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CHALLENGE, August 12, 2009

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12 August 2009 290 hits
  • From Compton to Hammond to Harlem: Fight Racist Police Terror
  • Obama’s Gates Flip-Flop Serves Racist Rulers’ War Needs
  • Rulers and Harvard Boost Slicker, More Deadly Nazi-Style Policing
  • White Cop, Black Prof Both Agents of Bosses
  • France: Workers’ Threat to Blow Up Machinery Nets $42,000 Each
  • D.C. PL’ers Lead Battle to Fire Criminal Transit Bosses
  • PLP Summer Project Fights Racist Attack by Harlem KKKops
  • PL’ers Lead Mass Protest Against Cal State’s Racist Budget Cuts
  • Chicago ‘Mini-Project’ Backs Transit, Health, School Workers
  • Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’: ‘1199’ Hacks Cut Wages, Pensions to Save Bosses
  • Minimum Wages Produce Maximum Profits

From Compton to Hammond to Harlem:
Fight Racist Police Terror

COMPTON, CA, July 18 — “Avery Cody, Jr.’s murder means, We got to fight back!!!” Chants roared through the city of Compton today at a PLP-led protest against only the latest racist murder by the ruling-class KKKops. A multi-racial group participated: twenty-five PLP Summer Project volunteers and an equal number of workers and their families from the neighborhood, including the victim’s father. The neighborhood responded warmly to PLP’s revolutionary communist analysis that police murders are part of a capitalist system that must terrorize workers to guarantee maximum profits for the bosses.
On July 5, sixteen-year-old Avery Cody, Jr. was coming out of a nearby McDonalds with three friends when they were stopped without cause by sheriffs’ deputies. As Avery was being frisked, he ran and was chased and shot in the back, killing him in broad daylight. The cops claim he had a gun but a video of his murder does not show him holding a gun. Neighbors who witnessed the murder also said he didn’t have a gun. They were never questioned by police.
A friend of the Party told us of the murder, and members of the LA Summer Project responded immediately, visiting the neighborhood with leaflets and CHALLENGE. Neighbors insisted we visit the family, which was holding a family gathering to grieve Avery’s death. There we found scores of people hurt and angry. Their eyes lit up when they heard our calls for fight-back and revolution. In short order, people were calling out, “Bring one of those newspapers over here” and, “What you guys are doing is important.”
As we urged people to fight against this murder, we explained how racist police terror is intimately connected with capitalism as a system. “It’s more than the sheriffs,” we said in discussions and speeches. Black and Latin workers are the targets of police terror because the bosses need racism to squeeze extra profits from the working class. The U.S. ruling class figured out long ago that by paying some groups of workers less than others, they could bring down wages for the entire working class. Now, in the midst of their crisis, as they scramble to bail out their banks and fund their oil wars to compete against rival imperialists like Russia and China, they’re using racism to increase their attacks on all workers through layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, and deep cutbacks in services.
In industries like auto and aerospace, bosses have been eliminating thousands of unionized industrial jobs. At the same time, they’re hiring other, often immigrant workers at a lower, non-union wage. Unemployment for black and Latin workers is double that of white workers. They are also often the first to recognize and fight the bosses’ attacks. Whether LA County Sheriffs, in this case, or LAPD, the police’s job is to try to force workers to accept capitalism, through harassment and outright murder. In a word, it’s called fascism, and it’s up to us to fight back!
The bosses are counting on workers to blame each other for these attacks instead of capitalism. We must never fall for racism! We need one united, fighting working class: citizen and immigrant, union and non-union, black, Latin, Asian and white, women and men.
The ruling class wants us to think we can simply “fix” the police under capitalism. But the police are an arm of the bosses’ state to oppress the working class.
Capitalism produces two opposing classes of people: one tiny minority of bosses who feed off us like vampires, and the mighty working class — the overwhelming majority of the population — that produces everything and is fully capable of running society in its own interest when not divided by racism. Fighting like hell against Avery Cody’s racist murder is part of that struggle to build a movement to smash capitalism once and for all. We have already made plans to follow up with our new friends in the neighborhood as well as raise this issue on our jobs and in our mass organizations. This fight has just begun!

Obama’s Gates Flip-Flop Serves Racist Rulers’ War Needs

Obama’s flip-flop on the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Gates stems from the complicated needs of beleaguered U.S. rulers. On one hand, U.S. capitalists, seeking to make workers pay for their economic crisis, need racism to reap super-profits by attacking one sector of the working class especially hard. Black, Latino and Asian workers suffer layoffs, pay-cuts, foreclosures and evictions at disproportionally high rates, which helps depress conditions for all workers. And they need racist cops to enforce that racism.
But on the other hand, U.S. rulers, with two wars raging and more on the horizon, need a patriotic, loyal working class. U.S. bosses are in the awkward position of having to recruit troops in large measure from among the most exploited workers.
So when initially Obama let slip that the Cambridge, Mass. cops were “stupid” for jailing Gates, and remarked that “the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause casts suspicion of [government],” it partially played to winning this loyalty. But, of course, he and the bosses’ media played up his relationship to his friend Gates as “the main issue,” while Obama never touched on the most devastating effects of racist discrimination: black and Latino workers last hired and first fired, double unemployment and foreclosure rates, poverty wages, destructive education and 70% of the prison population.
However, since Obama’s original comments didn’t serve his bosses’ need for racist exploitation, he was forced to withdraw them and, in effect, praise Cambridge police for adding Gates to a nation-wide wave of unjustified, racist stop-and-frisks, arrests, jailings, beatings and killings by cops. The rulers are caught in this contradiction of needing racism for profits and for dividing the working class but also needing the victims for their wars.
Consequently, while trying to step up cop terror, they seek to cloak it in sheep’s clothing under the seemingly benign name of “community policing.” This anti-worker campaign enlists local support like neighborhood watches for police repression. Begun in earnest in the Clinton era, its chief evangelist, top cop Bill Bratton, has spread the program from Boston to New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

Rulers and Harvard Boost Slicker, More Deadly Nazi-Style Policing

With Harvard’s help, Greater Boston’s local bosses now conduct the most advanced form of community policing. In 1992, a handful of Harvard-trained black pastors founded the Ten Point Coalition as a working alliance between churches and cops, supposedly to curb youth violence, which, they said “must be dealt with as crime, not simply as a symptom of poverty.” (Harvard Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2000) “Some kids need to go to jail, not only for the sake of the community, but for their own sake” (!) the Harvard-funded churchmen intoned, promising, “Ten-Point ministers will have a voice in who gets arrested and how they are sentenced....The ministers... are critical in pushing the police to follow a set of policies that the inner-city community is willing to support and sees as beneficial and helpful....That’s the whole idea of the ‘umbrella of legitimacy.’” (Harvard Magazine article)
Ten Point, which is thriving, blatantly copies the Nazis’ Judenrat scheme, which employed Jewish leaders as informers to draw up lists for their Nazi masters to use to send millions of Jews to the gas chambers. These traitors later became many of the leaders of the state of Israel.
Ten Point gets direct ideological support from Harvard’s sociology department, which has made it a major initiative. Ten Point’s chief funding comes from the ruling-class Boston Foundation; its financial boss, Jack Meyer, previously ran Harvard’s and the Rockefeller Foundation’s vast endowments.
The Gates’ hoopla and its aftermath form part of a larger — thus far unevenly successful — effort by the ruling class to impose fascism in the U.S. To compete with rising rivals in Europe, Russia and China, economically and militarily, the rulers must make the U.S. “leaner and meaner.” As jobs, wages, housing and every other aspect of workers’ security collapse with a crushing racist bias, Obama’s blessing of the police, the bosses’ main enforcement apparatus, helps the bosses crack down.
For their crimes, Gates, Crowley and Obama all belong in a working-class-run jail. This sentence can only be carried out through a PLP-led communist revolution that overthrows the hell of capitalism and establishes a workers’ society which abolishes wage slavery, including the wage system itself, along with destroying racism, the oppression of women and imperialist wars — all created by the profit system.

White Cop, Black Prof Both Agents of Bosses

The great irony in the Gates flap, untouched by the media, is that arresting officer Sgt. Crowley and Prof. Gates both play for the same ruling-class team. The Cambridge police department has impeccable anti-worker credentials. It helped break transit and rubber workers’ strikes from 1886 to 1956, reaching its fascist pinnacle in 1969-70. When our Party led mass, militant anti-Vietnam-war movements, including shut-downs, strikes, and sit-ins on and off Harvard’s campus, the Cambridge cops’ new Tactical Patrol Force came in to bust heads.
While PLP was leading college uprisings that called for the class unity of students and workers against U.S. imperialism’s Vietnam atrocities, Gates, then at Yale, also turned activist — for the ruling class. He became a disciple of Jay Rockefeller. Yale undergrad Gates wrote a book-length thesis extolling the arch-capitalist heir who was grabbing political control over Gates’s home state of West Virginia, strategic for its coal and steel industries. In 1972, Gates worked in Rockefeller’s campaign for governor.
Ever since, Gates has courted and served the big-money boys, garnering grants and fellowships from the Mellon, Carnegie, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations. His “scholarly” service to them lies in Gates’ constant focus on “identity” politics which masks the essence of capitalist society: class struggle between opposing classes, exploiters and the exploited, a contradiction that can only be resolved by the working class overthrowing the ruling capitalist class. The latter further rewarded Gates with a Harvard professor’s chair and pundit status as host of a series on their Exxon-Mobil funded PBS network.

France: Workers’ Threat to Blow Up Machinery Nets $42,000 Each

BORDEAUX, FRANCE, July 20 — Fifty-three workers at the JLG plant here slated for layoffs won over $2 million in severance pay after their co-workers occupying the plant threatened to blow up $352,000 worth of industrial equipment if the company ignored their demands. The JLG workers had been striking three plants for three weeks when they dragged four large platform cranes into the parking lot and surrounded them with gas cylinders and kindling.
Before that JLG bosses had refused to grant any compensation to the laid-off workers, but the blow-up threat forced the company to give 30,000 euros ($42,000) to each of the 53 workers, totaling $2,226,000. The cranes were then returned to the factory.
The JLG workers were following similar threats made by those at Nortel, the telecommunications equipment maker and New Fabris, an auto parts manufacturer. These tactics represent a new escalation by workers here in reacting to the bosses’ attempt to shift the burden of the capitalist crisis onto their backs. The government has reportedly “refrained from sending in the police to break up protests... [because they] want to avoid an escalation of violence.” (Reuters, 7/18)
Meanwhile, 366 New Fabris workers in Chatellerault facing layoffs have wired gas canisters to an electrical cable and threatened to detonate the gas and blow up the plant’s contents — worth up to 4 million euros ($5.6 million) — if they don’t receive 30,000 euros each by July 31. Renault and Peugeot-Citroen are Fabris’ main clients and were just given 6 billion euros ($8.4 billion) in state bailout funds after promising to preserve jobs.
One worker explained that, “The machinery and the stockpile of finished goods are our only bargaining chip.”
March Against Cops’ Cover-up:
Racists Set 10-year-old Black Child on Fire
HAMMOND, IN, July 24 — Sixty black, Latino and white workers and youth held a militant march today to support Joshua Judkins, his family and all children against racist violence and racist police complicity. This was the largest anti-racist demonstration here in decades!
On June 8, Judkins, a ten-year-old black child, was the victim of a brutal assault: three white boys (13, 14 and 15) doused his back with alcohol and set him on fire. Joshua was hospitalized for three weeks with second- and third-degree burns, had one major operation, and faces months of excruciating physical therapy.
The racist Hammond Police Department (HPD) “investigated” the incident and refused to charge the attackers with anything, saying it was just a prank!
A prank? If three black teenagers had set a ten-year-old white child on fire — for example, the child of the Mayor or police chief — would it be labeled a prank with no investigation? If a black child even accidentally started a fire that burned an old shed in a park, that child would be charged, but severely burning a black child is okay with the Hammond police and the mayor who keeps the chief on the job.
When Joshua came home critically burned, his father went to the woods, found the alcohol and matches and took them to the police, who refused at first to even accept them!
Members of a local campus anti-racist group heard about this and contacted the family. After distributing leaflets and setting up a page on Facebook, a rally was set. Word-of-mouth brought activists from several Illinois cities, including PLP members from Chicago. The overwhelming majority were black workers and youth from the area.
The rally started in Martin Luther King Park behind Hammond City Hall. We held signs, handed out flyers and spoke on the bullhorn, indicting the HPD for racism. We then marched and chanted through the park to Hammond City Hall and rallied there demanding mayoral action. Many members of the community, including Joshua’s father, also spoke. It was pointed out that if the white boys get away with this without punishment, it will only encourage more racist attacks. Furthermore, it will even damage the white boys who will go through life believing that if they set fires on, or otherwise abuse innocent people, there are no consequences! Chants included demands to fire the Police Chief as well as to bring the attackers to justice.
Some Party members gave our militant communist analysis on the bullhorn, which the crowd enthusiastically accepted. PLP members declared that until we end the racist system of capitalism, there will always be a fascist police force to terrorize our youth. CHALLENGE was also distributed at the rally.
While we don’t want to put anyone into the hands of the bosses’ watchdogs, the kkkops, still we must smash racism at all costs. When the HPD refused to file charges against the white boys, they were saying, “This black boy’s life is not important.”
PLP opposes police repression. We’re exposing the reality that the cops are the enemy. Even if the white youth are eventually charged, it will only be because of community pressure. This is all part of the process of building the movement. PLP will work with these serious, dedicated community anti-racists and keep the focus on building communist consciousness and commitment as the only way to destroy racism forever. Join PLP and help destroy capitalism, the system that reaps super-profits from racism.

D.C. PL’ers Lead Battle to Fire Criminal Transit Bosses

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 22 — PLP members rallied today outside a busy Virginia subway station against Metro transit bosses and in solidarity with Boeing workers. We distributed over 550 communist leaflets and dozens of CHALLENGES to workers during rush hour. We then took our protest to the local office of Boeing to demonstrate the link between the struggle at Metro and that of our brothers and sisters in Seattle against the no-strike clause and threats to move their jobs to North Carolina.
Meanwhile, the struggle for the Washington, D.C. transit union to go on the offensive against management is intensifying. Management negligence led to a horrible rail accident that killed nine people (including our sister operator Jeanice McMillan) and injured over 100 more. But at the last union meeting, President Jackie Jeter dodged the issue, postponing discussion until the tail end of the meeting. Then she declared that top Metro boss, General Manager John Catoe, could not be held responsible for the tragedy because he was not here when the problems began!
A PLP member at the meeting sharply attacked that position and her leadership as too timid, declaring that the union must demand that Catoe (who has run Metro for two years) and other managers be fired for their crimes. They knew about the longstanding safety problem and had deliberately decided not to do anything to address it because they decided fixing the problem was too costly!
Management always blames the operators for any problem. Since the accident, Metro bosses and their media have attempted to divert the discussion away from management negligence of safety by announcing a zero tolerance policy for cell-phone use on the bus and trains by operators. Huh? Since when was this a safety issue?
Metro bosses are using an event which rarely happens to portray it as an everyday occurrence and to get the riding public to believe that the accident was really the fault of the heroic Jeanice McMillan, who did everything in her power to stop the train in time but could not because of the equipment failure. Investigators even noted that her cell phone was off and in her bag, but that hasn’t stopped Metro’s smear campaign against its workers. Metro’s cynical lie reminds us of George Bush’s deliberate lying effort to get us to think that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, when he knew full well that there was not!
At the upcoming August union meeting, PLP’ers will mobilize the membership to fight against these attacks on us, to demand Catoe and his crew be fired, and to get us a contract, and continue to show how these problems all have their origin in the racist, capitalist system. One union member recently told our Metro collective that President Jeter’s concept of fighting management is meeting with politicians and begging them to fight for us, whereas the PLP approach is to fight for ourselves. By following the PLP line, we can steel ourselves in today’s struggles for the larger battle to smash the entire system of capitalism and seize power for the world’s working class!

PLP Summer Project Fights Racist Attack by Harlem KKKops

A protest march was organized in Harlem, where the kkkops from the 26th precinct, beat the hell out of a young black man returning home from work because he couldn’t hear the order for him to stop due to his headphones. Such actions are commonplace with the police, whose purpose is to serve and protect a system that allows for the bosses to close hospitals and schools to fund oil wars. The capitalists never lose a chance to remind the working class that they and their state are the real terrorists.
The 26th precinct is infamous for brutalizing the workers that live in the Manhattanville projects. Students, teachers, and workers under PLP’s leadership leafleted throughout the housing projects, marched back through the projects, and picketed across from the precinct. Afterwards, a speech was made condemning the police and linking their role in protecting the bosses’ scabs in Stella d’Oro and in Harlem.

PL’ers Lead Mass Protest Against Cal State’s Racist Budget Cuts

LONG BEACH, CA, July 21 — Fifteen PLP members and friends joined with over 200 Cal State students and faculty at the Cal State Chancellor’s office in demonstrating against massive budget cuts. The protest coincided with a meeting between the chancellor and the Board of Trustees as they voted to slash the already skeleton budget of the Cal State system. When we arrived we distributed our leaflets and CHALLENGE. Then the demonstration began and PLP’ers encouraged the protesters to push forward into the building.
PLP members organized students to link arms in order to keep from getting kicked out by the cops and ushered in a student with a bullhorn from outside the building. We shifted the chants from “Shame on you, Chancellor Reed” to “Strike, Strike, Strike!’ and “Asian, Latin, black and white, workers and students must unite,” and the overall demonstration picked up momentum and
militancy. Some of the students and faculty easily transitioned from chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, this whole system must go” to “Hey-hey, ho-ho, capitalism has got to go.”
The cuts are a vicious racist attack on black and Latino working-class students who make up the largest segment of the Cal State system, as well as against all students, faculty and campus workers. This week’s L A Times reported the massive cuts, including $6 billion to K-12 and community colleges and $3 billion to the Cal State and
University of California systems. One Latino student traveling as much as three hours each way would no longer be able to afford school. Another Latina student said she had used her already evaporating savings and would no longer have enough to pay for next semester’s classes. A faculty member who also spoke out reported her classes had gone from four a semester to two, with many of her students having to withdraw from her classes because they could no longer afford them due to financial and family responsibilities. This is the reality capitalism forces upon the working class. Only communism can create an educational system that meets our needs.
One professor who spoke angrily declared that the Board of Trustees, which continues to get paid throughout this crisis and these attacks, does not “live on the same planet” as the students and teachers who live these struggles day in and day out. The reality, however, is that the Board of Trustees and the Chancellors of all of these schools — not only for Cal State, but also nationally and worldwide — do live on the same planet as the rest of us; we the students, workers and soldiers, who sacrifice our homes, our educations, our wages, our social security and our lives to fill the pockets and war budgets of these thieves are united in our struggle against them.
One Cal State Long Beach student spoke of the need for militancy on the campuses. He referred to the depression during the 1930’s and how we have the militancy of the left of that era to thank for our 5-day week. PLP’s role in this rally shows that many students and workers are prepared to harness their anger and step up the fight, and we all need to go back to our campuses and our workplaces and organize unified struggles against these attacks. But until we can tie these attacks and this crisis and these wars to the essential crisis of capitalism, we will be fighting for the same crumbs generation after generation.
The working-class students and teachers that are participating in the Summer Project have protested against budget cuts in their own cities, and this protest really illustrated the chant, “Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite.” Nationally and internationally we are all struggling against the same attacks from the same capitalist system in crisis preparing for wider wars.

Chicago ‘Mini-Project’ Backs Transit, Health, School Workers

CHICAGO, July 23 — “Workers were interested in what we were telling them, so they were interested in the paper,” Chicago youth reported after their first CHALLENGE sale at Stroger Hospital. This was part of a Chicago mini-project to develop youth around PLP, introduce them to revolutionary work and raise interest for other Summer Projects. The mini-project greatly influenced those close to us and inspired the day-to-day Party work. The youths said they “were surprised to see us out there” — not just workers, PLP’ers too.
The project started when high school students joined a Chicago Transit rally about health insurance cuts. There many workers said they were excited to see students selling CHALLENGE and standing up to fight back with transit workers. One worker who met PLP that day came to our mini-project BBQ and told everyone about transit-worker struggles and encouraged PLP to keep reaching out to them. Chicago public school students and Cook County healthcare workers also addressed the group to prepare project participants for the next-day’s activities.
Most participants had never sold CHALLENGE before. One student said he liked doing it because it increased his confidence in discussing politics with people. Another was surprised by the response from workers and patients at Stroger hospital, saying, “Everyone took some of everything” (the paper and fliers), asking ‘Can I have that?’” All participants dedicated themselves to future CHALLENGE sales.
Afterwards, the mini-project went to two anti-privatization rallies, one opposing Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s education policies and one against the expansion and increased cost of parking meters, part of Chicago’s gentrification. The discussion induced by the rallies helped the group distill the political ideas from our activities that day, including those about the role of communists in reform struggles.
Participants were also excited to see the protests develop from small gatherings to militant struggles. The education protest — after rallying with speeches from displaced teachers — decided to demand to see Duncan. Two volunteers snuck in to hear him describe the profit-driven education “business,” but the rest of the protesters were forced out, showing everyone how the rulers protect their politicians. The second protest became a loud, crowded demonstration that project participants appreciated for its disciplined militancy.
We ended the mini-project with a dinner and study group on education under capitalism. The study group involved mostly college and high school students, which led students to say that they liked, “to learn that adults and kids have the same problems.” One of the new youths close to PLP led a political analysis of the day’s events.
Overall, the event was a success. Seven mini-project participants are attending the LA Summer Project and those who couldn’t plan to work with PLP in future sales and events. Mini-Project volunteers are talking about PLP with their friends and families and want to invite them to upcoming events. We’re organizing an August mini-project to continue to involve new friends in spreading communist ideas and develop new leaders among students.

Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’:
‘1199’ Hacks Cut Wages, Pensions to Save Bosses

NEW YORK CITY, July 19 — Local 1199, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Workers East, has reached a tentative agreement on a contract reopener that steals previously agreed-upon wage increases and decreases future pensions, all to fill a huge hole in the healthcare workers’ pension plan.
Previously, CHALLENGE reported former 1199 President Dennis Rivera as gleefully saying, “We’re all capitalists,” referring to the union’s multi-billion dollar Wall Street investments. But as finance capital’s house of cards fell apart, with “real estate investment trusts” and “credit default swaps” losing most of their value, 1199’s pension plan lost 40% of its worth since October 2007.
That’s how capitalism works: striking workers win pensions, Rivera and his union cronies invest them in the bosses’ profit system, which then looks to “solve” its crisis by taking them away, along with hard-won wage hikes.
Many 1199 rank-and-filers must be bewildered at the reopening of the contract and the loss of their raises. PL’ers were among — and helped lead — thousands of 1199’ers who participated in militant walk-ins, confrontations with local hospital bosses and human resources managers where workers packed the bosses’ offices calling for the hospitals to meet various union demands.
The appearance was of militant union action to make the bosses pay for their crisis. But the reality was that the 1199 leadership — following SEIU policy of viewing the bosses as partners rather than as enemies — was preparing the members for the Obama line of “shared sacrifice.” The members, however, were the only ones sacrificing.
Involvement in the afore-mentioned actions and attending negotiating and delegate meetings, we’ve met militant workers who want to fight back. We’ve struggled with our friends, new and old, to turn this fight over dollars and cents into a broader fight that unites with patients against racist health cuts and for better healthcare services. Part of this fight is to increase staffing by demanding rehiring of laid-off workers as well as hiring new ones. In our hospitals we’ve been increasing our CHALLENGE sales and involving co-workers in animated discussions about PLP’s goal of communist revolution.
The Obama administration, while finding trillions for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for bailouts of the biggest Wall Street financial houses, banks and capitalist companies, offered nothing to save workers’ pensions. Despite Rivera’s claim, we’re workers, not capitalists. Their system means war, oppression, racism and misery for the working class. We need a system that ends these injustices and represent the interests of all workers. That’s what PLP fights for — communism.

Minimum Wages Produce Maximum Profits

A big hoopla appeared in the bosses’ media about an increase in the federal minimum hourly wage, from $6.55 to $7.25. Yet not only did a NY Times editorial (7/24) admit that this figure — in terms of purchasing power — is no higher than it was in the early 1980s but it’s actually BELOW what it was in 1968!
Is it any wonder the Times could conclude that “no matter how hard they work, many low-wage workers keep falling behind”? “Low-wage jobs are a fact of working life in America,” says the Times, “they’re not going away” and “are going to be most plentiful for years to come.” Now there’s an “American dream” to look forward to.
The Times fails to mention that a goodly percentage of the labor force is specifically excluded from even this paltry minimum wage — farm workers, restaurant and other workers who depend on tips to make ends meet, etc.
Because of racist discrimination, this super-exploitation falls most heavily on black, Latino, Asian and immigrant workers who comprise a disproportionately large section of the low-wage work-force (not to mention double the unemployment rate). In fact, the reason for government raids on undocumented immigrant workers — most of whom are paid below the minimum wage — is to threaten them with deportation and jail precisely to keep them from protesting and organizing against their low-wage status.
As tens of millions of workers fall victim to joblessness in the bosses’ current Depression, they’ll be competing for these low-wage jobs, which will only give the bosses the opening to lower wages still more, and act as a brake on wages for all workers.
So why are these low-wage jobs so “plentiful,” are “not going away” but are “a fact of life” in the U.S.? Because of the one word that never appears in the Times’ editorial’s crocodile tears: PROFITS. The lower the wage, the higher the profit reaped by the bosses.
Low wages are built into capitalism. Under its wage system, a worker who labors for eight hours will create value in perhaps two hours that will equal his or her wage. The boss pockets the value created in the other six hours, from which he reaps his profit and uses to pay other sections of the ruling class their profit: rent to the landlord; interest to the banks for loaning the boss the money he uses to invest in machinery; payments to utilities that supply the power to run the factory; and so on.
This value the bosses steal from the workers is what Karl Marx called “surplus value” — the source of the collective profit that all these sections of the ruling class make off the labor of the working class. So the lower the bosses can force wages down, the more profit to be stolen. Of course, the Times omits any relationship between slave wages and profits.
On top of all this, when unemployment rears its head periodically because of the system’s recessions/depressions, the workers lose even more as the bosses lay off masses of workers to try to maintain their profits, making the workers pay for the crisis. And only 40% of the workforce is even eligible for the unemployment insurance that millions of workers fought for in the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, as tens of millions of workers suffer this wage exploitation, the Obama administration serves its masters by doling out hundreds of billions to the bankers and for the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan.
There’s only one way to eliminate this exploitation: eliminate capitalism, its profit system and abolish the wage system altogether. With communism, the working class rules society and portions out the collective value it creates according to the needs of the workers who produce all that value.

How We Organized an Anti-Racist Rally

This summer, my second Summer Project, had many similarities to last years’ project. The CHALLENGE sales were easier for me this year. My conversations with MTA and Boeing workers were politically sharper. I was able to talk to the workers and use the articles in CHALLENGE to tie it to their own exploitation. After helping lead a study session last summer I was more confident and ready to help and lead study groups at home. This year also had some new experiences that have helped me further develop, sharpen my understanding of PLP’s line, and push me to accomplish more for the Party.
Last year’s shooting of a Latino teen by the Lennox cops was repeated again this summer in Compton. Avery Cody, Jr. a 16-year-old black youth was shot by LA County sheriffs. A comrade’s friend told her of the shooting. I, along with three other comrades, spent time leafleting the neighborhood where Avery lived and was killed. There we met Avery’s dad and family. I spent time talking with Mr. Cody while my other comrades were talking to other members of the family. Along with my comrades I worked on plans to have a rally in their neighborhood. Continually talking with area residents and Mr. Cody helped us to begin building a base there. We knew that this work earlier in the week paid off when the bullhorn for our rally broke. Instead of just standing around, one of the workers of Compton ran inside his house and got us a megaphone to use.
He even held it for me while I finished giving my speech. I was able to politically say what I really wanted to say: that only through a communist revolution will we be able to overthrow the capitalist bosses, smash capitalism, end racism and sexism!
Summer Project Red

U.S., Local Bosses Use Crisis to Militarize Mexico

MEXICO CITY, July 28 — Capitalist speculation and its endless drive for profits, built into the system’s very nature, was the straw that broke the camel’s back in this bosses’ financial crisis. In the U.S., millions are unemployed and have lost their homes, unable to cover mortgage payments.
This has a cascading effect in Mexico. Due to reduced purchasing power of U.S. workers, Mexico’s industries have had to lower production, leading to massive unemployment here. Money Mexican immigrants in the U.S. send back home — an amount only surpassed by oil revenues and tourism — has been severely reduced, creating even more poverty. Capitalism has never met workers’ basic needs.
In recent months, more than 700,000 jobs have been lost here. This drastically increases informal work like selling popsicles, flowers, music CD’s, etc. The youth, even university graduates, see no future. Many turn to crime. Those still working face poverty wages, increased hours and slashed medical benefits.
Police repression is the bosses’ answer to workers’ reform demands, attempting to maintain their profits and prevent destruction by their competitors. They want us to sacrifice to save them; they spare nothing to fight to the last drop of our blood to sustain their allies and their imperialist wars.

Militarization and Drug Trafficking Attacks All Workers

The struggle against the drug traffic is the perfect pretext for U.S. bosses and Mexico’s ruling class to militarize the country. Recently, the U.S. gave the first $400 million of the $1.4 billion approved by the U.S. Congress to buy helicopters and weapons, as well as supply military “advisors.” In the last two years, 13,000 people have died in this war, among them drug dealers, civilians, police and soldiers. However, drug trafficking has not diminished.
In the face of eventual world war, U.S. imperialists must try to guarantee — under any and all circumstances — various sources of wealth from Mexico. This country’s strategic role includes: all the oil that’s exported going to the U.S. as well as the majority of its auto, aerospace and agricultural production. Resources in dispute involve biodiversity, uranium, metals, food and low-paid workers.
To try to terrorize and pacify masses of workers as well as the anti-U.S. bosses, they use fascist strategies like population control through the swine flu, to kick off a whole system of social control. They’ve passed laws to search homes without warrants, for mandatory registry of the personal details of all cell-phone users (supposedly to fight kidnappings), to tap telephones, put chips in cars (supposedly to avoid robberies), all to intimidate and firmly control workers and submit us to police terror. Backed by the federal government, sellout union leaders, churches, schools and bosses’ media, they’ve stopped one of the working class’s most important mass demonstrations, the May Day March.
While things are more critical for the working class, it also gives us a greater opportunity to fight to make communist ideas the property of masses of workers in struggle, in our work-places, schools and universities, among farm workers and soldiers. The working class needs communist
ideas to break the chains of the capitalist system.
The sooner we advance, the less the suffering for our class. That’s why we need to build PLP, organizing study groups with communist literature, extending CHALLENGE networks, participating in mass struggles, recruiting new members and sharpening the ideological struggle with our friends, family members and co-workers. We need to make the fight for communism primary.
We are one class, with one goal and one party, from Afghanistan to Honduras, from Mexico to China, from Los Angeles to Pakistan, we need to strengthen the bonds of struggle. Only an internationalist struggle can smash capitalism once and for all.

