Nicanor nervously resumed his speech, but the point had been made: No more passivity in the face of fascism and corruption!

Quiñonez, a target at this rally, owns the bus company that pollutes nearby streams in which workers' families bathe and wash their clothes and dishes. Until recently Quiñonez was the owner of the Cordillera Department's famously corrupt local lottery. He has used thugs to threaten the Contraloria Ciudadana anti-corruption group and also transferred a prosecutor who threatened his corrupt dealings to the Chaco Desert! (Sounds like Bush and friends?) But, as in the USA, the liberals will misdirect our struggle for liberation if we do not decisively advance the goal of communist revolution to our working-class friends.

In 2007, at a similar protest, the Contraloria Ciudadana and the Liberal Party organized a modest counter-inaugural protest rally against Nicanor and Quiñonez. The bosses had sharp-shooters atop buildings, and police beat back and chased the small reformist crowd chanting, "Nicanor, You Liar!"

Based on this past experience, police repression should have been expected this time and greater numbers should have been mobilized to counter police brutality. Our friends could have mobilized many more than 15 militants and the tactical battle might have had a different outcome. The action would have been better politically with more revolutionary chants like, "Out with Capitalism!" or "Smash Capitalism!" Such politics would clarify who the enemy is: not just the Colorado Party but the system of capitalism. A comrade here has said, "The elections, and voting for Lugo [a non-revolutionary, liberal politician] are only a means of getting to where we want to be." But elections will not solve the problems of the working class. Voting only justifies the system, and says in effect: "Capitalism can change itself; all we have to do is vote." A revolutionary organization cannot justify the capitalist system it hopes to destroy. This is a complete contradiction!

Only by building a base in the working class and the community, amongst farmers, workers and students can we truly put forward the revolutionary ideas that will free all workers from enslavement.

A truly revolutionary organization places its trust in the working class and never minces words or hides behind reformist slogans. Wearing a Che Guevara shirt and mentioning imperialism or revolution a couple of times don't make an organization or its politics revolutionary. We must study dialectical materialism, trust the working class and put our learned understanding into action.

Hugo Chavez, P-MAS's idol, only wants to reform capitalism. This is impossible. There is no "Bolivarian" nationalist/populist or electoral way to change a system that today is even more rotten to the core than ever. Its international economic meltdown is dragging the world's workers into endless imperialist wars, mass poverty and death.

Red Guarani

Howard Students Fight Campus Militarization

Howard University students in the Political Education and Action Committee (PEAC) are mounting a struggle against the University's ties to U.S. imperialism. They're particularly aiming at ROTC, whose colonel is aggressively trying to strengthen its role on campus, putting up new permanent signage and forcing its way into the Social Sciences Division of the College of Arts and Sciences. (Some "science"!).

PEAC is also questioning the Howard University/Army High Performance Computing Research Center on campus, concerned that the University's president serves on the National Security Agency's Advisory Board.

PEAC's first issued a flyer around the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday comparing King's 1967 Riverside Church speech against the war in Vietnam to the University's opposite approach of essentially supporting the Iraq war through its concrete ties to U.S. imperialism.

These initiatives grew out of PEAC's investigation of the U.S. Armed Forces' new Africa Command. Students concluded that the goal of this new military structure was to better safeguard U.S. imperialist interests in Africa, from Sudan to Nigeria to South Africa to Kenya; it had nothing to do with assisting African victims of civil war, AIDS or poverty.

This initiative should be linked to, and hopefully inspire, similar struggles on campuses nationwide.

Red Observer

Soviet Reversal Wasn't All Stalin's Fault

The letter from Ancient Red (CHALLENGE, Jan. 30) discussed the rise of the "red bourgeoisie" in the USSR after the revolution and how this contributed to the eventual reversal of the gains made through the revolution. While the comrade is correct that the inequality in wages (and wages themselves, really) was a tragic ideological and material concession to capitalism, it is incorrect to place the blame solely on Stalin.

There is some evidence that Stalin was very unhappy with the development of privileged status for party leaders. Joseph Davies, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the 30's described him as "clean-living" and "modest." Marshall Zhukov said that, "He never tolerated any luxury in clothing, furniture, or his life in general." Finally, as early as 1928 Stalin himself complained that, "...As these leaders [of the Party] rise they get further away from the masses, and the masses begin to look up at them from below and do not venture to criticize them... [This] cannot but give rise to a certain danger of the leaders losing contact with the masses and the masses getting out of touch with the leaders." Part of our battle against anti-Stalinist ideology (beyond refuting the bald-faced lies) is explaining that what happened in the Soviet Union was the result of incorrect theory and collective errors, not because Stalin was a bad person. Stalin certainly deserves blame; he was the leader of the Party and he could have more vehemently opposed the development of privilege. But to blame him solely is incorrect.

JP

Angry Tenants Unite to Fight Slumlord

(The following letter was received from a friend of PLP and describes the anger that many workers feel towards conditions they suffer from profit-driven landlords.)

I thought your readers might be interested in a struggle we've been having with our slumlord. After many years of dealing with him individually, my fellow tenants consciously decided to unite and rise up.

For many years we've struggled by ourselves with uninhabitable housing conditions and a landlord whose only concern was to collect our hard-earned money. Recently I learned that based on our sweat and silence over the years he has bought three houses. While we tenants struggle to live amid a state of disrepair, thanks to our rent payments he can rest on three beds of his choice.

About two months ago, another tenant and I began discussing the mutual obstacles we shared and the problems we face independently. Then we decided to stop talking and take matters into our own hands. The two of us formed a tenants committee and considered how to rally other tenants to our mutual cause. We began with our best viable asset -- our mouth.

We reached out to other tenants about how our shared burdens gave us a common ground to change our conditions. We planned a tenants meeting to discuss our strategy for attaining our goals. We've spread the message that the only way we can beat the landlord is through a determined unity.

We sent the landlord a letter and a signed affidavit with our demands for repairs. We've also taken steps to begin housing-court proceedings. As a combined force, we have a real opportunity to change the status quo.

To the landlord we're nothing but illiterate, uneducated, ill-informed and too divided to do this. To him we're the human sheet rock that sustains his bank account. However, he's forgotten how profitable joint dialogue can be.

At the very least, when two individuals discuss their mutual concerns, they begin to realize the bonds that exist between them. Looking around, one can see others facing a common enemy. United and strengthened by our mutual rage, we're not only fortified to challenge management but to destroy the mechanism behind the curtain.

Mad As Hell Worker

Striking Writers Undercut By Scabbing, Bosses' Culture

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 29--The strike by film and TV writers which began on Nov.5 is being pressured more and more to reach a deal favorable to the mega corporations that own the mass media. The West Coast leadership of the WGA (Writers Guild) agreed not to picket the Grammy Awards Show. It also entered into "informal" talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), while announcing it was dropping demands for jurisdiction over animation and reality shows.

The deal last week by Directors Guild (DGA) and the studios and networks -- which doesn't challenge the right of the media bosses to monopolize the profits from the internet and and other new media sent a strong message to the WGA to reach a similar sellout deal. This might also force the Screen Actors Guild to follow that pattern when their contract expires in the summer.

The WGA strike reflects the current dismal situation faced by many people who consider themselves part of the "middle class." The WGA members, who in general write horrible mindless stuff used by the media bosses to indoctrinate workers and youth with racist, sexist, pro-cop, anti-working class, pro-war and anti-communist ideology, consider themselves above the working class. But in this day and age of capitalist economic meltdown, sharper inter-imperialist rivalry leading to more and more wars, the bosses can't afford to bribe all those who serve them. In a way these writers are victims of the same crap they produce: they don't think about seeking the solidarity of production workers in the studios (truck drivers, cleaning staff, technical staff, etc.). A strike by those workers would up the ante and could really shut down the studios -- and would stop the scabbing by millionaires like Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, and Ellen Degeneres (all members of the WGA).

Workers and youth should support the struggle of these writers (many of whom are not well-paid) because they are fighting the same bosses -- Sony, Disney, Viacom, General, Rupert Murdoch, etc.-- who have made our lives even more miserable. But, we also must sharpen the ideological struggle against the crap these writers produce.

Puerto Rico Teachers Defy Strike Ban

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, January 29 -- Over 500 teachers picketed the Caguas region of the Department of Education as more than 25,000 members of the Puerto Rican Federation of Teachers (FMPR) prepared to strike February 1 for higher wages, better working and school conditions and against the strike-breaking Law 45, which calls for firing of public workers who strike. The teachers are also fighting the bosses' media and union hacks affiliated with the AFL-CIO who actually support Law 45 containing the strike-breaking clause. The government decertified the FMPR for violating this anti-strike law.

These militant teachers deserve the support of all teachers in the U.S. and internationally. It is a particularly important struggle for public workers in the U.S. who face the same kind of union-busting law.

Good Riddance to an Anti-Communist Mass Murderer

Suharto, Indonesia's former military dictator, finally kicked the bucket after a long illness. Unfortunately, he died in bed and not at the hands of the working class, to whom he brought so much suffering.

Suharto was the leader of the 1965 military coup that ousted the nationalist regime of Sukarno. "Throughout the country, members, supporters and suspected sympathisers of the Parti Kommunist Indonesia [PKI] were massacred; it was estimated that up to one million were killed, while many more were imprisoned or detained without trial." (The London Independent, 1/28) It was one of the bloodiest massacres in recent history, and the CIA helped the death squads all the way, supplying them with the names of communists and sympathizers.

More than a decade later, the Suharto regime committed more mass murder, this time against 200,000 in East Timor, which was occupied by Indonesia after it had became independent from Portugal. The Indonesian army also massacred many thousands in West Papua and oil-rich Aceh (where Exxon-Mobil has huge investments).

Suharto served in the Dutch colonial army (Indonesia had been a Dutch colony). Then, during World War II, he won promotion in the puppet army controlled by the Japanese fascists. After the war, he joined the anti-Dutch struggle until Indonesia became independent in 1950.

His regime lasted from 1965 until May 1998, when, after a mass rebellion, Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, suggested he step down to avoid more turmoil.

Corruption was rampant in his regime. It's estimated that his family and cronies stole anywhere up to $35 billion, using their control of state power. But justice wasn't served and Suharto was able to live out a quiet life within his fortified villa. The new rulers refused to try him or his crooked sons for corruption.

Indonesia's communist movement was one of the world's biggest. The PKI was a mass-based party, but it made a fatal error: it tried to unite with Sukarno who they saw as the "progressive bourgeoisie," actually joining his government -- only to be massacred when Suharto seized power in 1965, leaving Sukarno in a figurehead role. The PKI had no strategy for a real revolutionary struggle to smash capitalism and imperialism. Its ill-fated faith in "lesser-evil" capitalists was paid in blood.

The communist movement in Indonesia has not recovered from that mistake. This led to Suharto and his cronies never paying for their crimes against the working class. Let's make sure this doesn't happen in the future.

REDEYE REDEYE

Stimulus for poor? Dems say no

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan.... The Democrats appear to have buckled,... dropping demands for provisions that would have helped the most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective....

But the Bush administration has apparently succeeded in killing all of these ideas, in favor of a plan that mainly gives money to those least likely to spend it...and Democrats accepted. (NYT, 1/25)

Class war behind `tribal' wars

Here is how the story has been framed: the peaceful Kenya we know and love from our holiday snaps has suddenly erupted in senseless, tribal barbarism....

The coverage shows how quickly the west reverts to racism. Why is the word "tribal" only used to refer to Africa? Why don't we talk of Belgian...tribes? No, only in Africa is inter-ethnic violence cast as "ancient," immutable tribalism, associated in the European mindset with barbarism and irrationality. It's a language of self-congratulation -- we are civilised, Africans are not....

But Kenya is a complex society with 48 different ethnic groups and the highest internally displaced population in Africa... and its burgeoning, largely unemployed, population struggles to secure some of the gains of the recent economic boom.

It's hard to imagine any country negotiating such chronic insecurity and rapid social and economic dislocation without conflicts of interest flaring up....

The violence that results is certainly barbaric... but it is not about a primordial African capacity for savagery.... On a continent that has seen more wars since 1990 than in the whole of the previous century, violence can be a form of communication of last resort. When all other channels of seeking justice for embittered grievances in a corrupt regime appear to have been exhausted, some will see violence as the only way to protect their interests....

What we are seeing in Kenya -- and in other unstable developing countries -- is how human beings behave when faced with the kind of chronic insecurity that globalisation is incubating the world over. (GW, 1/18)

Marxist students active in Iran

TEHRAN - In early December, a surprising scene unfolded at Tehran University: 500 Marxist students held aloft portraits of Che Guevara to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's policies. Smaller groups of Marxist students held similar protests in several other cities....

Leftist students...refer to the government as a capitalist regime and condemn pro-democracy politicians who support change as "bourgeois...."

A woman...writes "Reform died, long live revolution...."

"We don't think we can change anything in the near future...but as students we think we can transfer our knowledge about class, capitalism and equality to society, especially the workers." (NYT, 1/20)

Food prices up; world-wide riots

From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.

The food price index...climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages.

...Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen....

Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food. (NYT, 1/19)

Disasters built into capitalism

After every crisis, regulators say they will cure the financial system of the recent folly, reassuring the public that the caustic asset du jour -- Latin American debt, Internet stocks, mortgages in Florida -- will never again be allowed to bring the banks down.

Yet the recurrence of disasters suggests that the risky cravings of the masters of the universe are uncurbed. All that happens is that the next crisis takes a somewhat different form....

There's nothing like a smart banker motivated by an otherworldly bonus to get around the most carefully written regulatory limits on his or her ability to make money.

...They don't have to return past bonuses when the year is bad. (NYT, 1/25)

Economic Collapse Burying Workers; Will Spark Wider Wars

The global economic collapse is crushing workers even more. The UN's International Labor Organization (ILO) predicted that the subprime crisis and rising oil prices will increase world unemployment by five million (Agence France Press, 1/23) over and above the already 189.9 million now jobless. That forecast was reached before the current turbulences in the world's financial markets. "We still don't know the impact of the stock market crisis on the employment figures," explained ILO chief José Salazar-Xirinchs.

Trenton, NJ Mayor Douglas Palmer, president of the U.S. Mayor's Conference, told 250 mayors meeting in Washington that the subprime crisis is "an economic tsunami...hitting our cities." A recent Conference study said home values would drop by $1.2 trillion this year.

The mayors are asking for immediate federal help, but -- even though some cities are suing banks and speculators who caused the subprime mess -- their main response has been to cut social services even more nation-wide. Sacramento city officials have responded to a $55 million projected budget shortfall for next year by ordering an immediate hiring freeze and ending some discretionary spending. In Virginia, Fairfax County -- facing a $220 million deficit for the coming fiscal year -- is considering cuts to school districts. On January 24th, billionaire New York City Mayor Bloomberg announced an across-the-board 5% cut for all city departments, for a total slash of $1.5 billion in two years, including a $505 million dollar reduction in schools.

The effects of the current economic crisis are also hitting countries closely linked to U.S. imperialism. During the current world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, the governor of Mexico's Central Bank reported that his country's economy will be hit badly -- 40% of Mexico's Gross Domestic Product depends on trade with the U.S. Already, Mexico is predicting a slowdown in growth for 2008. On top of that, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. are losing their jobs because of the subprime crisis (many work in construction) and general economic collapse, reducing their remittances to relatives back in Mexico.

This racist aspect of the subprime crisis is affecting Britain and Spain. Immigrant workers involved in construction there are losing their jobs.

International financier George Soros is not bullish about this crisis. He told the Davos economic forum that there is a profound difference in the current crisis, marking the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency. He called it the worst economic crisis since World War II. The hope that the rising economies of China and India will help ease the situation is being dashed since they depend on exporting to the U.S. and European markets, hard-hit by the current crisis. For example, incomes for workers in the U.S. have not risen in real terms for three decades because of downsizing, racist wage-cuts and the lack of mass fight-back by the union movement. The subprime crisis has put working-class homeowners -- who borrowed money based on the rising values of their homes -- in a hole, decreasing consumer spending. Less consumption and a falling U.S. dollar might spur China and other countries, who have lent the U.S. trillions by buying Treasury bonds, to cash in their investments, sinking the U.S. economy even more.

Soros is worried that resulting political tensions, including U.S. protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession or worse.

That "worse" could turn economic conflicts into a shooting war among the world's imperialists for a bigger share of the capitalist pie. The subprime and credit-crunch crises are just symptoms of a capitalist system based on speculation, endless imperialist wars and racist-fascist attacks against the international working class. None of the tricks the bosses used in recent decades have worked, including Thatcherism, Reagan's "trickle-down voodoo economy," Clinton's "new economy" or Bush's tax cuts. U.S., British and other capitalists' turning away from production has created an even more parasitic capitalist class, still more dependent on financial speculation and increasing fraud, without creating real value. Each new scheme -- dot.com, subprime mortgages, etc. -- created bigger bubbles, dragging the world economy down.

