PARIS, March 5 — Tens of thousands of workers demonstrated here today against the fraudulent agreement on “secure employment.” Nationwide, 200,000 joined 174 protest marches.
The loudest contingent in the Paris march comprised 250 Peugeot auto workers from nearby Aulnay, who chanted “Forbid layoffs, no factory closures!” and “We’re here today, we’ll continue tomorrow!” One worker, Mohamed, declared, “I didn’t vote for [Socialist president] François Hollande because I knew it was the same thing, the same hot air.”
“There has been no break with the previous [Sarkozy] government,” said Jean-Pierre, who marched here. At 66, having just retired, he fears retirement pensions will “not be guaranteed.”
In Lyons, Renault autoworkers waved signs reading. “Shame on the agreement!” In Toulouse, the main banner condemned “the blackguard January 11 agreement.” In Nantes, large contingents of metalworkers and workers from the Airbus factory participated.
In Le Mans, the workers chanted, “Flexibility, competitiveness, mobility, no, no, no!” In Rheims, the demonstrations halted bus and tram traffic. Over 200 Michelin rubber workers joined the protest march in Clermont-Ferrand. “Young people don’t want to see their careers made precarious,” commented one rubber worker.
In Lille, contingents from the Dunkirk ArcelorMittal steelworks, the Valenciennes Peugeot factory, the Toyota auto factory, the Conforama furniture chain stores, and the Fraisnor lasagna factory all marched.
The demonstrations were organized by three union confederations, the CGT, FO and Solidaires against government plans to adopt anti-worker laws in May. The “lesser-evil” Socialist government  sponsored talks between the unions and the bosses’ associations. On January 11, three union confederations, the CFDT, CGC, and CFTC, representing a minority of workers, signed a sellout agreement on which new laws will be based.
The main feature of the proposed law allows a company to cut wages and change working hours, supposedly for a limited two-year period, in order to “increase competitiveness” — exploitation — and allegedly avoid layoffs.
The law would also create “intermittent permanent job contracts” — allowing bosses to bind a pool of workers to a company, free to employ them as much or as little as they choose. It would also allow bosses to close a factory in one region and open a new one in another region. Workers who refuse to follow their jobs will be fired and will be ineligible for unemployment benefits.
In exchange for these give-aways, the three sellout unions supposedly won “compensatory rights” for workers. But none are in the signed agreement that was signed. All are subject to future negotiations and no one is discussing guaranteeing them legally.
The deputies belonging to the right-wing UMP party, which lost the last presidential and legislative elections, will vote for the Socialist Party’s law, although former labor minister Xavier Bertrand criticized it for “not going far enough.”
The Socialist government, says it will allow superficial changes in the future law, but none are substantial.
Neither these union leaders, elections or laws will guarantee workers a decent life, much less the full value of the products their labor creates. As long as the bosses hold state power, laws will always favor them.
Clearly, the key to obtaining real rights for workers lies in our class eliminating the bosses’ government. That can only be done by a revolutionary party leading the working class in a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and create a society run by and for workers.

Capitalism is a dictatorship of the small group of bankers, bosses and billionaires who own and control the means of production, agriculture and transportation; the state apparatus (the government, military, courts and police); the educational system and the media. Despite the pretense of democracy, the capitalist class uses this ownership and control to maintain itself in power and suppress serious challenges to its rule.
In the U.S., the 1960s anti-racist ghetto rebellions and massive anti-imperialist movement against the war in Vietnam rocked the capitalist class to its core. These uprisings forced the rulers to step up their use of their Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In cooperation with local police forces, the FBI, through its Counterintelligence (COINTEL) program, planned or fomented physical and psychological attacks on leading communist and militant anti-racist political forces like PLP, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party.
CHALLENGE (1/16/13) quoted from attorney Brian Glick’s book War at Home. The FBI’s COINTEL tactics included : “[i]nfiltration: … [to] not merely spy on political activists … [but] to discredit and disrupt their activities; [l]egal harassment: … [a]buse the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals … [using] perjured testimony; and
[i]llegal force: … [c]onspire with local police departments … to … commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations …”
These attacks did not stop with the 1976 liberal Church Committee congressional hearings and report which partially exposed COINTEL. The following describes a police attack on PLP in Los Angeles (from a 1982 PLP pamphlet):
    On June 18, 1977, PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR)    held a mass anti-racist demonstration in the Los Angeles garment center. The demonstration was organized to combat the sweatshop and slave labor conditions faced by L.A. garment workers, most of whom are immigrants. The demonstration was called in connection with InCAR’s campaign to organize a new anti-racist garment workers union, which had been gaining a mass base of support.