LETTERS

Summer Projects Unite Workers and Students
‘Learned what communism really means...’

I concluded from the LA Summer Project that, in a certain way, workers and students are going through the same thing. I’m a student from Chicago. Schools there are experiencing something called a “turnaround,” because they’re not getting enough funding. In a “turnaround” the school closes, and all the teachers are fired, replaced with new teachers who are paid less because they lack the amount of education needed to become certified.
Others who aren’t teachers are also hired, and the same students who attended before return to the school. The rest go to neighborhood schools, crowded with other students from other areas.
During the Summer Project, we visited the workers who are getting fired and laid off because the companies are not meeting their expected money-making goals. Living under this capitalist system, my teacher brought me out here because I wanted to learn a better definition of communism. At first I thought it was just a word. I never really knew it was something the working class really needs so they can get what they worked for. From my understanding now, communism is a system where all workers will be equal, with no bosses or banks.
Summer Project Volunteer

No More Doubts: ‘I’m joining PLP...’

As a youth in Los Angeles, being involved in the PLP Seattle Summer Project was a little intimidating, but it was very much worth it. I was interested in what the Party was doing to fight racism and sexism but I had some doubts. My parents are struggling to make ends meet because of the attacks on the working class but they disapprove of my involvement with the Party.
My friends told me I was fooling myself by participating with PLP. But by the end of the Project, my doubts completely disappeared. I met great people who’ve been involved with the Party for a long time. I heard about all their struggles and could relate them to my parents’ struggles and to the problems at my school.
For example, Boeing workers were fighting to stop pay cuts and layoffs. Seeing how serious they were, whether in reformist or revolutionary ways, was really inspiring. All the hands-on experience — visiting workers and in the early-morning distribution of CHALLENGE at factory gates — was really amazing.
One activity that really stood out for me was the visit to the military base, Fort Lewis. It was really interesting speaking to soldiers and realizing how they are both a major factor for the well-being of capitalism, but simultaneously a key element for a communist revolution.
The PLP Summer Project was an eye-opener for me. I went to the Seattle Project with doubts but I left wanting to join PLP, with no doubt in my mind. We’re now in the middle of the Los Angeles Project and I’m happy to be in it. I’m now proud to say I’m a part of the struggle and ready for a lifetime fight to end capitalism with a communist revolution.
A doubter no more

‘What we do really counts...’

During this Summer Project, I saw that, with struggle, the Party is capable of progress and growth.
We went to a high school where the PLP has teachers and students. When I was in high school, it was cool to see the presence of other PLP members outside of the teacher at my school. It helped me understand that PLP is a movement and that my teacher was not the sole proponent, individually printing CHALLENGE in his basement. I hope our agitation will make a qualitative difference in our comrade’s base-building and class struggle.
A friend that I had introduced to the Party a few years ago pleasantly surprised me. Several comrades over the years in our mass organization built political and social ties with her. This Summer Project she informed us that her mother saw a cop kill Avery Cody, Jr. a 16-year-old black youth as his back was turned. PLP immediately contacted the family and helped plan a protest against racist cops. I could never have imagined that knowing her would lead to a mass movement against racism. What we do really does count.
Project Participant

‘Along the pathway to communism...’

Having now spent three days with the Los Angeles Summer Project, I can happily say that it has been a productive week. As a neophyte in the Party, I had few expectations for the Project, save that it would be a collection of communists actively working towards a classless society. My favorite event thus far has been an evening forum on dialectical materialism, in which Party members clarified the definition of the term, and actively challenged one another regarding processes and conflicts that exist along the pathways towards communism.
In addition to great discussion, we have conducted some paper sales in the garment district and at a local high school in Los Angeles. Though we have distributed countless papers and flyers, I question how effective our efforts have been without constant reinforcement at these locales. With greater organization and communication between Party members, we may be able to capitalize upon existing strongholds with more structured events like rallies, forums, and debates.
Hoping to Consolidate

Party-led Group in Spain Vows Anti-Imperialist Struggle

This is a letter from an internationalist comrade who met with a Party group in Spain before leaving for the U.S.
At our study group we invited the new comrades with whom we were talking to join, and to understand that if you are conscious and are not ignorant, nor alien to problems, you must deepen your political work with the PLP. We need to go out to the streets, but we need to have the arguments of why we have to fight.
This struggle must be massive and militant; we must be millions, convinced that a revolution is necessary to overthrow the imperialist governments; we must not wait any longer while the bosses put out their strategies which keep the working class always on the margin, or that allow the bosses to control mass revolutionary movements.
Every inhabitant of this planet is witness to each injustice that is committed, second by second, worldwide. Let’s not fall again into this vicious cycle. Let’s truly struggle for the working class.
This is what I have been struggling for, for several years, and which continues to be essential: continuing to prepare myself to consolidate even more the political basis for being objective on this road.
A comrade

Rally to Unite Boeing Workers vs. No-Strike Deal

LA Summer Project calls for unity of Boeing workers in Long Beach and Puget Sound against the “no strike deal”, and unity between Boeing workers and subcontractor workers. Black, Latin and white youth summer project volunteers made impassioned speeches attacking the capitalist system for laying off workers, outsourcing jobs, racist super exploitation of subcontractor workers and trying to enforce a “no strike deal” on Boeing workers. They exposed the bosses’ moves to deepen fascism to prepare for wider imperialist war. We called for unity of the whole working class against capitalism and for communist revolution. As we were chanting “Fight Back”; “Same enemy same fight, Boeing and Auto workers, unite!”, “Workers of the World, Unite!”, “The only solution is a communist revolution”, hundreds of Boeing workers took CHALLENGES, leaflets and the Summer Project industrial EXTRA. This response by the majority (though not all) of the workers showed us that industrial workers are very open to communist politics. That’s important for the future, since industrial workers, in subcontractor and heritage plants, are the key to revolution. This demonstration was entirely organized by the youth volunteers from all over.

Attacking Racist Devastation of Industrial Workers Head-on

• A young Latin machinist described the contradiction he faced expanding his CHALLENGE sales at an important aerospace subcontractor. “I live with five family members in a small apartment. Everybody has been laid off or had their hours cut, including me. Frankly, I ask myself how much can I risk what’s left of my job in order to do what I know has to be done to end the cause of this misery, capitalism.”
• Another comrade in a union Boeing plant has a running bet with a co-worker, who believes the struggle will continue along the lines of the last 30 years: contract fights and legal strikes. For the first time in three decades, this CHALLENGE reader now thinks the government, company and union will discard all these legal niceties as every bosses’ paper and TV station demand a “no-strike regime.” “It’s the ‘rhetoric of fascism,’” he admits.
• Detroit has been turned into Katrina without the water, while the small nest-egg generations of black autoworkers fought for growing out of the black rebellions of the 1960s, has been largely wiped out.
• LA bus drivers and mechanics are working without a contract while the drivers’ union tells rank-and-filers, in effect, they’re “lucky to have a job.” The union strategy is to wait a year “until the economy is better.”
In the face of rapid changes like these, this year’s Summer Project tackled the racist decimation of the industrial working class head-on.
The worldwide economic crisis has accelerated U.S. bosses’ economic, political and military decline, giving U.S. imperialists less maneuverability, bringing the prospect of wider war and world war closer. The bosses here are preparing for a confrontation with their imperialist competitors, like Russia and China, by attacking the whole working class.
Central to the U.S. bosses’ strategy is saving their industrial military capacity. This includes civilian auto and aircraft production, which, as a purely military industry, is too expensive to maintain over the long haul. The “bottom line” is trying to maximize profits while also saving the empire.

What’s Good For GM Is Racist
Devastation For Us

But saving basic industry does not mean saving the industrial working class. Quite the contrary, the bosses are using their government to ensure the racist decimation of the industrial workforce. The “new GM” or a “new strike-free culture” in the unionized Boeing plants means unprecedented cuts in wages, pensions and health care.
Racist super-exploitation in the subcontractor factories over the last decade has set the stage for this latest onslaught. “Either Boeing is going to move to the low-wage South or the low-wage South is going to moving to Washington State,” one Seattle area comrade explained to the Summer Project volunteers.
Developments in basic industry signal the direction society is heading. The might of the capitalist empire is centered here. The racist lie of the Obama “shared sacrifice” administration stands naked before the destruction in Detroit. The nationalization of auto and the devastation of auto workers signals the further consolidation of fascism. The “no-strike regime” at Boeing mirrors Mussolini’s fascist corporate state.
Traditional trade unions are helpless faced with this assault. The vast majority of industrial workers are now non-union. The International Association of Machinists, United Auto Workers and the Amalgamated Transit Union are rapidly becoming agencies of the very government that’s coordinating the building of fascism. “Shared sacrifice” replaces striking.

Only Communist Revolution Can Smash Fascism

The trade union officials must hide these changes to maintain their positions in the new fascist
hierarchy. We workers, on the other hand, must not build our movement based on illusions.
Winning economic concessions from the bosses becomes more difficult as the imperialists’ maneuverability declines. We must fight tooth and nail against the fascist attacks on our class, understanding that we fight a system hell-bent on our destruction.
PLP at LA Metro and our friends correctly called on transit workers to strike against a system that attacks workers in this latest contract in order to prepare for their wars and to save the bosses’ banks. The more we can build class struggle highlighting the present-day political situation the better.
Communists have long known that strikes can be schools of class war, but not the war itself. Political struggle with transit workers — for example, about breaking the law and confronting the bosses’ state apparatus to build for such an illegal strike — are keys to our victory. Our ability to mobilize our fifty CHALLENGE readers in this struggle — and expand our networks — measures our ability to act without relying on the social-fascist union leaders. The very political and ideological obstacles we face winning our fellow workers to engage in class struggle within capitalism offer us an opportunity to win these workers to the kind of revolutionary communist politics that will lead to capitalism’s destruction.
Fascism is a fact of life; the racist devastation of the industrial working class is the carnage in its wake. The Summer Project volunteers faced this fact head-on, building for the only solution possible — communist revolution. The transit workers who sat in their break-rooms reading CHALLENGE, the CHALENGE EXTRA and our PLP leaflets, asking for more, and giving their names are becoming more aware of this battle. So are workers in aerospace subcontractor factories throughout Southern California.

Youth Take Lead in L.A. Summer Project

“I came to the LA Summer Project to find out what communism really means to all the workers and why we should fight for what we need in life — and why we don’t need capitalism. As a youth, I’m trying hard to fight for those who don’t know what capitalism is doing to them. It is not right for people to work so hard and then lose pay and jobs. I want and need to be out here helping in any way I can.”
Students and workers came from throughout the United States and Latin America to participate in this year’s PLP Summer Project in Los Angeles. The main objective was to put forward PLP’s communist analysis of the economic crisis, war and fascism while organizing Southern California’s industrial base to join the fight for communism.
Every morning Summer Project volunteers woke up as early as 3 am to sell CHALLENGE and distribute leaflets at aerospace subcontractors, Metro divisions, garment factories, and schools. The leaflets called on workers and students to organize fight-backs against layoffs, cutbacks, wage reductions, and other fascist attacks, with the long-term goal of fighting for communist revolution. Many workers and students were excited to take CHALLENGE, and were open to the call for communist revolution.
Transit workers took literature and gave it to friends in the bus barns. During a sale at a garment factory, a bus driver recognized our literature and asked for some to hand out to riders. And at aerospace subcontractor plants, workers openly defied their bosses to get our literature. At one factory, the police were called to intimidate us and forced us to stay on sidewalks, away from the traffic of workers coming in. But the workers pulled to the side of the street to take CHALLENGE and talk to us.
Youth, especially high school students, played an especially important role in the Summer Project. Students led study groups on dialectical materialism, the study of change, and on political economy. They helped everyone to continue developing their understanding of these important ideas, crucial to fighting for communist revolution.
Forums were held to present the important questions of the relationship between reforming capitalism and fighting for revolution, the nature of the economic crisis, and U.S. imperialist activities and wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. At one, comrades from Latin America reported on the work of organizing PLP in other countries. At these forums young comrades and friends raised important discussions about how the Party fights for communism, and what communism means.
Summer Project participants organized a rally outside a Boeing plant that produces C-17 military transport planes. The UAW and IAM union mis-leadership are pitting these Boeing workers in Long Beach against Seattle Boeing workers, while Boeing bosses attack both groups of workers. We led chants that pointed to the bankruptcy of union leadership and called on workers to assert their power by organizing against the company’s and union’s attacks. Many workers were very receptive to our message. One woman bought CHALLENGE and told the seller, “You are absolutely right, believe me!”
Following a forum discussing the strategic importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan for the U.S. imperialists, we visited a local military base. Summer Project volunteers overcame their initial trepidation about approaching marines and engaged marines in discussions about the nature of the war they are being asked to fight. The responses were mixed. Many marines said the war was about fighting terrorism but many others also expressed disagreement with the war and revealed that marines are willing to talk about communist politics if we are persistent.
One Summer Project volunteer noted that despite our conversations being short it was clear that we had an impact on how many of these marines view the nature of the war and their role in it. She said, “it saddened me to see how these young marines were trying to make sense of our analysis and how it related to them because for them these are life-and-death questions. But this is also why I joined the Party because this work is so important. I know that when these marines are overseas in the middle of war, they will be thinking about our conversation and our communist ideas.”
PLP has a long history of holding Summer Projects, during which PLP members and their base fight the products of capitalism, including racism, sexism, and nationalism. We also fight to run the Projects in a collective way by sharing responsibilities of the daily tasks, such as cooking and cleaning. It is difficult in this capitalist society to enjoy culture and socializing with one another, but we struggle to make it possible. Each Summer Project is a small taste of what an actual communist society will look like.   
This Summer Project showed the tremendous opportunity for winning workers, students, and soldiers to a revolutionary communist outlook. It strengthened the fight to build a communist base among Southern California’s industrial workers. Additionally, the Project won seven high school students to join PLP. The Party will try to build a new collective of students when the school year starts.
There were some areas where we can improve, particularly in how to better balance promoting youth leadership while relying on the knowledge of more experienced comrades. Overall, PLP in Los Angeles — and everywhere else — has learned and grown from the experiences of this year’s Summer Project. J

Protest Bankers’ Threat to Dump Stella D’Oro Workers

NEW YORK CITY, July 22 — Fifty workers and students picketed the Wall Street headquarters of Goldman Sachs (GS), one of the world’s richest investment banks, an important section of the U.S. ruling class. GS owns a big share of Lance, Inc., a southern-based non-union outfit that may buy the Stella D’Oro Bronx bakery from its Brynwood owners. This scheme would shut the plant and dump the workers, on strike for 11 months to save their jobs and fighting wage-cuts.
GS executives gave almost a million bucks to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They then received over $10 billion in federal bailout money, helping GS reap the highest profits in its 140-year history.
The Stella D’Oro Solidarity Committee — unionists who supported the anti-racist group of 135 bakery workers, uniting black, Latino, white and immigrant workers, men and women — organized the demonstration. A highlight was the participation of 20 IBEW Local 3 electrician apprentices, brought by a professor at a nearby labor college. These young workers — black, Latino and white — added their loud and enthusiastic chanting of “No Runaway Plants, Keep Stella D’Oro in the Bronx!” Joining them were faculty from the Professional Staff Congress and the United Federation of Teachers, other unionists and CUNY students, including PLP members recently returned from the LA Summer Project.
We warned GS that if Lance does steal these jobs from the Stella workers, we will hold GS responsible. Party members involved in the struggle have stressed that while capitalist law allows companies to move plants wherever they like, workers don’t have to respect those laws. Stella D’Oro workers’ labor built the company and have every right to protect their jobs.
Workers everywhere should fight runaway plants, a battle to protect our class’s livelihood. PLP workers and students are organizing co-workers and friends to come to the plant to join the Stella workers when they stand up to any plant closing.
This is part of fighting a capitalist system that exploits millions to benefit a tiny group of profit-hungry bosses. The system’s crisis has the capitalists scrambling to protect these profits by cutting wages and benefits of millions of workers, and laying off millions more.
Stella workers are producing fighters for our class and must join PLP to lead class struggle and build a communist movement that will have workers running society, without bosses, bankers and profits. J
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a name="Rivalry Over Gas Pipeline Feeds Ruler’s War Surge">">"ivalry Over Gas Pipeline Feeds Ruler’s War Surge

"The Good War," as the media calls Obama’s mounting slaughter in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has the same imperialist motive as the war in Iraq: U.S. dominance of world oil and natural gas supplies to counter Chinese, Russian, and regional competitors. In 1979, Jimmy Carter declared that the U.S. would regard any other power’s encroachment on Exxon Mobil’s turf as an act of war and backed up his threat with his new Rapid Deployment Force. The Carter Doctrine formalized the United States’ top strategic priority: securing and controlling Mideast and Central Asian energy and export routes.

Last month, with the agreement by Iran and Pakistan to complete a 1,200-mile IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline from the South Pars gas fields in Iran to Karachi, this strategy suffered a grave setback. According to Middle East Energy Strategy, a newsletter from Harvard’s Olin Institute, "What may seem like a standard energy project could have profound implications for the geopolitics of energy in the 21st century and for the future of south Asia, as well as for America’s ability to check Iran’s hegemony in the Persian Gulf" (5/29/09). In retaliation, Obama is sending in his new Afghanistan commander, Harvard-trained General Stanley McChrystal, best known for his command of death- and torture-squads in Iraq and Afghanistan. These ground-based "special operations" will supplement airborne Drone terror strikes in Pakistan. And coming soon: 21,000 more GIs in Afghanistan.

Iran, China, Russia Score Economic, Military Gains

U.S. rivals come out big winners in the pipeline deal. Iran gets steady income to offset losses stemming from U.S.-led sanctions, and also cements political ties with nuclear-armed Pakistan, already a shaky U.S. ally. As for China, "Iranian gas will flow to the Baluchistan province port of Gwadar, in the Arabian Sea [where China is now building a refinery]. And Gwadar is supposed to be connected to a proposed pipeline going north" to China (Asia Times, 5/29/09). Even before it launches a blue-water navy, China will gain the ability to import energy along routes beyond the reach of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. "With IP in place and with multi-billion-dollar, overlapping Tehran-Beijing gas deals, China can finally afford to import less energy via the Strait of Malacca, which Beijing considers exceedingly dangerous, and subject to Washington’s sphere of influence" (Asia Times). For Russia, meanwhile, "IP is a gift-from-above tool in rerouting gas from Iran to South Asia away from competing with Russian gas. The big prize, in this case, is the Western European market, dependent almost 30% on Gazprom [the gigantic Russian gas company] and the source of 80% of Gazprom’s export profits" (Asia Times).

Pentagon Unleashes Ivy League Assassin-in-Chief

By mid-summer, Obama’s deadly Afghan surge will be poised to strike, backed by a new U.S. Marine mega-base in Helmand province, a stone’s throw from the Iran-Afghan border and Pakistani Baluchistan, where the pipeline will run. It’s the ideal strategic base for an extended, tri-border (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan) "counter-insurgency splash," as coined by General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command (Asia Times, 6/4/09). Key to this effort will be Gen. McChrystal’s secret Special Operations killers, "targeted assassination teams working out of Afghan bases in Kandahar and Nangarhar, and allied with wily, local militias" (Asia Times). These militias, cynically manipulated by U.S. war makers, are separatist, nationalist Baluchi tribes. They claim a homeland that spans parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, including the critical Gwadar port.

The imminent Iran-Pakistan pipeline sharply contrasts with its hapless rival, the U.S.-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project. Begun under Clinton and Unocal (now Chevron) in 1995, TAPI’s U.S. backers first courted and then fell out with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. In 1999, when the Taliban favored an Argentine rival builder, Bridas, Clinton pulled the plug on the deal and essentially ended—temporarily—the U.S.-Taliban alliance. Taliban-run Afghanistan soon became a haven for al Qaeda, and its training ground. Washington has repeatedly insisted that its sole objective in invading Afghanistan in 2001 was to defeat Taliban and al Qaeda forces. But of late, pipeline building has reemerged as a chief aim. Bridas, which U.S. rulers now grudgingly support as a hedge against Chinese, Russian, and Iranian interests, has re-opened TAPI talks with Kabul. But while these negotiations remain in the talking stage, Iranian gas is set to flow to Gwadar and Karachi by 2014.

U.S. rivals make significant geostrategic gains with the stroke of a pen and guarantee them with vast numbers of nearby troops. U.S. rulers, on the other hand, can’t enforce deals without transporting their war machine across oceans and continents. Relative U.S. weakness is creating a field day atmosphere among Moscow’s and Beijing’s military planners. "Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated in April that Russia and China would strengthen their military cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and engage in several joint military maneuvers. He implied that these plans were aimed at limiting the U.S.’s presence in Central Asia" (Asia Times, 6/13/09). At the same time, Russia is marshalling former Soviet vassals into a fighting alliance called the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). "The new force would comprise large military units from five countries - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The creation of a powerful military contingent in Central Asia reflects Moscow’s drive to make the CSTO a pro-Russian military bloc, rivaling NATO forces in Europe" (Asia Times).

Phony "peace candidate" Obama is fully on board with the war program that U.S. capitalists require. Today it is death squads and more troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tomorrow it could be a frontal confrontation with China or Russia — a step that will require a full military mobilization of the U.S. This includes disciplining the capitalist class and rebuilding infrastructure (popular media topics) and a restoration of the draft (an as yet unmentionable one).

Obama is no friend of the working class. Despite his Cairo speech to "reach out" to the Muslim world, these are the same people who suffer daily atrocities in U.S. war zones. At home, millions of jobs have vanished under the new president. Poverty and police terror run rampant. Yet despite the decay of material conditions for the working class, Obama enjoys sky-high approval ratings: proof of his value to U.S. rulers. Exposing Obama’s true class allegiance — and his role — in these worsening times is a major priority for our Party.

U.S. Pours Fuel on Iranian Fires

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest last week’s presidential election in Iran. Several things are driving the battles taking place in Tehran. Economic problems caused by falling oil prices are causing attacks on the standard of living. There is a built-up hatred of the ruling class by young people alienated from the fundamentalist movement as well as people who had hoped the 1979 revolution against the Shah would liberate them and were betrayed. Divisions have developed within the Iranian ruling class on whether to deal solely with China and Russia or develop closer business ties with Europe. This is happening as covert operations by the U.S. to build up anti-government movements in Iran have been stepped up in recent years and are exploiting the contradictions in Iranian capitalism.

The anger at the disputed Ahmadinejad election victory is in part a reaction to 30 years of the Iranian ruling class’ brutality. Tehran’s rulers secured power by jailing, torturing and killing many thousands of people who had allied with them to get rid of the Shah. The left-wing and liberal parties who joined forces with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist movement were immediately turned on and attacked once the Shah was ousted. For years the remnants of these movements have been waiting for an opportunity like this.

The U.S. has invested heavily in the weakening of the Iranian ruling class. In his last year in office the Bush administration, under Defense Secretary Gates, began a $400 million program of covert operations in Iran to destabilize the country (New Yorker 7/7/08). While it has never been publicly confirmed, "It is very hard to imagine Obama abandoning covert operations [in Iran]" (Stratfor, 1/12/09). This estimate was strengthened with Obama’s retention of Gates as Secretary of Defense. Unless there is a mass communist movement built in Iran, the current uprisings are leading people into the arms of the U.S. ruling class, just as the movements of 1979 against the U.S.-installed murderer, Shah Reza Pahlavi, led to the installation of the Khomeini-led capitalists.

a name="Obama’s Big Beginning:">">"bama’s Big Beginning:

Wider War, Billion$ to Banks, Jobs Down, Rising Racism, Foreclosures - All in 100 Days!

Millions of workers supported Obama, wanting real change: jobs, an end to the imperialist wars, and, importantly, a victory against racism. However, Obama’s first 100 days hasn’t been the "change" from the Bush administration workers expected.

The day Obama was inaugurated, home foreclosures and racist unemployment were at their highest pace since the 1930s. Defenders of Obama claimed that he ‘inherited’ these crises from the Bush administration. Throughout the Bush years, CHALLENGE argued that the real problem "isn’t Bush, it’s capitalism." It doesn’t matter which president is in office; the ruling class sets the agenda.

Instead of bailing out the working class, Obama gutted the auto workers’ contract, gave billions to his ruling-class buddies and called on workers to sacrifice for the "good of the country." On April 27, Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in the presence of Senator Kennedy and former President Clinton. This will triple the number of U.S. youth volunteering for AmeriCorps, create four new national service corps (three focused on youth) and turn September 11 into a National Day of Service. The building of this volunteer corps takes people’s desire to serve the working class and directs it into service for the needs of the bosses. It will create a free army that can be mobilized as the wars waged by the rulers expand. It is a partial realization of the Hart-Rudman Commission’s report that outline the ruling-class’s plans for confronting rising imperialist rivals like Russia and China, and securing long-term global military superiority.

Obama’s true class loyalties were foreshadowed by his reaction to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. During Bush’s last months, Obama was more than willing to accuse Bush of "mishandling" the economy, and yet didn’t say a word about the thousands of men, women, and children being killed and maimed. His only remark was "we only have one president at a time." Even Ben Cohen, liberal columnist and staunch Obama supporter, commented that Obama’s "silence was deafening" (Huffington Post, 12/29). When Israel destroyed a U.N. school and murdered at least 40 Palestinian refugees, Obama turned a blind eye.

Millions of workers expected and hoped that the Obama administration would improve workers’ lives. Obama staffed his administration with bank executives, former Clinton advisors like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and known torturers like General McChrystal, now in charge in Afghanistan. The Obama-led government passed a $787 billion "stimulus" package, secured a bank bailout and nationalized the auto industry. Obama’s priority has been saving the capitalists. He has no intention of stopping the foreclosures that are leaving thousands of families homeless with each passing week nor of fixing the racist unemployment that grows with each passing month.

As a presidential candidate, Obama promised to bring all combat troops back from Iraq by May 20, 2010. This gave him an edge among workers over Clinton or McCain, who admitted U.S. involvement in the Middle East may stretch a century or more. On February 27, President Obama changed his promise. By December, he plans to remove only two of the fourteen brigades, leaving a so-called residual force of around 50,000 troops. Those remaining beyond the Bush-brokered "Status of Forces Agreement" with the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi government will be merely renamed "advisory training brigades."

Meanwhile, Obama continues authorizing the massive bombing campaign over Afghanistan and missile strikes onto villages in Pakistan. The makers of these weapons, arms industry giants such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have a strong voice in the Obama administration through William J. Lynn III, former Raytheon lobbyist and Obama’s new Undersecretary of Defense, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, one of their favorite campaign contribution recipients. The arms industry is intertwined with the very megabanks like J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup whose former executives now advise Obama’s administration.

Obama, just like Bush before him, has shown his willingness to serve the bankers and bosses at the expense of the working class. No matter how much we hope for change, the capitalists will never allow a president who isn’t loyal to them to occupy the White House. Voting will never bring about a society that truly serves the needs of the workers of the world. Only communist revolution can do that. J

a name="Peru’s Indigenous Indians: Armed Fight Challenges U.S. Imperialism’s Power Grab"></">Pe"u’s Indigenous Indians: Armed Fight Challenges U.S. Imperialism’s Power Grab

LIMA, PERU, June 8 — Massive armed protests by thousands of Indigenous Indians have rocked this country. The fight is over government decrees doling out vast tracts of the farmers’ communal forest lands to corporations for oil and gas drilling, logging, mining, control of water resources and large-scale agriculture. The robbery is being carried out under government decrees directly linked to a Peru-U.S. trade pact that "would bring Peru’s rules for investment in jungle areas into line with the trade agreement." (NY Times, 6/12) The decrees would enable these capitalists to seize 72% of the country’s rain forest for exploitation of natural resources that threatens the survival of the Indigenous peoples.

But the people are not taking this corporate grab lying down. After sporadically blocking roads, waterways, state-owned oil pipelines and airports since April 9, violent clashes erupted on June 5. Government troops opened fire on unarmed protesters from helicopter gunships, tanks and the tops of buildings killing them while they slept alongside a road. Over 250 protestors were slain, "disappeared," burned and/or thrown in rivers. Hundreds more were wounded in the massacre. The protesters say there is a cover-up: "The government is trying to clean the blood off its hands by hiding the truth," declared Andrés Huaynacari Etsam, an Awajun student who said five relatives were killed and three are missing. (NYT, 6/12)

Insurgents Turn the Guns Around

A thousand Indians then killed 25 cops and abducted 38 as hostages. In one battle the insurgents wrestled guns away from the cops. Two hundred Mahiguenga Indians occupied an oil pipeline valve station in the Southeast, where the rebellion had spread from the North. Although the Army re-took it, the Indians said they would try again.

A general strike on June 11 brought thousands out into the streets in Iquitos, the largest Peruvian city in the Amazon, and spread to cities as far away as the capital and Arequipa on the Pacific coast.

The militant struggle forced Peru’s Congress to temporarily suspend the decrees, Said 24-year-old Wagner Musoline Acho, "The government made…[a] condescending depiction of us as gangs of savages in the forest…. They think we can be tricked by a maneuver like suspending a couple of decrees for a few weeks and then reintroducing them, and they are wrong." (NYT, 6/12)

President Alan Garcia has declared a "state of emergency" and imposed a curfew, but that has only escalated the rebellion which has spread to the strategic South. Garcia has ordered the arrest of one of the leaders, Alberto Pizango, on "sedition" charges and has suspended the constitution in four provinces. The protestors have charged the government with violating both the country’s constitution as well as international law for failing to obtain the Indigenous peoples’ consent before any of their land and resources can be given away.

The Peruvian Jungle Interethnic Development Association which has organized the protests represents over 300,000 people from dozens of Indigenous groups. Their leaders have charged the government with genocide for the killings of their people. Daniel Marzano, an Asháninka leader from Atalaya Province, declared: "We want an immediate halt to every project that was conceived without consulting those of us who live in the forest." (NY Times, 6/6) They vow that their protests will continue until their demands are met. They have derailed a plan by Brazilian-controlled Electrobras to erect five hydroelectric plants on the Indigenous people’s lands at a cost of $10 billion.

A Duke University scientists’ study reported that, "At least 58 of the 64 areas secured by multi-national companies for oil exploration overlay lands titled to indigenous peoples." (NYT, 6/5) Contracts for oil and gas exploration cover 72% of Peru’s rain forest.

While the government hands over billions of dollars worth of resources to these corporations, 40% of the country’s population — half of whom are Indigenous — live in poverty. (NYT )

Meanwhile, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist and a former lieutenant-colonel in Peru’s army who was defeated in the last presidential election, has sided with the insurgents to prime himself for the 2011 election. President Garcia, who also held the position in the 1980s, is the very butcher who suppressed a prison rebellion in 1980 and murdered over 100 inmates as "suspected guerillas." (NYT, 6/7)

The rebellion exposes the role of the capitalist state. The constitution is not worth the bosses’ paper it’s printed on. If it endangers the multi-nationals’ aim to exploit the workers’ and farmers’ claim to the country’s rich resources, the rulers’ government simply voids it. And when the exploited classes rebel to assert their rights, that same government comes down with the full weight of its state apparatus, army, air force and police, to crush them.

