WASHINGTON, November 12 — PL’ers held an Anti-Capitalism Teach-in at Occupy DC in order to sharpen the debate around the movement’s political analysis and strategies for change. Three long-term occupiers had attended a PLP study-action group and encouraged us to do this. Almost all of the fifty occupiers and friends at this event had previously received CHALLENGE.
Presenters stated that capitalism is based on exploitation and racism. They explained how its internal contradictions, due to the impoverishment of the workers by the ruthless drive for profit by the bosses, creates periodic depressions. They also argued that the state (the government) is a tool of the capitalist system. It must be smashed, not reformed.
Smash the State
Capitalism must be replaced, they continued, with a communist system where the international working class collectively runs society, planning production based on workers’ needs and liberating the creativity of the billions of wage slaves on the planet. Presenters noted that communists work strategically in all kinds of mass organizations to bring these ideas to broad groups of people, but that special emphasis is put on industrial workers, like the transit workers in DC. The temporary shutdown of the Port of Oakland, for example, could not have happened without the longshore workers.
There are lots of different views among the occupiers, which came out in the discussion following the presentations. Some argued that campaign reform, especially a constitutional amendment to bar corporate contributions to campaigns, would let the elected representations genuinely represent the people. PL’ers responded that the state is part of the capitalist system and controlled by the bosses, and that no reform could change that fact.
Others argued that withdrawing from the capitalist economy by setting up alternative communities, like the occupy sites, was a sound strategy to create a new society. PL’ers countered that until we gain state power, it’s better to organize on the job to confront the bosses at the point of production.
These debates went on for some time, and will certainly continue at Occupy DC. The validity of our analysis and politics is already gaining traction among some occupiers, and could be demonstrated in the coming period as the crisis of capitalism deepens and the repression and racism by the state intensifies.
BALTIMORE, November 14 — A Progressive Labor Party tent is now part of Occupy Baltimore at McKeldin Square. On our second night there, a red flag was mounted high on a light pole near PL’s tent. Some of the occupiers, who have stayed at the square overnight for many weeks, inquired about the flag’s meaning. PL members replied that it stands for communism. They explained that red is the communist color, in honor of the thousands whose blood was spilled when the Paris Commune — the first time workers took power, in 1871 — was attacked and defeated by capitalists.
The PL’ers pointed out that these Communards took bold steps toward equality. They made a rule, for example, that leaders could have no more resources than ordinary workers, and that leaders could be immediately recalled if they failed to serve the working class. At the end of this conversation, the folks who asked about the red flag were respectful and pleased. They saw the flag as a worthy addition to the occupation.
‘When We Fought the Nazis, You Had Our Back!’
Earlier on, PL members had given three revolutionary communist speeches at various occupation events. After one of those speeches, a listener approached a Party comrade, gave him a big hug, and said, “You may not remember, but ten years ago when we fought the Nazis, you had our back!”
One issue of CHALLENGE has been widely distributed at the occupation. With our tent, and more ongoing PL participation within the movement, CHALLENGE will certainly be read by many at McKeldin Square. To up the ante, the Baltimore PL club recently made plans to organize a Party-led, communist study group session at the occupation. Young comrades have taken the responsibility to make this happen. Our planned topic will be how to defeat the 1%. In other words, PL members will be winning workers and youth closer to the understanding that violent revolution is necessary, and that the communist PLP must be built to provide leadership in that struggle.
One of the occupiers, who has been sleeping at the square since the beginning, volunteered to help Party members put up the red flag. This friendly neighbor said he had no problem putting up a communist flag because our perspective, he said, is the most conservative point of view among Occupy Baltimore activists.
In reality, the opposite is true. Fighting for communism is actually the most revolutionary, winning strategy. This conversation served as a reminder that the death of the old communist movement has left many workers, students, and soldiers discouraged. They think communism can’t work. But PL has looked carefully at the strengths and mistakes of the old communist movement. We have learned much from the heroic experience of those who came before us. Without question, the working class and its revolutionary Party will sooner or later smash capitalism and build a truly egalitarian world!
