Landless farmers are facing horrible exploitation in Pakistan. They are absolutely dependent upon the rule of big landowners, even in their private life. They’re constantly abused, physically, verbally and sexually, and may be kept imprisoned while they have no work.

When laboring in the fields, they are treated as slaves. From dusk to dawn, they either endure the scorching heat or shiver in the cold. Their legs are chained, and are even denied access to food. These parasitic bosses are becoming richer and richer off the blood of the poor workers and are gaining increasing control of the state.

A comrade addressed the 65th anniversary of the death in Sindh province of Mai Bukhtawar, a poor farmer woman who worked in the fields. She had no formal education, but she had great class consciousness. She refused to accept the so-called laws formulated by feudal lords (landowners descendent from aristrocracy) to control the working class. A brave worker, she stood firmly against new methods of exploitation and subsequently was assassinated by these powerful bosses.

The comrade noted that her death fueled anger among the peasants against feudal lords, inspiring them to resist and revolt against oppression and exploitation. 

Reform No Substitute for Revolution

He made his point loud and clear that without an international communist revolution we cannot eliminate these miseries. He explained that the struggle against landlords is deep-rooted in Pakistan. Many poor peasants have sacrificed their lives in the fight against exploitation but the situation hasn’t changed. History proves that reform struggle cannot be a substitute for revolution.

The peasants twice forced the rulers to announce land reforms, in 1959 and 1972, but the bosses used these reforms to cheat us. They did this by putting a cap on the amount of land an individual can own but not on the amount a family can acquire. Through many provisions and loopholes, the landlords were allowed to transfer land beyond the cap to their children and relatives. Exemptions were granted for orchards, livestock farms and huge hunting areas.

Ironically, many high government officials used these reforms to acquire land in Sindh and Punjab provinces at exceptionally low prices, using their officialdom to increase their wealth. Thus a new class of landlords emerged to intensify the exploitation of the working class. 

Now 18 million farm workers, about 70 percent of the entire work-force, have no right to unionize nor organize sit-ins or strikes. Most are treated as slaves, receiving only cheap food for their hard labor. The comrade emphasized that to eradicate this exploitation we must build an international communist movement, led by PLP, and establish workers’ power.

AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 27 — Hundreds of workers, both Bedouin-Arabs and Jews, marched against the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) attempt to evict the Bedouin village of al-Arakib from its ancestral lands. In the last two years, this village has been demolished no less than 40 times. Yet the villagers, impoverished workers and peasants, still cling to their land and rebuild again and again, bravely defying the will of the racist Israeli regime.

Workers from all parts of Israel-Palestine stand in solidarity with this struggle, encouraging the villagers of al-Arakib in their fight for a piece of land to call their home. But what is this struggle really about? For this, we must look at the history of the Bedouins in Palestine.

Before the 1948 war, 90,000 Bedouins lived in the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine), mostly settling down as pastoral peasants in the early 20th century. When the Zionist movement took power and established the State of Israel, 59,000 of them were deported, mostly to the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The rest were kept under martial law in the “Siag” region, essentially a tiny native reservation (or ghetto) until 1966. Then they were allowed more freedom, but were still confined to a small part of the land. Currently, the Bedouins, some of whom were living in the Negev for centuries if not millennia, make up only 25% of the Negev’s population; the remaining 75% are Jews brought by the Israeli government after 1948.

How Israeli Rulers Cheat Bedoiuns 

The Israeli government claims almost all of the Negev as its own state land. Bedouins who live on state land — even if it was their family’s ancestral land for centuries — are considered to be “squatters.” Since the 1970’s, the Israeli government “generously” allowed the Bedouins to “sell” parts of their claimed lands to the state for ridiculously low prices, usually around 25-30% of the land’s market value.

Understandably, most Bedouin workers and peasants were very reluctant to give up their lands, especially for such an unfair price. So most remaining Bedouin settlements are technically illegal — that is, the government and the Zionist JNF can demolish their homes and evict them legally. These “unrecognized” villages, such as al-Arakib, are not allowed to receive electricity or running water from the state infrastructure, and have to improvise amenities. Sometimes their children have to walk for many kilometers to get to school.

Since the late 1960’s, Israel has built “planned” settlement towns,  essentially ghettos, for the Bedouins. In these towns, the largest of which is Rahat (population 50,000), there are almost no jobs, and the residents have to make do with minimal infrastructure and under-funded health and education services. Unemployment in Rahat, for example, is upwards of 50% for men and 85% for women with 60% of households below the poverty line. This poverty breeds crime and drug use.

This is the main reason why half the Bedouin population chooses to stay in “unrecognized” villages with no modern amenities and engage in subsistence farming (usually herding sheep) rather than move to the poverty-stricken “planned” towns where no jobs can be found.