The rebels must not rely on the bosses’ laws or elections of a nationalist ex-army officer like Humala to protect them. A revolutionary communist leadership is needed to combat these attacks and forge a movement for a communist society with an armed struggle for working-class ownership and distribution of the wealth of resources that are being stolen by Peru’s bosses and their international capitalist backers. J

Boston Teachers, Students and Parents Unite to Fight Budget Cuts

BOSTON, MA, May 19 — Chanting "Bail out schools, not banks" and "Money for schools, not war," Boston teachers, students, parents and supporters rallied at the State House and marched to City Hall. We demanded no cuts in public school programs and full funding for community colleges and public education.

This was the first mass action of Boston teachers against budget cuts since layoffs were announced in December. Teachers attacked cuts in their own schools. A Haitian community leader spoke against cutbacks, pointing to rising immigrant dropout rates. A Roxbury Community College student attacked underfunding at state colleges. A parent explained how cuts in inner-city schools are racist. A school bus driver opposed the Superintendent’s plan to further segregate the Boston public schools by creating five zones and restricting school choice to within these zones.

A PLP speaker called for an end to the system of capitalism that created the economic crisis. PLP leaflets calling for communist revolution were distributed.

To organize this rally inside the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), teachers had to fight the BTU Executive Board for months. The Board overturned the vote of the BTU membership to sponsor the rally, disgusting many members. The Board is calling for more taxes on working people, and for lobbying "friends" in the government. But many teachers followed the call to hold the rally anyway!

Teachers are skilled workers. But, like all workers, they are under attack by the bosses. Therefore, they must unite with working-class parents and students to fight against the bosses and their budget cuts. Otherwise, other workers may view teachers as "greedy and selfish." By fighting to improve the education of working-class students and against racism, imperialism and war, teachers can fight for the needs of the whole working class.

The Progressive Labor Party tries to give leadership to the anger of the hundreds and thousands of teachers, parents and students and turn the fight against cutbacks into the fight for communist revolution.

a name="Racist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits">">"acist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits

LOS ANGELES, June 15 — Students at high schools across this city walked out against racist budget cuts, carrying picket signs teachers had put up on their classroom doors, to protest the rulers’ Board of Education’s layoffs and increase in class size.

Obama called for "shared sacrifice" in his inaugural address, and lauded "the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job." On May 27, LA Mayor Villaraigosa said, "Given the unprecedented economic downturn in California, everyone must share in the responsibility and sacrifice to bridge this budget deficit." But neither of these bosses’ servants said the bankers must share their profits.

This idea isn’t new. For years, autoworkers were told a pay cut would avoid job losses. They’ve taken pay cut after pay cut, and then lost their jobs as well. That’s the way a profit system works.

Given the state budget crisis and virtual collapse of the union leadership in the wake of the May 15 injunction, teachers may be forced to take a pay cut "to save teacher jobs and class size," but will probably wind up with both a cut and layoffs.

The fight continues with picket lines, community camp-outs and other actions. But the reluctance of teachers to strike against the injunction indicates our class must gain the confidence to defy the union leadership. The teachers and students fighting together against the cutbacks has been an inspiring example of working-class unity. Most important is the increase in CHALLENGE readers, five youth joining PLP, more meeting with the Party and distributing CHALLENGE. In this crisis, the working class’s main victory is the growth of the communist movement.

We communists believe in sharing scarcity as well as abundance, and we believe that the working class can be won to this communist idea. While the willingness of many teachers to take a pay cut in the belief they will save jobs and prevent class size increase might be an example of the collective spirit of the working class, under capitalism "shared sacrifice" is a lie and a trap.

Workers’ militancy should be used not to negotiate their wages and conditions down but to fight to up the ante of class struggle. The hypocrisy of a system that gives $750 billion of workers’ taxes to super-rich bankers while they squeeze predominantly black and Latino students into larger and larger classes must be exposed. Then they cut teachers’ wages to boot! In this capitalist class society, it’s always the working class who sacrifices and the rich who live off that sacrifice.

 

The German poet Bertholt Brecht wrote in "A German War Primer" in 1938:

"Those who take the meat from the table preach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined demand sacrifice…
Those who lead the country into the abyss call ruling too difficult for ordinary men."

Capitalism is in a deepening crisis. The U.S. is isolated internationally, fighting an imperialist war on at least two fronts, leading the international global market into decline and attacking workers to pay for this crisis. Millions are losing their jobs and homes. The only government expenses not being cut are their war expenditures, the police and the prisons — the infrastructure for the war and fascism which is the capitalists’ main hope of surviving this crisis.

Clearly capitalism cannot provide a decent life for the working class. It must and can be overthrown and replaced by a communist system based on collective work, collective planning, and real equality (not socialism which retained money, banks, and wages, with the latter’s differentials splitting the working class). Eliminating the exploiter class which lives off the profits it squeezes from workers’ labor will release the potential for workers to reap the full fruits of the value that they, and only they, create.

Every struggle must have the long-term strategic goal of building the communist movement that can seize power from the bosses. The class struggle has crucial lessons to teach us how to get there. Three wildcat one-hour work stoppages built the unity, militancy and resolve of teachers, students and parents, independent of the union leadership. Student walkouts throughout the district, fighting for their own and their siblings’ education, build their potential to fight for the working class.

This is a victory the Board of Education can’t take away — the unity of parents, teachers and students; the experience of confronting the district, the Mayor and the banks; seeing our potential to unite against the bosses and their racist system; and the growth of PLP.

Read CHALLENGE. Participate in our PLP Summer Project, where students and teachers, soldiers and industrial workers will reach thousands with our newspaper and spread communist ideas.

 

a name="Stella D’Oro Diary 3: Strikers Continue to Fight">">"tella D’Oro Diary 3: Strikers Continue to Fight

Bronx, NY, June 17 —

For the wife of J.F. \

En la vida todo es ir /
In life everything is going

A lo que el tiempo deshace./
towards what time is undoing.

Sabe el hombre donde nace/
Where we are born we know,

Y no dónde va a morir./
not where we’re going to die.

This dialectical poem by the revolutionary Juan Antonio Corretjer1 captures the experience of Puerto Rican workers’ migration to New York, and treats life itself as an endless migration from our birthplace into unknown time. It speaks to the poignant experience of time in any migrating worker’s life. We heard that in the memorial tribute by his brother to Marcelo Lucero, the Ecuadoran immigrant worker murdered by racists in Long Island last year. And we hear it in the strike of the Stella workers, 97% of whom were born outside the U.S.. The strikers tell us that not knowing how a long strike will end is a hard thing to live through.

If you ask them what is the worst thing about their strike many speak of the dragging, endless time waiting on their corner of north Broadway for the strike to be resolved. "Ten months! In two months it’ll be a whole year!" "We started in summer… into the fall… winter… spring… and now it’s summer again — another summer!" They shake their heads, put their hands on your arm and ask "Are all strikes this long? How long are other strikes?" Where is it going? Is all this time undoing their lives? Is everything coming undone because of the boss’s heartlessness and refusal to listen to them even when they speak in the chants of a thousand supporters?

Sitting near us in the courtroom last month, while the Brynwood lawyer and the hated manager Dan Meyers droned on with their racist contempt for the workers, an older woman from Africa looked so sad we asked her what she was feeling, and she said she was thinking about her life ending this way, destroyed by these people. That’s one ending to the strike people are thinking about, that it might be the end of their working lives, the death of their common life together in the factory which, exploitation and all, was nevertheless a life where they shared good feelings as well as hard times, and had pride in their collective strength as unionized workers who had struck twice already for their demands. Will they ever go back to that time?

The Brynwood bosses, snug in their Connecticut suburbs, of course count on a strike wearing down the workers, but the strikers say grimly that Brynwood has underestimated them all along and that they will never give in. And strike time is not all unrelieved waiting. It is punctuated by a big rally that lifts their spirits; the last was twice the size of the previous one and they see they are gaining momentum. Every day other workers come with coffee and they know they are not alone. Yesterday a TWU busdriver blasted his horn going by and yelled through the window "Down with the scabs!" Those scabs walk brazenly past and they get up from the crates they’re sitting on and yell at them, competing to make up witty insults.

They see their fellow workers step up and develop as leaders growing in political knowledge and skill (one man on her shift bought one of these new women strike leaders a bullhorn of her own, as testimony to her fighting for all the workers). They know they are being talked about by radical workers in Germany and Guatemala and Spain and France and wherever CHALLENGE is read around the wide world they come from. Some come to meetings with PLP and discuss it all at length, as we make it possible for them to know one another, and speak together, in new, politically informed ways. But others sit there on their crates. A striker’s time drags and drags and drags towards its unknown end.

People are getting tired and worn down; they get sick again and again. (It’s good that tomorrow some doctors are coming to the line to do free checkups.) Some are thinking about bankruptcy or looking for other jobs — will another job be the end of their time at Stella? A spouse’s grave illness removes one of the most militant workers from strike activity and we don’t see him for more than two months. A woman speaks of how hard it is to answer her five-year-old grandson’s question, "Where are you going? Is that strike still on?" The strikers don’t know the end of the process, but they know the way, their struggle is making the road by walking. All of a worker’s struggling life is going, going forward, and starting from their political "birth" place at Stella D’Oro some of these workers may die as revolutionaries. We, and they don’t know where we individually will end, but we and they do know that the working class itself will never die.

________

1

Corretjer left the revisionist Puerto Rican Communist party to found the Liga Socialista, which for a time in the 1960s was a fraternal party of the young PLP. You can find on the internet Roy Brown’s musical setting of this poem in decima style sung by him, the group Haciendo Punto, and the Catalán singer Joan Manuel Serrat.

Four Years Post-Katrina: A Capitalist Disaster

Because of inherent racism, capitalism turned Hurricane Katrina into a destructive disaster for working people, a result which could have been prevented. Four years ago this coming August, Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, causing damage from central Florida to Texas and displacing over a million workers.

The majority of destruction was in New Orleans where 80% of the city was flooded and 1,836 workers’ lives were lost. The federal flood protection plan failed in 50 places and almost every levee was breached. Working-class people were stranded in flooded neighborhoods as the police and National Guard pulled guns on them, preventing them from entering the Superdome.

The areas in New Orleans affected the most and suffering the highest death rate were those in black and Latin communities. The local and federal governments did nothing to protect these communities, which were poverty-stricken even before the hurricane.

The news media painted a racist and anti-working-class picture of the city’s residents. While levees were breaking and police were preventing residents from crossing bridges to non-flooded areas, the media focused on attacking people that were "looting" food from local grocery stores. People who had been stuck on roofs and in flooded areas had no other choice but to take food to survive.

The violence, which the media skewed, was mainly by cops and the National Guard against the people in the affected areas. The media, a ruling-class tool, is used to slander working people. However, from the beginning CHALLENGE exposed the bosses’ neglect of the working class and the media’s lies.

Today, we see little change in the politicians’ and government agencies’ response to problems stemming from Katrina. Of the 1,859 public housing apartments in the St. Bernard and Lafitte Housing developments, only 10 have been replaced. Only 11% of families have been able to return to the Lower 9th ward, one of the poorest and most devastated communities. There are 25% fewer hospitals in New Orleans than before Hurricane Katrina hit. Almost the entire school system, formerly public, has been privatized and has left teachers without a union.

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was scheduled to give $2.6 billion to the state of Louisiana and $1.9 billion to New Orleans, neither of which has been delivered (San Francisco Bay View, 11/09/08). But the government has no problem spending $750 billion dollars to bail out U.S bankers.

On June 1, FEMA was set to evict thousands of residents from their FEMA trailer homes, but after militant protests, the government was forced to sell the trailers to the residents for $1. Here, four years after the hurricane, workers are still living in trailers, many of which were poisoned with toxins and poor construction, sickening many people.

The rulers have used this disaster to gentrify New Orleans and profit off the reconstruction in the tourist and rich neighborhoods. Undocumented workers have been hired at poverty wages, sometimes going unpaid, to work in unsafe conditions to rebuild the city. What was a disaster for the people of New Orleans has been turned into a gold mine for the ruling class.

Cuba has created a hurricane emergency system which, even as a remnant of the system that existed before Cuba gave up on fighting for the interests of the working class, has consistently kept death tolls to a minimum during hurricane season. Cuba assigns people to distribute medication to those in need and prepare food for times of natural disaster so people won’t have to "loot."

PLP has gone to New Orleans every year to stand with our working-class brothers and sisters to help rebuild homes and work with groups to spread revolutionary ideas. A communist society will plan in advance how to handle natural disasters, which will minimize loss of life and provide food, clothing and housing to those who may suffer losses.

That’s why we need to build a society that values workers above all, abolishes profits and destroys racism. Join the struggle to fight for communism!

Korea: From U.S.-Japanese Colony to Pro-Communist Land to State Capitalism

On June 12, the U.S. had trade sanctions placed on North Korea to punish it for testing a nuclear bomb. This conflict is part of a rising one between the U.S. and China, one where the U.S. tries to marshal anti-communism to win U.S. workers to support increasing military action worldwide.

North Korea is repeatedly presented as a mystery, a place impossible to understand, with a crazy, untrustworthy leader, likely to irrationally attack the U.S. or Japan or other "play-by-the-rules" nations. Ironically, U.S. imperialist urge workers to trust them — the only ones who have experience using these "weapons of mass destruction" in war!

Modern Korea began with Japanese and U.S. imperialism, and the wars they fought to gain control of the region. In 1905, Japan "won" Korea as a colony after a war with Russia. Teddy Roosevelt received a Nobel Prize for brokering "peace" between the two imperialist rivals, one that included Japan’s acceptance of U.S. control of the Philippines. In 1945, after 40 years of brutal exploitation and resistance to Japanese imperialism by Korean workers, the U.S. occupied southern Korea. As part of its World War II victory, the U.S. took what is now called South Korea as both an economic beachhead and a potential garrison for containing the Soviet Union and the communist-led, anti-imperialist movements of northern Asia.

Initially, a pro-U.S. government was staffed by Koreans who had served in the hated Japanese army and police force, but it couldn’t shut down the people’s committees that had been formed during the anti-Japanese resistance.

In June, 1950, after months of border skirmishes, most often initiated by the South Korean government, the U.S. demanded UN permission to attack North Korea for what it alleged was a foreign "invasion" of South Korea. Plagued by guerrilla resistance to landlords, to former collaborators and to U.S. rule, the U.S. hoped to "roll back" the northern communist regime that it blamed for civil war in the south.

The resulting Korean War demonstrated the lengths to which U.S. butchers would go to destroy communism and defend imperialism. As control of Korean territory passed back and forth between U.S. and North Korean forces, U.S. officials adopted a scorched-earth policy aimed at wiping out every city in North Korea.

By August 1950, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons of bombs per day over North Korea, many of them pure napalm. Every city in North Korea was damaged, with most experiencing 75-80% destruction. U.S. bombers targeted dams and shot farmers in their fields. The goal: to starve the population into submission. The U.S. also threatened to use atomic bombs, moving them into Asia, and ran practice atomic bomb drops over the North.

As a result of this aerial bombardment, 4 million out of a population of 30 million died during the Korean War: 2 million North Korean civilians, 1 million South Korean civilians, and 500,000 North Korean troops. A million Chinese soldiers (who had joined in the defense of Korea just as Koreans had fought in their revolution) and 56,000 American soldiers were also killed. Like the Vietnamese a decade later, Koreans know from personal experience that U.S. imperialists have never valued the lives of the worlds’ working class.

A 1953 truce — officially the war has never ended — left Korea just as divided as before. The Korean communist party (the Workers’ Party) of Kim Il Sung governed the North. A fascist, pro-U.S. government ruled the South, aided by a permanent garrison of some 40,000 U.S. troops armed with nuclear missiles and tactical nuclear weapons. North Korea defied the U.S. military assault, but its own political weaknesses turned this victory into a defeat for the international working class.

Founded in 1925, the Korean communist party grew out of the resistance to Japanese occupation in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. Part of an international movement, thousands of Koreans served in the Chinese Communist army during the resistance to Japan.

In 1946-47, the Korean communist party initiated land reform, made education and health care free for all, liberated women, and nationalized the large number of Japanese and U.S. factories in the North. But these socialist reforms did not move Korea toward communism. The Korean party focused on building "socialism in one country" which, over time, led to nationalism becoming its primary ideology.

In modern North Korea, no slogans call for workers’ power or internationalism. Banners proclaim "Long Live the Great Juche idea!" "Juche," calls for national (Korean) independence in politics, economics and defense; the term is linked to monarchist ideologies that meld the people and the nation into the person and family of the ruler, now Kim Jong Il, the son of Kim Il Sung. Glorified images of Kim Il Sung — reminiscent of the cult of the individual that weakened the Soviet Union and China — replaced the internationalism and the fight for communism that were once part of Korean practice.

Within its nationalism, North Korea retained wage differences and operated within the broad international economy. From the 1950s to 1980s it traded with the USSR and China for raw materials (oil) and manufactured goods. In the 1990s, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the intensification of capitalism in Russia and China, North Korea began to suffer the problems of all capitalist economies. Russia wanted hard currency for oil, and Korea had to find more markets for its goods.

The North Korean government had two responses to these economic problems, both reflecting state capitalism, not communist goals. One offered its workforce as low-wage labor by setting up free trade zones where South Korean and Japanese factories employ highly-skilled North Korean workers at low wages.

The other was to enhance its exports. In the 1990s, the trade in weapons became an increasingly important source of petroleum and foreign currency, and North Korea became a major supplier of SCUD missiles to countries such as Iran who are linked to China, Russia and other rivals of U.S. power. North Korea’s push to develop nuclear weapons is a tool to gain economic benefits and to manipulate the intensifying imperialist rivalries.

None of this benefits the working class. We can draw two lessons: One- no matter what sweet words the latest U.S. ruler coos, imperialism is a dead-end and a death trap for the working class. Second- there are no shortcuts to communism, to a society without wages, run by the working class. Nationalism has repeatedly been offered as a path to change, and it has repeatedly led workers back to capitalism and to death, whether in the Middle East, Asia, or the U.S. Only an international communist movement to smash capitalism worldwide can end war, racism and exploitation once and for all. J

Letters

Luis Castro Inspires Renewed Dedication to Fight for Communism

A group of comrades and friends of the Party in Los Angeles met to remember happy moments of political discussions about the communist movement, about entertainment, and the strengths and weaknesses of Comrade Luis Castro, editor of CHALLENGE for more than 30 years. Luis died on June 3, 2009.

His love and commitment to the international working class were enormous, as was his reading and infinite knowledge about liberal groups, nationalists, revisionists [fake leftists] and obviously, about the Russian and Chinese revolutions and the line of PLP. This same love was reflected in his love and tremendous commitment to his family.

A comrade said, "For decades, Luis was the symbol of CHALLENGE, from the time when we sent articles by telephone and he had to type them while we read them to him, asking questions or adding points to make it more political, until recently with the era of the internet. His knowledge about editing and his communist line were transmitted to many comrades, young and old, in many places."

Other participants in the meeting noted, "For years, Luis was the paper’s main translator. But when it came to simultaneous spoken translation during a meeting, that was something else. Once in New York, we, a group of garment and farm workers, were to have Luis as our translator (from English to Spanish). After a few minutes in which someone was giving a report, we asked Luis, "What is he saying?" He answered, "He says we have to fight for communism." Another two minutes passed. "Luis, what’s he saying?" Luis responded, "He says fascism is bad." That’s how Luis was.

Remembering Luis brought tears, laughter and calls to dedicate our lives to fight with greater vigor for what millions around the world dream of so much, true communism. We ended the evening singing Bella Ciao and Venceremos — We will win, the PLP version.

PLP Comrades, Los Angeles

a name="Reader in El Salvador Praises PLP’s Exposé of FMLN Swindlers"><">R"ader in El Salvador Praises PLP’s Exposé of FMLN Swindlers

I’ve been reading CHALLENGE for more than 10 years. I’m 76 years old and I’d like to take this opportunity to write something my conscience pushes me to write.

I want to deeply congratulate the Progressive Labor Party for the clarity that you’ve shown through the liberating principles of your communist literature. I say this because in reality there’s no other way of life — only communism can offer us what we need and tell us: with capitalism all of humanity faces the abyss.

It’s time to discover new horizons and with the help of PLP we will go forward. Before I read CHALLENGE, I lived with the hope that a government formed by the FMLN would change our system of life, not thinking that they are manipulated by the dictates of merciless capitalism and never in their path conform to communism, and thus they’ll swindle all the workers of the world. Long live communism.

A CHALLENGE reader

Testing Protested At H.S. Graduation

On June 6, residents of my Texas town prepared to witness their children graduate as the Class of 2009. Sadly, some students were barred. Though having completed all their credits, they had failed one of the required Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests. At a special meeting the students requested to walk in the graduation ceremony as state law permitted. But this was denied. Students were threatened with arrest if they defied the ban.

At the ceremony, extra police lined the entrances and facilities. The protesting students came in their caps and gowns and sat together where their protest would be visible. When their class exited the stadium, they walked together with locked arms behind their class and threw their caps in the air with their class. No arrests were made.

Thinking back, I remember debating how to react if my daughter did not pass her exit level and TAKS exams. I figured that if she didn’t try hard enough, then maybe she didn’t want or deserve a diploma. She would just have to attend summer school and miss the family vacation. When I learned that she had not passed one TAKS exam and that the school board would not allow her to walk on their graduation day, I felt I had disappointed her. But the more I thought about it, and the more I talked to her, the more I realized that "it’s just not fair." My daughter has never repeated a grade and, like many others, has overcome many obstacles.

Under "No Child Left Behind," high school kids must discontinue their regular curriculum to prepare for a four-part TAKS test and exit exams to receive a high school diploma. Not only has the government given school districts the tools to discriminate but also the power to destroy. As more schools give up on kids, they don’t tell parents that a child may fail or not graduate. I got a phone call two weeks before school was out. The school has NEVER shown students their test results. And no one knows how many students were forced to drop out before graduation.

Kids are accountable to the state for test performance, and schools receive government funds to improve programs, but are the schools and states held accountable to the children? Our town has cancelled summer school, and students who need to make up credits must go to a different district, 30 miles away, with no transportation provided. Yet the school is building a new indoor football practice field.

"No Child Left Behind" left many kids behind. How did so many go unnoticed for nine months? They are not troubled kids, not in alternative or special ed classes, not gifted or homeless. So I wonder, where was the tutoring, letters of concern, or phone calls requesting parent involvement?

A Reader

a name="Youth Felt Comrade Luis’s Communist Humanity">">"outh Felt Comrade Luis’s Communist Humanity

When Luis Castro, former editor of CHALLENGE, passed away I could not believe it. My feelings about his death weren’t and still aren’t pleasant. However, the experiences I shared with him were happy and educating ones.

Luis left a legacy and I will sorely miss him. He taught me, a young person, a lot about current events and history. Being late to the memorial, I didn’t see him in the casket at full view, which would have provoked tears, making it even more difficult to carry on. He was easy to talk to and a very good person.

Westchester Comrade

New Highways Pave the Way To War

From South America to Alaska, new highways are ready to go to create pathways for transportation and communication. These roads will ease the ruling class’ access to oil and natural gas, manufactured goods, minerals, iron, biodiversity, water and other natural resources and cheaply made goods. The goal is to maximize profit, guarantee security and control, to try to keep these resources away from the rivals of U.S. imperialism, and to prepare for the third world war. Since 2001, Robert Pastor (the founder of Harvard’s Center for North American Studies), has put forth the proposal regarding "deep integration", which was spurred on by the Alliance for Security and Prosperity in North America (ASPAN) and Chamber of Commerce of North America (CCAN) projects.

The CCAN is a subsidiary of The Chamber of Commerce and Council of the Americas (founded by Rockefeller), the Mexican Institute for Competition (financed by the international and national private sector), and the Canadian Council of CEOs.

The executive committee of CCAN is formed by Chevron, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Procter & Gamble and its subsidiary PUR Water Purification, Mittal Steel, etc. From Canada the committee includes: Power Corporation of Canada, Suncor Energy, Linamar, Home Depot, etc. And from Mexico: the Business Coordinating Council, Mexican Council of Businessmen, Confederación de Camaras Industriales, Grupo Posadas, Modelo, Kimberly Clark Mexico (US), Grupo CYDSA, etc. (Delgado, n.d.)

Mexico, one of the North American "allies", has received financing through Plan Puebla Panama, and has been upgrading the Highway of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the tourist highway of the Caribbean and the inter-oceanic logistical highways of Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama, as well as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and the Mesoamerican Coralline Corridor, which have been implemented through them.

One of the most important highways is CANAMEX which crosses the American states of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana. It connects to Alberta, Canada and the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit and Jalisco.

At the same time, the Super Highway of North America extends from Canada to the center of Mexico. It is estimated that it allows the movement of merchandise worth billions of dollars. The highway is widened from Mexico City to the north, passing through Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi (multipurpose land ports) where the rail lines and highways from the Pacific ports connect. The outer zones connect to the corridor as sources to transport petroleum and petrochemicals.

The U.S. ruling class wants to secure these corridors and merchandise, and, under the excuse of drug trafficking, its national security. The bosses want to be ready to put down any signs of discontent as well as their rival imperialists, and have militarized the country. That’s why it is important for us to unite and fight for a society where the pathways to communication do not serve the economic interests of the bosses, but as paths to form internationalism among the working class. While bosses are constructing their web of highways, we will fight and use these paths to construct one Party around the world, under one same flag and the sole struggle, the struggle for communism!

Young Mexican Comrade

Communist-led Open Mic Kicks Out the Jams

The capitalist education system maintains divisions between teachers, students, and parents behind their petty administrators who carry out the bosses’ orders. The schools function as the ideological production centers that indoctrinate our youth with rotten capitalist ideology drenched in patriotism and elitism that poisons the necessary aspects of the learning that we know our youth need. PLP has been struggling to create unity through class consciousness and collective action in one high school. Through distribution of 100 CHALLENGES, we’ve recruited and consolidated students and teachers, and built an organization that attempts to create communist culture.

Several student PL’ers facilitate CHALLENGE networks while struggling with their fellow students to attend protests and PLP study/action meetings. The Culture Club proposed at a PTA meeting that an open mic would be a great way for the two organizations to have a fundraiser.

The Open Mic was a success. Parents provided hot food, teachers rapped and jammed with the students, and the students performed dance, poetry, music and stand-up comedy. The event was a clear illustration of PL’s idea to build solidarity between workers (parents and teachers) and students. By creating a communist culture within the school, communist social relationships take seed and develop between the students that read CHALLENGE, distribute the paper, and/or are interested in fighting the budget cuts.

A year of struggle culminated in an Open Mic that had parents and students moving to heavy metal that blared out of angry guitars strummed by students was an inspiration. Asian, Latin, black, and white students expressing, working, and socializing together with staff and parents is a brief glimpse of how communist entertainment will be both participatory and exciting. The PLP continues to gain ground by developing communist consciousness through cultural work. "Everything you do counts."?J

Transit Bosses Make Workers Pay for Crisis

LOS ANGELES, June 15 — With the bosses cutting bus hours, health benefits and jobs, transit workers are under attack as the rulers try to solve their crisis on the backs of our class. But this is a capitalist disaster — not an act of nature. This crisis was created by those who profited hugely. Now that the capitalist economy is in decline, these same bosses and bankers demand to be bailed out. Workers are doing the bailing. With a salute to their commander-in-chief, the labor union executives have stepped in line behind Obama’s call for "shared sacrifice" to save their system. But instead of sacrificing, the richest of the rich are taking $2 or $3 trillion for the banks while workers suffer cuts in wages, benefits and vital social services.

The entire goal of the capitalist system is competition to produce maximum profits for a tiny group of capitalists, not to produce to meet the needs of the workers. In times of crisis, hard wired into the capitalist profit system, more goods are produced than people can afford to buy. The greedy bosses would rather destroy products than give them away to people who desperately need them. They take food, jobs, benefits and bus service away from us so they can pay huge amounts to keep their banks solvent. We don’t need their banks; we need to survive.

That’s why the main victory in this contract fight and in our coming struggles against their attacks will be unity and understanding that the source of these attacks is capitalism. We need to unite to fight for a system in which we produce to meet the needs of our families and our class, not to bail out the banks and to keep profits high for these blood suckers. We need to build a mass PLP to fight for workers’ power through communist revolution.

These attacks are coming home to MTA workers but the majority of the 9,000 mechanics, clerks and drivers know next to nothing about what’s going on with negotiations. The union leadership tries to keep the membership in the dark, only calling on us when it needs our votes to legitimize its murky deals. The last thing they want us to do is to unite against the capitalist system and to fight for a communist society without bosses, profits, banks or union hacks!

An independent strike committee is forming to call on transit workers to fight the union leadership as well as the company’s attempt to impose "shared sacrifices." CHALLENGE readers will be active. A lack of leadership leaves many workers feeling defenseless.

We can learn from our fight for contract issues how the apparatus of the bosses’ government is used against us. From a strike, political lessons always become clearer. Our unity strengthens when we realize that the only solution to the constant attacks is to build workers’ revolution. This can never succeed without increasing the size of our communist party, PLP, among drivers and mechanics.

Why rescue a system that, in the name of profit, forecloses and empties thousands of houses while families live in camper shells? The LA Times reports cuts of more than 400,000 bus service hours since 2007 at a time when even more workers must rely on public transit. The madness and greed of the racist profit system must end.

If transit workers are against these foreclosures, layoffs, cuts and the job freeze at Metro, if we’re against bailing out the banks at our expense, we must understand that we’re against capitalism itself. To guarantee the future for the working class, we should unite against the coming war contract, build for a strike against any and all cuts and deepen that unity. We must build the long-term fight to get rid of the profit system and for a communist society where all workers will work and produce to meet the needs of our own class, not the bankers!

 

Comrade Luis Castro: An Internationalist for the Ages


Comrade Luis at 1971 March for Jobs

Luis Castro, a stalwart communist, a fighter against racism and for the working class his entire adult life and the editor of CHALLENGE-DESAFIO for a quarter century, died on June 3, having battled pancreatic cancer for an astonishing three years.

Our hearts go out to his loving family, to his wife Lucia, to his six children and his five grandchildren.

Forty years ago Luis volunteered to translate for DESAFIO and eventually became the editor of the entire paper. His knowledge about everything across the globe was boundless. Before there was the World Wide Web, there was Luis. Before there was Wikipedia, there was "Luis-pedia."

Luis had a razor-edged, penetrating political understanding. Whenever he spoke at meetings or in private conversations or at street rallies, Luis’s political line was on the mark. He was sharp and to the point.

Luis was the prototype of an Internationalist. He truly saw the working class as one international class. Whenever workers were attacked or suffering in some corner of the world, he would become enraged. He would take it personally, like an attack on his family, because his family included workers everywhere.

