LOS ANGELES — “There is no ‘we’ that includes the U.S. government and working people.” A member of the political action committee of our organization spoke in favor of a resolution for the U.S. to withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately.  She continued:

“The politicians who make decisions represent U.S. corporations who are fighting to control the resources, markets, and investment opportunities necessary to make profits. Workers in the U.S. are losing their homes, their medical insurance, their jobs, their civil liberties. Do you really believe the same corporate interests that are screwing us will bring peace and prosperity to Iraq and Afghanistan? They haven’t brought it to New Orleans.”

The resolution stated that the U.S. is in the Middle East and Central Asia to compete with other capitalist powers for control of oil, gas, and pipeline routes, and not to build infrastructure, establish human rights or build schools for girls.

More than 30 people participated in a lively discussion of the resolution. Some of it went like this:

Against: Obama has so many opponents, we need to support him.

For: Why should we support Obama when he is doing what we attacked Bush for doing? Obama has given hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall St. banks and little or nothing to working people. Obama’s Secretary of Defense is Robert Gates, who was Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

Against: If the U.S. withdraws without defeating the Taliban, it will encourage terrorists all over the world. And other countries, such as Iran and China, will move in.

For: We are equally opposed to all imperialists, but as working people living in the U.S. we have a special responsibility to fight against “our own” imperialists. U.S. bosses try to suck us into blaming Iran and China for our problems. We should do everything we can to encourage our fellow workers in those countries to attack “their own” imperialists. As for terrorists, the biggest terrorist in the world is the U.S. military, which kills, wounds, and terrorizes Iraqi and Afghan civilians every day.

The resolution passed by a large majority, and the committee also decided to start a weekly protest against the wars. Those who voted for the resolution have compassion for the ordinary Iraqis and Afghans who are suffering and dying under U.S. occupation, and they want the men and women in the U.S. military to return to their families and a better future.

Many who voted for it did not fully agree with our class analysis of society. Some argued, for example, that the U.S. should follow Greg Mortenson’s (author of Three Cups of Tea) model of promoting peace by building schools. Others suggested the U.S. was in Iraq and Afghanistan mainly to support the “military-industrial complex,” and the solution was instead to build schools, hospitals and infrastructure at home.

This fight will be expanded as we try to pass the resolution at the full local meeting and at the national meeting of our organization. We will continue the struggle by working to educate people about the imperialist nature of these wars. Our plan is to win people to go to the weekly protests on the basis of agreement with aspects of our political line, including opposing racist unemployment.

Since the meeting, we won several friends to participate in the rally against Nazis at city hall, although the members of the mass organization were not ready for that step. We hope that we will be able to win these friends to more militant action as we build stronger friendships and expand our monthly CHALLENGE readers’ group. Our goal is to win these readers to join PLP in the fight for communism. J



PARIS, April 17 — Striking undocumented workers and their supporters rallied outside city hall here today as their strike entered its seventh month. Most of the 6,000 strikers are from Africa and work in construction, the restaurant trade and as guards.

They’re demanding general “legalization” according to “improved and simplified criteria that are the same everywhere in France.” Presently, “legalization” is decided arbitrarily and on a case-by-case basis by the 100 French prefectures. Estimates of the number of undocumented workers in France run from 200,000 to 400,000.

On April 1, Immigration Minister Eric Besson said he had no intention of easing “legalization” criteria: five years in France, one year of steady employment at a company promising to employ the worker for an additional year, and in a sector where there is “a shortage of native-born workers.”

Ruling Party’s Electoral Defeat
Leads to More Repression

The ruling UMP party and the government were defeated in the March 21 regional elections when the fascist National Front reappeared as a political force. It seems neither the debate on “national identity” nor the immigration minister’s inflexible anti-immigrant and anti-undocumented worker policy was enough to persuade the far right to vote for the UMP party.

Now it appears President Sarkozy’s regime has reacted by veering to the right, hardening its position and increasing repression of immigrants.

On March 24, the workers at the oldest Paris sit-down strike were evicted. Following the March 31 Council of Ministers [Cabinet] meeting, the occupants of the FAF-SAB premises were evicted the next day, and simultaneously the immigration minister announced no change in the anti-immigrant policy.

Strikers’ Victories

Nevertheless, the undocumented workers’ movement has been able to score victories. On March 8, 60 CGT trade unionists accompanied undocumented workers to the STN cleaning company in Aulnay-sous-Bois and forced the boss to promise hiring 28 striking undocumented workers. (This “promise-to-hire” is one precondition for “legalization.”)

On March 17, the Bagatelle restaurant was forced to issue eight promises-to-hire to its striking workers. On March 25, one of the Bouygues construction company’s renovation sites was occupied by undocumented workers and CGT union activists.

On April 1, hundreds of activists opposed the eviction of the undocumented strikers from the FAF-SAB premises for the whole day. Ultimately, the workers were evicted, but the struggle showed the strength of workers’ support for the strikers.

An April 6 editorial in Le Monde, the French “newspaper of record,” called on the government to abandon its policy as “sad and sordid.”

On April 12, a Paris appeals court recognized the right to strike and the right to sit in of the striking undocumented workers employed by Synergie, a temporary work agency.

Trade Union United Front Is Broken

On April 6, the Solidaires trade union confederation announced that it would encourage undocumented strikers to file “individual legalization” requests at the prefecture, without waiting for a new ministerial circular. This was the first break in the united front of 11 associations and trade union organizations supporting the strike.

On April 7 the organizations of the striking undocumented workers discussed the decision and remained unconvinced of its wisdom.

