PUERTO RICO, April 15 —Two years after Hurricane Maria, the capitalist disaster that ravaged Puerto Rico’s working class, six young Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members from New York and New Jersey returned to the island earlier this month (see letter on page 6).
The trip was organized as a follow up to last year’s summer project, the Puerto Rico Brigade, with the purpose of reinforcing our bonds of solidarity, and delivering PLP’s internationalist message to our working-class brothers and sisters surviving there.
Although Maria ran its natural course, an increasingly fascist storm still rages on for the island workers. To date, 4,600 workers have died of causes attributable to ruling class negligence before and after the hurricane. U.S. bosses continue clamping fangs down into the working class with austerity measures (The Atlantic, 5/29/18).
The trip exposed that there is no disaster more destructive and lethal for workers than this system. From Puerto Rico to New Orleans to Haiti, workers cannot escape capitalism’s lethal grip. Thus this trip was a step towards building the kind of international working-class solidarity we need to smash capitalism, and replace it with the only system that guarantees us a future–communism. More importantly our trip sharpened the young PL’ers ideologically, as they learned from workers in the trenches, shared stories, distributed CHALLENGE to workers and students, and struggled with newer comrades about how nationalism is toxic for workers in Puerto Rico.
Capitalism deadlier than any natural disaster
While the damage caused by Hurricane Maria was extensive, the disaster of capitalism and U.S. imperialism has been pummeling the island since 1898, with raging super-exploitation and violent repression, stemming from the racist Jones Act, which turned the island into a cash mill for banks and corporations.
Before the hurricane, 45 percent of workers were suffering from poverty and 10 percent unemployment (CHALLENGE, 10/25/17). More recently, the Puerto Rico Oversight Management Stability Act (PROMESA), the austerity measures that cut funding to important social services—passed by liberal terrorist ex-president Barack Obama in 2016—exacerbated the attacks.
Since then, inflation has worsened and workers’ wages remain stagnant; students are being piled together in trailers used as makeshift classrooms, as funds are hoarded by the bosses.
When the ruling class neglected Puerto Rico after the storm, we teamed up with the PR October Brigade, university students, workers, and a veteran comrade to take matters into our own hands and rebuild, both literally and consciously. Young Party members helped clean up after the storm, delivered supplies to workers, led communist study groups, and attended rallies fighting these vicious cuts.
The Department of Education closed more than 400 schools under Secretary Julia Keleher’s regime. Yet many teachers and parents are not taking it lying down. The Federation of Puerto Rican Teachers (FMPR in Spanish) has occupied at least ten schools with community assistance and help from El Movimento al Rescate de Mi Escuela y Comunidade (the Movement to Rescue our Schools and Communities).
Trip to Toa Baja
On the third day of the visit, PLP organized a trip to Toa Baja to visit the Lorencita Ramirez de Arellano school, one of the schools the workers occupied. There, we spoke to parents and teachers who converted the shuttered school into a community center, complete with free tutoring, capoeira and fencing lessons provided free to local elementary school-aged children. The parents and teachers hope to collectively keep the school running, through grassroots funding, and count on educators organizing in the movement to volunteer their talents to serve the working class.
The movement is another example that workers are the only class fit to create the society we want for our children and youth. At a FMPR march, we learned about the school shutdowns, budget cuts, and their privatization. These learning conditions reflect teachers’ working conditions, as they often must buy school supplies, and provide air conditioning for students, while on average living on a $27,000 a year salary ($7,000 below the poverty line).
More the same than different
One teacher particularly interested in our ideas and CHALLENGE pointed out how the abuse teachers face on the island is a product of capitalism, which does not care about truly educating workers. Through this discussion we were able to connect how these conditions are replicated in the U.S. We shared the notable example of how U.S. bosses used Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to expand corporate-backed charter schools, and the way in which capitalism uses disasters like Maria and Katrina to profit from working class misery.
Even though Puerto Rican nationalism was on full display at the march, we won some friends to internationalist ideas by showing that while workers everywhere face attacks at varying levels, we all have one common enemy, capitalism. Our hope is to continue to forge ahead, and fight with workers to rebuild Puerto Rico, with the ultimate goal winning workers to fight for the most important batle ahead, and that is for Communism, a world in which workers run society for the benefit of all.
CHICAGO, April 5—Graduate workers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) along with their supporters gathered for a rally on campus today to mark the end of their three-week strike against the racist university administration. The Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) Local 6297 union, representing some 1,600 workers, secured a tentative contract guaranteeing annual raises and a decrease in parasitic university fees.