In whatever article he wrote, he would invariably refer to what became his trademark: "From Detroit to Oaxaca, from New Orleans to Bogota, from Johannesburg to Shanghai, workers are fighting back." Luis constantly saw it as one grand struggle.

Before he became ill, he chaired PLP’s International Committee and continued to meet with it as his health permitted. He wrote a huge number of international articles for CHALLENGE. He would read all the bosses’ papers, both English- and Spanish-language, from New York to Europe to Latin-America and searched the world’s websites for information that would find its way into a communist analysis of global events.

Although he was now working from his apartment, he checked the politics in all the articles he was translating for DESAFIO and then offered changes to strengthen them. He was especially sharp on matters relating to racism and war. Thus, Luis’s grasp of PL’s politics found its way into the paper and helped other comrades to take the initiative to write more and raise the level of the paper’s content. This made for a smooth transition for an expanded editorial board composed of many younger comrades.

As the paper’s press deadline approached, he would help out by suggesting corrections, raising ideas and writing short articles at the last minute.

As long as we are writing articles for CHALLENGE-DESAFIO, we will be visualizing Luis, standing behind us looking over our shoulder and saying, "What about including this point?"

When his cancer was first discovered, we thought he would only have a short time left with us, weeks or months at the most. Yet slowly but surely he fought the disease, even after his doctor said that with chemotherapy he’d hardly last a year. That prognosis never seemed to get him down, at least outwardly.

Luis was a brave comrade, right through to the sudden end. He rarely complained as he endured constant changes of medications and MRI’s and a myriad of tests while he battled for hours on the phone with insurance companies and in the offices of government bureaucrats over bills charged to him and benefits due him.

Through it all, that first year came and went, and then a second year, and a third. Astounding!

His continuing to write and translate from his home seemed to keep him going. It may have been the best "chemotherapy" he could have had, and may very well have done more than any medication to prolong his life.

He was an amazing translator. While sitting at his computer, he would be reading an article in English and translating it into Spanish, as he simultaneously carried on a conversation with whomever approached him. Expert translators marveled at the nuances embedded in his work whose content would come across with such clarity to DESAFIO’S readers.

Luis was also a sports enthusiast, writing about baseball or some so-called "earthshaking" event happening in the sports world, under a pen name, "S. Port." And he was a huge movie fan, writing reviews under the name of "Rex Red."

He accumulated a mountain of what he called his "files" — a big pile of papers and e-mail printouts sitting next to his computer. Whenever he needed some information for something that he or someone else was writing, he would dive into the pile and just pluck it out.

Comrade Luis also was active in workers’ struggles as well as writing about them. At his memorial service, a leader of his building’s tenant’s committee described how Luis would sit at meetings, seemingly "reading" a paper, but as soon as the management tried to pull something that attacked the tenants’ well-being, Luis would immediately interject and expose their tricks. She said the committee couldn’t have succeeded without him.

But, as everyone who knew him realized, Luis was not exclusively a political being. He took great care of his kids, worrying about their welfare and progress. He spent hours in hospitals and emergency rooms trying to obtain medical attention for his wife Lucia, provoking a storm of rage about the way the medical system treated working people.

Luis’s apartment was always a bundle of excitement. His grandchildren would be over on the weekends, along with his children and their friends. Rather than being disturbed about all this tumult, he seemed to revel in it, saying it kept him on his toes.

A lot of this love came from his thorough working-class make-up, his deep understanding of what we were all fighting for, to have a world filled with this excitement.

Food was a big thing in Luis’s life, central to his working-class culture. He was always ready for lunches and dinners with whoever was prepared to join him.

He loved jokes. He would e-mail a load of them. He especially shared the ones about the foibles of old age.

Luis was always concerned about problems that had befallen others. Since he couldn’t travel, he would always ask anyone who had just visited PLP’s former chairperson Milt Rosen, out in LA, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, how he was doing. He would keep up-to-date on anyone who was sick or hospitalized.

These days the words "awesome" and "amazing" are flung around so indiscriminately that it begins to dilute their meaning. But to say Luis was "amazing" is to use the word in its most profound sense.

Luis will never be forgotten. His legacy will endure, both in the love of his family which he embraced, and in the Progressive Labor Party which he helped build and lead.

So great is comrade Luis’s contribution to the international working class’s communist movement, it is difficult to measure. Suffice it to say he will be remembered and treasured for as long as the fight for communism goes on, setting an example for all to follow in working to build a revolution to which he was so devoted his entire life.

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CHALLENGE, July 15, 2009

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15 July 2009 339 hits
  • Winning Means Destroying the Profit System: Stella D’Oro Strikers Fight for All Workers
    • Fighting Bosses’ Racist and Sexist Divisions
    • Profit System = Bosses’ Robbery
  • Long-range U.S. Oil-War Plans vs. Russia, China Shadows Iran Crisis
    • Fearing Iran Explosion, U.S. Rulers Tone Down “Green Revolution “Hype...
    • ...As Pentagon Takes Long-Range Aim At Teheran
    • Carter’s 1980 Doctrine Basis for Current Oil Wars
    • Iran: Missing Cornerstone of U.S.-U.K. Energy Empire
  • Chicago Transit Workers Protest Bosses’ Retiree Health Cuts
    • ‘The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!’
  • Persist, Persist, Persist... Exposing Nationalism Opens Door for Red Ideas
  • No More ‘Happy’ Talk Boeing Workers: Prepare To Fight For Our Class
    • Deadly Insanity
    • The Sane Alternative
    • Industrial Workers Crucial to Battle vs. Exploitation
  • Mexico’s Elections: Voting for Bosses’ Pols = More Repression of Workers
  • Honduras Coup: Workers Have No Side in Bosses’ Dogfight
    • U.S. Rulers’ Hand Seen in Honduras Coup
  • Racism, Music Industry Profiteers Killed ‘King of Pop’
  • U.K. Oil Strikers Need Intern’l Unity, Not Attacks on ‘Foreign’ Workers
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    • Maybe U.S. really in it for oil?
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    • We tapped your phone? Oops!
    • Grads, welcome to the working class
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    • Franco “disappeared” leftist kids
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    • What Happened?
    • More of Same Negligence by the Bosses
  • Build A Worker-Student-Soldier Alliance — Fight for Communism

Winning Means Destroying the Profit System:
Stella D’Oro Strikers Fight for All Workers

Bronx, NY, June 16 — As we go to press the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ruled in favor of the Stella D’Oro strikers. The ruling reinstates the workers to their old jobs with full back pay, holidays and benefits, and orders the company to resume negotiations for a new contract. This victory for the workers, who showed strength and perseverance over the ten month strike, was greeted by booming chants of “The workers united will never be defeated!” at a union meeting where the decision was explained.
Over the course of this strike the workers have had to battle virtually every aspect of the bosses’ state. Ten months facing the cops protecting the scabs, the removal of the picketers’ shelter, the harassment of militant workers by the District Attorney, and ten months battling through the court system. For the moment, the decision rolls back the pay and benefit cut imposed by the Brynwood venture capitalists who own the company. The bosses have 15 days to appeal the decision, so the strike continues. If the bosses eventually lose in court, they will still try to get concessions from the union, and the workers, now having gone this far, will have to keep fighting.

Fighting Bosses’ Racist and Sexist Divisions

Amid this battle the Stella strikers have shown the way to fight the ruling class by demonstrating the importance of multi-racial unity and fighting sexism. Early on, some of the male strikers were offered their jobs back, but not one took the bosses up on it. They risked losing their jobs to stay on the line instead of accepting a contract that left the women workers out in the cold. Only in this way can workers win — uniting black, Latin, Asian, white, men and women workers, fighting together against the same enemy, capitalism.
Rank-and-file workers from many unions have come out to support the Stella strikers. Train operators have saluted them as the subway cars rolled by on the elevated tracks passing the plant. Busloads of teachers, professors and students have marched to the plant gate. All despite the major union leaders not lifting a finger to build support. The Stella workers’ union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International did not push the AFL-CIO for a national labor boycott.

Profit System = Bosses’ Robbery

As support has grown for the Stella D’Oro strike, two contradictions have defined it: workers versus bosses, and revolution versus reform. The capitalist profit system means bosses reap the value workers create, leaving us only a tiny fraction as a wage. Fighting for reforms means only fighting to “win” the strike, which at best means keeping a bit more of what we create (see cartoon), but maintaining the bosses’ ability to go on stealing profit from our labor.
In the struggle of workers against bosses, PLP fights for the whole working class seizing power from the bosses’ state — international communist revolution. This means workers controlling production for workers’ need, not for bosses’ profit. Winning a better contract at Stella can boost the morale of many workers beyond the Bronx, but unfortunately if capitalism is left intact the bosses will use their power to try to reverse these victories. Reform is a treadmill, generation after generation fighting to keep the little we have, and in the end the bosses rip off every generation after us.
As revolutionaries we define “winning” differently. Winning means more workers becoming life-long organizers for the working class to win the communist world we need. Our goal is not only a contract, it’s a growing workers’ movement and a Party able to abolish the profit system. This strike has been an opportunity to put PLP’s communist ideas into practice.
PLP organizers advocate militant strike action to stop production in the best fighting traditions of the working class, like the great Flint sit-down strike against GM in 1936-37 (see www.plp.org/pamphlets/flintstrike.html). A communist-led working class would bring much more power to bear. The last rally of 1,000 closed the Stella plant that day. Bringing mass crowds of workers to block the gates to stop scab production has given workers their best chance to fight the wage cuts.
Many workers in other unions are involved and showing their support. The millions of workers in the city could surround the Stella plant, as well as other workplaces, every day, stopping scabs and deliveries. One union staffer said in response: “But that would be a different country.” That’s the point. Only communist ideas can inspire us to build a mass of workers to win that different world.
What will inspire us to dig in, organize, and take the risks of real militancy? The real value of our revolutionary line is that it shows workers there is a future worth fighting for, whatever the risks — a world without bosses, a world run by workers. This has a long history in the communist movement, and PLP carries that today into the Stella strike and all workers’ battles. We invite and encourage all the Stella D’Oro strikers to join this fight for workers power, and become members of PLP.
The Stella strikers are fighting back hard against the bosses, when others are caving in without a fight. They are reading CHALLENGE, discussing the ideas, getting better organized, and digging in — following the Party’s approach of reaching out to other workers in the Bronx for support. Communists and non-communists are all learning a lot in this strike. PLP’s Summer Project among these workers will fight to expand our communist base and consolidate the gains made during this strike.

Long-range U.S. Oil-War Plans vs. Russia, China Shadows Iran Crisis

The mass protests over the recent election in Iran do not signal a looming counterrevolution against the thirty-year reign of the ayatollahs, as many in the U.S. mass media at first imagined. And, unfortunately for our class, President Ahmadinejad’s opponents lack the communist leadership necessary to build a movement to overthrow the profit system. These people’s efforts and courage — and sometimes their lives — are being wasted in a doomed struggle to replace one group of capitalist exploiters with another.

Fearing Iran Explosion, U.S. Rulers Tone Down “Green Revolution “Hype...

The liberal sector of the U.S. media mistook the outbreak of agitation in Teheran for a “color revolution.” They inaccurately compared it to the anti-Russian election outcomes in Eastern Europe in the early years of this decade, a pro-U.S. campaign that was bankrolled by billionaire George Soros through his Open Society Institute. As The New Yorker gushed, “Iran seemed headed for a confrontation between...the forces for secular democracy and those for autocratic theocracy.” (6/29/09)
What is actually at play, however, is the rift between factions of filthy-rich oil ayatollahs with divergent views on how best to increase the take of the Iranian ruling class. The dominant Ahmadinejad wing favors a strategic alliance with Russia and China. Failed candidate Moussavi & Co. lean toward a quicker-buck deal with Western oil firms like Halliburton and Shell.
Ahmadinejad’s brutal crackdown, which has murdered at least 20 people, strengthens his nuclear-bent, anti-U.S. faction and sharpens the global imperialist rivalry. In response, Obama has placed his promised “diplomacy” with Teheran on hold. With U.S. armed forces bogged down for the moment in the Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan oil and gas wars, his administration is issuing long-term military threats against Iran — and its Russian and Chinese backers.
Obama & Co. are walking on eggshells in Iran. Evidence of U.S. meddling recalling the 1953 CIA coup [see box below] could set off an anti-U.S. backlash far worse than in 1979. The overstretched U.S. war machine can’t seize and occupy Iran just now. So U.S. rulers, in the form of the Rockefeller Foundation-backed New America Foundation, have been busy planting op-ed pieces arguing that Iran’s election was legitimate. Their cynical “proof” is that repressive internal security forces have remained loyal to Ahmadinejad. While Iran’s internal politics make electoral regime change in Iran impossible for Obama, U.S. commitments elsewhere in the region preclude imminent military action.

...As Pentagon Takes Long-Range Aim At Teheran

But make no mistake. The U.S. has Iran in its crosshairs. In the midst of the election furor, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who took part in wording the Carter Doctrine [see box at right] and misses no opportunity to espouse it, held a telling press conference. Said Gates (6/18/09), “We are already in two major conflicts. So what if we have a third one or a fourth one or a fifth?” The New York Times (6/22/09) clarified Gates’s statement, quoting unnamed Pentagon officials about “potentially significant operations elsewhere ... against Iran, North Korea or even China and Russia.” Arch-imperialist U.S. strategist — and war criminal — Zbigniew Brzezinski sums up the U.S. outlook for Iran: “I’m pessimistic in the short term, and optimistic in the long term.” (NYT, 6/28/09) Brzezinski assumes a relatively easy U.S. remilitarization, including a reinstated draft.
For workers, communist consciousness remains the missing link to an effective fight against the rulers’ war moves. Working-class Iranian marchers wrongly think a new set of mullahs will do the trick. Workers in the U.S. remain pacified by their new liberal president. They fail to see that Obama is escalating the assault on their livelihoods to maximize the bosses’ profits — and to impose an
increasingly exploitive police state that wages ever wider wars. Our Party must serve as an internationalist eye-opener both to the capitalist sources of workers’ misery and to its revolutionary, communist solution.

Carter’s 1980 Doctrine Basis for Current Oil Wars

The specter of a Russian-Iranian strategic coalition bridging through Afghanistan has haunted Western imperialists for almost two centuries. The current U.S. view dates back to Carter’s 1980 State of the Union speech, when he warned Iranian leaders that “the real danger to their nation lies in the north, in the Soviet Union and from the Soviet troops now in Afghanistan....” He continued:
“The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, through which most of the world’s oil must flow. [Editor’s note: The straits are a 35-mile-wide passage between Iran and U.S.-armed Oman.] The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.... An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Carter was essentially declaring the same war that Obama is now waging in Iraq and Afghanistan — and that will logically expand into Iran.

Iran: Missing Cornerstone of U.S.-U.K. Energy Empire

Third in the world in oil reserves and second in natural gas, Iran commands key Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea supply routes. Allied control of the “Persian Corridor” and its underlying crude helped the U.S. and the Soviet Union defeat the Nazis in World War II. In 1953, after Iran elected a Soviet-tilting government, President Mossadegh threatened to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Shortly, a CIA-led coup placed the dictatorial Shah on the throne. Anglo-Iranian, now called British Petroleum, remained in Iran, but only as a junior partner to U.S. giant Exxon-Mobil’s forerunners.
For decades, the Pentagon armed the Shah’s regime, which served the U.S. both as an oil source and a hired gun protecting the eastern flank of the Mid-east treasure trove, with grand prize Saudi Arabia at its center. Israel policed the western side. In 1979, two events brought this regional racket crashing down. The Soviets, by then fully capitalist and imperialist, invaded Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Iranian Islamist nationalists, backed by the pro-Soviet, phony communist Tudeh party, deposed the Shah.
The U.S. countered both militarily and ideologically. In Afghanistan, Washington supported anti-Soviet Islamic warriors, ultimately the base of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Jimmy Carter declared that the Mid-east was of vital U.S. interest (see box above), meaning that Exxon Mobil’s exclusive oil and gas rights would be defended by U.S. troops. Carter launched the Navy’s Persian Gulf Rapid Deployment Force, which has grown into the Pentagon’s Central Command. Today CENTCOM, with the slaughter of millions of Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis under its belt, has the mandate to plan and execute future assaults on Iran.
Back in 1979, U.S. rulers demonized Iran’s new Islamist regime by provoking the “hostage crisis.” David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger brought the ailing ex-Shah to New York for medical treatment, knowing full well that it would trigger a response in Teheran. Outraged Iranian militants retaliated by taking hostage 50 U.S. diplomats and spies at the U.S. embassy. As a result, Iran’s mullah-Tudeh alliance was branded as a terrorist rogue state — a label that clings to the clerics to this day and will serve to justify a possible U.S. invasion.

Chicago Transit Workers Protest Bosses’ Retiree Health Cuts

CHICAGO, IL , June 18 — Today more than one hundred active and retired city bus drivers picketed the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) main offices to stop the racist CTA bosses from cutting retiree health care on July 1. Almost 7,000 retired workers and their families will be forced to pay as much as $1,300/month for medical coverage, deducted from their pension checks. The workers are seeking a federal court injunction to stop the July 1 cutoff.

‘The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!’

A PLP contingent made up mostly of high school students attended today’s rally and kicked off our mini-Summer Project. We sold 50 CHALLENGES and everyone got a PLP leaflet. Our call for an anti-racist worker-student alliance and organizing working-class solidarity was very well-received by the workers. Racist Ron Huberman was head of the CTA when the state law was passed to steal retiree health care. Since then he has replaced Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan as head of the crisis-ridden Chicago Public Schools.
Huberman and Mayor Daley will continue their fascist reign of terror, this time on teachers and students. This is the real “stimulus package” to bail out the biggest banks and pay for the current economic crisis of capitalism. Uniting transit workers, teachers and students to support one another, taking to the streets and shutting the city down would be more powerful than any injunction could ever be. We have to rely on the power of the working class, and our ability to grasp and fight for revolutionary communist politics, not capitalist courts or politicians to save us.
We made several contacts and later that evening a retired CTA worker and Parent Representative from a local high school joined us in a discussion about racist health care at Stroger Cook County Hospital.

Persist, Persist, Persist...
Exposing Nationalism Opens Door for Red Ideas

LOS ANGELES, CA — “ When I go back to my place of origin (Guatemala), I’m going to change the way I act with my wife and kids... I think I’ve lost a lot of time... I want to be like you,” said a garment worker to a comrade and fellow worker.
The friendly and political relationship with this worker and his friends started a year and a half ago. The first week I worked in this factory, I sat down at lunchtime at a table with a group of workers. They moved to the other end of the table. I continued to sit at the same table every day, but the group only talked among themselves. I always greeted them with, “Hi, how are you?” Some answered me, others didn’t.
A few weeks passed and my comrades in PLP told me, “You have to break into this circle; keep trying; look for discussions about problems in the factory or with immigration, or about soccer.” After continuing to attempt conversation, little by little some started to reply. One day I gave a pat on the back to one worker. He said to me, very irritated, “What’s up with you?” I answered that I considered them my friends. Seeing this, others started talking, and they invited me to share their food.
Now we all sit together and discuss all aspects of life, including politics. One discussion that changed a lot was when the Mexican and Guatemalan soccer teams were playing each other (I was born in Mexico, they in Guatemala). I pointed out how the bosses use nationalism to divide and exploit us more. They were very impressed and liked my conclusion that we need international unity.
One day, with much emotion, a co-worker talked about traveling through Mexico on the “train of death” — many workers travel on top of trains and fall to their deaths — to the U.S. In a town in Veracruz, working-class families threw food and water to those on the train. He said, “These people didn’t know us, but still they helped us to survive.”
Days later my coworkers and I planned a meal at my house and they brought the food. My wife and others in our PLP club joined us and we presented communist ideas and CHALLENGE newspaper. Some of these workers have since participated in study groups and a group came to our May Day dinner. On several occasions they’ve invited us to parties with their friends, in which they initiate political discussions, saying that “we need a revolution.”
There’s a long road ahead to develop them as communist leaders, and win them to develop CHALLENGE networks and class struggle, but a recent event shows us we’re on the correct road. In the factory we celebrated the birthday of a coworker from Asia. My friends took leadership in organizing discussions about nationalism when another Asian worker made racist comments about Asian workers from other countries. Several of these workers, including the one who said, “I want to be like you all,” have been asked to meet with PLP and to fight for communist revolution. The fight against nationalism has opened a base for communist ideas and practices.
California Industrial Worker
H.S. Student-Teacher Picketline Hits Slash in School Budget
BROOKLYN, NY, June 23 — A multi-racial group of around thirty staff members at our local high school picketed outside this morning, carrying signs, and chanting: “They say cut back, we say fight back” and “Bail out the schools, not the banks.” Teachers, paraprofessionals and school aides kept the spirit going on the line as drivers passing by honked loudly in support.
The school, like many others in this capitalist crisis, has no positions for some staff members, is cutting hours for other staff and cutting programs for students. The administration hasn’t let us know exactly what will be cut, but even the small details which have leaked out scare and anger the staff.
We followed up with a bagel breakfast/union meeting, where the discussion was focused on how we can organize our chapter to fight both for the students and the staff. Plans were made to send letters to parents and set up various committees. Teachers and school workers were asked to join the Stella D’Oro picket lines over vacation and to attend planning meetings during the summer to get ready for the long fight ahead. Considering that we are heading into summer vacation, pulling off the protest and the union meeting was a big victory.
Our Party was part of the leadership of both this struggle and a staff newsletter which addressed many of the issues in the school. We can do a better job of trying to analyze and explain why these cuts and attacks are happening. They are part of a larger crisis throughout capitalism. Because of the racism inherent in the system, this kind of cut will most deeply hurt schools like ours, with its primarily black and Latino students, already struggling to provide them an education.
Our job now is to continue to sell CHALLENGE subscriptions to our friends, build new leadership within the school and bring revolutionary politics to this fight.

No More ‘Happy’ Talk
Boeing Workers: Prepare To Fight For Our Class

SEATTLE, WA — The IAM has lost hundreds of members during the last six months, with thousands to follow. The company is planning to lay off 10,000 by year’s end. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said this downturn is worse than after 9/11, with nearly $20 billion lost over two years. Subcontracting has increased while racist attacks on largely black and Latino subcontractor workers have intensified. We have suffered through recessions before, but is something more happening here?
Aerospace and auto are often referred to as the twin spines of U.S. manufacturing. The change in auto is clear. The UAW has become an extension of the government, agreeing recently to a wage freeze after having cut wages in half for new hires, to 21,000 more GM layoffs and to a strike ban until 2015. The Feds now own 70% of the company, while Obama praises workers for “sacrificing for future generations.” Those future generations will work for poverty wages if they are lucky enough to get an auto job.
Louis Uchitelle, senior New York Times economics reporter, asked if aerospace is following in Detroit’s footsteps. For the first time, the winter quarter saw a trade deficit in aerospace components. Although it is not as far along as auto, Uchitelle fears the same process is unfolding in aerospace.
Even as conditions worsen, misleaders try to cover up with happy talk. Indeed, May’s Aero Mechanic tells us “the future is bright” and to “focus our efforts on building a better relationship with Boeing [bosses].”
Meanwhile, strikes are becoming illegal in industry after industry — whether or not you have a union. Locally, “Boeing is signaling that unless it gets no-strike assurance...a second [787] production line will be in some other state, probably South Carolina.” (Seattle Times, 6/19) The paper demands, “This accommodation with modern business...most unions made decades ago...needs to happen at Boeing now.” Just ask the autoworkers how well that turned out!

Deadly Insanity

The insanity of capitalism has created a crisis of overproduction. More producers are making too many airplanes and cars for the market to bear. It’s not that workers don’t need reliable cars and safe airplanes. Rather, it’s that capitalism is a commodity system that produces for sale and profit, not for our needs.
At some point these periodic crises become unmanageable in the usual way. No bubble or stimulus can do the trick. The ruling capitalist class, through its government, takes direct control of industry and finance to insure the survival of their class.
The famous political economist R. Palme Dutt recognized in this pattern the birth of fascism. “Fascism is the working out, in conditions of extreme decay, the most typical tendencies of modern capitalism. [It] discloses itself as the dictatorship of big Capital [in crisis].”
The form may not look exactly like ‘30s fascism, but the essence remains the same. The bosses’ bottom line becomes the survival of the empire. Basic industry is salvaged by mercilessly attacking the working class in order to prepare for the only solution available to the bosses: war to destroy their competitors’ productive capacity.

The Sane Alternative

Traditional trade union politics is not equal to the task of defending workers in this scenario. We need a more advanced political outlook.
This must start with the understanding that production for profit must go. Communism, production for the needs of our class is the only system that can organize production sanely.
The bosses won’t give up their power easily. We can vote for “progressive” candidates until we are blue in the face and still the government will serve the interests of the biggest bosses. We can negotiate in good faith till the cows come home and still the bosses break contracts with impunity. No, the only way to take power from the ruling class is through communist revolution.
We must fight these attacks tooth and nail and increase the circulation of our paper, CHALLENGE. Join our Boeing CHALLENGE study-action groups as we collectively learn the lessons we’ll need to break free from the path the bosses have laid out for us and to respond to the bosses’ wars and fascist attacks on our brothers and sisters with multi-racial unity and class struggle, preparing to smash capitalism with our revolutionary might. Only then can we say, “The future is bright.”

Industrial Workers Crucial to Battle vs. Exploitation

“We are trying everything we can to keep everyone employed here and we need everyone to work safer, with better quality and of course more production,” a manager said to employees of a subcontractor aerospace factory, “Again it’s a profit thing. We are in competition with countries with lower costs and we need your help to stay competitive.”
The bosses’ goals are profit and saving their empire, which are directly opposed to the well- being of our families and friends. They want us to blame workers from other countries for the attacks on us, and win us to fight in their wars. But the capitalists and their system are to blame for attacking workers everywhere.
Some rank-and-file workers in non-union factories began to slow down production in a conscious effort to fight speed-up. We should learn from their class-conscious acts, and follow their example. Also, aerospace workers at Cytec in Anaheim struck for six weeks against being forced to work 60 hours a week with no overtime pay. Strikers on the picket line were open to CHALLENGE and to uniting aerospace workers in union and non-union factories.
Indigenous Indians in Peru and workers in France have united in mass and often violent protests against their oppression. All over the globe, men, women, immigrant and citizen workers have organized against the bosses’ attacks and won reforms. Now those reforms, like jobs, medical insurance, and maternity leave are being stripped away because of the bosses’ crisis. Capitalism can’t meet the needs of our class. It only offers us continuous cycles of unemployment, depression, war and crises that the working class pays for with our blood, sweat, tears and lives on the shop floor, in the streets and on the battlefields of war.
We have to fight to re-organize society without profit. Communism means a society that thrives by relying on the workers to produce and fight for our class’ needs. As industrial workers, we hold a strategic position to influence the rest of the working class by organizing against the bosses and their profit system with our own international Party, the PLP.
Growing unemployment and the threat of joblessness mean millions of workers and their families, sometimes desperate, struggling to survive the bosses’ system of exploitation and imperialist war. In some subcontractor factories, workers work only three days a week. One aerospace machinist said, “There have been weeks when I have gone to work everyday thinking it could be my last.”
The bosses push for increased fascist repression — more cops and immigration cops and increased spending for prisons — in preparation for more class struggle and higher “crime” rates because they fear our anger and potential unity to fight back against their system.
In one factory 12 of the 16 workers who were laid off do not qualify for unemployment benefits because of their citizenship status. Some workers say, “I have to keep my nose clean and stay below the radar.” The bosses use this fear to divide us, speed up production and to try to keep workers from fighting hour- and wage-cuts.
Their immigration laws and attacks on black workers are racist attacks on all workers, used to lower wages and weaken our determination to unite and fight together. Our answer must be to show that the source of these attacks is capitalism, and to unite in strikes and mass protests against the attacks on our survival and building these struggles into a rebellion against the capitalist system worldwide.
These same bosses want us to believe that we have no other option, that “we” [U.S. workers and U.S. bosses] are all in this together.” They want us to passively accept war and fascism, which means cutting our own throats.
Workers already have the ability to build and run all the machinery and transportation we need. The bosses hold back our potential by squashing our ideas and initiative to improve things because it is not profitable. They want us to think that without them we’re useless. But their worst nightmare is our invincible unity led by communist ideas to fight to get rid of the profit system and produce for our needs. Let’s make this a reality by reading and distributing CHALLENGE, joining a study action group to fight the bosses, and building international PLP.

Mexico’s Elections:
Voting for Bosses’ Pols = More Repression of Workers

MEXICO CITY, June 27 — The July 5 elections will elect 500 federal deputies, six governors, 468 local deputies, 606 City Hall officials, 20 municipal boards and 16 delegations. The Center of Social Studies and Public Opinion of the House of Representatives predicts that — despite all their million-dollar resources and giant propaganda apparatus — between 65% and 69% of the electorate will not vote.
Control of the House of Representatives is vital for the different ruling-class factions, since this body decides who controls the country’s energy wealth — oil, electricity and gas — along with which imperialist to ally. It will also determine the judicial system’s fascist reforms and the new labor laws designed to repress workers’ protests and eliminate labor rights.
The two key governing bodies up for election are Nuevo León, the state with the country’s second largest industrial production, and Sonora, the industrial state with an active harbor which borders the U.S. The PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) currently rules both states but PAN (National Action Party) is mounting a strong challenge.
Of the 1,616 politicians to be elected, not one represents workers’ interests. They all serve the millionaire businessmen or the drug dealers and defend the interests of those who put them in office. Voting means electing who will be our hangmen. We must organize a non-electoral party which unites all workers to take power and build a new society: communism. That’s the only road to liberate ourselves from these parasites.
As a result of the hypocritical management of President Calderon, the department head of Jobs and Security has presided over 386,000 layoffs in November and December 2008 alone as well as 6,290 murders so far this year. The main drug cartels’ structure remains intact. It’s predicted the economy will shrink 7.1% this year. Calderon’s false promises have created a hell for millions of workers, still more evidence that we should have no confidence in them. We can only believe in the capacity we workers have to unite and fight to get rid of them.
Some ruling-class sectors say they’re indignant over the current rulers’ corruption and lousy management of the country’s problems. Their “alternative” is to vote to “punish” the parties. Their real motive is to recover the privileges that other thieves have snatched from them.
We shouldn’t fall into their traps. Confidence in any of them only worsens our conditions. We must replace their fraudulent democracy with a communist-led workers’ society.
The fraud in the 2006 Presidential elections disillusioned and angered many. López Obrador’s movement has used this to try to trick the discontented into supporting capitalist “democracy.” The anger of millions of workers must be converted into revolutionary consciousness to overthrow capitalism for the benefit of those who produce all the wealth. This is PLP’s goal. Join us.

