a href="#Bush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans">"iberal Democrats Are Also Warmongers: Bush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans

Workers Need Red Politics, Not AFL-CIO Pro-Boss Hacks

Anti-war? Not These AFL-CIO Traitors

The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Immigrants

From U.S. To England, Racist Attacks Continue

Immigrant Workers Fight Racist Attacks

a href="#Coal Country Coalition in Solidarity with Nurses Aide’s Picket Line">"oal Country Coalition in Solidarity with Nurses Aide’s Picket Line

a href="#‘We need a revolution...’">Un"ted Airline Picket Agrees: ‘We need a revolution...’

a href="#‘Change-to-win’ SEIU Hypocrites Turn Backs on Home Health Care Workers">‘C"ange-to-win’ SEIU Hypocrites Turn Backs on Home Health Care Workers

a href="#PLP’S Songs On CD">"LP’S Songs On CD

Bible Group Moves Against War, Fascism

PLP Forum Makes Plans to Step Up Fight Against Racism

Small Schools: A Losing Lesson For The Working Class

Homeless Dying In Oppressive Heat Is Capitalist Murder

a href="#Killing Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’">Kill"ng Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’

a href="#Workers’ Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’">Workers’"Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’

a href="#‘Communist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting back...’">‘Com"unist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting back...’

a href="#Mexico’s Drug Cartel War Nets Huge Profits For U.S. Banks">"exico’s Drug Cartel War Nets Huge Profits For U.S. Banks

a href="#Movie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’">Mo"ie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’

BBC Polls: Marx Tops All Philosophers

Under Communism: Can You Have Both Wealth and Health?

LETTERS

Red Vet Says, What You Do Counts

Collectivity Conquers Fear

Rockers Raise $ For Anti-Racists

Communist Art Celebrates Workers

Attack on Lynne Stewart A Fascist Step

Pakistani Comrades Teach Their Youth

Strikes Spread in Italy

Fighting Racism Builds Internationalism

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

• Oil-hungry US won’t give up bases in Iraq
• US leads new ‘race to the bottom’ for labor
• Youth suicide high in capitalist China
• Bribery is zooming in Russia’s ‘democracy’
• Is Harry Potter worse than myths of Bible?
• Point a finger at all religion not just Islam

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Liberal Democrats Are Also Warmongers

a name="Bush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans">">"ush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans

Spokesmen for the liberal wing of U.S. rulers are talking out of both sides of their mouths about the bloody quagmire their masters created in Iraq. At times, they openly preach the liberals’ imperialist agenda and call for putting more boots on Iraqi soil now and mobilizing for greater conflicts later. At others, they seek to shift the blame onto bloodthirsty neo-cons, while portraying liberals as peaceniks.

Liberal mouthpieces in government, think-tanks, and the media have been pushing two related big lies lately. First, an energy policy directed by liberals rather than the Bush gang would shrink U.S. dependence on imported oil and thereby eliminate the need for military action in the Middle East. The second lie: invading Iraq was all the neo-cons’ idea; what liberals really want is an exit strategy.

The liberal Brookings Institution claims it knows how to end oil wars: "If all new cars, pick-up trucks and SUVs had roughly one-third higher fuel economy, it would take less than 10 years…to displace petroleum consumption equal to the amount the United States currently imports from Persian Gulf dictatorships. This would be fabulous for U.S. national security." (7/28/05)

But supplying the U.S. with oil is not the main goal of U.S. Mid-East military action; imperialism is. The U.S. wields its control of Persian Gulf oil as a weapon against its rivals. Relying largely on Saudi production, Exxon Mobil makes 70% of its sales outside the U.S. The firm has over 100 countries dependent to some degree on its tankers. Typical is Exxon Mobil’s recent deal to ship Saudi crude, under the U.S. Navy’s watchful eye, to a new $3.5-billion refinery in China’s Fujian province. U.S. rulers hope to use this leverage, which depends on the U.S. war machine’s continuing Mid-East slaughter, to check China’s industrial and military growth. Iraq is but one of the oil wars in the liberals’ deadly game plan. The N.Y. Times editorial (7/10) warning of a possible "takeover by Al Qaeda of Saudi Arabia’s government and oil reserves," said "the active-duty Army should be increased by about 100,000."

Employing oil and armed force to maintain the U.S.’s top-dog status is the chief aim of the dominant liberal faction of U.S. policy-makers. But the liberal media hypocritically hold the neo-cons solely responsible. By demonizing them, Bob Herbert, in his New York Times column (7/28/05), shielded the real enemy, "The obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks…Iran was also in the neoconservatives’ sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness."

Time for a reality check. Recall that the "weapons of mass destruction" lie, the pretext for invading Iraq, originated with the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the New York Times. In 2000, while Clinton was stepping up his missile attacks on Iraq, the CFR’s "ambassador in residence" Richard Butler, a former UN weapons inspector, published "The Greatest Threat," a book charging Saddam Hussein with developing a full range of nuclear, chemical and biological arms. In editorials and news reports, the Times constantly repeated the WMD lie. Early in 2003, a CFR task force declared "full-scale military operations will be necessary…[unless] Hussein disarms Iraq’s WMD program." The invasion came within months.

The Times’ Herbert wrote that Bush should "declare victory" in Iraq "and bring the troops home as quickly as possible." But the liberal rulers have other ideas. A CFR task force headed by Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, and Brent Scowcroft, who allies with Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, issued a report in late July drawing lessons from the Iraq quagmire. Called "In the Wake of Iraq: Improving U.S. Post-conflict Capabilities," it urged expanding the Army so that it can perform more "constabulary" duties in conquered nations undergoing "reconstruction and stabilization" by the U.S. It also said that, in addition to setting up police forces and law courts overseas, the U.S. should "establish coordinators for reconstruction-related programs in other agencies, including the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, and Health and Human Services."

In other words, the U.S. should take a page from the heydays of the British and French empires and establish full-fledged colonial armies of occupation and complete colonial civil administrations.

The liberals won’t bring the troops home. Their doubletalk is meant to steer us away from attacking the real cause of their wars: imperialist rivalry inseparable from the profit system,

In a future article we will analyze the love-hate relationship between the U.S. and the Iranian mullahs. How Iranian agents like Chalabi and Allawi are now ruling Iraq.

Workers Need Red Politics, Not AFL-CIO Pro-Boss Hacks

CHICAGO, July 30 — PLP conducted a week-long Summer Project here, starting with AFL-CIO pre-convention events the previous weekend. During the week we sold over 300 CHALLENGES — the majority at Cook County Hospital and the Ford plant — distributed 2,300 leaflets and made 12 contacts.

At the pre-convention session, to which rank and filers were allowed in, a contingent of youth and adults went to raise our ideas. Unfortunately, for the most part, we were forced to listen to hacks talking to hacks, as union bosses like President John Sweeney dished out their liberal pro-capitalist pro-war lies.

Many streaming in and out of the hall agreed with us that both this session and the convention itself would be shell games devoid of any real political content. The bosses’ media gave the big play to the so-called split between "opposing" sets of misleaders, two sides of the same sellout coin. (See CHALLENGE, 8/3.)

There was much talk about needing "diversity" in union leadership. But this was actually an empty call for token "representation" and "legitimacy" that completely ignored the real need to fight racist divisions and super-exploitation amongst workers.

Those fights occurred when communists led the unions in the 1930’s. Unfortunately those same communists were sucked into fighting only for reform, not for revolution, and, without a political base to support them, eventually were ousted in the Cold War anti-communist drive of the late 1940’s.

At the pre-convention session, the only real fighting spirit came from the floor. In response to the AFL-CIO’s nationalism, a union steward boldly stated that "working people have no nation." Later a young comrade spoke up to reveal the true history of how workers won the rights the bosses have taken away and continue to take away today.

The AFL-CIO did nothing when 140,000 United Airline workers were faced with losing their pensions, while further attacks loom for 20,000 mostly black and Latin baggage handlers, supposedly union represented.

The pessimistic reformism of many at the pre-convention events sharply contrasted with the atmosphere at the rank-and-file-organized SEIU picnic later on Saturday — at which many militant ideas were discussed with workers from Cook County and Michael Reese hospitals — as well as at our dinner- forum on Tuesday. At the latter, a worker from the local Ford plant related an impassioned story about his struggle to revive militant opposition among assembly-line workers, where there is mass skepticism and fear that the union won’t back them if they speak out against such lousy conditions as the lack of fans in an overheated workplace.

Other dinner participants jumped in about how their contracts (or lack of them) only help the bosses. One young friend of ours angrily reported how his post office job would last only 89 days — one day short of admittance to the union. An industrial worker quickly seconded this story with a similar one.

We concluded our project on Friday night with an open mic. Many spoke about the need for revolution. There were lively arguments about what this would mean and about the potential to really change society. We also held a group discussion with many young workers (all non-union) focusing on the decline of the labor movement. The collectivity and inspiration of the night did much to show the potential of our movement and goal of a communist society.

Anti-war? Not These AFL-CIO Traitors

When the AFL-CIO convention passed a resolution that supposedly opposed the war in Iraq, many anti-war "leftists" went wild applauding the union bureaucrats’ "historic" change from backing U.S. imperialism. Who’s kidding who?

The resolution says the Iraqi elections expressed the aspirations of the people "to control their own destiny." That’s exactly the Bush administration’s position. The U.S. military presence made sure that any new "government" didn’t conflict with the U.S. ruling class’s stake in controlling Iraq’s oil. The union resolution agrees that troop "withdrawal" should occur "as soon as security is established," again the administration’s position. It never mentions U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib, mass round-ups, huge destruction of cities like Fallujah and the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

But the real kicker exposing these fakers is the reference to the AFL-CIO’s "proud history of solidarity with worker movements around the world in their opposition to tyranny." In reality, these pro-capitalist sellouts worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to set up anti-communist "unions" in scores of countries to suppress militant workers’ movements opposed to U.S. bosses’ interests. They supported every war launched by U.S. imperialism, from Vietnam to Grenada to Panama to the Dominican Republic to Nicaragua to the Middle East. And now they hypocritically proclaim their allegiance to the Iraqi people "controlling their own destiny."

Their "solidarity" still lies with the capitalists who they serve all the time.

The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Immigrants

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 1 — Some anti-immigrant racists are turning their sights on this city’s black community. The racist "Save Our State" (SOS) group brags they’ve been invited to a "roundtable" discussion on Pacifica radio to be aired in a studio in South Central LA on August 20. Last week the LA Times reported some attendees at a meeting blamed immigrants for unemployment and racist conditions faced by black workers. Ex-police chief Bernard Parks weakly advocated the need for "coalitions," saying "we all have to get along."

Clearly the racist SOS and their financial backers, like billionaire Scaffe, want to drive a wedge between black and Latino workers with the lie that immigrants "cause" unemployment and low wages. Two weeks ago, black and Latin neighbors united in protest against the racist cop murder of 19-month-old Susie Lopez and her father. The rulers’ biggest fear is that workers of all backgrounds will unite against their system. When politicians like Parks call for multi-culturalism without placing the blame for low wages where it belongs, they want us to have confidence that this system will protect us.

Facts are stubborn things. GM Southgate and Van Nuys, Bethlehem Steel, Chrysler, Firestone and many other large manufacturers closed plants in the LA area in the 1980’s, laying off tens of thousands of workers, many black, from the few relatively good-paying non-government jobs available to them. Then the rulers helped flood many neighborhoods with crack cocaine, destroying families and leading to the "war on drugs," actually a war on black and Latin youth. This created the world’s largest prison population, over two million, 70% black and Latin. To prevent rebellions, the racist U.S. rulers and their Democrat and Republican politicians imprisoned black workers in record numbers after closing factory after factory in cities like Los Angeles.

Since the 1980’s many more unionized manufacturing jobs are gone. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Boston’s Northeastern University reports that 2.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the last recession. Simultaneously, about 320,000 new jobs went to immigrants in the manufacturing sector, concentrated in Texas and Southern California. Further, the Labor Department reports that 7 of 10 jobs outsourced go to U.S. contractors, rather than overseas (although some jobs have also gone abroad). In order to compete with other capitalists, U.S. bosses have been sharply cutting wages and working conditions. Most industrial workers have been forced to work for suppliers or mini-mills. Millions of these workers are Latin or other immigrants. Most are non-union. The hours are long, the work is dangerous. (The Communist magazine, Spring 2005, p. 44).

Blaming immigrants for this situation is akin to the KKK blaming black workers for working for lower wages than whites when they moved to the north from the south to find work. It’s the bosses — their racism and their constant competition for maximum profits — who force black and Latin workers to work for lower wages, slash better-paying jobs and produce more goods with fewer workers.

The solution is the opposite of the one proposed by the anti-immigrant racists (many of whom are open members of Nazi and racist skinhead groups who also hate and attack black workers). It’s working-class unity against racist low wages and conditions, racist unemployment and most importantly, against the capitalist system that profits by dividing and weakening the working class. Immigrant and black and white workers all have the same class interest. On-the-job segregation and apartheid help the bosses lower all workers’ wages.

We need to build unity and a fighting movement against the racist profit system which is based on the exploitation of labor. We call on black, white, Latino, citizens and immigrants, to stand up to the racist thugs who spread lies and division. The unity we forge is needed against the major racists: the top U.S. bosses who preach "multi-culturalism" (like Parks) while instituting and enforcing racist wage differences, low wages, terrorizing us with their killer cops, and sending our youth to war for oil profits in Iraq. The multi-racial unity we need is not to support U.S. imperialism but to build a movement to destroy it with communist revolution.

From U.S. To England, Racist Attacks Continue

The terror attacks in England have spawned a wave of racist attacks against immigrants and blacks in England. According to the BBC, since those attacks there have been 269 racist crimes reported compared to only 40 in the previous year in the same time period. Immediately after the July 21st bombing attempts the London police murdered an immigrant, Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes (memorial service above right). An 18-year-old black man, Anthony Walker(above left) was killed last Friday by a group of white men with an axe. The attacks have escalated so much that a leading Muslim cleric has advised Muslim women not to wear their traditional head scarves, the hajib.

