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CHALLENGE, May 20, 2009

Information: 20 May 2009 268 hits

Stella D’Oro Strikers, Auto Workers, GI’s Inspire NYC May Day

NEW YORK CITY, May 1 — May Day 2009 was a great day for the working class in NYC. Workers involved in class struggle against the bosses, was a highlight of the spirited rally and march in Brooklyn and at three dinners throughout the city, which were attended by over 800 people. Stella D’Oro strikers, Axel workers from Detroit’s auto industry who struck against the bosses and their union lieutenants last year, an airport worker fighting to regain his job all were applauded as they spoke at the dinners.

Several decided to join the Party, after having seen the multi-racial unity in the May Day activities and how PL’ers actively supported them on the picket lines and in the spread of communist ideas, especially through the distribution of CHALLENGE. Fifteen hundred dollars was raised for the striking Stella D’Oro workers.

Particularly outstanding this May Day was the participation and leadership of the youth who organized the march and the dinners, which bodes well for the growth of Progressive Labor Party. All told over 3,000 CHALLENGES were distributed.

Participants came from Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Boston, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore to join the march and dinners in New York. The rain failed to dampen the spirits of the marchers in Brooklyn and then the sun broke through as we strode through the working-class Flatbush neighborhood where over 30 onlookers who took CHALLENGE joined the march.

Comrades and friends led chants all along the route, calling for multi-racial worker unity and communist revolution to destroy capitalism, a system built on racism, sexism, police brutality and exploitation.

At all three dinners speakers clearly explained the state of the bosses’ crisis-ridden world and how workers, students and soldiers were beginning to step up to the plate to fight the misery it has produced, citing communism as the only answer. Other speakers described the history of May Day, born in the 1886 general strike for the 8-hour day in Chicago.

Stella d’Oro strikers spoke about their long and heroic struggle against their bosses — not one striker has crossed the solid picket line in nine months. They recalled their introduction to communism and the PLP, about how the Party was the first to support their struggle and how we’re still with them 100%. Another striker narrated the history of the strike and thanked the Party for its support and for “putting us on the map.” One comrade said when he joined the picket line, workers took him to their trailer headquarters and showed him CHALLENGE.

The dinners heard from transit and other industrial workers, from teachers and students. A young black soldier and Iraq War veteran, now a transit worker, kicked off one dinner describing battles at the plant gate and PLP’s effect on the struggle, linking it to the need to build the Party. Messages were read from comrades in jail who vowed to come out stronger in fighting the system that put them there.

A Detroit auto worker painted a picture of the real-life effects of what the ruling class was doing to workers. “Have you seen my city?” she asked. “It’s like Katrina without the water!” While describing the devastation in auto-worker cities, it was no sob story. She said she was inspired by last year’s May Day and demonstrated her revolutionary optimism by joining the Party this May Day. She was among many who raised their hands when the question was asked, “Who is ready to join PLP?”

At another dinner an airport worker spoke about the PL’ers who were supporting him in his efforts to fight a frame-up that cost him his job. Students involved in battles against the budget cuts were there. The dinner heard about the recent Boeing strike in which the Party played a leadership role. “We must fight back” was a great song performed by a group of teachers and students.

As always the food was excellent amid some super entertainment. Skits and songs prevailed throughout. At one dinner “What’s Going On” was sung to introduce the state-of-the-world speeches. History came through with the Depression song “Brother can you spare dime” and “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.” Youth jump-started that dinner with an excellent rap and Langston Hughes’ “Good Morning Revolution.”

The walls at the dinner sites were decorated with vintage front pages from past CHALLENGES. The Brooklyn crowd applauded a skit written and performed by high school students who had picketed scab-produced Stella D’Oro cookies being sold at a supermarket. It dramatized a real event in which one student had smashed boxes of them inside the store while on a shopping trip. The traditional working-class lesson that scabs must be fought was cheered as it rang out loud and clear.

At another dinner a skit by a high school debate team demonstrated how the battle between communist and capitalist ideas was not merely an intellectual discussion. A call was made for comrades and friends to participate in the Party’s Summer Projects this year in Seattle and Los Angeles.

All the dinners closed with the singing of the international working-class anthem, The Internationale. Workers, students and soldiers, inspired by the day’s events, vowed to return to their factories, transit barns, barracks, schools and campuses more determined than ever to fight this murderous system with the only solution: the battle for communist revolution. J

Mobilization for War Behind Rulers’ Flu Panic

Anti-Mexican racism and windfall profits for some drug companies are mere side benefits that U.S. capitalists are reaping from the swine flu mania. Its main value to the rulers lies in preparing for a future Pentagon-led mobilization of the nation.

The current, exaggerated outbreak falls short of triggering the dire measures outlined in a Defense Department’s 2006 memorandum, a plan to deal with a health catastrophe, entitled, “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza.” But the dramatic official response — closing schools, stockpiling vaccines, endless public announcements — suggests a dress rehearsal. And it has the effect of diverting workers from the really massive problems caused by the capitalist depression.

Pentagon Penned Flu
Scenario In 2006...

In a health epidemic, the 2006 Pentagon study says the military’s first task is forcibly securing the profit system’s physical plant, “sustaining infrastructure and mitigating impact to the economy.” In addition, the Department of Defense (DoD) would take over airport passenger screening from the inept Homeland Security.

To guarantee profits for the biggest U.S. bosses, the U.S. Army — not Immigration and Customs — would also enforce “a comprehensive border and transportation strategy that strikes a balance between efficacy of interventions to limit the spread of disease and the economic and societal consequences.” Obama & Co. would have a perfect excuse for establishing martial law in humanitarian guise. “DoD will augment civilian law enforcement efforts to restore and maintain order,” with local police taking “instruction” from Army officers.

...Bosses Today Recite Script

The present “crisis” suspiciously resembles the top brass’s 2006 scenario. The report reads, “An efficient human-to-human outbreak will most likely occur outside of the United States....It will enter the U.S. at multiple locations and spread quickly to other parts of the country.”

The military’s 2006 proposals are playing out uncannily now. “Voluntary, community-based measures, such as limiting public gatherings, closing schools, and minimum manning procedures, are most effective to limit exposure to the disease if implemented before or at the onset of the event.” “Afflicted” schools from Texas to Long Island have shut down. New York’s Catholic archbishop Dolan said he would call off Sunday Mass if the authorities saw fit. Boston’s Northeastern University banned graduation handshakes.

The war needs of a challenged U.S. ruling class transformed an ordinary illness into an “emergency.” The U.S. war machine itself provided the hype. According to the Scripps Howard News Service (5/3/09), “On April 16 — five days before the public first learned about the flu surfacing in Mexico [our emphasis — Ed.] — scientists at San Diego’s Naval Health Research Center spotted an unusual sample from a 10-year-old son of a service member, who was part of an ongoing influenza surveillance study. The Navy sent the sample across the country to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which identified it as the current swine-flu strain.” Politicians then began a good-cop-bad-cop routine to alternately sow panic and urge reliance on government. Biden warned us to stay off planes and trains. Obama said, “Trust me.”

The Massachusetts Senate passed a pandemic flu preparation bill 36-0 that would allow the public health commissioner to close or evacuate buildings, enter private property for investigation and quarantine individuals, and would fine people $1,000 for violating public health orders. (AP dispatch, 4/28)

But “the current outbreak...may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare. As we go to press, there were 22 deaths (19 in Mexico) of 1,001 confirmed cases worldwide. Yet the flu kills 36,000 in the U.S. every year, of 60 million who come down with it, and over a million globally (about 7,500 annually in Mexico). (LA Times, 4/30)

In the face of this, U.S. bosses are pushing the most vile racism against Mexican-Americans, blaming Mexico for an illness that, if anything, is spawned by U.S. corporations (see box) and fades in comparison to the “normal” flu statistics cited above. They use this racism to divide and weaken the working class, internationally. They use a pandemic scare to distract workers here and worldwide from fighting the massive attacks on our class: millions laid off, thrown out of their homes by bankers’ swindles reaping billons in profits and bonuses; unaffordable health care; and millions of children gong to bed hungry every night. That’s the real pandemic — capitalism.

Bosses Push Pro-War Obama
As ‘People’s Savior’

Bush, while launching two foreign wars after 9/11, failed to put the U.S. on a war footing at home. Capital, unregulated, poured into flimflam investments instead of into strategic industry and infrastructure. Much of the public considered Bush’s Iraq invasion deceitful and immoral.

Today, with China rising and Russia ever more belligerent, U.S. rulers hope Obama, far more popular than Bush, can refocus both bosses and workers on preparing for global conflict. A major “disease control” effort along the lines of the 2006 report would enable Obama to exert even more economic clout than he already has and help reverse the public image of government, especially the military, from nuisance and enemy to savior and defender.

The Pentagon paper shows that the rulers’ public health “concerns” are masks for building fascism and militarism. Obama and his masters think that, if masses of workers roll up their sleeves for a federally-administered flu shot they might also someday don a uniform.

The masses of workers who marched with our revolutionary, communist party on May Day displayed the kind of mobilization that aspires to lead the working class away from capitalist depression and imperialist war, the bosses’ twin evils which constitute the longest-running pandemic in human history. It slaughters hundreds of millions through world wars, extreme poverty, wage slavery for billions making less than a dollar or two a day, profit-created famines, preventable diseases, and deaths due to mass racist unemployment.

Only communist revolution can end this butchery of the international working class. That’s the goal of the Progressive Labor Party. Join us! J

U.S. Company is Real Swine Spreading Disease

While assuming the source of this latest flu virus are pigs (still not proven), consider this: La Gloria, Vera Cruz, a community of 3,000 in Mexico, is the suspected location of the development of this new strain of swine flu. The U.S.-based company Smithfield — the world’s biggest pig producer — moved here after environmental violations forced it out of the U.S.

Smithfield owns 50% of the outfit that raises and slaughters almost a million hogs a year. From this operation it has turned the surrounding area into “manure lagoons,” the dumping ground for the feces, urine and waste excreted by these hogs. These lagoons are the incubators and breeding grounds of toxic pathogens and of the clouds of flies that transmit them to the human population.

In the U.S., the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project in the 1950s which radically transformed pig farming into a massive concentration of hyper-crowded pens — from 53 million pigs raised on over a million farms to today’s 63 million on just 65,000 farms. It is profit-driven capitalism that is the source of any diseases spawned by this kind of agri-business, a fact which Obama and his ruling-class-owned media keep well-hidden.

MEXICO: ‘PILOT PROJECT’ FOR POPULATION CONTROL

The bosses in Mexico and the U.S. are using the current flu scare as a “pilot project” in Mexico for massive population control that will be needed in mobilizing both countries for war. Keeping 32 million school children at home, closing tens of thousands of restaurants in Mexico City (largest population concentration in North America), soccer games played in empty stadiums, and, incidentally, prohibition of the May Day march in Mexico City, usually the world’s largest — all parts of keeping masses of workers in check, in the guise of an “epidemic” that is nowhere near the figures for the “normal” flu outbreaks every year.

Whatever deaths do result from the current virus can be traced to the crushing poverty affecting 47 million workers in Mexico, denied medical care by the government’s draconian cuts in social services, made more dire by the deepening economic meltdown (the worst in Latin America). Then, of course, the bosses turn around to try to win workers to rely on “their” government rather than organizing against the massive attacks of the bosses’ crisis.

Support is Spreading for
Stella D’Oro Strikers

Bronx PL’ers Win Teachers to Join Struggle

BRONX, NY, May 3 — Twenty-five teachers and paraprofessionals at a Bronx elementary school recently attended a school union meeting of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) with five Stella D’Oro strikers as special guest speakers.

Producing this meeting was a big struggle. Although many staff members were enthusiastic about it, the school’s UFT Chapter Chairperson, right-wing staff members and the Bronx UFT District Representative were against it. The PLP Delegate at the school challenged their refusal to invite the strikers and built support to counter the opposition.

After negotiations with the UFT District Representative, permission from the school principal and the city’s Department of Education’s lawyer, plus increasing interest from staff members, the meeting was eventually approved. Still several reactionary teachers attempted to organize a boycott.

A few teachers helped the PL delegate draft a leaflet explaining the meeting’s importance, which was placed in every teacher’s mailbox. One teacher on each of the three floors organized other co-workers on their floors. Despite the controversy and a mild climate of fear and intimidation, 25% of the staff attended one of the most educational experiences of their lives.

First, the strikers explained why they struck the Brynwood Corporation and the hardships visited on the workers. Two of the five strikers described the importance of sticking together, preventing the bosses from dividing them. One striker elaborated on Brynwood’s attempt to split the so-called “skilled” workers from the “unskilled.” He explained that the bosses use such classifications to super-exploit one group of workers over another with lesser wages, benefits and working conditions.

“We are all skilled workers,” this worker explained, “and that was one of the big reasons we decided to strike.” One teacher added, “The Brynwood bosses’ attempt to divide the workers in this way is similar to the [Dept. of Education’s] attempt to divide new teachers [from] experienced teachers during contract negotiations.”

Building solidarity with these heroic strikers was only one purpose of this meeting. Meeting the strikers first-hand induced many teachers to ponder their own vulnerability during this current capitalist crisis. One teacher (a CHALLENGE reader) remembered the proposed lay-off of recently-hired teachers, saying, “Looking at this period of massive cutbacks and hearing the strikers talk about their struggle made me think that it can be any one of us out there on the picket line. Supporting these workers,” she added, “is no different than fighting for ourselves.”

Another teacher and CHALLENGE reader declared, “The situation these workers find themselves in is because of one reason — capitalism.” Although none of the teachers agreed to join the picket line, eight signed up to leaflet local supermarkets currently selling Stella D’Oro products produced by scabs.

Since then, three teachers and three strikers leafleted a neighborhood supermarket. Residents shopping at the store responded extremely positively. “As a fellow worker in a union, it’s great to see teachers... supporting factory workers,” remarked one customer. When asked, a number of them offered to distribute the boycott leaflet on their jobs and to friends and family members.

This active unity between teachers and the strikers was important for the latter and for workers city-wide. It sets an example for other local UFT chapters to invite the Stella D’Oro strikers to their schools. With constant struggle, this can produce real action.

Five of these teachers have become CHALLENGE readers and one attended May Day with her family. Since then, the teachers doing the leafleting have been encouraged to organize more boycotts at local supermarkets selling scab cookies. Our next step is organizing a day of support for the strikers, having staff members and parents visit the picket line with coffee, donuts and vocal support.

Finally, three teachers are interested in becoming more active in the union and possibly joining a CHALLENGE readers group. Consistent struggle with the staff over various union-related issues; the distribution of CHALLENGE; and joining the class struggle of the Stella D’Oro strikers, has galvanized a change among some of the teachers. The struggle continues!J

Westchester Teachers Back
Strikers, Defy Cops

BRONX, NY, April 27 — “Scabs in Blue, What’s Wrong with You?” “Police State? Fight Back!” These chants blew into the faces of strikebreaking cops closing in to try to confiscate our bullhorn, as the stubborn little international group of bakers on strike here for nine months were joined by a busload of Westchester teachers from NYSUT (New York State United Teachers), representing 600,000 teachers. The teachers, lifelong unionists, some presidents of their town locals, were not deterred by the cops’ aggression and the militant chants but joined right in. For the moment the cops were foiled, in a glimpse of workers’ power. More important, strikers read the new CHALLENGE as we invited them to May Day.

From the beginning of the rally, the police changed the city’s own regulations on sound systems, and told the rally leaders they couldn’t use the bullhorn for chants or speeches. Strike leaders and union representatives attempted to appeal the cops’ order to turn off the bullhorn.

When the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) President was to begin introducing speakers, she started using the bullhorn, and charged the cops with violating the rights of the strikers and those that support them. The cops began to move into the rally, but strikers and other demonstrators linked arms, attempting to stop the cops. The NYSUT teachers stood their ground as they witnessed the true nature of the police.

Eventually, the PSC President turned off the bullhorn and the cops backed off. Then the protesters began chanting, “Let us Speak” and “Scabs in blue!” Others began heckling the cops, charging them with protecting the bosses and attacking the workers. “Go arrest the scabs!”; “Go arrest Brynwood! They’re the criminals!” some workers yelled at the cops. They attempted to give the PSC President a violation but it was later dropped.

City University union activists (including PLP’ers) had brought the NYSUT teachers into this struggle by getting the NYSUT convention to pass a strike-support resolution. NYSUT was here today to present the strikers with a $2,500 check, and the strikers and supporters, three hundred strong, responded with the chant “Strikers and Teachers Will Never Be Defeated!” Links between us and these teachers will be sustained. A strike leader led the chant of “Thank You! Thank You!” as the teachers, almost all women, filed back into their bus, their faces glowing with the energy of picketing, some holding copies of CHALLENGE to reflect on.

Like the City College students who joined the line last week, this busload of teachers slowly builds the momentum of strike support, and with it the tension with the cops who protect the company and its scabs. May 12 is the day an NLRB court is set to render a decision that could require the bosses to go back to the bargaining table. Can we expand the support and up the militancy of the strike, against the company, the courts, the cops? This May Day, around the world, many battles like this must be raging. All point to the need of PLP organizers embedded for life in the working class, to drive on these endless class struggles holding the red flag of communist revolution. The strikers’ children on the line today — playing, dancing, holding our hands in their’s — must learn to fly that flag.J

Immigrant Workers Join the Picket Line

BRONX, NY, April 28 — It was a hot evening on the picket line; we’d been eating ices brought down by a nurse at nearby Montefiore Hospital, whose picket some strikers had joined the week before. This Friday, May Day, there’s an immigrant march in Manhattan, and three strikers were painting a banner spread out on a table: “Workers, Immigrants, Women...Unite...Support the Stella D’Oro Strikers.”

Then down the iron rungs of the elevated train staircase came a flood of blue shirts: they formed a group at the bottom of the stairs, unfurled their banner, raised their fists, and started chanting as they marched up the street to the evening shift of pickets: “¡Del norte al sur, del este al oeste, Luchamos hasta el final, Cueste lo que cueste!” [“From north to south, From east to west, We’ll fight to the end, Whatever the cost!”]

It was Hace el Camino al Andar, Make the Road by Walking, a community-based immigrant organization come from Brooklyn for a moment of solidarity with these workers, 97% of whom are from twenty different countries. We mingled, we had cool drinks, we spoke in a mix of Spanish and English, they studied our banner, we hung their’s on the fence, and we chanted for half an hour or more — communists and non-communists together — sang and chanted non-stop into the Bronx night. J

MAY DAY 2009 AROUND THE WORLD

Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, May 1st — “Capitalism always fails! Communism will prevail!” was chanted by our red May Day contingent in the immigrant rights march. Our PLP contingent with red flags, shirts and communist banners was led energetically by communist youth, who chanted and spoke without stopping for three and a half hours before and during the march.

Youth took leading our contingent seriously. Throughout the year they were involved in organizing and presenting forums in which communist politics were used to explain the budget crisis, the recession, the election, and the attacks on the working class. They also led several protests against the cuts.

Workers donated money for CHALLENGE, red PLP shirts and flags. The multi-racial group of youth drumming, chanting communist chants, and giving communist speeches was very appealing to other marchers. Some joined us. We distributed thousands of PLP leaflets and about 1,000 CHALLENGES.

Leaflets and speeches attacked the Dream Act, the crisis of overproduction, imperialist war and capitalism. This was important as the leadership of the march is trying to lead immigrant workers into the arms of the ruling class.

Three of the youth leaders had spoken at the May Day dinner about how they read CHALLENGE, distribute it to their friends, and discuss it with them. This has changed them and their friends.

At the end of the march, teachers union President Duffy had the nerve to speak, after he had sabotaged the motion to strike against layoffs on May Day. He said that the U.S. was the land of hope and promise; and we just have to keep demanding reform and our dreams will be fulfilled.

A PLP youth leader spoke on our loudspeaker to call Duffy a liar. He said the only purpose of the U.S. ruling class was to maintain their profit system through exploitation and wars. “We’re not here to beg the politicians for crumbs,” he said. “ We’re here to show that the working class has to take matters into our own hands and build a mass party to fight for communism.” Despite the union mis-leaders’ attempt to sabotage a May Day strike, teachers at one school stopped work for about an hour.

As the current crisis deepens, our choice is: their profits or our survival. Capitalism needs to bail out the banks, not meet workers’ needs. We fight to use our May Day events to show that communist revolution is the only way out of the crisis for workers.

Dinners the week before the march built PLP. More than 270 workers, students, teachers, soldiers and professionals participated. The speeches, poems, songs and a skit showed the need to destroy capitalism with communist revolution.

Two industrial workers (a man and a woman) said during their speeches, “We work in aerospace subcontractors, where the current economic crisis has brought more pressure, speed-up, and layoffs; but this has also brought more opportunities for our Party to grow, lead battles and build a base for communist revolution. CHALLENGE sales have doubled in our shops. Now we all need to double them again.”

A transit worker said, “It’s inconceivable that people are dying of hunger while stores are full of food; it’s incredible that thousands sleep in the streets while there are thousands of homes unoccupied. This crisis is not caused by lack of resources. It’s due to the anarchy of capitalist production. It’s intolerable, even immoral, to remain passive politically in the face of so much pain and suffering by our class.”

His speech ended with, “These crises, holocausts, catastrophes, worldwide massacres, will not be ended by reform movements or electoral parties. They’ll end with a COMMUNIST WALL of millions of workers, students, and soldiers, white, African-American, Latino, Asian, Arab, united in one single fist. Because the freedom of the working class can’t be begged for or negotiated, but won by the force of communist ideas and the power of the working class organized in the factories, schools, and the military. The future will be ours, comrades.”

Several people told how CHALLENGE had been key in bringing them to the Party and they now distribute it to friends. Regular CHALLENGE readers donated money to receive more papers for their friends, and others to receive it for the first time.

May Day was a culmination of a long hard struggle carried out throughout the year. As a result there are new groups of youth and workers around the party, some of whom joined PLP. Between now and the Summer Project we plan a series of meetings and activities to consolidate these youth and workers. Then they can help provide leadership in the upcoming Summer Projects. J

Bay Area

OAKLAND, CA, May 1 – Our PLP contingent joined the immigrant rights march on May 1st. Among our members and friends were young and old, students and workers, vets and civilians of many heritages and nationalities. For some younger people, this was their first May Day or political activity. What a start! They ignored the rain and cold to participate and were very enthusiastic.

In fact, the whole march was enthusiastic and loud. There was a walk out from Skyline High School earlier in the day. Oakland-based youth groups who provided the bulk of the march — over 85% were under twenty-five; mainly organized immigrant youth. The mainstream Church groups pulled out this year. Although the labor leadership officially endorsed the March, they did not mobilize their membership. This and the rain may have made the march smaller in numbers but, as in the Oscar Grant rebellions, the presence of younger people bodes well for the future. Estimates were about 500.

Our younger leadership had reviewed PLP’s participation in last year’s May Day and made improvements. They made sure that we had a well-coordinated and public presence in the march with our red flags, chants, and speeches. Everything was in English and Spanish. Some marchers distributed CHALLENGE and flyers.

Chants like: “Primero De Mayo, Comunista y Proletario – Long Live Communism, Power to the Workers” rang out from our contingent. We made some contacts who were attracted to our chants and communist orientation; follow up is in the works. The groups participating included a student “Revolution Club,” and a Filipino rights contingent. Of course, all the groups don’t agree on a common strategy, but a revolutionary spirit was in the air. A few “veteran” PLP comrades were given words of thanks “. . . for joining us today” by younger immigrant workers. They were quickly told that we weren’t joining them for the day. We’re all in it together from start to finish, until a united working class takes full power.

May Day Picnic a Step Forward
for Local Party

The Party’s May Day picnic held the Sunday before was a step ahead for the local groups, as younger members stepped up to give the main speeches and presentations of PLP’s
ideas to the dozens of co-workers and friends of all ages — students and teachers, junior high to retirees — who joined in the celebration of comradeship and internationalism. The range of nationalities was very broad, with at least nine countries, including Mexico, Germany, Japan, Kenya, and Cuba represented. More than a few sang the Internationale for the first time. As we broke up, a worker from Kenya, a friend of a friend, for whom this was the first encounter with PLP, told me, “I really liked this. These are my kind of people.”

It’s going to be a long, hard road, but as a comrade told a potential new member, “Nothing can be more rewarding than this kind of work.”J

Seattle

SEATTLE, WA, May 1 — “I see capitalism and this crisis leading to mass racist unemployment, and World War may become the only way out for the bosses, but how do I know that communism is the answer?” asked a black university worker at the PLP May Day dinner prior to today’s immigrant rights march. “How do I know we’re not going from the devil to the deep blue sea?”

We made progress answering this question during the recent struggle within the union at Boeing, at our May Day dinner and at today’s march of 2,500.

Only PLP’s contingent raised communist revolution within the march, which was led by reformist immigrant rights organizations that support Obama’s DREAM Act, Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation designed to keep immigrant workers in poverty-wage jobs and recruit their youth for U.S. imperialist wars.

Revolutionary Communist
Contingent

“Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!” and “Working people have no nations, smash racist deportations!” rang out from the PLP contingent marching through downtown Seattle. Nearby marchers joined our chants, including two Latino teenagers with their own bullhorns.

Our communist signs — blow-ups of the Party’s May Day poster and a PLP Magazine cover — drew attention. Many marchers snapped pictures. “I agree with everything on that sign. Can I join your group?” asked a friend from an anti-war group.

Marchers snatched up over 1,000 PLP flyers calling for “workers of the world to unite, smash borders and exploitation, and fight for communism by joining PLP.” Between the march, the dinner and sales on the shop floor over 400 CHALLENGES were distributed. One Boeing worker gave $5 for a paper, declaring, “You won’t find articles like these in the union newspaper.”

Our Summer Project plans encouraged many to bring these politics to industrial Boeing workers and soldiers July 5-12.

PLP May Day Dinner Prepares
The Ground

At our May Day dinner, after a delicious meal, a young laid-off construction worker — now a machinist in-training — set the tone.

“Class consciousness is the knowledge that there are those who sell their labor to survive and those who exploit those who sell their labor. These two sides are locked in conflict.” But that’s not enough, he continued.

“We need communist ideas to lead us out of the boom-and-bust quagmire that is capitalism. Historically, only communist ideas have provided solutions for workers in capitalist crises.”

He reviewed the history before World Wars
I and II and the capitalist “solution,” whether fascism or today’s “Obama Mania.” Crisis then world war: eerily familiar to today.

We know what’s coming and know the only solution. Class-consciousness is not enough. Workers must have communist ideas and leadership.

A discussion followed about the realities and depth of the current crisis and the chances for reform solving it. PL’ers raised the need for communism; our guests voiced both reservations and support.

Our May Day activities began with political struggle during a good meal. Though unable to convince all of our dinner guests to march with our contingent, we did end the week with a dozen marchers at a local restaurant after the rally. A Latino hospital worker picked up the tab. Two community college students, whose relatives are long-time CHALLENGE readers, invited us to their student organization’s events.

May Day strengthens our resolve to fight for communism. As the economic crisis deepens, the working class needs this fight more than ever. We will continue to struggle to bring our friends from the dinner and march closer to the Party. J

El Salvador

EL SALVADOR, May 1 — Thousands of workers organized in the main unions here marched in the streets to demand better wages, job security and respect for their rights. Many comrades and friends came from all over the country. Factory and farm workers, students, teachers and youth organized the distribution of our communist literature: 5,000 leaflets and 500 CHALLENGES were put in the hands of workers who welcomed our communist ideas. Nevertheless, even under repressive fascist conditions, this accomplishment was based on the discipline and perseverance of the comrades involved.

On the other hand, FMLN speech-makers said, “Friends, this is a celebration. Let’s not spoil our march, and celebrate the victory of the FMLN.” Then a war veteran declared on the microphone, “Here the only thing that’s been ‘won’ is the government, but the capitalist bosses will stay in power and we workers will continue to be oppressed. Here there’s been no triumph of the revolution.”

Another person in this contingent followed this by saying, “Comrades, we’re facing a class struggle against the capitalists. Those who’ve won are the bosses and their servants. The international working class continues in struggle.” There was much applause for these condemnations of the politicians.

A worker from the Union of Workers of the University of El Salvador (SETUES) said, “They [the FLMN] will repress us just as the fake left has done in other countries. Now we’ll see the red bourgeoisie.” He said he knew people in the FMLN leadership.

The current crisis of overproduction has capitalism sinking daily, similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s which fiercely attacked the international working class. Then the Second World War was on the horizon. Today we’re threatened by a Third World War.

In the ‘30s, revolutionary forces led by Farabundo Marti correctly saw that bourgeois national liberation movements would not liberate any workers from the yoke of capitalism, that only an armed revolution of workers, students, soldiers and farm workers, led by a communist party, could achieve that.

The Progressive Labor Party also has full confidence in our class and, learning from the experiences of the international communist movement, understands that the liberation of the working class depends solely on communist revolution. Like Marti, we reject national liberation because it only perpetuates national capitalism and its imperialist allies of the moment.

We aim to rescue the true revolutionary spirit of May Day from the premature grave in which the bosses and all traitors of the working class have tried to bury it. We reaffirm our commitment to our class, to struggle shoulder to shoulder with our fellow workers — in the fields, the factories, the classrooms and barracks — to bring them revolutionary communist ideas and organization. J

Spain

SPAIN, May 1 — This May Day was a true workers’ celebration in which thousands and thousands of people from all over the world, mainly immigrants, demonstrated. This gave a great impetus to PLP’s activity in the march where we distributed leaflets explaining the significance of May Day. Workers, who represented some of the unions, asked to help us hand out the PLP leaflets.

Once more we went to the streets to spread the communist ideas of PLP, the only ideas that will lead the workers to join the struggle to get rid of capitalism. We showed once again that PLP’s ideas are the only ones that offer a clear way to uproot this rotten system, to build the only solution to the problems of the working class, a communist system.

The PLP in Spain, consisting of some members with the support of friends of the Party, has said to the working class that we need to fight to organize workers, students, and soldiers to convert the wars for control of oil profits into revolutionary wars for communism. PLP took to the streets to tell the working class that communism isn’t Fidel or Chavez, that communism means abolishing wages, money and profits, abolishing racism and sexism, that communism will destroy all the weapons that the capitalists use against the working class. The comrades were very happy because the march was massive and our ideas were welcomed by the people who marched. We feel reborn, with more strength to continue giving leadership to our party, the Progressive Labor Party. Long live Communism! Long live the working class! Long live the PLP! J

Mexico

MEXICO CITY, May 1 — Tens of thousands of workers, teachers, students and farmworkers defied Mexico’s rulers’ using the swine flu to ban May Day marches and took to the streets in Oaxaca, Puebla and other cities.

When the PLP group arrived at the place in this city where they were supposed to meet up with hundreds of thousands of workers to celebrate May Day (traditionally one of the world’s largest), the streets were deserted. Not so much because of swine flu (AH1N1) but because the union leaders, the electoral parties and other organizations joined the fascist plans of President Calderon and his gang.

To date, the schools, restaurants and government offices are closed, but not the factories, nor the barracks nor the police stations. This experiment in terror and control of society using the bosses’ “flu” excuse did not stop the masses.

