Port-au-Prince, December 28 — The call to students and militants came over our emails very early Wednesday morning, December 11:
Get cracking! This morning at 7 am, the workers are hitting the streets to demand a minimum wage of 500 gourdes [$11.30 per day]. Every student activist is expected outside the industrial park. We did it in 2009 [last big national struggle for the minimum wage], we can do it in 2013. Pass on the message!
It was the second day of workers’ demonstrations in Port-au-Prince for a minimum day’s wage of 500 gourdes ($11.30), a third of what a family of three needs for a subsistence living. The High Commission for Wages (CSS) had just set it at 225 gourdes ($5), an increase of 25 gourds, which is effectively wiped out by the current 10 percent inflation rate. Hundreds of demonstrators, mainly young women, assembled in front of the National Society of Industrial Parks (SONAPI) — the capital city’s industrial zone — to march to the Hotel Royal Oasis in Pétionville. In that luxury hotel in a rich area, some big shots and members of CSS were conducting a meeting (Alterpresse, 12/11/2013). “500 gourdes! You guys don’t want it; but we want it, we want it!” they chanted outside the hotel. This wage would, according to the marchers, “allow us to deal better with the rising cost of living.”
A speaker condemned the fact that “the bosses have refused to raise wages while increasing the work-rate and working hours in the factories.” The workers, women and men, denounced both their work-day of more than 10 hours and their so-called representatives on the CSS who had failed to defend them. They sought the support of Parliament in their struggle against the betrayal of the CSS, which is on the bosses’ side. They demanded a wage more adequate to their needs. They showed real unity in the struggle. The marchers were prevented from demonstrating in front of the president’s private residence by the U.S.-trained police.
The struggle for wages under capitalism is a struggle to survive. Are workers here surviving under capitalism? Each day they face worsening problems: while the cost of living rises, they only earn a pittance. They lack access to food, health care, housing, education — everything! Two hundred twenty five gourdes a day is less than half the price of a main dish in a restaurant. How can workers send their children to school when their day’s wage cannot feed even a single person? Most workers in Haiti live in horrible areas with no electricity, no security. In fact, according to the NY Times (1/12/14), over 170,000 people are still living in tents four years after a devastating earthquake. Every day they travel miles on foot to get to the hell that is their workplace. They have no right to any form of welfare assistance.
Meanwhile, the bosses grow fat on their labor: the worldwide apparel and textile industry had 2011 revenues around $3 trillion (reportlinker.com), so you can imagine the profits from wages as low as these in Haiti or those in Bangladesh. It may be a “mature” industry where the profit rate is declining, but the misery of SONAPI workers still creates enormous profits for imperialist firms like GAP (2012 revenues of $15.7 billion). The average monthly spending on clothes by residents in glittering Manhattan is $362 (treehugger.com), three times the wage for making clothes in dusty Port-au-Prince.
This spontaneous struggle by garment workers shows the necessity of workers’ unity and organization, even as it also reveals the limit of forms of worker organization where the leaders are sometimes more on the bosses’ side rather than workers’. It raises several worrying questions.
Politicians, especially certain parliamentary deputies, benefit from and want to continue profiting from these mass mobilizations. In 2009, the fight for the minimum wage made one deputy, Steven Benôit, so popular it pushed him into a Senate seat and might even have carried him into the Presidency. And yet the workers and their supporters who were the main participants in the movement gained nothing from it. Such struggles without a communist party to give them direction are at the mercy of opportunists. They benefit bourgeois politicians looking for political and economic power.
The working class, in Haiti, Bangladesh, or Cambodia, becomes a force to be reckoned with when it gains communist political consciousness. The workers of Haiti — of the whole world — must unite under the leadership of the communist PLP to finish with the dictatorship of the bosses in all the stinking garment sweatshops of the tropical South and around the world.