But capitalism won't fall by itself. Since its birth the profit system has been based on boom-and-bust cycles, accompanied by massive wars, recessions and depressions. The anarchistic capitalist production system will continue as long as we workers let them make us pay with our blood for their profits. Previous wars and crises led to workers' revolutions: the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions. As the international working class prepares for May Day 2008, we in the Progressive Labor Party must step up our efforts to win workers, youth and soldiers worldwide to see that the only way out of this capitalist hell is building a massive revolutionary communist movement to bury the bosses once and for all.

The Demon Is Capitalism

A Demon of Our Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of FInancial Innovation

By Richard Bookstaber

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007

"Complexity cloaks chaos" concludes Richard Bookstaber in A Demon of Our Own Design. He draws on insider knowledge of recent Wall Street debacles to paint a future of bigger, more frequent financial collapses. The need to reinvigorate value-producing manufacturing becomes more severe with each crash: the attacks on the working class sharper.

Historically, many empires have been undone by letting go of their domestic manufacture-based economies. A seventeenth-century Spaniard enthused: "Let London manufacture... as long as our capital can enjoy them. ...All the world serves [Madrid] and she serves nobody." Eventually, London used its manufacturing to become the center of a new empire, while's Spain's empire declined.

Speculation: U.S. Imperialism's Hidden Weakness

The financial sector now accounts for 31 percent of U. S. corporate profits -- up from 20 percent in 1990 and 8 percent back in 1950. But, larger percentages of financial profits come from hedge fund speculation. New York Times business columnist Floyd Norris blames these financial "innovations" for spreading the housing-related credit market crisis.

On the other hand, China has a growing industrial economy allowing it to become an emerging imperialist competitor. Not long ago U.S. "experts" questioned China's economic viability since Chinese banks carried too many non-performing loans. China Investment Corporation, the state-run investment fund, will spend two-thirds of its $200 billion shoring up these banks. Their percentage of "bad" loans has already dropped by half.

Chinese imperialists got this capital from exploiting workers in their vast, rapidly-expanding manufacturing sector. They can get away with it because capitalist leaders long ago hijacked the communist revolution. They've turned it into it's opposite -- another exploitive capitalist nightmare.

Spiral to Hell

Bookstaber gives a running account of financial "innovations" beginning in the 1980s. He explains the mathematics behind investment strategies that caused such infamous disasters as the 1987 crash and the demise of Long Term Capital Management. He worked with many of the players and admits to contributing to financial catastrophes.

He freely admits speculative "financial tools" help for only a few years. The investment community "invents" one speculative scheme after another trying to stay ahead of the inevitable payback. By now, the very design of financial markets insures a "liquidity spiral to hell."

His solution is to reduce "tight coupling and complexity of financial transactions." The financial markets shouldn't use "every financial instrument that can be dreamt up." Speculation shouldn't rely on large sums of borrowed money. This "leverage" speeds up the spiral to catastrophe, spreading the danger to areas beyond the original investment. Bookstaber hopes "simpler financial instruments and less leverage will create a market that is more robust and survivable."

He never asks why U.S. bosses turned to financial speculation in the first place. Industrial opportunities to extract surplus value and profit failed to keep pace with those of emerging imperialist competitors. U.S. financial titans were forced to speculate to keep up. Bookstaber's solution is fanciful in this climate.

Workers Create All Value

The value of an automobile or airplane is greater than the sum of the parts that make it up. The amount of labor in production creates the increase in value. The boss can't use this extra value until he sells the product. Marx called this part of the process exchange. Exchange itself doesn't create any value.

As exchange becomes less connected to creation of value, it turns into speculation. One boss can make money at the expense of another, but no value is created in the exchange. That's what increasingly opaque hedge funds are all about. Eventually the house of cards collapses if no extra value is created to back up these financial "tools."

Ruling-class strategic thinkers have awakened to the danger and to the need to actually produce value. They are re-industrializing on the backs of low-paid immigrant and black labor, starting with expanding subcontractors.

Racist practices like this hurt all workers. The network of non-union subcontractors has grown to include low-paid sub-assembly and assembly factories. Conditions in traditional union plants -- with older white and black workers -- are being driven down to subcontractor levels. Even in union facilities, the new hires get paid half what veteran co-workers make. The bosses may not be able to stop speculation, but they can and will attack us. J

Re-industrialization with low-paid domestic labor is only the beginning. The bosses hope to rein in emerging imperialist competitors like Russia and China through control of Mideast oil. The current wars are only a prelude to more bloody oil wars. Eventually, direct confrontation will be necessary, leading to world war.

Poverty, war, racism and economic crisis are the demons of the capitalist design. We need a new design that produces for the needs of our class, not the profits of the bosses -- communism.

 

a href="#Elections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State">"lections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State

• Obama Lures Youth to Fight and Die in Wider Wars
• Clinton Team Drips With Serbian, Iraqi Blood
• Voting Never Solved Anything: Only Red Revolution Can

U.S. Imperialism: Killer By Suicide

Profs Fight for Right to Teach Anti-Capitalism in Classroom

a href="#Striking Miners Battle Mexico’s Bosses, Cops, Union-Busting Government">"triking Miners Battle Mexico’s Bosses, Cops, Union-Busting Government

Growing PLP Club in Spain Links Study and Action

Red Mechanics Needed: Detroit Totaled by U.S. Capitalism

Help Wanted: In Iraq

a href="#Capitalism Won’t Fall On Its Own">"apitalism Won’t Fall On Its Own

Ford Strike In Russia Ends

a href="#Bhutto’s Party and Musharraf, Two Sides of Capitalist Coin">"hutto’s Party and Musharraf, Two Sides of Capitalist Coin

Unity With African, Arab Workers Critical to Union Fight vs. French Bosses, Hacks

Battle for Resources Behind Endless Wars in Africa

4 Million Killed in Congo

Transportation Workers Can Be Key Force for Revolution

LETTTERS

Confidence in Working Class Pays Off

Worker from the West Need to Fight Racist Deportation Raids

a href="#Phony Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’">Ph"ny Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’

Revoking Union Rights Is A Law of Capitalism

Higher-paid Jobs Corrupted USSR Leaders

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

• Lessons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future
• Steroids Helped Baseball Bosses Bulk Up Profits

Challenge Web Extra: Chile: Massacre of Miners a Century Ago Led to Building of Commmunist Party

---

a name="Elections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State">">"lections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State

The Obama-Clinton battle in the Democratic Party primaries has spread the illusion that positive change results from voting to reform the profit system rather than from militant, revolutionary struggle to smash the bosses’ dictatorship. High voter turnouts for Barack Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa and Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire comeback signal a dangerous development for the working class.

Liberals push the myth that Obama and Clinton mark a decline in racism and an advance in women’s rights in the U.S. Obama is "fashioning a positive change in the very character of the nation,’’ gushed NY Times’ black columnist Bob Herbert. (1/12/08) A Times article the next day said, "Whoever wins the nomination....the victory will be a benchmark moment for the American promise of equality." Nothing could be further from the truth.

Obama and Clinton, in fact, will intensify the oppression of workers — male and female, black, Latin, Asian, Arab and white. Illinois Senator Obama didn’t lift a finger when thousands of mostly black workers were laid off in Chicago’s Cook County hospitals, simultaneously slashing healthcare for a mostly black and Latino patient population. And Clinton voted for war in Iraq and for the military "option" against Iran.

Both Democratic front-runners represent a U.S. capitalist class seriously challenged by rivals from Iran to China. In the coming period, U.S. bosses will need millions of troops to kill and die in their expanding racist wars. They need to transform a debt-ridden, declining economy into a wartime one by slashing workers’ living standards and creating a police state. Obama and Clinton are vying, not to promote equality, but to become the chief executor of the rulers’ deadly plans.

Obama Lures Youth to Fight and Die in Wider Wars

Contrary to Obama’s capitalist-fed worshippers at the Times, racism, the rulers’ main tool for splitting and weakening the working class, remains rampant in the U.S. By every measure and in every area — income, unemployment, education, housing, health, arrests, imprisonment, deportation — black and Latin workers suffer the most, and this super-exploitation worsens conditions for all workers, under every Democratic and Republican presidency. Obama’s role is to mask that reality with the falsehood of "equal opportunity." He follows in the footsteps of ruling-class protégés Colin Powell and Condi Rice.

As Obama lures young people to the system, one job he can attempt for the rulers (win or lose) is to help reverse the 58% plunge in black military enlistment since 2000. "Man-of-the-people" Obama turns out to be a tool of the top U.S. imperialist financiers. He "has raised nearly $100 million in campaign contributions, nearly as much as the Hillary Clinton money machine. Three of his four largest groups of bankrollers are executives of Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase." (NY Daily News, 1/11/08)

Clinton Team Drips With Serbian, Iraqi Blood

"Pioneer" Clinton aims to be the first woman to lead U.S. imperialism in war. She has constantly lobbied in the Senate to increase the size of U.S. forces. Her campaign advisors include a host of war criminals from her husband’s administration — Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and General Wesley Clark, who all helped orchestrate Clinton’s terror bombing of Serbia and softening-up of Iraq with missiles and starvation-inducing sanctions.

Opportunistically seizing on people’s disgust with the Bush regime, Obama and Clinton babble about "change." But the change they have in mind is bad for workers. They want changes like those called for by the Clinton-appointed 1999 Hart-Rudman commission. It demanded a huge revamping of the state apparatus with vastly broadened police powers to put the nation on a war footing. It sought a government that could enforce the sacrifice of workers’ blood and bosses’ profits needed in global conflicts to preserve U.S. supremacy. Bush failed at this; Obama and Clinton hope to lead that effort.

Voting Never Solved Anything: Only Red Revolution Can

The best changes for workers in the last century — establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Russian and Chinese revolutions of 1917 and 1949 — did not occur in a voting booth. They grew from class-based armed struggle in the streets after years and decades of painstaking organizing in workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and the army and navy. Our Party’s long-term goal is to repeat those true working-class triumphs while correcting the political errors that led to their reversal.

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U.S. bosses have failed to win masses of working class youth — especially black and Latino — to kill and die for imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. On October 31, the Army announced that it had started the October 1st recruiting year with the lowest level of "delayed entry" recruits since the beginning of the all-volunteer forces in 1973. The Boston Globe reports that in the military overall, recruitment among blacks has dropped by 58% since 2000 ("Military Sees Big Decline in Black Enlistees." 10/7/07).

Racism within the U.S. — especially against lower enlisted black and Latin troops — undermines the bosses’ ability to win workers to fight their wars in the first place. Blacks make up more than 22% of the army and only 12.3% of the total U.S. population. But Michael O’Hanlon, a senior advisor to the military, says that the trend of serving in the military is "at risk in the black community."

The Globe reports that the racist response to hurricane Katrina, the legal lynching of the Jena 6, and the history of disproportionate black deaths in Vietnam has spurred black youth to decline military service in higher numbers. To win more blacks to serve, politicians and media are trying to mislead and fool workers, promising anti-racist reforms like revamped hate-crime legislation. They only want to direct anti-racist anger away from the capitalist system.

In 2006 an Army report recommended increasing the pool of black officers in the combat arms branch of the Army office corps in order to build "the capacity for a long-term, sustained level of conflict." And this past October, two months after two nooses were found at the U.S. Coast Guard academy, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, Elijah Cummings (Dem.-Maryland), and Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen, decried the incidents. What they feared was not more racist attacks on students and officers-in-training but rather the effects on "the strength of unity" within the officer corps that imperialism requires to keep U.S. workers killing Middle Eastern workers.

One way the bosses are trying to win black youth is by running Barack Obama as a serious contender for president. But Obama wants to expand the war on terror and shift the center of combat from Iraq to Afghanistan in order to free up troops for possible attacks on Iran, Pakistan or the Sudan. According to lower-enlisted black and Latin troops in contact with PLP, Afghanistan is more accepted than Iraq because troops are not as likely to die there, along with the perception within the military that the U.S. is winning. But Obama is looking out for U.S. imperialists’ interests, not for lower-enlisted troops.

According to a recent Army War College report entitled "U.S. Interests in Central Asia and Challenges to Them," U.S. imperialists need Afghanistan as a base to project military power and to fend off Russian and Chinese imperialists’ influence over oil/gas-rich states in the region, regardless of who becomes president. Already, the "good" war has killed thousands of Afghans and over 600 coalition troops.

No matter what the bosses do to win workers to fight, overall recruitment trends continue to fall short of the troops the military needs to relieve the strain of current deployments. In October, the Senate voted down the Dream Act, a Pentagon-backed bill that targeted hundreds of thousands of undocumented, mainly Latino, youth for recruitment. Lawrence J. Korb, a top strategist for U.S. imperialism, say the U.S. needs 100,000 more troops the next few years and warns, "If we cannot get sufficient numbers of the right people on a volunteer basis, as Lt. General Lute, President Bush’s war czar noted, returning to the draft will have to be considered."

PLP and friends must link the racism of the justice system and imperialist wars to local bosses and to the capitalist system. Within the military, we need to influence troops to do what they can to resist killing for imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the bosses building to expand support for the "war on terror," fighting racism, especially against Arabs and Muslims, becomes even more important.

Union mis-leaders have told PL unionists that raising the war distracts from bread-and-butter issues. Anti-war groups have told PL’ers that racism is a related but separate struggle. And soldiers won to bosses’ ideology say the main enemy is those who are planting IEDs (roadside bombs), not the bosses pitting workers against each other to fight their wars. It’s up to PLP to combat these lies and win our base to take action that exposes capitalism for what it is — a racist, sexist, imperialist system that must be destroyed.

U.S. Imperialism: Killer By Suicide

There are many ways in which U.S. imperialism kills people. One of the least know is GI suicide: one veteran soldeir commits suicide every 84 minutes — 24 hours per day, 365 days a year.

A CBS-TV report (11/13/07) on figures from 45 of the 50 states revealed that in 2005, 6,256 veterans committed suicide: 120 every week, 17 per day. If the other five states had reported, the final figure might approach 24 per day, or one every hour.

In the 20-24 age group, the suicide rate is up to four times the civilian average.

The onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder is often delayed for decades, but it has reached epidemic proportions, which the Pentagon denies and refuses to even count.

Most youth do not enlist because they want to kill civilians. But experiencing the carnage in Iraq and Vietnam, among other imperialist wars, leads to another type of murder by war: GI suicides.

Profs Fight for Right to Teach Anti-Capitalism in Classroom

CHICAGO — The situation in U.S. higher education mirrors the increasing crisis and growing ferocity of U.S. rulers against other parts of the working class. They raise the rate of exploitation, aided by the complete sellout by the trade union leadership. Huge cutbacks in state and federal money mean that even "public" colleges are so expensive that they are scarcely public any longer. Students take 5-6 years to graduate, and graduate students take almost a decade to get their doctoral degrees.

Almost three-fourths of college classes are taught by graduate students, part-time, and adjunct faculty who work for less than a living wage, normally with no benefits and no job security from year to year. A campaign funded by "conservative" ruling-class forces to intimidate teachers away from criticizing capitalism and its horrors has been so blatant that many of the more secure full-time and tenured faculty recognize that some form of opposition is needed.

PL members and friends carried the campaign against these abuses and for communism to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the largest convention of college teachers in the world. As in the past we worked with our friends in the Radical Caucus (RC) to recruit more faculty and graduate students to class struggle and ultimately to the Party.

The RC’s reform struggles focused on three resolutions to the MLA Delegates. The first, on the relation between super-exploitation of teachers, their lack of job security, and lack of freedom to teach anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, passed with some debate.

The second resolution, urging freedom to criticize Zionism in the classroom, was sidetracked by a backstage agreement between one delegate who is also head of the liberal American Association of University Professors (AAUP), supposedly an "academic freedom" group, and the MLA leadership. The explicit defense of those who teach anti-Zionism was replaced by a general statement that all teachers should be free to teach as they wish. This ignores the big attacks against those teachers who criticize Zionism — and that was the AAUP leader’s goal. A third resolution, against the politically-motivated firing of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, was watered down to be passed in a weaker form.

The "liberal" AAUP leader and the "liberal" MLA Executive Board were exposed as failing to stand up for those faculty who want to attack U.S. imperialism and Zionism. We need to stress this more, and prepare better for next year.

We met many new, good people who will help build our struggles. We had some good discussions about the Party and communism, and are following up. We should have organized to leaflet the convention itself, as in previous years. We were also weak in distributing CHALLENGE. That error is being corrected now in post-convention contacts.

We have renewed our determination to make explicit anti-capitalism, along with anti-racism, the "bottom line" of all our public statements in sessions and meetings. A modest beginning must be improved in future years.