In Oaxaca, more than 25,000 teachers, students, city and farm workers challenged the prohibition and marched, blaming the government and capitalism for all the evils the workers suffer. Hundreds of PLP leaflets and CHALLENGES were distributed along the way.

In Puebla, two hours from Mexico City, more than 20,000 marched, especially teachers. A column of at least 2,000 teachers confronted the police in riot gear to rescue the building (Local 51) that the government had seized and was under police guard. The teachers shouted slogans against President Calderon, Governor Mario Marin and the fascist Ester Gordillo, leader of the national teachers’ union (SNTE). Elsewhere there were also marches and May Day celebrations.

The capitalist crisis is sharpening and the desperate bosses fight like wounded tigers. Our role as communists is more important than ever. As fascism spreads more darkness, the light of the communist alternative shines brighter. (More details next issue.) J

Colombia

BOGOTA, May 1 — The May Day march organized by unions and anti-government groups gathered some 60,000 workers and students. In its usual fascist way, the police attacked the marchers even using tanks to split the march. Young workers and students fought back and many were arrested by the cops of the “best friend”the U.S. has in South America, President Uribe.

A PLP contingent of 75 workers and youth also marched, distributing over 3,000 communist leaflets and several hundred copies of DESAFIO.J

letters

Detroit Mom’s Decision Inspires
Red Grandma

Thank you to the NYC PLP for organizing a wonderful May Day March and banquet! The march was a shining example for the working class. It’s hard to assess what workers felt who were viewing the spirited and united multi-racial mix of men and women, older and younger, marching through Brooklyn, but I know they liked it! It was definitely easy to get out CHALLENGES.

Among the many inspiring moments at the dinner, one stands out for me as a mother and grandmother many times over. A woman from Detroit was describing the devastation there and comparing it to “New Orleans after Katrina, without the water.” Then she talked about herself, saying it was her participation in last year’s May Day that made her decide to keep her baby.

She didn’t explain, but I think it was that the message of May Day — the fight for a communist future — gave her HOPE for the working class, and for her own unborn child. My mind jumped to news that my husband had just received from his family in Tanzania that his teenage niece is pregnant. In Tanzania, when a girl becomes pregnant, her options close forever. It’s as though her life is over, a time of mourning.

How can it be that new life brings sorrow when it should bring indescribable anticipation and immeasurable joy? Our niece made a mistake, but should it end her life? She, too, was once somebody’s “bundle of joy”! It is the epidemic of poverty created by capitalism that causes these perverse and unnatural reactions. If we lived in a society where children were perceived as the greatest gift and were cared for collectively, then rarely would people need or want to consider ending a pregnancy.

Communism is a powerful message. It can nourish hope and deliver babies!

Red Grandma

May Day Greetings From
Friends in Peru

Revolutionary greetings to workers all over the world. Our commitment to fight for communism is as strong as steel. Marxist-Leninism is the scientific ideology of the proletariat, which unites all communists. This is what guides our practice as we fight to break the chains of wage slavery.

May Day born in Chicago in 1886 as a day of struggle against capitalism is today being turned into a “feast” by the imperialist bourgeoisie and lackeys trying to turn workers away from class struggle against the bosses, particularly today when the economic crisis sinks more and more workers into misery.

Communists in Peru are fighting hard to build a communist party that unites urban and rural workers, students, and peasants to fight for a proletarian revolution. This task requires every minute of our lives to bring our ideas to the masses and fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism.

Aora, the ruling party, the servant and lapdog of U.S. imperialism, just approved another law attacking workers, increasing fines for traffic violations supposedly to curb “drunk drivers and protect passengers.” But this is just an attack on transport workers.

We recognize the struggle being waged by PLP spreading communist ideas in the belly of the beast, CHALLENGE helps us share ideas and analysis based on Marxism-Leninism. We promise to soon send PLP our proposal to help in the unity of all communists in the fight against capitalism, which only brings us imperialist wars, sexism, racism and exploitation

Red October Communist Nuclei

Marcher Picks Up Red Flag
on May Day

We were marching in the pouring rain toward Oakland City Hall, miles away on the horizon. I’m struggling with my cap tangled up in my umbrella in one hand and a red PLP communist flag in the other. I’m asked, “Hey, can I give you a hand?” “O.K. You want to carry the flag?” I replied to the day laborer who had moved up with his friends to march with our contingent. “Sure.” He carried our flag for the rest of the march. He told us that he and his partners did all kinds of construction jobs. E-mail addresses and cell-phone numbers were exchanged between them and us. They were drawn to us by our chants in Spanish and English: “Las luchas obreras, No tienen fronteras!” “Can we win communism? Si, se puede.”

As we marched, drenched to the bone, we sang the Internationale and kept up the revolutionary chants. Onlookers on both sides of the street in the long corridor of worn-down shops and apartments raised their fists and cheered. Cars and AC bus drivers honked horns in support.

At the end, I looked over the hundreds who had marched under a banner of “Justice for Immigrants,” which was quickly transformed to a demand for an end to all borders in the signs and chants of the marchers — overwhelmingly young workers and high school and college students.

Bay Area Comrade

Pope is Angel of Death for
AIDS Epidemic

In his recent trip to Africa, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) opposed the use of condoms in fighting AIDS. This is a criminal, unscientific attack on the millions of people infected by the HIV virus, from Washington, D.C. — one of the most affected cities in the imperialist world — to Soweto.

The World Health Organization reports 22.5 million people in Sub-Sahara Africa infected by the HIV virus, 60% of the world’s total. A UN report said one person is infected by this virus every 13 seconds. Worldwide, 32.9 million — 30.8 million between 15- and 49- years old — suffer from AIDS. Half of those are females. Each year, two million die from AIDS, for a total of 25 million in the last couple of decades.

The Pope proposes sexual abstention as the best option. But this myth contradicts nature. At the International AIDS Conference last August, Dr. Nancy Padian and Dr. Myron Cohen of the Univ. of North Carolina concluded that male use of condoms is one thing proven to prevent AIDS.

So the Pope has become just another angel of death of world imperialism and local capitalists who have already ravaged Africa with wars for slave labor and raw materials (over five million have been killed in the Congo since the mid-1990s). Pope Joseph Ratzinger seems to want to continue with the Nazi-like extermination campaigns of his Nazi past by trying to win Africa’s growing Catholic population away from using condoms.

The Great Train Robbery:
Bankers Profit, Workers Pay

NEW YORK CITY, May 6 — The latest swindle of this city’s working class will jack up subway and bus fares while handing $2 billion of the 2009 Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) budget (nearly 20%) in “debt service” to the banker-bondholders. This has been going on for decades. This interest is the profit that these bankers steal off the backs of transit workers and riders, while Obama hands over hundreds of billions to these same banks and his administration doles out $12 billion a month to fund imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The department stores, shopping malls, real estate interests or any big boss in the city would make zero profits without a functioning mass transit system that transports their customers and workers.

Meanwhile, masses of workers, many subsisting on poverty wages, and those jobless because of the bosses’ crisis, now must fork over still more money to get to their jobs or try to find one. A huge proportion of these riders are black and Latino, so the bosses use widespread racism to help get away with this robbery on their backs. And Mayor Bloomberg, the $16-billion robber baron, says we must “share the sacrifice” to balance the bosses’ budget.

The transit union “leaders” never utter a peep about the tie-in of the banks, the MTA and the billions spent on the bosses’ wars, nor about the bankers’ $2 billion-a-year gravy train.

PLP fights for a system without profits, bankers and phony “deficits”: communism. Workers will put these leeches six feet under. J

France: Million May Day Marchers Need to Dump Labor Sellouts

PARIS, May 2 — Over one million protesters — five times more than last year — participated in over 280 May Day demonstrations across France. It was the first time the eight major trade union confederations marched together on May 1.

But this was a show of unity at the “lowest common denominator.’’ The confederations’ March 30 call only put forward “making May Day a new key moment in the mobilization,” and repeated the four previous demands of the March 19 demonstration: opposition to public- and private-sector job cuts; opposition to non-permanent jobs and economic deregulation; maintenance of purchasing power; and maintenance of social security.

The call lied to the workers, saying the January 29 and March 19 protests had forced the government to limit the bosses’ stock options and golden parachutes. This is contradicted daily in the media.

Whereas last year striking undocumented immigrant workers led the Paris May Day march, this year there was less visible support for these mostly black and Arab workers. With the Sarkozy government launching a media blitz on “security” — which amounts to building racist fears — multi-racial unity with first- and second-generation immigrant workers is more crucial than ever for the working class in France.

The unions’ strategy of organizing bigger and bigger demonstrations every six weeks has not brought meaningful change for the workers. The movement’s momentum has been broken. Another day of action may very well be smaller, and the union leaders have little idea of what to do now. They are counting on the approaching summer holidays to let them off the hook.

However, they have succeeded in restoring their image. They appear to be doing something, which attracts many workers who have been depoliticized. (Trade union membership is below 8% of the working population, and less than 5% of the private sector.) The world capitalist crisis is pushing many into a new activism. The union leaders hope to continue shadow-boxing with the government, striking ferocious poses in public while signing sweetheart deals in private.

While the union misleaders are short on future plans, the “left-wing” electoral parties are all proposing to “give a political outlet to the labor movement” in the June 6 European parliament elections. These politicians all hope the economic crisis will induce workers to forget past betrayals and get on the electoral treadmill for another round. In any case, the unelected Council of the European Union has greater legislative powers than the European parliament, meaning that the different national ruling classes always have the final word, no matter what the elected representatives decide.

Millions of workers, in France and worldwide, are seeking answers to mass unemployment, the destruction of social security guarantees and increasing government repression. But the real solution — communist revolution — will not fall from the sky. It’s up to communist revolutionaries to explain that reformism is a dead-end and advance the alternative to capitalism.J

Workers Fight Back As Foreclosures Breed
New Profiteers

In the midst of staggering job loss and foreclosure rates, and while most people are too busy trying to figure out how to pay bills that are twice as high with half the money, the bosses’ media continues to avoid blaming capitalism. Instead, they create the anti-working class myths of “irresponsible home buyers.” When anger still rages, the bosses throw an individual capitalist like Madoff, under the bus.

Hours on radio talk shows and prominent headlines wax poetic about the evils of corporate greed, pointing to the few among the bosses who have been disciplined and rallying “good Americans” to dutifully assume the burden of “shared sacrifice.”

The bosses have played the part masterfully, finding a politician in Obama that could woo the most exploited among the working class. The current foreclosure crisis, while suffocating the working class, has fattened the pockets of many who can afford to bide their time hoping the economy evens out. A recent New York Times story, Homeowners’ Hard Times Are Good for the Foreclosure Business (April 5, 2009) celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of real estate agents who are cashing in on workers’ misery by selling homes banks have grabbed through foreclosure. With 700,000 bank-owned properties on the market (compared with only 100,000 two years ago), some of the very same people who helped create the housing bubble are still able to expect a profit.

Many cities are purchasing these homes and refurbishing the area for sale to developers. Boston, Minneapolis, and San Diego have been using both private and taxpayer money to convert working-class communities into the “it” neighborhood of tomorrow. While the economy lags, developers have time to work at their leisure, anticipating huge rewards in the future.

Even in areas not ravaged by foreclosures, politicians and developers have found ways to try to force struggling working-class families from their homes to make way for the money. With Tax Increased Financing (TIF), which lets cities keep tax increases in areas being “redeveloped” and gives tax incentives, developers have moved into neighborhoods scourged by poverty that predates the crisis by generations. While this money could be used to improve the abysmal conditions of schools and clinics in the area, it is instead being used to build luxury homes and condos that for the time being remain unoccupied- betting on the promise of tomorrow’s profit rather than giving people basic necessities.

Developing class-consciousness in these neighborhoods and fighting back are the only hope we have of turning this crisis into a fight for revolution that will free us from the backward logic of capitalism. Earlier this year, in a beautiful gesture of solidarity, workers in New York, Oakland, and Houston organized resistance campaigns to help keep families in their homes. Supporters formed human chains in front of homes in efforts to keep sheriffs out and their working-class brothers and sisters in.

Across the country, people are refusing to leave their homes, and their neighbors are rallying around them (NYT 2/17). In neighborhoods facing gentrification and take-over by developers, residents have begun flyering campaigns and have hung banners. They have organized their own rallies and demonstrations to save their neighborhoods and are struggling to find ways to create their own economic opportunities. PLP members must reach out to these people who want to fight the effects of capitalism’s contradictions, and present them with a real solution- revolution for a communist society.

Until then, corporations, developers, and politicians will continue to devastate our communities with impunity.

It is precisely this drive for ever-greater gains — even in the face of capitalism’s failure — that has condemned the working class to the tremendous suffering we are experiencing today. The production for profit is the essence of capitalism. The brutal cycles of boom and bust inevitably lead to depressions and ultimately the capitalists resort to war to get out of them.

Our Party has a vital role to play in this chapter of worker history. We must make the most of every opportunity, every struggle to bring to light the misery that comes with capitalism and the promise of a better tomorrow only communism can offer. While the bosses flounder, we must be more disciplined and dedicated than ever. In this critical juncture in history, we must make the most of all of capitalism’s contradictions; the working class is ready to see them. While everyone else says “Wait, it will get better,” we must offer our hand and lead them to the only true solution, the battle for communism.J

Subcontractor Workers, Facing Cuts,
Speed-up, Welcome CHALLENGE

LOS ANGELES — “Oh, this is the newspaper they pass out in front of the factory. I make sure to get it every time and read it right away,” explained a worker in an aerospace plant when his co-worker showed him CHALLENGE.

The bosses are taking advantage of this crisis by forcing fascist conditions. PLP is responding to their attacks by expanding our networks.

Raises were supposed to go into effect, but instead the bosses have cut some workers pay by as much as $3 per hour. With all overtime cut, many struggle to survive on $8-12 per hour. Rumors of lay-offs stop workers from asking about their raises, fearing they may lose their job. In some of these shops 80% of our working-class brothers and sisters are undocumented, making their situation more critical.

The aerospace industry is crucial for war, but the bosses must reduce costs, so they force workers to speed up. What used to be produced in 10 hours is now made in 8. The bosses cut breaks, raise production goals, audit production daily and require operators to document every minute of their shift in the computers. Workers joke when they see new office furniture saying, “Oh, there goes your bonus and overtime.”

They joke but almost everyone understands the contradictions they face every day. The workers are angry. With communist class-consciousness these workers have the power to stop production and spark a wave of strikes and fight-backs that could advance the battle for communist revolution. With workers’ only other option being to sacrifice more for the bosses’ profits, the PLP must and is spreading communist ideas and literature both inside and outside the factory walls.

CHALLENGE networks have doubled since the speed-up started and every member should struggle to double them again. Thanks to many discussions, barbeques and meetings with our friends, they were the first to react and consciously slow down production to fight back. One recruit told us of three more workers who should receive CHALLENGE and be a part of our activities. One of them has now come to a Party event for a discussion on the economic and political situation. This worker and others will be some of the participants in our upcoming Summer Project.

The two past Summer Projects have mobilized workers, students and soldiers to pass out communist literature and visit workers in Seattle and Los Angeles. These projects build a worker-student-soldier alliance and make the PLP stronger. The PLP invites everyone to participate with us this July in our Summer Projects in Seattle and in LA.

In this period the necessity for a communist revolution is clear. The Progressive Labor Party can act and grow. The bosses’ system will never provide for the needs of the working class. Join us in the PLP and fight to build a new communist world without fascist exploitation. J

Information: Print

CHALLENGE, May 6, 2009

Information: 06 May 2009 296 hits

May Day Means: Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution

a href="#Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth">Obam"’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth

Who Are the Real Pirates?

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May Day in El Salvador:‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’

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Letters

Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation

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Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers

May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class

May Day Means:

Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution

As we celebrate May Day, the lives of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters worldwide hang by a thread on the decisions of imperialist butchers — including racist U.S. bosses and their politician servants like Obama — who have the power to decide who among us lives and who dies.

They have that power because their capitalist system rules the world. Capitalism is based on production for bosses’ profits, not workers’ needs. The bosses make profits only from workers’ labor. If they can’t sell profitably what is produced, they will destroy it or let it rot. Thus, every year they murder hundreds of millions of our class through starvation, diseases that can easily be prevented or cured, imperialist wars and other capitalist-created evils.

Hundreds of millions of workers worldwide are forced to migrate in search of an ever-more elusive job just to be super-exploited and hounded like criminals. Billions more, unable to migrate, are condemned to a life of brutal poverty and premature death.

Over 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S., plus their three million U.S.-born children, are hoping their dreams of legalization may come true at last. Tens of millions more in Latin America, Asia and Africa who depend for their livelihood on money sent by these workers must be harboring the same hopes and dreams.

But, in times of deep economic crisis, the bosses’ drive for maximum profits requires complete and total control — fascism — over workers intent on rebelling against the mass racist unemployment, and the wage and service cuts devastating their lives. And this drive for maximum profits pits the U.S. bosses, the top world imperialists, against the challenge of rising imperialists in China, Russia and Europe, all fighting each other to capture the planet’s resources and "right" to exploit billions of workers — a dogfight which inevitably leads to world war. These needs driving capitalism — not "humanitarian" concerns — are behind Obama’s DREAM Act and Comprehensive Immigration Reform bills.

World supremacy is decided on the battlefield and requires the fascism and the war economy outlined above. U.S. bosses will need millions to loyally slave in their war industries for low wages and tens of millions in their armed forces to fight and die for U.S. imperialism’s blood-soaked profits.

The proposed immigration bills mirror these U.S. bosses’ war needs. The DREAM Act, hailed as a bill to help undocumented youth, in fact will kindly "offer" a pool of over a million youth the "opportunity" of serving in the rulers’ military to shorten the "path to citizenship" — but more likely a path to the cemetery (see box).

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill will create another pool of over 12 million undocumented workers to follow a torturous (and costly) path to legalization, at least a 12-year ordeal of slave-like working conditions in the bosses’ war industries. Deportation will always hang over their heads.

Capitalism is the bosses’ system built on racism which both nets them hundreds of billions in super-profits from the lower wages and benefits forced on black and Latino workers (which drag down conditions for ALL workers) while pitting these groups against each other to weaken any united fight-back against the attacks that oppress us all.

The latest wrinkle in this racist divisiveness, backed by the bosses’ lieutenants among black "leaders," is to blame mainly Latino immigrants for the unemployment among black workers — "they’re stealing ‘our’ jobs." But it’s the bosses’ profit system and its latest financial crisis/depression that is throwing millions of black (and white) workers into the streets and out of their homes, not their brother and sister immigrant workers who are also suffering the same attacks, besides fascist government raids and imprisonment. Many of these workers come with a long history of class struggle and can help the working class lead battles against the bosses.

Thus, the unity of the international working class under the leadership of a mass international Progressive Labor Party has never been more urgent. Only millions of students, workers and soldiers armed with our communist ideas can destroy this capitalist-imperialist inferno. Communism will abolish all borders and exploitation. It will use working-class state power to deal racism and sexism a death blow. It will eliminate the bosses, their wage system and money because production will be based on the needs of the international working class. Speed the bosses’ "path to extinction." Join PLP!

a name="Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth"></a>"bama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth

The Obama administration’s latest version of the "DREAM ACT" promises undocumented immigrant youth citizenship in exchange for fighting and dying in U.S. imperialism’s oil wars.

Re-introduced into Congress last month, the Act would grant citizenship if these undocumented youth had lived in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school and completed two years of either college or military service. But the Act does not change their ineligibility for government financial aid for college.

For most working-class immigrant youth, it’s far easier to join the military than to enter college, which is prohibitively expensive. So, in effect, it becomes a recruiting tool for the military. It fits right into Obama’s current aim to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has been a major backer of the DREAM ACT because it would provide 279,000 possible new recruits for the military (the brass is certainly not supporting it to send these youth to college). Furthermore, there are 715,000 additional youth between 5 and 17 who the military could get their hands on in the near future.

Supporters of the DREAM Act hide all this behind a "reform" label, but give undocumented immigrant youth who can’t afford college (the overwhelming majority) the "choice" of deportation or puts them on a path to the cemetery, while killing their brother and sister youth in imperialist war.

Mass Action is The Order of The Day

• Unite citizen and immigrant workers to stop the government raids, and the imprisonment and deportation of undocumented sister and brother workers;

• Organize strikes against layoffs; stop work if co-workers are being laid off;

• Stop foreclosures with a mass fight against evictions;

· Organize in the military to refuse orders to murder other workers;

• Establish union committees to unite those still working with the unemployed, led by rank-and-filers defying foot-dragging by sellout union leaders;

• Win local unions to organize marches on government buildings and mass demonstrations surrounding companies that announce future layoffs;

• Raise demands in unions, community groups, churches, schools and colleges to unite with workers in their areas to protest bosses’ attacks;

• Support striking workers in our areas, such as those at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx, NY and elsewhere, with funds and by joining picket lines;

• Organize students to participate in these actions and to support their parents who are either on strike, face layoffs or can mobilize their co-workers into action;

• Reach across all borders in solidarity with workers internationally who are facing these same attacks, especially auto workers who are in a unique position to unite against the auto bosses who have "globalized."

• Organize workers, soldiers, and youth everywhere to join Progressive Labor Party.

No doubt many rank-and-file workers will come up with additional ideas for action. Communists in PLP and their close friends will inject our red ideas into this struggle, to advance the need for communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven capitalist system that has thrived on unemployment, forcing workers to suffer the losses caused by the bosses’ crisis. These ideas can be spread effectively by the mass sale of CHALLENGE, the expansion of CHALLENGE networks and winning workers to subscribe to the paper.

Who Are the Real Pirates?

The support Obama has received while expanding military attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now killing teenage pirates in Somalia, highlights his value to U.S. rulers as they broaden their war machine’s existing theaters and open new ones. Obama, in his liberal guise, is able to "sell" patriotic militarism to a far broader audience than his predecessor ever could.

Obama’s deadly "humanitarian" rescue of the U.S. freighter captain furthers a U.S.-led NATO mission, begun in March, that makes the strategic Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa a war zone under the pretext of combating piracy. Pirates do indeed threaten commerce. But Obama and his masters’ main goal is to assert U.S. dominance of Mideast oil export routes against greater foes, especially China’s developing "blue-water" navy. The Maersk Alabama incident was a military operation from start to finish. The ship belongs to the Pentagon’s Military Sealift Command, having run thousands of tons of lethal supplies to Iraq. The ship’s officers, graduates of the U.S. Navy-affiliated Massachusetts Maritime academy, deliberately sailed into the pirates’ well-known range. The ship’s captain is the main trainer of anti-pirate tactics at the academy. A Navy destroyer just "happened" to be nearby. Obama’s high seas drama coincides with the Pentagon’s establishment of a new Africa Command, to safeguard U.S. interests — access to energy supplies in particular — throughout the continent.

The pirates of Somalia are being used to mask the real pirates, the big imperialist powers militarizing these waters. All kinds of warships, spy and combat planes, satellites from the U.S., France, Russia, China, India, Japan, the European Union and Spain have been sent there.

While Somalia’s population is of little interest to the major powers, the 1,900-mile-long waterways along Somalia’s shores have great geopolitical importance. Somalia, on the Horn of Africa, is separated from Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula by the Gulf of Aden. About 11% of the world’s seaborne petroleum passes through the Gulf to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

During the 1970s, U.S.-supported Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia waged war against Somalia, then ruled by pro-Soviet strongman Siad Barre. When Selassie was overthrown, and a pro-Soviet military junta seized power in Ethiopia, Barre switched sides and became pro-U.S., which then used the Somalian port of Berbera as a base for operations in the Persian Gulf.

When the Cold War ended, U.S. interest in Somalia waned. After Barre lost power, a civil war among different warlords ravaged the country. In 1992, Bush, Sr., invaded Somalia for "humanitarian reasons," leading to the famous "Blackhawk Down" incident, when a U.S. chopper was shot down after firing indiscriminately into a crowd in Somalia’s capital city. Once Clinton became president, he withdrew U.S. troops from the country.

Somalia had no central government and was ruled by different clans. Then Somalia’s waters became a dumping ground for nuclear toxic waste from Europe, destroying the livelihood of Somalia’s fishermen. This waste became dislodged and washed ashore during the massive tsunami in December 2004. Thousands of Somalis were poisoned.

It was then that local fishermen first began to seize ships they believed were dumping toxic waste. They began to chase away fishing trawlers. This was the beginning of the pirates who are seizing ships today and making millions. In 2006, the Ethiopian army, aided by the U.S., invaded Somalia to topple a pro-Islamist government which had actually stopped the piracy. After killing thousands, mostly innocent people, the Ethiopian army left, leaving the country in an even more chaotic situation.

So the little pirates are from a country where most of the population makes $2 a day and many are unemployed teenagers — like those killed by U.S. Navy Seals snipers — working for "pirate cartels." They’re small fishes compared to the huge imperialist navies, who are using this situation as a prelude to their big fight for control of the important oil routes from Somalia and along the entire Indian Ocean. These imperialists are the real big-time pirates who are fighting among each other to exploit and rob the labor and natural resources of workers in Africa, and have been for centuries.

Somehow the history they teach us does not define that as piracy.

a name="When Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’"></a>"hen Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’

Obama’s liberal aura also builds popular support for the U.S. rulers’ "surge" of 40,000 more troops into Afghanistan. A year ago, the New York Times could not have run the story they did this April 17, "Turning Tables, U.S. Troops Ambush Taliban With Swift and Lethal Results" without provoking an outcry against "warmaker Bush." But today, with Obama waging a "good war," the Times glorified a U.S. platoon that wiped out 13 unsuspecting insurgents. The Obama-worshipping Times saw fit to describe a "brave" U.S. sergeant stabbing a "cowardly" Taliban fighter in the eye. Obama, likewise, gets off scot free as he extends the conflict with civilian-slaughtering air raids into Pakistan.

a name="Can’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!"></a>"an’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!

(From NY Times, April 6)

"Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union…which helped get her out…after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments….

"In Georgia, poor people who cannot pay off fines — plus a monthly fee to the private company that collects the payments — are often being sent to jail for non-payment….In 2006, the [Southern Center for Human Rights] sued on behalf of a woman who was locked up in Atlanta for eight months…because she could not pay a $705 fine.

"Until a few years ago, the police in Gulfport, Miss., regularly did sweeps of the city’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, identified people with unpaid fines and put them in jail. Defendants who could not pay were forced to remain there until they ‘sat off’ their fines. The city ended the practice after they were sued."

May Day Fight Exposes Pro-Boss Union Hacks

SEATTLE, WA., April 13 — "It’s enough to make someone a revolutionary," concluded a comrade after the last union meeting. "You’re right!" agreed another Machinists’ union member who had just fought for our May Day resolution.

It called for "build[ing] the multi-racial, multi-national unity we so desperately need to answer the worsening attacks on working families" and outlined racist super-exploitation in low-cost aerospace subcontractors, noting that Boeing announced 10,000 layoffs. Joining with immigrant workers during their march on May 1 was a good first step in organizing against these attacks.

That very night the company revealed additional production cutbacks and more layoffs. "Boeing Forced To Park New Jets" [in the Arizona desert because airlines can’t pay for planes they ordered] screamed subsequent headlines. Still another reason why we need working-class unity to fight the bosses’ crisis!

The resolution was introduced at the Executive Board. They agreed to full discussion at the membership meeting. But just before the May Day resolution was to be introduced, the general meeting was abruptly adjourned without a word from the president who had supposedly agreed to this discussion. Some said it was set up; others were mad the leadership broke their word. Even some lower-lever union officers said, "It’s time they [the misleadership] got some balls."

What Are They So Afraid Of?

"It figures," most said back on the shop floor. Over time, with our help, dozens of these discussions raised the question, "What are they [the union misleadership] so afraid of?"

This question drew added weight after many read the CHALLENGE article on the Los Angeles teachers’ union resolution for a 1-day illegal strike on May Day. There the hacks counter-proposal was: a strike on any day in May, but May Day! (See CHALLENGE, 4/22)

The union movement was poisoned by business unionism with the anti-communist purges in the 1950s. Their heirs are dead set against a mass, militant fight-back that refuses to accept the losses for the bosses’ crisis. But class struggle is raging worldwide, and starting here, where the hacks want to control and divert it.

When Yugoslavia established free-market capitalism in the 1990s, it attacked workers mercilessly. Workers organized general strikes and mass demonstrations. Within a year, the bosses turned those struggles into "ethnic cleansing" and war because international, anti-racist class solidarity was sidetracked.

Even now mass actions in Europe play the divisive nationalist card: "French jobs for French workers;" "German jobs for German workers." (See CHALLENGE, 4/22). When Illinois steel workers began demonstrating against layoffs, the union diverted the campaign to "American jobs for American workers."

The sharpening crisis — threatening world wars — means we must strenuously advocate anti-racist, international class-consciousness. "Anything less means war," declared our friend who fought for the resolution. "Now I see why you [PLP] started this fight."

Is It Worth It?

This same friend complained his shop-mates didn’t understand the seriousness of the crisis. "They don’t believe this stuff," he said, a bit astonished. For him the crisis is real: his uncles work for GM and his daughter, a new schoolteacher, may be laid off anytime. Furthermore, he’s aware the bosses’ labor lieutenants are fiercely determined to halt any class-conscious, let alone revolutionary, pro-communist activity. All this raises the question, "Is the [hard] struggle for our politics worth it?"

Our friend’s greater understanding of the logic of revolution and the serious shop-floor discussion of CHALLENGE articles makes it worth it. Out of this struggle, some have bought tickets to our revolutionary communist May Day dinner and agreed to join the Party’s contingent in the immigrant workers’ march on May 1. Building our revolutionary communist forces amid this crisis is winning.

The crisis may press the pro-boss union leaders to fight us even harder, but opportunities to expand our base on the shop floor increase with every fight. Dare to struggle, dare to win! J

Stomping on Scab Cookies

I am a high school PL member in Brooklyn. For the past months I have heard about the Stella D’Oro workers on strike against the bosses’ racist acts towards them. My PL members and I have had many picket lines against the racist bosses. We went to a Stop & Shop supermarket and protested against them selling Stella D’Oro cookies. Doing this made me want to fight back even more. A couple of weeks after the picket line I went into a nearby supermarket where I lived and saw that they were selling Stella D’Oro cookies. Taking action I threw the Stella D’Oro cookies on the floor and began to stomp on them. Nearby a worker saw me doing this and asked me to stop but I didn’t and continued to do so. The manager then approached me and escorted me out of the store. After leaving the store I was proud of myself for taking action against the racist bosses. Taking this action shows that the workers can fight back against the bosses.

Cookie Smasher

Ivan the Nazi Stays, BP Immigrant Workers Jailed

I was outraged as I learned the news that Ivan the Terrible, the former Nazi prison guard responsible for 29,000 deaths at the Treblinka concentration camp, had been granted a stay of deportation. The story jumped out at me because of the work I’ve been doing with the British Petroleum (BP) refinery workers rounded up in an immigration raid a few months ago. My fury was only given more fire when later that same morning, these same BP workers were lured to the Federal Building in downtown Chicago. They were told they would either be getting work permits or having their ankle tethers removed. Instead they were arrested and charged with federal crimes.