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Masses of Black Migrants Denounce Israel’s Neo-Nazi Dictatorship
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- 16 January 2014 71 hits
Tel Aviv, January 15— Over 30,000 black migrants have been on strike for over a week against Israel’s racist Anti-Infiltration Law and fascist living conditions, bringing businesses to a halt. They chanted “we need asylum” and “Yes to freedom, no to prison!”
More than 60,000 undocumented migrants, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, are the superexploited workers of Israel. One man from Darfur said, “All of us are fleeing genocide, fleeing dictatorship regimes. Looking for protection.” What they get is social murder: “open facilities” in which they are separated from families, required to answer roll call three times a day, prevented from seeking work, on lockdown at night, and surrounded by a fence of razor wire; detention centers in the Negev desert; imprisonment; racist living conditions; mass deportations; disregard of asylum applications.
The Zionist state, and any state for that matter, are racist apparatus installed by rulers to divide and control labor based on an artificial concept of borders. This foments discrimination based on documentation, or the lack thereof. Undocumented workers — be it in England, United States, China, or Russia — must unite with documented workers, in this particular case, Jewish and Palestinian workers, to smash the bosses’ dictatorship. The strikers in Israel serve as an inspiration for workers everywhere, for they provide a glimpse of the potential of workers’ power.
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Haiti, Dominican Republic: Fight Apartheid Law Aiming to Divide Working Class
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- 16 January 2014 59 hits
On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Republic Supreme Court issued a ruling that strips citizenship from over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian ancestry. It applies retroactively to anyone born after 1929 who does not have at least one parent of “Dominican blood.” Those affected can no longer get birth certificates, attend school or college, marry, travel, or obtain jobs legally.
This act has galvanized the anger of Dominican and Haitian immigrant groups around the U.S., in Haiti, and in the D.R. itself. Far from dividing them, many are standing together to protest this ruling. In the U.S., they see how similar racist, anti-immigrant laws have affected all of them. Many protesters blame Dominican political and judicial leaders for creating the climate that paved the way for this ruling. We in the Progressive Labor Party believe that all borders need to be smashed so that all workers around the world can unite as one class.
This type of institutional racism is not new to the Dominican ruling class. In 1912, the government passed laws restricting the number of black-skinned immigrants, but the bosses in the sugar industry completely ignored that restriction to maximize profits by using Haitians as cheap labor. The majority of these workers were brought in by the sugar mill bosses, and forced to live and work in sub-human conditions in the notorious “bateyes” around sugar cane plantations. The descendants of these workers are the direct targets of this most recent racist act.
In 1937, U.S. Marine-trained Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, then the bloody dictator of the D.R., ordered all Haitians along the border to be tracked down and executed. Many reasons have been given for the killings, the most convincing of which is that Haitian workers were organizing into trade unions alongside Dominicans. Tens of thousands were murdered and their bodies thrown into the Massacre River along the border.
Another U.S. puppet in D.R., Joaquin Balaguer (Trujillo’s right-hand man and the political brain behind him), published a book in 1983 titled “La Isla al Reves (The Island in Reverse)” in which he expressed deeply racist ideas about Haitians. Then, when Francisco Pena Gomez, leader of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) who was black, ran for president in 1996, Balaguer openly promoted the idea that Pena Gomez was an undercover Haitian spy who, once in power, had planned to turn D.R. over to Haiti.
Balaguer was rekindling past enmities against Haitians. In 1822, the Haitian army — which had already defeated and driven out its French slave-masters on the western part of Hispaniola — invaded the D.R., which was called Spanish Haiti at the time. Although the subsequent 22-year Haitian occupation succeeded in ending slavery in the D.R., it also led to much hardship and animosity among Dominicans. The bosses were able to exploit those conditions into long-lasting anti-Haitian racism and Dominican nationalism.
So, why does the Dominican ruling class want this law now?
