PORT-AU-PRINCE, December 10 — Ten years of struggle by the unions in a progressive federation here have mostly meant heartbreaking frustration for the workers involved. They are still organizing, although their strikes, marches, mass meetings, forums, legal fights, petitions and press conferences have yielded so little. Yet they fight on. Many hundreds have been fired, in several different industries, for union activism. In fact almost every delegate at the dinner was currently jobless for that reason! In two unions they are still battling after three years or more for back pay and reinstatement after mass illegal layoffs of unionists. The workers in one case were rounded up and physically kicked out of their workplace by police swat teams. 

So how do we win? Among the ideas considered by this group of committed men and women workers was the road to revolution, the need for a communist party, and the importance of an international revolutionary movement. These ideas were raised by a union leader from the old communist movement and developed by PLP speakers from two countries. They put it in the context of inter-imperialist rivalry and war, and what this turmoil in global capitalism means for Haitian workers.

They spoke of the bitterness of this period for workers under fascist and imperialist attack like those in Haiti, but also even in the U.S., where workers face frozen wages in union contracts and over 20% unemployment. They showed how Haitian unemployment and labor migration (1 million in North America) are an important tool in the bosses’ plan to drive down wages and divide the working class in this whole region. 

Unemployment in Haiti is between 70% and 90%, which makes any union struggle difficult as bosses use unemployed workers as weapons against those with jobs. Workers here respond to the bosses’ use of the “reserve army of the unemployed” by helping one another day to day, making every job feed many of the jobless. Some progressive unions also seek to cross the divide by including the unemployed in their ranks. In one union there are 400 employed and 400 unemployed members. Those employed have actually taken the jobs of those fired en masse for unionizing. But despite the initial feeling against scabs, they are now accepted as brothers and sisters by those who were kicked out. This union sings a song at the end of its delegate assembly that leads off: “Unions stand up! Strike for liberty!”

Critically and self-critically, one major weakness of the event was the absence of the hospital workers recently on strike — the sharpest struggle of the moment. Inevitably, four of their leaders were fired during the strike. Party members should certainly have made sure these workers were not only present but cheered and supported by the meeting. The anniversary dinner could and should have become a moment of organizing by the federation of more active and militant support of these members under attack.

Unfortunately at this point the federation focuses not enough on getting masses of workers behind struggles like this one, and too much on legal cases, trainings in union organization, and political forums. These are all useful, especially the political forums, which some unions use effectively as an organizing tool. But haven’t 10 years shown them to not be really the road ahead?

This federation is also courted by a few big international union federations like PSI (Public Services International) and some big U.S., Canadian, and French unions like the AFT, CUPE (Canadian public employees), and SNES (a French teachers’ union). It’s interesting that these unions come from the Big Three imperialist powers who dominate Haiti. The term “labor imperialism” was coined to describe such international union operations. Not everyone involved deserves this term, but they could have the effect of pulling Haitian unions to the right as they pay to build clinics and rebuild union halls. 

Revolutionaries in Haiti, like everywhere else, have a ways to go in making our ideas of a need for a communist revolution a material force which grips the masses. In small group discussions around the edges of this event, however, and in firming up political friendships between communists in PLP and other workers, those ideas are slowly picking up steam. The Party and workers generally can expect to be attacked as fascism gathers momentum in Haiti (see box). These ten years of pain and bitterness will toughen up workers for more decisive battle if we all learn from our mistakes and strike harder for workers’ communist freedom. The cruel alternative is fascism and global war.

Fascism Grows in Haiti but Workers Are Resisting

One unionist reported to his delegate assembly how he had infiltrated a march through Cité Soleil, a desperately poor district, organized by a pro-Martelly group called “Ghetto Réuni” (“Reunited Ghetto”) to whip up support for a Haitian army. They gave out t-shirts printed with “Haiti: Vous Etes Souveraine!” (“Haiti, You Are a Sovereign State!”), implying that UN MINUSTAH troops should be replaced by a fascist local army. A new t-shirt would be half someone’s clothing needs for six months, and there were also small money handouts. A Rara (festival music) marching band attracted more people.  March organizers used their hands like guns, chanting “The army’s coming back!” Bosses will try to use the unemployed to build fascist mass movements, but the communist answer is to crush fascists ruthlessly with workers’ strength and courage, such as that displayed by the worker who infiltrated Ghetto Réuni for his union.

OAKLAND, CA., December 13 — Thousands of Occupiers, confronted by police in riot gear, shut or disrupted ports from Anchorage, Alaska, to Southern Ca., highlighting economic inequality and high unemployment.

Thousands of pickets chanting “Whose ports? Our Ports!” forced the closing of four shipping terminals here. Hundreds shut two of Portland’s four main terminals. Seattle cops used “flash-bang” percussion grenades against protestors blocking the port entrance, arresting 11.

