NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — More than 600 members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 demonstrated before the Sheraton Hotel on the first day of official negotiations between city transit workers and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Local 100 president John Samuelson said there’s no midnight strike deadline on January 15 when the current contract expires.

City transit workers are directly up against Wall Street’s rulers. Bankers and wealthy investors of MTA bonds drain more than $2 billion a year directly out of the $11 billion-a-year MTA budget, forcing service cuts, layoffs and fare increases.

All the transit bosses’ attacks hit the majority black, Latino and immigrant workers and riders the hardest. Now the racist bosses want a three-year wage freeze, $6,000-a-year per worker for healthcare, and elimination of the conductor title.

The most important action transit workers can take to fight the racist bosses is to organize a rank-and-file, multi-racial group of women and men that both prepares for a strike while spreading communist ideas as the solution for workers’ problems.

The MTA’s attacks on transit workers and riders are a natural organic part of capitalism. These attacks can’t be fixed by taxing the rich, regulating the banks, improving campaign finance rules or working with a “nice” MTA boss. The entire political system, including the promotion and appointment of the MTA heads, was created by and for the rich.

Bosses’ Dictatorship Cannot Be ‘Improved’

Capitalism is not a democratic system that “needs to be improved.” It’s a bosses’ dictatorship that needs to be smashed and replaced with workers’ power. Only in a communist society can workers make transit decisions and work for the world’s working classes’ needs, with no profit, money or bosses.

The 2005 transit walkout, despite being sold out, showed that black, Latino and immigrant-led workers can bring the racist city bosses to their knees. Today hundreds of thousands of workers in city unions are looking to Local 100 to set a pattern of gains in these hard times, particularly the smaller ATU (Amalgamated Transit Union) locals that have stalled negotiations with the MTA.

The “Occupy” movements have targeted attention on Wall Street bankers and politicians that serve the rich. But a transit strike would hit the bosses where it hurts: in their wallets.

Although Samuelson did not rule out a strike — telling the NY Daily News, “I think the public support that the union did enjoy in 2005 will have grown dramatically if we were to strike in 2011” — he has made working with politicians to increase public funds for transit his main strategy for winning a decent contract. Yet for more than 20 years New York State and local lawmakers of both parties starved the MTA of tax dollars, funneled MTA revenues to Wall Street through “debt-service” schemes and continue to make public-sector workers’ strikes illegal.

Obama Freezes Wages

TWU backed Obama who, a year ago, froze wages for federal workers — the largest employer of black workers nationally with 21% of all employed black workers. This was months before attacks against public workers in Wisconsin. Samuelson says politicians like Obama, responsible for such attacks on workers, are people we can work with to gain a winning contract!

The Progressive Labor Party advocates rank-and-file strike preparations: start a campaign for personal strike savings; mobilize Local 100 members for demonstrations; and organize safety/work-to-rule slowdowns. Throughout history transit workers made gains with mass militant class struggle, even during rough economic times.

The 1980 transit strike, during a nation-wide economic downturn, lasted 11 days. Transit workers won full amnesty from the fascist no-strike Taylor law before they returned to work.

During the Great Depression and massive racist unemployment, the anti-police brutality rebellion in Harlem in March 1935 pushed city subway bosses to hire civil service titles regardless of color, winning the first mass wave of employment for black transit workers.

During the same Depression, the 1937 Brooklyn sit-down strike saw hundreds of transit workers occupy their job site at the Kent Ave. power station and won legal recognition for the then communist-led TWU in NYC.

Despite the strength of militant class struggle under capitalist rule, gains can be — and are — taken away. We are experiencing that today with attacks on public-sector unions: 1,000 layoffs, delays in our raises and the MTA’s current concession demands. Racist imperialist oil wars that only benefit the capitalist class have killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and drained federal transit funding. The bosses’ racist unemployment and anti-immigrant terror laws target employed black, Latino and immigrant workers for cuts and super-exploitation.

To achieve victories that the bosses can’t take away, transit workers must combine militant fight-back with building a powerful, revolutionary communist PLP that can lead the working class to challenge and eventually overthrow the bosses, no matter how difficult this coming contract struggle may become.

MEXICO — The “war on drugs” reveals that capitalism means death, violence and terror for the working class. It has allowed the ruling class to turn most of Mexico into a militarized police state. These attacks are felt most by working-class youth, who also experience huge unemployment. The few jobs that can still be found don’t provide social security and the miserable salaries range from 400 to 600 pesos per week (US $31 to $46).

Access to education is constantly shrinking; the government has slashed the budget for education and health and funneled the money to the police and the army. Youth have lost faith and many have been swept up to fight the war, either as hired guns or in the police and military. Thousands have died in this war.

The military and police state terrorizes workers and violently represses any resistance. This is the fascist face of bourgeois democracy. The war on drugs hasn’t reduced the profits of drug cartels, estimated at $40 billion dollars a year, a good part of which enters the country’s financial system.

This ongoing militarization is also part of a fascist strategy to guarantee control over the natural resources in case of an eventual privatization of oil, gas and water, and the further privatization of the electrical supply. Industries that provide services, such as telecommunications. They are the focus of intense conflict between national and foreign capitalists.

The next national elections will take place in the context of this war and of major conflicts among the capitalists over the control of resources. All the candidates represent one section or another of the wealthy class. As workers we have nothing to gain supporting any of them. Quite the contrary, we must fight against them. U.S. rulers’ support of some of these candidates is still essential to their ability to get elected.