Seattle Project Sparks Growth of Communist OrganizersSEATTLE, WA., July 31 — We’ve just completed another Summer Project here, and as always, it’s been a great experience. The difference this year was that younger student and worker leaders of our Party led, organized and carried it out. This challenged us with limited experience leading a SP, but we responded, selling 1,800 CHALLENGES (1,000 to industrial workers, 200 to the community and 600 to GI’s) and distributing 4,100 leaflets (3,500 to workers and 600 to soldiers).

We focused on industrial workers and soldiers. Surprisingly, rising at 4:30 A.M. to sell CHALLENGE to workers in the plants was not as difficult as dealing with the union’s stark anti-communism and misleadership. The latter was very antagonizing, especially for some of the younger volunteers who’ve had no trade union involvement. As the last CHALLENGE reported (8/5), the union "leaders" spent all their time trying to tear our leaflets from our hands, rather than organizing workers against the bosses’ recent 30,000 layoffs.

One night, we watched the movie "Matewan." We discussed the differences between the unions that were led by militant class-conscious workers in the early 1920’s, filled with anti-racist solidarity. Today the union "leaders" spend their time and our money making deals and selling us out. Class consciousness and union membership are at an all-time low.

But unions and reformist movements can only do so much under a system based on the exploitation of the working class. As history has shown, without the necessary ideology, strikes and sit-ins will only win limited victories, if any. Now we’re considered lucky if we can retain our health care or pensions.

One SP cadre school reviewed the history of workers’ movements. (Others were held on dialectical materialism, democratic centralism, immigration and the history of rebellions in the military.) One workers’ struggle was the 1934 West Coast longshore strike — which shut all shipping on the coast for three weeks — and the simultaneous San Francisco general strike, where over 125,000 workers walked off the job and ran the city for four days when the cops killed four dock strikers. But because the bosses still held state power, eventually they were able to turn around any victories (converting the 30-hour week into 45 hours) and slashing jobs with containerization. Any gains are on the verge of being destroyed for the next generation of industrial workers.

Because unions operate within, and currently defend, the capitalist system, they inevitably sell out the workers, not even maintaining any gains. This is why our goal must be to smash the rulers’ state power and erect a communist-led workers’ state.

With all this in mind, our other SP focus was soldiers. Right now the bosses are using all military personnel to defend and maintain their imperialist goals. However, those soldiers will eventually have a choice: fight for the bosses or fight for your class. Therefore, twice a week we talked with soldiers and their families, having many great experiences (see CHALLENGE, 8/3). Everyone was inspired to continue this with soldiers and their families back home.

Our final forum of volunteers, Boeing workers and other young workers from the area emphasized the importance of what we had accomplished the past two weeks. As the out-of-town speaker on political economy explained, the sharpening economic, political and military conflicts among rival imperialists means building a base in these strategic areas — among industrial workers and soldiers —is crucial, not to mention the need for large numbers of student comrades who will be the future soldiers and workers.

All in all, we grew as communist organizers this summer. The real victory will be to continue the struggle throughout the coming year. Adelante! Forward!

Immigrant Workers Fight Racist Attacks

FARMINGVILLE, NY, July 28 — Two weeks after our militant confrontation with anti-immigrant racists á la Minutemen here (see CHALLENGE, 8/3), we were invited back to a vigil/march supporting the workers viciously evicted from their overcrowded homes deemed "fire hazards." As our multi-racial group of young people entered the rally area, many workers thanked us for returning. While our conversations were limited because not all of us spoke Spanish, the workers didn’t seem to mind since the DESAFIO/CHALLENGE front-page told the stories of our Party fighting against racism and imperialism.

Marching, chanting and singing in Spanish with over 300 workers and supporters in the early evening hours inspired us with the feeling of workers’ power. Although much of the chanting and singing were nationalist in character, they told of workers uniting to struggle against the bosses and/or system that oppresses them. We interjected class-conscious chants which were quite popular, like "Workers, United, will Never be Defeated" and "The Workers’ Struggle has no Borders."

As we rallied at the end of the march, we spotted several anti-immigrant racists from two weeks ago videotaping and holding up anti-immigrant signs. While this was not the right time to confront them, as the anger of the laborers grows, along with our building ties among them, the gutter racists will get what they deserve.

Most of the speeches called for legality and equality to gain justice for workers under this system. We told workers standing nearby that even if the politicians build the centers for laborers they want, the only future capitalism has for immigrants and all workers is low wages, racist terror and endless imperialist wars (see page 2). The next day at a NYC meeting, Mayor Bloomberg’s Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, Guillermo Linares, promised more centers, without making any concrete plans to build them.

The best speeches came from a militant woman who condemned racism against immigrants from California to Arizona to Florida to New York, and another from a man who blamed U.S imperialism for having created the poverty of these workers in the first place.

These workers shouldering the brunt of the system’s racism are realizing how capitalism and racism go hand in hand. But liberal politicians and their agents are working very hard to build illusions that the system can help them. We must both support workers and bring them our communist politics, to turn their anger and struggles into fighting for their real emancipation from the horrors of capitalism and its racism.

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EBENSBURG, PA., July 25 — "We work to live, not live to work!" "I was hired to work eight hours, not 16!"

These were the sentiments of more than 50 nurses’ aides, mostly women, demonstrating at the Cambria County Courthouse here against forced overtime at Laurel Crest, the county’s nursing home. Many of the aides not only work an extra four hours a day — getting called in early or staying beyond their shift — but end up working double shifts.

Members of the Coal Country Coalition, originally formed to battle the Klan in the Western Pennsylvania coal fields, joined this spirited workers’ protest, firstly to show our solidarity with the workers’ righteous cause, and secondly to talk with them about capitalism, workers’ power and the war in Iraq, hoping to raise the consciousness of some. We carried signs reading, "It’s not just Bush, It’s capitalism"; "Now’s the hour for workers’ power"; and, "Iraq War: Rich man’s greed, workers and poor bleed."

The workers, members of Local 1305, Laborers District Council of Western Pennsylvania, told us that forced overtime is causing them stress and leading to burnout. One worker’s sign stated: "Overwork seriously undermines workers’ health and safety." Another said, "I’m burned out. I work 32 to 40 hours in overtime alone in a two-week period. I could do 60 hours (overtime) in one week if mandated. It’s too much."

Still another woman, walking the picket line with her three children, stated, "I’m here because I want them to see we have a life outside Laurel Crest."

Many workers asked us about our signs. We talked with more than a few, saying it was capitalism, the entire profit system, that was waging war on workers nationwide. Many agreed. We also pointed out that the war in Iraq was a rich man’s war and that young workers and the poor were dying and being seriously wounded.

This protest reflected the fact that workers are fighting the ruling class’s attacks on their working conditions, as the bosses attempt to take out the cost of the war on their backs. We must support these workers while presenting the communist solutions to their oppression in order to win them to PLP.

Red Coal

United Airline Picket Agrees:

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CHICAGO, July 30 — "Save our pensions, smash the system!" is just one of the chants PLP led on the system-wide United Airlines flight attendants informational picket line today. We were invited by a flight attendant who got our leaflet and CHALLENGE at an AFL-CIO rally. "I do agree and I’ve been saying this for a while. We need a revolution!"

Arriving at the picket line with signs reading, "An attack on some is an attack on all. When workers unite, the bosses will fail." "When bosses and unions are united (United logo), workers lose." Many workers enthusiastically took CHALLENGE and talked about communism, capitalism and whether reform led by the union can work.

One attendant took the paper and declared, "That’s why people become communists because…people are just not valued, only money is."

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NEW YORK CITY, July 29 — "I don’t know anything about the split. No one consulted us," said one 1199-SEIU delegate in the Nursing Home division. "What does that have to do with us?" asked another delegate in the Homecare Division. While the "Change to Win Coalition" has bombarded the media with its goals to supposedly "revitalize" the labor movement, its leader Andrew Stern and 1199-SEIU have turned their backs on their members.

Nursing home workers face an immediate increase of 21.5% in payments to maintain their Benefit Fund. The union says "no give-backs," but has submitted to arbitration, which will result in "some pain on both sides." Homecare workers earn between $7 and $9 an hour and work 24-hour shifts for 12 hours pay and a $16 night differential. The government and homecare agencies have jointly robbed most workers of time-and-a-half for overtime for 20 years.

1199-SEIU courts politicians crow about how they "understand" the "pain and sacrifice" of the mostly women, immigrant workers. While claiming to lead the charge against racist and sexist practices and poverty, they’ve done nothing. Meanwhile most of the 200+ "unionized" agencies have cut workers’ hours to no more than 40 to avoid overtime pay, dropping thousands of household heads below the poverty line. The union says back overtime pay isn’t its "priority." But the misleaders all want the sons and daughters of these workers to join the military to fight for U.S. imperialism.

There’s no end to the shameless hypocrisy of the bosses and their agents in government, unions, institutions and the media. Capitalism, a system of profits for the ruling class and exploitation and misery for the working class, must be overthrown. We need a communist society based on production and distribution for workers’ needs under working-class rule.

About a year ago a group of home attendants at the Personal Touch agency in Brooklyn filed a case with New York State Attorney General Elliott Spitzer’s office for back overtime pay. Recently they won a settlement for between $1 and $3 million, going back to 1998. According to a 5/26/05 memo from Family Home Care Services of Brooklyn and Queens, Inc., the court ruling in Coke v. Long Island Care at Home "removes the overtime payment waiver that home care providers such as us had."

A worker and her 1199 ESL teacher contacted the Attorney General’s office asking about back overtime pay for the rest of the 100,000 homecare workers at over 200 union agencies here. A labor division lawyer pretended to be surprised at the numbers. He told us the workers must report their cases individually or agency by agency, not for the whole industry. A small group of homecare workers is organizing workers to file cases, to protest at public appearances of the mayoral and gubernatorial candidates this fall and to get student support. We expect a long, difficult struggle.

To proceed PLP’ers know we must build mass class-consciousness and overcome passivity, fear and isolation of the homecare workers. Workers need to develop their own rank-and-file leadership and give up the illusion that union leaders and liberal politicians will save them. To create a core group of communist leaders among the workers we’ve formed two club/study groups, which include four home attendants. One has joined PLP. We have a readership and network distribution of 36 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS. These small steps can lead to future advances. We must stay the course.

a name="PLP’S Songs On CD">">"LP’S Songs On CD

The 1970’s PLP LP’s "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers — in English and Spanish — such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.

Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202

Bible Group Moves Against War, Fascism

Recently our political Bible study group had an excellent discussion about the London/Egypt bombings. First we noted how the Roman rulers and their class collaborators in 1st century Israel created a climate of fear and repression for egalitarian radicals like Jesus. Then we compared that time of imperial oppression to the present.

The priest expressed sadness at the deaths and the vindication Bush and Blair would claim for their invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many felt frustrated that, besides the daily stress of surviving as black and Latino working people, we had to cope with the fear of terrorist atrocity. Support for the NYC detention/searches was implied. I admitted to sadness, and anger at the ruling class, but also a stunned sense of, "Well, they’ll get away with this higher level of oppression without a fight." One more hour’s thought brought decades of communist training into play, and I began thinking (with the help of an excellent recent Party forum) of how we could take the offensive against fascism.

Our priest made an excellent analysis of how the cops’ new stop-and-search program could in NO WAY prevent terrorism because a well-prepared bomber could simply avoid one of the search points and move to an unguarded station. Several workers, along with myself and the priest, explained the thoroughly racist foundation of what is inevitably racial profiling, and the mass intimidation and docility it fosters. (A N.Y. Times editorial insisted the cops had to assure that "the appearance" of racial profiling must be avoided. But all the Times’ photos of searches were of darker-skinned or Asian people.)

We then criticized and rewrote a leaflet: "Go On the Offense: Against the U.S. Occupation of Iraq; Against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine; and Against Tightening Fascist Repression." Probably half of the ten involved wouldn’t be ready to take even agitational action against the subway searches yet. But everyone participated actively in drafting the statement below. I trust that, with struggle, more will begin to test in practice what they’re beginning to understand of the Party’s line. Excerpts follow:

The…corporations and their servants who actually run the United States are facing growing crises in their bid to continue to dominate the world…. The Iraqi occupation — far from guaranteeing control of oil and a secure military foothold in Asia— is more quickly…degenerating into uncontrollable civil war. And the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is a cynical public relations move to cover expanded control of the West Bank. Thus, continuing terrorist attacks on the U.S. and its lackeys are inevitable.

Within the U.S. support for the war…is slipping, and fewer young people…are willing to fill the ranks…. The ruling class is becoming more desperate in its need to intimidate and repress any and all opposition. The "random," inevitably racist, searches in New York area transportation centers are the next stage in a strategic campaign to develop fascist controls.

It is essential to expand the debate about these developments and to…resist the searches in mass actions. We must also continue to mobilize support for Lynne Stewart, the courageous defense attorney who will be sentenced in September after a Patriot Act conviction designed to intimidate all activists.

Red Churchmouse

PLP Forum Makes Plans to Step Up Fight Against Racism

NEW YORK CITY, July 23 — Fifty people attended a Progressive Labor Party forum tonight and heard reports and communist analyses of the protest against the fascistic Minutemen in Bridgewater, N.J., the split in the AFL-CIO and the continuing struggle of home care workers for overtime pay. Each report referred to the main issues shaping today’s world, imperialist war and the growth of fascism. The forum’s value was measured by the fact that many people gained a better understanding of some current events, and secondly, this encouraged two people to join PLP.

In the first report, two young people who had participated in the Bridgewater demonstration examined the nature of the Minutemen movement and our efforts to disrupt their recruitment meeting. Clearly the police have a zero tolerance policy of our efforts to confront these racists. The audience made generous contributions towards legal expenses for those protesters who were arrested.

