The working class in Brazil continues to pay a high price for having a  pseudo“leftist” government. These rulers work only to benefit the international capitalist class, spending the country’s international reserves to save Europe’s bosses from their financial crisis. Meanwhile, they continue to exploit Brazil’s workers.

During the first five days of November, 1,800 workers went on strike against LG Electronics, the Korean multinational, demanding the rehiring of ten workers fired for fighting to improve their miserable working conditions. In the state of Ceará, university professors and students have been on strike since November 11 against budget cuts.

Meanwhile, as pseudo-leftist president Dilma Rousseff talks of “democracy,” police in Rio de Janeiro occupied the favelas (slum neighborhoods) of Rocinha (which alone has 70,000 residents), Vidigal and Chácara do Chapéu. The action was justified as part of the Police Pacification Unit (UPP). The occupation began on November 13, to continue indefinitely.

The UPP, initiated by Governor Sergio Cabral in 2008 in the Santa Marta favela, is supposedly designed to expel drug-trafficking gangs from the favelas while installing community security systems. According to Rio de Janeiro’s town council, 29 of the city’s 605 favelas are already controlled by the UPP. Most are in the southern part of the city, where is also home to some of the richest neighborhoods. A good example is Rochinha, sandwiched between such luxurious neighborhoods as São Conrado and Leblon. Unlike most big cities, where the poor population is isolated on the periphery of the city, Rio’s poor occupy the hills throughout the city. The social inequalities are more obvious and transparent here.

Does it fight drug trafficking?

As usual, the capitalist-controlled media considers UPP’s military operation in Rocinha a ´´success,´´ praising the police and the residents’ acceptance of them inside the favela. Tomás Ramos, an advisor to State Deputy Marcelo Freixo (the human rights activist who recently fled to Europe after receiving seven death threats), says that many residents actually have mixed feelings about the UPP: “What they approve of is the end of frequent shooting between the drug-trafficking gangs and the cops, but they don´t necessarily approve of how the police manage the territory in which they live.”

In reality, the UPP’s mission is not to fight against trafficking or to reduce crime, but to control the favelas in economically strategic areas. Even Governor Cabral publicly acknowledges that the UPP cannot solve the drug problem. As he noted just before the first UPP occupation, “The [objective] is not to end trafficking; no one has been able to do that….The objective is to reach a civilized level of crime.”

Pacification for Sports

This UPP project was never designed to make the entire city safer. The pacification units are concentrated in wealthy areas of the city that are frequented by tourists, to protect revenues from the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. They also occupy the favelas bordering these areas, like those around Maracaná, the scheduled site for the World Cup final. As Luiz Antônio Machado, a sociology professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, noted, “The big [sports] events were decisive for the creation of UPP.” Brazil needed to guarantee security in these neighborhoods to be awarded these games. “The objective,” Machado said, is to criminalize poverty and impose public order with a military occupation.

Meanwhile, little is done to develop social programs in these communities. While the police have sponsored some school sports and sweet-sixteen parties to gain acceptance by favela residents, no one is addressing the needs of poor workers. The government demonizes young people as criminals instead of pointing to the root of crime in Brazil and elsewhere: capitalist unemployment.

Cops Defend Property of the Rich

History shows that the police are in place to defend the capitalist state and the rich. The cops have yet to arrest a boss for stealing workers’ labor each day, but they are always ready to arrest striking workers for the “crime” of fighting for raises. The police in Rio are considered the most violent in Brazil. According to data from the security secretaries in each province, the Rio police killed three times as many people as the cops in Sao Pablo (who are also considered extremely violent) during the first half of 2011. In 2010, the Rio police officially killed 885 people in the province, half of them in the capital. Many were the poor children of the working class.

As CHALLENGE has pointed out (6/8/11), Brazil´s government has trained its forces within the United Nations’ MINUSTAH army in Haiti to prepare them to pacify its favelas at home. Brazilian bosses are using the UPP to evict and silence the poor and show a “friendly face” to the World Cup, excusing the murder of workers with stories about drug trafficking or terrorism. But workers’ potential power was evident as they rose up and organized the favelas to resist these evictions. Workers in Brazil and around the world need to join the PLP to build a society of true social equality, and to destroy this putrid system of exploitation and profit.

HAMMOND, IN, November 27 — Demonstrations at Purdue U. Calumet (PUC) against racist Professor Maurice Eisenstein show no signs of dying down. Students have been campaigning without let-up to force the administration to fire Eisenstein.