Cops Attack, PLP Resist
Acting on behalf of the garment bosses, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attempted to break up the demonstration. The cops attacked. Naturally, the demonstrators resisted. A sharp clash resulted. Many demonstrators and cops were injured. Indeed, the cops took a real beating. Subsequently, two dozen members and friends of PLP and InCAR were arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting officers …
PLP members faced serious jail time as a result of these false charges. However, before the trial, PLP exposed the fact that two undercover police spies for the LAPD, Connie Milazzo and John Dial, had infiltrated PLP meetings, including the meetings of the Legal Defense Committee set up in the wake of the police attack. The criminal charges then had to be thrown out because of the “misconduct” of the bosses’ agents in the police department and the prosecutor’s office.
But the conspiracy to get PLP continued: “The fact that the case was thrown out of court because of the exposure of their own criminal behavior infuriated the LAPD. They decided to get PLP and InCAR by instituting a new and unprecedented legal tactic.” A civil suit was filed by ten cops against PLP and 20 individual members for $2 million in damages, stating there was a “conspiracy to injure L.A. cops” (PLP pamphlet).
The cops got plenty of help from the judge who barred PLP’s lawyers from introducing any evidence showing an LAPD conspiracy to attack PLP. “While police attorneys were allowed to ask questions about PLP’s membership, policies and structure,…defense attorneys … were prohibited from asking questions about…the LAPD’s vicious record of racist attacks on demonstrators…” (PLP pamphlet).
The judge also allowed the cops’ attorneys to use the trial to subpoena and question PLP leaders about the names of Party members and of our inner workings. When Party leaders refused to name names, the fascist judge ordered them jailed. To their great credit, these leaders did not follow the bosses’ rules, and refused to expose their comrades and the organization to harm.
With this judge’s assistance, and the bosses’ agents’ predictable use of anti-communism in the trial, they eventually got a verdict of $334,000 in their favor. The cops’ attorneys then began a long campaign of harassing individual Party members to try and collect on their judgment. Nevertheless, they were unable to break the political will of the Los Angeles PLP.
A key lesson of this police assault on PLP is that members and friends must be ever vigilant in the face of attempts by the rulers’ spies and armed thugs to undermine our unity and organization. Even in a period of less class struggle, the capitalists are still haunted by the specter of communism, which would mean their loss of the trillions in surplus value (profits) they’ve stolen from the working class. As Mao said, to be attacked is a good thing. If we turn the assault around on the class enemy by building PLP, it will bring workers’ revolution one step closer.

This July marks the 150th anniversary of the infamous NYC draft riots, one of the largest urban insurrection in U.S. history. Tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers, many of them Irish, burned down the city’s draft office and armory, and set fire to police stations and the homes of wealthy Republicans over the course of four days. Union troops had to be diverted from fighting the Confederate Army to suppress the riot.
Normally communists welcome working-class rebellion. Not this time. The main aspect of the NYC draft riots was the ghastly and brutal attacks on black men, women and children, one hundred of whom were murdered in less than a week. Black men were captured, beaten, tortured, strung from lamp posts and set on fire. Black women were stripped naked and beaten. An orphanage for black children was burned to the ground, with the occupants making a daring escape, which is captured in the historical novel Paradise Alley.
It brilliantly brings three days of the draft riots to life. It follows the paths of seven people over the course of those days: Billy Dove, an ex-slave who works at the orphanage; Ruth Dove, his Irish wife and mother of Billy’s children; Johnny Dolan, the sadistic killer who thinks that Ruth belongs to him and has vowed to kill her and Billy; Deirdre O’Kane, who lives next door to Ruth and Billy and must decide whether or not to help them and risk her own life; Tom O’Kane, who’s away fighting in the Union Army; Maddy Boyle, a prostitute living on the same block; and Herbert Willis Robinson, Maddy’s lover and writer for the New York Tribune.