Because workers from Haiti make up more than 80% of the workforce in agriculture, especially on sugar plantations. There are also high concentrations in construction, tourism, and domestic services. They earn starvation wages and their collective labor has been a big factor in the overall economic upswing D.R. has enjoyed in recent years. But, following in the footsteps of their slave-master predecessors, the Dominican bosses are not satisfied with their racist profits. They insist on pushing for this law that will not only strip Dominicans of Haitian descent of their rights, but also deprive them and their families of vital social, health and educational services needed for their well-being and survival, and making their labor even cheaper.
Another reason that pushes the Dominican government to intensify a racist crisis is to help create a smokescreen for its attacks on the entire working class there. The Dominican Republic has some of the highest income disparity and unemployment rates in Latin America: Unemployment is officially at 14.4%, and the wealthiest 10% control 40% of the economy while the poorest half controls less than 20%.
Although the economy survived the 2010-12 global recession, and is one of the fastest growing economies in the region, it also has growing deficits. As a result, the International Monetary Fund has demanded more revenues, leading the government to pass a new tax law in 2012. As it always happens, the working class has to pay the bulk of the new taxes. However, workers and students throughout the country have been fighting back against the policy. On several occasions these actions have resulted in several deaths and injuries in confrontation with police.
The new law is so blatantly racist that many of those who have historically harmed Haiti are compelled to speak out. This includes the UN’s own Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. This is the same UN that is responsible for bringing the deadly cholera epidemic to Haiti, killing over 8,500 and sickening over 700,000.
The working class in the Dominican Republic and the rest of us across the globe must send a clear message to these governments. We must not tolerate the racist treatment of our sisters and brothers in Hispaniola. The border that divides the island of Hispaniola was made by the colonialists and their imperialist successors who continue to exploit all of us. We must reject the nationalism and racism that is being pushed to divide us — we must unite as one class, one fist. With communist revolution we can rid ourselves of this vicious profit system. Only then can we construct a healthy world and a safe future for all our children.
BROOKLYN, NY— In the past few months CHALLENGE has been covering the racist murder of Kyam Livingston, a 37-year-old worker and mother who died in a cell in Brooklyn Central Booking on July 21, 2013. She was ill and crying out in pain for over seven hours while her pleas, and the pleas for help from people in the cell with her, were ignored.
Her family is demanding answers: the surveillance tapes of the cell, the names of the jailers who callously allowed her to die, the prosecution of those jailers, and a real and thorough investigation of conditions in Central Booking to change the culture of cruelty and indifference to the working class.
The next event in this campaign for justice will be a Community Speakout to air other stories of racist treatment and dehumanization under the “justice” system of U.S. capitalism. All are invited to attend and add to the event.
Community Speakout on Tuesday, January 21 from 6:00-9:00 PM
Flatbush Dutch Reform Church
890 Flatbush Avenue (at Church Avenue)
“We all hustle to survive.” That’s not just the reality of the millions of unemployed discarded by capitalism, it also the tagline for the new Golden Globe winner film American Hustle. It is the latest in a series of David O. Russell films about survival and self-reinvention — cornerstones of capitalism’s big “American Dream” lie. These themes speak to millions in the working class who struggle to survive and who hold on to the hope that one day they will be able to reinvent their lives to escape the daily grind of capitalism.
However, in this current period of economic crisis and imperialist competition, U.S. capitalism appears unable to offer the working class anything other than continued misery. Conditions for the working class are becoming visibly worse: mass deportations, mass unemployment, slashing of food stamps and unemployment benefits, prolonged war in the Middle East, and a growing National Security Agency (NSA) security state.
It is the job of capitalism’s Hollywood propaganda machine to keep the American Dream myth alive, by repackaging it as something that is obtainable even in a period of crisis. And American Hustle does just that.
The film, a comedy-crime drama set in the late 1970s, begins with the words: “Some of this actually happened.” It is a fictional account loosely based on a real FBI sting operation, “Abscam” (Arab Scam). In that operation, the FBI set up a fake Middle Eastern investment company and hired a con man to lure in white-collar criminals. The scam eventually attracted high-ranking politicians, including a U.S. Senator and several members of the House, who were convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for political services.