The women, all mothers, were then jailed in Hammond, IN, held for hours in a freezing cell, frightened and unaware of what was happening. They have already been arraigned on immigration charges and are awaiting hearings over the summer and early next year.

I rushed to make arrangements for their children to be picked up from school, and was devastated as one school official reported that she was going to suggest the child be turned over to the State. Luckily, while on the phone with her, I learned that the women had been released on new federal charges.

I marveled in disgust at how cleverly the system plays on our sympathies to protect an elderly Nazi war criminal and racist mass murderer, while exploiting capitalist-created racist fears to criminalize workers like my friends at BP.

Under this system, it will always be more of the same. Whether it’s "respecting" the contracts of AIG executives while demanding major concessions from auto workers, or "humanitarian" efforts to spare a vicious Nazi while criminalizing and terrorizing working moms, and possibly costing them their children, workers can always expect the deck to be stacked against them until we unite to fight for Communism.

Red Mom

a name="Spain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day">">"pain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day

SPAIN — Two years have passed since I came to this country, looking for a better job to be able to maintain my family economically. During this time I’ve always asked myself if it was worth it to have made the long journey, to have had to live in the street and put up with the racism that exists here against the "sudacas" (Central and South Americans).

I’ve always maintained the firm confidence that whether I’m here or anywhere else in the world, I have to continue building the PLP, that by organizing the working class we can get rid of this system, regardless of whether I can find a "good-paying job."

May 1st is always our end and our beginning of the calendar and surely I’ll be in the streets passing out CHALLENGES and thousands of leaflets, talking with the people and trying to explain what Communism really is. Friends of PLP, some ecologists, others pacifists, will help us pass out the leaflets.

Millions of people are out of work in Europe and the world. Everyone I speak with always talks with me about the worldwide financial crisis and I try to explain to them that this system has never been nor will ever be in favor of the working class. That the capitalists will always look for their profits and they’ll do it even if it costs the lives of millions of workers, making wars for the control of oil, squeezing the worker so he’ll work more and generate more profits for capitalism.

But all of us who are really part of the working class will work this May Day and try to duplicate the number of leaflets that we passed out last year, all together in spite of the barriers that the capitalist system puts in our path. It’s our duty to keep fighting for Communism and showing the imperialists that the working class is waking up.

The working class has to respond this May Day and we in PLP have to be there to be able to lead with our Communist political line, which is the only weapon of the working class capable of destroying capitalism. Everyone this May Day: go to the streets and demonstrate our true strength: the strength of the working class against the imperialist assassins! LONG LIVE MAY DAY! LONG LIVE PLP!

Comrade in Spain

Thousands Rally vs. Fascist Labor Scheme:

N.J. Gov. Using Crisis to Rob Workers of $500 Million

NEWARK, NJ,April 21 — On March 25, Democratic Governor Corzine was granted emergency powers by his hand-picked appointees at the New Jersey Civil Service Commission (CSC). They accepted Corzine’s argument, presented without proof, that the state of New Jersey is in "imminent peril" as a result of the economic crisis. Their ruling allowed the State to impose mandatory furloughs and a wage freeze without notice and without the pretense of "good-faith bargaining" called for in the bosses’ labor laws. With the furloughs, Corzine wants to take half a billion dollars from the salaries of state workers over the next year.

Hundreds of state workers, along with thousands across the state, rallied in Newark at lunchtime on April 7 to oppose this fascist labor plan. The workers, members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), were angry and militant. Chants of, "They say cut back, we say fight back," and, "The workers, united, will never be defeated" filled the streets.

Unionized workers from other local offices, including legal services workers, joined the line. One of those workers had a sign that said, "Make the bankers and the bosses take the losses, not the working class." Many CWA workers who saw the sign said, "That’s right" and "You’ve got it." The legal services workers were told about a rally to be held at the next meeting of the CSC.

The Civil Service rules also give county and local bosses the right to submit layoff plans. Sixty of these have been submitted already, affecting thousands of government workers. On April 17, an appellate court upheld the "imminent peril" finding of the CSC. Although the furloughs were temporarily stopped by the court, that is no big victory for the workers. Corzine’s Public Employee’s Commission can still decide the state doesn’t have to bargain. Meanwhile, Corzine is holding over workers’ heads the threat of 7,000 layoffs as his "alternative" to the furloughs.

During his election campaign, Corzine posed as a "pro-labor" reformer. But his past stinks of the ruling class. Before becoming governor, Corzine made hundreds of millions as CEO of Goldman Sachs. During Corzine’s reign, Goldman "invented" securities that offered Enron and other companies a new way of shielding their debt from investors. Who were the biggest losers? The workers of Enron and others who were sucked into buying company stock and were left holding the bag as Enron bosses sold theirs off before the company went bankrupt.

The CWA leadership has no answers for the workers. One of their local presidents, Carla Katz, who has since been removed, was literally "in bed" with Corzine during his election campaign. In the face of these attacks, the leadership calls for "shared sacrifice," exactly what President Obama and other ruling-class representatives put forward. It is the capitalist system that is behind this crisis. The biggest bankers and bosses, including Corzine, couldn’t make enough profit off of U.S. industry, so they devised more elaborate speculative schemes. It is these schemes and the anarchy of their competitive, unplanned production that caused this depression. (See page 7) Why should our class have to pay for that?

Communist revolution would end this boom-and-bust nature of capitalism, which always ends up screwing workers. In building for that revolution, we need to spread class solidarity and sharpen the struggle against the bosses’ attacks. These schemes and the anarchy of their competitive, unplanned production led to this depression with its racist sub-prime mortgage rip-off that will leave millions of black and Latino workers homeless. These ideas will help workers see through all politicians, push aside the enemy within our ranks, and seize power for the workers away from the rulers.J

a name="Linking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP">">"inking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP

LOS ANGELES, CA — In the ongoing struggle against teacher layoffs, fighting to make the capitalist crisis central reveals the potential to build PLP. Teacher union leaders, attempting to deflect the tremendous anger at the layoffs and the support for the resolution to strike on May 1, are calling instead for May 1 to be a "day of action" at each school. We encourage students and teachers to rally and march with the PLP contingent in the immigrants’ rights march on May 1 against the layoffs and the crisis-ridden capitalist system. The latter is bailing out the banks by attacking students, teachers and workers worldwide. We’re spreading CHALLENGE and the fight for communist revolution as the only solution to this crisis and building for the PLP Summer Projects.

At one union area meeting, a new teacher who was just given a layoff notice also received a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE for the first time. He underlined parts of the leaflet, and showed it to a fellow teacher, saying "Look, they’re talking about communism." Turning to the teacher who gave him the leaflet, he asked, "Are you a real communist?"

"Yes," was the reply. "We must fight these layoffs, but also see this as a crisis of the whole system. To defeat it, we’ve got to destroy this system; it’s based on expanding war for oil profits and attacks like this on teachers, students and other workers." The new teacher nodded in agreement.

At this meeting, where 95 teachers voted to support a strike on May 1, the teachers told off union President Duffy. He got red-faced when teachers demanded to know why the union wasn’t organizing a strike against the layoffs. They noted that half the teachers in the predominantly black and Latino South Central area got layoff notices — many more than in the Valley. They wanted action.

Duffy answered, "We have to represent the whole union." This racist attack on black and Latino students through more layoffs in South Central LA is an attack on ALL teachers, students and parents. Capitalism stays in power by dividing the working class. Multiracial unity to fight the sharpest, racist attacks like this is fighting for ALL workers!

To prepare for May Day and for struggles like this one, we organized three potluck dinners to advance the politics described above. This helped students to not only understand that the capitalist profit-drive is behind these attacks but also to participate in actions opposing them: marches, picketing before school, walkouts, increasing CHALLENGE distribution to their friends, and at marches and factories.

At one dinner, everyone was invited to come to the PLP Summer Projects to bring CHALLENGE to industrial workers and soldiers. A student who’d been in the last three projects said, "They changed the way I see the world. They’re really great. Everyone should come."

At another dinner, we explained that the drive for maximum profits is the goal of capitalism, not producing for workers’ needs. One worker commented, "I liked the symbolism of Obama, but with the seriousness of this crisis, I see he won’t get us out of it." He questioned how long the honeymoon with Obama would last, since if people say, "Waiting to see what Obama does before fighting racist cuts, layoffs or imperialist wars" just helps the bosses.

When someone said it’s hard to be optimistic in today’s world, others commented that while we’re not optimistic about U.S. rulers resolving this deepening crisis, we are optimistic about the working class. History shows that workers will fight back and fight for communism when communists show the need for it, participate in class struggle and spread CHALLENGE to more workers, soldiers, youth and teachers.

Join with PLP on May Day and for a lifetime of struggle to unite the working class in the fight for a communist society which will produce to meet the needs of the international working class.

Campus Forum Attacks U.S. Escalation In Afghanistan

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, April 14 – Presentations opposing the U.S./NATO Afghanistan war were given by two students and two faculty at a forum sponsored by a campus anti-war group. Some speakers argued that the U.S.’s real aim for the Afghan war is to get access to Central Asian oil and gas, now dominated by Russia. Other speakers showed that if the Obama administration were really trying to "fight terrorism" as it claims, then killing thousands more Aghans and Pakistanis would be the last thing they would do. Others showed that the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Afghan government in 2001 never had any justification in international law. They also denounced the new Aghan law that legalizes rape of wives and forbids them to leave home without a "legitimate reason."

About 60 people came to the forum, and many stayed for discussion afterwards and gave their email addresses for further contact. One person asked the key question: if this is the way the U.S. and other big powers operate and have operated for a long time, what can we do about it?

The questioner was invited to continue participating in the anti-war group. The openness of these students and faculty to anti-imperialism shows that there is a real potential to build up an anti-imperialist movement on this campus. To answer the student’s question about what to do about imperialism, however, we need to increase our CHALLENGE distribution. This will show students and faculty that only international communist revolution can end imperialist wars. J

a name="Imperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico">">"mperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico

MEXICO CITY, April 20 — The international economic crisis has driven the bosses worldwide to increasingly depress workers’ conditions every day. While they lay off masses of workers, and cut or eliminate loans and workers’ rights, they simultaneously financially rescue the big bosses using the wealth only the workers created.

This year 750,000 jobs have been lost in Mexico so far, an average of 6,250 daily. Those still working are forced to produce more while their real wages decline due to the devaluation of the peso and to price increases. The bosses try to threaten workers, saying if they don’t accept these conditions, thousands are waiting to take their jobs.

The sharpening dogfight among the imperialists for the world’s markets and natural resources has led to war, mainly over control of oil. Rising imperialists — China, Russia and the European Union — are challenging U.S. bosses, the top imperialists. This rivalry will inevitably lead to world war (see front page).

Mexico, one of the U.S. rulers’ main allies, is of crucial geopolitical importance. Eighty-six percent of Mexico’s industrial output and all of Mexico’s oil exports go to the U.S. (Mexico is the second biggest provider of oil for the U. S.) These industries, relying on abundant low-paid labor, can easily be converted to war production. Mexico can also become an enormous source of cannon fodder in wars as well as of food supply and other vital natural resources.

That’s why U.S. rulers urgently need to guarantee direct political and military control of these strategic sectors and protect them from their imperialist enemies, including the more nationalist sector of Mexico’s bosses.

So, under the pretext of "fighting narco traffic" (which they have helped promote), U.S. rulers are implementing Plan Merida to militarize the country, and Plan Puebla Panama to guarantee the flow of wealth to the U.S. rather than to any other imperialist. Obama’s recent trip to Mexico was part of this strategy.

Here in Mexico, the bosses allied to the U.S. are fomenting police terror against the workers with mandatory arrests, home searches without legal orders and unjust prison sentences, in addition to approving new laws authorizing capital punishment. Their fascist objective is to squash whatever opposition exists to their genocidal plans.

U.S. imperialism’s excuse to militarize Mexico, in preparation for a future invasion, is the excessive violence this country suffers from drug traffic. In Mexico, there are 5,700 deaths a year from violence. Mexico’s population is about 110,000,000. Meanwhile, in El Salvador there are 4,000 people killed per year because of violence. El Salvador’s population is 7 million. Yet, if El Salvador’s population equaled Mexico’s, the proportional number of deaths would be over 60,000 per year. Nevertheless, the U.S. Plan Merida is investing millions of dollars to fight the "insecurity" in Mexico, not in El Salvador. They talk about "humanitarianism," but the U.S. government’s real goal is control of Mexico’s wealth.

However, the nationalist rulers opposed to Mexico’s president Calderon and his allies are willing to fight for this wealth through their main political leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who’s preparing for the 2012 elections. If necessary, he would lead a civil war to defend the nationalist Mexican bosses’ interests. We workers shouldn’t choose any sides among these capitalist groups. We should organize to turn the bosses’ wars into armed struggle for communism.

The capitalist crisis, with its attacks on workers and fight among the bosses, provides us with great opportunities. By overcoming nationalism, sexism, racism and individualism, we can build international workers’ unity and the fight for communism. During imperialist wars communist-led workers have turned their guns against their class enemies, organizing the most momentous revolutions in human history, in Russia during World War I and in China at the end of World War II. When masses of workers are armed with revolutionary communist ideas, no force on earth can stop them! J

May Day in El Salvador:

‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’

EL SALVADOR — "A system that cannot meet the needs of the working class does not deserve to exist." This is our slogan on May Day 2009.

"This year the march will be a celebration," assured the union leaders in El Salvador who are planning on celebrating "change" in the government. The revisionist (fake leftist) leaders of the FMLN will dominate the new government, which will try to give a better mask to the capitalist system through reforms that will not improve the lives of Salvadoran workers.

El Salvador is considered one of the most violent countries in Latin America. This is the fault of the capitalist profit system. In this country where there is great poverty, unemployment, corruption and repression, there is an average of 12 murders a day, with a population of less than 7 million people.

In the current worldwide economic crisis, the bosses can’t grant any significant improvements and the working class is finding it harder and harder to live. That’s why the only alternative that’s left to us is the struggle for a system that will provide and meet our class’s urgent needs, like food, housing, work and freedom from wage slavery.

This May Day, we denounce the bosses’ system, whether it be neoliberal (ARENA) or state capitalist (FMLN) financed by the imperialists, whether they be from the U.S., Russia or China; both are forms of oppression for the workers. The international crisis of capitalism and the coming inter-imperialist World War III represent an opportunity for the working class worldwide to intensify the struggle to end, once and for all, the bosses’ exploitation.

"What will the Party do to take advantage of this opportunity?" asked a PL’er. Another worker answered, "The Party is us and each one of us has the task of fighting to put an end to this rotten murderous capitalist system."

Let’s all march this May Day, youth, students, war veterans, soldiers, industrial workers from the maquillas, and workers from the fields to distribute thousands of CHALLENGES and leaflets to our fellow workers and for the death of capitalism.

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ORANGE, NJ, April 8 — Eighty immigrant workers, along with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County, the Family Success Center, PLP and the ACLU, demonstrated against police harassment at the Bravo Supermarket parking lot where hundreds of workers gather to seek day work. At this lot, the racist police drive through, lights flashing, chasing the men from the sidewalks and the lot, onto back streets. On March 11, unprovoked, the police fired pistol shots above the men’s heads.

Obama and the liberals’ talk about "immigration reform" is just a cover to super-exploit immigrant workers even more and, through the DREAM Act, try to win them to join the army and fight in the rulers’ endless wars. These ideas were spread in up to 100 CHALLENGES distributed among these workers here.

Workers have gone to the Family Success Center several times to seek help getting back wages for weeks of work when criminal employers have deliberately cheated them. During meetings, a PL’er has pointed out that this system of layoffs, pay robbery and unemployment is one of the many ways the profit system survives, by dividing us and driving down all our wages.

One of the employers that hires these workers is a former East Orange cop who has been indicted on 22 counts of insurance fraud! The legal system released him to continue his criminal activity.

The signs at the demonstration at the supermarket read, "To Be Human is Not to Be Illegal"; "We Are Workers, We Are NOT Criminals"; and, "We want to be part of the community." Channel 47, a Spanish-language news show, broadcast the demonstration at 6 and 11 pm. As soon as the supporters and media left, two squad cars pulled up and the police forced all the workers off the parking lot. But the workers have already returned to the lot, and so has PLP, with more issues of CHALLENGE, which workers ran to grab and read. Six of the workers have signed up to join PLP’s May Day celebration.

Letters

Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation

In regard to the letter (4/8) from "Red Comrade In Spain," knowing my somewhat similar situation might help you.

I’ve been in PLP for 23 years. I live in North America and work at a major airport among mostly immigrant workers, away from any major political concentration, so I’m somewhat "alone" too. (To paraphrase Marx, "Workers don’t always make history the way they choose to.")

1. Having friends helps avoid political and personal isolation. Seek them out for advice. (Self-critically, I myself could always improve on these points.) Your friends can also "watch your back" against class enemies you’ll encounter during your struggles.

2. Seek advice from Party comrades as often as feasible.

3. Maintain a routine and stick with it to instill discipline.

4. Practice criticism/self criticism. It’s O.K. to make mistakes. From political practice we learn to be good communists. (As Mao said, "Turn a negative into a positive learning experience.")

5. Study dialectical materialism, particularly Marxist classics and Ira Gollobin’s ground-breaking scientific work, "Dialectical Materialism." Also, study science; many dialectical materialist examples can be drawn from scientific concepts.

Study history’s many examples of international working-class fight-backs. Learn from our successes as well as our failures, everything from the Paris Commune to the reversal of workers’ power in the former Soviet Union and China. We stand on the shoulders of giants. History can inspire us to greatness.

A fine autobiography of a Bolshevik revolutionary who experienced political isolation is, "20 Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik" by Celia Babuskya. (If you can’t find this or other books mentioned here, contact the Party.)

I hope some of this is of help. Your letter reveals your heart is in the right place! You’re not alone. Many of us want to help change the world. We have Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the revolutionary practice of millions who came before us as guides. We have a world to win and our potential friends are in the billions!

Airport Red

a name="More Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers">">"ore Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers

CHALLENGE is doing a good job in reporting the struggle of the Stella D’Oro strikers. They are fighting not only a company that puts profits before workers (like all capitalists) but one fighting to survive during the newest crisis of capitalism. Brynwood Partners (BP) owns Stella D’Oro. BP is an investment fund. It mainly gets money (capital) from investors like large public-employee pension funds (including the largest — CALPERS of California — and the Pennsylvania State Retirement System), venture capitalists and other private investors. Without capital, BP cannot acquire other firms or "turn around" the ones they’ve already acquired.

BP brags on its website that it specializes in making profit from "underperforming" companies like Stella D’Oro. "Underperforming" means that the bosses haven’t squeezed out the last bit of profit off the workers’ labor. So they lower wages and reduce or eliminate benefits. This is why they can brag of how an investment of $175 million makes an annual return of 28.8%! They tell investors that when they sell a company they make three times the capital invested!

A Dow Jones newsletter says: "Brynwood Partners has pulled off a rare feat as it gears up to market its sixth fund, returning money to its investors via a dividend recap." In a dividend recap[italization], a company borrows money to pay a special dividend to its investors — almost always a small group of private investors. This puts downward pressure on wages, as a portion of the company’s profits must go to pay off the loan.

BP’s website lists eight managing partners. Most of them have experience with big Wall Street firms, such as Merrill Lynch or Paine Webber, or with Nestlé, a mega food producer. Nestlé was the leading company, according to Wikipedia, in which the "promotion of infant formula over breast-feeding has led to health problems and deaths among infants in less economically developed countries."

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco, Grain Millers Union (BCTGM) talks about boycotting Stella D’Oro products but does not tell workers the role their bosses play in the capitalist system or the connections their strike has with other workers. BP owns a number of food companies such as DeMet candies, makers of Turtles; Flipz Pretzels, and Richelieu Foods (pizzas). Just as Stella D’Oro workers are getting the shaft from BP, we can be sure that workers at their other companies are also getting screwed.

BCTGM has union locals in food companies like See’s Candy, Nabisco, Keebler, Interstate Bakers (Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, Columbo) and Nestlé. These companies have many plants; some are in NY, Chicago, and southern and northern California, all areas where we can help reach out for support from other BCTGM workers. Nestlé workers might especially be receptive as DeMet, Stella D’Oro and other BP companies were at one time owned by Nestlé. Seems that BP bosses use their connection with Nestlé to pick up companies to plunder.

I hope that this information helps the Stella D’Oro strikers. The better we are able to make the connection of workers’ struggles to the workings of capitalism, the more they will value our communist ideas and analysis.

A Comrade in LA

Skycap Fights Frame-up, With PLP Support

I am a skycap worker at LaGuardia Airport and have been so for nine years. Last November, I was at work doing my normal duty of helping passengers with their luggage from the baggage carousel to their taxi.

When we reached the taxi line it was long and after waiting 25 minutes only two people had been placed in cabs. So I was asked to call a private taxi for the family I was with. After doing so I went to the pickup island to wait for the taxi. When it came I went on my way to get the passengers and out of nowhere a man in plain clothes viciously grabbed me and slammed me on the side of a bus. Then came another plain-clothes man who lifted me up from the ground, cuffed me and took me to jail without ever identifying himself as a police officer!

I was held in jail for over 36 hours. I was charged initially with "trespassing" and "soliciting." Later the charges were changed to resisting arrest and soliciting.

A few days later, I returned to work and was fired without a reason. When I filed for unemployment — for being fired without cause — my boss claimed I was "hustling" passengers. At an unemployment hearing to review my case, several friends from PLP accompanied me; the judge threw out the case since there was no proof (he also said that in 18 years he had never seen someone bring supporters to a hearing and kicked them out of the room because he was suspicious).

I have been to criminal court over four times trying to free myself from the charges. Thanks to friends from PLP and those who have been helping me, at my last court date around 25 people showed up with me and we shocked the whole courtroom. The bailiff asked why they were there and a supporter said they were there to support me.

When we walked out of the courtroom everyone started talking and there was a lot of noise because more than half the room stood and left together.

Friend of PL

Farmworkers Block Highway, Renewing 30-yr. Struggle

In the decade of the 1980’s, the farm workers who grew coffee in Merced del Potrero, a rural community on the coast of Mexico near the isthmus of Tehuantepec, organized a massive violent struggle to form a cooperative to directly administer the cultivation of coffee. They did this to confront the exploiters and landlords of the area who maneuvered to buy their coffee for a very low price.

Now, after almost thirty years, forced by marginalization and poverty generated by the bosses and their capitalist system, this group of workers have again risen up in struggle. They are now blocking the Administrative Center in the city of Oaxaca. Earlier they blocked the Coast highway to Huatulco near the Pacific Ocean, to pressure the fascist government of Ulisis Ruiz Ortiz (URO) to give them economic aid to pay for the needs of their community.

In order to divert them from a more effective struggle, the workers of these localities have been bombarded with electoral politics from the bourgeois parties coordinated by the State Electoral Institute with seductive speeches about progress, equality and democracy. With their goal of tying the population to the fraudulent trap of capitalist elections, the PRI Governor threatens the needs of the poor by offering crumbs with their Firm Floor Program. They give away supplies like cement in hopes of gaining votes and to win seats in the upcoming federal delegations for Congressional elections and to prepare the ground for the Presidential election in 2012.

The bosses’ parties and their elections will never solve the problems of the farm workers, city workers, students or the rest of the marginalized and exploited population. The only real solution is the destruction of this capitalist system of constant crisis which attacks our class every day. We need to join together in one party of the international working class, the PLP, to take power and build a communist society that will guarantee the well-being and equality of all.

Comrade from Mexico

Back Fired Unionists in Haiti

Eight employees of the National Archives of Haiti have been fired for union organizing, and their union COSEANH (Union of the Employees of the National Archives of Haiti) has asked U.S. friends for help. The fired unionists have also received death threats against themselves and their families. Eighty percent of the Archives employees have been kept on one-year contracts, since reduced to six months.

There is a long history of racist U.S. imperialist invasion and domination of Haiti, where slave workers led the first revolution in the New World. Let’s come to the aid of the threatened Archives workers. Haiti today is occupied by a UN armed force led by a Brazilian contingent. Their flashy white SUVs lord it over the capital city as the U.S. marines and the Tonton Macoute did before them, but they will go the way of the macoutes.

Would CHALLENGE readers please send letters protesting these firings and death threats against COSEANH unionists to Jean Wilfrid Bertrand, Director General of the National Archives of Haiti, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Compère Général Soleil

Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers

The bosses’ media has pointed fingers at various causes of the current economic crisis: seedy mortgage brokers, "deadbeat" homebuyers, "stupid" investment bankers, greedy and arrogant CEOs, Ponzi schemers like Madoff, and now AIG executive bonuses. They claim the root cause is the "subprime mortgage" fiasco, the housing market collapse, the financial industry crisis and the freezing of credit. Except for workers trying to keep and/or buy homes, all the above characters are part of the problem. And all of the above crises have contributed to what increasingly looks like a Depression,

But all these explanations don’t really explain what’s at the heart of this worldwide debacle for capitalism: fundamental laws governing the inner workings of the system itself. Over 140 years ago after decades of struggle by workers against capitalist exploitation, Karl Marx, in his work "Capital," revealed important laws of capitalist development. In that and other important works, Marx described two: the tendency of the overall rate of profit to fall, and the occurrence of periodic crises of overproduction as the necessary result of a competitive and unplanned system of production. Communists say that only revolution to overthrow capitalism can end this system’s "boom-and-bust" nature.

Real Wages Falling Since ‘73

The rate of return on capitalist investment (rate of profit) in the "developed" economies (U.S., France, Britain, Germany, etc.) has been falling since the end of the 1960s (see interview with Robert Brenner in "Asia-Pacific Journal," 2/7/09). This happened despite the fall in real wages since 1973, which should have caused the rate of profit to increase. The profit rate fell because emerging capitalist economies in Europe and Asia began producing "the same goods that were already being produced by the earlier developers, only cheaper."

Bosses in the more developed economies tried to hold on to their dominant positions by pouring money into new technology. However, this only made the problem worse, for two reasons. Firstly, more high-tech upgrades led to even greater overcapacity in industry, with goods flooding the world market. Secondly, the higher the percentage of total capital invested in plant and machinery, the further the rate of return on capital investment tends to fall. Profit can only be made off of human labor power, not from machinery (see box).

As their economic position worsened, U.S. and Western European bosses cut real wages, increasing racist exploitation to attack ALL workers. They used their control of the government to cut back "social wages", i.e. social service benefits for workers paid for from taxes. But these attacks on their income meant workers were less able afford the products that the bosses had to sell in order to realize their profits.

Fed’s Policy Led to Toxic Assets

The solution? The U.S. bosses’ state, particularly the Federal Reserve, encouraged the massive use of public and private credit. Government budget deficits increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, the Fed deliberately kept interest rates very low. This induced a huge increase in private borrowing and encouraged investment in financial assets like stocks, bonds and more exotic instruments like bundles of mortgages (see CHALLENGE, 12/08). Prices of these assets soared. In addition, workers bought more and different products using borrowed money, credit cards and refinanced mortgages.

A succession of asset "bubbles" — first the dot com/technology stock market "bubble" of the late 1990s, then the housing and credit "bubbles" of the 2000s — were basically speculation sanctioned by the government and Fed. But these bubbles only temporarily postponed the day of reckoning. Again, only labor creates actual value under capitalism, not writings on pieces of paper, or computer entries. The huge increase in speculative investment pulled U.S. and other "developed" capitalisms further away from the labor-created method of wealth accumulation.

Thus, the two laws of capitalism revealed by Marx interact with each other. Both contribute to the inevitability of crises as long as capitalism exists. It’s the anarchy of capitalist production and the system’s competitive nature that generate these built-in problems, which are always taken out on the backs of the working class. Communism, a planned, cooperative system of production based on our class’s needs, not bosses’ profits, would abolish these capitalist relations.

The above Brenner interview estimates that capitalism can solve the global economic crisis without major imperialist wars, including World War III. He argues that "[t]he world’s elites want more than anything to sustain the current globalizing order, and the U.S. is key to that." The Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote that inevitably rival imperialist powers settle their economic competition by war. This is proven by the history of capitalism — one war after another, and now world wars.

Bosses’ Solution for Disputes: War

Thus, thinking the bosses can peacefully solve their disputes produces deadly consequences. Rising rivals of U.S. imperialism like Russia, China and their allies will not, and cannot, stop short of trying to take down the top dog. The fight to control oil and to use that control to keep or gain number-one status continues. Wider war plans are being prepared right now.

Meanwhile, the bosses are casting the weight of the economic crisis onto us. As we unite unemployed and employed to fight these attacks, remember: the bosses need our labor, but we don’t need the bosses or their crisis-ridden, exploitative system. The working class under the leadership of a mass PLP will put an end to this sordid chapter in the history of humanity. J

May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class

On this May Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of inter-imperialist rivalry beat louder and millions are slaughtered in widening war. World capitalism is pushing its economic crisis onto workers’ backs with mass racist unemployment and wage-cuts, and throwing hundreds of thousands of workers out of their homes.

We can’t be misled by Obama’s promise that the stimulus package will help workers survive this crisis. Capitalism doesn’t work for the working class and cannot be reformed to change that. Masses of workers are fighting back around the world. From general strikes and militancy against the bosses across Europe to strikes in Guadaloupe and Martinique to the fight against budget cuts in Los Angeles and the ongoing 9-month-long Stella D’Oro workers’ strike in the Bronx, workers are saying "make the bosses take the losses."

May Day (May 1) is the working-class’ international holiday. This year, millions of workers around the world will march to commemorate this important day. It is the day when the world’s working class "holds a review of its forces, mobilized for the first time as One army, [under] One flag...[to] make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united."

May Day was born in the heroic struggle for the 8-hour day when 350,000 Chicago workers went out on a general strike on May 1, 1886 and shut down the city. On May 3 the cops murdered six McCormick Reaper Works strikers. The next day thousands of workers marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent, killing four workers and seven cops, and wounding 200 workers in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre. Nine demonstration leaders were framed for "instigating a riot." Four were hanged. In 1891, the then Illinois Governor freed those still imprisoned, declaring they had been convicted unjustly.

At the 1889 meeting of the Second International -— a working-class organization patterned after the First International led by Karl Marx — the world’s workers decided to honor the Chicago strikers and martyrs by mobilizing as "one army, with one flag." May Day had begun. Ever since, with communist leadership, it has symbolized workers’ demands and class interests, united in the fight against capitalism.

Capitalism creates a world in which workers and youth, infants and the elderly, are dying in unprecedented numbers from hunger, poverty, curable disease, war, death squads, police terror and a poisoned environment. Poverty, racism and war do not spontaneously lead workers to communist revolution, or the red flag would fly over most of the world. Communist revolution can only come about when millions of workers are politically conscious of how the world works and how to change it. This can only be accomplished by the efforts of a mass, international, and revolutionary communist party.

In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red banners of May Day in the U.S. It has organized May Day marches and activities in many countries for 39 years, to unite workers around their universal demands, regardless of capitalist-created borders. These include opposing imperialist war, racism, the special oppression of women, wage slavery and fascist police terror, while championing unity of all workers — immigrant and citizen, Asian, Latin, black and white.