As in previous years, there will be electoral fraud. If that fails, then there will be military and police actions. In addition to official public and private financing of electoral parties, millions of dollars will be contributed as part of a money-laundering scheme. Candidates will have to respond not only to the millionaires who finance them, but also to the interests of the drug lords.

Workers here are angry with the government, but many still believe that elections are the only way to bring about changes. Some are apathetic about the struggle and choose to make individual efforts just to get by; some hold several jobs where they are super-exploited. Ultimately, the electoral farce and individualism are dead-ends.

We workers have an alternative to win our liberation: we must be part of an organized communist party, not a bosses’ electoral party. Capitalism, the system that exploits us and kills our young people, cannot be changed by elections. It must be destroyed by millions of organized, class-conscious workers, ready to build a new communist society.

Join a Progressive Labor Party study-action group. Join the struggle for a communist society, for the emancipation of the working class. Let’s turn the war against working-class youth into a class war against capital.

PARIS, November 23 — The working class here is reeling as one austerity plan after another destroys social gains won through generations of bitter class struggle. But the trade union misleadership, having lost last year’s battle to save retirement pensions, is marching workers straight into another Waterloo (British defeat of the French).

On November 18, five union confederations issued a call for workers nation-wide to rally on December 13 to protest the government’s austerity plans. In the build-up to that demonstration, they’re urging workers to “question the government and elected officials” — a give-away of their election treadmill aims.

With presidential elections five months away, the union misleaders are walking a thin line. They want to organize just enough action to mobilize workers to vote for Socialist Party candidate François Hollande. But they also want to avoid any disruption of French society that might cost the Socialists the elections.

Sellouts Control Workers’ Anger

This is a mirror image of last year’s losing kid-glove approach, in which 24-hour strikes were held at six-week intervals so that workers’ anger remained controllable.

On September 7, the National Assembly adopted a 12-billion-euro austerity plan (US$16 billion), followed by a November 16 vote on a new 7-billion-euro austerity plan (US$9.3 billion), now being debated in the French Senate.

The new plan includes higher taxes for 86% of the population, cutting health and welfare benefits further and forcing people to work one year longer before retiring and until 67 for a full pension. Even subsidies to associations providing services to elementary school children are being axed.

These austerity plans are racist in that they fall most heavily on immigrant workers — most of whom are of North African or sub-Saharan African origin — and are disproportionately among the poorest workers in France

All these measures are being taken to satisfy the finance capitalists, who worry that the government will be unable to pay back the money they’ve lent it. And a third austerity plan may be in the works.

On November 8, the day following the announcement of the second austerity plan, Natixis, the corporate and investment banking arm of the BPCE group (the country’s second-biggest banking corporation) complained that the plan is based on “overly-optimistic” estimates of economic growth and reduction of government spending.

This drive to make the working class pay for the rulers’ economic crisis mirrors world capitalism’s inevitable “solution” to its problems: make the workers take the losses — “inevitable” because all these recurrent crises grow directly from all bosses’ drive for maximum profits to “stay ahead of the competition.”

The inter-imperialist rivalry for control of resources and cheap labor has had a particularly devastating effect on the billions of workers worldwide who are forced to exist on starvation wages of a dollar or two a day. Only communist revolution can end the profit-system’s horrors.

As the tailspin of the world capitalist economy continues, the old recipes of the union misleaders are being revealed for the poison that they are. Now’s the time for new communist leadership to orient workers’ struggle away from reformist electioneering and pro-boss trade unionism and towards anti-capitalist revolution.

BRONX, NEW YORK, November 28 — For the past month, Occupy the Bronx, one of the offshoots of the main Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, has met every Saturday morning, providing further evidence that the anti-Wall Street sentiment is shared by large sections of the working class. The largely black and Latino group here expresses the same outrage and anger at bankers and bosses that is found on Wall Street. PL has been participating in the group’s activities, attempting to bring communist analysis and leadership into the darkness of reform and pacifism that limits this movement.

Perhaps the primary weakness in OWS is its lack of understanding of how racism is essential to capitalist inequality. In the Bronx, the links between racism and unemployment, poor education, and inadequate health care are more obvious.  But even here, the task of bringing communist or even anti-racist ideas to the forefront is not necessarily any easier. For one thing, the leadership of the Bronx group is straight from OWS, and they’ve brought the same organizational style with them. Called “direct democracy,” it is actually a strategy to block radical motions and stifle revolutionary ideas. Also prominent is vague, idealistic thinking, typified by slogans like “the power of the people” and “This is what democracy looks like.” While they sound good, these slogans leave the working class unprepared to confront our class enemy.

Idealism versus Materialism

Idealism says that thoughts and ideas are the most important things, and that they determine our material reality, the way we live. The opposite of idealism is materialism, which says that the way we live (including social relationships between workers and bosses or protesters and cops) determine the ideas that we have. To put it simply: Positive thinking, by itself, will never stop the police from attacking us. It will never stop capitalists from exploiting us. Materialist philosophy calls for a deep understanding of the role played by the police and politicians in maintaining capitalism — and the extent to which the ruling class will go to maintain its class rule.   

It is unclear how the recent attack by Mayor Bloomberg and the cops to clear OWS from Zuccotti Park will affect Occupy the Bronx and other offshoots in New York. Whatever happens, we will continue to participate in the group. Our first goal is to correct our major weakness: to begin to distribute CHALLENGE to the Occupiers.

We are involved in various “working groups,” including one on education and another called the “think tank,” where we try to bring communist ideas into the group. We are meeting people who are completely fed up. They are looking for answers and finding reformist, dead-end, idealist solutions. CHALLENGE will help us transform the idealistic struggle against Wall Street and corporate greed and into the materialist struggle against the profit system and for communism.