Approximately 50,000 workers participated in this well-attended march, defying bad weather and police threats. They occupied both sides of Seventh Avenue and adjacent streets, harassing and frisking workers. Union leaders carried signs with no messages, and whined about a better functioning capitalism. Peasants and indigenous groups denounced the genocide, against them during the last 50 years, because of the bosses’ thirst for maximum profits.
There were groups of retirees fighting against the reduction of their pensions, neighborhood mothers fighting for their jobs, workers marching with whistles and horns and all types of opportunists cackling about peace, sovereignty and social justice.
PLP arrived early. We distributed our literature, sold CHALLENGE and let marchers know about our revolutionary program. A Coca-Cola worker we knew and some veteran operators of Bavaria beer, encouraged by our meeting, introduced us to their co-workers and invited us to attend their meetings and to inform our readers about their conflict with their bosses. We chanted our slogans against wage slavery and for a worldwide communist revolution. We explained that while capitalists get richer from our sweat, we’ll be the ones who’ll bury them. Then we organized our group to raise our flag and chant our slogans as we marched.
Some youth and workers joined our group as a comrade called out the slogans and directed the group with a bullhorn to help us chant as a single voice: “Democracy is a capitalist farce, Let’s organize a communist revolution,” “One working class, One communist world, One Progressive Labor Party,” “Don’t support any capitalist, We offer communist leadership,” and 30 other slogans. Our chants generated interest amongst the marchers because we rejected reformism, wage slavery, fascism, nationalism, electoral politics, the capitalist dictatorship, racism, imperialism — always presenting the internationalist communist revolution as the solution.
We marched with revolutionary pride, with raised fists, demonstrating our hatred of the class enemy, finally arriving at Plaza Bolivar, where we sung the Internationale. We highlighted the organization and discipline of our comrades and their active participation, and left in well-organized groups to prevent arrests by the bosses’ repressive apparatus.
At the end of the march 160 people were arrested, some youth severely beaten and local businesses damaged. Shock bombs, pepper spray, water cannons and explosives emptied the Plaza. The march was also reduced by arrests of dozens of youth before it began, starting from different points in the city, in Soacha, Bolivar, and Restrepo.
WASHINGTON, DC, May 1 — “1, 2, 3, 4, We declare class war, 5, 6, 7, 8, Smash the system, smash the state!”
Three hundred Occupiers and friends marched to the White House with red flags flying high to condemn the racist, capitalist system and politicians like Obama and Bush who foster imperialist war and the exploitation of the working class. Workers alongside the march saluted the May Day marchers with clenched fists of support and applause.
With the bullhorn cranked up to the maximum and pointed (illegally) towards the White House, the May Day marchers rattled the windows of the White House with revolutionary chants. The Labor Committee of OccupyDC vigorously organized all sections of Occupy to join this march. It was a smashing success, overcoming the fragmentation of the movement and demonstrating that the struggle that began with Occupy Wall Street last fall continues stronger than ever.
Highlights included speeches by a Metro transit worker, calling on Occupiers and Metro workers alike to unify against the system, especially as fare hikes and attacks on workers both intensify on July 1; a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union organizer calling for ever bolder attacks on capitalism; a moving poem in the tradition of Langston Hughes written by a college student; a series of dramatic readings of May Day speeches from historic figures; several labor songs from the Labor Chorus including the Internationale in four languages; and a final rally featuring grassroots labor leaders from Bangladesh, Honduras, and the Philippines providing solidarity messages.
The PLP May Day march in New York and the Occupy May Day march in DC made many people realize the possibilities for revolution. At a recent PLP club meeting, two marchers pledged to join the Party, and two others pledged to continue to march with the Party through next year.
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CAT Workers Reject Boss-Union Pact; Walk Out on May Day
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- 25 May 2012 80 hits
JOLIET, IL, May 19 — About 800 Caterpillar (CAT) workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 851, struck at 12:01 a.m., May Day morning, after rejecting a proposed six-year contract that includes pay cuts and almost doubled healthcare costs. CAT made $1.5 billion in first-quarter profits.
“You can only bend people so much until they can’t take it anymore,” said one striker. “Put it this way,” said another. “Under their proposed contract, I wouldn’t be able to afford to take my kid to the doctor.”
CAT wants to determine starting wages for second-tier new hires on a “market-based” formula allowing the company to pay even less than the current $13/hour. CAT also wants to eliminate guaranteed healthcare for current retirees, key seniority provisions and put workers on unpredictable schedules with shifts that change every week.
Despite increasing profits by 44 percent over last year, CAT is stepping up attacks on its international work force. And while the workers have taken a bold a step by walking out, they should have no confidence in the pro-capitalist union leadership.
• In January, CAT locked out 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers union at a locomotive facility in London, Ontario, after they refused to accept a 50 percent wage cut. CAT then closed the plant and moved the work to a non-union plant in Indiana.
• Last year, 840 IAM members at a Honeywell plant in Kansas City and almost 200 IAM union members at Manitowoc Cranes in Wisconsin struck against concessionary contracts. After a few weeks, both strikes collapsed in the face of scabs, and then strikers, crossing the picket lines.
Similar things could be happening here. It underlines the need for revolutionary communist leadership, with the goal of leading the workers to power to abolish wage slavery, as opposed to hanging on at any cost to keep the dues money rolling in.
