TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, August 12 — Fifteen students and workers organized the first ever PLP Summer Project in Palestine/Israel. Throughout the project we met with students and workers who were fighting house demolitions (see CHALLENGE, 8/17/11); daycare workers fighting sexist exploitation (see CHALLENGE, 11/3/10); and participated in rallies and demonstrations protesting declining living standards of Jewish and Arab workers and students. We received a friendly reception when we distributed PLP literature in Hebrew and Arabic.

The Project not only inspired many of us to continue to fight for one international party but also validated our line: racism hurts all workers. Capitalists can divide workers politically as well as maximize profits by exploiting some sections of the working class and super-exploiting others. Here the Israeli ruling class exploits Jewish workers while super-exploiting Arab workers.

Destroy Arab Workers’ Homes and Then Charge Them for the Demolition!

The government confiscates Israeli citizens’ lands, justifying this by claiming that the Arab residents created extensions to the houses “without the proper permits,” making them “unsafe.” Israeli cops then evict the people and demolish their houses. And then they often charge the former residents for the demolition of their own homes!

This has occurred all over Palestine/Israel, from Jaffa to Lod to the West Bank. According to the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, since 1967 the Israeli government has demolished nearly 25,000 homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, besides thousands of other homes in other areas.

Those able to resist demolition are forced to live in miserable conditions, without access to basic food, running water and jobs. In areas where Arabs live near Jewish settlers, the Israeli government is constructing walls to separate the Arab workers from the town centers. Arab workers can only get food and go to work by traveling through a tunnel underground. If there is no Israeli soldier present to unlock the tunnel’s gate, the Arab workers must wait until one gets there (if at all) or else they can’t get to work.

Tent City Demonstrations

While Arab workers in Palestine/Israel definitely face the sharpest attacks from the Israeli ruling class, Jewish workers also suffer from these actions. When we arrived for the Summer Project, young professionals and college students had began pitching tents to protest rising rents and growing inequality here. Within two weeks those six tents turned into demonstrations of over 300,000 Jewish and Arab workers protesting the rising cost of living accompanied by stagnant wages and lack of social services.

These demonstrations are attracting Arab and Jewish workers throughout Israel, making them the largest against the Israeli ruling class in recent history. However, there is little criticism by Jewish workers about the apartheid state that the Israeli government has erected.

According to Avi Shauli from Ynet, Israeli rulers have spent over $50 billion to occupy Gaza and the West Bank (exceeding $700 million annually). In fact, they spend twice as much on the Jewish settlement residents as they do on other Jewish workers (NY Times, 8/3/11).

Fight Against Anti-Arab Racism Crucial to Workers’ Power

These struggles show the strength of PLP’s line on fighting racism. We have always advocated that the fight against racism is the key to uniting the working class and taking state power. Once Jewish workers connect their struggles to those of Arabs living in Palestine, it lays the basis for the working class to move forward towards building for communist revolution. However, Zionist ideas as well as Palestinian nationalism continue to divide the workers.

This is where CHALLENGE plays a big role. In the literature we distributed we cited the importance of Jewish and Arab workers uniting to fight for a worker-run communist state, not fighting for a capitalist one- or two-state “solution.”

We know we have a long way to go in building a communist revolution, but this can happen only if we’re involved in the struggles of the working class. Through this we can win workers to unite and fight for communism. The bosses have created the conditions for this fight. It’s up to us to bring all workers this communist analysis and build PLP in Palestine/Israel.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, August 6 — In a growing resistance to capitalist inequalities, 300,000 workers and students of all religious and ethnic groups held a mass rally against rising prices in central Tel Aviv. This demonstration was the high point, so far, of the “tent movement” that began two weeks earlier, as it went beyond the initial focus on unaffordable housing to more far-reaching demands that challenged the bosses’ dictatorship.

The backdrop for these protests is the rapidly-rising cost of living and rapidly-deteriorating wages in Israel, as the capitalists’ regime, facing crisis after crisis, tries to milk the last ounce of profit out of the working class. Despite a shortage of decent housing, many real estate developers refrain from developing land they’ve purchased to wait for the price to go up and maximize their profits. And, finally, the workers have had enough.

The protestors’ main slogan was “The People Demand Social Justice,” accompanied by “The People Demand a Welfare State.” Many also denounced the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his “pig-like capitalism” (as if there could be capitalism which isn’t “pig-like”).