Then a veteran red unionist compared the current split in the AFL-CIO to the one in the 1930’s. He contrasted the world view of communist-inspired union activists then to the pro-capitalist business unionists of both camps in the current AFL/CIO "split." He noted that today’s low percentage of unionization (12% of the work-force, compared to 35% 40 years ago) makes the unions less useful to the main, liberal wing of the ruling class and the Democratic Party. He also exposed the AFL-CIO’s role as an arm of U.S. imperialism worldwide, citing examples from Latin America and Poland.

A young comrade then outlined our Party’s strategic goal of building a base among industrial workers as a key force for revolution. She urged those present to consider devoting their working lives to achieving this goal.

In the last presentation, a veteran comrade and a home care worker teamed up to outline the racist super-exploitation of these mainly immigrant women. Listeners were horrified at their working conditions, involving long hours with no overtime pay, 24-hour shifts with flat rates of $16 for the overnight hours, and the low hourly wages chaining them to poverty.

During the discussion period, many questions and suggestions were directed to the home care worker in an effort to help that struggle. We also drew up a collective plan to fight the "random" searches in the NY/NJ mass transit systems.

Small Schools: A Losing Lesson For The Working Class

NEW YORK CITY — Many large public high schools here are being phased out for new "small" schools, comprising 125 students per grade. They will gradually become full four-year, 9-through-12 grade high schools of 500 students. These schools are housed in the same building as the large schools being phased out. Some of those buildings may contain three or four separate schools. As the process proceeds, the new small schools will take over the space the old large school has vacated.

As we will show, this change represents a further ruling-class attempt to increase their fascistic assault on the working class. As communists, with PLP leading the way, we must fight them on this critical battlefield for the minds of working-class youth.

Firstly, the rulers try to convince teachers that these new schools provide the mostly black and Latin inner-city children their only chance to learn. The racist nature of this move is revealed in the fact that schools in predominately white neighborhoods are not being forced into such reorganization.

Many teachers buy into the idea that they can design "their own school" the way they think it should be run. However, the realities of the education budget bring the teachers down to earth very quickly. Teachers work on curriculum, administration, etc., to design a school with a certain "theme." The bosses even have teachers disciplining other teachers to "improve student performance." The teachers can then remove a colleague who doesn’t conform to the "theme" of the school's designers. Some of the teachers in the new schools say they’re told not to talk to teachers in the phase-out school because "they don’t know what they’re doing." Supposedly their school is closing because their students flunked the state regents exams.

Secondly, the rulers are increasing their absolute control of the small schools. The latter have very small staffs — maybe 15 to 20 teachers and support staff, secretaries, etc. Most are either first- or second-year teachers without tenure. They’re asked to perform many different tasks, violating the union contract, tasks that a veteran teacher who knows the rules could refuse to do. The administration is everywhere. I observed one small-school principal go from room to room overseeing each teacher's lesson. The teachers must follow the pre-designed lesson plans issued from the central office or face disciplinary action. Capitalism in crisis uses fascistic methods to completely control what’s being taught to future workers. Many of these small-school teachers have told me they don’t protest their being overworked for fear of losing their jobs. The teachers’ union is doing little, if anything, to stop this abuse.

As in all working-class attacks in the schools, the students are the most exploited. Students and parents have been deceived into thinking that these small schools are somehow better for them. The school "themes" never really have anything to do with education. For example, the curriculum of the Stevie Wonder School of Music and Art, the All-City Leadership Academy or the Harbor School, don’t resemble Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science high schools. The new small schools take students on field trips at least once a week, or give them lots of lessons using videos instead of books. I’ve seen many students rebelling by walking out of the classrooms, arguing with the staff and, unfortunately, fighting with each other. The structure of these schools is very loose, where many young working-class students need structured guidance in their formative years.

Communists believe all workers must be educated to help lead and run society. They must be able to read, write and think critically. The bosses' plans for working-class children are either war or slave labor jobs, negating any education beyond those bosses’ needs. It is on this critical battleground that we must wage many fights to win the hearts and minds of the working class to communism.

Homeless Dying In Oppressive Heat Is Capitalist Murder

PHOENIX, July 24 — "I’m dying out here," declared a homeless man seeking shade while waiting for a handout meal and bottle of water. "The police are making us move all over the place. Where do they expect us to go?" (NY Times, 7/23)

So spoke one of the up to 20,000 homeless on the streets of this city during a month that saw 14 days of 110-degree temperatures and a week in which 21 people died due to the blistering heat. "When the temperature is 115 degrees," said a Phoenix Rescue Mission worker, "the pavement is 130 degrees and people’s feet are burned even through their shoes."

The actual death total "is probably much higher …because heat is either not listed on the death certificate or listed only as a contributing factor." (Arizona Republic, 7/24) The bodies of the homeless are discovered in dirt lots and between buildings. Volunteers distributing water found some were too weak to move.

Why these needless deaths? Because Phoenix has barely 1,000 shelter beds and hundreds of them are available only in winter. And these shelters lie in the shadow of real estate valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

This utter disregard for the homeless who the profit system has thrown out on the street exists alongside a corporation/city government joint plan renovating downtown Phoenix to create a "business friendly" environment. The homeless are seen as a "nuisance" to be ignored or driven out entirely, their presence conflicting with the long-term business plan.

Of course, there’s no profit to be gained in providing shelter for the homeless to protect them from the ferocious heat, so naturally a system based on profit will never build the shelters needed to prevent death. And since most of the homeless are workers who capitalism’s mass poverty has dumped on the scrapheap in the first place, the bosses’ attitude is, "if they can’t produce profits, let ’em die."

Workers need to heat up the class struggle to put an end to this hellish system.

a name="Killing Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’"></a>"illing Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’

Additional victims of this relentless heat are job-seeking immigrant workers trying to enter the U.S. because capitalism has created even more mass unemployment in Mexico. During this lethal 3rd week of July, 13 immigrants died near the Arizona-Mexico border because of the 116-degree temperatures. Many more died crossing the border in other areas.

While the police protect the racist Minutemen bent on attacking immigrant workers, the U.S. Border Patrol is arresting volunteers from the group "No More Deaths" who station themselves along the border to transport immigrants to receive medical attention. These Border Patrol agents claimed that the immigrants — one of whom was vomiting blood and a 13-year-old boy who had severe blisters on his feet — "did not seem sick." No wonder many consider the Border Patrol just like the Nazi Gestapo.

a name="Workers’ Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’"></a>Work"rs’ Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’

On July 22, DaimlerChrysler in Carabobo, Venezuela topped off six recent firings with two more, for trying to organize independently of the plant’s sellout union. Some workers wrote to Aporrea, a Venezuela news service:

"DaimlerChrysler, faithful to fascist and counterrevolutionary principles, once again attacks the working class…This company gets foreign currencies from the national government for its operations and financed the failed coup attempt and bosses’ strike of 2002. It has been plotting against a group of workers who decided to break with the pro-COPEI (the Christian Democratic Party) which for 25 years has not allowed a free and democratic union election."

The fired workers were trying to organize into the UNT, a union federation which has broken with the sellout union (part of the old corrupt union movement which was and is still supported by the AFL-CIO and was active in the 2002 coup and other attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez). The UNT has demanded rehiring the fired workers.

Venezuela’s workers, as in the rest of Latin America, are fed up with the old pro-boss and pro-imperialist union hacks. But, as in this case, they believe Chavez’s Bolivarian movement is the answer. Chavez recently called for "a socialism of the 21st century." This follows social-democracy á la Zapatero (Spain’s Prime Minister, head of his Socialist Workers Party). In essence, Chavez’s socialism is state capitalism with some free-market capitalism. Workers will get some crumbs, but they’ll still be exploited since capitalism in any form is based on extracting surplus value (profits) from labor.

But many workers understand socialism as being workers’ power, a real revolutionary anti-capitalist society where production serves the needs of all workers. History has shown us that the old socialist societies (of the Soviet bloc and China) led back to capitalism, so we need to fight for workers’ power under communism (no concessions to any form of capitalism). Following Chavez or a new set of reformist union leaders won’t produce that. These revolutionary workers in Venezuela need to turn their struggles into schools for communism.

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El Salvador —"We must be convinced that we have to fight racist ideas." "How can I explain that among us poor farm workers, the one who owns a cow thinks he’s more important than another farm worker?" "Racist attacks are a direct result of capitalist economics." These statements were part of a heated political discussion about capitalism and communism.

With light from a gas lamp on a beautiful star-filled night on a mountain, a new group of friends of PLP was meeting, including workers, youth, teachers and farm workers. The discussion centered on racism.

"Communist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting Back," said the comrade leading the meeting. First we discussed the world situation, showing that racism wasn’t a question of "races," but rather that capitalism needs it to divide workers. "Our own internal conditions are primary," said a young worker.

We reviewed PLP’s fight to expose capitalism’s puppets like Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Nelson Mandela and Koffey Anan. No matter what color their skin, if they serve the capitalists, they’re racists.

We also talked about the LAPD’s murder of a Salvadoran immigrant and his daughter, two more in the long list of racist police murders. The Mayor of LA, Antonio Villaraigosa forgave the police. Then he invited San Salvador mayor, Carlos Rivas Zamora, and an FMLN group to his inauguration. They congratulated this social fascist mayor. "The devil created them and they join together," is a wise saying.

"I would have thought the laws of Dialectical Materialism would be very difficult to understand, but now that we’ve been discussing the law of contradiction, how the internal one is primary to advance the struggle for communist ideas, it makes me really enthusiastic," said one worker.

There was much sharp self-criticism about our weaknesses and how we can collectively overcome them. The comrades made valuable contributions about their own lives and how racism has affected them. We plan for every meeting to be a true political school to strengthen PLP.

a name="Mexico’s Drug Cartel War Nets Huge Profits For U.S. Banks">">"exico’s Drug Cartel War Nets Huge Profits For U.S. Banks

Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, across the border from Texas, has become the center of a war between drug cartels, employing local cops. Recently after one police chief was assassinated,his replacement was killed the very next day. It’s basically a war zone.

According to a Southern U.S. Joint Task Force of police agencies, Mexican cartels have now replaced the Colombian drug lords as the main distributors of cocaine, marijuana and methaphetamines in the U.S. (El Universal, Mexico, 7/31). The drugs flow from Colombia and elsewhere through Mexico and into the U.S.

The latest development finds the Mexican Sinaloa and Gulf cartels using heavy weapons, not just Uzis and guns. How do these drug gangs obtain their weapons?

"Reports by Mexican authorities say that in their fight for control of the drug routes in the Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean side of Mexico, the criminal organizations have increased their purchase of weapons in the U.S. The same way they transport the drugs to the U.S. they bring back heavy caliber weapons to Mexican soil." (La Tornado, 7/31).

Mexico’s authorities blame this on the U.S. government’s lack of control over the weapons sales. The Gulf cartel is the main group with a paramilitary wing armed with heavy weapons, but their enemy, run by drug capo Chap Guzman, now also has heavy weapons. Both use them to kill each other and anyone else who gets in their way. Now a 50 millimeter Barret machine gun was also found on one of the Pacific drug trafficking routes.

According to Mexico’s Justice Dept., the arrests and jailings of some drug capos and their lieutenants have led to a war among many of the drug cartels in Tamaulipas, Sinaloa and Baja California.

Drugs are big business. Methaphetamines are now becoming one of the most lucrative for the cartels, which have established labs on both sides of the border. The bosses — especially in the U.S. — have always been very hypocritical about the drug business. U.S. banks make billions laundering the drug-money. Only about a decade ago, Citibank had a special unit just to manage the money of the brother of Salinas de Gortari, then Mexico’s President, before he was jailed for drug trafficking and murder. Corruption is rampant among the politicians and cops on both sides of the border. Afghanistan again has become the biggest producer of heroin following the U.S. invasion and restoration of the warlords back into power. Now the weapons manufacturers are making big bucks from the drug trade.

So basically, as long as capitalism is in power, drugs will be around.

a name="Movie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’"></">Mo"ie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’

Must Smash Capitalism, Not Just ‘Big Mac’The documentary, "The Fourth World War," produced by Big Noise Films, uses footage of street demonstrations and interviews with activists, a poetic narration, and vibrant music, to present a vivid picture of the class wars that are taking place in Argentina, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and many other countries. In these wars, workers are resisting — with tremendous energy, solidarity and commitment — capitalism’s attempts to drive down their living standards in order to boost bosses’ profits. Some powerful segments include:

• Huge demonstrations in 2001 in Argentina demanding the resignation of the government viewed as responsible for the severe economic crisis producing a steep increase in unemployment and sharp decline in the standard of living. An older woman tells a mass rally they must develop a new, collective way of thinking about society: "I am ‘the Other.’ I am the unemployed worker. I am the revolutionary. I am those who take over their factories. I am those who do not eat. I am all of us."

• A general strike of South Korean workers, who shut the factories and march militantly through the streets protesting the "crushing poverty of the working poor," hidden by glitzy skyscrapers.

• Massive street demonstrations of black South Africans protesting the ANC government’s privatization of water, electricity and housing, leaving many workers without these basic life requirements. One South African activist bitterly recounts how in 1994 the South African owners of the mines and factories shrewdly replaced white politicians with black ones, who now manage the same exploitative system.

While there’s much to recommend in this film, there’s also much to criticize. Its politics are that of anarchism. Anarchists may hate capitalism and racism, and many youth influenced by anarchists have participated in many demonstrations. But anarchism opposes building a revolutionary communist party, which is the only way the capitalism they hate can be defeated.

Because of this basic contradiction, the film is often confusing:

• It never names the system of exploitation producing the poverty and misery that workers are shown fighting against. It refers to "corporate globalization," "neoliberalism," and "empire" but never once identifies the system as capitalism. This only leads people in the anti-globalization movement to think capitalism can be improved and saved, thereby promoting a liberal rather than an anti-capitalist outlook.

• Although the documentary shows the governments’ armed forces (police, army) repeatedly breaking up demonstrations, arresting and shooting protestors, while protecting the meetings of the corporate and political elites, the narration never states the obvious — that capitalist governments must be forcibly overthrown before capitalism can be replaced with a system of, by and for workers and their allies.

