SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, February 17 — PLP members joined 500 workers and students in a march and rally to support the 200 undocumented workers and families fired by Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) in Berkeley, California. 

We distributed a leaflet and CHALLENGES, focusing on racism in capitalism as a labor policy. Many gave thumbs up to our poster: “A world without Borders is a Communist World” (Un Mundo sin Fronteras es un mundo Communista).

We are following up on contacts among these workers and some of the younger activists on the march, which included NGO’s, community organizations, churches and Occupy Oakland. There was no official presence from the labor movement.

Using CHALLENGE and actions in our various mass organizations, we’re aiming to make May Day truly a march to unite the international working class and the many individual struggles in this area.

Workers at Pacific Steel Foundry, members of Glaziers, Molders and Plasterers Union Local 164B had a 3-day strike last March against a company-threatened 10% pay cut plus an increase in the cost of health benefits.

Later, the workers filed a $30 million class action lawsuit against Pacific Steel for failure to provide rest and meal breaks. By December, ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) had conducted “silent raids” which required Pacific Steel to verify all workers’ Social Security status (I-9 audit raids). 

The company then fired 200 workers (a third of the workforce). Most had 5 to 20 years seniority. Now their pension benefits are “in question” even though they paid into the union pension fund for years. Many have citizen children, pay taxes and own homes. One fired worker, 14-year veteran Jesús Navarro, was denied a kidney transplant by UC Medical Center here due to his undocumented status. After huge protest and outrage, UCSF medical center is now negotiating a transplant. 

Bosses Profit, Union Misleaders Collaborate

While the steel industry “off-shored,” these workers have produced huge profits over the years for this “family-owned company.” It is the 4th largest such plant left in the U.S. Current wages, $11-$19\hr, used to be substandard for the steel industry up to the 1980’s. Union leaders negotiated these low wages, with the justification of “making the company productive” and “keeping the jobs here.”

Pacific Steel has now rehired about 200 workers, presumably at the lowered $11\hr starting wage. Both the company and the union leaders (including Vice-President Ignacio De La Fuente who is also president of the Oakland City Council) say their hands are tied by “Federal Policy” and the law. 

Those fired have formed a rank-and-file Workers Committee for Mutual Support. The official union leadership has abandoned them but they are reaching out through mass leafleting in mainly Spanish-speaking communities and social justice organizations. 

Racist War on Workers

“If, through enforcement, a large fraction of illegal immigrants returned to their home countries, there would seem to be an ample supply of idle American workers to replace them, particularly workers who have relatively little education.” (Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), think tank on immigration policy)

The 200 replacement workers (mainly Latino and black) Pacific Steel has hired — U.S.-born or “legal” residents — are the “ample supply” mentioned above which unemployment has forced into these “substandard conditions.” 

With Obama’s Secure Communities program, deportations have reached record numbers, 300 000 annually since 2009, almost double that of George Bush. ICE “silent raids” (I-9 audits) have focused on companies with unionized workers. 

These are parts of the racist, anti-immigrant policy. This is how fascism operates, as a virtual gun to the heads of these workers.  

The Communist Alternative

“We want to feel proud that working our jobs means we are contributing to the well-being of the human race and to ourselves.” This is Progressive Labor Party’s view of a future communist society. We organize to fight for a better life today while struggling long-range for communist revolution.

We learned from the successes and failures of communists in the Soviet Union and China as they attempted to build new societies. While those communists abolished private profit, they still maintained a capitalist mode of production: production for buying and selling in the market, wages and wage inequality for workers. 

They became a ruling party that controlled and distributed what the working class produced, turning it into state capitalism, the socialist economic model. This produced a return to capitalism. 

Our goal is REAL communism, with a mass communist party, with production for need and abolition of the wage system: from each according to commitment and ability, to each according to their need. When the international working class wins and holds control over all of society’s economic, political and cultural institutions, it will unleash a creative power that will propel the human race to its highest accomplishments in all fields of endeavor. This is workers’ power.

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Government Policies: Legalized Racism to Increase Profits

 • Chain gang and Jim Crow laws in the South from 1880-1920’s; the anti-loitering laws of those years are equivalent to the nonviolent “drug arrests” and deportation policies of today. Both result in racist jailing. 

   • Workers from Mexico were “repatriated” (deported) in the 1930’s and re-imported in the 1940’s to replace workers drafted in World War II.