Honduras Coup: Workers Have No Side in Bosses’ Dogfight

HONDURAS, June 28 — The armed forces took President Manuel Zelaya prisoner and exiled him to Costa Rica under direct orders from the Honduran Congress. The fight between the bosses supporting Zelaya and those backing Robert Micheletti, ex-president of the Assembly and now interim President, was sharpened when Zelaya tried to call a “popular referendum” to change the constitution, including ending the term limit for the Presidency, enabling him to run again.
But this is only the appearance. The essence is that U.S. imperialists have promoted this counter-attack to challenge the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA — Spanish initials) of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (a big Zelaya supporter) and his allies, including the Russian and Chinese imperialists.
The Honduran army and police have arrested, beaten and killed Zelaya supporters to terrorize the population and build passivity. Workers have bravely confronted the tanks and rifles, defying death. Thousands took to the streets to protest, including calling for a general strike to return Zelaya to power.
But we workers shouldn’t support any of these bosses’ groups. Instead we must use the current situation to take our destiny into our own hands, fighting for the communist future that we need. In exposing that “democracy,” or the well-being of workers under capitalism, doesn’t exist — that we live under a dictatorship of Capital — we will be revealing the only alternative: a workers’ revolution for communism.
Micheletti and his group of bosses and military thugs are recognized as murderous assassins and exploiters, old allies of U.S. imperialism. But the “popular referendum” of Zelaya is also a farce, used to fool the workers with the capitalist lie that through elections we can make the changes we need. With hundreds of years of elections the world over, we workers continue to be exploited, repressed and killed from hunger, terror and imperialist war.
Honduras, with a wealth of natural resources, is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, where ALL the bosses, represented by the different electoral parties, have exploited the working class. Recently the teachers have been in mass struggle for better working and living conditions. A million Hondurans live in the U.S., the majority under threat of deportation and savage racist exploitation. Many were forced to come to the U.S. in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Mitch, which left them homeless and with no other recourse. Thousands of unemployed farm workers suffer the attacks of global capitalism. Neither the U.S. imperialists nor the ALBA are the solution to the problems the workers suffer. They are both just competing wings of capitalism.
When one group of bosses sees its power threatened, they take off their mask and show their true fascist face. The working class needs a true communist party like PLP, which will organize a revolution to end racist capitalism once and for all, not another bosses’ electoral party tied to one or another racist imperialist exploiter.
We need to build a true communist society where we ALL produce to meet the needs of the working class, not the profits of a handful of murdering thieves.
The sharpening battle among both local and imperialist bosses means more attacks on workers in Honduras and worldwide, as well as more war. The workers’ fury against the conditions imposed by capitalism shown in these demonstrations must be channeled daily into building for communist revolution.

U.S. Rulers’ Hand Seen in Honduras Coup

In September 2006, U.S. President Bush met with Manuel Zelaya. He wanted Bush to help “lower energy costs to Honduras, one of the Western Hemisphere nations most dependent on imported oil, including to generate electricity. Bush’s response stressed the importance of relying on market mechanisms and of limits on government interference.” (Znet, 7/30/2007) Bush refused this deal to Zelaya.
In January 2007, Zelaya’s government took temporary control of Chevron’s and Exxon’s terminals. In March, the Honduran government established diplomatic relations with Cuba. In July, Zelaya went to Nicaragua to celebrate the overthrow of dictator Somoza, sharing the platform with Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez, angering Washington.
In January 2008, Zelaya announced that Honduras would join the Venezuela-led Petrocaribe initiative, a regional energy security alliance, through which Venezuela sells oil with flexible credit terms and preferential prices to Caribbean nations. U.S. diplomats worried that others would follow. In August 2008, the Honduran government joined ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), signing further trade and especially energy agreements with Chavez.
Chavez enjoys oil deals with China, Russia and others. His ALBA initiative directly challenges the U.S. Free Trade Pact with Central America. Despite Obama’s “condemnation” of the coup ousting Zelaya, U.S. imperialists wanted to eliminate him and his growing ties to Chavez and rival imperialists. It’s up to communists to turn these attacks into a movement to destroy all bosses with communist revolution.

Racism, Music Industry Profiteers Killed
‘King of Pop’

The death of the King of Pop has sparked mass sympathy for Michael Jackson. As an entertainer Jackson was talented, but he was just another product of capitalist culture. As a person he was eaten alive by racism, an abusive father, and the music business.
After the break-up of the Jackson Five, Michael became the most popular solo singer in the history of U.S. music. He was the first black artist to appear on MTV, and the album “Thriller” is still the highest-selling album in history. Most of the songs from this period foreshadowed selfish themes that would come to later dominate pop music.
The demons of racism took their toll on Jackson. Endless plastic surgery, and tortuous skin bleaching bewildered the world as Michael Jackson tried to “become white.” As he was destroying his body Jackson began engaging in exploitative relationships with young children. While this was happening before the eyes of the entire world, Michael’s “mentors” in the music business did nothing to intervene as the money rolled in and they lined their pockets.
Michael Jackson was ground up by the nature of music under capitalism and turned into a commodity, unable to have real relationships. In one of his last interviews he talked about only being comfortable on stage, where he knew what to do, and behind the gates of his fantasy world “Neverland,” where he could make his own rules. Michael Jackson was the ultimate product, the can’t-lose money-maker, in many ways, the American Dream come true. But the price of this “success” was a large chunk of his humanity, and ultimately his life.

U.K. Oil Strikers Need Intern’l Unity, Not Attacks on ‘Foreign’ Workers

The ugly nationalism of the British refinery workers strikes shows the urgent international need for PLP’s communist politics. The demand of “British Jobs For British Workers” makes immigrant workers the enemy of the striking workers — a division that only serves the capitalist bosses and dooms the striking workers to be pawns in the larger battles between local and international bosses. The strike at the New York City Stella D’Oro bakery may be much smaller in numbers. Yet that strike by predominantly immigrant workers, who have welcomed and embraced PLP’s communist ideas, points to the only direction that truly serves the working class: multi-racial unity, internationalism, anti-sexism and communist revolution.
The oil refinery strike was sparked in February at the Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire. The refinery is owned by the French corporation Total, the world’s fourth-largest oil and gas company. While hundreds of British-born workers have been laid off, Total brought in an Italian sub-contractor who used workers from Italy, Portugal and Poland.
The unions representing the British workers, the GMB and UNITE, may or may not have authorized the earlier stages of the strikes. The Total bosses called the strikes “wildcats.” This has led some observers to praise the apparent rank-and-file nature of the strike and the strikers’ seeming defiance of their union leaders, while ignoring the strike’s racist and nationalist politics. Whether the union leaders supported the earlier strikes or not, they now call for larger mobilizations and support the strikes’ nationalist demands. Proof again that the bosses’ labor leaders will do whatever it takes to keep workers divided and chained to their “own” capitalists.
The strikes’ main nationalist demand echoes none other than United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Gordon Brown. At a Labour party conference in September 2007 Brown said: ‘This is our vision: Britain leading the global economy . . . drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers.” One striker even carried a sign ‘In the wise words of Gordon Brown: UK Jobs for British Workers.’ (The Daily Mail 1/31/09)
These may be “wise” words for the UK bosses but they are poisonous for workers of all countries. Capitalism is based on profits made by exploiting workers at home and in foreign countries. The bosses will use racism and nationalism to increase their profits, divide workers internationally and win workers to ally with their national capitalists against capitalists and workers of different countries. At the same time that refinery strikers carry signs quoting Gordon Brown, the UK bosses and Brown are attacking UK postal and Tube (subway) workers who have conducted strikes of their own. Brown is also an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bosses and their politicians and labor leaders are no friends of ours. We can only advance the fight against layoffs and unemployment by uniting all workers in mass anti-racist struggle. Internationalist workers’ unity is the communist road we must travel. J

LETTERS

Proposing PLP Student Club in Tanzania

On June 7th a meeting took place in the Mlimani City Mall in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in which I introduced PLP’s ideas to a group of high school teachers and students. The organizer of the meeting teaches in a high school in Tanzania. For the last year he has been distributing CHALLENGE to some of his students and fellow teachers.
Even though the younger generation in Tanzania, including those at the meeting, has had little exposure to the history of the worldwide communist movement, they have been impacted by its legacy. After independence in 1961, socialism was established in Tanzania. It led to tremendous advances for the masses (in human relations as well as material conditions of life), but it was a doomed system.
Like socialism everywhere, it maintained capitalist practices and ideas — like wages, classes, privilege, nationalism, elitism, and bourgeois styles of leadership. In 1985, socialism was officially replaced by a “free market” system. Although the older generation remains nostalgic about Tanzanian socialism and its leader Julius Nyerere, it seems to me that there is little understanding about why socialism failed. (A confusion that I believe is prevalent all over the world and which PLP’s analysis addresses.) Whereas many more Tanzanians are clear about why capitalism is failing, the failure of socialism has left them confused and skeptical about the possibility of any kind of economic and political system ending poverty, war, corruption, imperialism, and racism.
The discussion focused on the issue of what communism is and how it can be achieved. Is human nature inherently selfish, or is the selfishness we see a result of capitalist conditioning? How will culture have to change in order to win people to work for the common good? Why is the seizure of power a necessary step in achieving communism? How do we choose leadership and involve the masses in decision-making to achieve communist (not bourgeois) democracy? Does each country choose its own version of communism or do we build one party that represents the interests of the international working class? They asked questions about how the ruling class in the U.S. views PLP, where else in the world the party exists, and what is PLP’s outlook toward religion.
Everyone listened attentively as one of Nyerere’s speeches was read aloud. Nyerere had said that inequality and not poverty is the main problem in the world since poverty could be easily overcome if inequality was destroyed. These profound words from Mwalimu, (the Swahili word for “teacher”) were clearly pointing to a communist solution. By the end of the discussion everyone was leaning forward around the table with a palpable interest and openness to PLP’s ideas. The main organizer proposed that they form a PLP student club in their high school and try to spread communist ideas to students in other schools. This was a great suggestion!
PLP welcomes our Tanzanian brothers and sisters to join our Party. We have a world to win!
Boston Comrade

BBQ Raises Dough for LA Summer Project

More than twenty-five high school and college students and teachers from New York and New Jersey had a barbecue to help raise money for the CUNY students who are going to L.A. in July to be part of the Party Summer Project. We raised over $1,000 and had an excellent discussion about the Project. We were fortunate to have four students who participated in last year’s Project in L.A. articulately describe their agitation at textile and aerospace factories, movie nights, political classes and BBQs. They all explained how much they had learned — about conditions in the plants, about working collectively, and about presenting communist ideas to workers.
Comrades brought friends and food, and despite some rain, we had a great time. Besides talking about the Summer Project, two comrades beautifully sang “Joe Hill,” “Deportee,” “Clifford Glover,” and other progressive songs. We celebrated a year of struggle against budget cuts at CUNY and the NYC public schools, as well as supporting the Stella D’Oro workers.
We encourage CHALLENGE readers to host BBQs, parties or film-showings to raise money for the Summer Projects in Seattle and L.A.
CUNY teacher

Food and Politics for Strikers Who Won’t Scab

I made a pot of curried chicken and rice and drove over to the Stella D’Oro plant in the Bronx. There were 15 workers there and as usual they were warm and welcoming. It was a pleasure feeding workers who have stayed together on the picket line for 10 months, refusing to break ranks and scab for a company that’s trying to cut their wages and benefits. One of the shop stewards has walking pneumonia and he looked tired, but he was there because he feels responsible to the other workers.
Many of the workers immediately recognized those of us in the PSC (the CUNY faculty and staff union) who have joined them on the picket lines, helped them give out flyers calling for a boycott of Stella D’Oro products, and worked with them to organize support rallies and marches. Besides the chicken and rice, I also distributed copies of CHALLENGE, with a large front-page picture of the recent march of almost a thousand people — including many Party comrades — to the plant gates.
I had an interesting conversation with an unemployed printer who was there supporting his friend who’s on strike. He has been laid off from two printing companies, the last because clients are now sending printing jobs to competitors in China, where workers are paid very little. He agreed that workers of all different trades need to unite as a class against the owners who compete to see who can pay the least in wages and benefits.
This summer, PLP students and teachers will be visiting the workers regularly, bringing food and red politics to a terrific group of men and women who are determined not to surrender to the owners, and who need and deserve our support.
Red Faculty

Haiti: Need World Support for Workers’ Fight vs. Starvation Wages

CHALLENGE readers in Haiti send this report. There is sharp struggle in the streets here to get the President René Préval to enact a minimum-wage law passed by the Parliament. Préval is obeying the employers’ association and refusing to raise the wage from 70 gourdes ($1.70) to 200 gourdes ($5) per day; these rock-bottom wages allow imperialists like WalMart and J.C. Penney to subcontract work to Haitian bosses. The recent general strike in Guadeloupe, which impressed Haitian workers, was over this issue of the low buying power of the wage. Workers will not tolerate starvation wages forever.
This struggle is uniting students from the State University of Haiti (who are resisting privatization) with workers and organizations trying to rebuild the Left. Some activists in this movement read CHALLENGE and pass it from hand to hand. With some disagreements, they respect PLP’s take on communism and are appealing to the Party to organize international solidarity to help their wage fight and to get young militants out of prison.
Haitian students, with medical students in the lead, joined workers in the streets the week of June 4 with militant protests at the presidential palace. They burned vehicles, smashed windows of an NGO funded by George Soros, and threw rocks at the police and the UN occupation troops of MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti).
More than 20 young people have been jailed without charges and moved from prison to prison to keep their comrades from helping them. One young militant was shot in the head, though he escaped serious injury. Some union leaders have had to go into hiding. Tear gas was pumped into the children’s wards of the hospital that serves the poor of the city, and parents had to carry their sick kids out into the street to escape the gas. The fight goes on. (More details available at www.alterpresse.org, and www.lenouvelliste.com.)
The best solidarity is to strengthen the Party where we live and extend its reach to Haiti and everywhere. But we also need to spread the word now in every country where CHALLENGE is read. Please mail a message like this to President René Préval, National Palace, Port-au-Prince, Haiti: “As workers and students of [name the country], we stand in solidarity with our Haitian sisters and brothers who are fighting for a minimum wage of $5 a day. We demand the release of all protesters jailed for seeking the simple human right of a living wage.”
Please forward this appeal widely. We can also organize a picket at the local Haitian consulate (even a small one will be noticed). Send reports of any pickets to CHALLENGE. By such small steps an international communist movement to end wage slavery will grow again.
Friends of PLP in Haiti

Cytec Strikers See Need for Unity with Non-Union Workers

ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA — Cytec workers, members of the IAM, went on strike for six weeks against proposed 60-hour work-weeks with no overtime pay, and against wage cuts. No strikers crossed the picket line. The company brought in scabs and cops threatened arrests, taking pictures as strikers held up trucks and cars.
The strikers say that Cytec, which makes a special epoxy for military airplanes, has a non-union plant in Texas. They see that the bosses are threatening the workers so that they will accept the same conditions as the non-union plant, or production will be moved there.
These workers, black, Latino and white, gladly took CHALLENGE and invited us to return to their factory during the PLP Summer Project. We had long discussions with some strikers about capitalism’s crisis and the communist solution. Communism would end production for profit and the exploitation of workers, as workers would control production, based on the needs of the working class.
Some strikers gave us their contact information. They are interested in meeting with other defense workers to talk about building a movement to unify union and non-union aerospace workers against the bosses.

Anti-Racists Pack Courtroom to Back Black Youth

MARYLAND, June 27 — In the ongoing case of the two activist black youths who have been jailed and denied bail for over four months, one has received a favorable ruling. He won his legal motion to be charged as a juvenile, not as an adult, meaning he won’t face a possible 80-year sentence.
While awaiting the youth’s trial, a similar case was heard and after about 12 minutes, the judge summarily threw away that other young man’s life, ruling that he would indeed be tried as an adult, and therefore could face many years in jail.
As the hearing for our teen started, we were packed into the courtroom and his lawyer asked us to stand. As we stood, the lawyer said, “They would all like to speak,” and the judge responded, “They just did!” In fact, toward the end of the hearing, the judge said that in her nearly 30 years on the bench, she had never seen that much support for anyone!
The two victims of the street robberies that our youths are charged with also testified. One, when asked for a recommended decision, replied that he himself “didn’t grow up in the best neighborhood” and that friends of his had made poor choices. He never answered the judge’s question and — obviously conflicted, as reflected in his long, thoughtful silence — he finally said he didn’t want to give an opinion. He seemed to have been truly affected by the highly positive things that witnesses said about the young activist.
When our young friend took the stand, he said he wants “a chance to prove to all the supporters that I can be the person they expect me to be.” That was the voice of someone who has walked the picket line supporting striking Stella D’Oro workers; who has voyaged to the San Joaquin Valley to hear first-hand the history of farmworkers’ struggles; who has helped give leadership to the successful fight for student bus passes to be accepted later in the evening so students without adequate funds can participate in after-school activities. It was the voice of our future.
If the racism that’s inherent in capitalism wasn’t already clear after this day in court, all one needed to do was look at the “prestigious” names carved in the courtroom’s stonework. One was the Supreme Court Judge Taney who ruled in the racist 1857 Dred Scott decision. He labeled African-Americans as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
We need to flip that, and argue that the capitalist class has no laws which the working class is bound to respect. Just as the Dred Scott decision is considered to have been one of the indirect causes of the Civil War, the rejection of racism needs to find its fruition in a revolution to achieve a communist society.
Capitalism is a deadly system. It perpetuates itself by promoting a deadly culture: self-centered thinking, racism, and getting ahead by preying on others. In a sense, it’s not surprising that many people — including members of the working class and even members of the communist movement — are influenced by these bosses’ ideas and sometimes make bad decisions. After all, the class in power always dominates human thought because they control the means of disseminating culture: music, movies, textbooks, TV and so on.
As Progressive Labor Party grows in size and strength, a positive communist culture will become increasingly influential. Our bad decisions will lessen. Our humanity will, more and more, trump the sick corrupt spirit of capitalism.

Red Eye

Reformers so phony they can’t win

GW 6/19 – Most of the major social democratic parties in Europe have been sliding into decline for years. The reverses did not come out of the blue. But they offer a strikingly similar picture. Labour’s 16% share of the poll in Britain was matched by the Parti Socialiste’s 16% in France, the SPD’s 21% in Germany.
It is important to understand that this is a long-term process, not a sudden spasm. Immediately after the collapse of communism, it seemed as though the hour of social democracy had finally arrived. Yet most centre-left parties in Europe were already failing to attract big enough coalitions of voter support to continue in government. Since the European economies went over the edge, the centre-left’s predicament has got far worse.

Democrats selling out on health

NYT 6/22 – Voters overwhelmingly favor the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.
The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option. Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex – who in politics doesn’t?

Far-right shifts focus of media

Wash. Post 6/5 – When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left of a truncated political spectrum.
The media are largely ignoring critiques that come from the left.
Isn’t Afghanistan a more important issue to debate than a single comment by Judge Sonia Sotomayor about the relative wisdom of Latinas?

Maybe U.S. really in it for oil?

NYT 6/23 – The news from Afghanistan is grim. In the first week of June, there were more than 400 attacks, a level not seen since late 2001. Washington has already spent 7 years and more than $15 billion on failed training programs.
The Pentagon also neglected to keep track of weapons it gave out, like mortars, grenade launchers and automatic rifles. Tens of thousands disappeared, sold to the highest bidder and, in some cases, used against American soldiers.
Kabul’s central government is notoriously corrupt, but the tales from the field are even more distressing. Journalists for The Times have reported seeing police officers burglarizing a home and growing opium poppies inside police compounds. American soldiers complain of police supervisors shaking down villagers.

Immigrants graduate — to what?

NYT 6/24 – We were caught between exhileration and despair at a graduation on Tuesday as we watched more than 500 young people in caps and gowns gather in a park a few steps from the United States Capitol. While there was talk of bright futures, the speeches were threaded with notes of impatience and defiance and made clear that those hopes were in no way assured.
That is because all of the[se] students are in this country “illegally.” These students came here as minors, hitched to their parents’ aspirations for a better life. But once they graduated from high school, they found their choices restricted to the same dead-end jobs and shadowed lives that their parents live.
They look tired, solemn, defiant, hopeful in the way young people have that banishes cynicism. They seem incredulous that a message they grew up with — work hard, stay in school, study and you will succeed — does not apply to them.

Pro-worker laws not enforced

LAT 6/5 – For the vast majority of workers who want to join unions today, the right to organize and bargain collectively – free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation – is at best a promise indefinitely deferred. In election campaigns overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, it is now standard practice for companies to subject workers to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance and retaliation for union activity. In the most egregious instances, the employer can count on a final decision being held up by three to five years.

We tapped your phone? Oops!

NYT, 6/18 – The National Security Agency continues to routinely collect Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail messages — perhaps by the millions. ...The government offered its usual response: Oops. A spokesman for the intelligence community said any “overcollection” was inadvertent and “when such error are identified,” they are quickly corrected... That excuse wore thin long ago. “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.”

Grads, welcome to the working class

NYT, 6/14 – Graduates heard a similar message at hundreds of colleges this spring... congratulatory messages with acknowledgement of the bleak marketplace outside campus.
[at the] California, Berkeley, School of Journalism, Barbara Ehrenreich [said] “You are going to be trying to carve out a career in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You are, furthermore, going to be trying to do so within what appears to be a dying industry. You have abundant skills and talents; it’s just not clear that anyone wants to pay you for them. Well, you are not alone. How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent time with plenty of laid-off paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They’ve got skills; they’ve got experience. They just don’t have jobs. So let me be the first to say this to you: Welcome to the American working class.

Bail $ for bank jobs, not auto jobs

NYT, 6/24 – For some Citigroup investment traders, the changes could mean salary increases of as much as 50 percent... Their salaries are going up to offset smaller annual bonuses... and neutralize a precipitous drop in the value of their stock holdings... Citigroup has gotten not one but two rescues from Washington.

Spraying hits poor, not coca

MinutemanMedia.org 3/5 – In July 2007, Teresa Ortega stood solemnly in a field of wilting corn and pineapple crops as tears streamed down her cheeks. She had taken it upon herself to start a farm with 100 widows — women who had lost their husbands and children to Colombia’s war and were fighting against poverty. Now — after a plane sprayed chemicals over their farm — all was lost.
Between 200 and 2007, the U.S. government spent over half a billion dollars spraying a chemical defoliant on approximately 2.6 million acres of land in Colombia. Half a billion dollars bought U.S. taxpayers not the promised 50 percent drop in coca production, but rather a 36 percent increase. And now there is “credible and trustworthy evidence” that fumigations are harmful to human health.

Franco “disappeared” leftist kids

NYT 3/1 – For 65 years, Ms. Girón, a Spanish mother of seven, ached to know what had become of her son Jesús. The story is part of a dark and long overlooked chapter of the repressive decades under Franco: the “disappearance” of children taken from left-wing families as part of an effort to purge Franco’s Spain of Marxist influence.
Hundreds, there could be thousands, of children were taken from families suspected of ties to left-wing groups....Children led a life of fascist doctrine, harsh discipline and Catholic ritual.

Banks con relatives

NYT 3/4 – One group is paying its bills: the dead. The people on the other end of the line often have no legal obligation to assume the debt of a spouse, sibling or parent. But they take responsibility for it anyway. Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry.

Irish crystal workers sit in

NYT 3/10 – What do you do when your employer announces that your company has shut down? Like the employees of the Waterford Crystal factory here in Ireland, which ceased operating in January, you can go to your workplace, occupy the building and refuse to leave....A crowd of angry employees prevailed on security guards at the headquarters to unlock the front doors and let them in, on Jan. 30.
The crystal company has posted huge losses in the past few years, and much of its manufacturing is already done in factories in cheaper countries abroad....”If it’s mass-produced, the craftsmanship we have here could be lost forever, so we’re fighting for that as well.” Thousands of people marched through the streets of Waterford in sympathy with the workers. Workers all over Ireland were in awe of what the crystal factory employees had done.

Do English-learners move up?

NYT 3/15 – Studies suggest that English learners in separate, so-called sheltered classrooms perform better in school....There has been no systematic tracking, however, of English learners beyond graduation to determine whether schools are leveling playing fields or perpetuating the inequalities of a stratified society. Many recent immigrants and their children are not going to college.
The majorit eventually move into the same low-skilled jobs as their parents....The more Amalia Raymundo goes to school, the mor she feels her options narrowing. She was a rising star in her remote village in Guatemala....She works hard to make all A’s. But this year, she started to wonder whether the work was worth it, and she nearly dropped out. “If I am going to end up cleaning houses with my mother,” Amalia said to explain why she almost quit, “why go to high school?”

Profit-Hungry D.C. Transit Bosses Try to Blame Crash on Workers

WASHINGTON, DC, June 29 — A horrible crash of two trains on this city’s Metrorail killed nine people, including the operator, and injured 80 others. The bosses’ media first tried to blame the operator, but then discovered she had done everything possible to avoid the crash. Now the bosses are trying to find some other worker to blame. But it’s the profit-hungry capitalist system and its willing flunkies like the Metro Board and the General Manager who are the killers here. Capitalism forces us into minimal safety and to make maximum profits for the bosses. Transit workers should take the lead in building for revolution against such a vicious, exploitative, racist system!

What Happened?

The immediate cause of the crash was a failure of the automatic train-control system which regulates the train-speed, directing it to stop at the stations, and maintains a safe distance between trains. For several years, this system has revealed many flaws. Trains have overrun stations, have slowed down and then suddenly surged forward requiring quick action by the operator to avoid a mishap and have run red signals when in automatic control. Management always blames the operators and suspends them or disqualifies them from operating the train.

More of Same Negligence by the Bosses

In 2005, the union began fighting this, demanding a change in the Authority’s knee-jerk, “blame-the-operator” attitude. Management refused. It’s easier and cheaper to blame a worker than to fix a defective system! In fact, at a Safety Committee meeting in November 2006, management took the position that the issue of the trains overrunning stations was not even a safety issue, but rather one of “labor relations” because operator error was causing the problem!
Then, in December 2006, when two track-walkers were killed because of management’s inadequate safety policies, the bosses claimed they were ready to make safety a top priority. A new General Manager was appointed and he promptly hired an outside consulting firm to investigate safety at Metro. But after about six months, it became clear that the consultant was more concerned about reducing Metro’s workmen’s compensation costs than dealing with the safety issues the workers were raising. The issue faded when the new union leadership (quite cozy with management) took over, leading to this month’s deadly results.
Last April, at a hearing on Metro’s proposed service cuts, the former union president testified that the safety consultant hired by the General Manager was a waste of money because the bosses were not dealing with the real issues. Metro Board chairman Jim Graham ignored the comments.
The real culprits, the local governments that own Metro and the General Manager who administers it, are all attempting to escape the workers’ anger. We must not let them off the hook. They are criminals and should be treated as such. General Manager John Catoe, who is now calling the operator who was killed a hero, last month was demanding her wages be frozen and her benefits cut. What hypocrisy! Workers must understand that Graham, Catoe and all the Board members decided long ago to work for capitalist interests and support their system, putting money and corporate profits ahead of workers’ safety.
PLP’ers and friends are fighting to hold Metro management accountable. They’re organizing to bring masses of workers to the next union meeting where a resolution will be introduced to demand a demonstration at the Metro headquarters and the firing of the Metro manager.
Despite the bosses’ crocodile tears and their promises to “do better,” the system won’t become safer any more than it did after the deaths of three Metro workers in 2006. Only if workers ran the system with the interests of workers riding the system in mind, would safety improve. That’s why more Metro workers should help build PLP’s revolutionary movement for communism, which would change the priorities of the entire society from maximizing corporate profits, waging wars to expand them and using racist systems to enforce their rule to one of putting the needs of the world’s workers above all else.