Most of our friends believe that a "humane" capitalism without imperialism and war is possible. They think, and want to believe, that U.S. bosses can be won to making the U.S. like what they think Denmark or Switzerland are. This is impossible, but most of our colleagues "want it to be true." The Democratic candidates for President are feeding those illusions with promises of "Change!" and "Dump Bush!" Revisionists — phony "communists" and "socialists" — are building those illusions, leading our class down the path to world war. We have to win more and more teachers to seeing that there is no hope in capitalism, and that they need to join PLP, to smash capitalism with revolution for a communist world.

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CANANEA, SONORA, MEXICO, January 14 — The miners of Cananea — whose struggle marked the beginning of the 1912 Mexican Revolution — are again fighting back against their bosses and the bosses’ state. This past week hundreds of state and federal cops attacked copper miners who have been striking for almost six months. Twenty miners were injured, some seriously, and many have been arrested.

The mine, owned by the Grupo Mexico (GM) capitalist group — which also owns two mines and a smelter group in Arizona — is raking in huge profits from high copper prices on the world market. Yet it refuses to grant workers a decent wage hike, reopen a hospital serving them and their families, and improve mine safety and working conditions. GM’s chief financial officer is a former executive of a Kimberley-Clark subsidiary in Mexico. That’s the paper company founded by the family of Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner, sponsor of the racist anti-immigrant bill that sparked mass mega protests in all major U.S. cities in 2006.

The bosses are trying to break the strike by declaring it "illegal." On January 12, the miners won an appeal against such a declaration.

The miners are also battling government and company plans to bust their union and bring in a company union. It has become the longest walkout in the history of the Union of Mine, Smelter and Allied Workers, surpassing the 2006 Lazaro Cárdenas, Michoacan, strike when workers beat back an attack by an army of cops and soldiers. Miners’ strikes have spread since February 19, 2005, when 65 miners died in a huge explosion in the GM-owned Pasta de Conchos coal mine in the northern state of Coahuila.

The 1912 Mexican revolution didn’t free Mexico’s rural and urban workers from the yoke of capitalism and imperialism. Today, all the contradictions in Mexico are sharpening. Now, a nationalist section of the local capitalist class, led by López Obrador, wants to use the anger of workers and youth to fight for a bigger share of the capitalist pie for their own interests. Obrador lost a fraudulent election in 2006 to the current President Calderón, a pro-U.S. lackey. The country is being militarized, with Pentagon help, under the guise of "the war against drugs." For workers, the only way out of this hell is to turn their struggles into schools for communism and join and build the internationalist communist PLP.

PLP calls on workers and students in the U.S. and Mexico to denounce this attack on the Cananea miners and unite in international workers’ solidarity.

Growing PLP Club in Spain Links Study and Action

SPAIN — "I didn’t know that an international party existed that was so concerned about the workers of the entire world," said a friend, a student from France, when I showed her CHALLENGE-DESAFIO at a meeting of a club formed in one of the largest cities here. Our club began with a Turkish worker and myself, an immigrant worker from El Salvador. Now we’re more than ten workers of different nationalities. We’ve joined marches organized by the transit unions and other mass reform groups fighting for better transit city-wide.

We met to review international events. It became complicated because two workers from Ireland didn’t understand much Spanish, but a youth from Venezuela translated our discussion on dialectical materialism. One was very excited because he hadn’t understood before why — if the communist line was correct — the old Soviet Union failed. Then he read a CHALLENGE explaining some of the errors committed then. We all concluded that in order to establish a system in which we’re all equal, instead of fighting for socialism as a stage between capitalism and communism, we must fight directly for communism.

Our French friend was quite taken with the recent workers’ and youth mass protests back home. Then when we read CHALLENGE, she saw the title headline saying when workers unite, we can stop the whole capitalist machinery. She took several copies to continue sharing communist ideas with her fellow students in France.

We met a week later in an area "occupied" by squatters to celebrate a member’s birthday, which led to turning a bad thing into a good thing. While discussing the racist police repression here against immigrants and social groups in general, the cops knocked at the door. Someone had called them to report a group of "disorderly" squatters in the neighborhood.

The good thing: we organized everything in a way that seemed natural. Two people left to talk to the cops. One stayed to guard the doors to bar their entrance, and another pair organized the rest to make a plan. The police said we couldn’t meet here, to go elsewhere. So one group left for the park and the others (immigrants without "proper" papers) stayed. Then we got the police to leave.

Afterwards, we all returned and initiated a sharper discussion. We said we need to print more leaflets and try to organize struggles with revolutionary, not reform goals.

These friends of the Party are now excited because they understand communist ideas more clearly, including the significance of union struggles for reforms and the real struggle that all workers must carry out worldwide, the fight for a communist system, organized by the only international communist party, PLP. We must fight to build more CHALLENGE readers’ clubs everywhere.

An internationalist communist worker

Red Mechanics Needed: Detroit Totaled by U.S. Capitalism

DETROIT, MI — "There are not enough park benches in the state to accommodate all the homeless people that are being created." That’s how one worker who faces losing her home described the sub-prime mortgage crisis that is affecting one out of every 21 homeowners here. Another said, "It doesn’t matter if you’re white or black. All working-class people are going through the same thing. We’re all just one step from being on the corner asking for food and money."

The home foreclosure rate here is the second highest in the country, and eight times the national average. Fifty years ago, when GM, Ford and Chrysler ruled the auto world, Detroit had the highest rate of home ownership of any major city in the U.S., and the highest median income. Today, with those same auto bosses fighting for their lives, and being increasingly challenged on their home turf, Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the U.S., with a median household income of only $35,500. Gambling casinos have replaced closed factories and there is hardly a supermarket or movie theater within the city limits. This is one of the clearest examples of the racism that is built into the profit system, as about 75% of Detroiters are black.

Since 2000, the metro area has lost 126,000 jobs. Many of those affected by layoffs and the recent wave of UAW-negotiated auto contracts are also facing foreclosure. In August, foreclosure notices were served on 260 homes per day. In the fall, the Wayne County treasurer’s office published a 121-page list of foreclosures. According to the Detroit News, more than 70,000 homes in the tri-county metro Detroit area entered some phase of foreclosure between January 2006 and September 2007. In some Detroit neighborhoods, the rate was 1 in 7 homes. This represents more than 250,000 active and retired workers and their children. Another wave of foreclosures will hit in March 2008, when many more adjustable mortgages will reset to a higher rate.

Help Wanted: In Iraq

On December 14, hundreds of workers lined up for the "Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles Job Fair." The Army was seeking more than 500 civilian welders, heavy mobile equipment mechanics, production controllers, administrative assistants, supply technicians and quality control specialists. The workers were hoping to earn between $138,000 and $212,000 for working 12-hours a day, seven days a week for 366 days in Iraq!

The deputy chief of staff for personnel at the Army’s TACOM Life Cycle Management Command said, "When an economy is down, we have more opportunities to get qualified applicants." The young black worker, who makes $50,000 a year working two full-time security guard jobs said, "…the neighborhood I live in, it’s no different than Iraq. I’m not scared."

This is a long way from the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, where Army brass was literally under fire, from Vietnam to Detroit, from Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers. It’s also a long way from the role played by young black Vietnam vets and auto workers who rebelled in solidarity with their Vietnamese brothers and sisters. But the collapse of the old communist movement gave the bosses a new lease on life. It opened the door to decades of massive racist attacks with little or no fight-back and very little class consciousness.

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This past summer, the Detroit News examined economic conditions that sparked the Detroit Rebellion, and found:

•Detroit blacks had less buying power in 2000 than in 1967,

•In 2000, black median family income was down 6 percent from 1970, while white median income rose 18 percent,

•In 2005, blacks were 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed than whites – the same gap that existed in 1960.

Overall, there is more poverty in the U.S. now than 40 years ago and the poverty rate is about triple for black and Latin workers than for white workers. What’s more, the level of racist police terror and the rate of incarceration are far more oppressive than anyone could have imagined back then. The schools are much worse.

As with every crisis or "natural disaster," from sub-prime mortgages to Hurricane Katrina, black workers get hit first and hardest. Racism is at the very core of capitalism, created to justify slavery and the very cord that holds the whole profit system together. And while billions are lost on Wall St., and a few heads roll, millions of workers, children and the elderly are having their lives wrecked by the bosses and bankers. Building a mass PLP and increasing the base for CHALLENGE newspaper is the only way to answer the racist horrors of capitalism.

While this sub-prime crisis is very serious for the bankers and bosses, it is important to remember that the bosses can survive any crisis, even defeat in imperialist war. The only crisis they can’t survive is communist revolution. And the future of that movement is in our hands, not theirs.

Ford Strike In Russia Ends

The three-week strike at the Ford factory in Vsevolozhsk, located right outside St. Petersburg, ended on Dec. 14. Ford workers are among the lowest-paid factory workers in Europe, making between 16,000 and 25,000 rubles ($600-1,000) a month. This is comparable to auto factory wages paid in Latin America.

Ford used office workers to maintain one production shift, and toward the end of the strike managed to start a second. Nevertheless, the strike crippled production and exhausted the union’s strike fund. The police harassed the picketers and strike leaders were threatened with arrest.

Ford workers voted to go back to work after the bosses agreed to a wage increase. The union and the company agreed to settle all unresolved issues by Feb. 1. This was the longest strike in the post-Soviet era, the first under the new Labor Code and the first where strikers won a general amnesty against reprisals.

The workers failed to win their demands of a 30 percent wage increase, higher pensions and reducing the work day. But a strike leader, reflecting the fighting mood of the workers said, "I think [Ford] should agree to concessions. They would hardly want to see a new strike in the spring."

Lesson of Mack Ave. Wildcat: Scratch A Liberal, Find A Fascist

In December, Justin Ravitz died. He was the judge in 1974 who tried to jail the Chrysler workers who led the Mack Avenue Sit-Down strike. In August 1973, 350 workers seized the plant after a comrade was fired for his role in an anti-racist health and safety struggle, and reported to work the next day, refusing to leave.

Chrysler security was driven out of the plant, and the next day, the workers faced off against the Detroit police chanting, "FIGHT BACK! – FIGHT BACK!" It finally took 1,000 thugs organized by the UAW, just about everyone on the payroll and many KKK members, to violently retake the plant for the bosses. A white comrade and a black worker who gave crucial leadership to the action were arrested and each charged with two counts of felonious assault.

Ravitz had a reputation as an anti-racist lawyer and criminal court judge. He was involved in the legal dismantling of STRESS, a police undercover unit that murdered 20 people, 17 of them black, and fought to have more black people on juries. He called himself the only Marxist judge in the U.S., banned the American flag from his courtroom in protest of the Vietnam War, and refused to stand for the pledge when he was sworn in. But when it came to prosecuting PLP and communist-led workers, Ravitz was on the side of Chrysler, the UAW leadership and the Detroit police.

At the time, the bosses were still trying to retake control of the major cities, after the armed rebellions of the late 1960’s. Henry Ford and the New Detroit alliance of bosses, bankers and politicians were calling the shots in Detroit, pulling the strings of Coleman Young, a former Communist Party auto organizer and Detroit’s first black mayor, and a City Council of preachers and fake radicals.

PLP relied on auto workers and youth to wage a political defense around the city, exposing Ravitz and the bosses he served. Every notice posted inside the plant soliciting prosecution witnesses was torn down in minutes. Literature saturated numerous plants, Wayne State University, and unemployment and welfare offices, calling on workers and students to defend PLP, the Mack Sit-Down and exposing Ravitz, the UAW leaders, and the rest. Many supporters attended the trial, and many more gave money. The black worker who was arrested, a Vietnam vet, joined the Party on the very day he was called to testify.

Ultimately, the case was tossed out. There was a provision in the law at the time that the prosecution had to produce witnesses from a cross section of the population that witnessed the alleged crime. The Chrysler bosses, UAW and the Detroit police could not produce one Chrysler production worker to testify against the defendants. Not one. Case dismissed. Ravitz was beside himself, and scolded the cops and Chrysler bosses for failing to make their case.

A lot has happened since then, and today Detroit is a shell of what it was. Every anti-racist "reform" has given way to more and deeper racist oppression, from mass unemployment and poverty to crumbling schools and over-crowded jails. The infant mortality rate here is comparable to that of the poor countries in the Caribbean. This is the legacy of the reformers like Ravitz, who above all else were loyal to the profit system until the end. And we are better off for having fought them.

Mack Ave. Defender

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The recent murder of Benazir Bhutto released the pent-up fury of workers and youth in Pakistan against the repressive and exploitative military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf. Workers and youth clashed with the police and army in cities nation-wide. Fifty-eight were killed, 89 injured, 800 shops, 185 banks, 27 railway stations and 13 polling stations burned.

Benazir Bhutto, was a former prime minister and chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). She had recently returned from exile to take part in elections after a deal with Musharraf worked out with the U.S. and Britain. Her assassination blew up that deal. (See Jan. 16 CHALLENGE on how that was a big blow to the U.S.-U.K. "war on terror," and on the inter-imperialist rivalry behind events in Pakistan.)

But even though Bhutto’s murder sparked the masses’ fury, it was really fueled by a smoldering discontent with the country’s rigid class system, poverty, oppression and a widening gap between the rich and poor. Despite a rapidly-expanding economy, conditions for the working class have worsened as the cost of basic necessities rise and wages fall.

New anti-labor laws strip away previously-won rights to organize. Among 20 million industrial workers only two million have contracts, leaving 18 million who can be fired at any time and paid as bosses see fit. Workers have no social security, health care or pensions. In a population of 168 million, (the 6th most populous country on Earth) 70% are agricultural workers, many of them "housewives" who work without pay, and landless peasants dependent on wealthy landlords for survival. Forced labor and child labor are common.

Privatization is making bosses even richer. The government is handing over the country’s state-owned utilities and major industries to individuals, often army officials. As the new bosses "downsize," workers lose jobs. Privatization of colleges, which previously received government funding, means that working-class youth cannot afford an education.

Benazir Bhutto was part of the same capitalist class, as corrupt as the generals who run the country and dominate its businesses and banking sectors. In her two terms as prime minister she acquired immeasurable wealth. Her husband, known as "Mr. Ten Percent," served eight years in jail for extortion. Before the assassination, Benazir was facing corruption charges.

The Bhutto family, among the biggest landowners in the southwest province of Sindh, has feudal-like control over the lives of thousands of landless peasants and sharecroppers and sees the PPP as its personal domain. The PPP’s first chairperson was Benazir’s father; her will names her 19-year-old son as heir to the party’s leadership.

The PPP was founded in 1967 during a fierce revolutionary-type fight-back. In 1968-69, under the influence of a worldwide anti-Vietnam War movement and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, workers occupied factories, peasants surrounded landed estates and youth took to the streets. This anti-capitalist movement cut across ethnic and national lines, uniting around one slogan: "Revolution! Socialist Revolution!" It nearly overthrew the government but failed because the movement had no party with the strategy of taking state power. In addition, many workers joined the PPP, attracted by its stated aim of a classless society, only to be misled into the dead-end struggle of reforming capitalism through electoral politics.

The PPP leadership, acting in its own class interest, deflected the revolutionary aspirations of the masses and never delivered on its promise of ending exploitation. Her government also helped prop up the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan and led to the Taliban. Yet some workers still look to the PPP as the way forward.

But revolutionary ideas can be embedded in workers’ consciousness. They surfaced in the mass movement of the 1980s and are present again today as Pakistan falls into political turmoil. Revolutionaries of the 1960s missed the historical opportunity to take power. Now the working class is organizing again and learning from its past mistakes, as well as from the experiences of revolutionaries worldwide, that the fight for a classless society is not for socialism but for communism.

(This is the first part of a series on current struggles in Pakistan.)

Unity With African, Arab Workers Critical to Union Fight vs. French Bosses, Hacks

PARIS, January 9 — Workers are searching for effective ways to fight the government’s continuing attacks on them. The next test of strength will be a public workers’ strike on January 24.

Yesterday President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted he wants to abolish the 35-hour work-week and impose racist immigration quotas. On January 6, Budget and Civil Service Minister Eric Woerth repeated his refusal to uniformly raise public workers’ wages, which fell 6% between 2000 and 2006 due to inflation. Wage negotiations for public workers will begin January 14.

On November 20, some two million public and private workers struck for higher wages. (See CHALLENGE, 11/28/07 and 12/12/07) When Woerth refused to consider an across-the-board wage hike on Dec. 19, six union federations representing public workers called for demonstrations and a strike on January 24. Five teachers’ unions joined the strike call, demanding higher wages and protesting the government’s decision to eliminate 11,200 jobs.

Education Minister Xavier Darcos then announced he will test strike-breaking "minimum service" in public schools in at least four cities that have signed strike-breaking contracts with the national government. Scabs will baby-sit pupils to keep them in school and not disrupt parents’ work schedules, minimizing the strike’s impact.