This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class. On this May Day, international workers’ solidarity must meet the bosses’ assault head-on.

With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students we can fight the bosses’ racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world’s workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.

PLP is marching to win workers, soldiers and youth to realize our great potential to overthrow the war-makers and build a communist world based on serving the needs of the international working class! Join the march and join PLP! J

Assemble with PLP:

NY- May 2, 11 am, Linden Blvd. & Flatbush Ave.

LA- May 1, 11 am, Olympic & Broadway

Seattle- May 1, 3:30 pm, Judkin Playground

Information: Print

CHALLENGE, April 22, 2009

Information: 22 April 2009 317 hits

Worldwide Fight vs. Crisis Needs Communist Leadership:

Workers in Europe Seize Factories, Bosses

Militant, mass demonstrations hit London and other European cities protesting the G20 meetings while the big imperialist powers bickered about how to handle the capitalist economic meltdown. There was also a demonstration attacked by the cops in Strasbourg, France, during NATO’s 60th Anniversary meeting where the European rulers decided to send a very limited amount of extra troops to aid the U.S. war over oil-gas pipelines in Afghanistan.

Workers are angry. A common chant in many of their protests — from Dublin to Paris, from Rome to Athens — is, “We won’t pay for their crisis!” Workers in the U.S. and elsewhere should follow their example in upping the ante of class struggle against the capitalist attacks. However, the anger and class hatred of these workers are being misled by union hacks, fake leftists and ruling-class politicians who build nationalism and illusions that voting for a “lesser evil” capitalist is the solution.

Nationalism and racism hold back these struggles. GM workers in Germany and Sweden limited their demands to to keeping their plants open since they are “more efficient” than others, which weakens and divides international workers’ solidarity. Meanwhile, racism against immigrants and non-white citizen workers is growing throughout the continent. Anti-racism is vital to these fight-backs.

General Strike in Greece

On April 2, a massive general strike in all industries shut down Greece, with huge marches in Athens and nationwide, protesting G20 policies and their own right-wing government of Prime Minister Karamanlis. Most schools, ports and department stores in most big cities closed down. TV, radio and newspapers were affected.

In Athens there were three marches by different union groups, including heavy contingents of workers — mostly women — from the United Textile company whose 14 factories are suffering mass layoffs. The Finance Minister is demanding United Textiles fire 950 of the 1200 workers at these plants before approving a “survival plan” for the company. Hacks of two unions are accusing each other of betraying this struggle, but neither are supporting workers’ occupation of the plants. This is no surprise, since these sellouts also refused to support the mass rebellions of young workers and students that hit Greece last year when the cops killed a young student.

France: Caterpillar Workers Seize Bosses, Continental Workers Burn Tires in Paris

Striking Caterpillar (CAT) workers at the Grenoble and Echirolles plants held five bosses in their offices after management refused to discuss a 733 jobs-cut in a workforce of 2,800. After netting a $3.5-billion profit in 2008, CAT announced it would eliminate 22,000 jobs worldwide based on an estimated 55% drop in orders.

CAT, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, produces much of that large machinery in France and provides armored vehicles for the British army and several other countries. It also makes the D9 armored bulldozers with which the Israeli army razed Palestinian housing. CAT CEO James Owens was Bush’s nominee to a trade advisory board and is now on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

The “CAT-napping” is just the latest in a series of similar actions throughout France:
• March, 2009 — The boss of Sony France was forcibly held at the Pontons-sur-Adour plant.
• Workers seized the industrial manager of the 3M factory at Pithiviers near Orléans.
• Riot police had to rescue the billionaire chief executive of the retail and luxury group PPR after workers protesting 1,200 job cuts blocked his taxi for over an hour as he left a meeting.
• Union delegates at the FCI plant near Paris held two directors in the meeting room until police intervened. They were supported by striking workers who have been picketing around the clock for six weeks against layoffs and plant closings.

On March 25, workers from the German-owned Continental Tire factory in Clairoix converged on Paris to burn tires on the city’s main boulevard, demanding the government bail out the company. Continental is moving its work to Timisoara, Romania where the average monthly wage is 280-420 Euros ($375-$500). In Clairoix it’s 1,700 Euros (over $2,000). Continental is closing two plants in France and another in Germany. It broke its promise to keep work at the Clairoix factory through 2012 after workers had made big concessions in 2006.

On March 16, angry workers burst into a board meeting and pelted the bosses with eggs and shoes. The bosses held their next meeting, under strict security, 600 miles away in Nice.

These bold actions are good but demanding to “save our jobs” without international solidarity with workers in Romania is a dead-end for the working class.

Visteon Workers Occupy Factories from London to Belfast

“They’ve treated us like dogs....But the workers in Ireland occupied so we thought now it’s our turn to do something,” declared a British Visteon worker as he and 100 of his co-workers occupied the Enfield factory in north London. Another added, “While [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown was living it up with the G-20, we were losing our jobs. Brown says he has a big plan to save the world, but how about...our jobs?”

The plant’s 200 workers built parts for Jaguar and Land Rover. On April 1, they were fired ten minutes before the end of their shift, and told they would have to ask the government for their last seven days’ pay and would not collect any benefits.

Workers also occupied two Visteon plants in Basildon and Belfast Ireland. Over 50 workers slept inside the Basildon plant and many more were on the road outside. About 100 workers protested outside the Visteon Customer and Technology Centre. Showing solidarity, the office staff there walked out to join them.

Visteon was spun off by Ford in 2000; the majority are ex-Ford workers. One who worked for both companies for 25 years warned, “We know that if we’re going to get anything we’ll have to fight for it. Over the years we’ve given a lot of ground, maybe too much. We’ve even bought our own tools on occasion, just to help the company. And this is how they repay us.” Another declared, “A lot of us are in danger of losing our homes. We’re determined to stay because we have nothing to lose.”

All workers, students and youth should send messages of support to the Visteon workers to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Huge March Against Fascist Berlusconi

On April 3, hundreds of thousands of workers protested the economic policies of Silvio Berlusconi’s fascist government. (His ruling party recently fused with remnants of Mussolini’s old fascist movement.) The huge march in Rome started from five different points and converged on the Coliseum.

The marchers opposed government plans for mass cutbacks in education and public services and demanded an improved policy towards immigrants — super-exploited and persecuted because of racism. But the CGIL union federation leading the march, and the different politicians addressing the rally, just want to replace Berlusconi with their own brand of capitalist rule. They have no real solutions to the deep crisis of Italian capitalism hit hard by the worldwide financial meltdown.

The bosses and their pundits parroted nonsense about the “end of history” — meaning the end of class struggle — after the implosion of the Soviet Union, but workers never stop fighting as the system bails out billionaires’ while millions lose their jobs. But to turn that fight into the beginning of the end of capitalism, the main ingredient needed is a revolutionary communist leadership. May Day 2009 is the day to raise the red flag of communist revolution worldwide. That is the lesson CHALLENGE and PLP bring to the world’s workers. Join us in making it possible! J

Obama Ups ‘Body Count’: Afghan Deaths, U.S. Jobless

Barack Obama won 62 million votes on a “peace” platform — that slated 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan — while promising “to create new jobs.” Instead, his brief regime has relentlessly attacked workers with intensifying war and economic misery.

Obama is sending 21,000 more GIs to Afghanistan now and backs his generals’ demands for an additional 10,000 this fall. U.S.-led forces have slain 27,000 Afghan civilians since 2001. Obama’s surge can only worsen the death toll.

The U.S. war machine’s new commander-in-chief is also stepping up airstrikes into Pakistan. One such raid killed a dozen civilians on April 1. More than 400 people have died in the Iraq war since Inauguration Day. Bush Sr.’s invasion, Clinton’s sanctions and bombings, and Bush Jr.’s invasion and occupation took over two million Iraqi lives. Obama, despite his lies about “withdrawal,” is extending the U.S. oil war’s body count while pledging to keep combat brigades in Iraq.

Domestically, it’s workers’ livelihoods that suffer mass extermination. According to doctored government figures, at least 1.7 million jobs have disappeared on Obama’s watch, so far. The true figure, counting “discouraged” workers and part-timers who can’t find non-existent full-time jobs, is double that. And his scheme to “save Detroit” forces both job- and pay-cuts on autoworkers.

Obama can’t and won’t bring either peace or prosperity because he, like all politicians, serves his nation’s capitalist class. Obama’s top advisors, hailing from major corporations and ruling-class think-tanks, are tightly tied to the dominant, imperialist JP Morgan Chase-Exxon Mobil-Rockefeller wing of U.S. capital, as CHALLENGE has often noted.

Obama’s bailout of Citigroup, AIG & Co. further exposes his true class loyalty. It wipes out shareholdings that include workers’ pensions and 401Ks, but guarantees billions — via AIG’s bailout money — to creditor banks like Goldman Sachs.

White House Job No. 1: Wars to Save U.S. Oil Empire

Obama’s U.S. capitalist masters face sharpening political, military and economic competition from imperialist and regional rivals. Thus, he’s expanding military operations in the Mid-East and Central and South Asia to protect U.S. bosses’ most important single source of profits, oil, and its control as a weapon against its rivals.

But threats to Exxon Mobil’s and Chevron’s “black gold” keep mounting. Energy-thirsty China is building attack submarines and aircraft carriers to challenge U.S.-Navy dominance over oil routes. Iran’s oil baron mullahs exert growing influence in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, which surround Saudi Arabia, U.S. imperialism’s grand profit prize. Putin’s Russia, which supplies energy to much of Europe, using it as blackmail, seeks a new empire that includes a nuked-up Iran.

Obama is pouring $10.5 billion in lethal military aid into already nuclear, unstable Pakistan in hopes of rooting out Taliban and al Qaeda forces there.

At home, Obama’s “stimulus” won’t reverse U.S. capitalism’s inevitable descent into decay. U.S. workers’ real wages have declined over the past three decades. Yet producing useful goods here, with aging plants and infrastructure — increasingly costly to upgrade — has become, in the main, less profitable than in rival countries.

So U.S. finance capitalists turned from investing in cars, appliances and textiles to trading basically worthless “paper” instruments like bundled bad mortgages and credit default swaps, and at exorbitant prices. Fraud disguised as finance boosted U.S. earnings rates for a time. But the current bust lays bare U.S. bosses’ fundamental and widening global profit disadvantage.

Rival Rulers Draw Daggers at G-20 And NATO Summits

Obama’s feeble effect at recent G-20 and NATO summits underscore U.S. rulers’ deepening predicaments. Rising capitalist powerhouses China, India, and even Brazil played 800-pound-elephant roles at the G-20 economic confab in London, new threats U.S. bosses can’t deal with. Pundits said G-20 was more like the failed 1933 central bankers’ meeting in London, which highlighted the insoluble economic disputes that led in large part to World War II.

Meanwhile, Obama’s attendance at NATO’s 60th birthday party gained only token support for the U.S.’s Afghan war. Only Britain, whose Mideast-focused Shell and BP tie it to the Exxon-Chevron-Pentagon agenda, pledged more than a few hundred soldiers. The NATO festivity also unintentionally prompted a 20,000-strong pro-Russian protest in Ukraine’s capital Kiev against president Yushchenko’s bid to join the U.S.-led war coalition.

World War III Needs Spur U.S. Infrastructure Schemes

If Obama does, in fact, overcome a dysfunctional Congress to create jobs, it won’t be to revitalize GM’s Pontiac sales, but rather to beef up U.S. infrastructure, enhancing its capacity to wage world war. Felix Rohatyn, a major U.S. imperialist strategist, has written a book, “Bold Endeavors,” which recounts past huge U.S. public/private undertakings that enhanced “national security.” These include transcontinental railroads, the Panama Canal and interstate highways.

Rohatyn urges Obama to rebuild rails, ports and roads to make the U.S. not just more productive but better able to withstand attack and project its considerable military might overseas. U.S. rulers, and servants like Obama and Rohatyn, understand that, ultimately, recovery lies in destroying rivals’ productive capacity (including human capital) through war and forcibly seizing their territory, raw materials and markets.

War-maker, job-destroyer, union-buster Obama nevertheless enjoys a high 66% approval rating, according to pollsters. Many people, who rely on government to solve their problems, believe his election struck a blow against racism. But Obama, by winning workers to support the government, actually helps U.S. rulers get away with racist murder, quite literally in their Iraq and Afghan slaughters. Unemployment under Obama, approaching 30 million and counting, hits black, Latino, and immigrant workers hardest. Obama’s military cold-bloodedly targets unarmed Arabs and Asians.

For workers, supporting Obama, or any agent of the class enemy, is a big mistake. Rather we need to organize to destroy the profit system, which can’t provide us a living but often deals us death. That is our revolutionary, communist Party’s long-term aim.

‘Scabs in Blue! Scabs in Blue!’
Stella D’Oro Strikers Face Bosses’ System and Its State

BRONX, NY, April 1 — On a rainy, cold afternoon, chants of “Scabs in blue! Scabs in blue!” rang out as the bosses’ cops stopped Stella D’Oro strikers and their supporters from marching from their picket line to a local supermarket. They wanted to urge neighborhood workers to support this strike by boycotting Stella D’Oro products. As a PL’er addressing the rally explained, Stella strikers are fighting not just their own bosses but the capitalist system and its state. The strikers very much liked the front-page article in the April 8th CHALLENGE championing their struggle — one of the very rare strikes in the U.S. today showing multi-racial, working-class unity against the bosses’ attacks.

Sometimes strikers talk with cops at a picket line or demonstration. Cops, however, are not neutral. They serve to protect the interests of the bosses and their system. Has a cop ever arrested scabs for dangerously racing their cars through a picket line or arrested bosses for falsely accusing strike leaders of harassment? Hell no! Has a judge ever issued an injunction to prevent bosses from hiring scabs to break strikes? Never.

At today’s picket line the cops invented laws to limit the effectiveness of strikers and their supporters. First they said we couldn’t cross the street in front of the factory. Then they said if we left the picket line in front of the factory, we couldn’t return to resume picketing. Finally when we tried to march on another route, they said that we couldn’t walk on the sidewalk to the supermarket because we needed a march permit.

Although the multi-racial group of over 150 strikers and supporters wanted to press forward, a score of cops with guns at their sides were able to stop us. Later, at a closing rally for today’s action, a strike supporter from the Professional Staff Congress (college teachers’ union) declared that if the cops didn’t protect the Stella bosses, the workers might have won this strike long ago. Like the speaker said, “We’ll be back!”

While the Stella D’Oro strike is about trying to maintain prior levels of pay and benefits, this strike has proven that the capitalist system benefits only the bosses. What we need is to smash the bosses’ system with communist revolution!

May Day Brings Communist Politics to LA School Struggle

LOS ANGELES, April 4 — “I move that UTLA adopt the motion calling for a one-day strike on May First,” said a comrade in the teachers union (UTLA) House of Representatives. This motion had passed overwhelmingly in four of the nine area meetings two weeks previously.

On March 13, nearly 9,000 teachers and health and human services personnel got pink slips for June layoffs. The jobs of many classified workers are threatened too. In response, teachers, other school workers, parents and students are fighting back and PLP is giving communist leadership.

The day of the layoffs saw walkouts and spontaneous demonstrations. Since then, there has been much more organized struggle, including before-school picketing and some militant job actions where teachers and students walked in an hour late. More actions are planned, with students, parents and non-teaching employees. Hundreds of “Petitions to Save our Schools” are circulating charging teacher layoffs as racist — layoffs of new teachers hit schools with black and Latino kids (the vast majority) the hardest — and an attack on the whole working class.

PLP members and friends are active in these struggles, linking these layoffs to the deep crisis of capitalism. The capitalists’ goal is profit at all costs; our goal is the well-being of ourselves and our class, to have decent jobs, raise our families and survive. These two goals are directly contradictory. The bosses demand more and more of the value workers produce (which is all value) through cuts and taxes to prop up their banks, profits and expanding wars in the Middle-East for control of oil and gas resources to maintain their empire.

We advocated an illegal strike against layoffs and cutbacks, calling for a one-day work stoppage on May 1 — joining with immigrants organizing for an immigrants’ rights march that day — in an action to defend the education of the children of all workers. From the start, the union leadership opposed the resolution, saying it would be too difficult politically to organize a one-day strike on May Day, the same day that immigrants were marching, because so many teachers are both anti-communist and anti-immigrant.

These fake leftists are seen nationally as “progressive,” but when it counts they’re unwilling to fight for the unity of the working class or to defend the rights of immigrants and their children. “Our message will be diluted in the immigrants rights march,” said a member of the Board of Directors. A young teacher responded, “May Day represents the international working class, and we support a one-day strike in defense of our teachers, our students, and their families.” The union leadership put forward, and narrowly won, a substitute motion for a membership vote to ratify a one-day work stoppage — any other day in May but May Day!

Many were angry. Of 250 teachers at the meeting, 100 took CHALLENGE. There are real victories here. By making May Day a mass issue we’ve raised with students, teachers and other school workers the real meaning of May Day — International Workers’ Day.

May Day is the day when workers worldwide fight for our class, against the racist exploitation and wars of the capitalist bosses. It’s been our day since 1886, when workers in Chicago fought for the eight-hour day, and has been celebrated around the world ever since. PLP has brought the fight for internationalism and communist revolution back to May Day.

That’s why we’re having a PLP contingent within the immigrants’ rights march, to champion this communist nature of May Day. This is distinct from the march organizers who support the liberal rulers’ plans to exploit immigrant workers for super-profits in low-wage jobs and use their youth as cannon fodder in the bosses’ imperialist wars.

The struggle is helping our friends see the nature of the capitalist crisis. We say shutting down Los Angeles on May Day would be part of building up to a strike to shut down the school system until all jobs are restored. More importantly, it would help to build unity for the long-term fight to destroy the profit system. We’ve explained that we should have no illusions that even a militant strike will reverse all the attacks. This is a contracting capitalist system in crisis — one built into the system based on profits for a few at the expense of millions of workers.

Instead we need a system run by and for the working class, not the bankers, to eliminate the bosses and organize society to produce for the needs of the working class, not for profits. We need communism, not socialism (which retained banks), for a world without money, bosses or borders. Our success will be measured in expanding CHALLENGE networks and recruiting more PLP members!

Building for May Day Amid Capitalist Carnage in Detroit

DETROIT, April 6 — “Why are we marching? What are we going to get out of it?” she asked. A PLP member responded, “We’re marching to build a movement. We’re marching to show the workers in NYC, and those we bring, that there’s a movement growing that’s out to overthrow this system and fight for communism, equality, no bosses and no profits.” “YES!” shouted the American Axle worker from the couch. “That’s what we need!”

That exchange captured the mood of the May Day committee meeting here last week. Bringing a busload of workers and youth to march on May Day will be our answer to the overwhelming racist oppression that has laid waste to Detroit and stolen the future from our youth. This is our answer to the bankers and auto bosses who grab billions in salaries and bonuses while destroying jobs and boarding up homes.

Here, more than 50% of all black males are unemployed and the jails are full. There are no supermarkets or movie theaters but there are curfews against our youth and plainclothes cops harass students inside the schools. Forty thousand homes are boarded up, more empty homes than homeless people, because under capitalism if the bosses can’t sell it for a profit, it can’t be used, no matter what the need.

We met in the shadow of GM world headquarters, while the Obama auto task force, led by two former investment bankers, was forcing chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner into a retirement worth about $23 million. With the global financial crisis deepening, the federal government is taking direct control of the fascist restructuring of the shrinking auto industry. GM was given 60 days to come back with a bigger list of plant closings and job cuts, and still more wage, health care and pension cuts from the UAW. Chrysler was given 30 days to form a partnership with Fiat. These conditions must be met in order to get more government money. If not, both companies will be forced into that financial chop shop known as bankruptcy court.

The ruling class is using Obama to whip the auto industry into fighting shape after having been routed on their home turf. CEO Wagoner’s ouster means an even more fascist crackdown on GM workers who should realize they are in great danger. GM’s pro-capitalist UAW “partners” will be asked to deliver even deeper wage and benefit concessions, including retiree health benefits. The message to the workers is clear: if you don’t give it up, we’ll take it in bankruptcy court. Many illusions that auto workers have in Obama are being challenged, if not smashed.

Fiat said it was eager to merge with Chrysler, especially after Obama said he would bless the deal with $6 billion in federal aid. G.M. said it would “take whatever steps are necessary to successfully restructure the company.” So far, all is quiet at UAW headquarters at Solidarity House, as these miserable low-lifes finally face their own mortality. They hitched their wagon to U.S. imperialism 50 years ago, and now they are feeling every bit of the decline of their masters.

Unlike them, we shed no tears for the bosses. We will build a new communist world on their graves. We fight for the laid-off truck driver and his family, the high school students, the hospital, county and hotel workers, the American Axle worker and his partner and their 8-month old baby boy. After the four-month American Axle strike in the winter of ‘07-’08, two-thirds of the workers lost their jobs, and wages were cut in half. At the ratification meeting at King H.S., workers tore up the contract and shouted down their leaders. One year later, the flicker of communist revolution still burns. This May Day it will burn a little brighter.

‘DREAM Act’ is Attack on Immigrant Youth

LOS ANGELES, April 7 — We’re fighting to bring people to march with PLP on May Day for internationalism and communist revolution. There were immigrants’ rights marches here the last two Saturdays, giving us a good start. The immigrants’ rights groups are mobilizing for Obama’s “ comprehensive immigration reform” and the DREAM Act. We’re fighting in the streets, schools and factories to make this a struggle to unite the whole working class against the capitalist crisis and show the solution is communism.

In the March 28 march, when PLP youth answered every liberal chant with a different one, many others joined in. When we chanted that we’ll have a world without borders, a good section of the march took it up.

Then on April 4, about 2,000 mainly Latino immigrant workers, marched through downtown Los Angeles in support of the DREAM Act, re-introduced in both houses of Congress on March 26. The latest version of this immigration legislation puts undocumented immigrant youth on a path supposedly to citizenship if they’ve lived in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school and completed two years of either college or military service. But the DREAM Act does not change an undocumented immigrant youth’s current ineligibility for government financial aid for college.

For most working-class immigrant youth it’s far easier to join the military than enter college, which is prohibitively expensive. In effect, the DREAM Act offers undocumented immigrant youth the promise of citizenship in exchange for service to U.S. imperialism. In fact, the timing for this Bill fits right into Obama’s current effort to send more troops to Afghanistan. The Pentagon has been a major supporter of the DREAM Act. It would result in 279,000 newly eligible people for either college enrollment or the military, and 715,000 more between ages 5 and 17 in the near future.

A contingent of PLP students and teachers participated in the march, leading chants for international working-class unity, and distributed leaflets that explained the fascist nature of immigration reform proposed by the U.S. ruling class. We passed out 1,600 leaflets which called for marching on May Day with PLP for workers’ unity and communist revolution. We also distributed about 400 CHALLENGES.

After the march the PLP group, mainly Latino immigrant high school students, analyzed the illusions created by the DREAM Act among immigrant youth and the need to understand how these type of reform movements ultimately serve the ruling class’s efforts to build patriotism and

recruit youth into their army. We also discussed organizing against imperialism in the military.

Participating in this DREAM Act march helped PLP youth understand the importance of fighting for revolutionary communist politics that expose how immigration reform potentially can lead workers into supporting U.S. imperialism. The group of students and teachers also vowed to redouble their efforts to bring more youth to march with PLP on May Day.

Salvadoran Bosses’ ‘Lesser Evil’ Preserves Profit System

EL SALVADOR — “If Funes wins, we’ll be more controlled by the right and the fake left,” remarked a comrade at a PLP communist school.

In the recent Presidential election, the FMLN’s Mauricio Funes won with 1,350,000 votes, 51.2% of the electorate. Thousands of workers celebrated in the streets of the country’s main cities, shouting, “Yes we could”; “The people united will never be defeated”; and, “Today is different. Funes is President.”

When Funes and the FMLN’s political commission declared victory, they said there were no winners or losers in this election — the victory was “for everyone”; that change had come and there were no distinctions between right and left.

It was very different from the speech people expected, which is why the right celebrated too. That same week, Vice-President-elect Sánchez Ceren stated, “Not all the promises made by the FMLN during the election can be fulfilled.”

The liberal rulers paid for much of Funes’ electoral campaign. They represented the group “Friends of Mauricio Funes,” which includes millionaire businessman Nicolas Salume. He also financed the previous campaign of Antonio Saca (the outgoing President from the right-wing Arena party). Two sectors of Funes supporters made a deal for the FMLN to continue to control the mayors and the representatives while the capitalist “Friends of Funes” would pick the cabinet ministers. The bosses made sure that whoever won would continue capitalist policies.

The workers who see Funes and the FMLN as the solution within the capitalist system to the international crisis of unemployment, poverty and hunger will be frustrated since capitalism is in decline; none of these politicians can solve the crisis. Actually, they’re part of the problem.

The sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry is also reflected here. Funes said he would follow the governing model of Obama and Brazil’s Lula, while an FMLN group continues to insist that Funes must offer an opening to Cuba, Russia and China through Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

The international capitalist crisis is intensifying here. The bosses can’t keep hiding the emptiness of state coffers, so empty that subsidies for energy, transportation and rent can’t be paid. Fiscal collections, consumption and sales have declined, and, according to the Central Reserve Bank, the country’s projected growth rate is nearly zero. This is one of many countries affected by the crisis due to its dependence on remittances from families in the U.S., down $250 million in the last year.

Progressive Labor Party has shown the only way forward amid the international capitalist crisis is to sharpen the workers’ struggles worldwide; this country is no exception. Only the working class can save the working class.

During the election campaign, union and social group leaders diverted the working class from any sign of protest against the bosses or their system. But PLP continued to struggle against, and denounce, the deals among the bosses who financed Arena and the FMLN.

This election was a multi-million dollar campaign by the FMLN and Arena. The FMLN leadership paid $36 million to the media companies while 20,000 people are losing their jobs.

All these electoral events are aimed at lining up both the leaders of the capitalist system, as well as the workers, behind a group of bosses, whether in the U.S., Europe, Russia or China. All of these latter forces face the growing necessity of wider war and World War III, a war over international markets.

Now, after the elections, workers’ anger is starting to surface. A worker on a local radio program said, “This Funes has already shown he’s allied with the right. He just won the election and he showed his capitalist leanings. He’ll respond to the capitalists’ interests, like those of his friends who financed his campaign. As the saying goes, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.’”

The election results mean a change in the governing party but not in the capitalist political and economic orientation. Those capitalists who now hold State power won’t change the way they exercise it. Whether there’s a neo-liberal or a state capitalist government, both are bad for the working class. There’s only been a superficial change among the bosses.

The only solution for workers is the long-term struggle for the dictatorship of the working class and communism through the growth of an internationalist PLP. To all workers: lets all march worldwide on May Day!

As Economic Crisis Looms Over Contract Fight:
Forging Communist Base Among LA Transit Workers

LOS ANGELES, April 6 — “One of the first things I do each day is put CHALLENGES or leaflets in my backpack,” said a PLP member. “I think about who I’m going to get the paper to today or what kind of political discussion I’ll try to develop. I am motivated by a deepening anger against the storms of crisis, war and fascism that confronts our class, an anger that is growing in many of my co-workers.”

Building a base of communist workers for the Party means knitting together a network of CHALLENGE readers, organizing study groups, forums, and personal social and political visits, as well as becoming part of class struggle. It also involves our own families, in trying to have the time and space for all this. Ideally it means integrating our family’s participation in this process.

We’ve been working in the transportation industry for 10 years. Our PLP club now regularly distributes 55 CHALLENGES — having six veteran members, four new members and another five readers who help distribute one or two papers each.

We’ve worked with many workers over time. Some have responded immediately. Later, when they understand the seriousness of the situation, they may pause to think about it. Others are more cautious from the beginning and slowly get closer to us. Others want our literature and to help the Party in some way, without committing themselves completely. Others have joined and are advancing, taking more leadership.

Recently we’ve organized four forums involving 30 different workers —Latino, African American and white, and some from Russia and the Middle East. The forums concerned the history of the working class and the need for PLP and the fight for communism as the only viable alternative to the world-wide crisis of capitalism, imperialist war and fascism.

There’s a great potential to recruit new members in a short time. Building a communist base requires patience and urgency — patience because it’s not so easy to change workers’ minds. Much consistency and persistence are needed.

Consistency: we can’t just take people CHALLENGE once and then, after a few months, bring them another one. We have to take the political development of each worker seriously and follow up, but without being mechanical. Many times we want to force the process of development because we’re not viewing things dialectically. If you plant a fruit tree, you can’t expect to be eating mangos in one month. It won’t happen! Then you could decide to abandon it and leap to a new one, and on and on, without success.

We’re involved in the class struggle. We’re forming a strike committee, with PL’ers, readers and co-workers to fight around the contract this summer. Three years ago, during the last contract fight, we formed a committee that gave communist political leadership during the strike, organizing protests, meetings, leafleting, articles and CHALLENGE sales, and bringing other workers and students to the picket lines. The current economic crisis — which our contract fight is a part of — is an opportunity to expose the capitalist system and show workers the vision of a new communist world.

Besides inviting all the CHALLENGE readers to the May Day Dinner, we’re also struggling with them to invite their friends and families. May Day offers the chance to clarify PLP’s communist ideas, enabling us to build a mass communist party of the working class. To achieve that, we need many communists, and for that we need an expanding network of CHALLENGE readers that becomes a mass network.

These advances come from sharpening the political struggle inside the club and the leadership to spread PLP’s communist politics.

“When are we going to talk about politics?” a transit driver asked a CHALLENGE seller at a work site. “I’ve got a lot to say and some questions to ask you.” In the past, this driver occasionally took a paper. He was friendly but not particularly interested in PLP’s communist ideas. Today that’s changed. He, his wife and two children are all victims of capitalism’s crisis. In the “tender” phrase of the bankers, this family is “underwater” — they owe substantially more on their house than it’s worth, even after paying $100,000 down. He’s one of millions being sacrificed to bail out the billionaire swindlers. Stung by the betrayal of his “American Dream,” we hope this driver and more like him will come to the May Day Dinner where he can learn about the historic battles against capitalism and begin to participate in the current movement. We plan to involve him in PLP activities during the contract struggle and upcoming Summer Project.

Now, even before the contract expires, the collapsing U.S. economy is falling on our heads and on the rest of the world’s workers. The bosses’ media complain about the speed of the collapse of manufacturing, but transit workers could be next on the chopping block if they need us to transport fewer workers to the factories. The economic meltdown increases our opportunities to win these workers to PLP’s politics while fighting the attacks on our co-workers’ and riders’ lives.

During the last contract struggle we encouraged drivers and riders to unite, held social events and explained that “Contracts only spell out the terms of our oppression; they don’t stop exploitation.” Some transit workers who participated in these activities became more interested in the long-term possibility of communist revolution.