Pickets in Longview, Wash., demonstrated in solidarity with longshoremen fighting EGT Investment over the latter’s takeover of their jobs. They were also protesting Goldman-Sachs which owns a stake in the largest cargo terminal operator, SSA Marine. Other demonstrations occurred as far south as Long Beach, CA. and as far north as Vancouver, Canada and Anchorage, Alaska.

Although the longshore union refused to support the actions, an Oakland docker said “the rank and file have spoken today by not crossing the lines.”

Reuters reported (12/13) that in Oakland, “Two longshoremen outside the gate said they would refuse to cross the picket lines to get to their jobs and assumed others would follow suit” (Sacramento Bee 12/13).

Doug Seaman, a 35-year-old unemployed construction worker, told the San Francisco Chronicle (12/12), “We need to make the public aware that Wall Street’s tentacles have infiltrated every facet of our lives.”

“Infusing his speech with the type of populist language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Mr. Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class” (NY Times, 12/6/11).

On December 6, the 101st anniversary of arch-imperialist president Teddy Roosevelt’s (TR) famous speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Barack Obama returned to the town in an attempt to steer the momentum of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to serve U.S. capitalists’ war needs.

TR supposedly had come to Osawatomie to commemorate John Brown’s heroic 1856 anti-slavery battle there (see box). But in reality, like Obama and other politicians now trying to mislead OWS, Roosevelt sought to channel workers’ demands for equality into all-class unity to support imperialist wars. With U.S. rulers seeking to expand beyond their 1898 conquests of former Spanish territories (including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines), he called for a “New Nationalism,” the patriotic ideology that would help push the U.S. into World War I five years later. At the same time, he created a template for Italy’s Fascists and Germany’s Nazis: a highly centralized and regulatory capitalist government that can control all classes, and the propaganda that service to such a state is for the greatest good.

TR aimed to reform capitalism. He ran for president on the so-called Progressive Party” ticket, and became known as a “trustbuster” for wanting to discipline the ruling class and save the system from its own excesses. Meanwhile, he popularized his case for imperialist aggression with a famous saying: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

A century later, Obama is working overtime to revive TR’s deadly pronouncements. Here are some Rooseveltian sound bites that Obama has embraced:

Equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest [read “military”—ed.] service of which he is capable.

I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us abroad that respect which is the surest guaranty of peace.

[I] ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole.

By championing the “national interest,” Roosevelt was hiding the fact that the government’s job is to protect the interests of those who control society, namely the capitalist bosses, both in the U.S. and abroad. Throughout the world, local bosses in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have used nationalism to spur workers to oust imperialist powers and “liberate” former colonial countries. Then the local capitalists take their turn in exploiting workers for profit, a common thread in this year’s “Arab Spring.”

The Patriotic ‘Middle Class’

Obama is straining to preserve the concept of a patriotic “middle class,” which serves to deaden class conflict and as a buffer between rulers and most workers. In imperialist economies thriving off colonial mega-profits, bosses can  be forced to respond to class struggle by conceding a higher standard of living for the home country’s working class. The bosses then cite these workers as a new “middle” class (see box below).

But this phenomenon, described by Karl Marx 150 years ago, can last only as long as the imperialist nation’s ability to dominate less-developed countries and super-exploit their workers.  In the U.S., huge sections of workers in auto, steel, railroads, manufacturing and mines have lost the jobs and living standards that they’d won through militant, communist-led class struggle. U.S. bosses, no longer in a position to afford these extra crumbs for a “middle class,” due to imperialist competition, have neutralized the unions and now pay a newly hired auto worker half of what the old contracts called for.

Racism is a big part of this ruling class offensive. After centuries of super-exploitation of black workers, from slavery through post-war Jim Crow, the rulers now offer middle-class benefits to some black bosses and professionals, while extorting super-profits from the overwhelming majority of black workers, along with Latinos and immigrants. At the same time, the capitalists have used the Great Recession to steal back benefits from black workers and others that were won through long struggle. The black workers themselves, whose ‘60s rebellions won those higher-paying jobs, began to be laid off in the recession of the early 1980s. As proof that racism hurts all workers, now white auto workers are suffering the same fate. (See page 4 on unemployment.)

Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin who greatly admired TR, held out the promise of potential prosperity — later supported by full employment in war plants — to mobilize workers for World War II.  But the social contract over which FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presided, the so-called “American way of life,” has crashed..

Obama acknowledged as much in Kansas: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.” The president’s myth-spinning about an improving economy flies in the face of economists’ warnings that today’s mass joblessness will last for years — and that many of these unemployed may never get another job.

Populist Fascism

To deal with these domestic crises, Obama has pounced on the working class by sustaining many of Bush’s policies. Obama’s administration has detained and deported record numbers of undocumented immigrant workers, while pushing for a “Dream Act” that would send tens of thousands of immigrant youth into imperialist wars. The Obama Justice Department has endorsed military tribunals and enforces the most oppressive provisions of the Patriot Act, which Obama extended earlier this year. He bailed out the big banks with workers’ money while allowing millions of foreclosures. His federally backed bankruptcy plan forced workers at GM and Chrysler to accept a ban on strikes. And even as he spouted empty phrases about “democracy” and “freedom” for workers abroad, Obama imposed a wage freeze on hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the U.S.