Build A Worker-Student-Soldier Alliance — Fight for Communism

To fight against the root of exploitation and oppression — capitalism — workers, students, and soldiers worldwide must build unity with communist ideas. Successful revolutionary movements in Russia and China demonstrated the power of the worker-student-soldier alliance; today the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party sees this unity as essential to the working-class’ success in fighting against racism and imperialism and for communism.
France’s general strike of 1968 sharply illustrates the power of workers and students. Protesting against declining living standards, the legacy of imperialism in Algeria, the Vietnam War and poor working conditions, workers and students struck out against Renault, among others, and stopped the whole country from running — literally — with a general strike. They succeeded in scaring the ruling class by their potential to stop capitalism. However, lacking revolutionary communist leadership, they settled for temporary reforms rather than fighting to take power and run society in the interest of the working class and their student allies. Forty years later, the French rulers are stripping every one of these reforms as their system faces crisis.
As future workers, students play an important role in revolution. In every historical period of class society, the universities have been centers where ideas are formed and propagated in defense of the ruling class. Under capitalism they are where racism, sexism and nationalism are justified. Universities like Harvard and its Kennedy School of Government not only plan and justify imperialist wars, but train students to mislead their own class by becoming liberal reformist leaders.
Many other universities and colleges train students to be reformist union leaders as well. They teach them that they can escape the working class because they are “smarter” and more “hard working.” Students angered at racism, sexism and imperialism and who want to change things are encouraged to join groups on campus under reformist and patriotic lines. The leaders of these groups say that they can get better wages and working conditions and a just U.S. society through voting and unions, and channel the students’ immense energies into fighting for dead-end reform and into “service” for the nation. In this period of capitalist crisis and war, neither voting nor unions can stop the attacks on us.
PLP has historically led the fight for worker-student unity against imperialism, racism and capitalism. During the Vietnam War, PL students, active in fighting against the war, also organized mass support for General Electric strikers. GE workers were producing weapons for the war. Students realized that to end imperialism, student rallies and sit-ins were not enough, and to build a strong anti-war movement workers are key since they produce weapons that are needed to fight the bosses, while also being the sole source of the bosses’ profits. The only way to end imperialism is with a revolution to get rid of its capitalist source. Because of its size, because of being exploited, its organization and political potential, the working class is crucial for revolution.
Yet workers and students cannot do it by themselves. Soldiers, sailors and marines, play a key role by uniting with their working-class brothers and sisters. Soldiers are forced to risk their lives for the bosses’ oil profits. The rulers try to force them to carry out acts of extreme racism upon workers in other countries. Black and Latino soldiers are particularly open to opposing imperialist wars and the capitalist system, to rebelling and turning their guns on the bosses, owing to the blatantly racist system they are sent to defend. White soldiers can follow their lead.
During the Vietnam War, many white soldiers followed the lead of black and Latino soldiers in rebelling against the racist imperialist war. In the face of a mass strike, the National Guard is often called in to protect the interests of the bosses, but with communist consciousness, soldiers will side (and have done so) with workers and fight the common capitalist enemy. In Russia in 1917 during World War I, soldiers refused to fight for the bosses and joined workers to make a revolution for workers’ power.
We urgently need worker-soldier-student unity against the very system that attacks both workers and students. We encourage students to join and build worker-student alliance groups at their schools to bring anti-imperialist and communist ideas and actions to the students, workers and soldiers, and to build PLP.
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CHALLENGE, June 17, 2009

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17 June 2009 303 hits
  • North Korea Joins China’s Nuclear Club: ‘Nuke-free’ Scheme Impossible in Imperialist World
    • China Calls North Korea’s Dictator ‘Our Loose Cannon’
    • China’s Rulers Expanding Their ‘Nuclear Club’
    • ‘World’s Only Superpower’ Spurs Nuclear Upstarts
  • ‘What’s good for Obama’s GM is death for workers...’
  • Shining Example for U.S. Working Class: Mass March Backs Stella D’Oro Strikers, Defies Cops
    • Marchers Stand Up to Scabs in Blue
    • Only Communist Revolution Can Destroy Capitalism
  • “El Gran Mantel”/“The Great Tablecloth”
  • LA Students, Workers Fight Capitalist Storm Hitting Calif. Colleges
    • Disasters Are ‘Natural’ Under Capitalism
    • Students, Teachers: Unite With Industrial Workers
  • Derail CTA Racist Health-Care Rip-Off!
  • France: Anti-Racist Unity, Red Leadership Could Sack Sellouts
  • Immigrant Airport Workers Resist ‘Homeland Security’ Attack
  • LETTERS
    • Haiti May Day: Cops’ Tear Gas Fails to Stop Workers’ Protest
    • Resistance Rising in Guadeloupe vs. Capitalism’s Misery
    • ‘Liberalism 101’ Masks Class Exploitation
    • As Bosses Push Us, Airport Workers Must Push Back
    • Colombia May Day Marchers Mark Workers’ Bloody History
    • Need Revolutionary Communist Politics
    • Karl Marx Scores Again...
  • Exploited Subcontractor Workers Need Sharper Class Struggle
  • Mandela’s Nationalism Fronts for South African Capitalism
  • PL’er Helen Jones Dies; Led ‘Rolling Thunder’ Through Boeing Plants

North Korea Joins China’s Nuclear Club:
‘Nuke-free’ Scheme Impossible in Imperialist World

Under the profit system, competing capitalists, either as individuals or nations, pursue advantage ruthlessly. Today, the ability to wipe out rivals’ military bases, factories and cities by touching a button is an increasingly available advantage. While Obama rode into the White House on an “anti-war” platform and has now touted “a world free of nuclear weapons,” even the Pentagon says weaker U.S. foes would be fools not to produce atomic bombs, making a nuclear-free world impossible under capitalism.
The latest issue of the U.S. Army War College’s journal “Parameters” says, “our current conventional superiority obliges our enemies to seek asymmetrical offsets [see footnote*]. The more effective are NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) conventional arms, the more likely it is that regional great powers would choose to emphasize a nuclear-based deterrent and defense. If you do not believe this, you are in effect claiming that, say, China or Iran would choose to be defeated in conventional war, rather than raise the stakes through nuclear escalation.”
The war-makers’ article admits that “anti-nuke” Obama is lying: “Nuclear proliferation [the spread of atomic weapons] is here to stay. We say that we endorse the abolition of nuclear weapons. We do not mean it...A world of zero nuclear arms could not be monitored or verified, at least not by our side....”
On May 19, with Vietnam-era mass murderer Henry Kissinger at his side at the White House, Obama tried to hide the above admission, saying, “It is absolutely imperative that America takes leadership.... to reduce and ultimately eliminate the dangers that are posed by nuclear weapons.” (Voice of America broadcast)
A week later North Korea exploded a Hiroshima-sized A-bomb and launched a series of ballistic missile tests. Obama & Co. push other nations not to manufacture nuclear arms (“non-proliferation”) in order to maintain the U.S. as the capitalist nation with the largest, most powerful nuclear arsenal. But North Korea’s actions point to a Chinese-led effort stretching from the Far East to the Middle East to counter Washington’s arms supremacy.

China Calls North Korea’s Dictator ‘Our Loose Cannon’

For U.S. rulers, the current economic crisis makes criticizing China’s effort to gather together a bloc of nuclear-armed nations a touchy matter. Obama just sent Treasury-Secretary Geithner to beg Beijing’s bankers to buy more Treasury-bills (in effect, loans from the Chinese to enable the U.S. to pay for its wars and to save its financial system). But meanwhile, the U.S. bosses’ media calls North Korea an “isolated, rogue” nation. However, North Korea, in fact, functions as a war-threatening client state for China.
China’s $2 billion in yearly exports to North Korea — quadrupled since 2004 — effectively amounts to outright aid, because China seldom demands payment. The bulk of these “sales,” mostly food and fuel, go to the military, North Korea’s biggest employer. In return, perpetually-mobilized North Korea serves China as a buffer against U.S.-occupied South Korea, and soon will threaten U.S. ally Japan.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il has a reputation as a self-obsessed madman in the West. Chinese rulers’ opinion differs significantly. Zhang Wantian, vice-chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, described Kim as a loose cannon “but our [China’s] loose cannon.” (Asia Times, 9/12/03)

China’s Rulers Expanding Their ‘Nuclear Club’

North Korea lies at the heart of China’s sponsorship of the new members of the nuclear club among present and potential U.S. enemies who China hopes will oppose the U.S. in a crisis. Thomas Reed, Air Force Secretary under liberals Ford and Carter, has written a book, “Nuclear Express,” dedicated largely to exposing this goal.
Reed told U.S. News and World Report (1/2/2009), “China has been using North Korea as the re-transfer point for the sale of nuclear and missile technology to Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.” U.S. foe Russia provided North Korea nuclear material-handling technology essential to its recent blast. And Iran’s burgeoning nuke program depends entirely on Chinese and Russian fuel and expertise.
Control of nuclear-armed Pakistan totters between an unstable government rooted in the army and Islamist militants. U.S. strategy relies on billion-dollar bribes to the military, which doesn’t seem to be paying off. China on the other hand, courts both sides. It contracted a deal with the current Pakistani regime to run an oil pipeline carrying Mid-East crude from Pakistan’s Gwadar port (where China is building a naval base) to eastern China.
But if Pakistan’s generals should fall from power and lose their grip on the nuclear trigger, China’s bosses have a plan B, which U.S. rulers lack. A surprising number of sophisticated Chinese weapons have been found in Taliban hands in Obama’s newly-enlarged Afghanistan-Pakistan war theater.
The U.S. quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan also help China’s rulers gain a nuclear leg up. Any U.S. bombing of nuclear facilities in North Korea or Iran would entail massive ground wars — no wars have ever been won without an invading, occupying army. This would mean restoring a military draft in the U.S., quite inconvenient right now for Obama’s Pentagon.

‘World’s Only Superpower’ Spurs Nuclear Upstarts

In the last century, capitalists carving up the globe killed well over 100 million workers in their imperialist wars. And after all, the U.S. ruling class is the only one that ever used atomic bombs, mass-murdering over 250,000 civilians in two Japanese cities in a few minutes. They did this mainly as a warning to the Soviet Union not to challenge U.S. post-World War II supremacy (Japanese rulers were already ready to surrender). With all the important profit-seekers, great and not so great, now or soon wielding nuclear arms, the likely death toll for our class stands infinitely higher in this century. The broadening threat of capitalists’ nuclear, profit-inspired holocaust makes the need to build a revolutionary workers’ party all the more urgent.
PLP’s efforts to build a massive base for communist revolution to take on these imperialist butchers are crucial to workers’ ability to challenge and wipe out this hellish system. As a class, the working class will never die. No amount of capitalist nuclear arsenals can destroy our class, which produces all value. Dare to struggle; dare to win.
* Non-traditional, technologically-based and biological warfare

‘What’s good for Obama’s GM is death for workers...’

Now that the UAW union leaders helped elect their “friend in the White House,” who has also become the workers’ boss at GM, the sellouts have sunk to the following:
• A ban on strikes until 2015;
• A wage freeze (after having cut wages in half for new hires);
• Allowing GM to close 14 more factories and lay off another 21,000 workers without a fight.
With friends like Obama, who needs enemies?

Shining Example for U.S. Working Class:
Mass March Backs Stella D’Oro Strikers, Defies Cops

BRONX, NY, May 30 — “Shut it down and shut it tight, the bosses can’t profit when the workers unite” chanted over 1,000 workers, students and teachers, who rallied and marched in support of the courageous Stella D’Oro strikers. The Stella workers, who have been fighting for nearly 10 months against the vulture capitalist bosses of Brynwood Co., have set a shining example for workers nation-wide by refusing to accept cuts in benefits and wages.
A group of demonstrators seized the moment as the march approached the Stella D’Oro factory, and surged through and around police barricades blocking the street between the marchers and the Stella D’Oro plant. Pumping fists and chanting, they stormed right up to the factory gate, catching the cops completely off guard.
PLP organizers have won the respect and confidence of many of the strikers based on our consistent strike support and our involvement in preparing what was a very successful rally. Hundreds of CHALLENGES were sold throughout the day. Besides bringing our friends to the march, PLP’ers in the New York City UFT (United Federation of Teachers) have brought strikers to its Delegate Assembly to raise support, and into their schools to speak to teachers and parents.
The strikers’ determination has inspired people throughout the area, and contrasts sharply to the sellout nature of the labor bosses. At the opening rally, union members from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University (PSC) and the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) spoke of the importance of the Stella struggle to the entire labor movement and vowed their continued support. A PSC member read a poem “The Great Tablecloth” by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. (See sidebar) A NYSUT activist gave the workers an envelope with more than $2,000 that she had personally raised from rank-and-file members on Long Island.
Except for the PSC contingent of 60 and the two busloads of NYSUT teachers that came from Long Island and Westchester, “organized labor” is not supporting the Stella strike. The leadership of the Stella D’Oro workers union, the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union (BCTGM) did not make a big effort to turn workers out for this rally. Instead it has encouraged the workers to rely mainly on a court case the union has filed against the company.

Marchers Stand Up to Scabs in Blue

As we began to march through the neighborhood, we were enthusiastically received by the community and our numbers swelled. Transit workers on the elevated train line above sounded their horns and waved at the marchers in solidarity.
When we reached a Stop & Shop supermarket which sells scab cookies, the organizers attempted to have a brief rally on the sidewalk. The cops ordered the marchers to keep marching. One of the security leaders, a NYC transit worker, who has recently been on strike, raised his arms and exclaimed, “This is our march. We’ll move when we’re ready!” When it became apparent that the cops were going to arrest the transit worker, others came to his defense and the cops backed off.
Since the strike began, the cops have been busy protecting the scabs and bosses, and hassling the workers. The cops tore down an awning the strikers had erected to protect themselves from the rain. For months the precinct stalled before granting the strikers a permit to park a “warming bus” on 237th St. At an April rally, the police told organizers they could have a sound permit but then changed their minds. PSC leaders were threatened with arrest for using even a small hand-held bullhorn. So much for “free speech.”
March leaders were looking for an opportunity to go more on the offensive against the company and the cops. As we approached the factory site, the cops had erected metal barricades to block off the street to the plant gate. The cops expected we’d go right into the pens they had set up. Instead, organizers in the march seized the moment and moved past the barricades, surprising the cops. Over 100 chanting marchers ignored their pleas to turn around and return to the pen.
The raised fists and shouts electrified the major part of the crowd on the main street and a woman striker got up on a platform with her bullhorn to lead a chant of “boycott Stella.” The cops found themselves surrounded by two groups of angry workers.

Only Communist Revolution Can Destroy Capitalism

After making our point, the demonstrators moved back into the street, assembled in the penned area and began the second rally where rank-and-file members from several unions spoke. A PLP member, a UFT teacher, warned not to rely on Obama or union misleaders. Instead, he declared that this strike is the “real ‘stimulus package,’ representing what workers must do worldwide. Eventually, black, Latino, Asian and white workers will recognize their true potential and bring the capitalist system down.”
Raising a copy of CHALLENGE in the air, he called on every demonstrator present to support the strike by “...organizing on their jobs, in their churches and mass organizations with CHALLENGE in your hands!”
PLP members are discussing with the strikers the limits of relying on the union strategy of mainly working through the courts. It’s an on-going struggle for the strikers to maintain their morale. This rally helped invigorate them and their supporters, and showed the importance of building mass support for workers’ struggles.
We call on all CHALLENGE readers to raise money, organize people to demonstrate at local grocery stores selling scab cookies, and support the next battle in the Stella struggle, which is indeed a fight for all workers.

“El Gran Mantel”/“The Great Tablecloth”

Pablo Neruda
Hunger is a cold fire.
Let’s sit down soon
with all those who haven’t eaten,
spread the great tablecloths,
shake salt on the lakes of the world,
planetary bakeries,
tables with strawberries in snow,
and a plate like the moon
from which we all will eat.
For now I ask no more
than the justice of eating.

LA Students, Workers Fight Capitalist Storm Hitting Calif. Colleges

LOS ANGELES, May 30 — Community college students were angered over the Board of Trustees’ cancellation of summer classes district-wide starting July 1, as part of state budget cuts that could slash nearly $100 million from its nine colleges through 2010. In the fall, fees will rise while the CalGrants financial aid system may shut down completely. Veterans and CalWorks (welfare) recipients may lose their sole source of income if they can’t find classes. Others depend on campus-based childcare and might be unable to hold onto their jobs.
“What’s going to happen to us?” some students wondered. A teacher replied, I don’t know what will happen to each of you individually. But many like you who came to college hoping for a better life will wind up in exactly the jobs they wanted to escape. Some people in CalWorks will be forced into slave-labor jobs. Some will end up in the military. Bottom line, wherever you end up, it’s important to organize the people around you to fight back. And that fight has to be for revolution.”
The students nodded slowly. Then someone brought out CHALLENGES. One student hadn’t read it before. Another student told her, “This paper shows us how to fight!”
Someone else said her teacher had dismissed communism as “a nice idea that didn’t work.” That sparked a discussion about why the bosses push lies about communism even harder as it becomes clear that capitalism doesn’t work — not for the working class!

Disasters Are ‘Natural’ Under Capitalism

The Chancellor compared the budget crisis to Hurricane Katrina. “It’s a natural disaster,” he said, “all we can do is pull together and plan to rebuild.” But even Katrina was mainly a capitalist disaster. After 2001, money allocated for flood control was diverted into “Homeland Security” and the Iraq war.
Like Katrina, the California budget cuts are racist attacks hitting black and Latino workers hardest. For example, the college with the largest percentage of black students, and the one that’s growing fastest, was reported to be the ONLY one with no summer school at all.
The budget cuts are a 100% capitalist disaster. The bosses are forcing workers to pay for the steep decline in tax revenue resulting from the general crisis of their racist profit system. Meanwhile, state interest payments to large financial institutions have more than doubled as a percentage of the state budget. And the $100 million LA community colleges will lose is only 1% of LA’s share of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars!

Students, Teachers: Unite With Industrial Workers

Comparing the district to General Motors, the Chancellor said that wages and benefits for teachers and other campus workers are “too high.” Like auto workers, we’d better not count on our union leaders to fight for us. The annual faculty union meeting was all about how (not whether) medical benefits would be cut. One union member drew both jeers and cheers when she called for a general strike against the cutbacks. The Chancellor’s reference to GM opens the door to struggle with college teachers about the need to unite with industrial workers. One way is to support the PLP Summer Projects in Seattle and LA.
Since February, community college student activists have collected signatures, rallied and marched against budget cuts. They’ve become bolder and more confident in their ability to lead, while beginning to understand that reforms are difficult, if not impossible, to win in the present period.
“The rally in Pasadena turned out to be bogus,” a student leader explained to another student who is just getting involved, “but we started chanting ‘They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back’ and students from other campuses joined in. We took it to the streets. Then when we went to Sacramento, it was the main chant for the whole march.”
Someone suggested a new chant: “Budget cuts are no solution, workers need a revolution!” Others liked this. Several took extra copies of CHALLENGE. We invite these students and their friends to join our communist “summer school” of struggle.

Derail CTA Racist Health-Care Rip-Off!

CHICAGO, IL, June 1 — If the bosses prevail, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) will stop paying retiree health care on July 1. Almost 7,000 retired workers and their families will pay as much as $1,300/month for medical coverage, deducted from their pension checks. They will also pay large deductibles, $100 for office visits and as much as $50 per prescription. Many will join the over one million uninsured workers in Cook County, just when the County health system is being severely cut back. A system that can’t provide health care should be destroyed!
This deadly racist plot was hatched in the winter of ’07-’08, during the “doomsday budget” hysteria. The plotters included ATU (Amalgamated Transit Union) leaders Darrell Jefferson (Local 241-bus) and Rick Harris (Local 308-Rail), Democratic Party Mayor Daley, the Democratic Governor (on his way to prison) and State Legislators, who together have collected untold millions in campaign contributions from transit workers for decades.
The unions and CTA agreed to sacrifice retiree health care in an arbitration settlement, by-passing a membership vote that would have rejected the deal. Then, with the blessings of the ATU and the Chicago Federation of Labor, the State Legislature passed a law to “guarantee permanent funding for mass transit.” This law states that as of July 1, 2009, CTA is no longer responsible for retiree health care.
CTA claims it has no money for retirees, but it has plenty for the racist bankers that are forcing millions of us from our homes. CTA cut its pension contribution from $58 million to $18 million-a-year, but is paying Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley $132 million-a-year in interest (“debt service”) on bonds they hold to finance mass transit. The “debt service” far exceeds the money raised from the bonds in the first place.
CTA is the second largest mass transit system in the U.S. Our labor creates $2 billion in value-added-wealth by bringing 1.6 million riders-a-day to work, school, shopping and events. But that $2 billion goes into the vaults of the bosses and bankers. Now they want to steal the “guaranteed” health care from retired workers who sacrificed their health to keep this system running.
The rulers are trying to dig their way out of their global financial crisis with racist cutbacks and layoffs that hit black and Latino workers first and hardest. That’s how the racist profit system works. It’s no coincidence that this attack affects mostly black workers who entered the workforce in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. From Obama to Daley, the Democratic Party and the union leaders are doing the dirty work. Ultimately, these capitalist crises lead to fascism and world war.
Workers have instituted a federal lawsuit and are seeking an injunction to stop the July 1 cut-off. They’re reaching out to both retired and active workers for support. The best way to get the court’s attention would be to shut the city down with a wildcat strike, surrounding CTA headquarters or City Hall with tens of thousands of workers and riders.
As we wage this life-and-death struggle, PLP will organize support from transit workers in NYC, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. In the process we can show thousands of transit workers that only communist revolution can end capitalist crises and racist terror. A communist society will exist to meet the needs of the international working class. Mass transit will be the main form of transportation and health care will be universal and free for all.

France: Anti-Racist Unity, Red Leadership Could Sack Sellouts

PARIS, FRANCE, May 28 — If you blinked, you probably missed the French labor movement’s national day of mobilization two days ago. Its showcase was the strike called by four rail unions, involving only 25% of the rail workers, down from 41% in the last big walkout on March 19. On May 26, from 50% to 75% of regional, Paris commuter and high-speed trains were running normally.
The unions issued no national strike call in other sectors, calling only a few regional ones, accompanied by a half-hearted call for workers to demonstrate without striking, so the protests were small. The biggest, 15,000 in Marseilles, compares with 300,000 there on March 19.
After the recent wave of wildcat seizures of bosses by angry workers, one might expect bigger actions. There’s certainly plenty of reason to protest:
• Skyrocketing unemployment could lead to 4.4 million officially jobless by year’s end, plus another 2.8 million who want to work but have given up trying to find jobs. In a potential workforce of 31.1 million, the current 20% real unemployment rate could hit 23% by New Year’s.
• Racism doubles those rates for black and Arab workers. A 2007 French government study reported unemployment is twice as high among immigrants, many of African or Arab origin. (France has 4.9 million first-generation and 2.3 million second-generation immigrants.)
• Six million people survive on RMI (welfare payments). At least 1.5 million have no home, living with family or friends, in loaned accommodations, in shanties or on the streets. On May 26, Frédéric Lefebvre, ruling right-wing UMP party spokesman, insulted all workers by floating a proposal to “give workers the right to work from home” while on sick leave or maternity leave!
But workers here are no longer willing to lose a day’s wages in symbolic one-day strikes that don’t frighten either the bosses or their government. Yesterday, the eight union confederations met with representatives of the bosses’ organization. Instead of serious discussions, the bosses called two recesses totaling 3½ hours and finally agreed to discuss “the social management of the consequences of the economic crisis on employment” in two weeks.
That’s far less than the unions’ May 25 platform demanding higher wages, easier access to unemployment benefits, “a new deal” on the distribution of the wealth created by labor, stable jobs for youth and greater union rights. Today’s CGT union claim that “the extent and unity of the workers’ mobilization has shaken the bosses,” rings hollow.
The CGT said successful mobilizations are not “a numbers game,” citing the many different protest forms — leafleting, protests targeting prefectures and chambers of commerce, barbecues and picnics — as “proof” that the protest movement is broadening. It said hundreds of thousands of workers — who would not have joined traditional protests and strikes — participated in these actions.
Thus, May 26 is supposedly a springboard for a bigger national day of mobilization on Saturday, June 13. But once again no national strike — only “protests.”
A strategic retreat is O.K. if it makes future advance possible. The unions claim that layoffs announced for the summer and the massive entrance of high school graduates on the job market this fall will create “a critical mass” of worker anger. But dragging out the struggle for five months risks disheartening and demobilizing the working class.
It’s likely union misleaders will call more symbolic one-day strikes in the fall. On March 27, 2007, François Chérèque, the CFDT union sellout leader, asked about subcontracting by the bosses’ circle ETHIC, replied: “Take Airbus [as an example]. To you, I say: the government doesn’t need to invest a penny. We’ve got to do to Airbus what was done to Boeing! Increase and develop subcontracting, and then let them all compete.” (From “Riches et presque décomplexés,” by Jacques Cotta, p 125.)
As long as these traitors are running things, demonstrations and strikes will be schools for cynicism and discouragement. These union misleaders restrict things to harmless symbolic actions, letting workers blow off steam.
Workers here and worldwide need to develop communist leadership and organize hard-hitting actions that unite all workers black, Arab and white, native-born and immigrant. That will help transform the class struggle into a school for communism.

Immigrant Airport Workers Resist ‘Homeland Security’ Attack

Naked fascism has finally come to the airport where we work. The racist bosses have declared open war against airport workers who dared to believe they had a right to defend their jobs from the boss-created global economic crisis. The bosses started their terror campaign when night-shift janitors, members of SEIU, met to discuss over-work and firings for petty offenses. They met in a public area before their shift started.
The bosses instructed our supervisors to call the Airport Police if workers have “unauthorized” union meetings. The cops raided the meeting of mostly immigrant workers and declared it “an illegal gathering in violation of airport and Homeland Security rules.” The workers were briefly detained, identified, and cited. When the cops let them go, they warned that next time they would be subject to arrest and having their airport security ID confiscated. News quickly spread to other workers and other shifts. For many workers from Africa and El Salvador, these fascist raids are nothing new.
This fascism is occurring with a black U.S. president and his Homeland Security laws. Changing the appearance of capitalism does absolutely nothing to change its racist essence. There is no such thing as a “good boss.” All bosses expect workers to accept capitalism’s global crisis without fighting back.
SEIU officials came to the airport for an emergency meeting. Before the meeting started, a racist supervisor warned that we had three minutes to get back to work after the meeting, and failure to do so could result in a suspension. Some workers whose work areas were further away from the meeting did not go. Others did. Workers discussed how this treatment is a fascist and racist attack on all of us, like what was done in Apartheid South Africa or civil war-era El Salvador. We have a right to organize and no one is going to stop us!
After the meeting, a worker was accused of taking more than three minutes to return to work; his work area is on the far side of the terminal. The entire staff of managers and supervisors came to deliver his write-up in a clumsy attempt at intimidation. The worker was not intimidated and refused to sign!
This whole episode was a set-up from start to finish. These fascists want to make an example out of this worker because they feel threatened. Some airport workers are afraid, but others, including regular CHALLENGE readers, are organizing against these fascist attacks. Workers under the political leadership of PLP are committed to fighting racism. Together we can resist fascist attacks and build even more CHALLENGE networks. Only a PLP of millions can lead the international working class to communist revolution to put our fascist oppressors where they belong. Then we can build a new world without poverty, racism, sexism, and oil wars.
Airport Red

LETTERS

Haiti May Day: Cops’ Tear Gas Fails to Stop Workers’ Protest

POTOPRENS, HAITI, May 1 — Unlike previous years when May Day was celebrated as a kind of fair, thousands of workers here took to the streets with slogans like “Down with the Capitalist System, Down with Exploitation!”; “A Worker Is Not a Slave”; “500 Gourdes [$12.66] Minimum Wage”; “No to Corruption”; “No to MINUSTAH” (the UN occupation force in Haiti); “No to the Occupation.” All along the route the demonstrators sang the Internationale, the anthem of the working class: “Debout! Les damnés de la terre!” (“Arise, ye wretched of the earth!”). Bands from the poor districts enlivened the march.
A whole string of mass organizations returned to the origin of May Day and held high the demands of the vulnerable workers crammed into the filth and destitution of the bidonvilles (shack towns), the peasantry, and the working-class districts of Haiti. Trade unions, peasant, university, and other movement groups took to the streets of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, around the theme “Yon lòt premye me pou yon lòt sosyete”: “Another May Day for Another Society.”
The mass organizations included the Confederation of Public and Private Sector Workers (CTSP), Tèt Kole ti peyizan ayisyen (Joint Leadership of Haitian Small Farmers, 500 of whose members were massacred in 1988 by the military and right-wing vigilantes for demanding land), the Union of University Workers and Teachers (STAIA), and the Association of Dessalinean Students (ASID).
In spite of agreements with the police, the government used the same weapons as the authoritarian regimes of the past to try to wreck our movement. Although we know this country is not a country of laws but a police state, we thought things might go well, given the government propaganda claiming crazily that the regime is following a path to democracy. Our “right-thinking” turned out dead wrong.
In the past, especially under the authoritarian regime of the Duvaliers (1957-1986), historic days like May Day, May 18th, July 22nd, and September 22nd had been celebrated in style: the state used to bring thousands of poor, trusting peasants into the capital, giving them red scarves, shirts and jeans like the uniform of the Tontons Macoutes (fascist government militia). This year we should have started the demonstration in front of the Parliament, but to everyone’s surprise the government had brought the peasants there again, blocking us with lots of agricultural machinery given Haiti by Venezuela in its politics of solidarity.
Even when the police burst in to disperse the crowd, claiming they had received an order not to let us go further, workers continued to struggle on. Several marchers were beaten, including a woman in her sixties who had to be taken to the hospital bleeding from her ears.
After the march was broken up by tear gas from the police, some demonstrators decided to go over to the Presidential Palace in the Champ de Mars, where a fair was going on. In spite of more police, we all — students, feminists, teachers, unionists, the unemployed — kept pounding the pavement. And so we celebrated this May Day in Port-au-Prince not as a fair but as a day of protest.
Trade Unionist in Haiti
Editorial Note: The mood of revolt among workers and students in Haiti is inspiring. We’re sure many at their militant May Day marches will be looking now to carry out that great slogan “Down with the Capitalist System! Down with Exploitation!” But to do so, we in PLP believe workers, students and soldiers need to join and build the international communist PLP. We commit ourselves to working with our friends in Haiti to achieve this end.
We note the fact that tractors given by the Venezuelan state to the Haitian state were used to block a workers’ and students’ May Day march. Whether government propaganda proclaims democracy, solidarity, or even socialism, only one class at a time can hold state power: in Venezuela and Haiti it is the capitalist class which holds that power and uses it to maintain their system of wage slavery. But not forever, if workers in every country keep marching on the road to revolution.

Resistance Rising in Guadeloupe vs. Capitalism’s Misery

For about two months recently workers’ kinetic energy in Guadeloupe — notably the workers’ unions and other organizations — exploded in a fury like that raised by the slaves of Saint-Domingue [now Haiti] in August 1791. Then the colonized denounced the inhuman, unjust, and cruel slave-owning colonial system and pressed on at all costs and at great danger to their lives to win freedom. Now their Guadeloupean cousins were demanding a substantial lowering of the cost of living, especially necessities like sugar, oil, milk, bread, gas, beans, etc., as well as a wage hike of 200 Euros.
Guadeloupe, an Overseas Department of France, has something approaching the rule of law, while the Republic of Haiti, the first independent black republic in the world, sinks into the authoritarian mud from which a police state is emerging. One thing is certain; in Guadeloupe there is an organized working class with leaders capable of backing mass demands, drawing on their political commitment to avoid any kind of compromise with the bosses (carriers of capitalism) and the government (attack dogs of imperialism). But here the shoe pinches: a large part of the “unions” in Haiti are in the pay of the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist government instead of working to create class consciousness and to stand alongside the weakest, the poorest, those in the worst misery and distress.
These so-called “unions” set themselves up as spokespeople for a corrupt government blind and deaf to the distress of a destitute population. Last January the Guadeloupeans revolted against the high cost of living and demanded a wage hike, and in Haiti in April 2008 riots broke out pretty much all over to say no to famine. In Guadeloupe, however, there is some buying-power, while in Haiti buying-power is almost non-existent and the watchword is famine, destitution.
Spartacus didn’t win, but the slaves of Saint-Domingue brought off the only victorious slave revolt anywhere in the world. At that time the slave-owners knew they had to provide their subjects with the primum vivere, that is, the minimum: housing, clothing, food...while the modern capitalist slave receives nothing, for the only aim of the capitalist is to impoverish the worker. In spite of the persecution and threats of the French colonizers in Guadeloupe, the LKP [Guadeloupean union] has resisted capitalist corruption. Similarly, in Haiti the CTSP (Confederation of Private and Public Sector Workers) is resisting the perversions of the capitalist system. The Guadeloupean experience is an experience to follow.
Friend in Haiti
Editor’s Note: The sharp class struggle in Guadeloupe is an inspiration to workers everywhere. But while trade union leaders in Guadeloupe may have been more militant in fighting for wage-hike reforms, they did not challenge capitalism as a system, leaving workers in Guadeloupe just as deeply mired in wage-slavery as workers in Haiti. To break free of our chains, we need to bring communist ideas of revolution to these struggles so that the “workers’ kinetic energy” can create a lasting workers’ power.