   • Workers of Japanese ancestry were interned when World War II began. Their property and jobs were stolen. They were replaced by Latino, black and dust-bowl refugees (often white) to perform farm labor. 

   • The vast prison population today, disproportionately comprising black and Latino workers, provides profits from free or below-minimum-wage labor for U.S. corporations. Those on probation increase the ranks of the desperate unemployed.

   • The present destruction of jobs in the public sector (transit and schools) disproportionately hurts black workers because 1 of 5 employed black workers have jobs in the public sector. 

As Karl Marx pointed out, “the reserve army of labor” is built into capitalism. It condemns millions to misery and helps suppress the wages of those who have jobs.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 27 — Many workers in many industries in Haiti have been fired for organizing a union or striking, including printers, hospital workers, archivists, transportation workers, teachers, city workers and others. This treatment violates labor laws on the books but never enforced. One such group who has stayed together in their union and are still — years later — demanding their jobs back, met with PLP to find out about the Party and to ask how it could help them expand their campaign. 

This is a very determined group of workers, including many active women, who have dared to oppose the repressive and cruel capitalist system here by staging  demonstrations, confronting the corrupt management, organizing petitions and press conferences, and requesting the support of various unions and organizations. Although their efforts so far have been ignored by the rulers, they continue their fight-back.

Those of us present were thrilled to see such courageous workers who, in spite of the misery being imposed on them by the deadly duo of capitalism and imperialism in Haiti, continue the struggle for dignity and bread. We explained that we will do what we can to obtain the support of other unions where we have a presence. Our student friends will continue to meet with a workers’ committee to plan how students and workers can help one another’s struggles. The workers clearly understood the need for this unity of workers and students in confronting a common enemy.

Spreading the Struggle 

Our exchange of experiences and ideas gave rise to a pledge on our part to work harder in the U.S. to denounce these attacks on workers in Haiti and to step up circulation of a petition in their support. We delivered some petitions containing hundreds of signatures for the workers, who received them with great appreciation and will show them to other unions. They will also gather signatures on a petition of their own supporting U.S workers’ struggles.

We stated, however, that we have no “magic bullet” to help them win their demands. The capitalist system is a deadly treadmill of attacks against workers worldwide. Like any reform struggle, even if they succeed, the bosses can take those wins away the next day, or make new attacks. Without an outlook that involves the destruction of capitalism and the fight for communism, we will  always be fighting the next assault against our class since that’s what the system produces in its thirst for profit from our labor. 

During the meeting we discussed the ten PLP principles stated in “Our Fight”” from the Kreyòl issue of CHALLENGE.  In response, women workers were especially passionate in their hatred of the system. One told us she lives in a single room with four grown children since being fired. She asked how workers could win an armed revolution when the state has all the weapons. One answer stressed that our strength is in our numbers, if we get organized.  

Some liked “Our Fight” but asked how these ideas could help win their long struggle for their jobs. We stressed that each battle, win or lose, can “win” if we come out of it stronger in numbers and with more comrades committed to revolution. One comrade found it very painful to have to tell such hard-hit workers that only revolution and expanding the Party can win. But that is the challenge we all face.

Their determination is a good example of a working-class fighting spirit. No matter how destitute, hungry and oppressed the workers might be, they are fighting back and refusing to submit to the nightmare of misery and neglect that their masters have created for them in Haiti. They have our support and admiration as communists. In the course of their struggle, they can understand that capitalism, just like a leech sucking up our blood, must be destroyed so that we can live and prosper under a system of justice and equality: communism.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 18 — The ruling class is stepping up its attacks here. The government has turned its fascist power against the students, especially those at the State University of Haiti, and particularly the Faculty of Ethnology, invading the campus and brutally assaulting the students. However, the students fought back with rocks, sending Haitian President Martelly running off with his personal guards while a large force stayed.

At 3:00 p.m. on February 17 a Toyota with tinted windows pulled up to the Ethnology Faculty. An envoy from Martelly had come to announce his imminent arrival. This was the same campus — the most militant left-wing campus in Haiti — where Martelly had organized a December 27 raid to win over certain students and divide the rest.

Anti-Martelly students vowed not to let him on the campus as had happened in December when the pro-Martelly “pink” student-mercenaries (as they are known) took advantage of student vacations to open the gates for him. Now again they and his militia thugs were prepared to invade the Ethnology campus.