We should make no mistake. Obama’s goal, like TR’s, is not to better the lot of workers, but to lead them to support an imperialist solution to a capitalist crisis. One such solution from the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies involves “major U.S. attacks on military and civilian targets” in Iran, specifically up to 2,500 cruise missiles and strike sorties that “hit all suspect facilities for nuclear...targets including universities” (CSIS, 11/28/11).

For the U.S. rulers whom Obama serves, this aggression could lead to a mobilization for a larger invasion in the Middle East as the U.S. military expands its presence in the region, adding tens of thousands of troops in countries surrounding Iran. Another would be an intensifying conflict with Iran’s primary enabler: China, the U.S. capitalists’ main strategic foe.

For the international working class, the only real solution to the misery wrought by the profit system is to get rid of it altogether with communist revolution. This is PLP’s goal in immersing ourselves in workers’ class struggles. Our goal is to win our class to the communist ideas that will free us from the hell of capitalism.J

Myth of the ’Middle Class’

Obama, alongside his political buddies and the bosses’ media, constantly invoke the mythological “middle class” while never mentioning the working class. They are trying to convince workers who earn — or who aspire to earn — $50,000 or $75,000 a year that they are not workers. They want to hide the reality of a working class with its antagonistic relationship with an opposing, parasitic ruling class. The latter controls the means of production and reaps profits from exploiting worker’s labor power, the source of all value. Capitalists own; workers create.

Many workers’ struggles may have won incomes that enable them to afford a home, a car and a college education for their children, but they have no security under capitalism. Come the next crisis of overproduction and the next wave of mass unemployment, these higher-earning workers promptly get laid off and made homeless. Their “middle-class” life goes up in smoke. One’s class is not determined by income, but rather by the source of that income.

Opportunist-in-Chief ‘Forgets’ Anti-Racist Hero John Brown

Barack Obama spat on our class’s militant, anti-racist history by excluding John Brown from his December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was there, in 1856, that the great abolitionist led thirty-eight fighters, black and white, to counterattack 250 pro-slavery troops and kill twenty of them. Brown’s boldness at Osawatomie, Harpers Ferry and elsewhere helped encourage millions to take up arms against human bondage. 

At Osawatomie, Brown wrote, “There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for.” But the United States’ first black president, whose own wife has slave ancestors, omitted John Brown because Obama understands that he’s on the other side. Far from fighting against oppression, the president wages war to heighten capitalist exploitation of workers around the globe.

Just before Virginia’s pro-slavery forces hanged him in 1859, after years of guerilla warfare, Brown acknowledged, “I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Brown was right. The main scourge attacking the working class today is imperialist war and its racist, fascist preparations. To rid ourselves of capitalism’s endless profit wars, we will need to transform the demonstrated anger of OWS into militant action and a long-term plan toward communist revolution.

LOS ANGELES, November 30 — Over 2,000 workers converged on LA’s City Hall on November 27, anticipating the police raid to remove the Occupy encampment. PLP mobilized a group of about 20 students and workers to show solidarity and help organize a defense of the camp. In the hours leading up to the midnight deadline, the PL group distributed 100 CHALLENGES and organized a picket line chanting, “The workers united will never be defeated” and “Whose streets? Our streets.”

As midnight neared, PL led the picket into the streets, defying the police who told the PL’er on the bullhorn leading the march to get back on the sidewalk. Eventually, what was a relatively small picket turned into several hundred protestors, taking over a street intersection next to the main Occupy encampment on the south lawn of City Hall.

Many expected a confrontation with the LAPD that night. However, it was not until the following night that the kkkops raided the camp, overwhelming the couple of hundred occupiers with a force of 1,400 cops. Under orders from the “progressive” LA Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the cops utilized their best “community policing” techniques to avoid an all-out confrontation with the occupiers.

Part of the plan included pre-selecting which media outlets would be allowed to participate. This was important for the LAPD and the Mayor since they were keen on not letting the media cover the brutality of the police in their violent arrests of occupiers who refused to leave the encampment. The media also made no mention of the skirmishes between racist cops and protestors in the streets near City Hall when the occupiers were trying to disrupt the police operation.

The media did, however, glorify the LAPD’s military-style attack to clear the encampment. Besides mobilizing over 1,000 cops, the LAPD established a police command and processing center at Dodger Stadium for potential arrestees. They also turned dozens of MTA buses into police buses in which they transported close to 300 arrested occupiers. The following day Mayor Villaraigosa celebrated the efficiency of this fascist operation, lauding the “restrained” police behavior.

Despite the clearing of the Occupy encampment, PL’s participation in the nights of the police operation showed the potential leading role a disciplined organization can play in militant struggle. The next step is to transform this militancy into class struggle in our workplaces and campuses around our vision of revolutionary communism.