In the film’s interpretation of “Abscam,” con man Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), his mistress/accomplice Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) balance an odd love triangle with a half-baked scheme to bring down a few white-collar criminals.
Throughout the film everyone is hustling to get their piece of the pie. Rosenfeld and Prosser attempt to live the American Dream by selling forged paintings and fake loans. The FBI catches them. They eventually cut a deal, offering to help bring down a few criminals in exchange for their freedom. DiMaso’s dream to move up in the FBI and have people work for him pushes him to go after bigger fish, including Congress and the mob. In the end, the politicians go to jail and Rosenfeld and Prosser, after conning the FBI, live happily ever after. They put their hustling days behind them in order to run their own legitimate art business. The takeaway message: the American Dream is possible, even in the midst of crisis, you just have to hustle your way to the top.
The reviews in the mainstream press praise the acting but have little to say about the politics raised in the film. To its credit, the film calls attention to an episode of political corruption in U.S. history few know anything about. But while the director has stated that he is more interested in telling a story about his characters than he is about telling history, his account of the 1970s (and what he leaves out) must be taken seriously.
The capitalist crisis of today had its origins in the crises of the1970s caused by the rise of U.S. imperialist rivals in Japan and Germany, stagflation (a condition of slow economic growth, high unemployment, and rise in prices), and the failure of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam. The Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation and the subsequent exposés by Sen. Church’s Senate committee revealing illegal activities of the FBI, CIA and NSA were part of the bosses’ attempts to blame the crises of that period on individuals rather than on capitalism itself.
“Abscam” occurred in the wake of these crises, at a time when public confidence in capitalism and the U.S. government was at an all-time low. At the same time, however, the international communist movement and the militant labor and civil rights struggles it had inspired were also collapsing because of their reliance on liberal reforms and bourgeois elections. The possibility of revolution was being abandoned and a new era of cynicism and individualism began to set in.
The “Abscam” operation was an attempt by the FBI to restore public confidence in both the FBI and in the larger U.S. political system. By focusing on “bad-apple” politicians, the FBI hoped to repair the damage to its image caused by the Church committee hearings and to show that the political system was ultimately sound. And while the bosses have been successful in winning many in the working class to once again believe in capitalist “democracy” and the American Dream, the ongoing crisis of capitalism has again shaken the faith of many workers.
The film uses the “Abscam” story of the past to teach us how to view the present. In the same way the FBI attempted to restore faith in the U.S. political system by exposing some of its problems, American Hustle attempts to rebuild faith in the American Dream by revealing its flaws. The film taps into the ideology of cynicism that has been brewing since the 1970s and seems to proclaim, “Yeah, the American Dream is a bunch of bullshit. It’s one big hustle. It’s a corrupt game of survival of the fittest. So what — maybe you can survive, too.”
Lacking any visible alternative to capitalism, workers are invited to “hustle” in pursuit of this new American Dream — to do whatever it takes to get theirs. Today the old American Dream’s myth that hard work brings success is joined with a hustle mentality sold to a generation of youth through rap. The bosses promote drug dealers turned rappers like Jay-Z who hustled to survive the ghetto but climbed his way to being a billionaire boss.
The message to our youth: Under capitalism, everyone hustles and only the strong survive. Working class youth are taught to accept that capitalism is a game of survival of the fittest, and that those on the bottom are either weak or lazy. This hustle mentality erases working-class consciousness and teaches workers to strive to be a boss. It hides the fact that the working class, united and armed with communist ideas, is the only class that has the power to end the misery of capitalism.
Only communist ideas that promote collectivity over individualism and faith in the working class over cynicism can combat the death spiral of capitalist ideas. We must redouble our efforts in this period to combat the bosses’ lies and hold up the torch of communism under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party to fight for a world where workers don’t have to hustle to survive, and where the American nightmare of capitalism becomes a story of the past.