Scabs will be paid with money docked from the strikers’ wages. The unions denounced "minimum service" as an assault on the right to strike.

These attacks stem from the inter-imperialist rivalry that is pressing the bosses in each country to drive for maximum profits by taking them out of the pockets of the working class, smashing the social contract that has existed since World War II. Only international working-class unity can begin to meet these attacks.

Increasingly, workers here realize that they must meet escalating government attacks with greater working-class unity across public sector-private sector divisions. Responding to this rank-and-file pressure, the FO union confederation called for private-sector workers to join the January 24 demonstrations, but stopped short of calling on them to strike.

The SUD-Education union in northern Brittany issued a sarcastic statement denouncing "an isolated, one-day strike by only public workers," asking why the major trade unions insist on: (1) pursuing the losing 24-hour-strike strategy, (2) negotiating crumbs while abandoning fundamental demands, and (3) allying with the government’s effort to smash the welfare state. SUD-Education 22 nevertheless backed the strike call.

Several recent developments underlined workers’ and students’ combative mood. The public television union is calling for a strike to oppose plans to merge the five public TV companies and lay off workers.

The CFE-CGC nurses’ union is calling for a strike to protest unpaid overtime hours. Each nurse is owed an average of 70 hours overtime pay from 2007.

Tolbiac University students here voted to strike and occupy university buildings to protest Sarkozy’s "reforms." Classes were disrupted and cancelled, and access to elevators was blocked. The students condemned "the privatization of the universities, and the axing of some academic departments," and also raised the anti-racist demand of "papers for all undocumented immigrants."

This is an important step in making the fight against racism central to workers’ and students’ overall demands. The rank and file must link their struggle to that of African and Arab workers and youth against racist unemployment and police terror. Otherwise, the rulers will have accomplished their goal of dividing and weakening the entire working class.

Nevertheless, as of today, the CFDT union confederation — whose leader was denounced as a sellout and expelled by angry workers from the November 20 Paris march — still wanted to look at government proposals before considering joining the strike.

These pro-capitalist union misleaders will push workers to the bottom. Communist leadership is needed to turn workers’ and students’ growing frustration with the union hacks’ betrayals into an understanding that only communist revolution can abolish the whole capitalist system, with its bosses, reactionary governments and labor fakers.

Battle for Resources Behind Endless Wars in Africa

The bosses’ mass media reports about Africa only when Madonna or Angelina Jolie adopts another baby or when another massacre or tragedy occurs. But they rarely explain what’s really happening there. This series will present a communist analysis of events on that continent.

Kenya is the latest victim of a combination of imperialist super-exploitation of Africa’s workers and its resources and how crooked capitalist politicians use tribal politics to pursue their own interests. For many years, there was little tribal conflict in modern Kenya; people basically got along. U.S. and British imperialists used Kenya as a base to invest, super-exploit and wage their "war on terror" in the region. But amid growing inter-imperialist rivalry and capitalist economic turmoil, the imperialist-created "stability" of Kenya was bound to fail.

The power struggle between President Kibaki and opposition leader Odinga sparked an explosion. Kibaki stole the December election and now refuses to give Odinga a piece of the action despite calls by Koffin Annan, Barack Obama (whose father is Kenyan), Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) and Condi Rice. Hundreds have died in clashes between supporters of both politicians, and 500,000 now need immediate relief because of this politicians’ dogfight.

4 Million Killed in Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has again erupted into a bloody civil war, particularly in its Eastern region. It’s being labeled a re-play of the fight between Tutsis and Hutus that led to the murder of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda and Burundi over a decade ago.

A front-page NY Times article (1/10) reported: "The recent clashes in eastern Congo…have exacted a grievous toll on a region ravaged by a decade of war. Around 400,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, thousands of women have been raped and hundreds of children have been press-ganged into militias, the United Nations says….But the fighting is also rekindling the kind of ethnic hatred that previously dragged this region into the most deadly conflict since World War II."

The rebels fighting the Congo army are Tutsis, who many see representing the Rwandan rulers who aim to control this part of the Congo. But while this conflict is defined as involving ethnic and tribal politics, economic and political factors are really behind this endless war in that country. (Since the 1990s, this war has killed over four million people, beginning with the fall of long-time strongman Mobutu, a rabid anti-communist first installed by the CIA and then propped up in his last few years by French imperialism).

The real fight is over the region’s mineral wealth — gold, diamonds and coltan (used in ballistic missiles and cell phones) are among the many lucrative minerals mined there. Usually, local bosses and generals work as subcontractors for multi-national corporations from Europe, the U.S. and South Africa which buy and trade these minerals.

(Future articles will explore the role of inter-imperialist rivalry in the misery of Africa; Chinese and Russian energy giants’ involvement in the imperialist power game, from Darfur to Nigeria; Pentagon creation of a new command to protect U.S. imperialist interests in the region; and how the powerful working class of South Africa and Nigeria can play an important role — if given red leadership — in helping liberate all of Africa from imperialism and their local capitalist lackeys.)

Transportation Workers Can Be Key Force for Revolution

For several weeks last fall, French transit workers engaged in a series of strikes to defend their pensions and jobs. Other workers and students also struck. Meanwhile, the cops murdered two youths, sparking an anti-racist rebellion of African and Arab youth. It is inter-imperialist rivalry that is spawning increased racist attacks on our living standards worldwide, attacks which impel these strikes and rebellions.

French bosses are using president Sarkozy to attack industrial workers and youth, shredding the old social contract. The pro-capitalist union leaders refuse to counter these attacks. The bosses have their strategy for the future; what is ours?

The major imperialist powers are freely investing capital globally. New transportation and communications systems are creating rapid, mass migration of workers. The industrial working class is expanding, especially in India and China, where migration is mainly internal, from rural areas to the cities. In Europe and the U.S., migration is primarily from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In Latin America, workers migrate from poorer countries to those somewhat less poor — from Haiti to Dominican Republic, from Nicaragua and Honduras to El Salvador, from neighboring countries to Brazil and Argentina. The bosses use this mobility to force large pools of unemployed workers to compete for jobs. We can use this greater connection to build an international movement against capitalism.

Transportation systems that move people and commodities are becoming increasingly critical to capitalist profit. The transportation industries can be the Achilles heel of capitalism if we can organize breakthroughs here. This adds importance to the recent transport strikes in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, and the struggle in mass transit worldwide.

Our strategy is to unite the unemployed, immigrant and industrial workers in a movement for communist revolution, bringing workers to power and crushing the racist bosses. With communist leadership, transportation workers can take the lead.

French transit workers were able to draw students and other workers into the struggle, but lacked the leadership to unite with the unemployed and immigrant youth. Communist leadership is necessary to develop the anti-racist class consciousness required to advance at this time.

Among transit workers in NYC, Washington D.C., Chicago and the West Coast, we’re fighting racist attacks and cutbacks that target a mostly black work-force that serves an even larger black, Latino and immigrant population. We struggle to keep the fight against racism in the forefront of contract fights and union elections. We organized support for those left to die in New Orleans during Katrina, and more recently for the Jena 6. We have tried to pass union resolutions and collected money from co-workers.

Mainly, we’re fighting to spread CHALLENGE and PLP literature in our garages, bus barns and workplaces. We’re trying to develop personal and group discussions among co-workers, inviting them to study-action groups and PLP club meetings. Self-critically, we can do much better on this. The better we do, the better we can do. We must fight against getting buried in the daily demands of "union work."

The transportation unions are shadows of their former selves. Strikes, like the 2005 NYC transit walkout, are seldom used and often broken. This year the rulers will spend over a billion of our dollars in a sucker’s bet on the 2008 presidential elections. Clinton, Obama and Edwards are the bosses’ shell game. Whoever we choose, we lose! No matter who’s elected president, more and deadlier imperialist wars will still rage, racist terror will be used to attack and divide us, and transportation workers will face more cutbacks and attacks. These are the laws of capitalism.

Transit workers, airline workers, railroad workers and truck drivers are the lifeline of modern industrial society. We can be a key force for communist revolution. The current inter-imperialist rivalry is leading to wars that will make Iraq look like a tea party. Slowly but surely, a new generation of black, Latino and women transportation workers will be building a mass international PLP to end the profit system once and for all.

LETTTERS

Confidence in Working Class Pays Off

Recently, industrial workers in the Party got together to discuss the present and future state of industrial work. At this meeting the idea that we have been too timid in talking to our co-workers came up. We decided to be bolder and work harder to expand our CHALLENGE networks. This emphasis on boldness lies in having confidence that the working class can understand local, national, and international issues and how they are all connected. Most importantly, our practice must be based on the knowledge that workers can and will understand and identify with our Party line.

This new emphasis has paid immediate dividends for the workers who attended the meeting. Shortly after I returned to work my conversations with my co-workers became more political and the content of the conversations was pushed to the left, not just by me but also by my co-workers.

The quantity of conversations increased as well. While having lunch last week one of my co-workers, out of the blue, asked me what I thought about the new UAW contract. Seizing the opportunity, I put forward the Party’s analysis regarding the ruling class’s push to "re-industrialize" and how this push was a reaction to growing inter-imperialist rivalry. One co-worker brought up the Navistar strike and how the presence of UAW scabs is a sign of this intensifying struggle. The conversation then took on a life of its own as we discussed the Russian and Chinese push to build a massive industrial base in preparation for war and how the sub-prime loan crisis has exposed U.S. weakness in the face of its adversaries. The conversation expanded my potential base from just one person on the job to five.

All our lives the ruling class tries to tell us that the working class is stupid and incapable of understanding the world around them. But when you have confidence in the working class and you boldly put communist politics forward you realize that myth of the stupid and complacent worker is a capitalist lie. It is important that when we talk to workers sympathetic with our politics that we trust their ability to understand them.

Worker from the West Need to Fight Racist Deportation Raids

When we heard about a fascist ICE (immigration police) raid that rounded up many of our undocumented working-class brothers and sisters at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, we figured if it happened there it could happen at our airport. My co-workers — CHALLENGE readers — were glad to help distribute flyers calling a meeting to discuss anti-immigrant racism.

The week before there was much political discussion among immigrants and citizens who helped build for this meeting. Led by our anti-racist shop steward, it was multi-racial and included Latino and black workers from El Salvador, Mexico and the U.S. However, one weakness was that no African immigrants came, influenced by nationalist thinking that says, "Well, this raid only affects Latino workers." This only aids the racist U.S. bosses and must be addressed. When one group of workers is singled out, none are safe.

In reviewing the O’Hare incident, we realized our airport hasn’t had such a raid since 9/11. We need a plan to warn our fellow workers on all shifts in case the ICE police show up. Soon afterwards, when the union mis-leader visited the airport, the shop steward asked, in front of the airport workers, what would the union do if there’s an ICE raid. This question disturbed the misleader who had no concrete answer or plan.

Later a black woman worker remarked, "You could tell the union leader really didn’t want to talk about that." It exposed the racism and incompetence of our union leadership. Since half our membership is Latino, we need a plan to fight anti-immigrant racism, a part of capitalism which the bosses use to super-exploit immigrant workers and then discard them after they’ve made millions off their labor.

In fighting racist deportations, PLP is following the anti-racist traditions of abolitionists like John Brown and Harriet Tubman and the Dutch communists in World War II who led workers to protect Jews from Nazi attempts to deport them to concentration camps.

The racist U.S. bosses use anti-immigrant racism to scapegoat immigrants just as the Nazis did with Jewish workers. PLP is building a movement of communist-led workers to smash such U.S. fascism with communist revolution that would benefit all workers.

Airport Red

a name="Phony Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’"></">Ph"ny Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’

I wrote a letter to a local paper based on a CHALLENGE editorial exposing the split in the ruling class over war with Iran.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard some yahoo state that U.S. troops are stationed around the world to protect "our" freedom, I could purchase a BMW.

On Christmas Eve, I was forced to watch the World Wrestling Entertainment tribute to the troops in Iraq. Imagine that spectacle: a bunch of phony wrestlers entertaining "our" troops fighting a phony "war on terror." How appropriate!

Of course, nobody mentioned that the war was based on the lie that Iraq had WMDs. Instead we’re told that the mission is to ensure a "bright future" for the Iraqis and an end to persecution there. The viewer is also told that the Saddam Hussein regime executed the entire Iraqi soccer team in a stadium and therefore the U.S. invasion was correct.

This reminded me that 3,000 Chilean workers were murdered in a stadium following the U.S.-backed coup there in 1973. So U.S. imperialism should know a lot about soccer stadiums.

One thing I like about CHALLENGE is it always points out the need for communist revolution. If it was possible to reform capitalism to meet workers’ needs, there’d be no real need for communist revolution. Some "left" groups (like the "Communist" Party) don’t seem to grasp that fact.

Reform of any sort will not be on the agenda in capitalist-imperialist Amerikkka. The head honchos in the labor movement won’t even launch serious unionization drives.

CHALLENGE is not afraid to tell it like it is.

Red Coal

Revoking Union Rights Is A Law of Capitalism

Recently all of Mexico’s capitalist parties (PAN, PRI, PRD) approved the elimination of the labor rights of hundreds of thousands of office workers in state-run companies and as well as "mixed" ones (combined state-run and private) — PEMEX (oil), IMSS (health care) and CFE (electricity).

The legal protection of the current contracts was eliminated. Now the bosses can freely establish contract conditions through individual work agreements (CIT), dividing and weakening the workers.

In PEMEX, 32,000 office workers are forced to sign CIT work contracts. One clause bars a worker from appealing unjust company decisions, including being fired.

The bosses have spread the lie that these workers are an "elite," loyal to the company, and sworn enemies of rank-and-file unionized workers. Many of the latter believe this bosses’ tale. But in reality working conditions for the office workers and the unionized workers are similar.

The majority of these office workers receive only a few crumbs more than the rest of the workers, and are often forced to work long hours without overtime and without any recourse against the bosses’ abuses. Only the higher directors and very specialized professionals receive bigger salaries. The majority carry out functions very similar to those of unionized workers.

This division is the cutting edge in eliminating workers’ rights since these attacks will later be extended to unionized workers.

The office workers are starting to organize in associations to defend themselves. However, although they recognize the importance of uniting, they consider the legal road as the main way to fight the bosses. This limits their power and effectiveness.

We’re active in these organizations where we’ve distributed DESAFIO-CHALLENGE and leaflets. We’re struggling to overcome passivity and to be bolder in presenting the Party’s ideas. We want to show these workers that defending ourselves from the bosses’ attacks legally will fail in the long run and leave us frustrated.

All workers must see clearly that the laws of the capitalist system function to guarantee the bosses’ profits. Working-class victory can only be guaranteed through uniting the workers and organizing a revolutionary communist party which fights for a society that workers control. This is the struggle of the communist PLP. Join us!

A Red Worker, Mexico

Higher-paid Jobs Corrupted USSR Leaders

CHALLENGE’s recent back-page historical article on the Russian revolution urged readers to study and learn what the Communist Party did right and what it did wrong.

Good idea.

But in your suggestions about where to look for errors, there is an important blank space. That is the fact that in the 1930s Communist Party members who moved up as leaders –– even very minor or local leaders –– moved up to a standard of living much higher than the average worker. Yes, putting forth "socialism" as the immediate goal opened the door to wage differentials. But, keeping communism as the long-range goal would not be believable unless party members set an example by not taking excess income.

When Anna Louise Strong, a sympathetic reporter, visited the USSR for some time in the 1930s, she was shocked to be offered a country home. "We’re all getting them," she was told by party members. She did not report on this at the time, fearing it would feed anti-communism.

Whatever mistakes Stalin may have made, I consider this the greatest harm he did to communism. Leaders who have a financial stake in keeping their jobs cannot honestly listen to and represent the workers. In fact, the leaders split-interests paved the way for the growth of a Party central leadership that ended up condemning Stalin and enriching themselves and their cohorts as they reverted to capitalism.

Ancient Red

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Clear case of insurer-murderer

The 17-year-old had been in a coma after complications following a bone marrow transplant to counter leukaemia. Her liver failed and doctors referred her for an emergency transplant. She was fully insured and had a donor but Cigna refused to pay….The family… could not afford the down payment of $75,000.

The family mounted a protest of 150 people outside Cigna’s Glendale offices. The demo was amplified by an internet campaign…. Cigna decided to reverse its decision….

The news drew cheers but the crowd grew sombre when they heard her condition had deteriorated. A few hours later her life support was switched off. "She passed away, and the insurance [company] is responsible," her mother, Hilda Sarkisyan, said.