There were, however, far more militant slogans in parts of the rally, especially the bloc of the Power to the Workers union and a group of workers of all ethnic groups from Jaffa. Their predominant slogans were “All power to the workers!”; “A workers’ state – not a slave state!”; “The answer to cutbacks: revolution!”; a nd “The people will overthrow the regime!” While this group’s leadership actually meant “reforms” when it said “revolution,” many of the rank-and-file truly want significant change in Israeli society. Some would like the working class to be in power. All in all, they are very open to new ideas about how and where to lead this fight.

Many of these demonstrators clearly see themselves as part of the working class. For decades, the bosses bribed Israeli workers with a few crumbs from their table and convinced them that they were a “middle class” with different interests than those of blue-collar wage slaves. But as these white-collar workers saw their standard of living decline, they came to understand their exploitation by the tiny capitalist class. Now they see their true place in the class system — under the boot of the bosses and their state.

For the first time in many years, masses of Israeli Arabs and Jews marched together against the capitalist government, refusing to let racism divide them. This unity needs to grow even broader. The way forward is to link rising prices to the bosses’ need to expand fascism in the West Bank and Gaza, where racist Israeli settlements get huge government subsidies.

We in the Progressive Labor Party welcome these militant mass protests by the working class. We believe, however, that a reformed “welfare state” cannot bring true social justice. After all, capitalists are constantly driven to maximize profits, and do so by robbing workers and spilling workers’ blood in wars over resources and markets. Our only solution is a communist revolution by the whole working class, which will smash the bosses’ state apparatus and replace it with a new state for the workers, by the workers and of the workers.

Workers produced every item working-class rebels took from shops in English cities. Workers also produce all the Middle East’s energy supplies. So what constitutes real “looting”? Is it a London youth, who may never find a job, grabbing a pair of sneakers? Or is it racist British capitalists joining racist U.S. bosses to murder millions in seizing Iraqi and Libyan oil and Afghan gas routes?

The recent rebellions take place in a context of declining U.S-U.K. imperialism. For survival, the depleted British Empire became the U.S.’s junior partner during World War II. Now, rising China, resurgent Russia, and regional powerhouse Iran have the U.S. & Co. on the defensive. So both U.S. and U.K. rulers are implementing an agenda of widening wars overseas and police terror to enforce massive economic attacks on workers domestically.

Since racism is fundamental to capitalism and its drive for super-profits, the racist super-exploitation of black and Asian workers has moved these youth — subjected to the system’s mass racist unemployment and poverty — to openly rebel.

Militant anti-cop uprisings in England come as a mainly healthy reaction to fascist policing. London’s working-class Tottenham district erupted after August 4 when cops gunned down Mark Duggan, a black father of four, on “suspicion” that he had a gun. He, in fact, never displayed one. The rebellion quickly spread to other deprived communities across London, and to the northern cities of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.

But although the killing was a source of anger, it was not the primary cause behind the rampage of thousands of black, Asian and white youth that lasted four days before the heavily-reinforced police could clear the streets. The torching of police cars, police stations and public buildings expressed the pent-up frustration and rage of an alienated generation with no opportunities, gripped by poverty, discrimination and joblessness. Many are the second and third generation of their family without jobs. For some African-Caribbean youth unemployment is as high as 50%. A 2007 UNICEF report found that British and U.S youth had the worst quality of life of 21 developed nations.

“We’re sticking it to the police” yelled one  woman, “and to the rich” she added. A Tottenham protestor who appeared on a radio show described the events as, “A war against injustice.”

Their fury against the rich echoed the anger most Britons have against the bankers who paid themselves huge bonuses after taking government bailouts and of the blatant looting by politicians of public funds for their private expenses last year. One of the most notorious cases involved the member of parliament who took £80,000 ($130,000) of tax-payer money to subsidize his second home. This year’s scandal of police officials taking bribes from the Murdoch news organization has only added fuel to the fire.

Even the right-wing Telegraph newspaper (8/8/11) had to admit legitimate grievances, “Tottenham’s unemployment is still among the highest in London. Black people are far more likely to be stopped and searched by the Met [Metropolitan Police] than whites.”