LOS ANGELES, November 5 — PL here helped plan a teach-in at Occupy LA titled “Building Working Class Unity – Racism and the Economic Crisis.” We discussed the racist nature of capitalism and argued that racism is the main ideological tool the U.S. ruling class uses to keep working-class people divided and unable to build enough power to fight back. If we are going to build a revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism, we are going to have to start by addressing racism.
We also provided examples of specific forms of racism, such as the recent rise of anti-immigrant policies like the Secure Communities program, which checks prison inmates’ legal status to increase deportation rates. Other examples included the media’s role in building anti-Arab racism and the historical nature of anti-black racism which was key to the birth of capitalism and continues to be critical to the survival of the system.
We held the teach-in at a space occupied by the People’s University Collective (PUC) which is organized by high school teachers in Los Angeles. Participation at the teach-in was good and led to sharp discussions over the racist nature of the system. The teach-in ended with many asking “What do we do next?” Several friends from our schools and workplaces attended the event, which impressed the PUC organizers who recently asked us to come back.
The teach-in on racism is a step forward in PL’s work at Occupy LA. The teach-in also took place a few days after PL helped initiate and lead a march against police brutality in solidarity with the students and workers in Oakland, California who have been under attack by the police (see CHALLENGE, 11/16). The next steps will be to figure out how we can better use our actions at Occupy LA to win students and workers to the idea that we need a Party organization like PL to lead our working-class sisters and brothers in the fight for communism.J
NEWARK, NJ — “Occupy Rutgers! Occupy Newark! Occupy the world!” These words rang throughout the Rutgers University campus. This was the first rally as part of the Occupy movement that is sweeping across the U.S. and many parts of the globe. Students at this multiracial working-class campus have plenty of concerns. Tuition is high; student debt has skyrocketed; the financial aid office is poorly organized and abusive; graduating students face the worst job market in many years.
Some students just keep slogging on, not daring to think about the larger implications of the situation they face. But the Occupy movement is attracting students who insist on seeing the big picture, and doing something about it.
The were a number of these new activist-students, a community organizer from the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), and a Marxist professor who described herself as an “unreconstructed 60s radical,” delighted to see students in motion once again.
There are real strengths of the Occupy movement that can be extended and deepened:
Occupy calls into question the sanctity of private property and the law. Why should Wall Street exist at all? Why should capitalist-run governments dictate where and when people express their political views?
The slogan of “we are the 99%” has the advantage of overcoming the divisions — between employed and unemployed, U.S.-born and “foreign-born,” as well as among different “races” — upon which capitalism thrives.
More occupiers recognize the great majority of workers in the United States designated as “middle class” are in fact working class. As one speaker at the rally asserted, to cheers, “The notion that we are all ‘middle-class’ is bull****!”
While the level of energy at the rally was high, there needs to be sharp political analysis of the potential pitfalls of the Occupy movement. These include:
An inadequate analysis of economic inequality that focuses on issues such as the under-taxation of corporations and very wealthy individuals. While it is true that the bosses get away like bandits, contributing less than ever to the public, the fundamental basis of inequality is the exploitation of labor.
The need to understand that capitalism is a system of class rule, not just an “economic” system that can be corrected or controlled through a supposedly democratic “political” system. Capitalism is, as Marx pointed out, the dictatorship of the owners of the means of production.
While the Occupy movement is fraught with peril, readily open to misleadership by the liberals in the ruling class using electoral politics, it has prompted many young people to think deeply about the real reasons for poverty, racism and war.
Bosses Aim to Pacify Occupy Wall Street
As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) helps to sow mass anger against the billionaires, the liberal wing of the United States ruling class is working full-tilt to make sure that it does not boil over and out of control. On October 12, a group of about fifty protesters toured the Upper East Side of Manhattan, stopping to rally before the homes of some of the ruling class’s biggest billionaires: Rupert Murdoch, David Koch, Howard Milstein (chief executive of Emigrant Savings Bank), and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. They made their final stop at hedge-funder John Paulson’s 86th Street townhouse, just east of Fifth Avenue.