Street demonstrations, no matter how militant, will not topple the capitalist state. Yet the film suggests they can.

One segment shows unarmed peasants in Chiapas, Mexico — led by the Zapatistas — marching into a small, temporary military base and demanding the soldiers leave. The stunned soldiers, seeing themselves being filmed, don’t fire their rifles and leave the base. The film presents this as a big victory. But this is politically deceptive. Actually the army has been able to establish military bases in Chiapas, and unarmed peasants haven’t, and won’t, be able to prevent this. Only when the workers and peasants establish a red army — with units in both rural and urban areas, as well as in the military — will they win real victories.

The first criticism — that anarchists don’t identify capitalism as the enemy — is related to the second criticism, that anarchists don’t say capitalist governments must be overthrown. If anarchists tell people that it’s not enough just to demonstrate, or smash McDonalds’ windows, that the system needs to be overthrown, people will rightfully ask, "How can we accomplish this?" Then anarchists are in trouble, because it’s only by building a mass revolutionary communist organization that we can succeed. Without a revolutionary solution, anarchists often fall back into reformism, betraying their own desires for meaningful change.

BBC Polls: Marx Tops All Philosophers

Karl Marx was voted the most important philosopher in history in a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) radio poll of 30,000 people in the UK, leading with 28% of the total. An October 1999 BBC Online poll chose Marx as the "greatest thinker of the millennium," followed by Einstein, Kant, Descartes, Hawkings, etc.

Marx won the latest poll despite a massive campaign to stop him by The Economist magazine, representing Britain’s big bosses. The Economist pushed David Hume, who came in a distant second. Marx beat Aristotles, Schopenhauer. Confucius, Kant, Descartes, Locke, etc.

Now that Marx has won, the bosses are trying to "justify" it by separating his revolutionary philosophy from real revolution. Historian Eric Hobsbawn, a renegade from Marxism, used the already timeworn argument of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union supposedly marked the death of revolutionary Marxism, whining that "the fall of communism has liberated Marx of the deformations it suffered in the countries where real socialism ruled."

Hobsbawn uses the term "real socialism" to mean the attempts to build revolutionary workers’ societies from the 1920’s to the decade after World War II, not the state capitalism that ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1950’s until 1989.

But Marx was not just an "armchair philosopher." He himself said philosophy’s real job was not simply to explain the world, but rather to transform it. His discovery of the "dirty secret of capitalism" (surplus value extracted from labor); his helping to found — along with his comrade Frederick Engels — the first international revolutionary workers’ movement; their writing of "The Communist Manifesto"; and his development of Dialectical Materialism (the universality of change, that capitalism is not eternal) — all this still gives workers worldwide the roadmap to emancipate themselves from the endless wars, racist terror, mass unemployment, famines and super-exploitation that is capitalism.

Aspiring to be a good Marxist

UNDER COMMUNISM:

Can You Have Both Wealth and Health?

The first column in this space (6/8) discussed health care in communist China in the 1950’s, based on the inspiring "Away With All Pests" by British surgeon Joshua Horn.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the workers and farmers of China made tremendous strides after the 1949 revolution. That column described the struggle to improve relations among health care workers and patients, especially efforts to overcome the elitism of doctors and learn from the experiences of the worker-patients. (Future columns will give other examples, such as the amazing mass campaign to wipe out schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by snails.)

In the decades following the revolution, the CCP made health care widely available to the working class in poor and war-ravaged China.. (The "barefoot doctors" movement merits another column.) Starvation was eliminated and once the population had enough to eat, the Chinese diet became one of the healthiest ever: modest portion sizes, not that much meat and fat, lots of whole grains and some vegetables. Obesity was no problem and the physical labor carried out by much of the population probably meant fairly healthy cardiovascular systems and bones.

Sounds like a great start for a society aiming for communism. But what has happened to health and medical care in today’s capitalist China? Millions cannot afford health care. Drugs and prostitution have become serious problems. It’s unclear whether Chinese officials are able (or willing) to control potentially dangerous diseases like AIDS, SARS, or avian flu. Industrial accidents, especially in mines, are epidemic and pollution is a major health problem in many areas, even sparking anti-government protests.

Fast-food companies like McDonald’s and KFC are rampant and the consumption of animal fat has risen substantially. An increasing percentage of the population has adopted a sedentary lifestyle, sitting for hours at a time in factories and riding scooters or cars rather than walking or bicycling. Obesity, high blood pressure, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes are afflicting ever larger numbers, and western drug companies are salivating at the prospects of cashing in on these chronic conditions. Capitalism has undermined people’s health and made medical care unavailable to tens of millions.

Under communism, health care will be free and distributed based on need. Collective exercise time can be built into factories and offices. We will build and use mass transportation systems that include lots of opportunities for walking. Agricultural production and distribution will be organized to make fresh, healthy foods available to all. There will be mass campaigns to end smoking. Prostitution, drugs and pollution will be wiped out by a society that consciously and vigorously adopts a communist way of living and thinking.

When it comes to health and medical care, we need to learn both the positive and negative lessons of communist and capitalist China. Readers will undoubtedly have many other ideas about how a communist society should develop in order to guarantee the health of its people.

LETTERS

Red Vet Says, What You Do Counts

During our Summer Project, many comrades and friends questioned how you can know if you’ve made "progress" with friends at work, in school or in the barracks. At least in my case, I’ve consistently underestimated how much our work and politics affects those around us. Here are three examples, beginning when I was a soldier during the Vietnam War.

About 20 years after I left the Army, my wife was selling CHALLENGE at a local shopping center. One shopper stopped in mid-stride, stared at the paper and exclaimed, "I haven’t seen that paper in twenty years since Sam Smith sold it to me when I was stationed at the Fort."

"Sam Smith! That’s my husband." answered my wife. Needless to say she made that sale!

A few years later, I was running for union office on a slate organized by the "outs." I went to the first campaign meeting thinking I didn’t know these people too well as they were working in different plants, in different cities. After the formal meeting, one candidate pulled me aside with a couple of his friends and proceeded to recommend me highly. "You should listen to Sam and his paper," he told his friends, "These guys in the Progressive Labor Party are the real deal!" You see, during my court martial — for fighting against racism and imperialist war while in the Army — I had stayed at his apartment. I remembered him, but he really knew me and our Party!

Around this same time, I recognized another of my "rebellion" buddies from the Army as I was walking into work. He asked me what I was doing after all these years. "Oh, the same old thing," I answered, non-commitedly.

"Good!" he said, "because this is the most racist place I seen in years." We started some fight-back and he invited me to his house. When I arrived, there were maybe eight of his relatives sitting around the living room.

They immediately started to chat with me as if they had known me for years, complete with details of my history. There was only one problem; I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever meeting them. After about 15 minutes of this, seeing the perplexed look on my face, they broke out laughing. In truth, they had never met me before, but my "rebellion" buddy had been telling them stories about our years of class struggles in the Army, so they just "felt" like they knew me.

You just never know how much our political work and base-building affects those around us.

Red Veteran

Collectivity Conquers Fear

On July 25th I went to my first PLP demonstration. On my way to a comrade’s house, I was more nervous than I was willing to admit. My mother’s old joke of "don’t get arrested" struck me in an odd way, possibly because I knew this wouldn’t be like the other activities my mother jokingly issues this warning for. The minute I saw my comrade’s face all my fear diminished. He looked so ready for today’s event that I knew I had no reason to be nervous. Another comrade arrived and also helped quell my fears. We left for the meeting place, getting really excited. I had waited for this kind of event for a long time.

The environment at the assembly point was like every other PLP event — comfortable but charged with energy. After discussing the importance of fighting these fascists, we drove to Bridgewater, N.J., where I saw police cars. Suddenly my mother’s warning filled my head. I contemplated turning back but my comrade put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and I realized I was surrounded by friends who would look out for me.

Everyone marched in front of the sports arena, many with copies of CHALLENGE. Then the cops, deciding we were a "threat" to their fascists inside, told us to move back, away from the entrance. Fellow comrades urged me to stay away from the cops — I wasn’t there to get ‘arrested. One searing image was seeing a fellow comrade being handcuffed and taken away. I was angry, but kept myself in check, realizing this was not the time nor place to confront a cop. I could care less about getting arrested; it’s more the wrath I, and the comrade my mother trusted to watch out for me, would endure if I did.

Soon I got into the spirit of the chants. Slowly our numbers grew. It was hot. At times I wanted to stop, feeling faint (as has happened before) but the voices kept me going. I was amazed to be part of it all. My heart jumped as I saw the cops in riot gear arrive. We then stormed up the hill where comrades were holding up banners and cheering. I was ready to join them but realized we were supposed to go to the car and leave.

We returned to a friend’s house to talk about it all. A few thought it could have been organized a little better and that there should have been a little more discipline, but overall we felt it was a very good demonstration. Our four friends shouldn’t have gotten arrested, but that’s the way the system works against us.

I was sad to see it end. I never feel so right as when I am doing something with the Party. So thank you to all my comrades, you’ve become a second family to me.

First-time demonstrator

Rockers Raise $ For Anti-Racists

On July 29, a benefit concert raised funds for the legal expenses of anti-racist protestors, including one PL’er, arrested at a demonstration against the fascist Minutemen on May 25th in Garden Grove, CA. A diverse crowd of youth, students and workers came to listen to several alternative rock music bands and speakers. The latter reviewed the May 25th demonstration, the need to understand the nature of fascism as a necessary outgrowth of capitalism and to be aware of the danger of liberal politician misleaders. The last speaker concluded that the only way to fight racism is to build a multi-racial, revolutionary communist movement that rejects racism, patriotism and nationalism.

Many youth who helped organize and participated in the event because of its anti-racist character were glad to hear a broader analysis of the relationship between racism, war and fascism. Many also took CHALLENGE and asked to be contacted for future events. It was one more step in building an anti-racist, anti-fascist political campaign defending the anti-racist protestors under attack by the fascist Orange County cops, sheriffs, and courts.

Red Youth

Communist Art Celebrates Workers

What would the role of entertainment be under communism? In William Hinton’s historical work "Fanshen," documenting his experiences during the Chinese Communist Revolution, he recounts an opera he saw in the countryside. It clearly depicted the landlords’ savage brutality against the peasants, fleecing them for maximum profit. The opera’s music, acting, and beauty came from a realistic portrayal of the working class’ oppression.

Communist art will seek to challenge, motivate and educate as well as entertain. It will not be escapist, but will seek to illuminate working-class struggles.

About 10 years ago I saw the Chinese state ballet put on a beautiful show depicting a young woman being chased through dark woods. She eventually joined the communists and red flags and beautiful colors celebrated her new communist commitment. Her arrival at a communist consciousness was the greatest beauty; the ballet reflected this. This opera portrayed a glimpse of what art is capable of creating and inspiring.

Communist art will seek to create such consciousness. Soviet art celebrated the beauty of the working class and depicted factory workers building and struggling to create a socialist state.

Our art will celebrate the values communists hold dear — the family, love, struggle, and communist politics. Our villains will be the real enemies of the working class — the CEOs, kkkops, politicians, kkkourts and the bosses. Our creative ambitions will facilitate destroying rotten capitalist consciousness by building, reinforcing, and creating a morally communist conscience.

Red Reader

Attack on Lynne Stewart A Fascist Step

PLP’s role in the Stewart case is about exposing U.S. imperialism and the development of fascism via the legal system which is increasingly being used to discipline the working class. We must fight the fascists as they seek to expand their control of the world’s wealth for their own profits.

The followers of Lynne Stewart’s client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, have committed acts of terror in Egypt and plotted to do so in the U.S. He has called for Jihad against "Jews." Abdel-Rahman is a vicious, racist, religious fanatic and a murderous fascist but Red Lawyer is wrong to say that PL’ers shouldn’t be active in her defense.

Though Stewart has ideological differences with PLP, she certainly stands against imperialism and racism. Comparing her to Mathew Hale and Abdel-Rahman confuses the issue, which is that the ruling class is changing its laws to usher in growing fascism.

Red Lawyer’s letter (CHALLENGE, 7/20) was inaccurate. Ramsey Clark, who also represented Abdel-Rahman, testified at Stewart’s trial that he also broke the Special Administrative Measures (SAMS), both in the U.S. and in Europe. The reason the Bush administration chose to go after Stewart and not Clark or the third lawyer, Abdeen Jabara, was probably a political not a legal choice.

The fact remains that Lynne Stewart has been convicted of five federal counts. She faces 40 years in jail for acts which previously would have resulted in nothing more that a fine and/or professional disciplinary action.

Who was the target here? Not just Stewart but the entire working class. Changes in the legal procedures, as in Stewart’s case, show that anyone who speaks out can face "zero tolerance" and be viewed as a "terrorist," intimidating activists as well as lawyers.

Despite differences with Stewart, we must seize the political opportunity in this case to broaden our base, raising the issue in our unions, community organizations and churches. We need to understand and explain why this struggle involves developing fascism and affects us all.

A Worker

Pakistani Comrades Teach Their Youth

As a Party we emphasize winning the masses to communist ideas, a struggle that begins with our own families, many of whom are won to bourgeois ideology. We must struggle to build a political life which abandons bourgeois customs and creates our own communist habits.

Here in Pakistan we held a communist cadre school in July with a good number of school children (sons and daughters of PLP’s comrades and their friends). We believe these children are our future so they must prepare themselves for communist struggle.

Capitalism produces poverty, slavery, terrorism, religious and sectarian violence, exploitation, illiteracy, injustice and fundamentalism. The education system here is based on capitalists protecting their interests. It teaches that class division is made by God, so workers must thank God for their poverty. But we communists know it’s the capitalist system that makes us poor by exploiting our labor and resources. We preach each according to his/her need. Communist society will have none of the divisions rampant under capitalism. This is the only way to get rid of poverty, illiteracy, exploitation and alienation.