Despite the media focus on burning stores, the so-called riots’ main aspect was black, white and Asian working-class youth uniting in fierce battles against the killer cops. The Independent (London, 8/14/11) quoted one terrified cop, “We could hear time after time on our radios, ‘Officer down,’ ‘Officer injured’ and we knew it was bad.”

Actually, that’s pretty good, given London cops’ reputation for racist brutality. The protests’ weakness, however, lies, not in violence (which was unfocused at times) but the lack of a communist movement with the goal of destroying the profit system, the root cause of workers’ ills.

Bosses’ Media Ignore Libya
Massacre for London Blazes

Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, who has never done a day’s work in his life, jetted back from vacationing in Tuscany to decry workers’ “criminality” spreading across his country. But the real criminals are “NATO’s air-strikes [on August 8th] at Majer [in Libya which] killed 85 people, including 33 children, 32 women and 20 men. Reporters and visitors were shown 30 of the bodies in a local morgue, including a mother and two children” (Counterpunch, 8/14/11).

Seeking access to Libyan oil unfettered by dictator Khadafy, British (along with French and Italian) bosses avail themselves of U.S. weapons and leadership. NATO supreme commander, U.S. admiral Stavridis, runs the Libya operation.

While London Burns, Oil Wars Enrich U.K. Bosses

And in Iraq, British rulers’ staunch military support for U.S.-led genocide pays off big time, though stability may never arrive. (On August 14, 42  coordinated attacks in ten cities killed 96 Iraqis and wounded 315.) “Iraq’s oil auctions were portrayed as a model of transparency and a negotiating victory for the Iraqi government,” said Greg Muttitt, author of “Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq,” quoted in the London Observer (7/31/11): “Now we see the reality was the opposite: a backroom deal that gave BP a stranglehold on the Iraqi economy, and even influence over the decisions of OPEC.”

British forces based in Basra fought mostly near the vast Rumalia oil field, which BP (British Petroleum) had owned from 1927 to 1972. BP, to nobody’s surprise, won the potentially 3-million-barrel-per day Rumalia contract at the “transparent” 2009-2010 auctions. Now it’s revealed that in the 2011 backroom deal Baghdad must pay BP for oil not even extracted from the wells should renewed warfare or OPEC quotas curb production. As for Afghanistan, British troops have concentrated on Helmand province, through which much of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline may run.

PM Cameron Wants Nazi-style  ‘Community Policing’ in Britain;
Summons U.S. Top Cop Bratton

Just as in the U.S., British imperialists’ war efforts cost vast sums of money. And, just as in the U.S., the rulers get that cash by stealing from workers with sharp, racist cuts in pay, jobs, health, education, pensions, etc. In Britain, mostly urban African, Caribbean and Asian workers (along with poor white native British and Irish) bear the brunt.

To enforce this exploitation, the bosses employ more intense fascist measures. However, Britain’s police establishment is in disarray. Its two top Scotland Yard chiefs were forced to resign amid the Murdoch payoff scandal to squash the media mogul’s bribery of cops. So to head off future rebellions, Cameron is calling in Bill Bratton, formerly top cop in Boston, New York and Los Angeles, to establish sweet-sounding but deadly “community policing.” It resembles the Nazis’ Judenrat scheme, which turned local Jewish leaders into a network of snitches that led millions to the gas chambers.

In Boston, Bratton employed black pastors. According to a 2008 report from Harvard’s Kennedy School, “The ministers...helped the Boston Police manage negative publicity by the local media after several potentially explosive events [such as] the accidental death of a 75-year-old retired minister who suffered a fatal heart attack during a botched drug raid.” Cameron wishes he had agents like these in Tottenham.

Fascism on the Rise

Fascism is being institutionalized. Government laws, surveillance through a vast street camera operation along with Cameron’s deep cuts in social services impoverishing the working class have become the order of the day. Alongside this is the increasing influence of racist organizations like the anti-immigrant British Nationalist Party which recently took over nearly 10% of the local council seats in the extremely-segregated city of Bradford and has gained enough legitimacy to be included in nationally-televised political debates.

However, workers are not giving these fascists a clear path. Last year when the fascist English Defense League, which has held demonstrations against Asians nation-wide, rallied in Bradford, they were confronted by thousands of anti-racists and local residents, both white and Asian.