The students’ actions include circulating petitions, urging victims of Eisenstein’s racist and sexist attacks to file formal complaints, and organizing public demonstrations and a campus-wide forum. Despite right-wing opposition and institutional apathy, students are demanding nothing less than immediate termination of Eisenstein’s professorship at PUC, and won’t back down until that goal is achieved.

Eisenstein has used his classes to disseminate his extreme Zionist and imperialist rhetoric — advocating extermination of Arabs, and the colonization of their lands by Israelis and Americans. He has stepped far beyond the usual pro-imperialist stance on current events, propagating into hateful dehumanization of Arabs, blacks, Latinos, migrant workers, and women. His extremism has culminated in direct personal attacks on students and faculty.

Despite much evidence to show his complete unsuitability as a professor, the university has been apathetic to the point of complacency for almost two decades. Only after the impassioned protests from a multi-racial coalition of angry students has the university begun to take the issue seriously. Meanwhile, both Eisenstein and a small group of his supporters are hiding behind a right-wing excuse of “free speech” while turning a blind eye to his abuse of power as a professor and the potential consequences of racist indoctrination.

PL’ers have been active in this fight since its onset, working with fellow class-conscious demonstrators to inject a much-needed energy and radicalism to the struggle. While some demonstrators want to fight within the restrictive confines of university policy, PL’ers and friends have been ensuring that the struggle won’t be diluted to fit a weaker liberal agenda.

We in PLP don’t see Eisenstein as just one “bad apple,” whose dismissal will automatically cure the university system of racism and bigotry. Even if Eisenstein is fired, PL’ers intend to keep the militant fire burning in our fellow students, many of whom have faced the brunt of racism their whole lives from imperialist propaganda. It is our goal to build solidarity with fellow students fighting bigotry and help them see that racism will be eradicated only with the destruction of the capitalist system that needs the extra profits from racist wage differentials to survive.

We will continue working with students and workers who face similar racist intolerance and intimidation. With solid communist leadership, these small struggles can harness the energy and commitment to destroy racism and capitalism once and for all.

“The real number of unemployed or underemployed people in the U.S. is a stunning 26.9 million,” (LAT, 11/30), although figures below indicate it’s closer to 35 million.

“The term ‘reserve army of labor’ is vintage Karl Marx” admits the LA Times. “But,” it continues, “let’s not hold that against it if it’s on the mark. These workers are on reserve; they are standing ready to work. And their sheer numbers make them an army.”

The ‘8.6%’ Scam

The bosses’ media spouts a “drop” in the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.6% (from the previous month’s 9%). Obama hails this as a sign of economic recovery. But this spurious figure results from the fact that 300,000+ workers who gave up looking for non-existent jobs are no longer included in the labor force and therefore are not counted as unemployed. According to such fraudulent figuring, if a few million more workers give up looking for these non-existent jobs, the jobless rate might “drop” to 6%!

Shadowstats.com reports that this “drop” in the jobless rate “actually signaled ongoing economic collapse…not the ongoing recovery heralded by the Administration and…Wall Street,” given the “swelling ranks of ‘discouraged’ workers.”

Not only does the government’s 8.6% jobless rate not include part-time workers who want but can’t find full-time jobs, nor “discouraged” workers who’ve given up looking for work after 26 weeks (which would raise the rate to 22.6% — Shadowstats.com), but it also excludes:

• Part of the massive prison population of 2.4 million being released from jail but also can’t find jobs amid the bosses’ economic crisis;

• GI’s recently returning from the rulers’ imperialist wars whose jobless rate is over 20%;

• Students “holing up in colleges and waiting for the economic storm to pass” (LAT);

• First-time job-seekers among high school and college graduates for whom there are no jobs;

• “Discouraged” workers who have been jobless for more than a year and who the Clinton administration re-defined in 1994 as “no longer discouraged”: the long-term unemployed;

• Workers on welfare who cannot seek jobs, lacking day-care for their children;

• Hundreds of thousands of youth who joined the military as the only “job” they could find.

Add all that up and the LAT’s “stunning 26.9 million” is closer to 35 million.

Unemployment’s Racist Factor

Within this massive misery is the fact that black and Latino workers have double the jobless rate of the working class as a whole. The government admits that even the low-ball figure of 8.6% rises to 15.5% for black workers (NY Times, 12/5), a rate that actually lies somewhere between 30% and 50% depending on the city, when considering the other factors outlined above. Growing out of centuries of racist discrimination, these workers became the last hired and first fired.