We say everyone can help fight for communism. A retired comrade, no longer driving, has helped circulate CHALLENGE and communist leaflets to transit workers. Not being tied to the time clock, he can visit drivers and mechanics on all shifts. Guys ask him, “How is retirement?” He replies, “I love not being a wage-slave, but this system is after us old folks too. A pension based on capitalist investments is a contract written on toilet paper. The contract struggle will involve retiree issues. The company will try to play active transit workers against retirees by saying there isn’t enough money for both with this budget deficit. Sure, I retired from the company but you can’t retire from the class struggle and the fight for communism.”

One thing is certain. The capitalist crisis will continue to push workers “underwater.” As bosses under Bush allowed workers to drown in Hurricane Katrina, the bosses under Obama will not, and cannot, rescue our class from the ravages of this economic hurricane. PLP’s goal of communist revolution is the only lifeline in these storms.

LETTERS

Anti-Communism: Bosses’ Key Weapon vs. Workers

Many workers in Europe are taking to the streets to protest the bosses’ forcing workers to take the losses for capitalism’s financial meltdown [see front page — Editor]. Now “theories” are being advanced on why workers in the U.S. aren’t taking similar action. The NY Times’ (4/5) labor editor comes up with a series of lies and half-truths, with “analyses” from various academics and union “leaders” to “explain” it: workers here “have individualistic streaks”; “guilt, shame and individualism undercut any impulse to collective action”; “declining numbers” in union membership; “enthusiasm for Obama”; blah, blah, blah.

Unable to hide the militant history of the U.S. working class, the Times admits that “worker protests” in the 1930s “were fueled by the then powerful Communist...Part[y].” And even then the Times feels incumbent to attribute the militancy of the 1936-37 44-day Flint sit-down strike and seizure of GM plants to “President Roosevelt’s blessing.” It fails to mention Roosevelt’s National Guard surrounding the plant with machine guns aimed at the sit-downers. Some “blessing”!

Then it says “American labor leaders...work hand-in-glove with C.E.O’s to improve corporate competitiveness.” It quotes Leo Gerard, Steelworkers union president, saying there are “smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs.” What’s “smarter”? “All that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington.”

Yes, this “expert lobbying” has reduced union membership from 35% to “just 7.4 percent of private-sector workers today.”

Of course, the Times and their pundits don’t want to point to the real source of passivity: anti-communism and the ouster of communists from leadership in the labor movement. The full weight of the ruling class and its state apparatus was brought down on the working class in the rabid Cold War anti-communist offensive following World War II.

The demise of militancy got its start with the kicking out of the reds in the late 1940s, masterminded by the Times’ darling labor “leader,” Walter Reuther. In the 1950s and ’60s, mass movements erupted against racism and the war in Vietnam, alongside the Cultural Revolution in China, all of which involved masses taking to the streets and no doubt influenced workers’ struggles. This included armed miners’ battles in the Kentucky coalfields, nationwide strikes in steel and GE, the ’71 national shutdown by postal workers and the ’73 PLP-led Chrysler Mack Ave. sit-down strike.

But with the end of the Vietnam War and the demise of the international communist movement, the situation deteriorated, so by the early 1980s President Reagan felt secure enough about the pro-capitalist union leaders to fire 10,000 striking air controllers. Had the labor fakers organized the rest of the unionized airline workers to respect the strikers’ picket lines, it could have shut the entire industry tighter than a drum. Then it wouldn’t have been so easy to fire those workers. (Coincidentally, the only union to support Reagan’s 1980 run for the White House was...the air controllers! Which goes to show how far workers can get when they follow the union honchos’ lead to look to elections to solve their problems.)

Unfortunately, the communists of the pre-World War II era made the fundamental mistake of not really trying to win the tens of thousands of workers supporting them to the goal of revolution to overthrow the bosses’ system. So even though the ruling class and its lieutenants in the AFL-CIO succeeded in ousting the communists from leadership, a huge base could have been established for future militant and revolutionary action.

PLP is trying to learn that lesson. Historically, workers have always fought their oppressors, especially with militant and revolutionary leadership. Therefore we immerse ourselves in the workers’ class struggles, in the fight against racism and for unity of all workers. We tie those experiences to understanding the necessity for communist revolution, not settle for reforms that can be taken away at the first drop of the Depression hat. Marching on May Day is a good step in that direction.

Red Labor Buff

Boston, MA: Thousands fight school cutbacks

“You won’t balance your budget on the back of my child!” “Do you know what Boston students’ lives are like? We need MORE social workers, not less!” “Bail out schools, not banks.” That’s what some of the thousands of parents and students said, as they angrily attacked school cutbacks in “budget hearings” called by Supt. Carol Johnson. Between 210 and 900 school jobs (out of 8,000 teacher and staff positions) will be cut; 110 “permanent” teachers and paraprofessionals, and 400 provisional teachers, will be cut. Art, music, and language programs are to be closed; many math, English, science, and social studies teachers will be cut.

The capitalist government works for the rich against the working class. That’s why anything that workers have won, like public education, can be taken back.

Gov. Deval Patrick announced $165 million for schools in Mass. but $0 for the mainly black and Latino students of Boston! Teacher unions spent heavily for Patrick/Obama — but these politicians are the enemies of working people.

The Boston Teachers’ Union has called a mass rally for May 19 at 4 pm together with parents, teachers, and students to restore all school cutbacks. Now the job of PLP’ers is to build a massive rally; to talk to more parents, students and teachers about PLP; to sell more Challenges, and recruit members during this struggle.

Boston Comrade

Capitalism Can’t Crush Memories of Collective Struggle in East Berlin

On a recent week’s trip to Berlin, we — a group of veteran communists — spent a lot of time thinking about history. People are often taught to honor things that, if they were taught the truth, they wouldn’t be celebrating at all.

In Berlin’s case, there is the glory of this or that ancient era (when most people were crushed under feudalism), the golden age of one king or another with his palaces (built with the blood of workers and sustained by war), the rise of German power in the 19th-century (as part of the rise of imperialism all over), and more. In this century, publicly everyone agrees not to celebrate Hitler’s era, but Berlin is still caught in its aftermath.

After WW II, Berlin was a capitalist outpost surrounded by East Germany. With whatever errors they made, East German workers were trying to create a socialist Germany — not glorifying capitalism. We recognize that socialism could no more happen under revisionist East German leadership than it could under western capitalism. But we saw exhibits explaining the struggles to rebuild after the war — clearing the rubble, meeting in collectives to try to figure out how to rebuild, what the much-needed housing should look like. Despite all the stories about people cramped together in apartments, East Germany had actually overcome its housing shortage through these initiatives.

West Berlin had exactly the opposite mission: to try to lure people from the east back into accepting capitalism, to wanting Levis and Coke and glorification of big business and celebrities. So, it needed not only huge amounts of capital invested in shiny new office towers, and subsidies to lure people from West Germany to live there and give the impression of a lively city; it also needed to constantly trash-talk East Germany and in particular East Berlin.

We went expecting that even 20 years after the end of the wall East Berlin would be old and decrepit and gray, and that former West Berlin would be in Technicolor and young and lively. That’s what we’d always heard. Hah. It didn’t take us long to discover, when looking at buildings that pre-dated 1989, that both sides looked very much alike. We’ve read for years about big, soul-less, dispiriting apartment blocks in the east... well, the same designs were built in the west as well, and most of them don’t look bad at all.

Throughout the week we found a considerable degree of nostalgia for the pre-1989 East. People were looking for change as their revisionist government became weaker and less responsive but they weren’t looking for a corporate takeover by West Germany. People still come to the statues of Marx and Engels near the City Hall to take family pictures. A plan to replace the East-style walk-don’t walk signs ran into big resistance, and more.

Perhaps this is why, today, so much of the history talked about in Berlin is focused on the Berlin Wall which divided the city East from West, and on continuing to depict East Germany as the gray place with the ugly buildings, and all the rest. They’ve even rebuilt “Checkpoint Charlie” on a downtown street with students hired to masquerade as border guards. Even with glitzy modernism, even with the Euro zone, even after 20 years, capitalism is faced with memories it can’t kill, of a time when, even with errors, a different history was being built.

Red tourist

Union Turf War Leaves Workers Hanging

CHICAGO, IL March 30 – On March 21, the SEIU held a secret meeting and removed four militant women leaders from being stewards and chief stewards at Stroger (Cook County) Hospital. This is SEIU’s revenge for these women’s role in a recently failed organizing drive. The four stewards and chief stewards, Sonja Sanson, Bernadette Cornejo, Angie Ballard and Dimples Hughes-Williams, are going to need the active support of their co-workers to answer the County/SEIU attacks that are coming. More than anything, we need a stronger PLP at County.

For the past eight months, Cook County healthcare workers were caught in a turf war between the giant SEIU and the California Nurses Association’s (CNA) national organization, National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC). After two years of budget cuts that cost over 2,000 jobs and closed half the clinics that serve the more than one million uninsured workers and children here, SEIU and NNOC decided to spend millions raiding each other for a bigger share of a shrinking pie instead of organizing a massive strike of workers and patients against racist cutbacks. These pro-capitalist unions compete with each other just like the bosses do.

The most militant and class-conscious workers put their necks on the line for NNOC’s workers union, the Caregivers and Health Employees Union (CHEU). Despite their “progressive” reputation, NNOC maintains separate unions for nurses and workers. Based on the active support of these most militant rank and file leaders, the CHEU organizing drive became a mutiny against the SEIU leadership that had supported the budget cutters and sabotaged any fight back. Elections were scheduled in all four SEIU bargaining units.

On February 20, just days before the scheduled elections, CHEU pulled out, without any discussion with the workers involved. SEIU and CNA, who had been battling each other all over the country, formed an “alliance” to end the feud. While SEIU president Andy Stern and CNA president Rose Ann DeMoro were shaking hands and passing checks, the most militant County workers were left holding the bag. Some CHEU supporters had already been fired, and SEIU has no intention of fighting to bring them back.

As the economy continues to crumble, workers face more racist unemployment and cutbacks while the bosses get trillion-dollar bailouts. As workers have been forced to accept speed-up, wage-cuts, increases in our healthcare premiums and loss of pensions, the unions serve the bosses. We cannot expect anything different. No union can end the global crisis of capitalism. No contract can negotiate away the growing fascism, racist terror and war that the capitalists will need to force us to pay for their crisis. We are turning these attacks, and the growing anger of the workers, into a bigger base for PLP and more May Day marchers. Communist revolution is our answer to these attacks, and to the bosses’ crisis.

Black Youths Jailed; Real Criminals Go Scot-free

February — Two 16-year-old youths have been incarcerated for several months now by the criminal IN-justice system. They are being charged as adults for “aggravated assault” and denied bail! According to allegations, the young men used a knife to demand money from someone on the street.

At the time of the arrest they were separated and forcefully interrogated for hours. The police told the youths that if they did not “confess” to more crimes, their pictures would be shown to any number of random victims who could be convinced to “identify” them as perpetrators. The racist cops told the youths that this would be easy to accomplish simply because they are black. About 70% of the U.S prison population is black and Latino. While blacks and Latinos comprise only 25% of the U.S. population, nearly triple that percent are in prison.

The official police report does tell the truth about one thing. It states that the youths said they were hungry. Viewing that issue more broadly, every day over 30 million people go to bed hungry in the U.S., including 46% of all black children, 40% of Latino children and 16% of white children. The cause of this hunger is the international system of capitalism – U.S. imperialism in particular – which has also killed over 650,000 Iraqis in the last four years, and well over 1.2 million since 1992. Globally, more than 850 million people live on less than one dollar a day - the international poverty line set by the World Bank - and half the world’s population lives on less than $2-a-day! Over 250,000 children die every week of hunger and malnutrition. The vast majorities are black, Latin and Asian.

Why aren’t the criminals responsible for this in jail? For one, what they call democracy is really a dictatorship of the business owners, of the capitalist class. They control the power of the state, — courts, cops, government, schools, and military — that they use it to violently maintain power. Two, there is not yet a mass revolutionary communist movement to overthrow this system.

Members of PLP are active in the defense and support of these two teens. The support group is having regular meetings and has divided up tasks, like organizing a schedule for visits to see the youths in jail, raising money to put into the jail commissary accounts (so the two teens have access to basics like writing paper and stamps), meeting with the defense lawyers, and generating publicity about the case.

The jails will be filled with the capitalists only when we make a communist revolution, put an end to the whole profit system, and struggle successfully to completely defeat the legacy of racism. For now, as the system drives our class further into misery, PL does not condone anti-working class actions. It is wrong to forcefully take something from another member of our class. Even more importantly, however, we must point out that the main criminals are not youths who may sometimes make a bad decision, but the system itself which ravages our lives much more deeply.

Our alternative is to bring communist ideas to workers, youth, and soldiers. We must organize to smash capitalism, the root of our class problems. An important first step is to bring a sizable contingent to our May Day activities, where everyone can be inspired by a glimmer of the positive, communist future ahead.

Obama’s Plan ‘Stimulates’ Bosses’ Attack on Workers

Barack Obama recently lectured workers, not on capitalism’s systemic inability to avoid crisis and depression, but to “look beyond our own short-term interests to the wider set of obligations we have to each other...That’s when we succeed. That’s when we prosper. And that’s what’s needed right now.” The working class, not the bosses, will take the losses, that’s the meaning behind Obama’s stimulus package.

The international working class must brace for this “stimulus” as an outright attack, foreshadowing even greater misery. One former economist of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Worsley, openly pondered the bosses need for war, saying to Bloomberg news recently, “Can we spend enough with peacetime spending to get us out [of the crisis?]”

In addition to the major banks, many states are on the verge of bankruptcy; their failure would trigger a catastrophe. Only $54 billion has been allocated to states while 43 face a combined deficit of at least $200 billion for this year alone. “This is a band-aid” said Michael Bird, of the federal affairs counsel at the National Conference of State Legislatures (U.S. News & World Report, 2/25/09).

Between mounting job and home losses, decades of gutting federal social programs, and deep cutbacks made after the previous recession of 2001, the crises facing workers, especially in states like California, New York, Florida, and Michigan, are set to intensify.

While Obama stated that this crisis was years in the making, Marx predicted crises like these in the mid 19th century. Workers in the U.S., especially blacks and Latinos, the biggest holders of sub-prime mortgages, are being crushed under mountains of debt which threaten to amplify the crisis as millions are tossed out onto the streets, unable to make their payments.

As for solutions, the bosses can’t seem to print money fast enough. The billions of dollars in cash “injections” triggered unease amongst the Chinese ruling class, which holds several trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury Bills made worthless by the influx of dollars. The Chinese imperialists, flexing their new muscles internationally, recently called for a replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The Path Towards Wider War Among Imperialist Rivals

Obama’s plan to “tax the wealthiest” is a sham, since the upper echelons of the ruling class have all sorts of loopholes to avoid paying taxes. Since the U.S. bosses can’t sell off their own assets to rival imperialists without losing their position as top imperialist dog; their only option is to look to squeeze profits from workers currently being exploited by their imperialist rivals. This is a path towards war.

At the end of WW II the U.S. rulers were in a position to penetrate Latin America, Asia, and Africa unopposed by other capitalists. Times have changed. There is not a single part of the globe that hasn’t been penetrated by one or more rivals to the U.S., namely China, Russia, and Germany. The era of unchallenged U.S. dominance is over.

It’s unclear whether or not the financial wizards can cook up even a short-term solution to this crisis; the best they can hope for is to postpone this crisis for a larger one down the road. Rising competition in the face of worldwide crisis will ultimately lead to war between the biggest powers. The U.S. rulers will be forced to directly confront one or more of their rivals in wars of a scale that will dwarf the so-called “brushfires” around the globe now.

As the crisis deepens, millions of workers in the U.S. have been and will be laid off, and bankruptcies will only mount. The U.S. bosses will intensify exploitation here, and make us pay for their losses. As Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put so eloquently to the Wall Street Journal (11/21/09), “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

The Revolutionary Path Workers Must Take

As May Day approaches, PLP’ers and friends must step up our efforts to win workers and their allies to our Party to fight for a path for workers out of this hell: the fight for communism. Our fight is to organize as large a section of the international working class as possible to oppose these cuts and “make the bosses take the losses.” Everywhere we must support and build unity between employed and unemployed workers, and sharpen the struggle against racism in our schools, workplaces, and barracks. Workers worldwide must see that this crisis is capitalism’s “business-as-usual,” and that this system can only oppress us, bankrupt us, and send our children to kill and die to save one or another bosses’ empire, while sticking us with the bill!

‘Renewable Energy’ Subsidy for Profiteers?

Attempting to ride the growing wave of genuine concern many workers share over the health of the environment, the handouts given to “renewable energy” programs are supposed to reduce dependency on foreign oil but most of the petroleum consumed in the U.S. comes from either Mexico or Canada, and a large share is produced domestically. The U.S. rulers’ main interest in Mid-East oil is about controlling the other imperialists’ access to it. The popular slogan to “reduce dependency on foreign oil” is nothing but a hollow lie, but that won’t stop Obama’s ruling-class allies from paying their friends and business cronies at the expense of workers’ taxes!

Information: Print

CHALLENGE, April 8, 2009

Information: 08 April 2009 304 hits

a href="#All Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs">"ll Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs

a href="#PL’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies">"L’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies

a href="#Russian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses">"ussian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses

Iraq Vets Stand Against Imperialist War

a href="#PLP Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’">PL" Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’

HS Debate-Club Coaches Back Anti-Racist Fight

a href="#Anti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight">"nti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight

a href="#Haiti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs">Ha"ti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs

a href="#150th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry">"50th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry

Defend Framed-Up Airport Skycap

a href="#France: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis">"rance: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis

a href="#El Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers">"l Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers

LETTERS

a href="#Raúl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model">R"úl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model

Camping Trip Brings H.S. Student Step Closer to PL

Rulers Use Fear; Answer: Fight Back!

a href="#Spain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity">"pain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity

Spain: Students and Immigrant Workers Fight Back

March on May Day!

a href="#Obama, Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War">Obam", Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War

a href="#Ex-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?">"x-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

No free lawyers for immigrants
Sexist military hides rapes
No safety net for illegal work
Spraying hits poor, not coca
Franco ‘disappeared’ leftist kids

a name="All Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs">">"ll Stella D’Oro Workers United to Fight Racist Bosses As Strikers Battle Scabs

BRONX, NY, March 11 — A multi-racial and international group of several hundred Stella D’Oro workers and strike supporters chanted "workers united will never be defeated" as plans for more massive and aggressive picketing were carried out today. A loud and determined human blockade met scabs who tried to cross the picket line. Several scabs were stopped. One was turned away before cops arrived to protect the bosses and their scabs.

This was a good day for the Stella D’Oro strikers. Rank-and-file strikers are showing greater leadership. Several workers spoke during a rally ending today’s action. Prior to the strike, they probably never would have imagined that they would ever speak at a street-corner rally. Workers have played a part in the strike-support committee, planning today’s activities and carrying them out. They have gone out to meetings of other labor organizations to build solidarity and support for their strike.

A large proportion of the strikers are lower-paid women and immigrant workers. They are receiving great support from all the strikers, reflecting a fight against anti-immigrant racism and sexism.

Some strikers believe that positive rulings by the labor board around issues of unfair labor practices will be decisive in winning the strike. PL’ers have pointed out that none of the members of the labor board ever worked in a factory. They know that if they rule against the bosses’ interests, they wouldn’t be on the labor board for long! We have pointed out that workers’ power, unity and understanding of how the capitalist system functions is what is truly decisive. One chant that expresses this idea was often heard as we picketed today. "Who has the Power? We have the power. What kind of power? Workers power!"

On the picket line, workers discussed how the Stella strike mirrors what is happening to the workers all over the U.S. and around the world. Their fighting spirit is a beacon to all workers suffering under the oppression of bosses everywhere. PLP urges our friends and members to do what they can to increase strike support. You can arrange for strikers to speak to your union, community or church group. Raise money for the strikers from these organizations. If Stella D’Oro products are being sold at a store in your neighborhood, demand that scabs products not be sold. Picket the stores that continue to sell scab products!

PL’ers are trying to make the Stella-D’Oro strike into a school for communism. That means not only bringing CHALLENGE and our communist ideas to the striking workers but also learning from the strikers on how to have ongoing class struggle.

a name="PL’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies">">"L’ers Picket Scab-Made Cookies

BROOKLYN, NY, March 16 — Today a group of PL’ers went to a neighborhood Stop & Shop supermarket that was selling scab-made Stella D’Oro cookies. We marched into the store and began a picket line around the cookie shelves while distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES. Everyone in the store stopped and took notice.

The store manager quickly ran to notify the guard to call the cops and kick us out. We were then ushered out while chanting in front of the supermarket. When the cops showed up we chanted, "The cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan." Taxi drivers outside the store joined our picket line and chanted with us. As we left we shouted, "We’ll be back!"

This was only the start of more protests at local businesses selling scab cookies around the city. Next time we’ll up the ante in militant actions against scab-made Stella D’Oro cookies.

a name="Russian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses">">"ussian Rulers’ War Plans Heat Up Imperialist Rivalry with U.S. Bosses

Russia’s rulers, capitalizing on their U.S. rivals’ troubles, are shifting their own imperialist plans into high gear, taking more seriously preparations for future wars. On March 17, President Dmitri Medvedev announced to top Russian generals "large-scale rearming" in 2011 in response to "continuing threats to the country’s security." (NY Times, 3/18/09) The move advances the Kremlin’s drive to dominate the states of the former Soviet Union.

Key to the Putin strategy are: establishing pro-Russian governments in Eastern Europe; asserting military control of Russian gas and Caspian oil exports, the "energy weapon;" and supporting U.S. enemies like Iran.

Putin puppet Medvedev, however, couldn’t wait for 2011. Two days after announcing rearmament, he "formalized agreements that allow for a permanent Russian military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, territories... the United States considers to be part of Georgia" (NYT, 3/21/09). Russia’s 2008 invasion of these regions shut down a U.S.-backed million-barrel-a-day Caspian oil pipeline (Asia Times Online). And weeks earlier Russia had strong-armed satellite Kyrgyzstan into shutting its air base to U.S. supply planes bound for Afghanistan.

Russia-China Military Bloc Aimed at U.S.

Russia and China are conducting joint military maneuvers. The Moscow-Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization is meeting in Moscow and inviting Iran and India as "observers." RIaNovosti, a Russian news agency, said Venezuela has offered an air base on the island of Orchila to be used by Russian TU 160 strategic air bombers in their long-range patrolling flights. The TU 160 is considered the world’s most powerful strategic bomber, superior to the U.S. B-1 Lancet.

That development might provoke another missile crisis similar to the one in Cuba in1962 that nearly led to a nuclear World War III.

Russian navy ships have also recently visited ports in both Venezuela and Cuba.

Circumstances limit U.S. bosses’ immediate response to the Russian build-up. The bulk of U.S. ground troops are mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rising joblessness boosts enlistment only marginally. Public opposition to restoring the draft remains adamant. In addition, U.S. rulers must get their economic and political house in order before mobilizing against a power the size of Russia and its allies (to say nothing of China.)

Wall Street’s meltdown has put U.S. finance and industry in serious disarray, hindering war planning. Citigroup and GM, once pillars of U.S. imperialism, may not survive. And Congressional Republicans, locked in anti-tax ideology, try to block the massive outlays Obama needs for both the Treasury and the Pentagon.

So U.S. rulers seek to buy time with Russia. Last week Obama dispatched a geriatric diplomatic "dream team" to Moscow. It included Henry Kissinger, Vietnam-era war criminal; George Schultz, advisor to the oil-soaked Saudi monarchy; and James Baker, Exxon and J.P. MorganChase heir and architect of the first Gulf War genocide. The first two focused on reopening talks on nuclear arms, where the U.S. still has the upper hand. Baker begged Russia’s oil ministry to keep Caspian routes open.

U.S. Backing Down On Missile ‘Defense’?

A Harvard-sponsored report by liberal strategist Gary Hart urging temporary concessions to Russia found its way into a March 19 Senate hearing. It said Washington should "take a new look at missile-defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic and accept that neither Ukraine nor Georgia is ready for NATO membership."

But any U.S.-Russia "détente" only masks future conflict. Anticipating the Kremlin’s March 17 battle cry, Team Obama leaked its long-range war plans days earlier: "The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time." (NYT, 3/15/09) Obama’s not-so-subtle implication is that the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts may not be resolved before it’s time to take on Russia, China, Iran or any combination thereof.

Putin’s imperialist Russia, though less than half the population of the U.S., enjoys certain advantages. For one, it has military conscription. While some reports say draft-dodging and desertion mean that only 11% of eligible conscripts actually serve, U.S. recruiters would be thrilled to snag one in nine 18-27 year-olds.

Then there’s Russia’s more advanced fascistic streamlining of the state. Carrying out a 2004 Putin edict, on March 21 Medvedev simply fired and replaced a dissident regional governor. Compare that to the partisanship that often stymies Congressional action on legislation aimed at more central control of the economy. The Rockefeller wing of the U.S. ruling class aims to save its collapsing system. It must discipline the bankers and CEOs whose short-range profit goals hamper their long-range needs.

Workers Suffer From Russia-U.S. Imperialist Rivalry

These U.S. rulers would want to impose the economic discipline that Putin did when Yukos, a pro-U.S. Russian oil company, challenged the state’s Lukoil company. He jailed Yukos’s chief and legally bankrupted the firm. Public protest has been minimal.

Of course, workers have been suffering from Putin’s capitalism, increasing fascism and war preparations — unpaid wages and pensions, disastrous health "care," unemployment and racist neo-Nazi attacks on non-Russians and Putin opponents — all of which are fundamental to profit systems everywhere.

U.S. rulers will drive to catch up to their Russian rivals in winning the masses here to war and fascism, which means lowering workers’ living standards (Obama labels it "shared sacrifice") and increased racist — especially anti-immigrant — attacks.

Today, U.S. media giants openly question whether the popular wrath they have stirred up against Bernie Madoff and AIG’s bosses could be better directed, say, at a foreign foe. But the proper target for workers’ anger these days is the profit system itself that generates endless wars and economic disasters. Only communism can eliminate these horrors.

Iraq Vets Stand Against Imperialist War

BERKELEY, CA., March 23 — To mark the 6th year of the invasion — and now permanent occupation — of Iraq, and Obama’s shift towards Afghanistan, the Bay Area chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) recently held a Winter Soldier forum to a packed auditorium here. Each vet had a unique experience in the military, related in powerful testimonies. (This article is part of a long-term dialogue with rank-and-file IVAW members regarding communist politics and military organizing.)

Army’s Not For Millionaires’ Children

Soldiers join the military for many reasons, some out of necessity. Prior to joining, a number of young vets from the panel had tough situations, making attending college difficult and job prospects rare. The military’s offers of money for college and job opportunities disproportionately attract working-class youth. As most soldiers are plucked from the working class, they have a high potential to ally with the workers against the common enemies of the entire working class: the ruling class and its capitalist system.

Other vets on the panel joined out of a genuine and noble desire to help. They wanted to go on humanitarian missions and distribute aid packages. However, once in the military, it became evident that imperialism cannot afford to be gentle, either to the vets or to the Iraqi and Afghan working class. Distributing aid was secondary to combat missions. To the U.S. military — running on what one vet in intelligence gathering called "educated" guesses — "helping" meant sweeping invasions of Iraqi homes. It meant fighting a few insurgents among large local populations, causing staggering civilian casualties and unnecessary damage to both U.S. and Iraqi working-class life.

In The Belly of Imperialism

The vets’ honest testimonials included graphic accounts of war, violence, invasion and atonement. One vet was infinitely glad to have disobeyed the orders to shoot an Iraqi child on sight. Another vet intensely remembered friends that died protecting oil fields for U.S. corporations. Another vet recounted the surreal cultivation of extreme violence among his Marine troop. Intense anti-Muslim racism and an attempted frame-up drove one vet out of the service. Sexual assaults against female soldiers are also increasing.

Being placed at a point of physical, psychological and political contradiction, our vet friends’ experiences culminated in a breakthrough of consciousness and firm opposition to the war. It was not an easy journey, and it is to their great credit that these vets speak out against injustice. Upon returning to the U.S. and requesting counseling aid, many in the vet community are neglected, being forced to wait months to see an army doctor who will be dismissive of their situation. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is prevalent. Among vets, suicides climb as does unemployment. Homelessness encroaches. To the soldier as much as to the civilian casualty, as well as to the entire working class, imperialism is the enemy.

Fighting the War Machine

That these vets are survivors and can be won to fighting for pro-worker politics is evident from paraphrased statements such as, "I’m not anti-war. I’m anti-war for profit. I’m anti-war for oil. I’m anti-wars of occupation and aggression."

One vet joined the military as an anti-war activist. Through this, information was gathered, enriching the vet’s understanding of how the military operates within imperialism. This was particularly inspirational, and joining up while already being anti-war and anti-imperialist is something CHALLENGE readers, comrades and anti-war activists should seriously consider.

Issues of class struggle, armed struggle, revolution and the construction of a just and egalitarian society become tangible if, and only if, masses of soldiers and vets, along with workers and students, develop revolutionary class consciousness and take part in the organizing to smash imperialist war with communist revolution. This gives life to a new society. Soldiers can end the war, but soldiers can also speed up the beginning of the end for capitalism. As has been said before in CHALLENGE, there can be no communist revolution without revolutionary communist soldiers.

Bay Area Vet

a name="PLP Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’"></">PL" Anti-War Marchers Challenge Liberals, Phony ‘Leftists’

NEW YORK CITY, April 22 — A multi-racial group of PLP members, including a young new member and a Party friend, traveled yesterday with a local anti-war group to the anti-war march on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The marchers were predominantly white.

A PLP’er spoke, explaining that the war’s root problem was capitalism and that we must fight back as workers against the racist ruling class that Obama represents. We distributed CHALLENGE to the small but spirited crowd of a few thousand. The marchers’ anger was strong as we chanted, "They got bailed out, we got sold out!" and "Fight Back!"

For PLP’ers, veterans of previous national demonstrations, it was obvious that the mass anti-war movement was essentially an anti-Bush movement led by Democrats. Previous national demonstrations organized by, or with, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) — a national anti-war coalition tied to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing — drew hundreds of thousands.

Obama, the supposed "anti-war" candidate, is just as imperialist as Bush — he’s keeping combat troops in Iraq, expanding the war in Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan. But after Democratic victories in Congress and the White House, UFPJ has effectively declared, "Mission accomplished."

PLP efforts were modest. We need to struggle even more within our mass organizations to oppose Democrats’ leadership of the anti-war movement. In our local group we realized that as we took leadership in organizing for this march, more people chanted anti-capitalist slogans and discussed more class-conscious politics than at past actions of our group. The more people we bring, the greater our influence.

It was the first national anti-war march for the new young PLP’er. She saw lots of division among the various phony "left" groups but thought we could have been more effective if we all united around a revolutionary working-class line. But most fake left groups, like the march organizers, shouted "Iraq for Iraqis," instead of calling for workers of the world to unite against both local and foreign bosses. The "radical" socialists who controlled the protest avoided working-class neighborhoods and marched to the Pentagon past mostly empty corporate buildings instead.

Veteran PL’ers explained to our new comrade that only PLP organizes to smash capitalism with communist revolution. We vigorously participate in reform movements — against certain wars or to win economic gains from the government or bosses — but our goal is to build a PLP of millions.