We also met with some trade unionists and professionals who’ve become fed up with the ideas of fake "leftists." Pakistan’s revisionist parties have quarreled over "social democracy" and "national democracy"; they viewed socialist revolution as a first stage for communist revolution. But these ideas failed to influence the masses so their rank and file became frustrated, leading to splits in their parties.

Then these fake leftists formed NGO’s and enriched themselves. We in PLP know that because past communist movements didn’t break with social and national democracy they ended up forming united fronts with the bosses’ organizations instead of relying on the working class. They limited themselves to trade unionism. Such errors led to a betrayal of the working class worldwide.

After a long discussion about the Party and its ideas, we struggle internationally under a single revolutionary communist party, the PLP. We analyzed the current situation in the world and especially in Pakistan, concluding that PLP is the only party truly struggling for communist revolution. We must work hard to win the working class to our Party. Long live communist revolution and PLP.

Comrade from Pakistan

Strikes Spread in Italy

Strikes are erupting throughout Italy. For the third time in four months, the Transport Workers’ union has shut down bus and subway service nation-wide. They’re protesting the government’s decision to allow the transportation companies to stop paying workers for the first three days of sick leave. Workers feel if they let this attack go unanswered, it will set a precedent for future attacks. Participation in all three strikes has been very high.

In addition, Alitalia flight conductors struck on July 18. And railway workers were scheduling a one-day strike on July 25 against staffing cuts that lead to longer shift hours and threaten safety conditions for themselves and train riders.

A friend in Italy

Fighting Racism Builds Internationalism

I was impressed once again by the importance of PLP’s international work while participating in the NYC Summer Project. On July 16, we were determined to confront the racists in Farmingville on Long Island in solidarity with the Latino day laborers who gather at 7 A.M. daily at a local 7-11 store seeking work in landscaping or construction. (See CHALLENGE, 8/3.)

It was great to see these workers encouraging each other to join the picket line and participate in the chants. As they picketed they would signal others to do the same. These hardworking immigrant workers put a lot on the line by joining us; had any been arrested they would have faced deportation, not just a misdemeanor court date. Despite this, the workers were ready for action. Seeing the especially vulnerable and oppressed group come forward makes revolutionary ideas come alive. They showed that "the man" can’t keep us down because we’re willing to fight! With students and workers joining in solidarity against the racist oppression infecting Farmingville, the racists and their cops took notice.

Our comrades’ arrests were not in vain because the workers saw our Party in action and our commitment to all workers. Visiting these workers, bringing them closer to the Party, will strengthen all involved. These connections can help advance our movement globally. Suppose these workers who join here get others to join PLP in Mexico, some of whom may return to the U.S. for work. Such results within this group can have powerful impacts internationally.

The imperialist nature of capitalism forces workers to emigrate, chasing after the jobs bosses create through their global investments. Many corporations have left Mexico for China and other still cheaper labor countries to make maximum profits from workers’ labor. Mass unemployment in Mexico drives workers to the U.S. They’re often separated from families until scraping together enough money for brief reunions. They then travel to wherever the imperialists have taken the jobs. This dangerous trek is repeated over and over, showing the workers’ strong and admirable commitment to their families as well as their desperation.

As the ruling class continues its drive to increase pro-USA, nationalist sentiment, we must continue to promote international working-class solidarity. Capitalist bosses use borders and "race" to divide and oppress workers worldwide. We are one working class and must unite to smash racism and the profit system through communist revolution. Only then can we live, not just survive.

I was happy to join my NY comrades both for the protest and the discussions. This has been an unforgettable, red-hot summer! Keep the fight!

Militant Anti-Racist

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Oil-hungry US won’t give up bases in Iraq

It’s the oil, stupid.

…The whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the middle East and its precious oil reserves… "the greatest single prize in all history."

…The invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond.

…Dreams of empire die hard. American G.I’s are dug into Iraq and the bases have been built for a long stay. (NYT, 7/28)

US leads new ‘race to the bottom’ for labor

…As labor costs in the United States continue to decline, employers in other advanced nations will feel pressured to lower their costs to meet the competition….

…The United States is leading this race to the bottom in wages, benefits, working conditions and social protections. Many companies that once considered investing in Western Europe or Japan are now investing in the United States as the new low-wage center of the developed world….

The average annual employer contribution for Social Security in the United States is $2, 196, compared with $8,274 in Germany…and $5,183 in Japan. (Labor Research Association)

Youth suicide high in capitalist China

Suicide is the main cause of death among young adults in China, the state media reported. Loneliness and a lack of medical support for depression are thought to have contributed to a suicide toll that is estimated at 250,000 people a year. (GW, 8/4)

Hope of Communism built Vietnamese morale

…In South Vietnam, he [Westmoreland] was made commander in April 1964, in part because of his ostensible knowledge of guerrilla warfare.

Westmoreland’s main flaw was that he thought that if he confronted the communist forces directly, either on the ground or with his massive airpower, he could simply win by attrition. The communists’ death toll was very heavy, and this encouraged the delusion that the war was being won, as Westmoreland could not imagine how relatively small countries like North or South Vietnam could sustain such massive casualties.

As Stanley Karnow, the Vietnam reporter and historian noted: "Westmoreland did not understand — nor did anyone else understand — that there was not a breaking point. Instead of breaking their morale, they were breaking ours." (GW, 8/4)

Bribery is zooming in Russia’s ‘democracy’

More than $300bn will be paid in bribes in Russia this year, almost 10 times as much as in 2001, according to a survey. The average bribe paid to corrupt bureaucrats is 13 times what it was four years ago, research by the Indem thinktank shows….

Bribes are most commonly paid to avoid army conscription, secure a place in a school or university, buy up a judge or get better medical treatment. President Vladimir Putin admitted the scale of the problem in a recent speech… (GW, 8/4)

Is Harry Potter worse than myths of Bible?

…[An] anonymous clergyman…got a primary school to cancel a Harry Potter-themed fancy dress party on the grounds that children who dressed as witches and wizards were being led into "areas of evil". You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of such a pronouncement, coming from a man who peddles what some regard as superstition. (GW, 7/28)

Point a finger at all religion not just Islam

…Yet before we embark on a round of religious finger-pointing we should note that all major faiths are the same….

Think of the muscular Christianity of imperialist, Victorian Britain (or indeed, of contemporary America) or Hinduism’s lunatic fringe. In Sri Lanka even smiley, happy Buddhism has exacerbated one of the most vicious civil conflicts of our time.

In the Lebanese war of the early 1980s, more than 70% of the suicide bombers came from Christian secular groups. And, before being outraged by the more belligerent quotes from the Qur’an, we should examine the words of many hymns…considerable portions of the old Testament or the religious references made by extreme Israeli settlers. (GW, 7/28)

1. Soldiers Agree:
   `IT's A RICH MAN's WAR . . .'
2. Protesters Arrested for Confronting Anti-Immigrant Racists
3. U.S. vs. China:
   Profits Now, Nukes Later?
4. Rove `Scandal': Liberals Want More Troops to Control Iraqi Oil
5. LAPD -- Enforcers of Racist Exploitation
6. Push Janitor-Aerospace Worker Solidarity in LA Strike
7. Boeing Workers Defy Union Hacks, Greet PLP Summer Project
8. PLP Links War, Racist Cuts To Capitalism At NEA Convention
   1. REFORM AND REVOLUTION
   2. Education Not Incarceration
9. AFL-CIO `Insurgents' Another Gang of Pro-Boss Strike-Breakers
10. PLP'S Songs On One CD
11. Imperialist Rivalry For Oil Behind Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism
12. Liberal Bosses, Politicians, Minutemen -- All Enemies of the Working Class (Part II)
    1. Bosses Want Immigrants for Cheap Labor, War Recruits
13. CIA Puppet Regime in Ethiopia Massacres Anti-Gov't Protestors
14. Video Games Used to Recruit for War
15. UNDER COMMUNISM
    Auto Workers Will Have A Better Idea
16. According to Anti-Communists,
    Hitler Defeated Stalin!!
17. LETTERS
    1. Cops Murdered My Son
    2. GI's Like CHALLENGE
    3. Punk Anti-Racist Benefit Concert
    4. Racism, Sexism:
       No Laughing Matter
    5. Don't Name PL Union Prez?
    6. The Science of Cooking and Revolution
    7. It's More than Money
    8. What About Rural Areas Under Communism
18. RED EYE ON THE NEWS
    1. Londoners: Iraqi cities see worse killing
    2. Immigrant high school whiz can't go to college
    3. John Brown sanely rebelled against slavery
    4. African-aid celebration hides greedy reality
    5. Shaky US earners are in the red
    6. US crop-spray ruins Colombian Farmers
    7. China general says US may face Nukes

---

Soldiers Agree:
`IT's A RICH MAN's WAR . . .'

"All you had to do was mention oil profits and Iraq in the same sentence, and soldiers would grab the leaflets!" said one of the Summer Project volunteers, including PLP members, who distributed over 700 leaflets and 400 CHALLENGES at a local Army base and door-to-door throughout nearby apartments where soldiers and their families live. The leaflet was entitled "Oil profits or soldiers' and civilians' lives -- it's one or the other."

They were explaining the real reasons why U.S. soldiers are being sent to kill and die in Iraq -- oil profits and the rulers' need to ward off imperialist competitors. Suddenly, the wife of a soldier deployed in Iraq blurted out, "I know what you're talking about. My husband called me yesterday and told me he was being sent on a `suicide mission,' and that he wouldn't be able to call me until he got back to the States." She agreed the war was only benefiting rich multi-nationals like Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton. After taking CHALLENGE, the woman agreed it was important to build a higher level of political consciousness among soldiers. Others discussed with soldiers and their families the growing tensions and fundamentally contradictory interests between rank-and-file enlisted GI's and officers.

The sister of a GI who's back from Iraq but is being redeployed believed the war was not worth the death of a single soldier or civilian. She understood it was a "rich man's war," with workers paying the ultimate price for the bosses' profits.

In a show of class anger, the mother of a soldier in Iraq exclaimed, almost yelling, "I'd like to see Bush send his children to Iraq!"

Another GI, a member of the Special Forces, openly confessed: "We know this war is about oil profits for Exxon-Mobil, and we know it's not for us. Thank you very much for this."

"I was in Iraq, but I don't have an opinion about this war," said another soldier. "You can think, so you do have an opinion!" we responded. Although he wouldn't share his opinion, he agreed he had one, and took the leaflet and a copy of CHALLENGE.

After hearing us say Exxon-Mobil's profits and the bosses' oil wars are not worth the life of one GI or the death of one Iraqi civilian, a number of soldiers thanked us for coming to the town near the base and distributing the paper.

While many believe soldiers are won completely to capitalist ideology, most GIs were open to anti-imperialism and to PLP's red politics. In fact, the overwhelmingly positive reaction soldiers had to CHALLENGE surprised many in the group at first. The experience among many who had never spoken about politics with soldiers helped them to combat and demystify the negative stereotypes and opinions spread by the majority of liberal and phony "left" organizations. "While there were some negative responses," one said, "mostly it was a good experience, and I would definitely enjoy talking with soldiers again."

A Vietnam veteran felt soldiers were facing many of the same problems and difficulties today that he and others had to deal with during the 1960's. Suggesting that the war wasn't worth fighting, he felt soldiers needed to put their collective interests first, even if it means disobeying orders. There was some discussion of soldiers' tactics during the Vietnam War, including wildcat strikes on bases and "search-and-avoid" practices (where platoons would ignore orders and purposely avoid combat). Political solidarity is needed among soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. If these soldiers' and their families' reception of us is any indication, solidarity seems to be growing with every passing day.

Soldiers play a key role in the basic workings of capitalist society. The U.S. ruling class can continue to wage its bloody profit wars only by winning working-class soldiers to nationalism and racism. Yet, armed with communist ideas and leadership, soldiers and workers also can end the permanent cycle of wars, exploitation and racism endemic to capitalism. Winning soldiers to this fight will prove crucial to PLP's long-term struggle for communist revolution.

Protesters Arrested for Confronting Anti-Immigrant Racists

FARMINGVILLE, NY, July 16 -- Around 9:00 A.M., PLP'ers -- alongside angry day laborers waiting for jobs -- confronted the leader of an entrenched group of anti-immigrant racists here. As the bosses cut wages and workers' social services to pay for their endless wars, these gutter racists are attacking immigrant workers across the country, trying to divide workers and youth from seeing the real cause of these attacks -- capitalism.

On a previous visit we learned that every day these racists harass workers and those who come to hire them. On that earlier visit six workers took CHALLENGE and gave us all the information needed to plan a confrontation. (Farmingville gained international notoriety four years ago when two men linked to white supremacist groups attempted to murder two young Latino workers.) Recently, the town police raided and evicted these workers from their overcrowded housing on the pretext that it was a fire hazard, to hide its racist character. Some of those evicted are now living in the nearby woods. Today a local racist had thrown a bottle at a worker.

As we arrived, a group of four racists were leaving, with signs reading, "INS, do your job!" and "Deport illegal aliens!" We quickly set up a picket line. The workers we had met previously eagerly took stacks of CHALLENGE. They collected $11.00 for 30 papers they distributed.

Then the workers spotted the leader of the racist scumbags who was filming our demonstration from across the street -- big mistake on his part. We immediately surrounded him, blasting our chants in his ear through our bullhorn while the workers cheered us on from across the road. As our fists pumped and we shouted, "Working people have no nation!" the workers were grinning from ear to ear in appreciation that the local racists were getting what they deserved.

Then the cops arrived. At first, the coward chuckled arrogantly, but ended up whimpering to the cops to rescue him. The entire time, we marched around his car, continuing to chant slogans like, "We are not illegal, we are workers," and "The workers, united, will never be defeated," in both Spanish and English.

In minutes, at least 15 police cars arrived. Initially, the cops told the scumbag that since he was "free to leave," the actions of the demonstrators were not their responsibility. But in five minutes, they changed their tune and ordered us to the sidewalk.

At this point, one comrade made a short, impassioned speech in Spanish: "Now we can see that the police defend the racists, that the racists and the state are one and the same, but we're not afraid! We will continue marching!" When the on-looking workers heard that, they immediately joined our picket line.