The case points to growing disenchantment with healthcare in America. "This is what’s wrong with our health system – insurers decide treatment, not doctors…" (GW, 1/4)

Neocons trace to anti-Stalin cult

…Neo-conservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of… young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky… Along with Irving Howe… the veterans eventually drifted away from Trotskyism, becoming stalwarts of the anti-Communist left, where they were joined by Norman Podhoretz… few if any of them expressed concern when they discovered that Encounter, a magazine that Irving Kristol co-founded in 1952, was secretly underwritten by the Central Intelligence Agency. (NYT, 1/13)

Black workers lost more homes

… Wells Fargo made high-cost loans, with an interest rate at least three percentage points above a federal benchmark, to 65 percent of its black customers in Baltimore and to only 15 percent of its white customers in the area…

Wells Fargo allowed mortgage brokers to charge higher commissions when they put borrowers in loans with higher interest rates than the customers qualified for…

Now, Baltimore is a city in a foreclosure crisis…

Half of Wells Fargo foreclosures occurred in census tracts with populations that were more than 80 percent black. (NYT, 1/8)

Capitalist system: big trouble ahead

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world… Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies –– for example, institute honest government and a free market economy –– they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax.

[But] we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels… Whether we get there willingly or not… our present [is] unsustainable. (Jared Diamond, NYT 1/2)

Capitalism doubles mental ills

… studies in the United States, Britain and Australia reveal that [mental illness] almost doubled between the early ‘80s and the turn of the century.

Capitalism has massively increased the wealth of the wealthy, robbing the average earner to give to the rich.

In itself, this economic inequality does not cause mental illness.

But Selfish Capitalism stokes up relative materialism: unrealistic aspirations… Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people…can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.

…Most damaging of all [is] the ideology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough. If you don’t succeed, there is only one person to blame –– never mind that it couldn’t be clearer that it’s the system’s fault, not yours. (GW, 1/11)

Iraq: US bombings multiply by 5

The Iraq air war may be the longest in history. In one way or another it has been undermining Iraq’s sovereignty, destroying its infrastructure, and killing and maiming its people for over 16 years. And there’s no end in sight.

Despite global pressure to withdraw, President Bush –– and indeed the broader U.S. power structure –– has no intention of giving up Iraq. The potential oil bonanza is too huge. And Iran –– with its oil bonanza –– is next door.

That air war is intensifying. The U.S. dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first half of 2007 as it did in the first half of 2006. As U.S. troops withdraw, the air attacks will multiply.

From the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to Korea and South East Asia, to the first Gulf War and now to Iraq –– air war is the signature of U.S. war making. (MinutemanMedia.org, 12/27)

a name="Lessons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future"></a>"essons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future

The four months between May Day 1975 in Boston and the first day of school there in early September remains one of the sharpest sustained periods of struggle our Party has yet experienced. The anti-racist summer project BOSTON 75 remains rich in lessons and examples.

The most important is that gutter fascists like ROAR can be beaten even when they are protected to the hilt by the bosses’ state apparatus and made to appear invincible by the bosses’ media. The battle of May Day 1975 had already exposed ROAR as a paper tiger. In the ensuing months, the tiger lost its fangs and claws.

The BOSTON 75 volunteers were relatively few in number. Most had little experience in politics or class struggle. They were young, the majority in their twenties. They had to live on a shoestring. They confronted the daily fury of the ruling class’s dictatorship. Between June and September, the volunteers saw the inside of Boston’s jails more than 200 times. Some were arrested twice or even three and four times. A few eventually received prison sentences.

Yet, despite these attacks, they won a clear strategic victory. They proved that a small force of bold, determined anti-racists under communist leadership could at least temporarily thwart a ruling class bent on building a mass-based fascist movement. The numbers tell the story.

The day before the Boston schools opened in September 1975, ROAR led a demonstration of 3,000 people at City Hall, down from the 15,000 in a similar racist mobilization in 1974. Sporadic racist violence characterized the 1975-76 school year, but it never reached the proportions of 1974-75. ROAR’s public activities dwindled to a series of poorly-attended anti-integration "mothers’ prayer marches." Fascist Louise Day Hicks soon abandoned politics altogether and in time fell into disgrace after her son was exposed as a dealer of illegal drugs. Shortly after BOSTON 75, the ROAR organization was dead in the water. PLP and the Committee Against Racism (CAR) deserve the lion’s share of credit for killing it.

BOSTON 75 therefore belongs to the living history of the PLP and the working class. For four months, against great odds, communists and anti-racists inflicted important political and tactical defeats on the ruling class of a great city and its plans to turn a large portion of the working class into Nazi thugs.

The project nonetheless had serious weaknesses; their lessons remain valid today. The most important was political, which grew out of the Party’s basic line at that time. By 1975, PLP had rejected nationalism — the idea that there were "progressive" bosses, even though they all believed in capitalism and would try to stop the working class from taking the road to revolution. This tied into also rejecting the theory of making revolution by stages, the idea that we could get to communism while still retaining some of the elements of capitalism (such as the wage system) — socialism — because workers "weren’t ready for communism." But we still believed in socialism. We didn’t come to understand this error until seven years after the adoption of Road to Revolution IV in 1982. (For the full text of this document, see the PL website, PLP.org)

In practical terms, we continued to initiate reform organizations through which we would function, such as CAR — later InCAR. We had founded it in 1973. It achieved much: organized BOSTON 75 and the fight against ROAR; launched militant mass struggle against leading academic racist theoreticians like Richard Herrnstein and E.O. Wilson; and led many battles against attempts to revive the Ku Klux Klan.

But ultimately, with all their militancy, CAR and InCAR were still reform organizations. In creating them, we had committed two serious mistakes. Firstly, we were substituting them for existing mass organizations in which we should have been deeply active and struggling directly for communist ideas and the Party, both during the BOSTON 75 project and elsewhere over the long run. Secondly, related to the first, was the implicit belief that the workers and students we expected to move to communism needed a "half-way house" — a PLP-led militant reform organization — on the way to joining the Party. This was an opportunist error, allowing us to win people to militant reform, something less than the communism we stood for. We thought we had licked this aspect of opportunism, at least in theory. We were wrong.

In the ensuing three decades, we’ve been trying to absorb these lessons, as the pages of CHALLENGE show. In the face of rising imperialist war and the bosses’ advance towards police-state fascism, this task has become increasingly urgent today. We defeated ROAR, a specific manifestation of U.S. fascism, despite working with one hand tied behind our back. It would be sheer folly to think that the experience could be repeated in the present period with an identical political approach and tactics.

We fight to preserve the spirit of boldness, militancy, anti-racism, and class hatred that characterized PLP’s work during the campaign against ROAR. We reject the opportunism of "two-stage" approaches to communist organizing. The victory against ROAR was an important battle, but it was temporary. The war against the profit system continues. The lessons learned in Boston more than 30 years ago should help the Party improve its leadership in the battles and trials ahead.

Steroids Helped Baseball Bosses Bulk Up Profits

Under capitalism, money ultimately ruins everything, even the games that are designed to divert workers from the wars and fascism rising around us. On December 13, Major League Baseball released the Mitchell Report, which told us what we already knew: that baseball — like the Olympics, the Tour de France, and every other big-money sport — is hopelessly infected with performance-enhancing drugs.

After naming more than 80 players, from superstars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to average players like Paul LoDuca, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell declared that "everyone" in baseball was to blame for the spread of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone (HGH), from club management to the players’ union. But when it gets down to cases, the report essentially convicts individual players and low-level pushers like Kirk Radomski, the one-time Mets’ bat boy, while giving a pass to Commissioner Bud Selig and the owners and executives who have seen no evil as long as their profits and bonuses kept rolling in.

As Dave Zirin notes in his online column, Edge of Sports, the report was stacked from the beginning. Mitchell was appointed by Selig, whose family owned the Milwaukee Brewers until 2005. The ex-senator sits on the boards of the Boston Red Sox and the Walt Disney Company (which owns ESPN), and his law firm has earned tens of millions of dollars by lobbying for Big Tobacco and General Electric. Mitchell is a high-priced mouthpiece for his corporate bosses, first and last. His report gives baseball executives some needed damage control on the steroid front, along with leverage to re-open contracts with the Players Association in the owners’ ongoing struggle to grab a bigger slice of the money pie.

For communists, there is no "good" side in this controversy. In their desperation to gain an edge in the brutally competitive major leagues, the players — from the surly Barry Bonds to the God-fearing Andy Pettite — have been corrupted into liars, cheaters, and hypocrites. They bear responsibility for the countless high school athletes and insecure adolescents who ape their drug-enhanced heroes on the path to torn tendons, liver and kidney damage, diabetes, heart attacks, depression, and suicide.

But as in every enterprise in this society, the owners paint the landscape. As Howard Bryant points out in Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005), baseball’s steroid era was born in 1994, when a player strike led to a cancelled World Series, depressed attendance, and a sharp drop in network television revenues. The owners’ response was to lure back the fans and sponsors with artificially inflated home run totals. They built smaller ballparks, shrank the strike zone — and looked the other way at rampant steroid use. In 1998, when an AP reporter spotted a vial of androstenedione (a "legal" steroid developed in East Germany) in Mark McGwire’s locker as McGwire was en route to his record 70 home runs, "the entire baseball establishment," Bryant wrote, "crushed…the story." (In contrast to the media’s racist focus on Bonds, McGwire remained an all-American hero until 2005, when he humiliated himself by dodging questions at a Congressional hearing.) In 2001, the owners renewed their five-year TV contract with Fox for $2 billion, nearly four times higher than the previous contract.

To date, only two middling major leaguers have received 15-day suspensions in the aftermath of the Mitchell report, but no matter how the sport changes as a result of the report, history tells us that baseball will remain business as usual — an enterprise run by capitalists for capitalists, with the next season’s profits the only record that matters.

Challenge Web Extra

Chile: Massacre of Miners a Century Ago Led to Building of Commmunist Party

A century ago, on Dec. 21, 1907, Chile’s army and police massacred over 2,000 miners and their families in the town of Iquique. It was one of the worst individual atrocities in the history of Chile and Latin America.

Earlier that month, thousands of dockhands in the town’s northern port — mainly handling saltpeter — struck to demand better working conditions. During the next few days, thousands of workers from the saltpeter companies in the Atacama Desert flats, controlled by Chilean and foreign (mainly British) capital, entered Iquique to join the strike. The workers tried to negotiate some economic demands, but the bosses insisted the laborers return to work as a precondition for negotiations.

Chile’s President Pedro Montt initially acted as a mediator in the conflict. But as the workers’ strike grew, the authorities decided that the 5,000 workers occupying the Santa María school and the 2,000 who had taken over the Manuel Montt plaza posed a threat to the system. When the workers refused to move elsewhere, Interior Minister Rafael Sotomayor urged the town’s mayor Carlos Eastman to remove the workers by any means necessary.

At 3:45 PM on Dec. 21, Gen. Roberto Silva Renard gave the order to open fire with machine guns on the Chilean, Bolivian, Peruvian and Argentine strikers occupying the Santa María school, many of them of indigenous origin. Many workers and their relatives were shot and even cut through by bayonets and horse cavalry carrying lancers. Many were killed when they were forced back to their jobs, returned in the same trains carrying saltpeter.

The massacre was basically hidden from Chile’s history until 1969 when the late Luis Advis composed the Cantata of Santa María de Iquique and the internationally known Chilean folk music group Quilapayún recorded it in 1970.

But the massacre, and many more that followed, made the workers and the trade unions politically conscious. They turned away from their previous "mutual aid" role and broke from the control of the Catholic Church.

Working-class leaders who survived the massacre, like Luis Recabarren, called it a "crime of capitalism" and formed the Socialist Workers Party. The imperialist World War I led to the first workers’ state headed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. The 3^rd Communist International, led by the Bolsheviks, influenced revolutionary workers in Chile and worldwide. Under the leadership of Recarraben the Communist Party of Chile (CPC) was formed.

The bloody repression did not stop the workers’ mass struggles. In 1909, some 200,000 workers struck nation-wide. From 1916 to 1921 there were 13 general strikes throughout Chile. The country’s CPC was born from these mass struggles.

Unfortunately, decades later what the bosses’ repression couldn’t accomplish, the internal opportunism that rotted the old world communist movement did, turning Chile’s CP, the largest in Latin America, into its opposite. It helped bring Salvador Allende to power, creating illusions among workers about capitalist democracy. But these illusions were soon shattered by the heirs of the 1907 murderers of Iquique’s miners. General Pinochet’s fascist coup, organized by the new imperialist masters (Kissinger, the CIA and ITT), killed and jailed tens of thousands of workers and others.

Today, Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s first woman President, is a member of Allende’s same Socialist Party. She has continued the capitalist class’s attacks on workers’ struggles, including the copper miners’ strike several months ago. Chile’s workers need to learn from their history and rebuild the communist movement, based this time on fighting for communism, rejecting any faith in all bosses and their capitalist "democracy."

An Internationalist Reader

1. RULERS' NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: FOR MORE LETHAL WARS
   BHUTTO MURDER UNDERMINES U.S. EMPIRE
   1. Fight For Oil Sharpens
   2. NEXT PRESIDENT'S MAIN JOB: MOBILIZE FOR ALL-OUT OIL WAR
2. Bhutto Was Workers' Deadly Enemy
3. Letter From the Iraq War
4. 2007: Rival Imperiaists Challenged U.S. - Workers Fought Back Worldwide
5. South Asian Worker Joins the International PLP
6. PLP Youth Lead Anti-Racist Campaign At Brooklyn H.S.
7. Student Anti-Racist Assembly Sparks Fight-back
8. Opportunities to Build PLP After Navistar Union Hacks Sold Out
9. Red Transit Workers Mean
   `Doomsday' For the Bosses
10. Hacks' Phony `Human Rights' Unit Kills Jena 6 Resolution
    1. Communism: The Only Answer To Bosses' Racism
11. Fresh Direct's Anti-Immigrant Attack Is Rotten to the Core
12. Paraguay's Electoral Circus Offers No Solution for Workers
    1. The Electoral Players -- All Capitalist Stooges
    2. Lugo -- As Bad As the Rest
13. KENYA: Imperialist-Sponsored `Democracy' Blows Up
14. LETTERS
    1. Asian Youth Wants to _Serve Working Class
    2. Airport Workers Rap on Ideas in CHALLENGE
    3. Union Struggle Sparks Ex-Member to Nix `Ex'
    4. Deportation Terror Hits ALL Workers
    5. Backs Proletarian Dictatorship All the Way
    6. High School Program Supports the Jena 6
    7. A Friend's Memory of Carson Beach: Boston Summer Project, 1975
15. AIDS Day Hears Revolutionary Message on Epidemic
16. PL History:
    Anti-Racists' Multi-Racial Unity Defies Rulers' Attacks
17. NY Bosses Engineer Another Train Robbery: Hike Fares

---

RULERS' NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: FOR MORE LETHAL WARS
BHUTTO MURDER UNDERMINES U.S. EMPIRE

Benazir Bhutto's assassination and subsequent chaos in nuclear-armed Pakistan seriously set back U.S. plans for continuing control of the strategic region, especially of oil's grand prize, Saudi Arabia. U.S. rulers had hoped that Harvard-educated Bhutto could heal the ruling-class split between her land-holding family's faction and that of Musharraf's military and initiate more vigorous attacks on Pakistan-based al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Those who murdered Bhutto -- and simultaneously scores of workers -- dashed that dream and strengthened the forces of Osama bin Laden, who's almost certainly hiding in Pakistan. Bin Laden represents the non-royal sector of Saudi capitalists who are using unconventional violence to seize the oil bonanza the princes deny them.

Bhutto's killers' uncertain identity further underscores U.S. shakiness in its "ally" Pakistan. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are prime suspects but many blame Pakistan's pro-Islamist Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and fault Musharraf himself for not adequately protecting Bhutto. In any event, the killing reflects U.S. imperialism's tendency to create one crisis by trying to solve another.

All the possible culprits sport a "Made-in-the-U.S.A." label. Al Qaeda and the Taliban grew out of the U.S-led campaign to arm Islamists against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The ISI became powerful by helping run this operation. And the U.S. has built up Musharraf's military with gifts totaling $10 billion meant to "combat terror" but diverted to the power-hungry generals' own purposes.

Fight For Oil Sharpens

The grim Pakistan situation represents but one of the many major challenges U.S. rulers will face in the new year. Iraq remains an unprofitable hellhole, despite claims of the surge's "success." With the oil majors still afraid to risk capital and personnel there, Iraqi crude production hovers around 2.4 million barrels a day (mbd), far short of U.S. bosses' goals. Actually, just before the 2003 invasion, the Establishment's Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and James A. Baker Institute had issued a report foreseeing a six mbd windfall for Exxon Mobil and the rest.

Now Turkey's bosses, pursuing their own security needs, are making things even worse for their U.S. "allies": "Crude futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange soared past $96 per barrel...after Turkish warplanes hit alleged Kurdish rebel sites in northern Iraq....[T]raders fear that the rebels may respond by attacking oil pipelines in northern Iraq. (Energy Intelligence, 12/27/07) U.S. troops won't leave Iraq anytime soon, as Congressional Democrats keep writing the Pentagon blank checks.