We know that the bosses can strip away any reform victories with their control of state power but a mass party of millions can smash their state and build workers’ power. So-called socialists may appear "left" but they mis-lead workers to support lesser-evil capitalists and build dead-end reform movements. PLP uses CHALLENGE to sharpen class struggle and win workers to our communist politics.

To build a mass party we must do much more to challenge liberals and fake leftists. Based on our revolutionary outlook, our group returned home more motivated to intensify class struggle in our anti-war group, schools, jobs and families.

HS Debate-Club Coaches Back Anti-Racist Fight

I am a NYC high school teacher who has been active in coaching debate for some time. Over the years PLP members have helped to play a leading role in spreading CHALLENGE, organizing mass debates in the schools and in raising anti-racist, anti-imperialist and pro-working class ideas in our league.

Last weekend, at our coaches’ meeting, we were able to put two very important items on our agenda. The first was the racist arrest and incarceration of two Baltimore youths, Cedric Forte and Gregg Hill, a well-known debater in our region (see next CHALLENGE), and the second was an upcoming budget cuts speak-out in Brooklyn.

I was overwhelmed by the sentiment of the coaches and judges who responded to our call for action. They wanted to raise money, find lawyers, contact the Baltimore Debate League and start a mass letter-writing campaign in their classes. They wanted to post specific ways to help on the debate website. It was truly inspiring! They clearly understood the nature of racism and the prison system, and also that we must always be fighting back and taking action, even as we are involved in debates and discussions.

We had a brief speak-out on the budget cuts later in the afternoon, and some coaches really encouraged their students to take leadership. Many students were angry about how the schools will be hit by the bosses’ economic crisis and made plans to get their schools involved in a citywide conference, April 2nd.

Comrades who have been involved over the years, both students and teachers, have provided a strong foundation for our ideas. We must continue organizing in our league with students, parents and teachers.

Brooklyn High School Teacher

a name="Anti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight">">"nti-Racist, Multi-Racial Unity Needed in Nurses’ Fight

BROOKLYN, NY, March 17 — As the capitalist economic crisis deepens, producing hospital closings and millions laid off, nurses at Methodist hospital here conducted informational picketing yesterday demanding increasing staffing to enable them to deliver safe, quality care to their patients.

The nurses are currently negotiating a new contract so they took to the streets to win support from the community and from patients. Thousands of leaflets were distributed detailing a recent scientific study that reported:

The likelihood of patient deaths increases 31% if a nurse cares for eight patients instead of four;

Inadequate nursing staff is related to 24% of unanticipated patient deaths and permanent loss of functions;

Higher registered nursing staff significantly lowers pressure sores, pneumonia and post-operative and urinary tract infections.

On the picket line, a CHALLENGE reporter another health care worker interviewed one of the nurses and found there is one nurse to ten patients here. "We’re overworked," she said. "We have to go to the lab and pharmacy to deliver blood samples and pick up medications. Sometimes we have to go to the basement to pick up linen, since the hospital bosses have subcontracted the laundry services and that’s where the clean linen is delivered."

Questioned about nurse technicians in the hospital, she replied, "The nurse techs also have a heavy workload. There is one tech for fifteen patients or more. At the end of every shift we feel overwhelmed."

Noting that there weren’t many nurse techs on the picket line, the nurse said the nurses union hadn’t reached out to the 1199-SEIU members to join the line." "That was a mistake," she declared, "because every worker at this hospital is involved in patient care, from environmental service, food service and other departments. This would have had a greater impact on the hospital bosses."

Asked about Obama’s health care plan, she said, "I know he wants everyone to have health care insurance, but the plan does not call for building more hospitals and hiring more nurses."

When it was time to return to work, a PLP member gave the nurse a CHALLENGE, reminding her that all workers need a united plan of action against the hospital bosses and for quality care. This is especially necessary given increasing layoffs such as that of 250 workers at Brookdale hospital and the recent closing of two Queens’ hospitals.

The 1199-SEIU workers are mostly black and Latino and the nurses’ union is multi-racial, but when a leaflet was submitted to the 1199-SEIU headquarters calling for unity between the two groups, the union leadership rejected it. Rank-and-filers will have to by-pass these sellouts and organize this unity in the fight against racism and the bosses’ attacks.

Capitalism depends on racism and these divisions to reap super-profits. Workers don’t need these bosses, their union lieutenants and the system that sends workers to the scrapheap.?

a name="Haiti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs"></">Ha"ti: Pro-Boss ‘Unions’, Obama No Messiahs

[The writer is corresponding with a PLP member in the U.S. — Editor]

Thanks for your letter. I hope this correspondence will begin the long journey we must make together in the struggle for a just and equal world.

There is a void in the union movement in Haiti: the swindlers who’ve taken the movement hostage, gangster-like pro-capitalist "unionists," have nothing to do with unionism. They’re only there to steal money from the government and international organizations. The only "union" they represent is their own briefcase or computer.

Some of us are trying to restart real unions. But when we denounced the structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the new unions were hit with state repression, including firing nearly all our leaders. We also have problems of organization and training, so we’re organizing forums and training workshops, but not forgetting actions like sit-ins, strikes and street protests.

I’m very pleased to get the PLP newspaper and am open to it, especially on the question of the expansion of war. In Haiti, people tend to consider your president (the new one) a messiah who will set about resolving all the problems of humanity, when in fact he enters a system in crisis, a system by-passed by time which can supply not a single serious, lasting solution, but on the contrary could make the crisis worse.

So mustn’t we become a unified force to supply an alternative?

How can we work to make the voice of our peoples heard, instead of the multi-nationals? We need to deepen our discussions of ideas on the left, because Haiti does not have a serious left party.

The already-rich want to corner everything in Haiti by privatizing all enterprises. To do that, they’re hounding us, trying to shut us up. So your solidarity is very important.

A Union Militant in Haiti

a name="150th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry">">"50th Anniversary of John Brown/Harriet Tubman Raid on Harper’s Ferry

October 17, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the John Brown/Harriet Tubman raid on Harpers Ferry (Tubman is usually left out, but she was a key planner of the raid, and missed the raid because of severe illness). We are calling everyone to join us in Harper’s Ferry that day. We have obtained permits from the National Park Service and the town of Harper’s Ferry, so a big demonstration will happen.

Thirty years ago in 1979 we held a similar bold march in both Harper’s Ferry and Lawrence, Kansas to celebrate the fight against slavery. Since then, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore PL’ers have held at least 10 rallies at the site to link the anti-slavery struggle to today’s battle against racism.

Back in 1979, the National Park Service had no exhibits either on John Brown or on Storer College, a historically black college that opened in 1865. The only recognition of Brown was a private, horrible Wax Museum that demonized Brown (and terrified children with a scene of his hanging). Six years later, when we returned to Harper’s Ferry, the Park Service had set up exhibits and a movie about John Brown and the raiders. Perhaps it was the 500-strong antiracist workers and students marching through Harper’s Ferry that made the Park Service realize that the reason for Harper’s Ferry National Park was the raid, and that it should be honored!

We hope that mass organizations including unions, church group, school clubs, and community groups will join in this event and learn about the role of multiracial unity and militancy to fight all forms of racism. The march will celebrate the raid as a critical step in abolishing slavery, along with slave rebellions and the Underground Railroad, and will encourage everyone to "finish the job" undertaken by Brown, Tubman, and the raiders.

We are encouraging all antiracist readers of CHALLENGE to organize in their areas and bring busloads to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia on October 17!

D.C. Red

Defend Framed-Up Airport Skycap

QUEENS, NY – Last November, a black immigrant skycap worker at LaGuardia Airport was assaulted and arrested on the job. A week later, when he returned to retrieve his paycheck, he was fired.

The skycap was performing his normal functions, helping passengers with their bags to and from their vehicles. After waiting for about ten minutes with a family of passengers in the taxi line the skycap was asked to call a private car service. When the private car arrived the skycap went to identify it, but before he could return to the family he was thrown against an airport bus. "You’re going to jail!" screamed a man.

Bystanders said it appeared the skycap was being jumped, because the cops were wearing plain clothes. The police claimed the skycap had violated airport policy by hailing a private (black) cab off the street. When he showed them his phone, which proved he had called the car service, the cops confiscated it and took him away. After initially mixing up the charges, the skycap was charged with soliciting, and resisting arrest.

In the months that followed, the fired worker went to preliminary hearings regarding his case along with a few PLP members and friends. He agreed that it was important to fight this case and that it reflected a larger attack on all workers. Despite numerous attempts to force the skycap to settle, he refused to do so. "Why should I settle, when I didn’t do anything wrong?" he argued.

While he is fighting this racist arrest, the state and skycap bosses have launched another attack on him. After filing for unemployment and receiving two checks, the worker was cut off and told he would have to pay back the $800 he had received. His employer had contested the claim, saying that he was ineligible since he had violated company policy and was terminated, not laid off. This sort of attack is happening to industrial workers everywhere who are fired for minor offenses so that bosses can avoid contributing to the growing unemployment rolls.

Meanwhile, the fight against the bogus criminal charges continues. The judge refused to dismiss the absurd case of being arrested for calling a cab, even though there is no evidence against the worker besides the lies of the cops. This should come as no surprise since under capitalism the courts work hand-in-hand with the police to defend the bosses’ interests. Now the case will go to trial, and if convicted the worker could face as much as a year in jail. PLP is planning to pack the court with supporters for the trial in April and support our friend who is under attack.

a name="France: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis">">"rance: 3,000,000 in Marches, General Strike vs. Bosses’ Crisis

PARIS, March 20 — Yesterday’s general strike and demonstrations of three million people — 500,000 more than the January 29 action — saw 350,000 marching in Paris and 300,000 in Marseilles. Workers are reacting violently to rising unemployment and to French president Sarkozy’s attacks on social reforms won over the years. They are angry at the joblessness in a crisis triggered by financial speculators, while French bosses are reaping record profits and top executives are getting fat bonuses and golden parachutes.

Following the union-organized demonstrations, fierce confrontations with the police erupted in Paris (300 arrests), Marseilles, Toulouse, Nantes, Saint-Nazaire and other cities. Before the general strike, workers took several militant actions:

• On March 12-13, Sony-France workers held its chairman, Serge Foucher, overnight until he agreed to pay at least 45,000 Euros each ($60,000) to the 311 workers losing their jobs from the closing of Sony’s Pontonx-sur-l’Adour factory.

• In Evreux, workers occupied the GlaxoSmithKline drug factory on March 11, demanding a 10,000-euro bonus (over $13,000) for "mental suffering" for its 2,000 workers following announcement of 798 layoffs. The workers settled for a permanent 5,000-euro yearly bonus, starting this year. (The company calls it a "performance bonus.")

• After the Clairoix Continental Tire factory boss announced its closing in 2010, the 1,150 workers immediately struck. On March 12, 500 workers ambushed him inside a tire warehouse and bombarded him with eggs.

Finally, yesterday, the working class again demonstrated its ability to halt production — and profits. Half the trains were not running, one-third of Orly airport’s flights were canceled, no national newspapers were printed and the radio stations were forced to play only music all day long.

Overall, the strike included railroad, telephone, electricity, state radio and TV, weather service, postal, pharmaceutical, chemical, banking, telecommunications, Airbus, glass and building material workers, along with primary and secondary school teachers. For the past seven weeks, teachers and students have partly or completely shut down half the universities, forcing Education Minister Xavier Darcos to "give up" some planned changes in recruitment of primary and secondary school teachers (Liberation newspaper; see below).

‘Danger Of Uncontrollable Social Unrest…’

For the bosses, their government, and their lieutenants among the labor leaders, both the January 29 and today’s general strikes were carefully-scripted theater. Rémi Barroux spilled the beans in France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde (2/18): "In times of crisis and social torment ... [French President] Sarkozy needs the trade unions more than ever. Without them, and in particular the five so-called ‘representative’ union confederations, there is a real danger of uncontrollable social unrest."

According to Le Monde journalist Barroux, the government mainly wants the unions to "help…transform…the French social model," meaning dismantling the welfare state. Union membership has declined 50% over the past 25 years, down to 8% — unable, Barroux says, to obtain an increase in the minimum wage, much less follow the example of the militant workers of Guadeloupe (see CHALLENGE, 2/11, 25, and 3/11,25). But "for all that, the unions cannot abandon their protest activities, as they risk losing out to more anti-authority unions, like Solidaires."

Government Pretends To Grant Concessions

Thus, with widely-spaced one-day general strikes, the major unions pretend to be militant and the government pretends to give in. On February 18, the government reacted to the January 29 action, announcing 2.6 billion Euros (over $3.4 billon) in social measures: a one-time 150-euro bonus to the poorest families; a 500-euro payment for 12 months to unemployed workers who don’t qualify for jobless benefits, and "encouraging" companies to pay workers on short-time 75% of their normal salary, with the government paying two-thirds of the cost.

"Answering" yesterday’s actions, Sarkozy merely announced speeding realization of the above measures and promising to add more measures "if needed."

On education, minister Darcos gave up changing the content of recruitment exams while maintaining the core of his reform, giving students teacher training without recruiting them. (Presently, most teachers are recruited by competitive exams first, and afterwards get a salary while receiving teacher training.) This would enable the recruitment of large numbers of lower-paid temporary teachers. These "concessions" are a government maneuver to get university teachers to accept the principle of its reform and then ram through its entire program.

Bosses’ Leader Plays ‘Bad Cop’

While the government pretends to give workers crumbs, Laurence Parisot, head of the bosses’ organization, does a "bad cop" routine. She denounced the general strike’s cost to the economy, saying it was "an easy way out,… [not] an answer." She attacked the CGT union as guilty of "demagogy and creating illusions," holding it responsible for companies going bankrupt, hoping to split the eight confederations. And by talking tough she lets the Sarkozy government appear "uninvolved" in the conflict, hoping workers will view Sarkozy as the "lesser evil," or even the neutral arbitrator between labor and management.

The union confederations met but couldn’t agree on a future plan of action, other than looking into making future mobilizations more effective, agreeing to plan for May Day and to meet again on March 30. The obvious course would be to take inspiration from the 44-day general strike of the workers in Guadeloupe.

Need For Communist Leadership

The one factor that could upset this shadow-boxing by the union leaders, bosses and government is the workers’ class anger and ability to stop production and defend themselves violently. One vital element is the fight against racism, mostly missing during the strike, as was solidarity with the now-ended militant strikes of black workers in Guadaloupe and Martinique. This is where communist leadership is crucial, forging the multi-racial unity and developing the communist class consciousness necessary to win the real prize — not merely reforms that the bosses take away but seizing state power, abolishing capitalism and running society in our interest. J

a name="El Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers">">"l Salvador: FMLN Gov’t. Will Serve Bosses, Not Workers

EL SALVADOR, March 23 — "I identify more with the Brazilian model than the Venezuelan one," said President-elect Mauricio Funes of the FMLN party. He added, "For me President Lula and his government are part of the ‘Democratic Army’ of a government that can send signals of confidence to the foreign and national investors."

Lula has promised Funes technical and economic cooperation, financing social projects and infrastructure through the National Bank of Brazil. This is one more leap in Brazilian capitalists growing political influence in Latin America.

Even though thousands of workers celebrated the FMLN victory, having the illusion of a change to a better life, the reality is revealed in the above statements and plans of Funes and FMLN leadership: guarantee the profits of foreign and national capitalists and therefore the exploitation of workers. This is not a victory for the working class; instead it continues the monster of capitalism with the face of a "red" government,

The open fascist capitalists of ARENA (the governing party for the last 20 years) and the murderers in the armed forces quickly accepted the victory of Funes because they know they’ll continue being the ruling class that will keep exploiting the workers.

Funes has not hidden his great admiration for big capitalists like Mexico’s Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest capitalists. He also felt greatly honored" that Obama and Hillary Clinton, representatives of history’s most vicious imperialists, congratulated him on becoming one more capitalist leader.

We workers shouldn’t have the illusion that Funes will make conditions better, that he’ll combat the effects of the worldwide economic crisis or halt the imperialists’ preparations for world war. In Funes’ first post-election speech, he said, "Tonight we should have the same feeling of hope and reconciliation that made possible the signing of the peace accords in our country," he said in his first speech after winning the Presidency. But he didn’t say the "peace" accords have only brought more poverty, unemployment, repression and death to workers and their families.

A real communist revolution is still the only answer to capitalism and the bosses’ crisis, to "21st Century Socialism" 1or phony leftists like Lula, who keep oppressing workers. Our struggle continues to be organizing the workers using the Party’s ideas and practices through class struggle, the distribution of CHALLENGE and the growth of the revolutionary communist PLP — fighting for a communist world without exploitation, money or capitalists.

LETTERS

a name="Raúl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model"><">R"úl Castro Following China’s Capitalist Model

I would like to add to the letter (CHALLENGE, 3/25) on the Perestroika of Fidel and Raúl Castro. Big changes are indeed taking place in Cuba, besides their national baseball team not reaching the finals of an international baseball championship for the first time in decades. It wasn’t just the former foreign Minister Pérez Roque and the Prime Minister Carlos Lage who were forced to resign but also the entire top hierarchy of the Foreign Trade, Fishing, Steel and Labor ministries.

They were replaced mostly by military men linked to Raúl. Many see this as a triumph of the "Chinese Road" which Raúl and his group are taking to develop capitalism in Cuba. Those who were forced to quit were labeled as "Talibans," or roadblocks to a Chinese-style modernization of the economy, despite their backing the more open capitalist reforms since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its subsidies to Cuba. They are even identified as too "Chavistas," since Raúl and his faction want to break with dependence on Venezuelan oil so as not to fall into the same hole following the end of Soviet subsidies.

Raúl wants to diversify while building the "Chinese model" of joint ventures between the state and foreign companies. And, like in China where the army plays an important role in many of the key economic sectors, Cuba’s military is already the biggest manager of enterprises there, involved in over 800 companies of all types, many linked to foreign investors.

While Raúl and his group don’t necessarily want to break with Venezuela’s Chávez, they’re emphasizing their relationship with Brazil, whose huge Petrobras oil company has many investments in Cuba. Brazil can also help Cuba with biofuels, like ethanol from sugar.

Brazil’s President Lula is also on very good terms with Obama. He recently visited Obama in Washington and advocated ending the U.S. embargo on Cuba. (The Obama administration just eased travelling restrictions to Cuba.) The Raúl group also wants to make more deals with Russia and China.

Raúl and his group realize the Cuban economy is being heavily affected by the world’s economic meltdown. Relying on Venezuela is shaky since its oil-based economy is being hit hard by the drop in the price of crude.

The price of nickel, Cuba’s main export, has declined 30%. Tourism, another big source of foreign currency, is also down. Worst of all was the huge losses Cuba suffered from the hurricanes sweeping the entire island in 2008.

Raúl and his group have opted for the only road they know, more capitalism. That’s what’s behind Cuba’s Perestroika.

Red Che

Camping Trip Brings H.S. Student Step Closer to PL

The PLP camping trip in February was wonderful. I met some old friends and made some new ones. The conversations were interesting and the recreation was excellent. It was truly a communist affair.

I don’t know how life in a communist society is, but this trip felt like it was a small taste of communism. There was a strong sense of community among the people. I like that tasks were given to different individuals or groups. Each task, in the end, benefited everyone. No one had any problem sharing their belongings.

There were a few faults with this trip. We did not get to talk about dialectics. The main focus of the workshops were the budget cuts, foreign policy, and Obama. Another fault was that the groups did not stay on topic. Some conversations were so good that it took a while before anybody brought them back to the original question.

This trip has brought me a step closer to the Party. The more I read CHALLENGE, talk to other comrades about what is going on, and hear about workers’ struggles against the bosses, the clearer it becomes that this capitalist society is no good and needs to be eradicated. This trip showed me that the struggles in the world give revolution a chance. The chance of a revolution may be small right now, but it is definitely not zero.

High School Comrade

Rulers Use Fear; Answer: Fight Back!

In discussing the article in the last CHALLENGE, The Seven Deadly Scenarios, one in our group commented that the army has been forced to recruit on an individualist basis (An Army of One), which makes it harder to marshal the patriotism they need. However, once soldiers get sent to Iraq, they can either be disgusted by what they observe and open to communist ideas, or can justify the horrors of war by allowing themselves to believe the patriotic lies they’re told.

As CHALLENGE frequently points out, there is a connection between war and fascism. In the U.S., the government has fostered street gangs to the point where, in many cities, more young people are killed at home than in Iraq. The bosses use the fear engendered by their gangs to justify metal detectors in schools, cameras everywhere and heavy police presence in working-class black and Latino neighborhoods. The average teenager believes that metal detectors and police in the school are "for our protection," not to intimidate us. As the article pointed out, the rulers will use fear of epidemics as an excuse to control the movement of people out of their neighborhoods. This is reminiscent of the Nazis who used the lie that "all the Jews have typhoid" as an excuse for locking them up in the ghettos. The U.S. government has been getting many victims of fascist policies to accept or promote those policies.

Because of the weaknesses and small size of the communist movement, it is easier for the bosses to use fear to promote passivity. For example, some teachers would not fight school closings because they thought they’d be more likely to get another job if they kept quiet. On the other hand, there are many examples of the working class fighting back, which we read in the pages of CHALLENGE.

However, we are not working hard enough to strengthen the side of the contradiction that promotes fighting back and fighting for working-class control — communism. Sometimes we put too much stock in what the ruling class is doing and don’t think clearly enough about the ways we can make a difference by winning enough people to the communist side, so that we can smash the lying, murderous capitalist class.

CHALLENGE Reader

a name="Spain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity">">"pain: PL’er Aims to Grow Communist Activity

Some time ago when comrades here drifted apart — vacations, changes in work for some, and others returning to their countries of origin — I felt disillusioned with the political work we were doing in Spain. I was too mechanical in just counting the number of people that we had around us, rather than trying to understand that we’ve been doing positive work to build PLP internationally.

CHALLENGE and much of the communist political line of PLP has been distributed and discussed with many workers from Italy, France, Ireland, Turkey, Portugal, India and other parts of Europe. Some of these workers have emigrated back to these areas of the world.

Currently I count on two other people who are close to us but are still studying PLP’s documents and practice. I’m trying to expand our communist activity and we are all working to increase our commitment to the communist ideas of PLP.

PLP’s work is not simple, though it should not be necessary to say this. The working class is bombarded by capitalist ideas that try to divert workers’ minds away from the reality of oppression in the world. But people now are thinking about the economic and social crisis which gives us the opportunity to take the initiative to explain that what’s really happening is the owners of all the wealth want even more as they prepare for a third world war.

I’m proud to be a member of PLP and I want to dedicate myself to serve the working class, though it’s hard not having a comrade with the same ideas to work with. I struggle to continue the work of fighting for a better society, a communist society. I get up every day thinking of ways to talk to people and tell them about the Party’s ideas, but a visit from a PLP comrade to Spain wouldn’t hurt!

I hope where it’s possible that there are at least two who are thinking, planning, and building the Party. The working class needs the ideas of PLP and we have to continue figuring out how to win more workers to join the ranks of the PLP. Long Live Communism.

Red Comrade in Spain

Spain: Students and Immigrant Workers Fight Back

MADRID, March 23 — Students in Spain have been protesting the Bolonia plan to privatize public universities. Last week, the Barcelona cops viciously attacked students supporting the occupation of fellow students at the university there. The local "socialist" authorities fully supported the cops’ attack.

Yesterday immigrant workers marched in Madrid and other cities against the subprime fraud. Spain, like Britain, the U.S. and Ireland, were among the hardest-hit by the subprime collapse since their economies relied increasingly on speculation by bankers and real estate swindlers. The marchers complained about the lack of help they’re getting over what they call "real estate fraud and garbage mortgages."

The marches were organized by the National Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages and by the National Coordination of Educadoreans in Spain. The said they were sold overvalued homes and apartments and were charged four times as much as other customers. Again, racism is part and parcel of capitalism worldwide.

The marchers demanded a moratorium on their mortgage payments and other changes. But these workers shouldn’t expect much from capitalism in such deep crisis. Indeed the best lesson they can learn from this disaster is that a system which can’t satisfy the housing needs of millions worldwide must be destroyed.

March on May Day!

May Day (May 1st) is the working-class’s international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, a general strike that spread to workers nation-wide. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.

It’s the day when the world’s working class "holds a review of its forces, mobilized for the first time as One army, [under] One flag...[to] make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united."

Ever since, with communist leadership, it has symbolized workers’ demands and class interests, united in the fight against capitalism. But by the 1950’s, most "communist" parties had abandoned these principles. Union leaders became lieutenants of the bosses, and either renounced May Day or stripped it of its revolutionary character.

In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red banners of May Day in the U.S. It has organized May Day marches and activities in many countries for 38 years, to unite workers around their universal demands, regardless of capitalist-created borders. These include opposing imperialist war, racism, the special oppression of women, wage slavery and fascist police terror while championing unity of immigrant and citizen workers and the only solution to all these attacks facing the international working class — communist revolution. J

Assemble:

N.Y.- May 2, 11 am at Linden Blvd. & Flatbush Ave.

L.A.- May 1, 11 am at Olympic & Broadway

a name="Obama, Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War"></a>"bama, Bosses’ Immigration ‘Reform’: Slave Labor, Cannon Fodder for War

In preparations for wider, global war to maintain their world domination, Obama and U.S. rulers need liberal fascism: to sharply attack workers while trying to win us to their side. Domestically, they need slave labor for their war industries and tens of million of soldiers for their imperialist battlefields. Spurred by the deepening economic crisis and stiffer competition from other imperialists and regional bosses, they want to pass a Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill to achieve these aims, using millions of undocumented workers.

They’ve been pursuing two roads simultaneously: terroristic immigration raids and a lengthy road to legalization. Fascistic raids can terrorize immigrants into accepting super-exploitation, driving immigrants into the arms of the rulers’ politicians, patriotism and elections as a "solution."

A NY Times editorial (2/1) attacked "Nativists" or open anti-immigrant racists: "Americans want immigration solved, and they realize that mass deportations will not do that." Meanwhile, they praise the "rule of law" (bosses’ law), a call which liberal immigrants’ rights leaders adopted, accepting fascist immigration reform rules making legalization a long, expensive process, as the lesser evil to open racism. But they’re really two sides of the same coin.

The top imperialists’ "we-love-immigrants" line means low wages and cannon fodder for war, along with U.S. citizen workers. Another NY Times editorial attacked the Minutemen and called for "accepting" immigrants. A series on immigrants notes the growing numbers of immigrants and the importance of schools in teaching them "American" values.

So, despite the economic crisis, these bosses in their media champion this Bill, while portraying the 12 million undocumented workers and immigrants in general in a favorable light. They also use their past and present high-ranking fascistic officials and politicians to echo this call.

Obama and Biden toe the bosses’ line on immigration "reform." They "Support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens." (Whitehouse.gov, 1/21, 2009)

Janet Napolitano, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary and new chief of ICE (immigration police), said (2007 Washington Post op-ed) : "Don’t label me soft on illegal immigration…. [I] supervised the prosecution of more than 6,000 immigration felonies [as Arizona Attorney General] and I govern a state where, in 2005, there were 550,000 apprehensions of ‘illegal’ immigrants." In 2006, she sent the National Guard to the border to attack undocumented workers.

Meanwhile, Napolitano has criticized construction of the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and urged Congress to pass the June 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill. In January 2008, Napolitano called for enhanced border security and said the U.S. should crack down on employers who hire "illegal" immigrants. She also advocated a path to citizenship for "illegal" immigrants now here.

Michael Chertoff, Former Homeland Security Secretary — who, as head of ICE, terrorized the immigrant community, deporting 350,000 undocumented workers nationwide in 2008 alone — also lobbied Congress in 2007 for the immigration reform bill that failed to pass. In a recent interview on the impact of the economic crisis on immigration reform, he said it’s needed to be ready when the economy becomes vibrant again because the U.S. will need "some more workers coming from other parts of the world…" (CFR.org, Council on Foreign Affairs website, 3/16/2009).

With Chertoff’s remarks about a "vibrant economy" and the media’s platitude about "hard-working undocumented workers," these liberal bosses try to hide their "covenant with death" in preparation for global war and fascism.

The slave-labor conditions imposed on immigrant workers are becoming widespread in industry as the bosses also force citizen workers to accept layoffs, lower wages and more fascistic working conditions. PLP fights for unity of citizen and immigrant workers against racist unemployment, immigration raids and laws that mean indentured servitude and a military draft. We also fight harassment, speed-up and slave-labor working conditions.

Racism against immigrant, black and Latino workers is the cutting edge of the bosses’ attacks on all workers. We fight to unite the working class against racism, to abolish the bosses’ borders with communist revolution. In a communist society, all workers will be welcomed and needed to work and fight for the interests of the international working class.

a name="Ex-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?">">"x-CIA Agent’s Book: Was Iran Real Winner in Iraq War?

There’s much to learn from ex-CIA agent Robert Baer’s latest book, "The Devil We Know, Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower." Baer (the guy who George Clooney played in "Syriana") lays out Iran’s interests and policies in the Middle East, aiming to reform U.S. policy in the region. However, his analysis of the area’s dynamics, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, is very insightful and by-and-large correct.

He says Iran is a very complex society, poorly understood in the West. Although a police state, its population is becoming more liberal and modernized. However, Baer ignores the fact that 30 years ago Iranian workers and youth, going beyond liberalism, could have overthrown both the pro-U.S. Shah as well as capitalism. Unfortunately, misled by the fake left, the revolution was co-opted by the reactionary Islamic mullahs who rule today.

The U.S. sees the bombastic President Ahmadinejad as the center of power, but control really lies with the religious and security leadership. Likewise, Iran’s influence in Iraq, western Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza, through indirect proxies and policies, is much greater than is understood by Westerners. Much of this power has been inadvertently handed to Iran through the disastrous policies of the U.S. and its allies.

After a costly eight-year war with Iraq (1980-1988), lran was unable to topple Saddam Hussein, but U.S. rulers did it for them in 2003. The U.S. fiasco in Iraq allowed Iran to increase its control. Iraq’s Shia majority, long oppressed by Saddam’s Sunni Baath Party, welcomed the help of Shiite Iran. Washington’s first choice to run Iraq was Chalabi, a double agent working for Iran. In 1980, the Da’wa party, which now holds the major share of power, fled to Iran for protection from Saddam Hussein and remains heavily indebted to it. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (now the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council), was founded in ’82 sponsored by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Iran also co-opted the most militant Shiite nationalist, Muqtada al-Sadr, who fled there when the U.S. defeated his forces in 2003. After the invasion, the British supposedly controlled Basra, the large city in southern Iraq, which contains most of its oil. But the Iranians have controlled it politically, their adherents winning the elections and administering charities and leading mosques. The petroleum-export facilities are supplying 600,000 barrels a day to Iran despite supposed British management. Thus, Iran controls or heavily influences many of Iraq’s main players without sending its own forces into the country.