Martelly arrived at the head of a crowd in a Carnival-like entrance as performer “Sweet Micky” (Martelly’s stage name as a pop singer), shirt unbuttoned, urging on his thugs. After two turns around the campus shouting slogans (“Martelly, the country belongs to you, show your buttocks as you want. Micky is not afraid of anything!”).

Well-Planned Assault

Martelly tried to enter the campus grounds by force, along with his armed men. It was all well-organized. People in civilian clothes carrying guns, machetes, knives and clubs broke down the fence and invaded the courtyard. Eighteen windows on cars belonging to students and faculty were totally smashed. Dozens of students were manhandled and clubbed by the thugs who brutalized them with their batons and anything that could wound or kill.

All this occurred under the gaze of the well-armed security forces, who simultaneously used their heavy weapons to prevent the students from escaping. Those with heart conditions or asthma had trouble breathing. Many were taken to the hospital.

The cops took some students away after having beaten them nearly to death. The police fired their heavy weapons to scare off the students. Thus, the armed forces protect the profits of the criminal leaders who want to hang on to power!

Workers in the Ethnology department office, where some students had taken refuge from tear-gas attacks, were pushed around by Martelly’s thugs, who broke everything they couldn’t steal. They burglarized the office of everything of any value. Martelly’s armed gangsters in civilian clothes surrounded the campus until the last students left, ransacked and bruised.

This organized criminal act made certain students targets of Martelly’s thugs, one being attacked by a pro-Martelly “pink” criminal. The massacre targets this campus to erase any denunciation of those in power, who lie and make false promises to the people and use mercenaries to divide them.

This recipe for fascism shows clearly that the rulers plan to re-institute dictatorship in its most ferocious form. All this explains the massive presence in the Martelly government of Duvalierist-Macoute forces (murderous holdovers from the former Duvalier dictatorship). Down with fascism! Long live communism!J

Editor’s note: The above eyewitness account came from a student at the scene. We thank him and his comrades for fighting back and giving leadership to the international class struggle against fascism. As the 1930s Spanish communists said of Franco’s fascists, “No pasaran!” (“They shall not pass.”) We would add that Haiti’s rulers are a local capitalist ruling class who are clients of U.S. imperialism, not simply the gutter fascist Martelly and his thugs.

From an international perspective, this student struggle is an antiracist one. The fact that Haiti is being left to rot as a pool of reserve cheap labor for the region, and a possible military asset in the U.S. imperialists’ battles with their rivals, is a gross racist assault on all workers and students in Haiti. Antiracism, too, is an international fight.

[Note: An international petition campaign is being organized to condemn this raid and support the students’ struggle. Please sign it at www.ipetitions.com/petition/condemn-raid-on-haiti-university-campus. The students in Haiti will use it there.]

The Occupy movement has called for a general strike on May 1. While this is a positive development, it falls far short of the traditional communist holiday, a celebration for the international working class. May Day grew out of a real general strike in Chicago in 1886 (see page 5), one that shut off the bosses’ flow of profits — and not just for one day. For over a century, communists have organized around May Day’s revolutionary message worldwide. It has never stood for the reform of capitalism, which is what the liberal bosses want us to believe is possible. Rather, May Day stands for the overthrow of the profit system, a system that brings the working class mass racist unemployment, periodic depressions, poverty, racism, sexism and tens of millions of deaths in imperialist wars.

As we have witnessed in Italy and France, one-day general strikes are organized by pro-boss union misleaders who encourage workers to let off steam and then return to the workplace with the same unsolved problems. They barely touch the bosses’ profits. They’re more an inconvenience than a threat to the system.

The capitalist media will be sure not to cover our May Day marches for communist revolution. Our Party’s ideas contradict their class interest. But the rulers will eagerly publicize Occupy’s call for a general strike on May 1, as evidenced by their New York Times mouthpiece providing a link to Occupy’s Web page (www.occupymay1st.org), which both advertises the event and exposes the movement’s motives.

The page, sponsored by Occupy Los Angeles (OLA), begins:

In most European countries, May 1st is traditionally a Workers’ day – a day of Labor Solidarity, and a public holiday. In Los Angeles, it’s a day to celebrate and march in support of immigrant [and migrant] rights. In protest against the corruption of the worldwide marketplace, which has led to illegal foreclosures, mass unemployment, low wages, high taxes and a penalization of all those who do not own the “1%” of the world’s resources, and in solidarity with the immigrant movements of May 1st, OLA decided to declare May 1st, 2012 a People’s General Strike.