The strike has been instrumental in further exposing the exploitative working conditions for graduate and teacher assistants, which inevitably translate into inferior learning conditions for the university’s predominately Black, Latin, and international student population.
The strike highlighted the decadence of the capitalist bosses’ academic institutions, which function first and foremost as factories of ideological and social control, bound to the profit motive of capitalism. Comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) had a small role in supporting the strike, and look forward to connecting the lessons learned from the struggle to the larger fight of crushing the bosses’ rotten system entirely with communist revolution!
Graduate workers fight oppressive conditions
Shortly after the tentative contract agreement was announced, PLP joined over 100 graduate workers, students, faculty, and community supporters in the campus quad for a victory rally. Various speakers reflected on the oppressive conditions that led to the strike and the key role that bold action and solidarity played throughout the struggle. As one speaker sharply stated, “The graduate students are the backbone of this university, yet the university has been treating them like they are the appendix.” She wasn’t joking. According to UIC’s official statements, the graduate employee minimum salary for two semesters with 20 hours of work per week is a measly $18,000. Arbitrary charges and medical fees for the university’s Campus Care coverage have been steadily rising, bleeding working students of hundreds of dollars every semester.
A rapid community health assessment of over 600 graduate student workers conducted by campus public health organizations during the strike detailed some harsh realities. Seventy-seven percent of graduate workers don’t earn enough to cover their basic living expenses in rapidly gentrifying Chicago. Eight out of ten reported experiencing general anxiety, and seven out of ten reported depression (uic-geo.net).But despite these obstacles, the same graduate workers were able to lead a three-week strike that forced the university bosses to concede to some of their demands. The speeches shared experiences of their daily pickets on campus, cramming administration boardrooms during contract negotiations, classroom walkouts, and marching through the surrounding community after drawing support from local unions, faculty, and undergraduate students. Hundreds of classes taught by graduate workers had to be cancelled, even though the university claimed that courses went on uninterrupted (Chicago Tribune, 4/4).
Universities under capitalism serve the bosses needs
At the same time that many UIC students and workers have fought against economic insecurity and declining emotional health, the overall university system has continued to distinguish itself as a for-profit institution like all colleges and universities under capitalism. The same UIC bosses who claimed they couldn’t afford to pay student workers the Chicago minimum wage received an endowment of almost $400 million dollars in 2017, and salaries and bonuses for the chancellors and president total hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
What’s more, this past year the university bosses unveiled a plan to pour over $1 billion into renovating the campus over the next ten years, including building a new soccer stadium and ice-skating rink (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/31/18). These superficial vanity projects are sure to make the university more exclusive towards working-class students while displacing more workers and their families in the surrounding communities.
This is what passes for higher education under the profit system. Graduate students are worked to physical and mental exhaustion, helping churn out research that is instrumental in the university bosses cutting lucrative deals with major corporations, military contractors, and government agencies. Undergraduates lack basic support services to assist them in their courses, and graduate saddled with astronomical debt. All the while, the ideology promoted is saturated with pro-capitalist ideas that will not help students fight against a racist and sexist system of exploitation, wars and ecological ruin.
Lasting victories
In the wake of a strike against the bosses, it’s essential to define what constitutes real victory in the class struggle. Pay raises and better staffing can be offset or rolled back entirely, but the relationships forged in working-class fightback are much harder for the bosses to erase. It is the act of expanding the base and militancy of the mass movement that must be the key goal in any reform struggle.Such a strategy gives us communists opportunities to have more workers and students questioning the capitalist system entirely, and discussing how an egalitarian society based on science, collectivity, anti-racism, and anti-sexism could educate our class infinitely better.
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NYPD targets antiracists, workers expose liberal fascism
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- 20 April 2019 70 hits
THE BRONX, April 15—The police picked on the wrong family when they arrested Yajaira Saavedra. She and her family own La Morada restaurant, a place of antiracism and fightback for undocumented and immigrant workers. As racist cops carried out business as usual in the South Bronx, terrorizing Black and Latin workers, our class was ready to fight back.
The family called a community press conference. Progressive Labor Party particiapted and recognizes it as part of a bigger fight against capitalism and racism. “I was under the impression that I was in a sanctuary city, but more barriers are being placed by the mass policing that targets unjustly the working class like my family and local street vendors,” Natalia Mendez, the mother of the family, told the press (Civil Eats, 1/18). Clearly, sanctuary is no protection for workers.
Harassed by police
On January 11, Yajaira Saavedra, daughter of Natalia, saw the New York Police Department (NYPD) carrying out a sting operation outside of La Morada and began filming the incident. She was unaware that three plainclothes cops were inside the restaurant. One demanded that she stop recording. After revealing that he was an undercover cop, he ordered her to shut down the restaurant. When she demanded a warrant, he replied “I don’t have a warrant, but I have a badge and a gun and if you don’t do as I say, I’m going to flip the restaurant around,” flashing his gun as he spoke.