Real Estate Bosses Profit from Racism

The policy of the Zionist movement (and its creation, the State of Israel) places more Jews on more land and less Arabs on less land.

This racist policy is heaven for real-estate capitalists all over the Western world, particularly the U.S. It is hell for the Arab working class, as well as the Jewish working class which was settled in underfunded “development towns” providing cheap labor for local capitalist factories heavily subsidized by the government from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, most of these factories were shut down or moved to the Far East, leaving the entire towns stricken with mass unemployment.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government and the JNF keep planning and building gated communities for wealthy Jews in the Negev, all while claiming that the Bedouins — who were already there long before the state was founded — are “stealing land” from the state.

Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin village near Rahat and Beersheba, is home to several working-class families. In the past, they engaged in subsistence agriculture to supplement their meager income. In the summer of 2010, however, their village was demolished. The government uprooted their olive trees and destroyed their homes. Since then, the regime has demolished this village 40 times. The locals still fight back, with the help of working-class activists. This struggle is not only for the village of al-Arakib, but for the fate of 100,000 Bedouin workers and peasants who live in “unrecognized” villages. If al-Arakib falls, the racist Israeli regime will move on to demolish many more villages to make room for real-estate development for the profits of U.S. and Israeli bosses.

The only answer to this racist attack on workers and peasants is to fight back, and the villagers at al-Arakib are fighting courageously. However, the only way to ensure a better life for all parts of the working class is to get rid of the root of all evil — capitalism and its creation, nationalism — and replace them by a multi-ethnic communist world ruled by the working class as a whole. Such a communist society will provide real infrastructure and livelihood to all workers. The Progressive Labor Party fights for a communist Israel-Palestine and a borderless communist world. Join us!

Red Bread, by Maurice Hindus, was written in 1931 about the collectivization of the farms in the Soviet Union (USSR). Hindus was a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in a small village in the USSR and was visiting his home and writing about the people there.

In one chapter, a “New Girl,” Vera was introduced to Hindus by her superior on the collective farm (kolhoz) as a real daughter of the revolution. Her formal job title was as a milk maid — charged with milking eight cows, three times a day. 

Her real job started after her milking duties were finished. She was only 18 years old but her station and responsibilities made her appear more mature and a bit older. She was also the secretary of the kolhoz.  She was a talented organizer and passionate orator who gave lectures on the benefits of the kolhoz and also on the latest farming techniques. 

According to Hindus, the Russian peasantry at this time were living in unimaginable poverty and squalor. Moving to the kolhoz was a big improvement. Yet some resisted. The kolhoz  grew from 10 Jewish families a few years before to an international kolhoz,  with Poles, Letts, Lithuanians and Russians. One of Vera’s responsibilities was to settle disputes and promote collectivity among the workers from various backgrounds. 

Vera’s many duties and chores kept her very busy. Still she was a vibrant and inquisitive young woman. She wanted to know many things about the U.S. and especially about U.S. girls. She wanted to know their interests, what what they wore, what books they liked to read, if they have talking motion pictures. Hindus tried to answer all her questions which usually only led to a barrage of more questions.

Vera was very impressed with U.S. technology and advancements in manufacturing and agriculture. But she felt they were grossly underdeveloped in culture. The manufacturing was advanced in that it could furnish the workers with more than one pair of shoes. Yet U.S. workers were lagging behind the Soviets because capitalist exploitation destroyed their lives. 

Vera was a dedicated communist who was convinced that workers would soon overthrow the capitalist system in the U.S. Mainly she thought that capitalism had outlived its usefulness.

Hindus told Vera that the middle class in the U.S. would thwart any attempts at revolution, but Hindus failed to tell Vera that in the 1930s workers and the Communist Party in the U.S were organizing and fighting against capitalist oppression in basic industries, such as textiles, steel, mining and auto.

Even though the manufacturers were producing plenty of clothes and shoes, many workers were not paid enough to buy back what they produced; the same dilemma workers face today worldwide.

Overall Red Bread takes a positive look at the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union. And the chapter on the New Girl takes a good look at the new international woman.

Three thousand police march like Nazi storm troopers through a downtown metropolis to do battle with hundreds of rebels on the steps of city hall. Sounds like NYPD’s response to the Occupy Wall Street protests or the response of the Anaheim police to the anger at their latest racist killings? Try the latest movie in the Batman trilogy, Dark Knight Rises. In this film, the Dark Knight (Batman) must “rise” to the challenge of greater threats to the capitalist system as he leads thousands of Gotham police to fight armed rebels who have occupied the city. 