The rebellions in England hold important lessons in class struggle. They prove that a militant, multi-racial force of workers can take on and beat “highly-trained” cops. They also show the need for a revolutionary communist party and the outlook of seizing state power for our class, not just winning concessions which capitalism inevitably reverses. (See Verizon strike, p. 3.) Ultimately only revolution led by such a communist party can smash the creators of the world’s largest looting system — capitalism — that gives us police brutality, poverty, mass racist unemployment and war.

NEWARK, NJ, August 13 — Forty five thousand Verizon “wireline” workers struck their bosses last Sunday.  Like the mass uprising of workers in Wisconsin, the decision by Verizon workers to go on strike is a breath of fresh air in the current climate of joblessness and economic crisis. With 25 million adults looking for full-time work, the decision to strike takes courage! We in the Progressive Labor Party salute this courage.

PLP members here have gone to the strike picket lines all this past week. We have brought fellow workers and students with us. We helped lead militant chants on the line of “Shut it down, shut it tight, the bosses can’t profit when the workers unite”; “The workers united will never be defeated” in English and Spanish, and “Make the bosses take the losses.” Many workers took CHALLENGE and a Party flyer analyzing the big picture. Workers clapped when we came back a second time with others. We had great political conversations with workers, and renewed at least one old friendship (see more next issue).

Along with many other bosses, Verizon chiefs are expanding the limits of recent attacks on the working class. Although Verizon posted $22 billion in profits over the past four years, the bosses are demanding $3,000 per year additional health care contributions per worker, the elimination of pensions for new hires, severe cuts on current pensions, givebacks on sick days, etc. As a further insult, Lowell McAdams, Verizon’s CEO, made $20,650 an hour in total compensation in 2007.

This may be a long strike. Like all U.S. capitalists, Verizon bosses are in a dogfight for the number one position against domestic and “foreign” competition. To maximize their profits, Verizon has been downsizing and firing “wireline” workers, while expanding the lower-paid, non-union wireless division. Because the vast majority of Verizon’s profits come from that division, they have viciously opposed union organizing of those workers. A strike in 2000 challenged these anti-worker policies, but the Communication Workers of America (CWA) leadership caved in on unionization demands. Since then, Verizon has vastly expanded their wireless workforce.

CWA union bosses pose this strike as a defense against Republican “attacks on the middle class.” This idea keeps workers from understanding that it is the whole working class that is being forced to pay for the economic crisis of the whole capitalist system and their imperialist wars to control oil and gas overseas.

CWA leaders support Democratic politicians, who pose as friends of the workers, but are actually squeezing us more for the war-makers than the Republicans. Even beating back some of these attacks would take a united, militant strike that shuts down the company’s wireless division and organized mass community support to surround closed worksites. CWA sellouts will oppose these kinds of tactics every step of the way.

PLP members in the Northeast must go to the picket lines with friends, food and drink, leaflets, and CHALLENGEs. We must raise resolutions of support for the strikers in unions, churches, community organizations and student clubs. The international, class-conscious, anti-racist leadership of communists could have a big political effect on the strikers.

The bosses need us, but we don’t need the bosses. They exist to steal the value we produce, which comes only from our class. Nothing operates without us. Wireline workers, who built, build and maintain the Verizon wireless network, can also shut it down. Such an action would be a school for communism.

When the wage slaves of the world come to see our collective strength, no force on earth can stop us. PLP aims to lead that great power towards the overthrow of capitalism, and the advent of a communist system where all the value we produce will be used solely to meet the needs of our class.J

Verizon Pays No Taxes, Steals $12 Billion from Workers

This year Verizon is raking in $6 billion profits and paid a $10 billion dividend to its parent company last year while PAYING NO TAXES! Now, they’re demanding $1 billion in give-backs from the workers who produced this gigantic profit.

Said Citizens for Tax Justice, “Despite earning over $32.5 billion over the last three years, Verizon not only paid nothing in corporate income taxes, it actually received nearly $1 billion...in tax benefits from the federal government during that time,” the same amount as the concessions they’re demanding.

If Verizon paid the official 35% corporate income tax rate, they would have owed $11 billion. So that amount plus the $1 billion govenment subsidy means they’ve stolen $12 billion from tax-paying workers.

Meanwhile, the company’s top five executives grabbed $257 million over the past four years. CEO Lowell McAdam gets $55,000 per day! Capitalism means stealing.