‘Liberalism 101’ Masks Class Exploitation

Currently I’m completing my first year of graduate school at a local research university. This university plays an important role in developing liberal capitalist perspectives on issues such as race, immigration and education. It also ideologically trains many future labor organizers and teachers through its labor center and related programs, and its school of education. Thus, the university generates liberal reformist ideas and organizers utilized by the ruling class to put a caring smile on the continued exploitation of the working class.
Without a communist alternative, many well-intentioned students are won to these ideas, such as the student-led campus campaign for the Dream Act. However, recently I had the opportunity to help organize a May Day forum on campus where several comrades helped me advance the Party’s communist analysis on capitalism’s current crisis.
Speaking from the panel, a comrade teacher explained that the cutbacks to education represent the type of attack on workers the capitalist ruling class uses to “solve” its crisis. He also explained that the current meltdown results from the historic crisis of overproduction U.S. capitalism has experienced since the early 1970s. He concluded that capitalism’s only “solution” is intensified fascist attacks on workers and imperialist war against its competitors.
During the ensuing discussion, a comrade in the audience explained that the Dream Act was an example of liberal fascism, used to win immigrant youth to buy into the illusion that capitalism can work for them. Another participant attacked Marxism as an antiquated idea. A comrade responded that Marxism is based on a scientific outlook of the world and has evolved over time to reflect the changes in capitalism and the need to fight for communism. Many received CHALLENGE.
Following this event several students have asked how they can learn more about our ideas. Currently, a couple of students and I are reading “Marx for Beginners.” This is a good start which will surely lead to more struggle over communist ideas.
A Campus Comrade

As Bosses Push Us, Airport Workers Must Push Back

Conditions for workers at LaGuardia airport are deteriorating, just like on many jobs around the world. As our company here wages a publicity war against the union and its competitors, workers on the ramp and at the ticket counter know that it’s really just the same old bull. With the economy in crisis, the bosses are looking for even more ways to cut costs at the expense of us workers.
Essentially the company is trying to get 8 hours worth of work for 6 hours pay by cramming more flights into a single workday and providing fewer work crews. Work once performed by full-timers is being forced onto part-time and reserve workers.
In recent months local bosses have fired a number of workers for petty offenses. The most notable firing was of an older worker who had over four years with the company, on the bogus charge of “damaging airport equipment.” His real offense? Challenging supervisors’ decisions during briefings and openly supporting the union.
Other workers have been threatened, put on probation and forced to take sick leave at lower pay. Those still on the job work in an environment of fear and have to perform extra work to make up for those missing. All workers get screwed. Meanwhile the bosses have no plans to fix this by bringing anyone back or hiring more people.
In spite of the union’s nationalism and telling us to be hopeful about Obama, it is important to be involved in the union in which we can raise political ideas on the road to revolution. In the end the union will not be able to solve these problems because unions originate with capitalism and its inherently unstable economy; but as the bosses push workers more and more, workers have to push back.
Union or no union, PLP members and friends must join class struggles of the workers against the bosses. Fear gets us nowhere. We need to organize!
Airport Worker

Colombia May Day Marchers Mark Workers’ Bloody History

May 1st marked the 123rd anniversary of the Chicago massacre where courageous workers offered their lives so millions worldwide would have better working conditions. We remember the Chicago martyrs who symbolized the fight for the eight-hour work day. Today those reforms have been criminally taken away by the capitalists who enslave, exploit, and layoff workers. The police, military and paramilitary are used like private security by the drug-trafficking government to break unions, detain protestors in a mass way, and assassinate workers. Some of these capitalists own Chiquita Banana, Postobon, Drumon, Bavaria, Coca Cola, Nestle etc. Today because of the lack of an organized working class, we have lost reforms that cost rivers of blood to gain. The bosses have called this historic day Labor Day to hide its true name, The International Working Class Day. It is not in their interests to have workers recognize our bloody history.
On May 1st, along with the numerous worker and student groups, we mobilized in support of the more than four million displaced workers in Colombia, the millions who rot in the dungeons of the Uribe regime, in commemoration of the thousands who have been disappeared at the hands of the terrorist state, in memory of the more than four thousand unionists murdered, the hundreds of workers threatened with death, and in support of the more than one billion unemployed worldwide.
At the march, the PLP contingent raised our voices. We chanted for the destruction of capitalism with a communist revolution so that we could rebuild the revolutionary class-consciousness to end pacifism that the union leaders misguide workers with. With euphoria and courage some youth confronted the brutality of the state. They were beaten and arrested. We must double our efforts in helping our youth in their everyday struggles, teaching them our science of understanding the world, dialectical materialism, while at the same time getting them CHALLENGE newspaper. We must discuss the paper with them and find the best way to get involved in mass organizations. That is the only road to communist revolution and to rebuild a society that will put an end to all vestiges of racism, sexism and this imperialist system.
Comrade in Colombia

Need Revolutionary Communist Politics

During our May Day dinner a comrade gave a speech on how the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the imperialist conflict of World War I and how Soviet and Chinese communists defeated fascist Germany and Japan in World War II. The question arose, what made the Russians and Chinese different from others?
Prior to World War I workers had class-consciousness in Germany and France, but only the Russians had a revolution. Also, prior to the rise of the fascist powers there were powerful workers’ movements in Germany, France, Britain and the US, but how come only the Soviets and Chinese fought against fascism and not for empire?
The answer is that class-consciousness is not enough. Workers need revolutionary politics in order to escape the horrors of capitalism. In the U.S. during the 1930s the Communist Party stopped advocating communist revolution and fell in behind Roosevelt’s New Deal fascism. As the CPUSA became more involved with the reform struggles they moved further away from revolution until finally sellout leader Earl Browder declared in the 1940s that “communism was 20th century Americanism.”
Today, too, workers find themselves struggling for their very survival. But it is not enough that we bring them class-consciousness; we must also bring revolutionary communist politics. Union misleaders push the slogan, “American jobs for American workers” and the Obama Administration tells us, “It is a time for shared sacrifice.” Each claim to be for workers and against greedy bankers, all the while wrapping themselves in the flag of U.S. capitalism. Class anger can just as easily be turned into fascist nationalism unless there are revolutionary politics to guide it.
At the immigrants rights march on May 1 here in Seattle, many groups came out to support workers’ “interests,” but only one proclaimed that communist revolution was the only solution — PLP. As members of PLP and readers of CHALLENGE we need to push these revolutionary politics on the campuses, on the shop floor and in the military barracks.
Comrades from Seattle

Karl Marx Scores Again...

In the NY Times Book Review section (5/17) there is a revealing review of a book entitled, “A FAILURE OF CAPITALISM — The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression,” by Richard Posner, a federal judge and a champion of the “market-oriented law-and-economics” movement. The reviewer says Posner doesn’t blame any of the usual suspects. Rather, he says, “blame capitalism.”
Posner maintains “the current crisis is a depression....The typical post-war recession is a partly self-correcting disinflationary contraction that soon subsides....The present downturn is a self-sustaining...contraction whose costly aftereffects will linger for years. The Great Depression led to World War II. Today’s depression...may cause a huge loss of output, an immense increase in the national debt...a decline in America’s economic and geopolitical power and increased instability abroad.”
The review states that, “A depression is a market failure (his emphasis — Ed.)...that the market is powerless to prevent.” The “market” is a synonym for capitalism.
As Karl Marx proved in his analysis of capitalism, depressions are built into the boom-and-bust profit system. And Posner appears to agree, although using different wording. “Decisions that were individually rational” [that is, each capitalist striving for maximum profit] become “collectively irrational” — meaning capitalists collectively striving for that goal produce far more capacity (overproduction) than the market can sustain, leading to a pull-back: laying off workers to try to maintain profits, which leads to a decreasing ability to buy what’s been produced, leading to more capitalists’ pulling back, more layoffs, and on and on.
Posner says that Obama, by attributing the crisis to “irresponsibility” of the banking and real estate interests, ends up “blaming capitalists for a failure of capitalism.” (As PLP’s slogan said, “It’s not Bush [now Obama], it’s capitalism.”)
From this review, it does not appear that Posner deals with the inevitable suffering that this boom-and-bust cycle heaps on the working class, in a Depression that Posner says “will linger for years.” Yes, mass, racist unemployment means sickness, malnutrition, millions of children in poverty, homelessness, and death.
To make society “rational,” we must — as Marx said — eliminate a system that creates “social production” but appropriates the fruits of that production privately (profit). It allocates the vast majority of the value the working class produces to a small number of the owners of the means of production, who also control the State (the government) which, in turn, protects the “right” of the capitalist class to exploit the working class.
No wonder PLP says “communist revolution [abolition of the profit system] is the only solution” to this massive contradiction.
Old-time Comrade

Exploited Subcontractor Workers Need Sharper Class Struggle

LOS ANGELES, June 1 — The growing U.S. unemployment rate isn’t just a number. At factories in southern California, fellow workers are leaving shops jobless while others live in constant fear of losing their jobs. “There have been weeks when I’ve gone to work every day thinking it could be my last,” said one aerospace machinist.
The bosses are utilizing layoffs and cutting hours to maintain or regain profit. International competition and inter-imperialist rivalry are forcing them to rearrange and chip away at their workforce to stay afloat in the economic crisis. The latter means fewer orders for durable goods, causing unemployment in mining and quarrying as well as in manufacturing. From April 2008 to April 2009, the unemployment rate in mining rose from 3.6% to 16.1%. For manufacturing of durable goods, it went from 4.8% rate to 12.8% in that period.
Throughout our shops rumors abound about layoffs. Often workers hear of mass layoffs and complete shutdowns in other shops in the area. Many fear the same fate, and still others feel lucky to still have a job. Layoffs mean more work and speed-up for those still working. Workers go from grumbling to resisting speed-up with slowdowns.
Mainly the bosses tell workers we must sacrifice to maintain the company’s health. Recently hours were being cut in several departments in an aerospace factory. After explaining that management had been doing all it could to obtain more orders, a supervisor remarked that, “Now we must really learn how to budget our money.”
Of course, management works on salary and isn’t adversely affected by working fewer hours, but the “sacrifice” ideology coincides with Obama’s national service, “serve-your-country” talk. Additionally, the “We” talk tries to put bosses and workers on the same side, “working together for everyone’s benefit.” In this crisis, the aerospace bosses are grabbing profits by attacking us workers.
In the short term, many workers feel they must do anything to hold their jobs, their main means of survival. Although capitalism cannot and will never provide security, it’s a process to understand that our real danger is in not acting in our class interests. The loss of jobs and homes for many families shatters illusions about capitalism, but in and of itself that does not build confidence that another world is possible and that workers like us are critical to the revolutionary fight.
Sharpening the class struggle makes it clear that the workers and the bosses have clashing interests. This requires a concentrated dialectical discussion of the system’s contradictions on a “one-on-one” scale between communists and co-workers, and between PLP and workers, students and soldiers on a mass scale.
Our Summer Project here can demonstrate the need and potential for workers’ unity and struggle for communism with masses of workers, students, and soldiers. With the crisis showing no signs of letting up, and the dominant capitalist ideas splattered all over the shop floor, TV and press, we must fight these lies, and organize the class struggle to further develop our understanding of how to make the vision of communism a real thing for workers here and worldwide.

Mandela’s Nationalism Fronts for South African Capitalism

PLP has long exposed nationalist movements as essentially a capitalist tool to maintain the exploitation of the working class. When the Party did just that about Mandela and his government, we were severely condemned for daring to criticize those forces that had defeated the apartheid system. But a NY Times Sept. 12, 1994 interview with Mandela reveals the truth of the fruits of nationalism:
“Mr. Mandela recalled the paternal scolding he had delivered the night before to the Congress of South African Trade Unions....
[He] told the unionists....Ease up on the strikes; you are scaring foreign investors. Prepare to ‘tighten your belts’ and accept low wages....
“When he upbraided the labor leaders...he did not mention an additional reason that their militancy has worried him. Some employers who have been the target of strikes have been secret benefactors of the African National Congress.
“Before the election campaign, Mr. Mandela went to 20 titans of corporate S. Africa and asked for at least a million rand — about $275,000 — to build up the party and finance his campaign.
“All but one, he said, complied. A few, like Raymond D. Ackerman, the head of the Pick ’n Pay grocery chain, gave double the minimum request....So it rankled him that Mr. Ackerman’s stores had just borne the brunt of a raucous strike by store clerks.
“‘For them to target people who have been assisting us creates difficulties. Without funds we could not have built the organization, we could not have won the election....’ When Mr. Ackerman, his benefactor..., phones with a problem, Mr. Mandela instantly takes his call....
“Others in his government have not been...proletarian, prompting...indignant articles about lavish salaries, Concorde trips and free-spending bodyguards.
“‘We have this problem,’ Mr. Mandela said. ‘We have high salaries and we are living in luxury. That destroys your capacity to speak up in a forthright manner and tell people to tighten their belts....’” [No kidding!]

PL’er Helen Jones Dies; Led ‘Rolling Thunder’ Through Boeing Plants

In 1995 Helen Marie Barron Jones and her close friend led 500 mostly white workers banging their tools loudly on metal drums in the first march through a Boeing factory during a contract struggle. It became known as rolling thunder, which brings out thousands of marchers through the plants every contract.
A comrade from Chicago asked how she got the courage to lead all these workers. “Well, somebody had to do it!” she told her. That is how we in Seattle will remember Helen: when somebody had to stand up for the working class, Helen stood up!
Helen, a retired 22-year Boeing worker and comrade, died on May 16th from cancer. She was 68. Born in Monroe, Louisiana, she later moved to Seattle, Washington, raising three children (two surviving). She provided invaluable love and support to her ten grandchildren, three of whom, and their mother, lived with her. Last year, even as Helen’s disease progressed, she and her family attended a BBQ in support of our Party’s work during the Boeing strike.
Helen first came around the Progressive Labor Party as the O.J. Simpson trial hit the news. They had just released the notorious tapes of the racist cop [Mark] Furman. She and her close friend approached one of our members in the shop, asking him what he thought.
“Oh, you don’t have to ask that,” her friend interrupted. “You know what he thinks.”
“No, I want to hear it from him,” Helen insisted. They talked about how the tapes had made it perfectly clear racism was the biggest issue in the trial, particularly the vicious racism of the Los Angeles cops.
At the memorial service, the comrade recalled how he thought at the time, “Man, this woman is tough. She just won’t let you off the hook!”
Discipline and an unsurpassed sense of responsibility — to her family, her friends, her co-workers and the international working class — marked her time in the Party. Until her illness made it impossible, she would faithfully attend every national and local meeting. She was often the first to hand in CHALLENGE sales money and reveled in seeing a stadium full of Boeing workers reading our CHALLENGE extras during strike-sanction votes. She struggled with us to seriously study Dialectical Materialism. Coming from a religious background, she felt it imperative we have a world view that pointed toward communism.
Helen had the discipline to wait patiently at lunchtime factory meetings until everyone had spoken. Only then would she insist we pay attention to what she would call the big three: the fight against racism, nationalism, and capitalism.
When the engineers went on strike for the first time, the IAM refused to organize any real support. Our blue-collar members and friends on 1st shift debated what to do. Helen, a 2nd shifter, caught us in the aisle as we left the building. She laid down the law: we weren’t going to leave until we organized support for those workers on the picket line. ...And that’s exactly what happened!
Many commented, often with bittersweet humor, how Helen had struggled with them. Her sister called her, “that woman who could convince anybody to think what she thinks, to do as she did, because she knew the deal.” When Helen’s health forced her to retire, she helped organize breakfast and lunch strike meetings and brought groups of retirees to the picket lines. The salon where she got her hair done saw hours-long debates about “the evils of capitalism and the need for communist revolution.”
Helen’s first Party writing was a farewell poem to 1999 Boeing Summer Project volunteers. It read in part:
Whenever you’re in doubt
Of what PLP’s about
Look around
What have you found?
Cop’s brutality
School Fallacies
Friends are in distress
Lift your voice
The Party is on the way
The summer of 1999
You stood out on the line
Is now part of history
Etched in your memory...
Helen, you are etched in our memory. We are better for having known you. We dedicate this year’s Summer Project to you.
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CHALLENGE, June 3, 2009

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03 June 2009 292 hits

Rulers Use Obama to Widen Afghan-Pakistan Ground War

Obama Flip-Flops on Torture Photo-Op to Protect New War Leader

Obama: Ruling-Class Hero

Killer McChrystal in Ivy League Club Helping Obama Carry Out War and Fascism

Students Say ‘Professor of Torture’ Must Go!

CUNY Students, Stella Strikers Allies in Struggle

LA Teachers, Students Walk Out Against Layoffs

Racist Unemployment Is Capitalism’s Executioner

Again… Figures Don’t Lie But Liars Can Figure

PL’ers Bring Red Ideas to Colombia’s May Day March

Workers Storm Steel Bosses’ Meeting

Colombia’s TV ‘Reality Show’ Ponzi Scheme and Other Capitalist Evils

Why Are TV Shows So Important For The Bosses Right Now?

  • The Fight Against Sexism is Vital to Defeating Capitalism

Letters

Turning Shop Struggle into Class Consciousness

May Day Youth ‘Were On A Mission’

Fight Racism with Multi-racial Unity, Not As ‘White Allies’

‘Liberal’ N.J. Mayor: ‘Who, me racist?’; ‘Yes, YOU!’

Oaxaca May Day Marchers Defy Gov’t Flu Panic

30 Generations of Racism =Billion$ for Bosses


Rulers Use Obama to Widen Afghan-Pakistan Ground War

The dominant imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists is pressing Obama to emphasize ground warfare over air strikes in the widening Afghanistan-Pakistan battleground. The shift spells higher death tolls on all sides and even more U.S. troops than Obama’s surge of 21,000. Current U.S. strategy targeting al Qaeda and the Taliban with pilotless "drone" aircraft is unintentionally swelling enemy ranks.

The May 17 New York Times, the rulers’ leading mouthpiece, published an op-ed piece, "Death From Above, Outrage Down Below," by Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). It warned, "Over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians....Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased." Over one million Pakistanis have been forced from their homes into refugee camps because of groundwarfare.

Bankrolled by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Exum and Kilcullen’s CNAS served Obama’s 2008 campaign as a "Pentagon-in-waiting." CNAS’s president, Michele Flournoy, is now an Undersecretary of Defense.

Obama Flip-Flops on Torture Photo-Op to Protect New War Leader

Consequently, Obama’s dramatic replacement of General David McKiernan with torture expert Stanley McChrystal as top general in Afghanistan launches a more effective killing campaign that implicitly criticizes Bush’s efforts there. Not since President Truman booted General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War (1952) has a president removed a warzone commander this way. The big switch — along with the White House christening of a new "Af-Pak" theatre of war— makes Afghanistan-Pakistan "Obama’s War."

McChrystal’s expertise lies in the quintessential U.S. ground force, "Special Operations." Early in his career he trained anti-Soviet forces in the CIA operation based in Pakistan that helped oust the Russians from Afghanistan, an effort that produced Osama bin Laden and later al Qaeda.

McChrystal also trained the Afghan warlords in a joint campaign to chase the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, forces he must battle once more, now that they’ve staged a come-back in several Afghan provinces.

He most recently oversaw Delta and Seal Special Operations units. These units train fascist armies and are used to torture and murder "enemy suspects" in prison camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, seldom distinguishing actual insurgents from innocent civilians.

Obama abruptly broke his promise to release pictures of the U.S. military abusing prisoners to avoid embarrassing appointee McChrystal, who gave the orders. [For an account of the war crimes committed under McChrystal’s command, see Esquire magazine, 5/7/09.] The CNAS’s Exum told MSNBC (5/12/09) that U.S. and Afghan casualties "are likely to go up" once McChrystal takes over.

Obama: Ruling-Class Hero

For the war-bent rulers, Barack Obama is proving the most effective leader since Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s, transformed his popularity during the Great Depression into mobilization for World War II. Obama hopes to accomplish something similar, as the rulers plan for conflicts far bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan, against China and Russia. Aided immensely by the rulers’ main ideology-shapers, the liberal media and universities, Obama enjoys sky-high approval ratings.

Meanwhile, the war machine he presides over slaughters more and more civilians in his escalating Af-Pak war. He has reopened Bush’s Guantanamo Military Tribunals, which deny all rights to anyone they care to label "enemy combatant," validating "evidence" extracted by torture. And Obama is prolonging the Iraq war he promised to end.

The rulers’ media constantly urges us to vote for the "lesser evil" (usually a Democrat) in their electoral circuses. Since millions are disgusted with both parties, the rulers use liberals to spread the illusion that they will "reform"the system’s more brutal nature and won’t be as "bad"as reactionary Republicans. As a "lesser evil" who carries out the rulers’ war aims, Obama tops all his warmonger predecessors — Johnson in Vietnam; Carter in the 1979 CIA Afghan war cited above; and Clinton in the Yugoslavia air-war massacre and bombings of Iraq.

Since ultimately only communist revolution can forever halt these endless imperialist wars, we must strive in our shops and unions, in strikes and mass protests in our schools and on our campuses, in churches and all mass organizations, to expose Obama’s regime as an unprecedented, all-out assault on the working class.

Within this class struggle we must show how the super-exploitative, racist capitalist system is the source of this constant assault, and that the elimination of the profit system — replaced by a communist society in which the working class reaps all the value it produces — is the only road to workers’ emancipation.

Building the revolutionary PLP is the key to that goal.

Killer McChrystal in Ivy League Club Helping Obama Carry Out War and Fascism

For the bosses, Obama favorite McChrystal’s ties to U.S. imperialism’s main faction round out his resumé as mass murderer. The liberal Brookings Institution calls him a "superstar." Just before he won his general’s stars, he served as military fellow at the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations, the rulers’ most influential think-tank.

McChrystal did a year-long stint at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. Belfer, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, boasts a long roster of members aiding the Obama regime, not only in military matters but also in his anti-working-class economic "restructuring" laying off tens of thousands of auto workers. This includes Defense Under-secretaries Ashton Carter and CNAS boss Michele Flournoy, banking czar Paul Volcker, Mid-East envoy Dennis Ross, National Security aide Samantha Power (who, while working for Obama in 2008, revealed his pledge to leave Iraq as a phony campaign promise), NATO ambassador Ivo Daalder, economic advisor Martin Feldstein, Homeland Security guru Rand Beers and others.

Students Say ‘Professor of Torture’ Must Go!

NEW YORK, May 7 — Students at Columbia University held a small protest today against torture and oil wars, and called for the firing of Professor Philip Bobbitt. Bobbitt is a Columbia law professor, former director of intelligence for the National Security Council and associate counsel to three presidents. He has written that the law should be changed to allow harsher interrogations, that juries should acquit officials accused of torture who are doing it to "save lives," and he was one of the leading ideological advocates of the invasion of Iraq and the need for the U.S. to fight a "long war" in the Middle East. Members of PLP went to the protest to sell CHALLENGE and expose the role of capitalism in breeding imperialist war.

CUNY Students, Stella Strikers Allies in Struggle

NEW YORK CITY, April 22 — Chanting "Education Is A Right, Fight, Fight, Fight!" and "Education Is Under Attack, What Do We Do? Stand Up! Fight Back!" more than 300 students and supporters rallied at City College in Harlem today, the 40th anniversary of the 1969 City College strike and sit-in that brought Open Admissions and integrated the lily-white senior colleges of CUNY. At the administration building where police blocked entry they presented their demands to a Vice-President of the college.

The demands included no tuition hikes, budget cuts, or layoffs of campus workers; free tuition, open admissions, and quality childcare; and pay-cuts and a salary cap for the administration. Twenty striking workers from Stella D’Oro in the Bronx joined the students to offer their support, and were loudly cheered as they marched down the hill into the rally.

Teachers and students in PLP from CUNY and another college explained that capitalism in 2009 means deep economic crisis, global wars, and ecological catastrophe. The pay-cuts and tuition increases demanded of Stella D’Oro workers and CUNY students is a sign of what capitalism has in mind for our class. Our response to these racist attacks that fall most heavily on black and Latino workers and students must be to unite workers and students to organize for communist revolution.

The best feature of this rally was the collaboration of students with workers, who met jointly to plan a double rally: first at City College with the workers coming down, then at the struck plant with the students coming up. From the administration building, we marched, fifty or sixty strong, chanting "Workers and Students Will Never Be Defeated!" to the subway, and, still chanting and singing "Which Side Are You On?" and "Solidarity Forever," occupied a couple of subway cars on this "protest train."

From the elevated train we marched down the long iron staircase to the picket line, chanting all the way, greeted with smiles and cheers from the workers there. About forty students and workers spoke at the two rallies, many of them women taking leadership in both struggles. The MC at the plant site encouraged CUNY and other students to speak, and after a pause seven or eight came up, many for the first time, including one from New Jersey who had heard the strikers speak at her campus last week.

Our friends, both at Stella and at CUNY, understand that PLP fights like hell for our immediate needs, but is also organizing a Party to bring state power to the working class, so that we can use the value we create to benefit all workers internationally in a communist society. One worker at the CCNY rally told the students that the company’s demands for pay-cuts and their use of scabs was a "great social crime," which wouldn’t be punished until large numbers of students and workers united to fight for change. Another told the students that they had to struggle now so that "the capitalists won’t take hold of your lives and wreck them." Students told the workers with passion how much they appreciated their support, and how difficult it was for them to be a student and to work many hours every week to pay for rising tuition.

An Argentine filmmaker was at the rally with a new film on the Zanón ceramics factory that was seized and run by workers — the syndicalist dream of "a factory without bosses." Some of the Stella D’Oro workers were inspired by the film, and they all realize that they could, and should, be running Stella D’Oro without the owners and their agents. Workers can run the factories and students and teachers can run the schools, but only when they control the levers of power — the government and the military — with a communist Party. Today on the protest train, workers and students united had a brief glimpse of the world that is struggling to be born.

Stella D’Oro Strikers Pit Workers’ Unity vs. Bosses’ Wealth

GREENWICH, CT, MAY 11 — Two busloads of over 100 striking Stella D’Oro workers and supporters rallied in front of the headquarters of the private equity firm that owns Stella D’Oro, Brynwood Partners, demanding that the company rescind its plans for drastic cuts in the workers’ wages and benefits. One of the striking workers said, "The owners of Stella D’Oro have their fortunes, their tremendous wealth, their fancy homes and cars. But we have our numbers and our solidarity and our determination to fight and not give up." Worker after worker spoke of his or her determination to keep on fighting and not accept the company’s demands.

Workers and students told the strikers how their unity — not a single worker has crossed the picket line — and courage has inspired them and how they’re providing a stirring example of how to respond to the attempts to force workers to pay for the economic crisis.

Increasingly, more Stella D’Oro workers are viewing their strike as not just important for them but for the working class. Chants at the rally ranged from "The WORKERS united will never be defeated," to "Boycott Stella D’Oro," to "Same Enemy Same Fight, All WORKERS Must Unite."

The strikers have traveled all over NYC — to union meetings, to campus rallies, to high school classrooms — to spread news about their struggle and what it means for everyone today.

On the two busses every worker received CHALLENGE and read it, particularly the articles that featured their fellow strikers attending PL events.

LA Teachers, Students Walk Out Against Layoffs

LOS ANGELES, May 15 — About two months ago, Reduction in Force (RIF) notices were given to over 8,000 teachers in our school district, in essence laying them off for the next school year. About a month after that at a union meeting, PL’ers introduced a resolution for teachers to strike on May Day (May 1st). The union hacks suggested that we strike on any day BUT May Day. They said it would "distract from our issues" to march with the rest of the working class. (see article, page 4)

At one school, there was a "new teacher meeting" a few days after this union meeting. Almost all the new teachers had received RIF notices and were not interested in what the principal had to say about next year. They weren’t even sure if they would have a job next year! They wanted to know why the union wasn’t truly fighting for them. The union chair gave the company line, saying the union "had to think of all the teachers in the district" and not just those at one school. Of course, that school is majority working-class black and Latino students and almost a third of the staff got RIF’ed, while the rich schools only had two or three teachers laid off!

A PL teacher stood up and said that teachers didn’t have to rely on the union; we could do our own wildcat action on May Day, like the original resolution had proposed. The new teachers loved the idea! One said that the PL’er should be their spokesperson, not the union rep. They shamed the union rep so much that she had the teachers at the school vote whether or not they wanted to stay out for one hour on May Day, and 90% of the teachers voted yes!

May Day 2009 saw teachers (not to mention quite a few students) marching in front of the school for the first hour of the school day, chanting "The teachers united will never be defeated" and "Maestros luchando también están enseñando (teachers in struggle are also teaching)." There were quite a few political discussions amongst teachers about the system and the historical importance of May Day, especially those new teachers. One conversation centered around a recent murder/suicide committed by a laid-off worker at a local hospital who not only shot his boss, but also his boss’s boss before he shot himself. One teacher commented that if he was going to do it, he should have gotten the people at the very top. "And the system," was added. She agreed completely. She, and about five other new teachers are now getting CHALLENGE regularly.

The teachers went back inside the school after 9 am, but during 3rd period the students walked out in support of the teachers! They held up signs, marched around inside the school and even tried to march around the outside of the school before being threatened with tickets and having to come back inside the campus. About 200 students walked out. "Next time," they promised as they came back into class, "the walkout will be even better." What a day! What a May Day full of class struggle! Now we must make the rest of the year full of communist class struggle.

Racist Unemployment Is Capitalism’s Executioner

How sick is the capitalist profit system? When the loss of 540,000 jobs in one month is considered "a good sign"!

That’s how the economic pundits reacted to the government’s jobless figures for April, since they were allegedly lower than job losses for the previous two months. But even that figure is suspect (see box).

The fact is real unemployment — reported figures plus "hidden unemployment — has passed 30 million, over 20% (not the government’s phony 8.9%). The latter figure represents 13.5 million jobless. Then add the 8.9 million part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs, plus 5.8 million "discouraged" workers who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, plus at least two-thirds of the 2.4 million imprisoned for non-violent crimes, plus the hundreds of thousands of jobless youth who joined the military, plus those on welfare who are forced onto Workfare who are not counted among the unemployed. Add it all up, and it easily exceeds 30 million.

This is "the longest, most punishing recession since the Great Depression." (NY Times, 5/9; all statistics from that edition)

How sick is this latest capitalist depression? Consider:

• Nearly 10 million jobs will be needed just to get back to the "normal unemployment" at the start of the "recession" in 2007: the 5.7 million jobs already lost, plus the over 2 million jobs needed just to keep up with population growth, plus at least another 2 million jobs that will be cut before the economy may start growing again;

• Children in poverty will rise from 18% to 27.3% by 2010;

• Over 27% of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, the highest on record;

• Wages have been stagnant, while millions have lost their homes and millions more are behind on mortgage payments;

• "The employment picture for…men and women with four-year college degrees or higher is the worst on record," now being labeled the "recession generation."

Racism’s Special Toll

As has existed for generations among the last hired and first fired, racist discrimination takes a special toll on super-exploited black and Latino workers. If the "hidden unemployment" cited above is included, joblessness among black workers is at 30% and among Latino workers it’s 22.6% (doubling the "official" figures). Poverty among black children (39.5% in 2007) will exceed 50% when the "official" unemployment rate hits 10%.

The brutal fact is that, "There are a lot of people who lost jobs [that] …are not coming back," according to Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, especially in manufacturing industries like auto and steel. Many "are going to be economically desperate for many years" (Economic Policy Institute), especially when unemployment benefits run out (and only 40% of the jobless are even eligible at all), when tens of millions of workers with no health insurance fall sick, and when millions more who’ve lost their homes become homeless.

A 1971 Congressional study reported that for every 1.4% rise in unemployment, 30,000 workers die in the following five years. Amid this skyrocketing jobless rate, that means capitalism’s mass, racist unemployment will kill hundreds of thousands of workers in the near future. Truly the profit system is guilty of mass murder.

And this is in the "most advanced" capitalist country. Unemployment worldwide is in the hundreds of millions. Several billion try to survive on a dollar or two a day. This is besides the millions slaughtered in imperialist oil wars which will occur as long as imperialism exists.