Meanwhile, U.S. rivals are stepping up their military influence in the region. Iran almost simultaneously announced delivery of nuclear fuel from Russia and its purchase of a Russian air defense system. Furthermore, "Iran and Russia are in negotiations to expand military cooperation beyond air defenses, including attack helicopters and jet engines for a fleet of indigenous Iranian fighters. There have also been reports that Iran intends to purchase Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighters." (Washington Post, 12/27/07)

China, whose thirst for oil puts it on a collision course with the U.S., is building a naval port for its new oil tanker-shepherding "blue water" navy at Gwadar, Pakistan. Gwadar commands the crucial Strait of Hormuz chokepoint through which virtually all seaborne crude from the Persian Gulf to East Asia must pass.

NEXT PRESIDENT'S MAIN JOB: MOBILIZE FOR ALL-OUT OIL WAR

Both before and after 9/11, CHALLENGE constantly said that the U.S. would launch a war for control of the greater Middle East and its oil. Before 9/11, reporting on the Hart-Rudman commission that foresaw a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, we specifically said such an attack would precede a U.S. invasion of the Mid-East beginning in Iraq. Now U.S. rulers themselves admit as much. Richard Haass, president of the rulers' CFR -- when asked about the next U.S. president's main task -- said, "The greater Middle East represents the greatest collection of challenges that continue to face the U.S." (Nikkei News, 12/13/07) Haass charged the next president with militarizing the nation for deadlier wars. "[W]e have to expand the size of the U.S. military....[I]t is quite possible that a lot of uses of military will be manpower-intensive....And it now looks more [like] the current Iraq war is going to be the model of future wars."

Making Bhutto a martyr for wider conflict, White House hopeful Barack Obama called her "a respected...advocate for the democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people." Hillary Clinton also glorified Bhutto, "The world is once again reminded of the dangers facing those who pursue democracy."

But Bhutto was, in fact, no angel. She, like her U.S. backers, stood for nothing more than capitalism's utterly unprincipled, relentless pursuit of profit (See box below). In the ranks of departed foreign standard-bearers for U.S. imperialism, she joins Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran and countless Latin American dictators, from Pinochet to Somoza to Trujillo to Battista.

Obama, Clinton, and the rest of the liberals praising Bhutto are selling political poison. Far better than following them down the road to imperialist world war would be to join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. We have the ultimate goal of eradicating the profit system and its endless wars and establishing workers' rule in their place.

Bhutto Was Workers' Deadly Enemy

Benazir Bhutto was no friend of the working class. She belonged to the aristocracy of the Pakistani ruling class in particular and to the worldwide capitalist ruling class in general. Under her premiership the Pakistani state apparatus, one of the world's most repressive, continued its brutal practices of torturing, killing and "disappearing" workers and those who opposed her rule.

Even her younger brother Murtaza was mowed down by the police, which many (including her niece Fatima) believe Bhutto either engineered or tacitly approved. A member of parliament, he was a vocal critic of his sister's politics and her corrupt government.

She, her husband, mother and other family members became obscenely rich from laundering money, getting kickbacks, customs inspection fees and outright stealing funds from social programs. Her husband and she accumulated a $1.5 billion fortune while over 80 million Pakistani workers and peasants live on less than $2 a day.

Letter From the Iraq War

I'm doing fine, been very busy since last time I wrote. There's so much to write about. I'll start with the current condition of my sector. The army has allied with the local insurgent group. This is the same group that was blowing us up and shooting at us. It was formerly allied with Al Qaeda, but since the U.S. pays them more and gives them arms, they now supposedly fight Al Qaeda.

We've been walking around the villages and the city trying to find them, then put them in the "hide system," a machine that electronically reads fingerprints and retina scans, takes a picture and sends it to the Pentagon.

The Army pays them $250/month each and $350 to the leader of each house. They also have us passing out rice, flour, oil, books and backpacks.

Right now we're using the velvet glove, but the iron fist isn't far off. This has led to intense discussions about why we're here; why the U.S. is allying with the insurgency and now supporting the Sunni faction and fueling the civil war between Sunni and Shia. Would U.S. rulers support al Qaeda if it was in their best interest to do so? [After all, in the 1980s the CIA financed bin Laden and AQ to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan]

We've been involved in a lot of fighting -- many attacks against us and our unit has attacked many people. There is some death-squad mentality in my unit. A vocal group is swayed by the racist attitudes of Special Forces around our platoon.

I "came out of the closet," so to speak, so now everyone in my platoon knows about my politics. This has led to some heated debate and has been a good experience for me. I've taken on some of the racist ideas about the Iraqis with the other people in my unit. Being here and interacting with the local people has also made me challenge some of my own ideas about ethnic stereotypes. There is a lot of hostility towards my politics.

I'm arguing with the people in my platoon that the U.S. is the cause of much of the misery here. That we blew up the hospitals, power station and sewer systems so that people lie sick and shit runs in the streets. That we allow most of the food brought in as aid to be given out to pay off U.S. allies or to be sold on the black market. I've reminded them that we've blown up two schools since we've been here, and that there is no running water because we don't allow people to lay pipe. That our snipers are killing innocent people, and U.S. missiles are blowing up families.

These are some of the racist ideas I struggle over with them on a daily basis. On top of that, I've had discussions about the nature of capitalism and communism with some people, but that's been a touchy subject with many in the platoon.

It's been hairy, but I'm doing OK. I can't wait to see you guys, I will be home soon. Thanks for everything.

Bella Ciao, In Struggle

2007: Rival Imperiaists Challenged U.S. - Workers Fought Back Worldwide

World domination by U.S. rulers is being challenged by the bosses of Russia, Iran and China. This sharpening rivalry is displayed in many ways. Pick up a mainstream U.S. newspaper any time and the message you most likely receive is that China is evil. News sources reported all year about the dangerous or poisonous products of China: from pet chow to toothpaste, from toys to sea food. The mouthpieces of the ruling class were determined to paint China as the devil, even though U.S.-owned companies produced the goods in question.

A communist analysis tells us that the bosses' reason for this is not concern for our safety. They fear China's growing ability to compete with the U.S. as an imperialist power, and they need to build up anti-China sentiment in workers in anticipation of future armed conflict.

The U.S. rivalry with China and other growing powers drove many of the events of the year, either directly or indirectly. The Save Darfur movement is being built among students and workers in order to oppose China's interests in Africa. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is able to call George Bush names without much fear, partly because of his ties to imperialists in China, Russia and elsewhere. Over a million people have been killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan waged by U.S. bosses to prevent rivals from gaining access to Mid-East oil.

The year 2007 saw the outbreak of rebellions by Arab and Muslim youth in France and mass strikes in France, South Africa, Peru, Italy and the Dominican Republic and a general strike in Greece. Workers in the United States have fought back with strikes in war plants at Northrop-Grumman in Pascagoula, Mississippi and at Navistar. Although those workers struck for economic reasons, striking war plants shows that they did not fall for the boss's patriotism. PLP supported these strikers and helped expose the pro-boss union hacks still holding back our class. PLP'ers have also been organizing in the military and in subcontracting plants serving the war industry.

The lead-up to the next presidential election was big news as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton jockeyed for the Democratic Party nomination, each hoping to convince workers of their anti-war stance while assuring Big Oil that they would do a better job than Bush at securing control of the Middle East. Both Obama and Clinton have openly supported pre-emptive strikes against al Qaeda in Pakistan and the Iranian rulers respectively.

In mass events, PLP'ers -- through chants, speeches and sales of CHALLENGE -- have consistently exposed the liberal politicians as more dangerous as they try to win worker support with their lies while deepening the wars their "conservative" counterparts started.

Meanwhile, the current government used the "war on terror" to excuse increasingly fascist tactics in oppressing the workers. We saw a rise in the use of video cameras everywhere, from schools to buses. Police murdered black and Latin young people in every major city like Kiel Coppin in NYC, Francisco Mondragon in LA and Aaron Harrison in Chicago. Brutal crackdowns on immigrants, like the raid at a plant in New Bedford, Mass., separated families through deportation at the same time that immigration "reforms" like the DREAM Act promise citizenship to those who would join the military to fight in the Middle East. The bosses have worked hard this year to build fear and passivity in the workers, but they face a major contradiction: they are attacking the same people they need to be patriotic and fight their imperialist wars.

PL was there to lead militant, multi-racial protests against gutter racists like the Minutemen. We stood up against racist right-wingers like David Horowitz with his Islamo-Fascism week and against military and CIA recruiters on our campuses.

The local courts in Jena, LA, viciously punished young black students who fought back against racists who hung nooses at their school. Since then the media has reported that racist attacks are on the rise. As the NY Times reported (11/25), "...this country has seen a rash of as many as 50 to 60 noose incidents. The level of hate crimes in the U.S. is astoundingly high -- more than 190,000 incidents per year." Masses of black workers and students converged on Jena, LA, to protest the racist events there. PL members brought communist politics to these anti-racist events.

The rulers left workers to suffer in many ways while they struggled to keep control over their imperialist interests. The sub-prime mortgage crisis meant many workers, disproportionately black and Latino ones, lost homes and financial security. Bridges collapsed, miners died in cave-ins, homes and lives were lost to fires and floods, earthquakes from San Diego to Tabasco, Mexico, to Peru, the Caribbean and Bangladesh. The wreckage left in the wake of hurricane Katrina is in even worse shape after two years of the bosses' "recovery effort." The bosses have decided to demolish the public housing which were totally livable.

No matter how much the bosses abandon all responsibility for our safety, workers take care of each other. Students, teachers and workers are still traveling to the New Orleans area to lend support to their class brothers and sisters there. PLP contingents made the trip several times during the year, organizing our friends to help in schools, churches, community groups and workplaces.

High school students spoke to the Delegate Assembly of the New York teachers' union for the first time, demanding that their voices be heard against imperialist war. On the West Coast, high school and college students spent their summer building unity with industrial workers.

Even as the bosses try to beat us down and win us to their nationalist ideas, the workers' anger is still there. It's the job of communists to give this anger at the system a revolutionary direction. We don't want to rebel fruitlessly, but to build a movement that will be able to challenge and destroy capitalism. Then workers will be able to run the world according to our class interests. PLP is leading the way towards that communist future.

South Asian Worker Joins the International PLP

Recently on a trip to a South Asian country I had an experience that brought home so strongly to me that communist ideas are deeply embedded in the working class worldwide, over-riding apparent barriers of geographic origin, gender and language.

I, a jean-clad Western woman, was sitting with a traditionally-dressed Muslim male neither speaking each other's language. After a few minutes of awkwardness and pantomime trying to communicate, the comrade who had brought us together joined us and interpreted for us.

First the comrade told me that he and his friends had not been in touch for two years and that the man had previously been close to PLP and was now ready to join.

The friend began talking about the situation in the area, where the working class is caught up in conflict based on ethnic and regional differences. He went straight to the point, saying, "Our aim is a classless society, but to get rid of the bosses we need to overcome these barriers and unite the working class in one struggle. We can do this. The opportunity is there but the difficulty is our lack of resources and funds. Every member [and CHALLENGE reader] has to give money to support this work."

He continued, "We also need an international party, that if a worker suffers in one country it is felt in the heart of a worker in another country."

So, comrades, we do have an international party and this comrade inspired me to work harder to build it. J

A Comrade

PLP Youth Lead Anti-Racist Campaign At Brooklyn H.S.

BROOKLYN, NY -- Students, mainly black and Latino, and teachers at a local high school here -- located in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood -- have been battling racist attacks inside and outside the school. Every day after school the racist NYPD quickly herds students out of the neighborhood.

Before Thanksgiving, when an underage female student and her friends tried to leave a subway car because they feared a fight was about to erupt, a cop in that car yanked her back in. Her friends defended her, saying she'd done nothing wrong, that the cop's action was illegal. They wrote down his name and badge number. Seeing students stand up for each other angered this racist cop. When the train pulled into the next station, he ordered the young student out of the subway car.

Her friends, and passengers on the train, told her she didn't have to go because she'd done nothing wrong. But she went, fearing arrest and further abuse. About a dozen of her friends followed her, which angered the cop even more. He called for back-up; almost immediately a dozen racist cops came running down the stairs. They maced and beat the students, arresting six.

Four were underage and taken to the precinct and then to a juvenile detention center for the night, where they were further harassed and verbally brutalized with racist remarks. Three are CHALLENGE readers, which partially influenced their will to fight back.

When PLP members at the school, heard this story, we responded immediately, first calling the parents of those arrested. Consequently, we were able to accompany the students and their parents to a court hearing. The students, never offered legal aid, were instead offered a "deal": community service and a sealed conviction! Such is capitalist justice: get harassed, maced, beaten and locked up by racist cops -- the "crime" being black or Latino.

PLP members encouraged and supported the parents to fight the case and demand a lawyer. Despite the DA's scare tactics, and because the parents had a prior relationship with the teacher/debate coach of their children, the parents resisted the "deal" and await a trial date.

Back at school, a PLP youth club took an anti-racist petition to the Student Government Association. It linked the racist attacks on the Jena 6, the NYPD's brutal murder of Kiel Coppin, the cops' racist attacks on students to the racist pizzeria owner across the street. Hundreds of signatures were collected the first day!

During the petition campaign, a debate on metal detectors in the school occurred before the entire student body. One side argued safety required having such detectors. The other side exposed the racist nature of these detectors. They eloquently explained that besides metal detectors being ineffective at catching many metal objects, the main reason to eliminate them was their use to teach control and obedience to authority.

One debater argued, "Although we all won't get 95's in all our classes or pass all the Regents exams needed for graduation, we will all leave this school knowing how to "assume the position." This shows that the main reason school exists is to train us to follow orders, like prisoners." (This fits in with the bosses' need for obedient cannon fodder in imperialist wars and for cheap labor.) Another debater used statistics from the NYC Lawyers' Union website revealing that 82% of students attending high schools containing metal detectors are black and Latino. Hundreds of students and many teachers wore stickers distributed at the debate, stating: "Students not Suspects! Fight Racism!"

This modest increase of class struggle has helped expand our CHALLENGE distribution, though inconsistent, to 75 per issue. Two new students have joined a study group. Since one student's arrest and our response, she began meeting with a PLP study group again. She will attend the next PLP club meeting and has her mother's full support. Four PL student members have led the campaign.

Still, we must strengthen our organizing. The anti-racism campaign must include the Apartheid pizzeria owner across the street from the school; he refuses to allow our students to eat there. We're planning to more vigorously approach the building's other two schools; the petition is being passed around in one. We've also taken the petitions to mass organizations, provoking political discussion that's changed some of their thinking, increasing our experience in doing this.

The anti-racist campaign has not yet blossomed, but 2008 promises more opportunity to win these youths to the Party while advancing the class struggle within their schools.

Student Anti-Racist Assembly Sparks Fight-back

BROOKLYN, NY, December 19 -- "Asian, Latin, black and white; to fight racism, we must unite!" was a chant among 800 high school students attending our second annual anti-racist assembly. It centered on the theme of the "Jena 6" and students fighting back. Members of Progressive Labor Party -- understanding that racism is a crucial weapon in the capitalist arsenal against the working class -- see one way of building the anti-racist fight is organizing mass assemblies in the school to spread our ideas.

The assembly was exciting from start to finish, with original poetry, a skit about battling racism, some great speeches linking past struggles to today and lively routines by cheerleaders and steppers. It called on students not only to wear the Jena 6 button (see insert) but to become active in the fight against racism. The high point was a slam poet's poem opposing the criminalization of students in the schools. It really hit home as students are increasingly treated like suspects and criminals.

The main lesson: always rely on the students and staff, especially the students. Everyone came through in a big way. Students had been meeting daily for over a month to plan every aspect of the assembly, from the program, the lighting, the music and the ushers to, most importantly, the message. We had lively discussions about the nature of racism, its history and what to do every day to challenge it.

A few teachers lent their support and attended all the discussions and planning meetings. Others were very enthusiastic about the program, thanking us for doing it.

But clearly, the students led this activity, armed with much determination and understanding. It was followed a week later by a debate in the cafeteria based on the Lerone Bennett article, "The Road Not Taken."

We've taken some important steps, especially to make racism a mass issue. Our sharp assembly was even better received than last year's program. Nationalism was minimal in organizing the assembly, but the administration's fear was evident. One weakness was the failure to link racism here to the U.S. rulers' imperialist wars which use racism to win GI's to kill their class brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan

Those who run the school are afraid of our students and of PLP's communist ideas. They understand their power and know that we can be a spark to lead rebellions. Our job is to continue this fight, explain the class nature of racism and our solution -- and always rely on the working class!