The mass hiring of black workers in the auto industry resulting from the black rebellions of the 1960s got wiped out in the 1980s recession when the pro-boss auto union “leaders” agreed to mass layoffs to “save the industry” — again the last hired and the first fired. This set white workers up for the kill when Obama became the savior in bailing out GM and Chrysler, leading to the layoff of thousands of long-time workers. This enables these companies to net profits during the Great Recession. Under capitalism, the bosses’ government exists to enforce the profit system. (See box below.)

Of course, capitalism’s reserve army of unemployed is mounting worldwide, from Britain to Mexico to France to Spain to South Africa to India to Italy to Bangladesh to Pakistan and on and on. The “Arab Spring” was a rebellion by workers demanding jobs. This international crisis is intensifying the rivalry of the imperialist powers as they compete for cheap labor and resources, especially oil and gas — an economic war whose “solution” inevitably leads to world war as it did in 1914 and 1939.

Marx’s “reserve army of the unemployed” is part of a working-class army that, when led by communist ideas, can overwhelm and overthrow the tiny number of billionaires who now run the world in their drive for maximum profits. This is the ruling class’s greatest fear.

Progressive Labor Party is fighting to marshal our class into a mighty force that will drive the money-changers out of their Wall Street temples and bury them with communist revolution. This can produce a society without bosses and profits, run by and for workers who produce all value, and who will distribute the fruits of our labor according to the needs of our class.

Joining and leading this PLP-led army can truly change the world.

CHICAGO, November 23 — The Occupy Wall Street movement came to Chicago State University (CSU) today as the Independent Student Union (ISU) led 75 students and faculty to occupy the president’s office for two hours.

An ISU leader listed local campus issues and explained that Illinois owes CSU $15 million, including $3 million in state grants. During the following speak-out, many students, tired of being disrespected and given the run-around, detailed the university’s failure to facilitate registration; to properly process withdrawals from a class (leading to Fs on the transcript); to repair crumbling infrastructure; to treat students with respect; to raise funds; and to improve communications with students.

A married couple, both CSU students, brought their children, showing them by their example that we need to unite and fight back. The father told President Watson that his administration was damaging CSU’s reputation by not providing a student-friendly environment. A student brought her mother, a CSU alumnus, who remembered that students had the same complaints when she was attending.

Support from Purdue

A transfer student, about to graduate, was incensed over the lack of recognition for maintaining a 4.0 average. Students who came from Purdue U. Calumet to support the occupation described their campaign against a racist professor on their campus.

In reply, a dean scolded students for blocking the doorways, thus displaying the patronizing, racist attitude about which students were complaining. When Watson was asked who was recording the meeting, he looked around in vain for his staff to step forward. At other times administrators were visibly agitated and aggressive, furious that black students would have the nerve to challenge their authority. The black administrators were failing at their main job — enforcing racism and keeping black students “in line.”

Watson, who is black, serves the CSU trustees, who serve the capitalist class. Their system is in crisis. The bosses’ profits are in danger. Tax revenues are falling because workers can’t get jobs. Meanwhile, Gov. Quinn, supported by Democrats and Republicans, plans to give a $250 million tax break to Sears, the Board of Trade and The Mercantile Exchange while keeping $15 million slated for CSU.

This is a racist attack on black and Latino students (the vast majority at CSU). In capitalist society bosses only fund education when it is profitable. In a communist society, workers and students will work together to educate all of us so that we can better serve the working class.

‘Don’t Follow the Rules’

When administrators tried to take over the occupation and make excuses, faculty members and students insisted the administrators step back and listen, just as the faculty was doing. Later a student representative to the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the dean of student affairs attacked ISU for failing to work through “proper channels.” A communist teacher replied that the best thing about the occupation was that it did not follow the channels that keep students under the thumb of the administration. He said that the occupation and the students’ anger about being disrespected was an assertion of power and of self-respect, the essence of working-class democracy.

We in PLP congratulate CSU students for breaking the rules. We encourage students to resist any efforts of the racist black administrators to use nationalism to try to win students’ support — “don’t mess up our black thing.” We urge ISU to continue to break rules and empower other students and to adopt a broader social justice perspective, progressing from airing grievances to striking at racism and other injustices at the core of capitalism