No matter who’s in the ruling class’s White House, whether Republican Bush or Democrat Obama, unemployment and its gruesome consequences will go on and on, recession after depression….

Only the overthrow of the capitalist system by communist revolution, only a system without bosses and profits and racism and super-exploitation — communism — can free the world’s working class from the horrors of the murderous profit system.

Again… Figures Don’t Lie But Liars Can Figure

Even the "official" figure of a "lower" amount of lost jobs in April is suspect. The government hired 72,000 people last month, mostly temporary workers to gather the 2010 census. When much of that is added into the reported 540,000 newly-unemployed, the total is well into the 600,000s. Moreover, the figure for March of 663,000 has now been revised to 699,000 and the one for February was upped from the initially-reported 651,000 to 681,000. So what will this April figure become when it is revised in a month or two?

And none of these figures included the "hidden unemployed." So much for the "good news."

PLP Ties Communist Politics to Teachers’ Anti-Layoff Fight

LOS ANGELES, May 18 — "Teachers at three schools have already held illegal wildcat job actions protesting layoffs. The union leadership fears following the leadership of rank-and-file teachers," declared a PLP teacher at the May 6 House of Delegates meeting. On May 12, a judge, acting for the bosses, granted an injunction prohibiting a teacher strike, threatening fines and revocation of teachers’ credentials.

"We should have no illusions about the power of the state apparatus," another PL’er said. "The government is a weapon of capitalist rule against the working class. They’ll bring their full power against us by imposing an injunction, but we must be prepared to defy it."

Such speeches exposed the union president’s fear tactics. He warned that an injunction against a planned illegal one-day job action and potential fines of $1,000 per teacher would break the union. Teachers in PLP had joined with others to fight for a one-day strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day. Although we won support for this in many areas of the city, the union leadership, appealing to anti-communism and anti-immigrant racism, pushed through a counter-motion for a one-day strike on any day in May except May Day. Teachers voted by 75% for a one-day walkout on May 15.

But even this was too much for the mis-leaders. They caved in to the injunction, blocked the strike and instead organized civil disobedience. The union president and 40 teacher activists sat in at an intersection, were arrested and spent the day in jail, hoping to diffuse the anger of the teachers at being sold out. Many teachers called this "just theatrics."

The LA Times reported the union president’s proposal that teachers suffer a pay cut in exchange for retaining the jobs of the 2,600 laid-off teachers, while throwing 2,500 non-teaching employees to the wolves.

Instead of leading workers in a life-and-death struggle against the bosses’ system, the union leaders’ role is "negotiating" the attacks on public employees, trying to convince them that there’s no alternative to capitalism, fascism and imperialist war. As the bosses’ crisis deepens, they must bail out the banks and expand the war, leaving teachers to face huge layoffs.

The layoffs are racist, increasing class size and disrupting mostly black and Latino working-class schools, as are the cuts in the non-teaching staff, many of them black and Latino new-hires.

After layoffs were announced in March, teachers and students at three high schools held unsanctioned one-hour job actions against them, two of which involved over 90% of the faculty. Students in CHALLENGE readers’ groups gave leadership in forums, demonstrations and in the PLP May Day contingent.

Since teacher layoffs are not part of the contract, job actions are illegal. The union leadership failed to prepare the members for this and caved in to the injunction, provoking tremendous district-wide anger and frustration. The injunction claimed leaving students unsupervised for a day constitutes "irreparable harm." This implies a blanket prohibition of all teacher strikes.

Like Obama’s forced bankruptcy of the auto companies and the attacks on autoworkers’ jobs, wages and pensions, this is a fascist attack. As UAW mis-leaders help the bosses slam autoworkers, the teacher union leaders are doing the same by refusing to defy the fascist injunction.

While Obama counts on these mis-leaders to pacify workers and win them to patriotic sacrifice for the (bosses’) nation, communists prepare and call on workers to take the fight outside the bosses’ laws, with wildcats and non-union job actions, aiming to build forces for revolution.

The union leadership called for picketing before school and civil disobedience at the Board of Education. Teachers and students at many schools picketed in the morning, angry at the Board of Education, the judge, and the union leadership. All three — plus the bankers and bosses’ courts — represent the dictatorship of Capital, the capitalist class, attacking the working class to save a system which can’t meet workers’ needs but must use fascism and world war to preserve their blood-soaked profits.

We distributed CHALLENGE on the picket lines. This led to many important discussions with fellow teachers — who read the paper — about growing fascism, the bankruptcy of the union leadership, the dead-end liberalism of civil disobedience and the need for political leadership whose goal is communist revolution.

We rely on the working class, including teachers, students and parents. Our goal is to increase youth and workers’ understanding and hatred of the system, to build the long-term struggle to take political power from the capitalists. Our aim is a communist world, a workers’ dictatorship, where nobody starves and there no bosses, living in luxury off workers’ sweat. The victory is more CHALLENGE readers, militant study-action CHALLENGE groups, the Summer Project (see page 7), and a growing commitment to destroy this fascist system.

PL’ers Bring Red Ideas to Colombia’s May Day March

In Bogota, at one of the biggest May Days in recent years, thousands of workers marched down the main streets shouting their fierce rejection of fascist police, unemployment, low wages, budget cuts to social services, corruption and the rottenness of the whole Uribe government. The vast majority of marchers, while chanting against the genocidal President Uribe Velez, did not identify him as one of the many puppets used by this capitalist system, instead blaming him personally for the misery that Colombian workers endure.

Social democrats, liberals and opportunists, some disguised as communists, offered false promises and took the platform, not to bring a message of working-class solidarity and the need for communist revolution, but for their electoral speeches. Other groups of workers denounced the violation of human rights and the privatization of public institutions like the District University, the National University, and the telephone company.

These workers are honest and earnest in their desire for a better life, but they were missing a key point: the capitalist system is the real cause of all of our problems and only by destroying it can we hope to improve the lives of workers. The PLP supplied this missing ingredient by consistently denouncing capitalism and its degenerate, genocidal, corrupt leaders like Obama, Sarkozy and Uribe and their war policies against the working class in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world.

Workers and students, employed and jobless, men and women, all gave revolutionary leadership protesting militantly with our PLP sign and flags. Before and during the march we enthusiastically distributed 3,000 fliers and sold CHALLENGE, showing communism as the only true solution. "It’s May Day, not a carnival!" and "Paramilitarism and racism hold Capitalism afloat!"; "Long live communism and down with capitalism!" and many other chants were shouted by our forces throughout the day, in a disciplined fashion. Many joined our chants while other passer-bys were astonished and asked for our literature. We explained our revolutionary line and how to stay in touch with us and asked how we could continue to send them CHALLENGE.

As we entered the plaza, singing the Internationale, we were attacked with tear gas by the fascist police. As in most years, this ended the march. Later there were confrontations with the police and several businesses were destroyed. These lasted several hours, and some were hurt while 117 were arrested. Here we have another example of the chaos that capitalism creates for workers.

The international working class urgently needs new revolutionary leadership to unify, organize and prepare the working class for its immediate needs and its future goals to destroy this bosses’ system and build the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a long, difficult struggle, but opportunities abound. We must take advantage of the economic crisis of this rotten, stinking capitalist system to bring a communist message to our working-class brothers and sisters. Everything we do counts! The future is bright for the working class!

Workers Storm Steel Bosses’ Meeting

LUXEMBOURG, May 13 — Angry steel workers attacked the Luxembourg headquarters of ArcelorMittal, world’s biggest steelmaker, during the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting yesterday, setting off smoke bombs and breaking through the front door, protesting 9,000 layoffs. Buses brought 1,000 workers from plants in northern France and southern Belgium. Some hurled cobblestones and steel fencing, smashed windows and tore off a steel molding from the ornate 1920s exterior as riot police lined up to protect the head office.

Colombia’s TV ‘Reality Show’ Ponzi Scheme and Other Capitalist Evils

We know the importance of television and media in modern life as a communication tool. We can also see the how the bosses, conscious of the risks of using it excessively as a tool of repression, use it in a much more subliminal way now. In one case, they are doing this through "Reality TV".

Recently, a new TV show entitled "Inversiones el A.B.C." ("The ABC Investments") has been aired on a local Colombian TV network. The TV show is based on the real life story behind the David Murcia Guzmán (DMG) group. The DMG group is a controversial company disbanded in November 2008 by the Colombian government under suspicion of money laundering and using a Ponzi scheme. Essentially, they got people to spend 100,000 pesos on pre-paid cards they could use to buy various things distributed by the DMG group. They would then get their money back for buying the cards (and maybe even make a profit) only if they got others to buy a lot more cards.

Strangely enough, the majority of the working class here in Colombia did not feel robbed by the DMG group. They felt, rather, that the government robbed them when it precipitated the bankruptcy of the DMG group (acting under pressure from bankers and the U.S. Embassy). The government is now working hard to twist the necks of an important sector of the working class by using the media to show the incident from their perspective.

Why Are TV Shows So Important For The Bosses Right Now?

There are a lot of reasons why the government needs good publicity right now. Lately, the housing problem in Colombia has been getting much worse. According to figures from the Supreme Judiciary Council, the number of foreclosures in 1999 was 550,000 and 347,000 in 2003. According to figures from the organizations of victims of the financial system, there are over 500,000 families that have been evicted by the banks and 400,000 more arein the process of eviction. According to the World Bank, Colombia is the second largest country in concentration of wealth in the world, and five groups control 92% of the financial sector.

The pressure is mounting on this capitalist system, especially when it comes to the local systems. They act as a shield and protection for the global financial system. Because of this, the debt can be maintained even as the dollar falls. Here things happen with this very special formula: when the consumer price index (CPI) falls, the debt remains, but when the CPI rises, the debt rises.

For example, if you go to the bank and give them 100 pesos, hoping to have 105 or 110 if you save it, then the bank says that because of management expenses, card balances and taxes now you only have 80 pesos. Where is the motivation to save? There is none, and if another site, DMG namely, tells you that if you put those same 100 pesos in their pyramid scheme you can expect to get 200 back, then you’ll do it because you have to take the risk.

A survey of the International Youth Organization 2008 says: 120 million young people between 15 and 24 years of age in Latin America suffer an unemployment rate of 12.5%. In Colombia almost 30% of the youth are unemployed. This rate is increasing because of the bosses’ crisis. "It is said that only about 48% of children have access to Preschool. Also, teen pregnancy rates continue to increase reaching more than 20.5% in women 15- to 19-years-old and 16% of poor households living in precarious positions."

The Fight Against Sexism is Vital to Defeating Capitalism

PLP combats sexism, opposing the attacks against women and developing women leaders in our movement. We also continue to spread our communist analysis of sexism: that it is necessary for the bosses because it divides the working class and makes revolutionary struggle that much more unlikely. The fight against sexist ideas cannot be separated from the struggle against the system that creates them.

In a study of the Public Defense Organization and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Pasto, capital of Nariño, 43.3% of women reported having been the victim of physical violence and 70% did not report it or ask for help. Likewise, 19.7% were forced into sex acts or sex against their will. Sexual violence appears as a central strategy of territorial control. The attacks against women around the world are growing. While this system exists, where economic exploitation turns women into a commodity, women will be abused and disregarded both on a small scale to a much larger scale.

When asked: "Has a member of your family ever been physically forced to have sex or sexual acts unwillingly?," 11.1% of the population answered in the positive; 17.9% declared that sexual assault was the determining cause for moving away. Sexism increases oppression through economic, cultural and social means. Women earn less and are treated worse on a political level.

Sexism is not only the personal male chauvinism of a few right-wing and backward men and women or the outcome of the deployment of paramilitaries in the city. In Bogotá, the process of the exploitation of women is reflected in key areas of the formal economy (large projects) or the informal economy (drug trafficking).

For example, trade in San Andresito, money laundering in the neighborhood of Santafé, and other financial activities downtown all use the super-exploitation of women to make a profit. The steps they take are clear: infiltrate, control, prevent acceptance by the population or the institutions that have a presence in the area; create extensive networks in the neighborhoods, proliferate fear; execute the "Undesirable," and attempt total domination of the area. This practice is not new but now it is being done systematically against women workers.

All workers need to combat inequality as an integral part of capitalism. Attacks against women also keep their brother workers in chains. The divisions between men and women help employers cut our salaries. Victory for the working class requires that we break these divisions and join in the fight for equality by destroying the capitalist system. The working class needs to destroy sexism in order to defeat capitalism and build a revolutionary struggle for communism to eliminate the oppression of all workers.

Letters

Turning Shop Struggle into Class Consciousness

I work for a non-union auto subcontractor in the South. As car sales have fallen, the company has cut about half its workforce. Recently, the rest of us have been put on half-time. We work forty hours every two weeks and collect some unemployment. Many have had to pick up extra minimum-wage, under-the-table jobs.

Recently we received another reminder of what capitalism is when we lost eight of our 40 hours to a company "maintenance day." Managers and supervisors were paid to plan how to get even more work out of us, while the production workers were given an unpaid day off and left with a big hole in their paychecks. This became an opportunity to move my friends in the factory to higher levels of class consciousness.

I expressed my anger to another auto worker who works a part-time job with me. I suggested that we stop work, stage a kind of sit-down protest, to force the bosses to give us back our hours. After all, I pointed out, they still have a market for the trucks we make, and they can’t make them without us. My friend agreed, and argued that at this point "we might as well go out fighting." So we made a plan, and the next day we both talked to others at the factory to see where they stood.

People’s opinions were quite divided. Many were down for doing something. Some worried that if too few people agreed to the action that the managers would just step in and run the line. They pointed out that it had to be all of us or none of us.

Another close friend, who had helped write a letter of support for the Boeing strikers, criticized me for being "ungrateful" for the hours that we still had. I told her that "we can’t just be passive and let things get worse." Since she and I talk a lot about relationships, I used marriage as an analogy. When things are wrong there, she doesn’t just say, "Well, at least I have a relationship." For the same reason, we can’t just say "well at least we have jobs" since if we took such a passive approach, the problems for the working class would get worse.

A day later, the bosses announced that everyone who had gotten cut would be able to make up the lost days. We don’t know if they had heard of our plans, but that isn’t the main point.

Key were the discussions about how one can fight, about our role as workers, all of which are part of the struggle to build up a fighting class-consciousness. Some of my friends receive CHALLENGE, and this struggle helped me understand and push the limits of their understanding of what we mean by worker’s power, of a communist society without bosses. We still have a ways to go. Many of these workers were invited to May Day. Two came to a study group to consider our ideas more, and then came to May Day and helped prepare food. These are small steps, but they are the essential first steps on the road to communism.

As we fight for the loaves of bread to eat today
We can’t forget who built the factory,
Grew the grain and who bakes the loaves of bread for tomorrow,
The workers do.

Subcontractor Comrade

May Day Youth ‘Were On A Mission’

The following are excerpts from letters written by youth who marched with the PLP contingent in the Los Angeles immigrant rights march on May Day. Five of them joined PLP and many more subscribed to CHALLENGE, agreed to distribute CHALLENGES and/or be in a study group:

We stood together and stood out for the working class. Our red flags stood tall and angry, against the racist exploitation and mass deportations…. I, in red, stood for my immigrant parents, for my unemployed uncle, my little sisters’ future education and for my friend who was brutally assassinated when the cops didn’t decide to protect but to terminate. I stood for many.

The difference between our groups was that we were all one, like a big red flag. This May Day I was marching, holding a flag and chanting my lungs out. It was hard work, but you feel better about who you are and happy, because it’s not just for your benefit but many others as well…. I was glad that I went out to march on the street to support everyone, not just my Mom.

Our group was the most organized by far. As we walked down the street people could tell that we were on a mission and that mission was a revolution. We had our chants and vision set. We were organized and the most motivated group on the march.

The drums beating, the chants screaming and the red flags flying — there was no denying it, PLP.

The May Day march was amazing to me because I felt that I had a purpose to fight. I was there for workers and what we came for was to unite the working class together to overthrow the bosses and work together for each other and the things we need… The reason we stand out from the rest is because we didn’t get misled. We knew the true meaning of a May Day March; we held the red flag, not the U.S. or the Mexican flag. We marched in red; we told the truth about the people who died for their rights long ago in Chicago. Long Live May Day. Long live PLP.

We let people know the march was about the working class. We talked about CHALLENGE and we were the only ones with the red flag.

The working class has no bosses’ flag and no country. We fought for the red flag that represented all of the working class. It meant that we are all one and that we should unite to fight for a communist society where there is no poverty. I was on the security committee. My job was to keep the shape of our group — we organized how we should march.

From all the multiple crowds we were the ones popping out, the only ones with the red flag, which stands for revolutionary communism. I thought the march was really exciting and a really nice experience.

My friends and I joined together and got to the spot where the march was going to start. We helped distribute CHALLENGE and leaflets to explain the real reason for May 1st. When the time came to start marching, we started chanting. We all sounded like one. We were all organized. To me it was awesome that we were able to speak our minds and scream our lungs out. I’m happy I could assist the march and I really hope I would be able to go next year.

Red Youth

Fight Racism with Multi-racial Unity, Not As ‘White Allies’

I have worked with Jobs with Justice (JwJ) for several years and recently attended their class "Building Unity between Brown and Black." What a disappointment! There were segregated breakout sessions — "Black, Brown in the Workplace," "Black, Brown on Housing Issues" and "White Ally." I commented that this was very divisive and patronizing. The leader’s response was that JwJ was "trying something different." Racial segregation isn’t so "different" in America!

In the "white ally" session, I said I wasn’t comfortable with the separation. We’re all in the working class and need to fight racism together, especially in the unions! This emboldened some others to voice their concerns about this term. The facilitator argued that "white allies" couldn’t lead any anti-racist struggles, and should essentially be a cheerleader on the sidelines.

At lunch, two women union organizers for United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 400 (one black and one Latina) told of how they helped workers win the union election at the Smithfield Ham Plant in Tarheel, NC. Last year Immigration, Customs and Enforcement raided the plant for immigrant workers. Five hundred Smithfield workers of all ethnic groups protested this deportation raid! I asked the organizers how they showed workers that solidarity was in their best interest. They canvassed union workers from Richmond, VA, down to Tarheel, NC, and many workers sent letters of support. Smithfield workers realized they were part of a larger group and gained strength from it.

A "white ally" in the audience asked the organizers about the role of "white allies" in the union struggle. They were baffled by the question and didn’t know how to respond. I spoke up and said that in union organizing, you don’t have white workers on the sidelines. One of the organizers explained that workers need to work together to achieve their goals. Afterwards, I thanked the union organizers for their presentation, and when I told them I had to get back to my "white ally" breakout group, they looked at me in disbelief. I told them about the John Brown/Harriet Tubman March in Harpers Ferry planned for October, and that we wanted to organize unions to go. They told me to keep in touch with them.

Later, I discussed the JwJ conference with two fellow union members who meet with me regularly to discuss CHALLENGE. Both agreed the "white ally" strategy made no sense. One said, "How can white workers fight racism by only talking to whites?" Both said it was important to have multiracial unity among workers to win anything from the bosses. I explained that when PLP talks with workers, we always try to go as an integrated group.

Apparently JwJ thinks that "black and brown" workers won’t be able to play a leading role in the struggle if there are any white workers involved. That notion itself strikes me as "white supremacist" thinking! Black and brown workers have often led class struggle, and white workers unified with them give the working class the greatest punch against the bosses.

D.C. Red

‘Liberal’ N.J. Mayor: ‘Who, me racist?’; ‘Yes, YOU!’

Donald Cresitello, mayor of Morristown, NJ, is a face of the growing fascist attack on undocumented workers. Two years ago, Cresitello hosted the anti-immigrant Pro-America group on the steps of city hall. The Party, many of its friends and even some townspeople, shut them down.

Several weeks ago, the American Friends Service Committee hosted a "Conversation with the Mayor on Section 287g," the federal law which allows local cops to be deputized as ICE (immigration) agents. Cresitello, a Democrat running for reelection, has long advocated that Morristown cops act as immigration cops. At this event, he tried to pose as a liberal, proclaiming that he wasn’t anti-immigrant, that he supported providing undocumented immigrants with a "path to citizenship,"that there would never be racial profiling in Morristown. He even claimed not to "care"about section 287g.

One audience member pointed out that racial profiling and section 287g are inseparable. She also described Cresitello’s effort to promote anti-immigrant racism in Newark. There, after three college students were murdered by a suspected undocumented person, Cresitillo asked to speak at the memorial service. Knowing his anti-immigrant rhetoric, the family refused to let him come, and told him that his racist ideas were not welcome. The immigration status of the murderer was irrelevant.

Cresitello quickly exposed himself. He jumped to his feet to denounce the story as false, and threatened that the speaker had better not tell this story in public again. But his red face, bulging eyes, and yelling made it clear to the audience that he was the liar and the same racist he always had been. After the forum, a number of people in the audience came up and thanked the speaker for what she had said.

An important lesson was learned that day. We must never let these racists pretend to be something other than what they are. We must be sure to confront them whenever possible and make sure that we in the working class are not fooled by slick lies. And we must never forget that communist revolution is the only way to end capitalism and its racist exploitation of, and terror against, of undocumented workers.

N.J. Comrade

Oaxaca May Day Marchers Defy Gov’t Flu Panic

OAXACA, MEXICO, May 18 — Just before May Day, Felipe Calderon’s reactionary Mexican government unleashed a nation-wide media campaign about the swine flu epidemic, generating a somber atmosphere and severe anxiety among the population. It appears the government has exaggerated the effects of this disease to divert attention away from the financial crisis and the bosses’ fascist measures to overcome it, which are deepening attacks on workers’ living conditions.

About 10,000 education workers from Section 22 of the Oaxaca teachers’ union and activists from organizations comprising APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca) marched on May Day. They defied the government and overcame its pandemic panic.

A group of 100 members and friends of PLP including farm workers from La Merced del Portrero marched wearing shirts saying: "We fight for a better world against wage slavery." In the five-kilometer (three-mile) march our group stood out with our militant chanting of our revolutionary communist slogans, despite the teachers’ union leadership pushing for a silent march wearing masks covering their mouths.

Slogans resounded through the city’s streets: "The crisis of the system has no solution, the only solution is revolution!"; "Fight, win, workers to power!"; "The flu, capitalism, the bosses — the same garbage!"; "Advance, Advance, Communism will triumph!"

Slogans on our banners and signs stood out: "The virus...and worst pandemic in the world is Capitalism — destroy it with Communist Revolution!"; and "Workers’ Struggles have no Borders!" The 5,000 leaflets and 300 CHALLENGES we distributed were well-received by the marchers and the public who watched.

Afterwards we had a very warm intense discussion, recognizing strengths and weaknesses in this experience. We could have been better organized, and didn’t explain the demands of the farm workers, among others. But our most important strength was our commitment to continue advancing the political work of PLP.

Only Red Politics Can Dump Dead-end of ‘Reforming Capitalism’

PLP members are often asked why we bring in communist politics into every working-class struggle. Why can’t we just fight for higher wages, getting U.S. troops out of Iraq or against racist police brutality? Why should we be concerned with the ideas that are motivating and leading these struggles and not just be content that workers are engaged in struggle against the capitalists and their governments?

There can be no advances for the working class without mass struggle, but recent events in Pakistan show that reactionary pro-capitalist ideas can make that struggle a dead-end for workers. Landless tenants are justifiably rebelling against wealthy landlords and the high taxes and corruption of the U.S. puppet Pakistani government (NYT 4/16/09), but the struggle is being led by Taliban forces that are using the workers’ anger to establish their own religious-fascist rule.

Politics and ideas are a matter of life and death for the working class. Even when communist or left movements have led struggles for state power, if the movements were based on reforming the system, all the gains of the workers were eventually reversed. The Vietnamese working class heroically fought and defeated U.S. imperialism under the leadership of the North Vietnamese communists. The movement focused on economic reforms instead of changing the underlying politics of society. Now, Ford and Nike super-exploit Vietnamese workers and full-blown capitalism with all its misery has returned.

In South Africa, communists led millions of black workers to overthrow Apartheid. The Mandela-led African National Congress (ANC) chose to share power with the old apartheid capitalists. The working class went along with this because the movement had promised that an ANC victory would improve conditions for the country’s black workers as opposed to defeating capitalism and its ideology. With a black-led government in power the shantytowns remain, health care is non-existent for millions of people, and black workers toil for the same minimal wages they had under Apartheid. Still the capitalists rake in billions in profits.

In El Salvador, many tens of thousands who considered themselves communists or leftists fought against the U.S.-backed government fascists. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the decades long civil war. But eventually the working-class forces went along with the FMLN becoming part of the government. Now the former guerilla leaders are sanctioning the exploitation of the working class. The seeds of this betrayal were sown by the movement building itself on making economic reforms as opposed to a political transformation of society.

These defeats of the working class were the result of reformism in the communist movement, the opportunist winning of workers to fight the bosses based on the idea that the communists would provide more than the capitalists. We are fighting for a society that will share scarcity and abundance based on communist politics, not material incentive.

Socialism in Russia and China had many communist aspects but they focused on material benefits and retained the money-based wage system. Eventually the individualism of a system based on wages led society back to capitalism. Even the Cultural Revolution in 1960s China, that moved workers closer to communism than ever before, was undermined by its failure to break free from capitalist ideas.

Red Guards in China attacked privilege and inequality. But these advanced communist ideas that have so inspired our Party were undermined by the Red Guards’ inability to cast aside the "cult of Mao." Relying on an "all-knowing" leader rather than a mass communist party gave capitalist forces in the army and government a free hand to crush the Cultural Revolution.

These hard lessons show why communist ideas are essential to every struggle. Fighting against racism, nationalism, sexism, individualism, and selfishness, are necessary to build working-class unity and ultimately build a society without wages. Learning from the leadership of black, Latino and women workers, and showing that we don’t need the ruling class, are essential to our class gaining confidence in itself and in communism. To win in the long run our movement must have leaders today who are in the forefront of the class struggle and are self-critical about their weaknesses. Communist leaders must fight for the interests of the working class, take risks, and not seek personal gain from the movement.

Communists understand that the government’s "state power" is a weapon of the capitalist ruling class. This understanding is necessary to keep our class from relying on "lesser-evil" politicians whose job is to sabotage workers’ struggles. Armed revolution for communism to smash capitalism is the only lasting solution to workers’ oppression from a capitalist treadmill where reforms are given and taken back. From this the bosses bank their profits and shed workers blood in endless imperialist wars.

The movement we build today will shape the society we build tomorrow. There are no shortcuts. The only road to victory is winning our class to communism.

The movement we build today will shape the society we build tomorrow. There are no shortcuts. The only road to victory is winning our class to communism.

30 Generations of Racism =Billion$ for Bosses

For years, CHALLENGE has been reporting that the U.S. ruling class needs racism and its resulting discrimination because it nets hundreds of billions in profits from the lower wages paid to black workers (including Latino workers in the last century), dragging down the wage levels of ALL workers. Institutional racist inequality has spanned 30 generations — from slavery to post-Civil War legal segregation, enforced by KKK terror — to current racism. Now reports reveal this generational racism means that for every dollar of assets accumulated by white families (home and auto ownership, government subsidies, savings, pensions, among other factors), black families have only 10 cents worth of assets!

This doesn’t mean that white working-class families are so well off. The average in the above comparison includes upper-income white families, far more numerous than upper-income black families. Actually, the Federal Reserve’s "Survey of Consumer Finances" reports that overall the net worth of the average U.S. family today is less than it was in 2001. (Washington Post, 3/23/09) However, racist discrimination enables the bosses to net super-profits from the differential in income and assets denied to black families as compared to white families.

The biggest single factor in accumulating assets is home ownership. Historically, black families have been far less able to "reap the benefits of government support and tax-paid subsidies, which help...build assets. During the Depression [of the 1930s]…the Home Owners Loan Corporation was established "to rescue families from home foreclosures, but not a single…loan went to a black or Hispanic family….

"The black section of Detroit was simply excluded. After World War II, GIs received government-subsidized home mortgages….Of the 67,000 mortgages issued under the GI Bill in New York and northern New Jersey," only 100 went to black veterans! (Washington Post)

This discrimination is just as marked today as revealed in the home foreclosure swindle. "Payday lenders and other shady financial dealers…have preyed on [black and Latino] people fueling the economic and foreclosure crisis. African Americans…were more than three times as likely as white borrowers to be steered to high-interest loans, even when they qualified for a prime loan."

Moreover, U.S. tax-code rules, "Have strengthened…those who already have assets. You can get a tax deduction for interest on home mortgages of up to $1 million….But if you own a home and make too little to itemize [on one’s tax return], the mortgage interest doesn’t help you at all."

Concludes the Washington Post writer Meizhu Lui, "The over-hyped political term ‘post-racial society’ becomes patently absurd when looking at these economic numbers." The super-profits accumulated from this racism helps the ruling class pay for imperialist oil wars abroad, and they use racism to justify attacks on Arab and South Asian workers at home and worldwide.

The depressed assets of black and Latino families make it more difficult for them to obtain health insurance and therefore access to adequate healthcare, as well as to avoid bankruptcy from uninsured medical bills. This lack of assets lessens their ability to gain legal assistance when needed and to pay the rising tuition of their children’s education.

This generational racism keeps their children in a downward spiral. "The biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child is the net worth of the child’s parents." But as indicated above, historically black families have received less "government support and tax-paid subsidies for their asset-building activities." The GI Bill sending veterans to college after World War II was overwhelmingly denied to black vets, stemming from their discriminatory position in the then segregated armed forces.

This gap in assets or net worth is widening. The 10 cents referred to earlier was 12 cents in 2004. "These African American losses appear near-permanent, the result of the deindustrialization of the United States — the destruction of the black blue-collar workforce." (Black-White Wealth Gap Continues to Widen in U.S., by Joshua Holland, posted on AlterNet) This is especially true of the mass layoffs in basic industries like auto and steel.

As CHALLENGE has reported, the bosses are shifting their profit-making production from higher-paid, formerly unionized plants to non-union subcontractors spread across the South, Southwest and California, paying black, Latino and immigrant workers less than half the wages of the older plants, with no benefits. Given this drive for super-profits, especially based on racism, the wages and conditions of the entire working class are suffering. Racism hurts ALL workers, even as it hurts black and Latino workers the most — just as the bosses’ economic crisis hurts all workers, while oppressing black and Latino workers even more.

Since black households "earn less than 60 percent of median white income," says the above AlterNet posting, "At the pace of catch-up since 1968, according to a report issued…by United for A Fair Economy, ‘it would take 581 years’ [for black families] to achieve income parity." But that will never arrive; it will only help to reduce white family income.

It is only through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist profit-driven society and its state apparatus, and the establishment of communism — without bosses, profits, a wage system and racism — that the entire working class, which produces all value, will receive the full fruits of our labors according to need.

That’s "communist parity."

  1. CHALLENGE, May 20, 2009
  2. CHALLENGE, May 6, 2009
  3. CHALLENGE, April 22, 2009
  4. CHALLENGE, April 8, 2009

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