Opportunities to Build PLP After Navistar Union Hacks Sold Out

LOS ANGELES, December 30 -- The UAW ended a seven-week strike against International Truck and Engine Corp. (ITEC), betraying the company's 3,700 workers. ITEC, a unit of Navistar International, based in Warrenville, Illinois, imposed increases in workers' out-of-pocket healthcare costs, as well as a new-hire package lowering wages and benefits.

When the Navistar contract expired October 1, the union refused to call a strike, even though workers were ready to go. The UAW leaders postponed the walkout until October 23, enabling the company to send the work to non-union plants in Mississippi, Texas and Mexico. This helped the company and its imperialist masters build the armored vehicles they needed to send immediately to the war in Iraq. In delaying the strike, the union leaders continued their role as junior partners of the bosses and their contempt for the workers' conditions. Their failure to reach out to workers in the non-union plants in the U.S. and Mexico exposes their pro-boss outlook as well.

However, PLP built strike support from Chicago to Southern California. We walked the picket lines. We passed out thousands of leaflets to workers calling for support for the strikers and for unity between workers in the U.S., Mexico and Iraq, between union and non-union, citizen and immigrant, black, Latin and white. Our leaflets explained that a revolutionary party is needed to answer the bosses' growing attacks on workers, which are part of widening imperialist war and deepening attacks on war-production workers. Workers need one international revolutionary communist party fighting to destroy the rule of profit and to establish the rule of workers.

Hundreds of workers showed their support by buying CHALLENGE and revealing the similarity of their own conditions with the Navistar workers. These discussions included some sharp struggle about racism. A few citizen workers wanted to blame immigrants for worsening conditions in the war-production plants, but PL'ers made it clear that it's capitalism's need to force workers to shoulder the bosses' drive for super-profits and for war, not immigrant workers, that is to blame.

Red Transit Workers Mean
`Doomsday' For the Bosses

CHICAGO, IL, December 27 -- For the third time in five months, transit workers and riders are facing a "Doomsday"(see CHALLENGE, 11/14/07) deadline. The bosses are threatening to slash thousands of jobs, dozens of bus routes and other service cutbacks if a new 5-year concession contract and state funding are not in place by January 20. These are especially racist cutbacks as they target a mostly black work force that serves an even larger black and Latin population.

Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) boss Huberman admits that mass transit creates $2 billion in value added wealth to the local economy by bringing millions of riders to work, shopping and events. But that $2 billion goes into the vaults of the biggest bosses and bankers. We create the wealth and they keep it. That is the secret to capitalism. The attacks on transit workers, the riding public and para-transit users are taking place as the economy slides into a recession and federal funding is cut to pay for the $12 billion-a-month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!

City and state politicians are fighting over how to fund mass transit. Mayor Daley, the CTA and the ATU locals want the matter settled with a 5-year concession contract that creates a permanent two-tier system, a fare hike to $3.00 and service cuts. The CTA and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) sent the contract to arbitration to keep it from being voted on by transit workers. The contract will go into effect as soon as the state politicians vote on funding, but they are fighting to tie funding to casino gambling. As with the Cook County health care cuts a year ago that closed half of the public health clinics, closed wards and slashed hundreds of jobs, the city and state politicians are Democrats, black and white, elected with union money.

Daley and the CTA had the union leaders (ATU locals 308 - rail, and 241 - bus), call for a one-day "job action" on December 17. They wanted us to demand funding that would saddle us with the 5-year concession contract, force new hires to work 15 years longer before they can retire, and use our "raises" to fund the shaky pension plan.

Most transit workers smelled a rat and wanted no part of it. Others were frustrated and wanted to take some action, like the three-day strike of 500 para-transit drivers in November and the one-day strike of PACE drivers in early December.

Had this been the start of a real strike to stop fare hikes and service cuts, and win a decent contract, the media and the bosses would have threatened us with jail and fines. But we didn't hear a thing from them because they were behind it. Some workers notified the ATU International leadership and they threatened to put the ATU locals into trusteeship. The action was called off.

During this period, a group of transit workers took matters into their own hands, distributing a flier in several garages exposing the Daley-CTA-ATU charade. They called on workers to unite with riders to fight racist cutbacks. They got a very good response. As this struggle unfolds we have an opportunity to introduce more workers and transit activists to CHALLENGE newspaper and PLP. Communist revolution will be "doomsday" for the racist rulers, as we build a society that serves the needs of the international working class, not the bankers and casino operators.

Hacks' Phony `Human Rights' Unit Kills Jena 6 Resolution

Seattle, WA -- After nearly two months of struggle at various International Association of Machinists (IAM) union meetings and conferences, our rank-and-file Jena 6 support resolution was finally kicked upstairs to the District Human Rights committee. Last week, the Business Representative chairman informed us the committee decided to kill it. "If we supported this then anybody could come forward with his or her issues," he warned.

"That would be horrible" was the sarcastic reaction of many members on the shop floor. Then more serious discussions began. What is the purpose of these human rights committees anyway?

The network of Human Rights committees was started in the mid-'70s. At the time, the union was flooded with new younger members just back from the Vietnam War, with experience in anti-racist rebellions and familiarity with left-wing politics. These new members expected action against racism both on the job and in society at large. The leadership answered with a human rights committee in every local. Carefully controlled by the reactionary leadership, these committees served as the hacks' lightning rods. They diverted the efforts of honest anti-racists from militant class struggle into dead-end bureaucracy.

In our district, the activity of this committee is also driven by rank-and-file anti-racist struggle. But, once again, the misleadership used this committee to give an appearance of "diversity" while short-circuiting class struggle. The leadership even decided to cover their ass with diversity training for all union officers. Unfortunately, the International runs these classes. As explained by an International officer, diversity training is important to organizing. Their organizing slogan is "Defending Our Freedom; Defending Our Jobs." Their logo features a U.S. flag and an armed soldier.

The picture is complete. The International's version of Human Rights is multi-racial support for racist U.S. imperialism.

Communism: The Only Answer To Bosses' Racism

Under communism the PLP would bring workers into the street to battle racists. Racism hurts all workers; communism requires anti-racist working-class consciousness and unity. In order to ensure the victory of the revolution, we must muster our class's fighting might.

Today, with pro-capitalist unions, we have to expose the misleaders' phony Human Rights committees. In that sense, being attacked by the hacks in this struggle has not been such a bad thing. Our CHALLENGE sales have increased a bit as we have worked hard to bring communist ideas to our fellow workers who have lost faith in pro-capitalist unions. We now have to turn those sales into bigger CHALLENGE networks and new Party members.

Where possible, we should encourage honest workers to join these misleaders' committees. They should have no illusions about how far the hacks will let these committees mobilize rank-and-file class struggle. On the other hand, by pushing just such action, we can more profoundly expose the pro-boss union leadership.

As these struggles ensue, the revolutionary alternative will become more meaningful when we find ways to emphasize our communist politics.

Fresh Direct's Anti-Immigrant Attack Is Rotten to the Core

NEW YORK CITY, December 23 -- Two recent stories show how the racist noose, Jena-style, is tightening around the necks of undocumented immigrants, thereby sharpening exploitation of all workers and intensifying fascist control in the U.S.

On December 20, two days before a vote to have the United Food and Commercial Workers Union represent warehouse workers at Fresh Direct here, a multi-racial group of unionists and community and church groups rallied to support them. The bosses at Fresh Direct, a rapidly-expanding company that raked in a $240 million profit in 2007, fired hundreds of undocumented workers. They had threatened the workers with deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which the company had invited to the warehouse. Fresh Direct bosses are deliberately using ICE to divide and defeat the union drive.

A black worker, responding to an ad for a job there, encountered a comrade and later joined the rally. "I'm against deporting workers who've been working in the U.S. and dividing their families," he declared.

Our ability to fight exploitation and criminalization of undocumented workers depends on such an internationalist working-class outlook and an increasing willingness of all workers to fight back for our class, not on uniting with the politicians for so-called immigration reform. In fact, a key element of such "reform" will be a guest-worker program that will allow bosses like those at Fresh Direct to "legally" super-exploit and divide workers.

On December 13 about 80 people held a candlelight vigil sponsored by the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) at Manhattan's ICE Center, where immigrants awaiting deportation are processed before being sent to detention centers. Nearly two million people have been deported in the last decade; ICE detains more than 280,000 a year.

The NSM flyer exposed the fact that "New York City collaborates with ICE in many ways: In 2006 the City's Dept. of Corrections received over $18 million from the federal government in exchange for targeting non-citizens, more that any other city in the country....Without revealing their identities, ICE officers routinely question and then detain suspected non-citizens caught up in the criminal justice system, many of whom have yet to be convicted or even charged with a crime."

The New Sanctuary stance to protest in the streets against raids and racist terror is a welcome development. But the struggle must sharpen. Immediately after the vigil participants arrived, a handful of gutter racists from Morristown, NJ appeared with whistles, American flags and signs saying, "Deport them all." A comrade chanted in their faces. "We are workers, we're not illegals," trying to win the protestors to stand up to the racists. A few protesters joined her, but most chose to ignore them, saying, "Don't worry. Our message is stronger than theirs."

The comrade pointed out that allowing such racists to go unchallenged permits the growth of violent racism that historically results in fascist genocide. She explained how Morristown racists throw rocks and bottles at day laborers in New Jersey and work with politicians like Morristown Mayor Crisitelli and Colorado Senator Tancredo. But while Tancredo proclaims he's made "immigration a front-burner issue," it's the liberal ruling class that's primarily behind the legalization of fascist treatment of immigrants.

They don't want to deport most of the undocumented immigrants, just enough to terrorize them and all workers in order to super-exploit them even more. These liberals want to use the so-called Dream Act to force undocumented youth to serve as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and militarize the U.S./Mexico border, all in the name of "national security." A couple of the comrade's good friends later told her they agreed with her and that we need to discuss the issue in the Sanctuary group.

History teaches us that capitalism is built on racist exploitation and that defeating fascist terror requires a revolutionary communist party. PLP'ers join mass organizations like the Sanctuary Movement to bring these ideas to workers and their allies.

Paraguay's Electoral Circus Offers No Solution for Workers

Fairly soon Paraguayan workers will be asked to choose a new oppressor. The candidates, serving different capitalist interests, essentially all favor the exploitation of the working class and its allies. Instead of choosing a "lesser evil," it's time to organize a revolutionary communist movement to free workers from all forms of capitalist and imperialist oppression.

Paraguay is a key piece in the larger chessboard of imperialist domination and cheap labor in South America. Its ruling class has kept the population, many of them indigenous, super-exploited and very poor. Paraguay has one of the hemisphere's largest aquifers [underground water supply] and is strategically located, bordering Brazil and Argentina, the two giants of the "Southern Cone," as well as Bolivia and Uruguay. So the elections must be seen in the context of the growing imperialist rivalry in Latin America.

The Pentagon is trying to activate the Mariscal Estigarribia airport in the Chaco region, a very short distance by air from Bolivia. The latter is now on the brink of a civil war between very racist pro-U.S. forces in the rich gas and oil region of Santa Cruz against pro-Chávez President Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president. Energy companies from Brazil, Spain, China, Venezuela, India, France, Great Britain and the U.S. are all interested in controlling the region's oil and gas wealth.

Recently, several U.S. Senators and Congressmen made a five-country tour of Latin America, starting in Paraguay. Meanwhile, Brazil's bosses -- who exploit Paraguay's natural resources and cheap labor -- are supporting former general and presidential candidate Lino Oviedo.

Contrary to all the capitalist parties, PLP and our friends here, even though small in number, offer the only alternative: organizing workers across all borders -- including the large number of Paraguayan immigrants in Brazil, Argentina, the U.S. and Spain -- to fight all bosses and imperialists, for a world without capitalism: communism.

The Electoral Players -- All Capitalist Stooges

The ruling Colorado Party, in power for over 60 years, is now split between two candidates. Blanca Ovelar recently resigned as Minister of Education to escape striking teachers, and hit the campaign trail. Current Coloradan Vice-President Castiglioni is also running. Former bishop Fernando Lugo of the Christian Democratic Party, allied with the reformist pro-Chávez PMAS party, has formed a coalition with the Liberal Party, the main opposition to the Coloradoans, choosing a liberal as his V-P running mate. Pedro Fadul left the "Anything-but-Colorado" Lugo camp to run for President as the Dear Fatherland Party candidate.

President Frutos of the Colorado Party freed the jailed General Oviedo, after dropping treason charges against him (for murdering a former Vice-president), enabling him to run and split the opposition. Oviedo graduated from the U.S. School of the Americas which trains Latin America death squads.

Lugo -- As Bad As the Rest

Lugo, who leads the polls, has much support from workers and peasants because he has backed the poor farmers' movement. But he's turning out to be a "socialist" á la Chile's President Bachelet, a close U.S. ally and darling of Chilean bosses. Lugo has already visited the U.S. trying to win Washington's support, pledging not to interfere with Wal-Mart's recent opening here. Even if elected, Lugo is already entangled in a web of deals with very reactionary parties. Little will change for urban and rural workers if Lugo wins.

We in PLP must use DESAFIO-CHALLENGE to build our movement here, as the only true liberation for workers and their allies.

KENYA: Imperialist-Sponsored `Democracy' Blows Up

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 2 -- Kenya was considered the most stable capitalist democracy in this part of Africa and a gold mine for imperialist exploitation, but the violence following the rigged presidential election last week has blown all that. Kenya is too important for world imperialism not to try to squash a power struggle between two politicians that could turn into another Rwanda. The two candidates are using tribal politics in their fight but in reality their thirst for a bigger piece of the capitalist pie is behind this conflict. The two men became enemies after Kibaki (the current ruler) reneged on a 2002 deal that would have given Odinga (the opposition candidate claiming fraud) the premiership in return for his support in the election.

Kenya's importance to the imperialists is as a regional base for multi-national corporations like Barclays Bank, British American Tobacco and Unilever, among others who viciously exploit African workers. Its port of Mombassa is crucial to transport manufactured goods, fuel and military equipment for Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and southern Sudan. Financial Times columnist Michael Holman, wrote (1/1/08)): "For the outside world, Kenya has been the acceptable face of Africa: a safe destination for a million tourists a year from Europe, Asia and North America to the country of surf and safari; a reliable base, in a tough neighbourhood, for a burgeoning aid industry; regional headquarters for the United Nations; and -- less well-known -- a country whose military pacts with the U.S. and Britain have made it a crucial ally in the `war against terror.' Kenyan politics, however, has never been healthy. It has been dominated by ethnic allegiances, stained by assassination, distorted by one-party rule until 1991 and, above all, oiled by endemic corruption." These are central features of worldwide capitalism.

The U.S. government wanted the situation to remain stable enough to have congratulated Kibaki for his "victory," even though it's common knowledge it was fraudulent. Then, on Dec. 31, Washington effectively retracted that initial position with a fresh statement expressing concern about "serious problems experienced during the vote-counting process."

The instability of world capitalism, with its imperialist wars, economic crises, corruption and fascist terror, is deadly for workers and their allies in Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq and more "hot spots" that will surely arise in the future. This instability sharpens the divisions among workers and their allies along tribal, religious and national lines. These contradictions cannot be solved under capitalism. The world's workers are in dire need of rebuilding an international revolutionary communist movement that unites our class and allies based on our common interests to fight our common enemy: capitalism, imperialism and their crooked politicians.

LETTERS

Asian Youth Wants to _Serve Working Class

(This is a letter from a young working-class comrade whose family was made homeless in one of the many natural disasters turned into mass tragedies by capitalism in Asia in recent years. He is a first-year college student and sent us these comments on the situation for working-class youth like him.)

The rich people put drugs into our communities. They want to keep us down. They deprive us of an education and jobs. It's our duty to get an education because we need it for the future of the working class. All students have to get involved in the struggle of the working class so that we can get rid of the rich people's system. We can do this if we unite the ranks of the working class here and all over the world.

A Young Comrade in Asia

Airport Workers Rap on Ideas in CHALLENGE

At the airport where I work, I ran into my friend, a black flight attendant for a major airline. I gave her the latest issue of CHALLENGE. She's fairly new to reading it and knowing about its communist politics.

She asked me: "Do you get paid for doing this? Do they pay you for making sure people read it?"

"No," I replied, "I'm not paid for getting CHALLENGE to airport workers. My incentive is political rather than monetary or material. I do this (as do other Party members) because I want to see a better world and future, especially for our children. That's my `reward.' Some day, millions of workers will organize a communist revolution worldwide. In a communist society it will be, `To each according to need' instead of capitalism's hellish system, ruled by the almighty dollar."

My friend noted, "This communist revolution may be far off in the future; you may not be around to see it."

I answered, "Hopefully communist revolution will begin in our lifetime, but if I'm not personally around to see it, the international working class still needs it, regardless of my personal physical presence. It would solve many of the working class's problems -- racism, sexism, super-exploitation and imperialist war.