The reader comes to know each character intimately, as the racist and sexist violence brings them together and threatens their lives. We also get a strong feel for what it was like to live in lower Manhattan during that period: the housing, the food, the taverns, the smells in the air, and the awful racism of the day. Even though blacks were nominally “free” in the North, the character of Billy demonstrates the limits of this freedom. Billy had been a master shipbuilder in the South, working for his owner. He escapes slavery and comes to NYC, where he hopes to continue in the trade that he loves. Instead, he finds that only whites can work on the docks, and any attempt to break the racial barrier is met with extreme violence.
Kevin Baker, the author, is honest about the brutal racism of NYC in the 1860s. The Democratic politicians who ran its politics were in alliance with the plantation owners who controlled the Democratic Party in the South. They opposed the efforts of Lincoln and the Republicans to suppress the Confederacy and told white workers that if the South was defeated, the freed slaves would destroy “white civilization.” They instilled fear in Irish workers that ex-slaves would come north and take their jobs. The demagogues were able to persuade the majority of the Irish — who were despised for their Catholicism and exploited for low wages by the elites — to keep their boots on the necks of blacks, an even more despised and exploited group of workers.
Yet three of the seven main characters in “Paradise Alley” — all Irish — reject anti-black racism, not just in words but also in deeds. Ruth loves and marries Billy and bears their children, despite the disapproval of many of her white neighbors. Deirdre takes in Ruth and her children at the height of danger, while her husband Tom — a friend of Billy’s — is on the front lines at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, two of the biggest battles of the Civil War.
While Baker makes it clear that the main aspect of the draft riots was racism, there was also justified resentment towards the wealthy businessmen who could pay $300 to buy their way out of the draft. Many of these same businessmen were making a fortune by selling goods to the Union Army, while the poor died or lost limbs in a war that took the lives of 700,000 soldiers.
While the Civil War was at heart a struggle between northern industrial capital and southern plantation-based capital, there was an important anti-racist aspect to the conflict. In order to curb the power of the southern aristocracy and their political machine, the northern capitalists, through the Lincoln White House, had to abolish slavery.  The emancipation of four million slaves was the welcome culmination of generations of struggle — slave rebellions, the Underground Railroad and the work of fighters like Harriet Tubman, decades of abolitionist activism, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and the 200,000 black soldiers who fought to crush the slave regime.
Frederick Douglass sent two of his sons into the Union Army, and William Lloyd Garrison, although a pacifist, sent one of his sons to fight. Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the Civil War and strongly supported a northern victory. In contrast, the draft riots were inspired by, and benefitted, the racist Confederacy.
“Paradise Alley” builds to an exciting and emotional finale, and this reviewer couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

The sharpening rivalry between U.S. imperialism and China threatens armed conflict across the globe. From Iraq to Africa, as profit-seeking bosses go to war over oil, gas, uranium and other natural resources, more masses of workers worldwide will be killed. Millions of others will be driven deeper into poverty by the bosses’ super-exploitation in extracting these resources. For the international working class, the only answer to these horrors is a communist revolution to destroy their source — capitalism.
Late last month, Barack Obama sent 100 U.S. troops to Niger in Western Africa to establish a drone base. Aimed allegedly at al Qaeda, the unmanned assassination tools will menace China’s growing uranium operations there. (Niger is the world’s fourth largest uranium producer.) Meanwhile, Iraqi rulers are pressuring Exxon Mobil to sell its stake in a vast oil field to a Chinese firm. Exxon has countered with deals with the Kurds in northern Iraq, a move that could unleash a civil war.
U.S. Air Force personnel in Niger belong to the Pentagon’s Africa Command. Created in 2007, AFRICOM’s main mission is to combat the Islamic terrorists who pose a real problem for U.S. and allied rulers, as shown by a February attack on a British Petroleum gas plant in Algeria. According to J. Peter Pham, a lecturer at the U.S. Army War College, AFRICOM’s second mission is “protecting access to...strategic resources which Africa has in abundance” and “ensuring that no other interested third parties, including China, India, Japan, and Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential treatment” (World Defense Review, 10/2/08).
While Obama’s Niger move helps France’s efforts to stave off al Qaeda and recolonize neighboring Mali (see box), it also serves the U.S. strategy to dominate China’s energy sources. As the Washington Post noted, “The drones will be based at first in the capital, Niamey. But military officials eventually want to move them north to the city of Agadez” (2/22/13). It’s no coincidence that the Sonima uranium mine, where China is the biggest shareholder, lies in the Agadez region.