The current International leadership is mainly concerned with making sure the bosses are profit-healthy and then, at best, hoping workers can “share” in the profits. These pro-capitalist union hacks are looking out for “their” country, “their” company and “their” factory, and then “their” workers. While it works for the bosses, it’s a dismal failure for the workers.
Red leadership would have shut CAT down internationally to keep the Ontario plant open. And while the whole U.S. labor movement has been focused on Wisconsin for two years, it did not defend the 200 Manitowoc Cranes strikers in that state, even as they gathered one million signatures to recall Governor Walker.
These union sellouts are marching the working class into the bosses’ electoral circus, away from sharpening the class struggle and supporting striking workers. We have our work cut out for us.
Without the question you can’t think at all. “If you had an island to work with, how would you create a communist society?” This question and twenty others like it were asked by a young immigrant worker in our study group. Of course it made all the comrades think furiously. We’re so caught up in the daily political work that it takes a fresh eye sometimes to make us see anew our own political vision.
This worker was convinced, for example, that socialism in East Germany was inferior in productivity and drive to capitalism in West Germany, that the capitalist West had to rescue the backward East when they reunited the country. How could we explain that, as communists? He agreed that capitalist society did NOT work. But didn’t the German example mean that for a communist society to work we had to take some of the things capitalism is good at and use them to build communism? Such as motivating people by letting them get ahead or by technological innovation? We went at that one for a while.
We got tangled up about socialism because when we criticized socialism as practiced in the USSR, China and Cuba, and advocated moving directly to communism, he was confused. He had to ask us several times, what was the difference? Socialism, communism, which was which? Could we show him an example of communism the way we meant it?
We realized that socialism, in the sense of the USSR, China, and Cuba, is communism to most people because it is what communists built. They were communists, the only ones who ever won state power, and as communists they built socialism with unequal wages and commodities and markets held over from capitalism. On our theoretical communist island we would have none of those things. Communists made great steps forward, before it all got reversed.
So part of our discussion was in fact DEFENDING what our communist predecessors had built, before we could move on to a criticism of how their best efforts fell short, how their very advances revealed gaps in the communist theory they used. If we start with the criticisms and not the defense we confuse everybody. Our criticisms make more sense after we have showed the value of the steps socialist societies took to abolish capitalism. We realized that this is what had angered a Caribbean member of the study group, who loved the Cuban revolution and thought our criticisms slighted it, so much so that he left.
Another productive question was, “If I have a plot of land to feed my family, and the communist state comes along and says, ‘We have to take your land to make a collective farm which will be better for everyone,’ why would I accept that? I have to feed my own family first.” One thing we realized in answering is that the question comes from the fact that capitalist society forces every one of us into this kind of defensive individualism — it’s true that under capitalism you have to feed your own family or they starve. But collective, egalitarian communist society means that no one starves, no one is left to themselves to fight off everyone else as competitors for scarce resources.
And so it went. The new worker had a lot to think about and veteran comrades went home buzzing with fresh thought about some of the most difficult and most valuable questions humanity has ever asked itself. Without the question, you can’t think at all. He’ll probably have twenty more for us on May Day.
A lover of study groups
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Class Struggle Heating Up Workers Strike Against Lockheed War-maker
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- 25 May 2012 78 hits
FORT WORTH, TEXAS, May 19 — A strike by 3,600 Lockheed Martin workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 776, is entering its third week. The workers make F-35 and F-16 fighter jets, and are striking against healthcare and pension cuts. Lockheed Martin had $17.34 billion in federal contracts in 2010, making it the largest U.S. defense contractor. The company is threatening to “implement our contingency plan” to meet their blood-soaked commitments.
The war-makers’ “last, best and final offer” would force workers to pay much higher healthcare costs and eliminate defined-benefit pensions for new hires. These two issues have been at the core of practically every union contract, public and private, for more than a decade, regardless of the employers’ financial condition.
The International’s pro-capitalist union leaders generally agree to relieve the bosses of health care costs and are campaigning either for Obamacare or single-payer coverage. This was a central part of the auto union’s bailout contracts with GM, Ford and Chrysler. PLP fights to eliminate the bosses and their racist profit system altogether, with communist revolution. Then we will all contribute to — and share in — a society that exists to meet the needs of the international working class.
Workers here went on strike in 2000 and 2003 to resist concessions. A local leader said, “Every three years they want to come and take some other benefit. Everyone is sick and tired of it. These folks are prepared to be on strike for a long time.”
This strike, like the one against Caterpillar (see below) could be a sign that the class struggle is heating up. And such strikes show industrial workers’ potential power to not just fight for economic demands, but to cripple the imperialist war-makers.
If workers are won to that goal, they could paralyze the bosses’ slaughter of our sisters and brothers worldwide, in the interests of the international working class. Lockheed’s warplanes are used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Caterpillar’s bulldozers demolish workers’ homes in Palestine and erect Israel’s apartheid wall.
Defeating these warmakers won’t be realized without the building of a mass communist PLP and a raging debate among millions of workers. In that debate, combined with class struggle, PL’ers can win the working class to a complete overthrow of the profit system that mires our class in exploitation and perpetual imperialist wars.