After Yajaira demanded he leave the restaurant, the officer returned with more members of their gang to arrest Yajaira. Without reading her rights to her, they threw her into a black van and brought her to the precinct. Yajaira’s sister, who was also threatened with arrest, had a panic attack and had to be treated by Emergecy Medical Technicans. Community members mobilized immediately and demanded Yajaira’s release, which occurred three hours later (Civil Eats, 1/18).
Safety in fightback
Yajaira is a holder of DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Barack Obama-era program that delays deportations of undocumented immigrants who came here as children. She could’ve been easily deported as a result of this arrest.
The Mendez-Saavedra family is known for their fightback against racism. Yajaira started an advocacy group that promoted education access for undocumented immigrants. Her brother Marco has infiltrated detention centers three times, most recently with the Dream 9, a group of undocumented fighters who left the United States and re-entered to document and expose the fascist conditions of the of U.S. immigration system during the Obama administration (The Independent, 1/12/18).
Yajaira was correct when she said, “As an undocumented immigrant, we are always on our toes when it comes to immigration raids and police raids. They both create terror.” The bosses’ mass terror campaign deports immigrants daily on charges as minor as driving without a license, possession of marijuana, shoplifting, or violating probation (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 12/21/16). Liberal reforms like DACA, which only delay deportations on the condition of being passive to the system, keep workers in limbo and in a permanent state of fear.
While workers are told again and again to shut up and not resist, we in the Progressive Labor Party say, the only possibility of security is in fighting back. To take it a step further, joining a worldwide struggle against police terror, racism, and capitalism is the only real protection workers have.
Gentrification, a war on workers
Yajaira’s arrest occurs in the wake of intensifying gentrification in the Bronx. As rents rise and new real estate pops up, long-time residents face eviction. Gentrification, enabled by racism and police terror, is sown into the fabric of capitalism—a system in which the ruling class’ profits always come before the safety and well-being of workers
Gentrification depends on increased police terror against Black and Latin working-class people. The city is building a new $68 million facility for NYPD’s 40th precinct, the current location of which is just a few blocks from La Morada (ABC News, 7/10/18). In 2013, the precinct’s Deputy Inspector was caught on tape instructing cops to specifically stop and frisk “male Blacks 14 to 21” (Daily News, 3/21/13). The police are continuing a current-day War on Drugs in the area. Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered sweeps in the neighborhood targeting homeless people and people who use drugs, a move that he called off after much public criticism (Politico, 1/13). Crackdowns do not address addiction, and instead are a cover for violence against mainly Black and Latin workers. It is significant to note that all of this is happening in a “sanctuary city” under the Democratic Party.
Liberal politicians are the main danger
Liberal politicians offer no real solution to fascist violence against immigrants, and are not on the side of the working class even though they pretend to be. At the Saavedra-Mendez family’s press conference, attended by Progressive Labor Party, workers rightly expressed suspicion of the liberal establishment, calling into question the concept of the American Dream and police accountability. “American Dream, American Promise, the only promise that America gives is that you’re gonna get whipped as a Black and brown person,” said one resident.
Just as many workers cannot be won to the blatant anti-immigrant racism of the right, neither can we be pulled into liberal attempts to redeem electoral politics through multicultural patriotism. In response to Donald Trump’s overt attacks on immigrants, liberals have supported so called “sanctuary cities” to protect immigrant workers. What good is a “sanctuary city” if residents can’t pay rent and get terrorized by police daily. Folks live in fear of being snatched and separated from their loved ones. Similarly, policies like DACA and the NYS DREAM Act offer temporary and insufficient reforms, while at the same time increase workers’ buy-in to a multicultural American Dream.
Any movement that’s under the bosses’ leadership will serve those bosses’ interests. A sanctuary movement under the liberal bosses serves the longterm needs of the U.S. ruling class.As the bosses gear up for World War III, multicultural patriotism will be used to build an army willing to fight for the U.S. empire.
The comments made at the press conference give us confidence that workers will resist these liberal narratives, and we must continue to struggle with all workers to ensure this is so.
Rather than liberal reforms, we must fight for revolutionary change. We must abolish borders and create a safer world for all of us by fighting for communism.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) controls all of New York City’s public transportation. Over a year ago it proposed a 15-month complete shutdown of the L train subway line, in order to complete much needed repairs. Just four months before the repairs were to begin, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo played the hero role and announced a new plan so as not to “inconvenience” the riding public. That’s a big lie, typical of all politicians. The transit system was built to get workers to work. The trains function for the “convenience” of the bosses not the workers.