While previous villains like the Joker wanted to watch the world burn for fun, Batman’s newest foe, Bane, is committed to destroying Gotham because of a strict political ideology. For Bane, the decadent rich, corrupt kkkops and politicians have ruined the city and the only thing left to do is to blow it all up and start over.

In fact, Dark Knight Rises does not hide from the fact that a society ruled by the wealthy is unpleasant, full of poverty and crime and the petty rivalries of modern aristocrats jockeying for position. As Bruce Wayne dances at a high society ball with Catwoman, a thief from Old Town, she threatens him, stating that “a storm is coming” and asking how the wealthy ever “thought they could live so large leaving so little for the rest of us.” 

Perverting Revolution

As director Christopher Nolan soon makes clear, this situation, where the rich take everything and leave nothing for workers, is preferable to the prospect of workers taking over.  Instead of portraying him as a potential revolutionary hero, a leader of a party committed to organizing the workers of Gotham, Nolan’s Bane combines Al Qaeda-style terrorism with the revolutionary language of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Falsely equating communism with terrorism appears to be one of the key manifestations of anti-communism in the 21st century. 

After obtaining a nuclear weapon and trapping thousands of Gotham police underground, Bane implements his plan: The “innocent” and elderly rich are thrown out of their homes and into the streets. “Peoples’ courts” run by a psychotic madman sentence “good” and “bad” capitalists alike who are summarily executed.  He frees all of Gotham’s prisoners who have been incarcerated by the Dent Act. It’s a policy reminiscent of New York’s racist Stop-and-Frisk, which has harrassed 700,000 youth and workers in 2011.

While workers hide in their homes, the terror wreaked by Bane and his army of escaped convicts is presented as a natural outcome of revolutions.  The film transforms the fascist Gotham police into “freedom fighters” who go underground and organize against Bane’s “revolutionary” terror.

Distorts Communist Justice

Bane’s “people’s revolution,” however, has nothing to do with Gotham’s working class and draws heavily from a long history of anti-communist propaganda. The film’s version of “people’s courts” grossly perverts the true history of public trials like the ones held in the countryside in revolutionary China, where landlords were justly held accountable for their crimes against the peasantry. And Bane’s top-down “revolution” plays on the age-old anti-communist lie that revolutions are forced onto people and inherently lead to corruption, strongman dictatorships and anarchy. The true history — that millions in revolutionary Russia and China were won to fight for communist revolution — is obscured by Bane’s caricature.

The overarching message of the film is clear: revolutionary alternatives to capitalism are worse than the current system. According to the film, workers are essentially irrelevant and powerless. They are passive followers of either a madman or the bosses. Billionaire playboys, cops and fascist “caped crusaders” are the true heroes that will save our cities from “revolutionary” terror.  

Keeping a lie like this alive is critical for the bosses. In the same way that Gotham is really a dictatorship of bosses like Bruce Wayne, ruled by fascist laws like the Dent Act, real-world capitalism is a dictatorship of the rich that continues to create chaos and racist terror for workers worldwide — from the cholera epidemic in Haiti to the ongoing imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the rampant murder of workers by police across the U.S. 

In the end, Batman saves the day, rescuing Gotham from a nuclear explosion. In the aftermath Gotham is left to believe that Batman has made the ultimate sacrifice. As the masses cheer, the idea of hope that Bane earlier in the film said was only a façade used to control people has been restored. 

Neither Batman, Bane, Obama
Nor Romney Will Save Us

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, the U.S. bosses hope to restore workers’ “hope” in capitalism in the face of continuing war, racist unemployment and economic crisis. But as the crisis worsens, workers can’t afford to wait around and “hope” that some politician will save us. Like Batman, both Romney and Obama serve the capitalist ruling class. No matter which candidate wins, the working class will lose. 

The problem with Rises and the Dark Knight series is not simply its political content, but the depth of skill with which it was made. The films are engaging and highly entertaining. Workers root for Batman to send the poor back to hell where they belong while they are asked by Nolan to rationalize things like mass surveillance programs, expanded police powers, and vigilante violence on behalf of the capitalist class. 

Batman is a capitalist fantasy, but it is a fantasy willing to get into the grittiness of real life and so becomes a powerful metaphor for the modern era. It cannot be simply dismissed as movie fantasy like other “rich savior” films such as Iron Man. Dark and brooding Batman feels real (after all, what differentiates Batman from other superheroes is that he is “just a man” without any super powers).

 And ultimately this film dramatization of capitalist fantasy threatens to become real as the working class imbibes these class politics with no communist politics to counter them. Our role is to expose this fascist vision with a fight for working-class politics and power. Our friends and family will see this film. It is our job to reveal its class bias and provide a real solution: communist revolution.