When we didn't move quickly enough for the cops, they arrested four of us. The police targeted those they thought were the leaders, today's most visible fighters. But as communists in Progressive Labor Party, we're all leaders. We raised bail money to get our comrades released from prison, but in any event we would keep fighting.

As mainly a group of students and teachers, we have much to learn from these workers who, by joining this demonstration, put more on the line than any of us did. In defiance of the state, its laws, and its vigilantes, we will visit Farmingville regularly to water the seeds of revolution planted there today.

U.S. vs. China:
Profits Now, Nukes Later?

The rampant growth of capitalism in China puts U.S. rulers in a bind. On one hand, they can't do without China's cheap labor and its propping up of the U.S. Treasury through purchase of T-bills. On the other, they fear China's industrial expansion will provide the means to challenge the U.S. militarily. China National Offshore Oil Company's (CNOOC) impending $18.5-billion bid for Unocal has some in Congress demanding that the U.S. treat China as a strategic enemy openly and immediately. The dominant, liberal faction of U.S. capital, however, thinks it has time to make trillions more off China before things get too hot. But if China should move against Taiwan or gain a nuclear-armed ally in Iran, the liberals now pledging "engagement" and "partnership" will quickly change their tune.

Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with China three decades ago, realizing that the latter's embrace of the profit system would, for a time, prove a boon for U.S. rulers. It largely has done so. With workers averaging 40cents-an-hour wages, U.S. companies have raked in super-profits by erecting factories in China. Imports of low-cost Chinese goods have limited U.S. inflation. They've also provided a kind of bribe to U.S. workers, who can increasingly afford a broad array of consumer products despite stagnating wages. Prices of TV sets, for example, drop 9% a year mainly because of Chinese production. Wal-Mart imports $18 billion worth of goods from China annually. While the U.S. trade deficit with China reached $162 billion last year, Chinese rulers' holdings of $230 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds more than offset the gap. China's bosses are stealing more from workers than they can invest in the booming but not fully-developed Chinese economy. So they park a big chunk of the profits in U.S. government securities, which helps finance U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The liberal U.S. rulers' wing doesn't want to upset that apple cart just now, even as it plans for a future large-scale conflict. The San Francisco Chronicle (7/17/05) warns of repercussions if lawmakers block the China-Unocal deal: "Boeing could lose billions in contracts for commercial jetliners....The business climate for U.S. companies heavily invested in China's fast-growing market could turn chillier." Rockefeller protégé Kissinger is advising CNOOC on Unocal, as is JP Morgan Chase.

The main opposition to the takeover comes from the "Iron Triangle" of weapons makers, Pentagon arms buyers and compliant Congressmen. But Kissinger foresees a decade or more of breathing room: "Certainly, China's growing industrial capacity will improve its military capacity, and surely in a war with us, China could do us more damage in ten years than it can do now....China will not be in a position for a generation to threaten vital American interests militarily." (Council on Foreign Relations website, 7/14/05)

But the Nobel "peace" prize winner vows the nuclear murder of hundreds of millions when and if China does challenge U.S. profits through armed force: "It would suffer total devastation in such a war....[W]ar between major countries in the nuclear age is not the same as it was before World War I."

The clash could come sooner than Kissinger thinks. China's thirst for energy puts it squarely at odds with U.S. imperialism's need to control the world's oil and gas supplies. Taiwan, which commands the oil route between the Middle East and China, has become a flashpoint. A top Chinese general, Zhu Chenghu, said at an official briefing recently, "We will have to respond with nuclear weapons," if the U.S. military intervenes in a conflict over Taiwan. (New York Times, 7/15/05) [The general's statement reveals the Chinese "Communist" Party's utter abandonment of communist principles. During and after World War II, China's communists defeated their imperialist enemies not with capitalist "biggest-bang-for-the-buck" weaponry but by mobilizing the entire working class.] And, at the Persian Gulf heart of hydrocarbons, China has launched an "Arms for Energy" program with Iran.

"Beijing has reportedly threatened to veto any U.S. attempt to impose sanctions on Iran for pursuing uranium enrichment technology in what Washington alleges is a nuclear arms program. China has also sold Iran weapons, including long-range missile technology, that could threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40% of the world's oil exports flow. In October, Beijing used its friendship with Tehran to seal a $70-billion agreement giving Chinese companies a 51% stake in the huge Yadavaran oil field, Iran's largest onshore field, along with a promise to help develop the largely untapped area." (Los Angeles Times, 7/17/05)

To prepare for potential "real wars" -- such as a "mainland Chinese attack on Taiwan" -- in the near future, a New York Times editorial (7/10/05) urged that "the active-duty Army should be increased by about 100,000." (Hillary Clinton is sponsoring legislation to add 80,000 more troops to the Army.) And Kissinger holds the door wide open for U.S. military action against Iran. "I'm not recommending it but, on the other hand, it is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear-weapons centers without restraint. I'm not recommending military action, but I'm recommending not excluding it."

We cannot predict when or how hostilities between the U.S. and China will erupt. But we understand that cooperation among capitalists is limited by an overriding need for each capitalist to eliminate his rivals. When Kissinger and General Chenghu speak openly of nuclear slaughter, it's time for the working class to go on our own wartime footing.

Rove `Scandal': Liberals Want More Troops to Control Iraqi Oil

The scandal over White House adviser Karl Rove is heating up. Workers shouldn't mistake the forest for the trees. This isn't about protecting the "freedom of the press," exposing "treason" or disciplining a Bush operative for playing dirty pool. It's about sharpening tactical differences within the ruling class over an imperialist war in Iraq that is going badly for the bosses, as well as over how best to mobilize society, the economy and the capitalist state apparatus for future wars.

Of course Rove is a sleaze ball, who will stoop at nothing to slander Bush's critics. Sure, he "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband, Joseph Wilson, for blowing the whistle on Bush's Big Lie about Saddam Hussein's non-existent purchase of uranium from Niger. But that's not exactly news; repeating it won't get us very far in understanding why the rulers are making such a ruckus about this scandal. Our class has nothing to gain from glorifying a married couple with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which has directly or indirectly murdered millions of workers worldwide since its founding 60 years ago. Nor should we fall into the trap of celebrating the supposed "courage" of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, now serving a short jail sentence for refusing to divulge her sources for leaks in the Plame-Wilson caper.

Miller is hardly a hero. In fact she, and by extension her Times' bosses, are war criminals. As Bush & Co. were preparing to invade Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, the Times' editors published a series of front-page counterfeit stories by Miller about Saddam Hussein's "nuclear program." They played a key role in mobilizing public opinion to believe Bush's B.S. about going to war over Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD).

Facts, as the great communist revolutionary Lenin once wrote, are stubborn things. Here are a few: (1) The legend about WMD was a crude pretext for a war Bush & Co. were going to launch anyhow. (2) Congressional liberals who now criticize the war -- including 2004 Democrat presidential candidate Kerry and 2008 front-runner Hillary Clinton -- gave Bush the green light in 2003 to launch it. (3) The liberal press, which now condemns Bush and Rove for their lies about WMD, could have exposed the fiction well before the war started.

The liberals who voted for the war did so with misgivings. But these were purely tactical. The Liberal Establishment and its media ideologues never questioned U.S. imperialism's need to control Iraqi oil as an indispensable weapon in the struggle to maintain U.S. world dominance. They did worry, however, about the wisdom of conquering and occupying Iraq with fewer than 150,000 ground troops and few allies. But they put aside their doubts for the sake of class unity.

Now, however, the war is going badly. There seems to be no end in sight. Even the top guns in the U.S. military brass have to acknowledge that the anti-U.S. resistance is gaining strength. The U.S. occupation has increased rather than diminished the number of suicide bombers. Exxon Mobil and cohorts are a long way from enjoying the stable investment climate they covet to begin reaping a profit bonanza from pumping, refining and exporting Iraqi oil and gas. Perhaps most ominous for the rulers is growing cynicism among soldiers, workers and youth about the war and U.S. society in general. The military is stretched thin and demoralized. It needs twice the number of boots on the ground that it now has in Iraq. Hardly a week goes by without news about the army's failure to meet its recruitment quota. None of this bodes well for U.S. imperialism's future plans.

These, and not Rove's "dirty tricks," are the real reasons the liberal politicians and media are going after the Bush White House. While it's entertaining to see Bush -- the born-again man of "faith" and "character" -- having to duck questions about a top advisor who's a character assassin, the Times and others aren't attacking Rove and Bush for our benefit.

At stake here are an empire to defend, trillions of dollars in present and future profits and a world to rule -- and Bush simply isn't up to the job. That's the real scandal from the rulers' point of view. Rove may well prove to be the fall guy, because they always need one, but the center of the storm is a presidency that has failed to meet the needs of U.S. imperialism.

Bush might get impeached. After all, a lie about a sordid sexual scandal served as an excuse to impeach his predecessor, Clinton. Bush's failure and transgressions are much greater. Unlike Bill Clinton, an opportunist from a modest background who successfully hitched his star to one ruling-class faction, Bush actually comes from that class. His family represents the unstable marriage of convenience between Wall Street and a number of U.S. business interests. They include the domestic Oil Patch and oil services industry (Halliburton, etc.), which don't always share the agenda of liberal Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans. Whether or not Bush is impeached is of little concern to workers.

From a working-class viewpoint, the real "scandal" here is the profit system itself. When the bosses go to war, they always concoct a lie to cloak their mass murder in the fabric of righteousness. Lyndon Johnson's genocidal escalation of the Vietnam War began in the summer of 1964 after a fabricated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Clinton bombed the former Yugoslavia to smithereens in 1999 in the name of "human rights." Throughout his eight-year presidency his policy of sanctions and bombing in Iraq slaughtered hundreds of thousands, especially children.

The real scandal is that war and imperialism are inseparable. The rulers are trying to punish Bush for his ineptitude. But since 2003 this ineptitude has already killed over 100,000 Iraqis and maimed many more, and has caused the death of nearly 2,000 U.S. troops, plus tens of thousands injured. The liberal bosses' idea of competence is a presidency that can impose a police state at home and enlist millions in a military capable of far more violence and destruction than the Bush White House has managed to produce. There's no "lesser evil" here.

The Rove scandal and the liberals' hypocrisy around it reflect a sick, rancid system that has managed to hold on for so long only because the old communist movement fell under the weight of its own fatal errors. However, cynicism about the rulers won't get us very far. Yes, Bush, Rove, Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Kennedy, and their media mouthpieces are all rotten. But shaking our heads in dismay or disgust isn't the answer. Communist revolution remains the only road away from the profit system's dung heap of endless war, racism and terror. It's a long, hard road, but it nonetheless represents the interests of future generations of our class.

LAPD -- Enforcers of Racist Exploitation

WATTS, LOS ANGELES, July 10 -- "I don't want an apology. I want justice," declared Lorena Lopez, mother of Susie Marie Lopez. The LAPD killed Susie, her 19-month-old daughter, bullets piercing her left knee, her outer calf and finally her head, killing her instantly. The police also killed Susie's father, Raul Peña.

After a 911 call, the South East Division cops showed up at Raul Peña's small dealership in Watts. They claim Mr. Peña started shooting at them, while holding his little daughter in his arms. The family said Mr. Peña was upset and needed counseling, that he would never hurt his baby. They charge that he didn't shoot first.

Mrs. Lopez was on her knees, begging the cops not to shoot, but instead to call in a psychologist to talk to the distraught man. But a police SWAT team brought in nearly 100 cops who fired more than 60 bullets into the small office, killing father and baby.

Police Chief William Bratton and his lieutenants are working overtime to convince the public that Susie's father is the "sole responsible person" for his daughter's death. The racist LAPD keeps attacking the father's character.

Black and Latino residents of this neighborhood held several demonstrations against the murderous cops, demanding they be fired. Hundreds attended the wake at Mrs. Lopez's home. Several comrades distributed leaflets condemning the cops and connecting racist police terror to the capitalist system. Many asked for extra flyers and CHALLENGE. They expressed both anger at the police and the need for unity between black and Latino neighbors against the killer cops. Some agreed the problem is the system itself. People questioned why the police didn't look for alternatives to halt the standoff. An onlooker said the cops saw little Susie as "collateral damage."

Comrades also went to the mass for Susie, where once again leaflets and CHALLENGES were distributed outside the church. Many commented approvingly and asked for extras. The media was there to spread their racist filth. The priest had to recognize that multi-racial unity had resulted in the aftermath of Susie's death but couldn't quite blame the cops. Instead his sermon was about making the "right choices," clearly directed at the father.

Liberal politicians like Maxine Waters (who attended the wake), Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and AL Sharpton (who came to the mass) are telling everyone to rely on the results of the "investigation" and/or the "Community Civilian Police Review Boards." The Police Department's Force Investigation Division and the Inspector General's Office are "investigating" the cops' actions. The district attorney's office will "monitor" the investigation. That's like saying that after the wolf eats the chicken, a wolf's council will investigate the incident. No report will ever justify racist murder.

The Civilian Police Review Board would have us believe the cops can be "reformed." But that can never happen because their job is to enforce poverty wages, exploitation, terror and scabs, while protecting the rich and their capitalist system.

These two murders come a month before the 40th anniversary of the Watts Rebellion, which erupted not far from this site at 116th St. and Avalon, during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. Today, amid another imperialist war, racism continues and intensifies. Rebellions and protests are good but in the course of these struggles we must win groups of youth and workers in the factories, schools, churches and the military to build a mass red-led movement to fight the real cause of racist terror and endless wars: capitalism. That's the goal of the communist PLP. Join us!

Push Janitor-Aerospace Worker Solidarity in LA Strike

LOS ANGELES, July 17 -- Seven hundred janitors who clean the huge aerospace giants Boeing, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon in El Segundo, Redondo Beach and Long Beach began striking July 6 after contract talks stalled. The workers -- members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- struck over low wages and unfair labor practices by the three cleaning services subcontractors: Servicon Systems, Somers Building Maintenance and Aramark. They take home about $230 a week, without health care. Boeing refused to admit any responsibility for these slave-labor wages, saying it was an "issue between the janitors and the cleaning services."