Hiding the Truth

Whoever leads the supposedly “leaderless” OLA is trying, hand in hand with the media, to misdirect the anger and militancy of rank-and-file Occupiers onto the fatal detour of reformism. In the leaders’ view, all ills stem from corrupted markets that could be cleaned up by “tighter regulations.” They deliberately hide the bitter truth: that unemployment, low wages and economic inequality are essential aspects of the profit system, and cannot be “reformed” away.

Even worse, Occupy’s “Workers’ Day” organizers omit mention of the deadliest scourges that capitalists inflict on our class: imperialism, fascism and racism. In their pursuit of maximum profit, U.S. bosses have murdered millions and impoverished billions around the world. Whenever PL’ers have raised the issue of racism at Occupy General Assemblies, or called for action against it in Los Angeles and New York (including a protest against racist murders by cops in those two cities), Occupy’s leaders have tried to shut us up, despite support for the discussion from the movements’ rank-and-filers.

The fact is that masses of Occupy participants honestly want to battle against the unavoidable ravages of capitalism — the racist inequalities in education and healthcare, the banks that rob billions by foreclosing on mortgages, the mass unemployment and declining wages. We in PLP also believe in fighting these profit-driven horrors. But we cannot fight and win by choosing one or another ruling-class faction. All of them — from the Republicans’ Tea Party to the dominant Rockefeller Democrats — must sustain the system that fosters them. They are bankrupt of solutions. We stand instead for communist revolution to overthrow that system and create a society run by and for the working class.

Even with the liberal bosses’ attempts to control the Occupy movement and fold it into this year’s presidential campaign carnival, many Occupiers have begun to stand up to oppose this exploitative system. From anti-war appeals to an anti-racist march in Los Angeles (led in part by PL’ers) to last December’s shut-down of Oakland’s port, rank-and-file militancy is on the rise. Anti-racism was front and center in the long-term occupation of a downtown Oakland park renamed Oscar Grant Plaza, after a young black man who was executed in 2009 by a local transit cop.

Who Bankrolled OWS?

At the same time, however, it needs to be clear that Occupy Wall Street owes its birth to Adbusters, an online outfit bankrolled by imperialist billionaire George Soros (see box). Liberal imperialists like Soros are pushing to steer Occupiers into “solutions” that solve nothing for our class. Their goal is to enlist the most militant workers into the rulers’ desperate fight to maintain their superpower status by holding off their imperialist rivals — in China, Russia, India and Brazil — in the competition for control of fossil-fuel energy resources. 

Predictably, the OLA May Day manifesto falls squarely in line with the war needs of the biggest U.S. bosses. It champions immigrants’ “rights,” namely a Dream Act that would guarantee citizenship to undocumented immigrant youth in exchange for college attendance or enlistment in the military. Since most could not afford college tuition, the “choice” narrows into a back-door draft. If this legislation passes, young immigrants will give the U.S. Army brass the additional troops it needs to fight the capitalists’ imperialist oil wars. As a New York Times editorial noted, “The Defense Department, at least, understands [young immigrants’] value. Passage of the Dream Act is one of its official goals for helping to maintain ‘a mission-ready, all-volunteer force’” (9/19/10). 

In reality, Occupy Wall Street’s attack on “marketplace corruption” is a call for drastic regulatory steps to put industry and finance on a more aggressive war footing. Two Democratic Party presidents, Woodrow Wilson and then Franklin Roosevelt, imposed strict White House control on domestic markets to pave the way for U.S involvement in the first and second world wars. (They are unlikely to be the last ones, as long as imperialism exists.)

U.S. rulers routinely use their electoral circus to lure the most disaffected workers into backing a war agenda. Obama’s 2008 victory — after promising “yes-we-can” solutions to workers’ problems — enabled him to perpetuate mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that was just the start. Obama used this mandate, plus his unmatched ability to pacify left-leaning workers and black and Latino workers in general, to spread lethal U.S. action into Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and places known only to the Pentagon and CIA. The incumbent president’s murderous track record has the main wing of the U.S. ruling class hoping for his re-election.