Exxon Confronts Iraq’s Premier over Oil
An even hotter U.S.-China confrontation is brewing in Iraq. For two years, Exxon Mobil has battled Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki — who is pro-China and a favorite of Iran — over oil profits. Out of the U.S.-led slaughter of more than a million Iraqis, Exxon won the right to exploit the West Qurna-1 oilfield, Iraq’s biggest. But because U.S. rulers are divided and strapped for cash, they were unable to impose control with an effective military occupation.
Seizing on U.S. rulers’ weaknesses, Maliki put the screws on Exxon, which now gets less than two dollars per barrel as a service fee. The Iraqi bosses, the legal owners of the crude, then sell the oil for forty times Exxon’s fee.
Exxon’s temporary possession of the oil, and its ability to dictate West Qurna-1’s pumping rate, played to the advantage of U.S. capitalism. But Exxon requires profits as well as access. It wanted the same deal with Maliki that it made with the Kurds. In 2011, the U.S. empire struck back.
Exxon began cutting a more lucrative oil-drilling deal with Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government. Maliki went ballistic, demanding that Exxon sell its West Qurna stake and signaling that he would “favor bids by China National Petroleum Company and [Russian] Lukoil” (Reuters, 12/20/12).
Condoleezza Rice Threatens Maliki with Saddam’s Fate
To warn Maliki that he could end up like Saddam Hussein, Exxon hired three of the bloodiest mass murderers from the second Iraq war as advisors. They are ex-Secretary of State (and Chevron director) Condoleezza Rice, ex-national security advisor Stephen Hadley, and James Jeffrey, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq (National Journal, 2/15/13). All hail from the George H.W. Bush regime, further proof that the first Gulf War was also waged for oil. They are acting without reproach from either Obama or the liberal media, a clear sign of approval from the dominant finance capital wing of U.S. capitalists that controls Exxon.
To make the message even clearer, Exxon-allied bosses formed the United States-Kurdistan Business Council. In 2012, the group made ex-Marine commandant and Obama advisor General James Jones its CEO. Jones told the Iraq Oil Report, “It’s not a good sign for the global community when companies like Exxon and Chevron both kind of say, ‘It’s easier to do business in Kurdistan than it is with Baghdad.’ That has a chilling effect, you know, globally. And I think Baghdad’s gonna have to learn from that” (12/26/12).
The harsh lesson Jones and his Exxon handlers want to teach Maliki would amount to a fourth round of genocide against Iraqi workers. First came George H.W. Bush’s massive 1991 invasion to retake Kuwaiti oil, protect U.S. access to Saudi resources and put both Iraq and Iran on notice. Next came Clinton’s no-fly operation over Iraq’s skies, which enforced sanctions on food and medicine and wiped out at least a million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. In 2003, George W. Bush unleashed his “shock and awe” fiasco, which used a limited number of troops to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. But none of these imperialist assaults permanently subjugated Iraq, an essential goal for U.S. rulers. The solution? U.S. bosses now envision an Iraqi civil war to confront China by local proxy:
If Exxon Mobil starts drilling operations [in Kurdistan], Baghdad will have no option but to try and stop them,” the Middle East Economic Digest quoted a source in [Kurd capital] Erbil as saying. “But they’ll have the KRG [Kurdish Regional Government] and the Peshmerga behind them.”  The Peshmerga, which means “those who face death,” are the Kurds’ battle-seasoned fighters who for decades fought a separatist war against Baghdad until Saddam Hussein was toppled.... Both sides have heavily armed forces confronting each other along Kurdistan’s southern border. Oil could well be the spark to ignite a war. (UPI, 2/15/13)
The Final Conflict: International Working Class vs. World’s Imperialists
The international working class has no stake in any of these ruling-class rivalries. The bosses use workers from northern Africa, Iraq and the U.S., as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, as cannon fodder in their battle over energy resources. Masses of workers need to understand that capitalism is the source of their misery — and that it must be and can be destroyed. That is the goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. We fight for the overthrow of the profit system, the cause of mass unemployment, racism, sexism, poverty and imperialist wars. We need a mass party to get there. We need you to join us and help lead this revolution for a society run by our class, for our class interests.