PLP'ers joined the picket line with CHALLENGE and leaflets about the struggles of Boeing workers in Seattle, literature which the strikers gladly took. We told them, "We're here to support you and to say the workers at Boeing are in a similar struggle." Before finishing, one striker interrupted to say, "Wait. I want you to make this announcement to all the strikers."

While the workers picketed Raytheon and Boeing they chanted (in Spanish), "What do we want? Justice!" When we chanted, "The workers, united, will never be defeated!" the strikers became more enthusiastic and chanted that slogan.

They gave one of us their bullhorn. We emphasized the need to build the unity of all workers against all bosses' attacks. We added that the reason for these attacks was capitalist greed and the war in Iraq. We mentioned that whatever lessons they draw from their strike will benefit all workers.

The strikers applauded. Some gave their names. Then a striker told us, "It's true [as we had said] that workers' struggles have no borders. For example, in El Salvador a few families control all the wealth and the rest of us work for them." He gave us his name and requested our communist paper.

The janitors' union has over 9,000 members but some workers pointed out that the leadership is doing nothing to mobilize them to support the strike, nor to organize support from the machinists either. They emphasized the need to build a labor movement in which solidarity is the key principle.

Such a movement must be built on the communist principle that all workers have the same class interests and need to act as a class against the bosses' class dictatorship. Ultimately, the lasting victory in this or any other strike is the growth of the revolutionary movement, of Progressive Labor Party, whose goal is to destroy exploitation with workers' power, communism. We urge workers and students to go to the picket lines and support these workers.

Boeing Workers Defy Union Hacks, Greet PLP Summer Project

SEATTLE, July 17 -- Summarizing the first week of PLP's Summer Project here, a veteran Boeing worker and comrade concluded that "this may be a long-term struggle, but we can do this!" She helped us see it as a concrete step in the development towards Progressive Labor Party's goal of communist revolution. So far the numbers support this: 2,000 Strike Sanction flyers and 1,000 leaflets distributed and 1,200 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS sold -- 700 to Boeing workers, 100 to the black community and 400 to soldiers (see pages 1 and 6).

"Let them try to take this from me..." one worker warned when, true to form, IAM union hacks snatched our leaflets from workers' hands. Workers know if the hacks are trying to keep it from them, it must be in their interest.

Many evening visits and contacts were made with workers and soldiers. We focused on working-class solidarity, particularly among industrial workers concentrated at Boeing aerospace. The machinists' contract expires soon and last week saw the ritual strike-sanction vote. While the union sells out the workers every contract, this year there's an oil war and massive cutbacks, as well as the Boeing sale of their Wichita plant (see CHALLENGE, 7/6 and 7/20). PLP is exposing the union hacks' sellout, while winning workers to see that only PLP and revolution can truly end exploitation and war.

Project volunteers spoke with workers streaming in and out of the strike-sanction vote. We cited the need for a militant labor movement, but concluded that the only long-term solution to cutbacks and sellouts is a revolutionary movement destroying the profit system. A concerted effort on our part and a marked increase in class solidarity, led by communists, can fight the worsening attacks on workers.

We were inspired to see that a group of "concerned workers" had circulated a petition at the strike sanction vote calling for a new labor movement based on anti-racism and working-class solidarity. We heard one worker declare, "Everyone sign this petition! Workers Solidarity!" One petitioner said over 240 workers signed. We applaud these workers and fight for them to hear our revolutionary line. After all, the only choice in the present crisis -- with attacks from all sides on workers' livelihoods -- is to stand together as a class and use the power we have to halt production and halt the flow of profits into the pockets of the ruling class.

In the plants (average age is 52), a 60-year-old Boeing worker exclaimed, "I never thought I would be reading a communist leaflet...and agreeing with it!" He said his only hang-up was the word "communism" at the end. After a discussion with a friend, he read the Seattle General Strike article from PL magazine and wants to see PLP's documents, Road to Revolution III and IV. He planned to pay for and distribute a leaflet on the company's and the union's lies.

At the end of the first week, Boeing workers and Project youth attended a forum to learn from the experiences of a seasoned veteran of the class struggle. He described a railroad strike in the sixties in which the workers, through mass agitation and years of concentrated development of class consciousness, led by communists, were able to halt all freight transport throughout New York City in defense of 660 railroad tugboat strikers. Truck drivers, freight handlers and electricians banded together to respect the strikers' picket lines and stop all scabbing -- not one worker crossed the lines.

We also heard from a young worker from a local Boeing subcontractor (with thousands of workers) describe how work was being sent from Boeing union shops to hundreds of non-union subcontractors. In contrast to older Boeing workers, these subcontractors hire mainly young black and Latin immigrants, half of them women. The worker explained the necessity of -- and our ability to -- organize for revolution in such shops.

Both speakers inspired us to see the need and possibility of influencing industrial workers, especially in the non-union shops that capitalism is forcing onto the working class.

In the remaining week, we'll be out at the plants mornings and afternoons distributing CHALLENGES and leaflets with our communist analysis and talking to workers eager for a new direction in the class struggle. The latter may be a long one but we can and must win it, and we've done a good job moving it forward this week!

PLP Links War, Racist Cuts To Capitalism At NEA Convention

LOS ANGELES, July 18 -- A young black teacher, standing on her chair, shouting "Aye!" and waving her card in a vote to put the National Education Association (NEA) on record against the U.S. occupation in Iraq is my most vivid memory of the July 3-6 convention here. The motion called upon Bush and Congress to "support our troops by creating an exit strategy to end the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and bring our troops home." Of course, this wording echoes the Congressional Democrats' disagreement with Bush's war tactics, and opens the door to send still more troops and kill even more Iraqis, which is not really the intention of anti-war teachers. But it also expresses the anger of the majority of teachers at the death and destruction of Iraqis and U.S. troops and creates the potential for winning teachers to revolutionary politics.

Daily outside the convention hall, comrades and friends distributed PLP flyers, totaling over 5,500, and 800 CHALLENGES. Teachers were very receptive. They began asking, "What's today's flyer about?" Four different flyers covered the war in Iraq, prison construction, "Let Us All March Against Racist Budget Cuts" and "It's Not Just Bush and Arnold, It's War and Capitalism."

They opposed the NEA leadership's line of blaming Republican politicians for capitalism's problems and challenged them to lead all 9,000 delegates to Governor Schwarzenegger's office on July 5 to protest $2 billion in state education budget cuts. Although they planned a hand-picked delegation of 300, 3,000 eventually joined the march.

Later we erected a banner inside the convention center where exiting delegates could read: "Capitalism leaves every child behind." This stood for 20 minutes, receiving favorable comments from several delegates before security intervened. We also organized a well-attended PLP Forum, which included members, friends and delegates new to our ideas.

REFORM AND REVOLUTION

We advanced PLP's revolutionary principles with our friends and other NEA members, pointing out that even if the war ended, education wouldn't be fully funded (see "Permanent War Rules Out `Peace Dividend'"CHALLENGE, 5/11); that constant war is integral to imperialism; and that capitalism is a system of exploitation which can never satisfy workers' needs. We want teachers to understand that revolution is a war on the bosses to end the profit system; that communism is a system based on workers' needs; and that they should join PLP.

Shortly after returning from the convention, a study group examined how reform and revolution are both united and contradictory. As communists we participate in both processes, but reform builds capitalism and revolution destroys it. Actually we had been applying these concepts daily, as we tried to move delegates to the left in caucus and floor discussions.

For example, asking 50 delegates to sign a petition enabled us to introduce New Business Item (NBI) 39, which asked the NEA to "encourage its state and local affiliates to organize job actions in alliance with public employee unions and organizations....in response to massive cutbacks in funding for schools, healthcare, housing, and other social services caused by the war budget." The maker of the motion and our delegates speaking for it attacked the imperialist nature of the war in Iraq, described its burden on the working class and called for working-class unity in fighting these attacks on our class. While NBI 39 was defeated, it led to sharper discussion with many friends about the nature of the system.

Our speeches on the floor and in caucus meetings sparked a higher level of political response from delegates. However, we should have exposed the bosses' plans to recruit green-card soldiers for their imperialist war when a resolution about the DREAM Act demanded that "legalization [must] not be used as an incentive for or be dependent on military service." We also could have better explained that 70% of the prison population is non-white because the ruling class is intent on jailing the unemployed and young working-class men who are potential rebels against capitalism's racist attacks. As we return home to our study groups, the collective struggle with PLP's members and friends will help us all take advantage of the openness of our friends to the Party's ideas.

Education Not Incarceration

On June 30, we attended a pre-convention conference sponsored by two groups within the NEA: Education Not Incarceration (ENI) and the NEA Peace and Justice Caucus. ENI wants to shift funding from prisons to education. In workshops, conference participants were quite open to our revolutionary ideas. We explained that the imperialist war in Iraq was the primary factor affecting education and other social services, and that the massive 25-year increase in prison construction (during declining crime rates) is the racist cutting edge of an over-all fascist attack on the working class. Young people in one workshop responded enthusiastically when we said the bosses are trying to use the same youth the cops target on the streets as cannon fodder in Iraq, noting the revolutionary potential of working-class soldiers with guns in their hands. We also met teachers who want to work with PLP members in their areas to continue the struggle.

AFL-CIO `Insurgents' Another Gang of Pro-Boss Strike-Breakers

The AFL-CIO convention in Chicago is shaping up as a battle between the old guard (Sweeney & Co.) versus the "new insurgency," as phony a group of labor "leaders" that have ever sold out their membership. PLP -- understanding the pro-boss nature of all hacks -- was the only one who attacked the Sweeney coronation with a mass picket line ten years ago when he represented the "new guard."

The heads of five "insurgent" unions, with about one-third of the Federation's members, have two main demands they agree on: more power for themselves in an Executive Committee of select larger unions; and a 50% rebate on the dues they pay to the central Federation. Now consider who these "leaders" are:

* Joe Hansen, president of the UFCW (United Food & Commercial Workers) with 1.4 million members, has a resumé that includes destroying the strike and the union of meatpackers in Local P-9 who fought Hormel in the mid-1980's. Hansen plotted with the strike-breakers against a militant rank and file, becoming trustee of the local and then expelling the workers' elected leaders, offering unconditional surrender to the company and seeing to it that none of the strikers ever returned to work. Hansen screwed up the Southern California grocery strike and today pushes 2-tier contracts while gaining new members by making sweetheart deals.

* Andrew Stern heads the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the biggest in the AFL-CIO with 1.8 million members. Recently he spent $65 million of his poor members' money to try to elect John Kerry. One of his right-hand men, Steve Lerner, headed up the failed campaigns to organize the strawberry pickers and the Las Vegas building trades. Stern distinguished himself by promising corporations help in lobbying state regulators in exchange for union recognition. He is most aggressive at applying trusteeships, stripping power from a huge number of locals, a la Hansen at Hormel. He "organized" 70,000 Illinois health care workers by getting exclusive AFL jurisdiction and making a deal with Democratic Governor Rod Blagoievich in exchange for helping him get elected in 2002.

* James Hoffa, son of the infamous "Jimmy," whose Teamsters has 1.4 million members is close to the most reactionary and corrupt elements in that union. He stands out as pusher for oil drilling in the Artic and attacking reform-minded rank-and-filers. He collaborated earlier this year with the bosses at Tyson Foods to decertify his own union's Local 556 in Pasco, Washington. Its 1,500 members were bombarded with Hoffa's attacks on the local leadership, threatened with plant closure and forced workers to vote twice on a sellout before they capitulated.

* Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, president and hospitality division chief respectively, of the merged UNITE-HERE (apparel, laundry and hotel and restaurant workers), with 450,000 members. Raynor never fought the shakedown artists in UNITE's garment locals and essentially abandoned the country's sweatshops as a "lost cause," giving free rein to some of the most exploitative bosses in the U.S. Raynor's number two man, at UNITE, Edgar Romney, has run the union sweatshops in New York where contracts were never upheld, labor standards were violated and members lost wages and overtime pay. Wilhelm has never purged Mob influence from HERE.

* Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers with 800,000 members, has never worked in the trades, owes his position to his father who was union Secy.-Treasurer and ran it like a fiefdom jointly with the Mob, who the younger O'Sullivan has never cleaned out.

So these are the "insurgents" challenging the Old Guard. With "friends" like these, the rank and file doesn't need enemies.

PLP'S Songs On One CD

The 1970's PLP LP's "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers -- in English and Spanish -- such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.

Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202

Imperialist Rivalry For Oil Behind Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism

The terrorist attack that hit London's underground (subway) and blew up one bus has already claimed over 50 lives, many of them black, Asian and white workers. Several of the terrorists were identified by surveillance cameras, who turned out to be young British men won to the reactionary idea of political Islam (fundamentalism).

The terrorist attack (7-7) occurred a day after London won the 2012 Olympics and in the middle of the imperialist G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. Tony Blair returned to London from the meeting while Bush condemned terrorism. All the world's big bosses have condemned this attack. How hypocritical! These same bosses are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of workers and their families worldwide due to wars, poverty, starvation, lack of decent health care, mass unemployment, racist police brutality, and more -- all created by a capitalist system driven by the need for maximum profits. This is mass terror.

There are already many rumors about who was really responsible for this terrorist attack. The London Times (7/17) reported that MI5 (British domestic spy agency) had one of the terrorists, Mohammed Sidique, under investigation. Previously, the cops had said they didn't know any of the terrorists. But apparently, they knew Sidique and let him go because they considered him non-dangerous despite his connections with reactionary Islamic groups. So, conspiracy theories abound about who is really behind these terrorists. A French intelligence leak reported that MI5 had said that, contrary to other terrorist acts, military explosives were used on 7-7.