Actually, the MTA abuses two groups of workers, the riding public and the transit workers, members of the Transit Workers Union (TWU). Both of these groups of workers should come together to fight the capitalists who see the MTA as their tool and not a service for working people. The L train shut down is a prime example that shows the transit bosses’ real purpose, to make capitalists’ profits. The initial shut down proposal would have cost businesses a lot of money so Governor Cuomo dispatched his own set of expert engineers to declare it a bad plan (NYcurbed.com, 1/3). The new plan is to shut the L line down during off peak hours, during the weekend so it doesn’t affect the bosses’ bottom line.
Moreover, Cuomo doesn’t actually care about the health risk the construction project poses to workers(NY Post, 3/11).Workers traveling to work on weekdays will likely inhale the toxic dust left off from the weekend work. But what’s a little silica dust in the name of capitalism? It’s nothing to the bosses. What about the TWU workers that work in these L trains stations? They too will face exposure to the silica dust just like the workers riding to work.
Meanwhile the TWU has not made a public outcry about these working conditions. It’s a contract year. The union tells the rank and file members that the riders are not their friends. The union makes sure the workers are divided. The capitalist-controlled media makes sure the riders hate the TWU members who ensure these riders get to work. The media makes it seem that train and bus delays are the product of lazy workers and not bad management, the same bad management that would allow the workers, both riders and service providers, to live with silica dust. And neither the media nor the politicians blame the billionaire business owners and their capitalist system.
What can be done? The same thing that always needs to be done. Workers need to fight back! This could be an epic win if the riders and transit workers fought this together. The bosses keep us divided, but if we fought together we could win. A win against silica would be great. However, how many more battles would we have to fight? Fighting for small but important battles is crucial, but the ultimate solution is a communist revolution, where the workers run everything. Only then will we work and ride in safe conditions.
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Free Ramsey Orta, working-class hero! Jail racist murderer Daniel Pantaleo
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- 20 April 2019 72 hits
STATEN ISLAND, NY, April 16— On May 13, a phony NYPD departmental “disciplinary” trial will be held for Daniel Pantaleo, the racist cop who murdered Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, using a banned chokehold. While Eric was being murdered, Ramsey Orta, a neighborhood resident, turned on his cell phone and took a video of the murder of his friend. Ramsey filmed the killing while seven other callous cops and Emergency Medical Techincians watched and did nothing as Eric said, “I can’t breathe” eleven times.
These criminals with badges have not been charged with any crimes yet, and they certainly have not been fired. Mayor Bill de Blasio allowed current and former police commissioners to permit Pantaleo to continue to working (and even make an excessive amount of overtime). The trial is phony because it only makes a recommendation to the Police Commissioner.
SiaraPB (Staten Island Against Racism and Police Brutality), formed after Eric’s murder, will demonstrate for justice for Eric Garner and demand criminal charges against Pantaleo at the NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza at 9am on Monday, May 13.
Ramsey Orta’s journey through prison system is not over
Because Ramsey Orta made sure the video was made public, workers all over the world became aware of the racist brutality of the New York Police Department. This created an international firestorm and made Ramsey a target of the police. We won’t forget that if it were not for Ramsey’s courage, we would not clearly and vividly know the truth about Eric Garner’s death. There are many other cop murders of unarmed Black and Latin people, but their details are not known because they are covered up by the police and the media—there is no video.
Yet, Ramsey was released and arrested many times after the video went public. Two of the charges led to his imprisonment and he is now serving a harsh sentence of close to four years. As an essentially political prisoner, Ramsey has been treated very badly during his time in prison: he has been transferred six times to different prisons very far from New York City, where his family and friends live;he is frequently harassed, given violations for minor infractions, and even put in solitary for very minor infractions.Siara PB and the Progressive Labor Party have organized to help people visit Ramsey. We continue to support him. He will be in prison serving until July, 2020 and will likely face police harassment when he is released.
Anti-racist struggles help build communism
One of the things we’ve learned participating in anti-racist, anti-killer cop movements in the last few years is that many, many workers and students talk about the fact that we must change the whole system, usually meaning reforming the police and judicial system. Our job as communists is to help them understand that the capitalist system needs racism to divide the working class and make more profits and that the cops and the courts are part of the state apparatus that keeps the capitalists in power. Only by destroying capitalism and by the working class taking power under a mass communist party will we be able to abolish the capitalist injustice system. Bringing workers and students to that level of understanding is our job as members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party. Join us on MAY DAY!