Western Afghanistan has also long been an area Iran seeks to control. The destruction of the Taliban was another gift from the U.S., leaving a vacuum Iran rushed to fill. Herat, a 40% Shiite city, had a governor friendly to Iran. NATO removed him but made him energy minister! Central Asian gas must pass through either Iran or Afghanistan via Herat to get to Pakistan, and Iran intends to control either route, thus wielding influence over that country. Iran also has the power to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow exit from the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world’s daily oil supply passes, to a degree holding the whole world hostage.

Iranian influence in the Mid-East is also growing. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, the PLO fled in disarray. Then Iran organized the many angry young Lebanese men into Hezbollah. With patience and secrecy, they built Hezbollah into an effective military and political force, able to defeat Israel and dominate Lebanese politics.

Long anxious to gain a foothold with Hamas but unable to access Gaza, Iranians were waiting when, in 1982, Israel stupidly expelled the Hamas leadership to Lebanon. Since then they’ve influenced Hamas to de-emphasize terrorism and become a serious military organization.

The Iranians have also been gaining a foothold in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. Militant Sunni leaders are now willing to unite with Shiite Iran because no Sunni leaders have fought Israel and many, like the princes of Saudi Arabia, are known for corruption and self-indulgence. Extremists like Al Qaeda promote useless isolated terrorist attacks. Iran has been incorruptible, reliable and successful in building a political and military network of all Muslims in the region.

Baer warns U.S. rulers that Iran cannot be contained by force. That would require hundreds of thousands of troops that are indefinitely in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, a U.S. attack on Iran would probably fail even if invaded by a huge army. And Iran would almost certainly close Hormuz and/or destroy the Gulf’s oil facilities.

Thus, Baer says, the only realistic option is negotiations. He suggests guaranteeing Iranian internal security and ending the embargo in exchange for Iran ending its support of Hamas and Hezbollah. He would also acknowledge Iran’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan and establish an international body to monitor oil supplies and nuclear arms, including Israel’s.

This book is very informative, but even if the U.S. ruling class were to follow Baer’s prescriptions for U.S. imperialism’s survival, all its contradictions would still remain. Obama is expanding the war in Afghanistan, is maintaining a large presence in Iraq and supporting Israeli apartheid.

Whatever the exact pathway, massive war looms over the region for the control of resources. The U.S. will almost certainly fare badly in this conflict, while killing untold numbers of soldiers and civilians. Our job is to turn the guns around on these imperialist murderers and begin to build an international society based on anti-racism, anti-nationalism and egalitarianism — communism.

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

No free lawyers for immigrants

NYT, 3/3 – In the heart of Manhattan, amid one of the greatest concentrations of legal muscle in the world, hundreds of New York’s immigrant poor are locked up with no access to a lawyer as they fight deportation.... In the immigration court system no defendant has the right to a court-appointed lawyer, and some of the most vulnerable end up in the hands of fly-by-night operators who bungle cases wholesale…." Justice should not depend on the income level of immigrants,".…many should not have been placed in deportation proceedings by the government in the first place… While money for judges, clerks and free legal services is short, the Department of Homeland Security has been very well-financed…"They have tons of new lawyers who are raring to go, and now they’re just arresting lots of people and shoveling them into immigration court." Meanwhile, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said immigrant communities must learn to stop hiring bad lawyers.

Sexist military hides rapes

NYT, 3/2 – She was raped when she was in the Navy. "He was very rough," she said…."My military career ended. My assailant’s didn’t." The truly chilling fact is that, as the Pentagon readily admits, the overwhelming majority of rapes that occur in the military go unreported, perhaps as many as 80 percent. And most of the men accused of attacking women receive little or no punishment. The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious.

There is no real desire in the military to modify this aspect of its culture. It is an environment in which the overwhelming tendency has been to see all women civilian and military, young and old, American and foreign — solely as sexual objects.

No safety net for illegal work

NYT, 3/22 – Many Americans who lost jobs are turning for help to the government’s unemployment safety net, with job assistance and unemployment insurance. But immigrants without legal status, by law, do not have access to it. They are clinging to low-wage jobs, often working more hours for less money, and taking whatever work they can find, no matter the conditions.

Despite the mounting pressures, many of the "illegal" immigrants are resisting leaving the country. After years of working here, they say, they have homes and education for their children. "I’ve got my family, my wife, my kids. Everything is here."

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 2000 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 leftwing groups….Children led a life of fascist doctrine, harsh discipline and Catholic ritual.

Information: Print

CHALLENGE, March 25, 2009

Information: 25 March 2009 313 hits

Communist Response to Racist Unemployment: Employed and Jobless, Unite to Fight the Bosses

U.S. Unemployed Soars to 30 Million

a href="#Rulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers">Rule"s’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers

a href="#Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?">"raq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?

Fighting Racist Deportations Can Build PLP

a href="#Calif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts">"alif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts

a href="#Oaxaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress">"axaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress

50,000 Rally in NYC: Cut the Bosses, Not the Budget

Union Leaders Have No Real Answer to 30,000 Layoffs

AFL-CIO Hacks Deflate Angry Workers

a href="#Katrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery">Katr"na Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery

Germany: Patriots, Socialists, Union Fakers, Neo-Nazis Thwart Workers

Obama-Bosses-UAW Gang-up Mugs Ford Workers

Letters

Hero of Salvador War Is Reborn in PLP

a href="#Airport Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down">Ai"port Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down

Castro Brothers Continue Perestroika

a href="#Anger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker">"nger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker

Bangladesh Army Mutiny, Sri Lanka Civil War Tied to Oil Dogfight

a href="#Working Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women">"orking Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women

a href="#France’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops">"rance’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops

RED EYE on the NEWS

Marx got no respect, but now…
Old-time reds built China’s base
Asbestos poisoning for a profit
For Arab public, US is terrorist

Communist Response to Racist Unemployment: Employed and Jobless, Unite to Fight the Bosses

World capitalism has produced an economic earthquake that is throwing tens of millions of workers onto the streets. U.S. unemployment is approaching 30 million (see box). In China, 26 million jobless migrants are seeking work (which is not even the total unemployment figure) provoking protests at factories and riots at government offices. Hundreds of thousands are being laid off in Europe, and if GM goes under, it’s curtains for another 300,000 there.

In The U.S., ‘These Jobs Are Not Coming Back’

The current crisis is leading to a "wrenching re-structuring of the American economy." (NY Times, 3/7) "These jobs are not coming back," says Wachovia’s chief economist. "Many companies are abandoning whole areas of business."(NYT) With U.S. car sales having plummeted nearly 50% since 2007 — an annual pace of 17 million down to 9 million — which would "leave a lot of unneeded auto factories."(NYT)

This is exactly what Karl Marx analyzed as the fundamental contradiction in capitalism causing such crises: a planless system in which each capitalist tries to capture as much of the market as possible, resulting in the overproduction (over capacity) of the means of production. All the capital investment in hundreds of factories is lost as they close. Laid-off workers can’t buy the tremendous amount of products manufactured in these "unneeded factories," leading to more layoffs and home foreclosures, which in turn depresses house values, aggravating the crisis still more.

The Obama Administration: Of, By and For the Bosses

Obama’s bank-bailout program only serves the capitalist class which he and all U.S. presidents represent. They will use fascism to discipline their own class to toe the line; to counter workers’ rebellions against the bosses’ attacks; and to promote their oil wars which Obama is expanding in South Asia. Their class interest is to save the profit system at the expense of tens of millions of workers, employed and unemployed, and cannot solve the crisis for us. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who suffer racist unemployment, double the jobless and home foreclosure rates. This is based on centuries of racist discrimination and super-exploitation which nets super-profits for the bosses, a foundation for their system.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s — which this deepening downturn is fast approaching — communists led millions of jobless workers into the streets demanding jobs and unemployment benefits and organized hundreds of thousands in sit-down strikes in the mass production industries for unionization and the 8-hour day. But unfortunately they did not point out to workers that these crises are built into the system. Unless there is a communist revolution to overthrow these bosses, the control of production and state power will always be used to take away any reforms — which is exactly what happened.

U.S. union leaders are defenders of the system and therefore are in the bosses’ hip pockets. They have demoralized workers and have sunk union membership from 35% of the private industry workforce to 7%. When these hacks are forced by rank-and-file pressure to do something about these attacks — like the March 5, 50,000-strong march in New York City — it is to deflate the anger of the workers. After decades of betrayals and anti-communism by the union hacks, workers’ anger is slowly growing. To channel this anger into fighting capitalism, the real cause of their misery, instead of looking for other "saviors" (be it a liberal fascist á la Obama or a conservative fascist), communists must build a base for our politics while involved in any fightback — using CHALLENGE as our ideological tool. This fightback could include any or all of the following:

Mass Action Is The Order Of The Day

• Organize strikes against layoffs; stop work if co-workers are being laid off;

• Establish union committees to unite those still working with the unemployed, led by rank-and-filers defying foot-dragging by sellout union leaders;

• Win local unions to organize marches on government buildings and mass demonstrations surrounding companies that announce future layoffs;

• Raise demands in unions, community groups, churches, schools and colleges to unite with workers in their areas to protest bosses’ attacks;

• Support striking workers in our areas, such as those at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx, NY and elsewhere, with funds and by joining picket lines;

• Organize students to participate in these actions and to support their parents who are either on strike, face layoffs or can mobilize their co-workers into action;

• Reach across all borders in solidarity with workers internationally who are facing these same attacks, especially auto workers who are in a unique position to unite against the auto bosses who have "globalized."

No doubt many rank-and-file workers will come up with additional ideas for action. But it is the job of communists in PLP and their close friends to inject our red ideas into this struggle, to do what was not done in the 1930s: advance the need for communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven capitalist system that has thrived on unemployment, forcing workers to suffer the losses caused by the bosses’ crisis. These ideas can be spread effectively by the mass sale of CHALLENGE, the expansion of CHALLENGE networks and winning workers to subscribe to the paper.

By upping the ante of class struggle around the issue of mass unemployment, we can raise the level of understanding within the working class to the question of capitalism’s inability to provide a decent life for workers everywhere. This leads to the need to destroy it and put in place a communist system within which workers receive the full benefit of all the value we, and we alone, produce.

U.S. Unemployed Soars to 30 Million

Behind the phony government unemployment rate figure of 8.1% is the fact that this represents "only" 12.5 million. It doesn’t count the 5.6 million who have given up looking for non-existent jobs nor the 8.6 million underemployed who are forced to work part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs. (All figures from the NY Times, 3/7)

Add to that 26.7 million total the 1.6 million in prisons for non-violent, mostly drug "offenses" (of the total 2.4 million inmates in the U.S.) who never should have been jailed in the first place, plus several million on welfare because there are no jobs, plus the hundreds of thousands who joined the military because they couldn’t find jobs (and are continuing to do so during this depression) — all told the real unemployment figure is easily 30 million, or 20% of the labor force.

Even the government’s monthly figures are distorted. They just admitted that the jobless figures for December and January were under-reported by 161,000, which means that the latest February figure of 651,000 will probably increase to well over 700,000 a month from now.

Figures don’t lie, but liars can sure figure.

a name="Rulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers"></a>"ulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers

As imperialist rivalry, now aggravated by economic crisis, keeps intensifying, potential bloodbaths far deadlier than Iraq or Afghanistan are emerging globally. Andrew Krepinevich, a Defense Department strategist has just written "7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century." (Krepinevich is no armchair pundit; see box at right for his résumé.)

Publicity for the book identifies as plausible cataclysms: "(1) the unraveling of the state of Pakistan; (2) a nuclear attack on the United States with materials covertly transported across borders; (3) a pandemic influenza sweeping across the globe; (4) escalation of an Arab-Israeli conflict toward a nuclear showdown; (5) a U.S. standoff with China over Taiwan; (6) the crippling of an increasingly fragile global economy; and (7) a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq gone bad." Any one could cause massive loss of life and provoke an all-out U.S.-led war.

(An influenza pandemic scenario has produced bosses’ plans to use cops and the military to prevent any movement of large segments of populations to go to their jobs, in or out of the country or anywhere else without permission. A future CHALLENGE article will detail this fascist scenario.)

Though things can change rapidly, the first and last cases seem the most immediate. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is already inflamed by the Taliban and a military bent on war with nuclear-armed India. But additionally, Foreign Policy Magazine, an arm of the liberal Washington Post (March/April 2009), says: "Pakistan’s small but politically powerful middle class has been slammed by the collapse of the country’s stock market. Meanwhile, a rising proportion of the country’s huge population of young men is staring unemployment in the face. It is not a recipe for political stability."

a name="Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?">">"raq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?

The murderous efforts of 147,000 regular U.S. troops and an equal number of allies and mercenaries in Iraq can’t stop frequent bombings. On March 8, a suicide attack killed 28 people at Iraq’s police academy, and 33 more the next day. Obama’s proposed shift of U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan can only embolden Islamic militants in Iraq. GIs may be back in Baghdad sooner than expected.

Scenarios Four and Five, standard Pentagon doctrine for years, take on enhanced urgency in the current economy. The U.S. counter-threat to Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel over Palestine dates back to the Clinton administration. Checking the growth of a Chinese blue-water navy that can dominate Mid-East/Far East oil-supply routes was one reason President Jimmy Carter began his Persian Gulf Rapid Deployment Force. The latest financial crash only increases U.S. rulers’ needs to forcibly control the world’s cheapest — and thus most profitable — fuel supplies.

Item Six concerns a more belligerent Russia. Oil at $140 per barrel enabled Putin to buy off his population with jobs and other material incentives. Now he must resort to whipping up the warlike empire-rebuilding spirit that brought him to power a decade ago. As Foreign Policy (March-April, 2009) says, "He stirred dormant nostalgia for the lost Soviet empire...." Now Putin faces "an imploding economy, expanding economic hardship, and an increasingly desperate Russian state that must rely on repression and nationalism."

Rulers Preparing for Two Simultaneous Wars

Krepinevich’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) says the Navy must "prepare to fight and win two overlapping conflicts" against a continental-sized adversary [China or Russia] and a mid-sized nuclear-armed regional adversary [Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, or India]. It urges the Navy both to cut costs and to fire all its bullets before they rust. "Exploit ships now in production to greatest extent possible. Reduce total number of different ship types. Reduce crew sizes." (CSBA website). CSBA reports underlie an ongoing series of New York Times editorials on restructuring the military.

Workers Need to Take the Offensive

Two scenarios are missing here. One is the kind of mass anti-war organizing in the Vietnam era (led most militantly by our Party) that has made restoring the draft politically unacceptable. The CSBA considers conscription an "extreme measure" even in a deepening depression with sharpening challenges to the U.S. rulers’ empire.

But the rulers sorely need to beef up their forces. They’re not giving up on an expanded military. That’s why they’re organizing a "back-door" draft — Obama’s National Service, with pumped-up patriotism and loyalty (to the bosses) to induce millions of youth to join the military in exchange for college tuition or, for undocumented immigrant youth, U.S. citizenship.

This leads to the most important scenario of all, the need to fight for communist revolution. Because of the demise of the old communist movement rulers worldwide have been able to channel workers’ anger down dead-end nationalist, ethnic and religious paths.

That’s why communists and other militant workers need to up the ante of class struggle against the profit-driven ruling class, hell-bent on imperialist wars. We must mount an offensive on racist unemployment (see front page), win soldiers and sailors to join their brothers and sisters in other countries to rebel against the common enemy: the capitalist warmakers. We must organize strikes against the rulers’ attacks on workers’ living standards, against their wars and their attempt to implement fascist measures in the workplace.

In all this, we must unite the working class — black, Latino, Asian and white, men and women — against the rulers’ crises that worsen workers’ misery exponentially. All this will move us towards our Party’s long-term goal, rebuilding revolutionary class consciousness to prepare our class for communist revolution.??

CEO For Murder, Inc.

Andrew Krepinevich has a 20-year career as an Army officer, teaching at West Point and serving in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and Quadrennial Review, the Pentagon’s top long-range planning bodies. He participated in Clinton’s 1997 force review that set the stage for U.S.-led mass murder in Serbia and Iraq. Today Krepinevich runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an outfit studying which hardware and troop configurations can give the U.S. war machine its "biggest bang for the buck" in coming wars.

Fighting Racist Deportations Can Build PLP

CHICAGO, March 8 — "La lucha obrera no tiene frontera!" ("Workers’ struggles have no borders!") As the chant filled the banquet hall, hearts swelled with pride. Workers and youth, citizen and immigrant, especially the wonderful BP oil refinery workers swept up in a racist immigration raid last December, celebrated the unity we have found in fighting back. After a PLP member delivered her message of solidarity, salsa music filled the air.

On only a week’s notice, a small grassroots community center organized a fundraiser to help the BP workers meet their daily needs. They had worked for a contractor cleaning the giant BP refinery in East Chicago, Indiana, when they were arrested last December. At a meeting to discuss "parking in the lot," doors were locked and ICE agents swarmed in, arresting 11 women and four men. Since then, they’ve been fighting courts, cops and crooks.

One crook, their priest, held a fundraiser that collected over $14,500, reflecting the support the workers’ enjoy. But most of the money has gone to a politically-connected lawyer the priest hired to represent only a few workers. This lawyer doesn’t speak Spanish and comunicates only through the priest.

Most workers are seeking their own legal representation with community center help, but are being denied funds for attorney fees. Those who found other attorneys see their cases moving much more quickly than those going with the priest’s lawyer, leading many to suspect they’re dragging the cases out to drain more money from the funds raised for the workers and their families.

Workers are outraged over their trust being abused. Those families the fund was created to help continue to struggle to pay legal fees. Because the BP workers, many single moms, are unable to work, rent, utilities and grocery bills are mounting, causing tremendous stress. The community center has taken women to food pantries and assisted them in finding discounted or free legal aid, but that has done little to ease the incredible economic burden.

PLP members donated time and money to make this event possible. But the largest contribution was our revolutionary communist politics and our message of internationalism and multi-racial, working-class solidarity, delivered by our comrade’s talk and evidenced by our example. Three tables of comrades and friends of all colors, immigrant and citizen, were among the first to arrive, took tickets at the door and picked up garbage before leaving.

A vigil has been organized for the 9th of every month, to show support for the BP workers. While it is difficult to win many away from being under their priest’s manipulative thumb, we’re sharpening the contradiction. Our dedication stands in contrast to this opportunist priest.

Through disciplined work, spreading CHALLENGE and patiently building strong ties, we must help the BP workers day-to-day, and remind them capitalism will never solve their problems, a system in crisis and headed to fascist terror and wider wars. Only communist revolution can defeat the bosses who profit from our misery.

We steel ourselves for the long haul, but fighting for a communist world, with no borders and based on equality, is the solution. Out of this struggle we can win BP workers and others to march on May Day under the red flag of PLP! ?

a name="Calif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts">">"alif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts

PASADENA, CA, February 27 — Hundreds of students from fourteen community colleges rallied to fight the budget cuts that are devastating their campuses. College administrators tried to divert their anger into praise for the state legislature, but PL members and friends helped to organize chanting that disrupted the official event and led to a short breakaway rally.

"I thought we changed the vibe overall," commented a student. "Our group felt good leaving there. I had so many comments of empowerment, courage, and fight unlike anything I have ever seen before."

A rift between students and administrators broke out before the rally when an administrator scolded students from Rio Hondo College for carrying signs that read "WTF: Where’s the funding?" A student challenged her and a brief confrontation ensued. Ironically this same administrator later praised the emcee, a foul-mouthed comedian, as "the perfect representation of the community college mission."

The emcee declared, "this is a thank-you rally, not a protest rally." This was news to the hundreds of students that came out and are battling with class cancellations, disappearing tutors, overcrowded classrooms etc, as a result of the latest round of budget cuts. "What are we supposed to be thankful for?" one student asked angrily.

The rally went from bad to worse when the emcee launched into a half-hour "comedy" routine. Like many stand-up comics, his act was an unfunny mix of racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism. Many students were disgusted. "We didn’t come here to be entertained," one said, "they just brought us here to use us."

One delegation of students met briefly and then started chanting: "They say cutback, we say fight back!" The comedian responded by insulting the group of mostly black students. They chanted louder disrupting his act. He asked the audience to applaud if they wanted him to continue. Some did, but most didn’t. Shaken, he quickly ended his routine and a brass band started to play, signaling the official end of the rally. Then the entire delegations from three colleges — almost fifty students — moved to the sidewalk and started their own rally!

While most students bought into the rally theme that community colleges are "the key to the California economy" and that a college education was their key to the future, many took PL leaflets, CHALLENGE and talked with Party members about the nature of the capitalist crisis. Our leaflet attacked these illusions, stating, "Students need to ally with industrial workers and soldiers who are the key to bringing down this capitalist system..." We also explained, "the alternative is communism a classless society where workers hold power."

Earlier discussions about the economic crisis, and a video showing mass communist-led protests in Detroit during the Great Depression, helped to prepare students politically for the rally. By ones and twos, more are reading and distributing CHALLENGE, and thinking seriously about joining our Party. The struggle against cutbacks will continue on our campuses and on buses to Sacramento and open more doors as we build for more class struggle leading up to May Day 2009 and the Industrial Summer Projects in Seattle and LA. ?

a name="Oaxaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress">">"axaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress

OAXACA, MEXICO, Feb. 21- 22 — The 3rd Congress of APPO (Popular Assembly for the People of Oaxaca), met here with over 700 delegates — teachers, farm workers, indigenous communities, workers, students and others — on a reform agenda: popular democracy, against privatization, freedom for political prisoners and the firing of Governor Ulises Ruiz, among others.

During the two days, a few dozen members and friends of PLP distributed 1,000 CHALLENGES (asking for voluntary donations) and 300 leaflets among the participants and our friends in Oaxaca. A comrade who was active inside the Congress brought 100 CHALLENGES to the participants.

It was impressive to see how many people sat reading our revolutionary newspaper, especially the article that specifically exposed the APPO leaders’ reformist, opportunist line while also calling on the masses to join us in the fight for a real communist revolution. We expected to be attacked verbally since the article above sharply criticized opportunists in APPO for trying to use the movement to obtain elective office. But, on the contrary, people read the article and leaflet with great interest. And then the majority of the Congress decided that all those who want to belong to APPO must renounce participating with the capitalist politicians, and that APPO leaders can’t use their position for electoral careers. We believe that was partially due to our Party’s position, showing that our presence had a big effect, even though we’re not the only group in APPO against the bosses’ elections. We were very inspired by this and our other activities there.

In the afternoon, PLP had its own communist school with 28 people attending. We discussed the international situation, the CHALLENGE article about the militarization of Mexico and the PLP document on Democratic Centralism.

The discussion was comradely but sharp, mainly on democratic centralism, which was used to discuss the best way to present the Party, communist ideas and our hatred of the rotten capitalist system during the May Day marches. Some thought it was important to consider the fascist militarization and its relation to the Party’s long-term life and development. Others thought about the moral need and anger to show that the Party, its red flags and communist ideas are alive and well.

One comrade said, "We have to vote" on this issue, but the majority disagreed, saying we must use democratic centralism and more discussion to come to an agreement that benefits the whole Party and the international working class. The responsibility lies with the collective, not with one person.

Part of the event included visiting an organic products co-op. One of the partners explained that previously it had been a big ranch, terribly super-exploiting the farmworkers, but now they had taken it over. Some comrades explained that unfortunately, because of their high prices, these products are not accessible to people with little money. They’re for an elite market. In this area we had a friendly get-together.

This weekend was one more step in the development of the political understanding of each Party activist, in developing personal relations where the essence of our lives, the fight for communism, unites us struggle by struggle, reaffirming that our road is communist revolution and our life is one of struggle.??

50,000 Rally in NYC: Cut the Bosses, Not the Budget

NEW YORK CITY, March 5 — "Students and Labor: Shut the City Down" chanted hundreds of City University of NY students and teachers blocking traffic as they marched into a City Hall rally of over 50,000 workers and students demonstrating against multi-billionaire Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts. The rally included members of the United Federation of Teachers, the Hotel Workers Union, 1199-SEIU and several other major unions. The cuts fall particularly hard on black and Latino workers who, because of racism, suffer double rates of unemployment and whose communities are especially hard hit by the cuts in services.

The usual suspects of union misleaders and politicians dominated the speakers platform, including Congressman Anthony Weiner who’s running for mayor declaring that "too much" is being paid to city workers.

PL high school teachers and students had planned to rally at one location and then march into the demonstration chanting and holding a banner. Throughout the day they urged their co-workers and friends to join their contingent. They arrived at the rally holding their banner on a metal fencing, and then formed a picket line within the rally while chanting on bullhorns, "Make the bosses take the losses," calling on all workers to strike against the budget cuts. Workers joined our chants, raising their fists and taking CHALLENGES and leaflets. Many of the students felt it was a positive experience, militantly expressing communist ideas and helping the Party’s growth.

Hundreds of CUNY students from Hunter College, joined by a number of professors and staff, including PL’ers, had walked out of their classes to protest tuition hikes, layoffs and the budget cuts. They were chanting, "They say cut back, we say FIGHT BACK!" and "money for schools, not for war!" They then joined a rally of another several hundred college students from CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College condemning the budget cuts and marched to the larger rally at City Hall.

The proposed 600-dollar per year tuition hike will push thousands of CUNY’s mostly black, Latino and international students out of the university. Speakers angrily described how there already aren’t enough resources to meet Hunter College student needs; most are already stretched thin by working and attending school. Several condemned the bank bailouts and tied the current struggle to the history of CUNY students’ fight for free tuition, against racism, layoffs and imperialist war.

One hospital worker led a contingent of 70 from his workplace on the very day that two hospitals shut their doors for good in Queens. Many workers wanted to participate and take action but the union mis-leaderships limit them to supporting liberal Democratic Party politicians, refusing to organize strikes against the cuts.

The ruling class is pushing workers to the wall to take the losses from the bosses’ worldwide economic meltdown. The hundreds of billions Obama’s plan is siphoning off to the banks and spending on expanding the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is coming out of workers’ hides. This is all testimony to the failure of capitalism to provide for workers’ needs and intensifying their oppression. It opens the door to win millions to communist revolution as the only solution to the hell created by the profit system, with its bosses, bankers, racism and imperialist war.

Union Leaders Have No Real Answer to 30,000 Layoffs

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, March 6 — Workers from several public-worker unions picketed La Fortaleza, Governor Luis Fortuño’s building, protesting his March 3 announcement threatening possibly 30,000 layoffs among public workers here. The new governor claims this is the only way to deal with the island’s enormous budget deficit. This is another example of the bosses and their politicians trying to make workers pay for capitalism’s crisis.

Unfortunately, the union leaders here have themselves helped the bosses. In exchange for some crumbs, they agreed to accept Law 45 which basically bans public-worker strikes. During last year’s militant mass teachers’ strike, unions like those here that are part of the SEIU-Change to Win federation sided with then governor Acevedo Vila against the teachers. (Dennis Rivera, a former pro-independence activist here and now a big-time hack in SEIU was behind this). So this history of sellouts has left workers with still another obstacle in fighting the latest wave of attacks — one reason why today’s protest was smaller than expected.

But nothing lasts forever. Workers are beginning to realize that playing nice with the bosses doesn’t pay. Workers need to build a revolutionary communist leadership to learn that a system that cannot provide jobs and services for workers must be destroyed. ?

AFL-CIO Hacks Deflate Angry Workers

CHICAGO, February 17 — It was hard not to be moved when you first entered the Plumbers Union Hall at the rally to pass the Labor Free Choice Act (union certification based on a majority of signed union cards, not on a vote). Thousands of workers stood shoulder to shoulder wearing T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts and carrying signs reading, "Strength in Unity," and "UNITE for Power." Men and women, young and old of all colors, speaking all languages, greeted friends and introduced themselves to strangers.

The energy and enthusiasm was electric. It was easy to see how unions seduce workers. On one level, parts of their message is somewhat similar to ours. But as the rally proceeded, it became clear that the similarities are barely skin deep.

The AFL-CIO fat cats got the crowd "in the mood" with a black youth gospel choir singing "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful." Every time a misleader said it was "time for action," and "the City runs on our backs," workers cheered and exchanged high fives.

But enthusiasm waned as speaker after speaker praised Barack Obama and told the workers to call their Congresspeople and tell them to vote for the Free Choice Act. Soon, the room emptied; the remaining speakers spoke to less than half the original crowd. Momentarily, teachers and machinists, auto, transit, healthcare and buildings trades workers and more were united in one place, ready for action, waiting for direction on how to express their power. It seemed almost everyone but the "leadership" felt the potential in that room, and that "calling your Congressperson" fell way short. The very life of the city sat within those walls.

One was both inspired and outraged, and couldn’t help but wonder what a difference if our message linking capitalist crisis and imperialist war, fighting racist terror and cutbacks, and organizing a general strike and moving on the banks and centers of power for communist revolution were blaring from the stage. I could imagine the cheers becoming a roar as workers greeted the truth finally ringing from the stage.

AFL-CIO President Sweeney told everyone to "call and vote." I told a worker beside me, "imagine if he had said, ‘STRIKE!’" (Which, of course, he never would.) The worker looked around the room, smiled and said, "We’d run the city." Exactly!

As the economy spirals into a deeper crisis, workers are growing increasingly weary and frustrated with a system that bails out billionaire bankers and closes factories and health clinics. Some already realize Obama is not the "change" we need.

Capitalism will do what it will; fall into crisis, reinvent itself, and fall into crisis again. We must resolve more firmly than ever to take advantage of every opportunity to bring our revolutionary communist politics to the masses, organize workers and develop new communist organizers for PLP.

The 75 CHALLENGES distributed at the rally was good, but only a drop in the bucket. Without new soldiers in this battle, the bosses will dig themselves out of this mess by burying the workers even deeper into oppressive pits. Now is the time to act. We’ve been exploited long enough. The world runs on our backs. It’s time workers ran the world. Win workers to the only solution — communist revolution!??

a name="Katrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery"></a>"atrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery

Last month, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the Decatur Hotel chain owed not one penny to 300 immigrant workers from Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic who each paid contractors $3,000 to $5,000 for the "privilege" of coming to the New Orleans to be super-exploited. In one more sign of growing fascism in the legal system, the Court OK’d these slave labor conditions on the grounds that the workers couldn’t prove that Decatur "required" or "approved" of these payments.

These workers were recruited to come to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city in August 2005. New Orleans’ hotel bosses like Decatur saw a big chance to lower the already rock-bottom wages of the mostly black hotel workforce there. Conniving with other local bosses, recruiters promised the workers 60-80 hours work per week, time-and-a-half for overtime, free food and rooms in hotels with swimming pools.

The recruiters lied through their teeth! The hotel bosses jammed four workers into each room, charging $50 per week per worker, plus $8 per meal. The workers only got 24-40 hours per week at $6.39 per hour. Of course, as "guest workers," termination or leaving the job could result in immediate deportation. And their every move was under the watchful eye of the hotel bosses.

Despite this racist and fascist set-up, these workers organized against their slave-like working conditions. Unfortunately, the leadership of this struggle fell into the hands of opportunists, including Saket Soni, now head of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Soni and his fake-leftist friends convinced the workers that they should mainly rely on the bosses’ courts to win this battle. He and others viciously attacked PLP members when we tried to expose the workers to a real communist view of how to fight these bosses’ attacks with class struggle.