The government can react in two ways to this disunity:

(1) It can “legalize” a certain number of undocumented strikers on a case-by-case basis, the better to refuse all further demands, no new ministerial circular having been issued; or,

(2) It can refuse the requests for “legalization” and deport the undocumented strikers who filed the requests.

In either case, the six-month strike will have been in vain, since the undocumented workers will remain insecure.

The April 9 meeting of the committees of support for the undocumented strikers failed to re-establish unity and asked the 11 trade union organizations and associations for more material help, more means of communication and more initiatives in the struggle, all of which would help win across-the-board, not case-by-case “legalization.”

Presently, the undocumented strikers are torn between uncertainty and the possibility of victory. The strike has gone on too long for some, and some are discouraged. Many strikers have lost their jobs and their housing, unable to pay their rent. They expected a tough fight, but thought they would win mass “legalization” by the end of 2009.

Need for Communist Class
Consciousness

Another important factor in this strike is the development of revolutionary class consciousness. This means winning the strikers and their supporters to see the big picture, that the strike — as historic as it certainly is — is only one battle in a much greater fight: the struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish communism, a system in which the workers run society by and for themselves. Winning workers to this perspective guarantees that, however many battles we may lose, we will be on the road to winning the class war. J



SEYNE-SUR-MER, FRANCE, April 19 — The 120 Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) workers won a victory of sorts today in their struggle for a separation bonus (see CHALLENGE, 4/28).

The workers were demanding a 15,000-euro separation bonus (a total of 1,800,000 euros — $2,250,000) and a fund to tide them over until unemployment benefits kick in.

On April 17, a majority of the workers’ general assembly voted to end the one-week sit-down strike and lift the threat to burn down the factory after the prefect in Toulon promised to free up 450,000 euros for job training and to speed up the payment of unemployment benefits. Those measures were finalized today at a round-table meeting with the trade unions.

This, of course, is far less than what the workers were demanding, but they would have got nothing if they had not taken militant action. Only organizing for communist revolution can get workers off the treadmill of fighting for — and accepting — crumbs from the bosses’ table.

[Correction — PIP is owned by the U.S. company Heritage Worldwide, Inc., not Falic Fashion Group, as previously reported. CHALLENGE regrets the error.] J

“The Hurt Locker,” winner of six academy awards, follows a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. William James, Owen Eldridge and J.T. Sanborn are members of a U.S. Army “Bravo” EOD unit. They contend not only with defusing bombs but the insurgency of the “enemy.” Advertised as a suspenseful picture, which is “near perfect,” audiences know in advance that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have killed many U.S. soldiers and thousands more Iraqis. Bigelow sets us up in a “perfect” omission of the reason for the U.S. Army being there in the first place. Soldiers are portrayed as life-saving heroes.

A quote that begins the film is from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by war correspondent  Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The final scene, where James begins his new turn of hundreds of days, to leave his son and wife, speaks to irrational reenlistment. But the implied reasons for his returning to this war are much more compelling: the Iraqis are portrayed as the real fanatics and James as a complex character.

James is no stereotypical junkie-addict to violence. He forms a bond of affection with an Iraqi boy.  He has a “good marriage” and a child of his own. He comes within inches of sacrificing his own life to save that of an Iraqi man who is unwillingly locked into a suicide bomb jacket. His only Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome seems to be that of compulsively wanting to return to the thrill of performing a useful, highly-skilled humanitarian mission. His motivation could as well come from the exhilarating feeling of being extremely productive, emphasizing a human element that begs for some meaning or purpose in life. 

The film obliterates the real history of imperialist war. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers murdered by the Clinton “sanctions” of the 1990s and the U.S. decade-long war of aggression are nowhere to be found. The imperialist drive to control oil resources is not an Oscar-winning subject.

Two scenes in particular highlight the insidious message of the film. Iraqis, in the very beginning, are shown to be as unpredictable an enemy as the IED’s. They watch, portrayed as a potentially dangerously vigil in the wreckage of Baghdad, surrounding the Bravo Unit as it attempts to “secure a safe street.” Iraqis become ominous, dismissing the reality that it is that country the soldiers are occupying.

A second more powerful episode occurs when a pitiful, unwilling “suicide bomber” pleads for his life so that he can return to his family. He is literally padlocked into his jacket filled with explosives so that he cannot escape. In one frozen moment, he is the symbol for many suicide bombers who are victims of a terrorist minority (or a sick Iraqi society) rather than motivated people intent on driving the U.S. invaders out. While terrorism as a political modus operandi serves only to murder the innocent, the terrorist acts of U.S. army officers, pilots of bombers and robot plane technicians upon civilian Iraqi’s, Afghanistan and Pakistan people never enter the lens of the director’s camera.

The message the media industry wishes to convey is that Oscars make a film worth seeing, and that enlisting in a cause worth fighting for can be satisfying as well as addictive enough for re-upping that enlistment.   Hollywood is not interested in the communist motivation that empowered millions in the red armies of the USSR and China to smash fascism during World War II.

The history of working classes with communist leadership who have challenged capitalist wars of profit are left out entirely.  Instead, we are encouraged to identify with the individualist acts of one soldier who appears to resolve the problems of war by dismantling one explosive device at a time. Hollywood can only offer mind-numbing defenses of U.S. wars of aggression from Rambo and The Deer Hunter (a racist Oscar-winning movie that portrayed Vietnamese workers as crazy gambling killers of U.S. “innocent” soldiers) to Blackhawk Down and now “The Hurt Locker.”