Ballot Box a Dead-end

The rulers’ concern is that a crisis-ridden capitalist economy has weakened their ability to funnel workers into the dead end of the voting booth, the bosses’ safety valve of choice to diffuse militant action. Millions fewer may vote in November than in 2008, and pundits are declaring that Obama will be toast unless job creation tops 150,000 per month from here on out. Black and Latino workers and youth, the people most victimized by the unceasing racism of police brutality, mass foreclosures, and brutal unemployment rates, are less than thrilled with Obama’s performance.

Elections exclude a significant portion of the working class, including those who are convicted felons, have been imprisoned or are immigrants, both documented and undocumented. However, election 2012 still looms as the bosses’ main event. All the conflicting camps of U.S. capitalists need a popular stamp of approval for their various anti-worker, union-busting and militarist programs.

As CHALLENGE reported (2/1/12), the presidential campaign revolves around assorted bosses choosing which wars to wage next and how best to mobilize for them. Rick Santorum, the recent winner of several GOP primaries, has come out of obscurity by endorsing motives for war with Iran and China. 

Santorum serves on the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), an organization bankrolled by his top campaign donor, Foster Friess. EPPC proclaims itself “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” As Santorum’s own Website puts it, “China should be challenged on religious liberty.” As for Iran and the oil-soaked Middle East, it declares: “War with Radical Islam.”

Chanting “Onward Christian Soldiers” (though generously including the U.S. rulers’ staunch ally, Israel), Santorum echoes the racist rant in “Clash of Civilizations,” the book by imperialist darling Samuel P. Huntington. In posing a strategy for world war between Western imperialists and Muslim nations, Huntington makes an undisguised call for patriotic loyalty to an attack by U.S. bosses against billions of our sister and brother workers worldwide.

Blocked by its leaders from exposing capitalism’s built-in contradiction between exploiters and exploited, the Occupy movement cannot stop the plight of workers from getting even worse. The war-makers’ coming election is just as useless for our class. The profit system itself must be destroyed, and only a revolution for working-class rule can accomplish that goal.

Working Class the Key Force

Workers constitute the decisive force for transforming society. It is our class that produces all value in the course of production. The owners of the means of production have expropriated that value for their private profit, paying as little as possible to those creating that profit. The owning class cannot survive except by exploiting the working class, but workers definitely don’t need the bosses. Once masses of workers understand that we can throw them out and take state power, and are won to the Progressive Labor Party, the hell of capitalism will be ground into the dustbin of history.

Today, many have been won to Occupy’s leaders or Obama’s promises, even if only as lesser evils to the Republicans’ overtly racist ideology. Evil, yes; lesser no. It is now critical to work on all fronts — shops and unions, schools and campuses, churches and mass organizations, and especially among GI’s in the military — to expose and attack their leaders and advance our communist ideas.

On this May Day, it is to these ideas that PLP and our friends and supporters dedicate ourselves. We must win the participants in this upcoming one-day strike to turn it into something far more powerful and significant: a communist call for workers’ power.

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OWS Funded by One-Percenter?

While the rank and file of the Occupy Wall Street movement sincerely wants to expose the inequalities of U.S. capitalism, CHALLENGE has been reporting that — as the adjoining editorial indicates — the liberal Democrats and some OWS leaders are looking to use the movement’s militancy to re-elect Barack Obama. But what is a fairly well-kept secret, the origins of OWS may very well have received its initial funding from one of the world’s richest multi-billionaires.

The following is an excerpt from our November 2, 2011 editorial:

“The first call to ‘occupy Wall Street’ came this past summer from an online magazine called Adbusters, a beneficiary of the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation whose biggest sugar daddy is none other than billionaire imperialist George Soros.

“The ruling class media’s bizarre treatment of this link suggests just how much they want to conceal it. At 11:09 AM on October 13, mainstream Reuters’ coverage led with, ‘The group that started it all [OWS] may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.’

“By 5:25 PM, Reuters had changed the same article to begin, ‘George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics….’

“At 6:45 PM, Reuters had the original opener followed by a disclaimer from Soros & Co. In the face of the money-trail facts, liberal rulers spin the lie that only right-wing lunatics see an OWS-Soros tie.”

Of course, this is the same Soros who poured millions into liberals’ election campaigns in the Ukraine, Georgia and other Eastern European countries. Follow the money trail….