Immigration laws, like all bosses’ laws, are designed to insure that U.S. employers reap maximum profits from the labor of the working class. The liberal Southern Poverty Law Center exposed this collaboration of the government with the bosses in its report "Close to Slavery." In order to legally hire guest workers, it was necessary to show that attempts to hire local residents failed. U.S. citizen workers would most likely have told Decatur where to stick their $6.39 per hour. However, Decatur’s obviously false statement that they had tried to recruit workers from among "hurricane evacuees" was accepted by the U.S. Department of Labor, no questions asked.

This gave Decatur the green light to go ahead with its plans. They let the contractors handle the dirty work. This separation allowed them to claim that they "didn’t know anything" about the recruiters’ extortion. This gave the courts all they needed to legalize this workers’ slavery.

Communists will never promote confidence in this bosses’ system of "justice." Instead, we call for class warfare against the whole capitalist system and its attacks on workers. We encourage anti-racism and internationalism to win citizen workers to support the struggles of their immigrant brothers and sisters. Most importantly, we organize for a communist revolution. In a communist world, the bosses’ national borders would be abolished, and none of our working-class brothers and sisters would endure slave-labor conditions in order to survive. ?

Germany: Patriots, Socialists, Union Fakers, Neo-Nazis Thwart Workers

DRESDEN, GERMANY, February 26 — The capitalist economic crisis has reached here, hitting the auto industry particularly hard. Today, GM workers demonstrated in Germany, Sweden and Russia against GM’s mass layoffs worldwide. GM is seeking 3.3 billion Euros (over $4 billion) from European rulers and has offered a restructuring plan that will close three assembly plants and cut production capacity by 30%. With the global financial crisis deepening, GM cannot get any bank loans, making government bailouts the only alternative to a shutdown that would put roughly 300,000 European workers on the street.

The major weakness holding autoworkers back is their union leaders’ patriotism and nationalism. In the U.S. the UAW pushes, "Buy American." In Germany the IG Metall union hacks push the old fascist line of "German jobs for German workers." It’s no wonder that this "Day of Action" was smaller and less militant than past ones.

Big troubled companies like Opel or Nokia, which closed its Bochum factory, line up with politicians to promise "patriotic" workers they will rebuild German industry "together." They used socialists like Thomas Jurk to calm angry workers in Saxony when Quimonda, Dresden’s biggest firm, closed.

Jurk’s friends who run the huge IG-Metall trade union join him in this Big Lie. But the working class here can punch back by discarding these misleaders’ nationalist ideas and the racism that feeds on patriotism.

Workers in Germany, the world’s leading export economy by value, are starting to feel the scourge of the crisis. The government, a coalition between the bosses’ two "alternating" parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, already approved a plan to rescue the most important banks, like Germany’s second-biggest, Commerzbank.

But every sector is reporting big losses: auto, shipbuilding, iron and steel, other manufacturing, and the media. The bosses are using plant closings, wage-cuts, layoffs unemployment and longer working hours to "solve" the crisis by directly attacking the working class. But this is not just "a German problem."

In early February, 2,800 workers demonstrated against the Quimonda shutdown, Dresden’s largest employer, with 4,600 workers, amid an already economically struggling Saxony region. Saxony’s Socialist economic minister Thomas Jurk, along with the IG-Metall union hacks, tried to calm the protesters’ anger with typical ruling-class rhetoric: "we will make new investments and secure new jobs in the city."

But Quimonda has another plant in Vila do Conde, Portugal, where it notified 1,800 workers that it’s shutting down. Such circumstances demand not economic patriotism but a worldwide class struggle of internationalist workers allied across borders, from Portugal to Saxony.

However, Germany’s government and its trade union lackeys here are spreading national "optimism" in order to divide the working class and hold back militancy. Instead, workers here and everywhere need to turn this current financial crisis into an overall political crisis for capitalism. For that they need the ideas and organizing power of an international revolutionary communist party like PLP.

On February 14, 6,000 neo-Nazis gathered here, trying to divert workers’ anger into super-patriotism and racism against immigrant workers. They were marking the 64th anniversary of the terrible World War II U.K. /U.S firebombing of Dresden.

A counter-rally of 10,000 was soon organized behind the slogan "No pasarán" ("They shall not pass") used by anti-fascist fighters to stop Franco’s troops and his German allies from entering Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The anti-fascist demonstrators sought to prevent the new Nazis from marching through Dresden. But the cops protected the Nazis’ march, clearing away blockades and clashing brutally with the anti-fascists.

Once again an exhibition of truly ruling-class politics: protecting Nazis while attacking an alliance of workers and students. As the socialists and fascists push their lies, the situation in Dresden gets worse. Now anti-fascist militancy against these racist super-patriots needs to be turned on the big capitalists who sponsor and protect them, using them as tools to divide and hold workers back. ?

Obama-Bosses-UAW Gang-up Mugs Ford Workers

DETROIT, MI, March 9 — The new concessions the UAW granted to Ford are much more than the loss of benefits, break-time and retiree health care. They reflect that a new stage of fascism is needed to help the bosses survive 2009 and the global financial crisis that has brought the U.S. auto industry to a halt and threatened the survival of GM and Chrysler. Negotiators had to figure out how to meet targets imposed by Obama’s auto oversight committee and the finance capitalists that stand behind them. We should expect more of this where the state and bosses impose fascist conditions on workers.

But, if we aggressively bring communist leadership workers will turn to revolutionary politics to counter these attacks.

We can also expect more auto workers to turn towards revolutionary communist leadership if we more aggressively offer it. At one Ford UAW local hall, more than 150 CHALLENGES were distributed along with hundreds of PLP fliers urging workers to reject the concessions and march on May Day until panicked local thugs stopped our comrades from reaching the workers.

Ford lost a record $14.6 billion in 2008 and conditions have only worsened. Ford U.S. sales dropped almost 50% in February. The new agreement eliminates a holiday, cuts break-time and suspends cost-of-living increases and performance bonuses, offers more buyouts and allows Ford to fund the retiree healthcare trust fund with 50% worthless stock instead of cash.

Pro-Boss Union ‘Leaders’ Have Saved Nothing And No One

These new concessions are "modifications" of the 2007 agreement that cut wages and benefits in half for new hires and gave away more than 100,000 jobs, before the current crash. Since the 1979 Chrysler bailout, the UAW leadership lost two-thirds of our members and the majority of the auto industry. They’ve saved nothing and no one. Now we’re in a worldwide crisis of capitalism, shackled by a generation of pro-capitalist union leaders who refuse to fight back and who haven’t sacrificed a dime.

We’re facing a new Depression, with tens of millions jobless and losing their homes. In Detroit, Buffalo and Milwaukee, more than 50% of black males, 16-64, are unemployed, not to mention Flint, Chicago’s West Side, Gary and Hammond. Capitalism’s racist nature is evident as every measure of poverty, unemployment, and police terror hits black and Latino workers first and hardest. The bosses, the union and the Obama administration have ganged up to force us to pay for their crisis.

Ultimately, the bosses "solve" their global crises with fascist terror and more war. That’s where this new sellout is leading. The war in Iraq is spreading to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with no end in sight.

We need to build a revolutionary communist movement, led by industrial workers, that can eventually lead the working class to power. We need to follow the example of the Republic Windows workers who sat down in their factory last December; build unemployment committees in our local unions to unite the employed and unemployed and fight evictions, hunger and for jobs. Most of all, we need to vote with our feet and bring a contingent of Ford workers to march on May Day! ?

Letters

Hero of Salvador War Is Reborn in PLP

During the 1970s, a group of us peasants, workers and students worked in the eastern part of El Salvador, where nobody charged for their work. We were labeled communists, even by the parish priest. I built homes without being paid a single penny, but my family never lacked food. The others in the group supplied me. We shared everything with the conviction to do what is correct. We practiced working-class solidarity. We worked in communities collectively. This influenced the rest of our lives, preparing us for the armed struggle, unfortunately sabotaged by our organization’s mis-leadership.

The National Guard kidnapped me on August 2, 1977. I was building a home when they blindfolded me and took me with two other friends to the military barracks, where they began torturing us, tying our feet and hands to an iron post.

They later turned us over to the National Police in San Salvador where the horrible torture continued, to force us to confess we were communists. They put 220-volt electric shocks through me; my ears ruptured in blood. I fainted and dreamt that my mother, who had died three years before, visited me and dabbed camphor oil on my head because I was in deep pain. The moment she did this I felt no pain. I spent 11 days in pure torture at the police station. I had nothing to eat or drink, only blows and psychological torture.

On the 11th day I was transferred to the Santa Tecla prison. On my third day there I couldn’t eat — my jaws were stiff, I felt no stomach. There were many interrogations. They told me if I took responsibility for why I was there they would give me 500 "colones" (money) and free me. They told me not to associate with communists, saying there would never be communism in El Salvador because the army would combat it. They said I could not be a communist because they were atheists and I was Catholic (as they were). I asked what kind of Catholics are in the assassins’ army who kill everyone indiscriminately.

I was freed on August 29 because the communities and friends pressured the government of Colonel Molina. At that time partners in struggle seized 10 transmitters from the national radio in Morazán, despite being well-guarded by the army. They confronted soldiers in the Gotera barracks, but ultimately our forces captured it and issued a communiqué demanding my liberation.

All this pressure led to my release, but I was let out on the street like an animal out of a cage. Not knowing the area I hailed a taxi and told the driver what had happened, that I had no money. He drove me to the central market in San Salvador where my cousin worked. Both he and my cousin were glad to have helped me and happy I was alive, because most political prisoners were disappeared or murdered.

My cousin took me to her home to recuperate. The next day there was a workers’ protest in San Salvador and she wanted me to stay home. But I went to San Miguel and found a friend who took me by bus to the Torola river. But before arriving at a bridge where the National Guard — the same ones who had imprisoned me — had been carrying out a big inspection, I got off.

For years I organized many workers who later became commanders and combatants on different FMLN war fronts. Today, much later, we have re-connected in the ranks of Progressive Labor Party. CHALLENGE/DESAFIO has been our greatest discovery of true communist philosophy. I’m being reborn in working-class politics, overcoming my disillusionment in believing there was no other party for the proletariat. But now that I’ve found PLP I feel I’m starting anew, with the memory of my four children fallen in combat.

Communist Comrade from El Salvador

a name="Airport Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down"></">Ai"port Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down

At an airport where PL is organizing, workers have taken some political leadership in a reform struggle against the union mis-leadership around bogus health insurance. The company has been blatantly racist in giving the mostly immigrant workers an extremely bad medical insurance plan which has cost workers thousands of dollars.

The SEIU mis-leadership has been dragging its behind in helping resolve this issue. They have mostly been undermining the workers’ efforts to fight back because the union does not want to cause problems for the racist bosses since contract negotiations start at the end of the year.

The union went so far as to try to prevent the re-election of an anti-racist shop steward because of previous confrontations with union misleaders around anti-immigrant racism at the airport. They failed. He was reelected by the workers! The union mis-leadership stopped visiting our shift to avoid questions from workers. In one case a misleader hung up on a worker asking about insurance. The airport workers had enough!

The PL’er got together with some coworkers who all read CHALLENGE and came up with a collective plan to force the SEIU misleaders back to the airport. The B.S. leadership was sent an open letter from the workers detailing the complaints, especially about their union rep. They were given a deadline to respond to complaints, and workers threatened to go over their heads to the national SEIU in Chicago if there was no reply. It worked! A meeting was set up and the union official was forced to talk about medical insurance. This is by no means over.

An African American worker told the shop steward, "The threat made in the letter forced them to come to the airport!" There were workers from the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia who either helped proofread, and distribute the open letter or gave statements regarding the medical insurance to the union. This shows the absolute necessity of workers’ anti-racist collective action against the bosses’ racist actions.

There were many political discussions with airport workers regarding this action. Workers took a step in learning why reforms under capitalism are limited and that eventually workers need communist revolution to solve our problems. The class struggle goes on and workers, soldiers, and students need PLP for communist revolution.

Airport Red

Castro Brothers Continue Perestroika

The latest shifts among top Cuban government officials show that Cuban "Perestroika" (capitalist reform) continues. Capitalism needs these changes to thrive and to show European, Chinese and even U.S. imperialists that some "changes" are being made in Cuba.

From the sidelines, Fidel himself pushes these reforms. He admitted he was consulted about the removal of Felipe Pérez Roque as Foreign Minister and Vice-president Carlos Lage. But in reality it appears that Fidel and Raul are not fighting each other but rather both are promoting those who agree more with their scheme, while eliminating those who might oppose their economic reform plans. Neither represent any real left alternative. In February 2008, Raúl announced these reforms, which just deepen the Cuban Perestroika.

The official report from the Cuban "Communist" Party says these latest changes in leadership followed deep discussion inside the Political Bureau of the Cuban ruling Party. Then Fidel in his "reflections" writings in the Cuban press accused those demoted, his former protégées, of being "ambitious" and that "the enemy outside of Cuba had illusions about them." Even though Fidel is not officially in power, his justifications of the power shift hide the real power struggle probably occurring inside the Cuban "red" bourgeois bureaucracy.

The coming economic and political measures will show even more clearly the kind of capitalist road Cuba will take, possibly State Capitalism as what they call socialism now existing in Cuba, or following even more the example of China’s capitalism. But these reforms are bound to fail for workers, particularly since capitalism in any form — especially in this age of international economic meltdown — has proven unable to satisfy their basic needs.

Friends in Peru

a name="Anger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker">">"nger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker

PASADENA, CA, February 19 —Leroy Barnes, a 38-year-old black worker, and father of three, was shot by Pasadena cops, killing him on the spot. The cops had pulled Barnes over for a traffic stop. At first, the cops lied about what happened. They said that Barnes shot at them but he did not shoot at all. They said he was outside the car, but he never stepped out of his car. Witnesses saw the police shoot him four times while he was inside his car, then pull him out of the car and shoot him seven more times as he lay on the street! As a crowd of angry people gathered, the racist cops shot into the air, to intimidate people protesting the murder. Even so, some people threw rocks at the cops. Many people in the neighborhood, as well as friends and family, are furious at the racist killer kkkops.

PLP members have taken leaflets and CHALLENGES to the neighborhood where Leroy Barnes was killed, to a nearby shopping center, and to area schools. Many people were glad to have the Party there. Recently an Oakland transit cop murdered Oscar Grant, also a black man and a father. Since this was caught on tape, the racist killer is being tried for murder. In the killing of Leroy Barnes, even the police tape is not being released!

Racist police terror, and anti-immigrant terror, are on the rise as official unemployment in California is over 10% (it’s about double that if you count people in jail and people who have stopped looking for work). Obama and the capitalist system’s answer to this crisis is to put even more racist cops on the street to terrorize workers, especially black and Latino workers, because the bosses fear rebellion.

They’re right to be afraid! A system that can’t provide decent jobs but only racist terror should be destroyed! PLP invites angry workers and youth to protest this killing, come to our May Day Dinner and march with the PLP contingent on May First, International Workers’ Day, against racist terror, unemployment, imperialist war, and for communist revolution.

Bangladesh Army Mutiny, Sri Lanka Civil War Tied to Oil Dogfight

Nothing is safe in the oil pipeline dogfight among the world’s imperialists and Indian-Pakistani rulers. The terrorist attack against the Sri Lanka national cricket team is one example. The rulers of India and Pakistan blame each other’s intelligence services for the attack. The Sri Lanka team replaced the Indian national team which pulled out after the recent Mumbai terrorist attack blamed on the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service).

Just a few days before this attack, a mass mutiny by Bangladesh’s border guard (the BRD) killed 74 army officers, almost the BRD’s entire top brass. Years of corruption by their officers — sent from the regular army — frustrated the soldiers, who were mistreated and starved while making a miserable $70/month and seeing the officers selling their rations on the open market.

The mutiny began in BRD headquarters in Dhaka, the country’s capital. Initially the military brass tried to storm the mutineers, but then the rebellion spread nation-wide, forcing the brass to negotiate with the rebels and even agree to their demands. After the rebellion ended, the army and the government began the arrest and hunting of over 1,000 rebel soldiers.

The BRD dates back to the 18th century when the British colonialists established the "Ramgarh Local Battalion." In 1971, East Pakistan, helped by India, went to war and broke with Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh. The BRD was used to patrol over 3,000 miles of border with India and Burma (Myanmar). The BRD, like the rest of South Asia’s armies, retained all the class divisions of the old British colonial armies. Officers came from the ruling class while rank-and-file soldiers came from the working class and poor peasantry.

Unfortunately, in the absence of any real communist leadership, when these soldiers turned their guns against their officers, they were open to being misled by pro-Pakistani Islamists. The collapse of the old world communist movement reflected itself in the opportunism of the pro-Soviet and Maoist groups in Bangladesh — which supported "progressive-lesser evil" bosses and disarmed workers and their allies politically. This created illusions about "reforming" capitalism and prevented a fight for workers’ power.

Early in January, after several years of military rule, a civilian government — considered to be pro-India — took power in Bangladesh. The mutiny was reportedly supported by forces within and outside the military who supported the country’s recent "Talibanization." The new army chief, appointed by the civilian government, is considered "too secular" and pro-India and was clamping down on fundamentalists inside the military which are influenced by Pakistan and even by China.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan Sunday Times reported (3/1) that a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force might be sent to northern Sri Lanka under the guise of evacuating refugees from the civil war in that island nation. Thus, the U.S. could help the Sri Lankan army in its bloody "mop-up" operations against the nationalist Tamil guerrillas holed up in the island’s northern tip and fighting the government. U.S. rulers consider the Tamils terrorists.

However, it’s not the Tamil guerrillas that really worry the U.S. and India, but rather it’s China’s growing economic and military presence in Sri Lanka. China has supplied Sri Lanka with modern military hardware, including fighter planes, and is helping build a modern port at Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka, near one of the world’s most important oil-supply sea lanes.

All these bloody conflicts occur in a capitalist world wrecked by an economic tsunami. The Indian economy, supposedly an example of what free-market globalization could achieve, is now reeling from this crisis. Bangladesh is already one of the world’s poorest countries and has lost a lot of markets for its exports of textiles.

Workers and their allies in all of South Asia must break with all these bosses, their imperialist backers and all the Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists, and build a revolutionary communist leadership as the only way out of this hell.??

a name="Working Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women">">"orking Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women

March 8 marked International Women’s Day, inspired by the 1908 New York City march of 15,000 women demanding better pay and shorter hours. Throughout the history of class struggle every major movement that made progress for the oppressed class has had women as leaders. From the fight against slavery, to the Paris Commune and revolutions in Russia and China, from the mass strikes of 1848 in Europe to the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960’s women workers around the world have joined with men in the struggle against capitalist oppression.

Today these battles continue. In India, Hindu women and men fought back against brutal attacks against women in cafes by groups trying to build a society where women are kept in their homes. In New York, the Stella D’oro strike has united men and women workers on the picket lines in the cold of winter. They are fighting back against the wage and benefit cuts that are being forced on them by their factory’s owners. These militant struggles are an important inspiration for all of us.

With a black woman as First Lady, more female role models to idolize than ever and a new law that seems to help women get equal pay, it appears the only limit to women advancing is imagination. But the boss-worker relationship is the fundamental one under capitalism — bosses own and control their workers and workers fight to get as much they can from their bosses. If we peel back the appearance of upward mobility, women are suffering more than ever and no amount of media spin will cover up the horrible conditions all workers must deal with.

Sexism and Capitalism go Hand in Hand

According to the International Labor Organization, 22 million women around the world are expected to lose their jobs in 2009 as the bosses shift the burden of their financial crisis and wars onto the backs of the working class. The ruling class uses the special oppression of women the same as they use racism and nationalism – to oppress the entire working class. Besides lowering wages for all workers by increasing competition, sexism politically weakens the working class by dividing women and men on the job, in our homes, and during the class struggle. Black and Latino, women suffer triple exploitation from racism, as women, and as workers.

PLP fights sexism by taking on attacks against women, developing women leaders of our movement and spreading communist consciousness. The struggle against sexist ideas cannot be separated from the struggle against this system that is breeding it.

Sexism increases oppression through economic, cultural and social forces. Women make less, are treated worse on a political level and have less access to social mobility than their male counterparts. Early class oppression was seen as long ago as ancient, pre-capitalist, slave society, where women were captured and enslaved, then forced to produce more slaves. Today, with sexism as a tool, billions of dollars in profit are funneled into the coffers of today’s capitalists.

Sexism is not just the attitude of chauvinism from a couple of right-wing men and women on a personal level or the result of a brutal regime like the Taliban. It is a rampant aspect of the capitalist world. In England the unemployment rate for women is at 33%. In the U.S., where women are consistently paid less than men, the best "solution" Obama could come up with for women’s rights is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which extends the statute of limitations, to a mere 180 days, for a woman to sue if she is being paid lower wages on the job. This law is just a stop-gap to placate workers into thinking Obama is doing his best, since he’s got so much on his plate waging profit war in Afghanistan and asking for more bailouts for the ruling class.

Sexist Culture Fuels Attacks

As long as this system exists, where economic exploitation makes women a commodity, women are going to be abused and disrespected in big and small ways. The abuse inflicted by teen icon Chris Brown on singer Rihanna was another revolting example of the kinds of sexist beatings that happen to millions of working class women regularly but are never publicized.

The beauty, fashion and music industries that portray women as property to be owned and displayed drive this sexist culture, which reaps billions in profits. Women and men workers not only suffer living with this culture, but end up giving back hard fought for wages trying to chase the bosses ideal of beauty by paying for make-up, "fashionable" clothes, and beauty treatments.

Attacks on women are on the rise around the world. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, many hundreds of young women have been murdered in the last few years. While these killings have received some publicity, in other countries woman are being murdered in even higher numbers. In Guatemala the murder rate for women is twice as high as Ciudad Juarez.

Sexism is pervasive in day-to-day discourse, within romantic relationships and friendships. Women are used as sexual objects. Female workers have to contend with unequal pay and an attitude that women are either overtly sexual beings, prim, proper ladies, or something in between – assertive as long as they "look good" doing it. This mechanical portrayal of female identity keeps capitalism alive and well by keeping the working class focused on how men and women are unequal.

All workers need to fight the inequality that is endemic to capitalism. Attacks on women keep their working class brothers in chains as well. Divisions between men and women workers help the bosses slash our wages. Sexist ideas weaken our class as men and women fight each other instead of the rulers. It inhibits the needed leadership of women workers, and inhibits men from being better fighters and stronger leaders for our class. Victory for the working class demands that we break down this division by uniting as equals in the struggle to smash the rulers system. The working class needs to smash sexism to defeat capitalism and build a communist revolution that will eliminate the oppression of all workers. ?

1971 Temple U. Strike Won Equal Pay

The power of working-class unity among women and men was demonstrated in the 1971 Temple University strike of black and white male janitors and female maids. Both men and women struck for equal pay for equal work for women workers and won. This unity also broke Nixon’s 3.2% wage freeze. An important element in this struggle was the worker-student alliance. When the college Administration attempted to use scabs to clean up the campus (which couldn’t function with all the uncollected waste strewn about), the PLP-led SDS chapter dumped all the garbage back onto the campus. After two weeks, the bosses gave in.

a name="France’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops">">"rance’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops

POINT-A-PITRE, GUADALOUPE, March 9 — Mass protests continue in this French Overseas Department and in the neighboring island Department of Martinique even after the United Against Profiteering coalition (LKP) reached a deal winning some of their demands. The French government will provide 100 euros ($120) of the monthly wage hike for three years and the local government 50 euro for one year. But the local bosses’ group, MEDEF, has refused to sign the deal. The strikers’ original demand was a 200-Euro increase.

In Martinique, where a similar partial deal was reached, the February 5 Collective leading that strike refused to end the strikes, picketing and roadblocks because prices have not been cut (prices in both islands are much higher than in continental France).

On March 6, cops clashed with youth and workers attempting to block a bosses’ back-to-work motorcade, which drove provocatively into the capital, Fort de France. Four cops were injured as shots rang out and Molotov cocktails exploded. Ten people were arrested and the cops injured many.

A similar mass strike is developing in La Réunion, a French colonial possession in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the French labor movement has yet to express real solidarity with these struggles, showing the need for workers and students in all of France to fight the racism and nationalism of their labor mis-leaders, behind the slogan: Same enemy, same fight, workers and students of the world, unite!

RED EYE on the NEWS

Below are excerpts from mainstream newspapers that may be of use for our readers. For more, go to challengenewspaper. wordpress.com. Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times,

GW=Guardian Weekly, LAT=Los Angeles Times

Marx got no respect, but now…

NORTH STAR GROUP – Poor Karl Marx. Never got any respect. Not in the U.S.A., anyway. Seldom in the course of human events has one man been so derided, so reviled by such a great herd of ignoramuses, virtually none of whom have even the faintest notion what the object of their derision actually said, thought or stood for…. In light of current events… his insights concerning capitalism’s structural defects were spoton…. Marx wrote that in the end, capitalism’s fate would be sealed… by its internal rot…. If Marx were around, he’d be laughing his head off, but there are going to be plenty of tears to go around for [his deriders].

Old-time reds built China’s base

NYT, 3/8 – In the early 1950s, shortly after the Chinese Communist revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong set into motion one of the largest peacetime mobilizations in modern history…. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps built roads, canals, bridges and dams, turning wasteland into fields of cotton, maize and rice. They built entire cities in the desert…. A survivor of the force… recalled…. "At that time there was nothing I couldn’t bear…" she was honored at the time as a "Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought."

Sun’s recollections of Communist Party zeal, sacrifice and staggering economic transformation are among the personal narratives assembled by Xinran, a Chinese journalist now a resident of Britain, in "China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation." Many of the older Chinese Xinran meets still take a glossy view of the Communist Party.

Asbestos poisoning for a profit

NYT, 2/19 – At least 200 deaths and thousands of illnesses are known to be related to the town’s exposure to the mine….

The mine’s owner, W.R. Grace & Company… and its managers knew as far back as the 1970s that asbestos… posed a risk to their workers, but they conspired to continue releasing it into the air and to misrepresent the peril….

More than 30 years ago Dr. Teitelbaum, a retired toxicologist… was sent hundreds of chest X-rays of Libby workers and of workers at [a non-tainted] mine in South Carolina….

"At the end of the study, I wrote a letter saying that 30 percent of the miners in Libby have asbestosis, and nobody in South Carolina has asbestosis…. "They said thank you very much and did nothing with it."

For Arab public, US is terrorist

NYT, 2/26 – A battle over the term terrorist has become a proxy for the larger issues that divide Washington and the Arab public…. In Gaza… most Arabs came away certain who the real terrorists were.

"Public opinion views what happened in Gaza as a kind of terrorism…. They see Hamas and other such organizations as groups who are trying to liberate their countries…."

The case may be even more tangled with Hezbollah…. "If Obama thinks these organizations are terrorists, there will never be peace…." In this region… the invasion of Iraq is often referred to as a terrorist act.

Page 738 of 788

CHALLENGE, May 20, 2009

CHALLENGE, May 6, 2009

May Day Means:

Fighting Racism, Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War with Communist Revolution

a name="Obama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth"></a>"bama’s ‘Dream Act’: Nightmare for Immigrant Youth

Mass Action is The Order of The Day

Who Are the Real Pirates?

a name="When Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’"></a>"hen Liberal Obama Kills, It’s a ‘Good War’

a name="Can’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!"></a>"an’t Pay? It’s Debtor’s Jail!

May Day Fight Exposes Pro-Boss Union Hacks

What Are They So Afraid Of?

Is It Worth It?

Stomping on Scab Cookies

Ivan the Nazi Stays, BP Immigrant Workers Jailed

a name="Spain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day">">"pain: Will Lead With PL’s Politics on May Day

Thousands Rally vs. Fascist Labor Scheme:

N.J. Gov. Using Crisis to Rob Workers of $500 Million

a name="Linking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP">">"inking Fight vs. School Layoffs to Bosses’ Crisis Builds PLP

Campus Forum Attacks U.S. Escalation In Afghanistan

a name="Imperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico">">"mperialist Rivalry, Bosses’ Crisis Drives U.S. to Militarize Mexico

May Day in El Salvador:

‘Fight to end this murderous rotten system...’

a name="Immigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment">">"mmigrant Workers’ Rally Protests Racist Cop Harassment

Letters

Ties to Co-Workers, Communist Movement Cures Isolation

a name="More Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers">">"ore Ammunition for Stella D’Oro Strikers

Skycap Fights Frame-up, With PLP Support

Farmworkers Block Highway, Renewing 30-yr. Struggle

Back Fired Unionists in Haiti

Capitalist Crises: Boom for Bosses, Bust for Workers

Real Wages Falling Since ‘73

Fed’s Policy Led to Toxic Assets

Bosses’ Solution for Disputes: War

May Day, the Historic Struggle of the International Working Class

CHALLENGE, April 22, 2009

Worldwide Fight vs. Crisis Needs Communist Leadership:

Workers in Europe Seize Factories, Bosses

General Strike in Greece

France: Caterpillar Workers Seize Bosses, Continental Workers Burn Tires in Paris

Visteon Workers Occupy Factories from London to Belfast

Huge March Against Fascist Berlusconi

Obama Ups ‘Body Count’: Afghan Deaths, U.S. Jobless

White House Job No. 1: Wars to Save U.S. Oil Empire

Rival Rulers Draw Daggers at G-20 And NATO Summits

World War III Needs Spur U.S. Infrastructure Schemes

‘Scabs in Blue! Scabs in Blue!’Stella D’Oro Strikers Face Bosses’ System and Its State

May Day Brings Communist Politics to LA School Struggle

Building for May Day Amid Capitalist Carnage in Detroit

‘DREAM Act’ is Attack on Immigrant Youth

Salvadoran Bosses’ ‘Lesser Evil’ Preserves Profit System

As Economic Crisis Looms Over Contract Fight:Forging Communist Base Among LA Transit Workers

LETTERS

Anti-Communism: Bosses’ Key Weapon vs. Workers

Boston, MA: Thousands fight school cutbacks

Capitalism Can’t Crush Memories of Collective Struggle in East Berlin

Union Turf War Leaves Workers Hanging

Black Youths Jailed; Real Criminals Go Scot-free

Obama’s Plan ‘Stimulates’ Bosses’ Attack on Workers

The Path Towards Wider War Among Imperialist Rivals

The Revolutionary Path Workers Must Take

‘Renewable Energy’ Subsidy for Profiteers?

CHALLENGE, April 8, 2009

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Russia-China Military Bloc Aimed at U.S.

U.S. Backing Down On Missile ‘Defense’?

Workers Suffer From Russia-U.S. Imperialist Rivalry

Iraq Vets Stand Against Imperialist War

Army’s Not For Millionaires’ Children

In The Belly of Imperialism

Fighting the War Machine

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HS Debate-Club Coaches Back Anti-Racist Fight

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Defend Framed-Up Airport Skycap

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‘Danger Of Uncontrollable Social Unrest…’

‘Scabs in Blue! Scabs in Blue!’
Stella D’Oro Strikers Face Bosses’ System and Its State

As Economic Crisis Looms Over Contract Fight:
Forging Communist Base Among LA Transit Workers