The disciplined marchers chanted, “They got bailed out, we got sold out!” Led by Michael Kink, a veteran Democratic Party operative and shill, they brandished a dozen oversized foamboard checks in the amount of five billion dollars, “paid to the order of the top 1%” and drawn on “the 99%.” (The $5 billion, according to Kink’s Stronger Economy for All Coalition, will revert back to the rich if the New York State millionaire’s tax is allowed to lapse at the end of this year.)
A former Legal Aid attorney, Kink currently works as a chief policy adviser and senior counsel to Democrats in the New York State Legislature. The bosses can trust him to lead a demonstration through the heart of a prime residential district, knowing that he would confine any protest within the legal limits. Kink did not let them down. He called the suffocating police presence along the march route “very positive,” less than a week after hundreds were netted and dragged away on the Brooklyn Bridge amid indiscriminate beatings and pepper-spray attacks. Kink is the liberal bosses’ stooge.
At each fat cat’s home on Kink the Fink’s harmless tour, the demonstrators laid their symbolic checks on the front doorsteps of this or that billionaire. Revolutionary justice would have dragged those billionaires out of their plush apartments and put them before workers’ tribunals for their crimes: engineering an economy based on racist unemployment; waging imperialist war; wrecking the global environment for profit. In mass uprisings as old as class society itself, rulers have been eliminated without mercy; in the 20th century, workers under communist leadership in Russia and China disposed of their ruling classes. Eventually, however, these socialist revolutions degraded into state capitalism because of their failure to eliminate the profit system, the system still in place worldwide today.
Wars to carve the world into spheres of interest are, as the Russian communist leader Lenin said, the ultimate expression of capitalists’ drive for wealth and power. The billionaires’ imperialist wars are primarily paid for by taxes on the working class; that’s the way Presidents Kennedy and Johnson funded the genocide in Vietnam, and how the Bushes bankrolled their invasions of Iraq. The profit system cannot be reformed. Only its eradication through communist revolution will put an end to the bosses’ sickening slaughters.
OWS is far from reaching this understanding, but the ruling class is growing nervous over mass anger against their rigged system. They want to control this new political phenomenon and keep it within the tight bounds of the electoral politics. Meanwhile, the New York Times highlights dead-end debates between OWS reformists and Latino nationalists. Its narrow reportage shows how hard the bosses are working to build racism and undermine worker unity. Mainstream reporters are finks, too.
Nothing is more threatening to the bosses than multi-racial unity against racist super-exploitation. To the extent that black, Latino and immigrant workers do not join OWS protests across the country, the movement will be less dangerous to capitalism. The OWS manifesto begins with the words, “As one people, formerly divided by the color of our skin, we acknowledge the reality: there is only one race, the human race.” This is an important and positive statement, but OWS leaders have failed to take it far enough. Michael Fink and his reformist cronies own a vested interest in the status quo. They target the excesses and corruption of capitalism, but stop short of indicting the system itself. They lack something fundamental: a class analysis of racism and inequality.
History demonstrates that racism is essential to capitalism’s very existence. The wealth of the U.S. ruling class was rooted in the genocide of Native Americans and the holocaust of the Atlantic slave trade, followed by lynch law segregation. It industrialized by employing massive state violence and child labor against a workforce of new immigrants. It consolidated its global dominance in World War II, culminating in the racist incineration of Japanese workers and children with firebombs and nuclear weapons.
But the bosses’ power is not absolute. Under anti-racist, communist leadership, workers have waged epic struggles against racism and fascism, from the Scottsboro campaign to defend nine black youths framed for rape in the Jim Crow South to the Soviet communists’ annihilation of the Nazi Germany war machine. Since its beginning 50 years ago, PL has waged its own successful struggles against the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis.
Kink’s Stronger Economy For All has three demands: extension of the state’s millionaire’s tax; “real job growth” through infrastructure projects, and the restoration of funding cuts to education and other social services. These reforms will likely become central planks in the Democratic Party push to retain the White House and shore up U.S. interests in a period of sharpening international rivalries.
As imperialist war inevitably widens across the Middle East and beyond (see editorial page 2), a shaky U.S. empire will need enthusiastic citizens to support a military draft and to kill and die for the bosses. Only a sharp class analysis of the true nature of “the 1%” will lead the masses to the one conclusion that the bosses’ can’t hijack or repackage: that “the 99%” needs communism