"We can and will have a communist society where workers' needs will be primary and where money doesn't exist. For 95% of our existence humankind has lived without money (primitive communism). Money or classes have been around for only a relatively short time. With all this advanced technology, the Party can envision communist society without money. All it takes is the political will to organize it!

"And just because something has not historically happened yet, it does not mean it can't."

My friend commented, "You know, maybe you have a good point about everything we talked about! I'll read CHALLENGE to learn more."

What comrade Marx said a long time ago was as true today as it was then -- "When enough of the masses believe in an idea, then that idea will become a material force in the world." And so it will be with communism some day.

Airport Red

P.S. The following are excerpts of a draft resolution I circulated among workers at my airport for presentation in our union:

(1) Be it resolved we support the immigrant airport workers (undocumented and documented) at O'Hare International in Chicago who have been the victims of racist harassment by ICE (immigrant police). Immigrant or citizen workers should not respect our racist oppressors' national borders which only exist to divide us.

(2) Be it resolved we support our working-class African and Arab brothers and sisters in France who are fighting President Sarkozy's racist riot police and support the strikes of French workers fighting to not lose their union gains.

(3) Be it resolved we continue to offer our support to the "Jena 6" students of Louisiana, victims of the racist U.S. criminal (in)justice system.

Union Struggle Sparks Ex-Member to Nix `Ex'

I work in a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, where I have been a union delegate for many years. I used to be a PLP member, but since leaving, I was lulled into complacency for a number of years. The war in Iraq and events with Hurricane Katrina woke me up.

CHALLENGE has been reporting in great detail about the step-up of racist killings by police nationwide and how racism is used in the rulers' plans for war and fascism. Recently, a PLP leader asked me to work on a resolution to condemn these racist murders and call for action to mobilize hospital workers and others around this issue.

When the issue was raised on my job, most of my co-workers were enthusiastic about it. A discussion at our hospital's delegates meeting was very positive. Another delegate and I were asked to write a resolution to be introduced to our union. In the process, I was able to introduce my fellow delegate to CHALLENGE and use the article regarding the recent shooting of Kheil Coppin as the basis of our resolution. The process of fighting around this reform issue has opened many doors for the introduction of the communist ideas of PLP.

Our resolution was brought to the December delegates' assembly after being approved unanimously by our hospital's delegates. A lot of diplomatic maneuvering was engaged in so that the resolution would make it to the floor for a vote. (The leadership of our local, 1199, is fearful of any proposal that they don't control or initiate.) The resolution was adopted unanimously. The fight now goes to put rank-and-file pressure on the leadership to act on the resolution.

As long as 1199's leadership leads this struggle together with politicians it will go nowhere. However, we can show the contradiction of reform versus communist revolution to our CHALLENGE readers and larger base of co-workers. It is the daily work of struggle one-to-one that will result in recruitment and building a mass party on the road to communist revolution. This is the area in which I need the most improvement.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve the working class in this all-important struggle.

Thinking of rejoining

Deportation Terror Hits ALL Workers

I am an Ironworker working on a bridge spanning the Mississippi River, when the fascist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided our worksite. At the time I was working near a generator so I heard nothing. But I saw a group of guys running for the only way out. At first I thought a crane fell over or an accident happened, but it didn't take long to figure out La Migra had showed up. Even though they were on the opposite shore, it was enough to send immigrant workers running.

The purpose of these immigration raids is to terrorize all workers, and today they did a good job at accomplishing this. Those of us who stayed were jittery, nervous, and very angry. Black workers, the majority, were just as upset as white workers. Most of the immigrant workers who left were deck carpenters, and without them we couldn't proceed so after lunch the rest of us were sent home.

One layout carpenter told me that after the last ICE raid, about 6 months ago, the result was more speed-up for the remaining workers. This will probably be the result again after this latest attack.

There is only one-way to fight this terrorism and that is by patiently organizing to smash racism and the bosses, and organizing the entire working class to fight for communism. Conditions are becoming worse with each passing day. The need to organize is becoming more urgent. I hope that many more will join PLP and actively fight for communism until we see it through. No half steps. Every day I become a little more committed. Things won't get better on their own.

Red Ironworker

Backs Proletarian Dictatorship All the Way

I was studying the recent history of some organizations on the left and was quite dismayed. Lutte Ouvrier (LO) of France renounced the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in favor of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat" in 2003. Years ago, I was a supporter of Spark in the U.S., which is in solidarity with LO.

Unfortunately, I was NOT surprised when they threw in the sponge. Decades of parliamentary cretinism finally took its toll.

When I discussed this with a representative of WSWS.org (Socialist Equality Party of the U.S.) he said they don't have the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as part of their program either. No kidding! He said that it caused "misunderstandings" or some such garbage.

I was taken aback by this because I found their website interesting. But they are not alone. Other "leftist" organizations have also renounced the dictatorship of the proletariat. The important thing is that there is no compelling reason for this!

Just consider. The bosses have created a situation of enormous concentration of wealth for themselves, at the direct expense of the rest of the society, the likes of which has not been seen in 80 years. They're running non-stop and never-ending wars based on obvious lies. There's been an unprecedented attack on civil rights. Medical care is terrible. Wages are stagnant. The list goes on and on. But at exactly this juncture, these guys are giving it up! That's very revealing.

However, there's one organization that would never consider such a thing -- none other than the PLP! That's why I'm going to send the PLP a well-deserved contribution. Fight for communism!

RJ

High School Program Supports the Jena 6

A day of support for the Jena 6 was held at our high school in December. Many came with black arm bands in support of anti-racism and went to a teach-in, three students sang their own original song, another student performed a powerful spoken-word poem and a teacher did a rap. A parent of a former student gave the keynote speech about her visit to Jena to participate in the large, angry protest there in September, and she offered a first-hand account, along with a broad criticism of the unacceptable racial inequalities throughout the U.S.

The day's activities were sponsored by two organizations: the teachers' union chapter at our school, and a club for students who write hip hop lyrics and poetry. These two did good work in the fight against racism: making over 200 armbands, selling them in many locations around our school, raising money for legal defense of the Jena 6, and providing MC's, poetry, singing, and hip hop for the teach-in.

Much of the organizing and leadership for the event was provided by student and teacher participants in a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) study group. These study group members worked hard to make the event a success, and they also planned to personally speak up at the teach-in, explaining the idea that racism is caused by capitalism, that all students and workers are badly hurt by it, and that all of us - including white workers - need to fight hard against racism. In addition, a member of PLP planned to explain that to completely defeat racism, revolution and communism are needed.

Red teacher

A Friend's Memory of Carson Beach: Boston Summer Project, 1975

I recently read the December 12th issue of Challenge, "Battle of Carson Beach: Anti-Racists Send ROAR Thugs Running."

A friend of mine was at Carson Beach. He said, "I have a different memory of Carson Beach. That was a great day for demonstrating the power of multi-racial unity. INCAR had been following a strategy of multi-racial community organizing and anti-racist militance the entire summer, and the popularity of these ideas was growing. When we called for the "swim-in" to re-integrate Carson Beach, thousands came. However, most were under the direction of groups like the NAACP, which had initially opposed the swim-in. Recognizing the popularity of the swim-in idea, the big reform groups ultimately organized for it and, somewhat successfully, took away our leadership. And when the reform leaders and their police protection, which was massive, abruptly and unexpectedly abandoned the beach shortly after arriving, our very multi-racial INCAR group of approximately 200 was left to fight off overwhelming and simultaneous attacks from thousands of ROAR-organized thugs on one side and 50-100 black nationalists on the other. We fought courageously, but ultimately we retreated. The group I was with narrowly escaped. I cannot remember the exact outcome that day for everyone else, but my recollection is that there was absolutely no sense of INCAR having routed anyone, in regard to the headline in the December 12 Challenge story about Carson Beach, "Anti-Racists Send ROAR Thugs Running."

Stockton Challenge Reader

CHALLENGE comment: The writer has a good point. A sentence in the body of the article may have created the impression that the combined forces of INCAR and PLP "routed" the ROAR fascists. This was a mistake. The headline contributed to it. The account given in the comments made by the writer's friend seems fair and accurate.

The Carson Beach events showed the power of multi-racial unity, in the face of heavily unfavorable odds. Arrayed against the INCAR and PLP demonstrators were several police forces (the state apparatus), the organized racist movement they protected (ROAR), and a group of equally well- protected nationalist thugs. Despite these odds, the bravery and resourcefulness of the outnumbered PLP'ers and INCAR members defeated the trap. The article was correct in making that point. We thank the writer for pointing out the error of the exaggeration.

AIDS Day Hears Revolutionary Message on Epidemic

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 1 - Several PLPers joined over 200 activists who rallied at the White House on Friday, November 30th for World AIDS Day, an annual rally to demand aggressive action against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Our message to demonstrators -- it will take revolution to defeat the racist neglect of AIDS! At the rally, we distributed Challenges and flyers that urged our friends to join a PLP study-action group. Four of them attended the first meeting two weeks later. Activists need to stop trying to elect politicians or just promoting new HIV testing and educational programs. We need to figure out how to unite black, white, and immigrant workers for communism and the PLP so the working class can take power and reorganize society to meet the needs of our class.

The World AIDS rally demanded that the D.C. Board of Education approve comprehensive sex education for all students including safe sex, abstinence, and respect for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. Since the rally, the Board has agreed in principle to require this. Demonstrators also demanded that the U.S. government end ridiculous restrictions on the $15 billion it provides to countries struggling with HIV that force them to use 1/3 of the prevention funds for abstinence-only programs and to limit outreach to women forced into prostitution.

Forty people carried out civil disobedience around these demands, refusing to move from the White House sidewalk. Others maintained a steady stream of chants.

More activists are taking to the streets in D.C. to improve the health of all residents. Students from George Washington University continue to fight for drug treatment on demand and are helping the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association organize a spring conference on substance use, HIV, and mental health. Another student group militantly picketed a CVS drug store in a black neighborhood demanding it unlock its condoms, chanting, "1 in 20 with HIV -- CVS, Set the Condoms FREE!", and distributed free condoms to scores of people who stopped to talk to us.

The latest report from the D.C. Department of Health confirmed that 1 in 20 D.C. residents lives with HIV and 80 percent of people newly diagnosed are African American. HIV remains the leading cause of death for young black women and men nationwide. We urge other CHALLENGE readers to join the fight against HIV/AIDS and the capitalist system with its poverty, racism, homophobia and imperialist war that has made this disease into a global epidemic.J

DC Red

PL History:
Anti-Racists' Multi-Racial Unity Defies Rulers' Attacks

(Last issue's article about the 1975 summer of struggle against racism in Boston recounted the rulers' unsuccessful red-baiting campaign against the Committee Against Racism and the PLP, and the cops' attempt to ban CAR -- later known as INCAR, the International Committee Against Racism -- from marching on City Hall with an anti-racist petition containing 35,000 signatures.)

Early in the morning of August 18 -- the planned march date -- INCAR members and their lawyers went to court to enjoin the ban. The judge bent over backwards to help the cops' lawyers present their own case. But they had no case, even by the lopsided standards of capitalist "justice."

The cops' attorney was reduced to arguing that since the commissioner had already canceled the march, it was too late to assign enough police to manage it. This he argued despite the hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes cops stationed along the march's route at that very moment, waiting to prevent it.

In a public courtroom, the judge faced the alternative between flagrantly denying the right to free speech and assembly, supposedly "guaranteed" by the U.S. Constitution, and restoring the permit for the sake of protecting the system's democratic façade. This time, the mayor and cops had gone too far, even by their own standards. The judge regretfully revoked the ban, and 300 people marched. It was one of the summer's highlights. Thousands of workers watched from the street and shouted friendly encouragement to the demonstrators.

One speaker, INCAR's chairperson at the time, aroused a collective shout of militant anti-racist anger when he said: "We will turn ROAR into a mee-ow!" and then, pointing to Hicks, O'Neill, & Co., who were watching from their City Hall offices, led the demonstrators in collectively giving these fascists the finger.

After that march, most of the volunteers returned home to prepare for school openings. Some decided to remain in Boston to consolidate the gains made over the summer and to build both PLP and the anti-racist movement there. The project's final action came on September 8, the opening day of the 1975-76 school year. A year earlier, at the start of the busing program, ROAR thugs had thrown rocks at busses carrying young black schoolchildren into South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, etc., and had otherwise conducted a racist rampage throughout the city, under the benevolent gaze of Boston's police. Having proven that the ROAR goons didn't reflect the views of most Bostonian workers, INCAR and PLP were now intent on organizing a demonstration for multi-racial unity outside South Boston High School on opening day.

Two busloads carrying anti-racist black, white and Latino students and workers set out for "Southie" on the morning of the 8th. As the busses were crossing the bridge leading into South Boston, the cops pulled them over. A lieutenant named Bradley boarded and informed the anti-racists that they were all under arrest. "What for?" asked one of them, a final-year law student. "Well," answered Bradley, "you're not exactly creating a disturbance, but your presence could tend to create one." The law student retorted: "There's no such thing as `tending to create a disturbance.' Your arrest is completely illegal." "Don't worry," chuckled Bradley, "we'll think of something."

Before depositing the demonstrators in a South Boston jail, the cops made a point of handcuffing them so tightly that many lost circulation in their wrists. On the way to the jailhouse, the demonstrators were treated to a volley of racist vulgarities from the cops in the front of the vans transporting them. Once the demonstrators were behind bars, a cop at the jailhouse greeted them by saying, "Comes the revolution, we'll kill every f------ one of you." No one was intimidated, and spirits remained high.

After spending the day locked up, the demonstrators were transported in police vans back to the Park Street subway station in downtown Boston. The cops' original plan had been to release them at dusk onto the South Boston streets, where they might have been easy prey for a cop-ROAR trap. At the request of a PLP member, who had spent a good part of the day befriending a public defender from behind bars, the lawyer agreed to accompany several shifts of demonstrators on the ride to Park Street. The thought was that with a public defender in the van as a witness, the cops wouldn't dare try their usual brutalities. This estimate proved correct. The demonstrators held a short, defiant rally at Park Street.

The public defender's courageous action had taught a valuable political lesson: sharp situations provide important opportunities to do the "right thing," and given the proper encouragement, many people can be won to rise to the occasion.

BOSTON 75 proved that under determined communist leadership, a relatively small number of militant anti-racists can put the rulers, their state apparatus and their gutter racist henchmen on the defensive. This was one of the project's important lessons. In the final installment, we will discuss others, including the crucial ones to learn from its weaknesses.

NY Bosses Engineer Another Train Robbery: Hike Fares

NEW YORK CITY, December 21 -- Another chapter in this city's Great Train Robbery is being written by the bosses' Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) upon their decision to raise subway and bus fares through the "back door."

Amid some big public relations hoopla by Gov. Eliot Spitzer about "freezing" the $2 fare -- implying that there would be no fare hike -- the MTA is increasing the unlimited monthly Metro pass by 6.6% to over $80. This despite their admission that it will have more than a half-billion dollar surplus at the end of 2007. Use of the straight $2 fare accounts for only 14% of transit revenues while the monthly pass brings in over 30%.

This fare hike will hit low-income families particularly hard, the greater proportion of which are black and Latino. It will become more difficult to buy the unlimited monthly Metro cards (with its discounts) since one must lay out a larger sum initially.

The racist nature of the increase is exposed in the MTA's raising commuter fares -- used by an overwhelmingly higher-income white population -- only half as much: 3.76%.

The MTA bosses' excuse for the fare raise is "to prepare financially for large deficits...in 2009....expected because of increased debt service." Debt service is the nice way of saying billions of dollars in interests to the banks. These, of course, are the same banks who have robbed homeowners of billions in the subprime mortgage scam and will try to recoup any bankers' losses by squeezing whatever they can out of the working class. Interest on transit "debt service" is the first expense the MTA must pay out, before operating costs, maintenance, workers' wages or anything else.

This is the way the capitalist system works: profits first, workers last. Mayor Bloomberg himself has a $6 billion fortune, stolen from the working class. No wonder we call it the dictatorship of the bosses. Only a workers' dictatorship through a communist revolution can end such robbery.

Transit fare hikes, mortgage foreclosures, mass layoffs and tax cuts for the rich suck money out of our class while the rulers spend $12 billion a month of our tax money on imperialist wars for control of oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The transit union leaders and other hacks utter hardly a whimper about these fare increases, much less organizing a mass campaign to oppose them. Instead they tell us to vote for a "lesser evil" politician to "save us" from such robbery. In many other countries like France, Italy and Brazil, despite the union sellouts, workers fight such hi-jacking of their pockets by taking to the streets, battling the cops and even burning buses and trains. U.S. bosses will get away with such robbery as long as we, the workers, let them. It's time we united our class in organized mass opposition to these attacks, one big step on the road to revolution to destroy this oppressive system.