What is not a conspiracy theory is that all these groups are fighting for the control of the oil profits of the Middle East and Central Asia. They include Al Qaeda that represents Saudi bosses who want to break with Exxon-Mobil; MI5 representing BP-Amoco and Shell; Mossad representing Israeli bosses; and Pakistan's drug-dealing Inter-Service Intelligence service.

We live in a world full of danger for the international working class. Imperialist war for control of oil and other resources has put millions at risk, from New York to Madrid to Baghdad to Kabul to London. We in PLP condemn all forms of anti-working class terrorism, whether by individual terrorists or the terror hi-tech bombing by B-52s and cruise missiles, or the racist-fascist backlash against Moslem workers and youth.

While the G-8 bosses have condemned the London attack, don't hold your breath if you think the imperialist rivals of the U.S.-UK war in Iraq will help Bush-Blair in their troubles there. The rivalry among the imperialist blocs is sharpening. These bosses have inflicted war and tremendous terrorism on the world's workers and their families. The only way to smash all forms of capitalist terrorism is to fight for a world without any bosses, a world run by and for workers: communism!

Liberal Bosses, Politicians, Minutemen -- All Enemies of the Working Class (Part II)

(Our last issue reviewed bi-partisan immigration reform enabling U.S. rulers to use immigrants as cheap labor, cannon fodder and to "tighten the fascist noose around the neck of all U.S. citizens and documented residents.)

With this reform, U.S. rulers are also aiming to further stem the flow of immigrants by eliminating one of the main reasons they've been forced to stay here and bring their families: inability to travel abroad. The H-5B bill will allow workers in the program, and their families, to travel freely back and forth. But most important, they hope this bill would win many immigrants and their children to join the military. If this fails, when a draft is reinstituted, millions of these workers will be forced to enlist or face deportation.

This policy follows the mandate of United We Serve in which U.S. rulers' strategic thinkers advocated the need to integrate millions of undocumented workers and their children into the system, to foster their patriotism and consequent willingness to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. As U.S. rulers' need for more "boots on the ground" in Iraq grows, so grows their desperation. Articles in both the N.Y. and LA Times have promoted allowing undocumented workers to serve in the military in exchange for U.S. citizenship.

Behind their "humanitarian" facade of "caring" for the immigrants' plight and "safeguarding" wages and jobs for U.S. workers, U.S. bosses are creating slave-like conditions for millions of immigrant workers. This includes legislation like the Real ID Act, which establishes uniform standards for state driver's licenses. It effectively creates a national ID card (resembling South Africa under Apartheid) to better control the population, supposedly aimed at possible immigrant "terrorists." It intensifies the fascist conditions U.S. rulers will use to try to stifle the struggles of all workers against racist cutbacks, unemployment and imperialist wars.

Both the open and the liberal racists are the enemies of the whole working class. Relying on "lesser-evil" liberal politicians who back expanded wars and low-wage war production is a deadly trap. Racism will be ended when a united working class revolts and eliminates its source: capitalism. The rulers' biggest fear is the growth of a massive alliance of exploited industrial workers, students and soldiers to fight for power for the whole working class. That is the road to victory.

Bosses Want Immigrants for Cheap Labor, War Recruits

The bosses' media is "discovering" that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are good for the economy. A Business Week cover story (7/18) entitled "Embracing illegals" cited increasing profits from selling goods, opening bank accounts and issuing home loans to undocumented immigrants. It said with these money-makers, the Corporate Establishment is legitimizing the over 11 million undocumented immigrants, 84% of whom are between 18 and 44.

The same week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story "Banks Open Doors to New Customers: Illegal Immigrants." It also detailed the trend to grant mortgages to undocumented workers, saying they're good risks because they make payments on time.

The LA Times ran a story (7/3) on the benefits immigrants supply to the economy, saying, "Immigration is part of the DNA of America, and its as necessary as ever." It favored the "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005," sponsored by Senators McCain, Kennedy and others.

The bosses' media haven't just "discovered" that undocumented immigrants make huge profits for the bosses. But the liberal rulers now argue for a combination of "amnesty," winning immigrants to feel part of the U.S., to be patriotic, and have them and their children work for slave-labor wages in the arms and other industries, this is especially important since many industrial workers among the tens of millions of baby boomers are about to retire.

The bosses have always known they could make super-profits from immigrants' labor. Now they need them also for war. We shouldn't be fooled. The liberal imperialists are even more dangerous than the openly fascist Minutemen but slicker. All these racist bosses are the enemy of all workers. Our allies are workers and soldiers of all backgrounds, whose class interests sharply contrast with those of the imperialist exploiters.

CIA Puppet Regime in Ethiopia Massacres Anti-Gov't Protestors

The news from TransAfrica Forum describes how, in early June, Ethiopian government forces opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in Addis Ababa, killing 36 and wounding over 100. They were protesting the May 15 elections.

Supporters of the opposition parties -- the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF) -- organized the action. The so-called opposition party CUD is a pseudo-left and nationalist assortment. The UEDF is composed of feudal remnants and their cronies who fled to England and the U.S. in 1972 when Haile Selassie was deposed by the Dergue (military Junta led by Mengistu, who sided with Moscow against the U.S. in the rivalry among the superpowers back then). Both of these reactionary bourgeois parties claim the election was fraudulent, as if they have different agendas for the working class. There's no difference between the current rulers and these so-called opposition parties.

Jane Gaffney, U.S. State Department director for East Africa, said the election was "fair and free and non-violent," but after the government murdered 36 people, she "condemned" the violence because their puppet embarrassed them. The European Union, which monitored the elections, declared there were significant irregularities, while Gaffney called the balloting "very impressive."

The Ethiopian publication Nation online (6/11/05) reported, "Ethiopia's position is global geo-politics [which] could mean it escapes international scrutiny (it is a key U.S. ally in the anti-terrorism campaign)." This enables the government to crack down on any opposition by calling it "terrorism." So now we know what "anti-terrorism" means. Britain is also freezing its so-called aid to the Ethiopian government ($36 million). So rival imperialists are in the act.

The CIA helped the current government come to power in 1991, after deposing the military junta (a Russian client) that had ruled from 1973 to 1990. Originally called the Tigrai Liberation Front, after it took power it changed its name to the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front), an umbrella disguise to cover its fascistic character.

For the working class and the oppressed masses there's no difference who's elected. The working class's only alternative to this murder, starvation, poverty, oppression and exploitation is to fight against capitalism by establishing the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Only communists represent the interests of the workers in the fight to emancipate our class from exploitation.

Video Games Used to Recruit for War

In their struggle to normalize fascism and force working-class youth into the military, the rulers' culture makers use every form of media, including video games. While such games have existed for over 20 years, in the last decade game marketers have especially targeted youth between 16 and 24. The types of games they sell indicate some of the values the ruling class hopes to instill in this vital segment of the population.

The extremely popular "Command & Conquer" series of strategy games allows gamers to "experience" leading an imperialist power as they build giant armies to conquer other nations. One of the most popular installments, "Red Alert," puts the gamer into the middle of World War II. Only this is an imagined version where the allied forces utilize time travel to kidnap a young Hitler so the German military can ally with Britain and France to fight Stalin and the Soviet Union in the 1940's. By doing this, the game makers switch the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in the gamer's mind. As the game progresses, Stalin is revealed to be a mere puppet controlled by "Kane" who represents pure evil and turns the USSR into the "Land of Nod" (the mythical area outside of the Garden of Eden where wickedness dwelled).

The games' premise reflects the anti-Soviet trend in U.S. universities that accuses the USSR of being "worse than the Nazis" and labels Stalin as history's most evil man. These lies are pounded into workers' heads so they'll forget that it was the Soviet Union which wiped out the scourge of Nazism during WWII.

To the current ruling-class academic, the USSR and all it represented (workers' power, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism) are the real evils. It's important to remember that in the 1930's, other imperialist states supported German fascism in the hope it would fight the USSR. Not until the Nazis invaded France (a fellow imperialist) did other imperialist powers make any effort (small as it was) to stop the Nazis.

By implying that without Hitler, Germany would not have fallen to fascism, the games' creators are also saying that "great men," not masses of people, make history. Fascism, like imperialism, is a natural outgrowth of capitalism, not the actions of one man. When dealing with the Soviet Union, the game not only spreads lies about Stalin, but erases the role of Russian workers and peasants in defeating the Nazi armies. The game implies that working people are too weak, too dumb, or both to resist such "great" leaders. This same belief in individualism and the fear that workers couldn't be won to communism undermined many working-class movements in the past.

"Command & Conquer's" latest effort, "Generals," continues with more of the same. This game pits the Chinese, the U.S. and the GLA, (an imagined terrorist organization of Middle Eastern origins) against one another. It sees the three sides as imperialist powers that fight one another in order to expand their empires.

This game intensifies the level of violence. The intro to the game assures us that "in the modern world leaders use words to solve their disputes...words like `scud launcher' and `carpet bombing.'" It portrays B-52's carpet bombing houses while people run in terror; a scud missile smashes into a crowded market. Your tanks roll through towns, running over people who happen to get in the way, and civilians run away screaming as artillery barrages destroy city blocks. Such acts of violence against civilians were not available in previous games. These images are both a sign of people's willingness to accept this kind of violence and a tool for U.S. culture makers to prepare people for the slaughter that accompanies real imperialist conflicts.

One sign of the power of these games is that the Army now uses a combat simulation game similar to these commercial games to recruit youth, showing them that the army is "cool." Perhaps these kids think that if they join the "Army of One" they can be a "great man" too, just like in the game.

To combat such indoctrination, we must constantly remind workers of our true history and the great accomplishments of workers' power in the last century. We must expose the anti-working class nature of individualism and the "Great Man" theory by showing that it is the masses of people working together for a common goal who make history, not individuals.

What appeal do these games have for workers? Is it the feeling of power they give the gamer after a hard day of being exploited and feeling powerless on the job? Is it that the mind-numbing effects of video games help one forget -- for a night -- the situation facing the working class? Is it that we have internalized enough ruling-class ideology that we are "amused" by imperialism and fascism and the violence they create? Or do we simply want to permanently escape reality and feel like we can be one of the rulers?

We must answer these questions if we are to provide an effective defense against these opiates of the masses.

UNDER COMMUNISM
Auto Workers Will Have A Better Idea

Many years ago I worked at the River Rouge Ford engine plant. Signs everywhere offered trips to the Caribbean for any idea that would improve the production process. Plenty of ideas floated around among the plant's workers, but the suggestion box remained empty. Why? Every worker knew that, in the eyes of the bosses, improvements meant more production with fewer workers, and therefore layoffs of yourself and co-workers.

The bosses understand that almost all good ideas are held by those who actually engage in the practice of production -- the workers. Makes you wonder which worker(s) actually came up with the idea for the movable assembly line that made Henry Ford famous as an inventor.

Indeed, major business consulting firms are now teaching bosses how to reap the benefits of workers' knowledge. They preach that since the bosses own the workers' hands for eight or more hours a day, tapping their brains comes at no extra charge. They preach that only a small percent of ideas are held at the top of the corporate structure. The further down the structure you go the more knowledgeable and smarter people get. No kidding. I've actually attended such corporate consultant meetings.

In any case, in a communist society there'd be no obstacles to putting innovative ideas into practice. No worker would be laid off and there'd be no boss to profit. Only the workers would benefit, both those in the plant as well as those throughout society.

We can see how this worked in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China when communists were in the leadership. For one example out of thousands, Chinese workers at a steel plant invented the process of cold rolling, now used all over the world. They met regularly during work-hours to discuss everything from political issues and relationships among the workers to the production process and how to improve it. Of course, improvement to them did not mean increasing profits, since there were no profits to be made for a boss (only steel). Rather, improvement meant increasing the amount of steel they could make in a particular amount of time and making the job easier to accomplish with fewer workers so that others could be freed to do other jobs.

Under communism, once the bosses and their murderous imperialist profit system are eliminated, no capitalists will be around to steal the fruits of workers' labor and ideas. No capitalists will be around to prevent the workers from taking time out to meet, discuss and think, let alone go to the bathroom, rest or eat lunch. Under communism the sky will be the limit in what the world's working class can accomplish. After all, as even business consultants understand, the workers are the ones who possess almost all the knowledge about production.

According to Anti-Communists,
Hitler Defeated Stalin!!

It's well known that certain anti-communist writers make their living from condemning Stalin. But a review of three recent anti-Stalin books appearing in the New York Times Book Review (6/12) tops them all. The reviewer, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, heaps praise on the theme of all three authors: because Stalin allegedly did not prepare for a German invasion, he cost the Soviet Union millions of lives, resulting in "the greatest military defeat in Russian history," [!] Of course, the fact that Hitler sent probably the largest invasion force in world history into the USSR had nothing to do with those deaths -- "Stalin killed them," according to these red-baiters.

In the course of a review covering two-thirds of two full pages, nowhere is it ever mentioned who won this war! If someone from outer space came to the Earth and read this opus to find out what happened in World War II, they would have to conclude that Hitler beat the Soviets. The review never states what actually happened.

Ferguson, therefore, never quite explains how Stalin and the Soviet leadership was able to convert this "greatest military defeat in Russian history" into a war that not only stopped the Nazis cold at the gates of Moscow; not only produced what is accepted even by Western historians as the turning point of World War II when the Red Army smashed the German 6th Army at Stalingrad; but somehow was able to drive one of the most committed armies the world has ever seen all the way back to Berlin. This is never mentioned in the book review, and presumably in the three books themselves.

Ferguson doesn't explain this because, seemingly, it never happened. He also fails to contrast the Red Army's achievements with the six-week collapse of France's military and government, not to mention the rest of Western Europe.

Somehow he sees a "demented" Stalin as "assum[ing] that the capitalist powers...were more interested in the destruction of the Soviet Union than in the destruction of Nazi Germany." The anti-communism of this reviewer knows no bounds. For that is precisely what Britain, France and the U.S. were aiming for: Hitler to destroy the world's first workers' state. U.S. President Truman even said he hoped the Nazis and the Soviets "would bleed each other to death."

Ferguson "concludes" that it is hard "to conceive how World War II might have turned out if Stalin had not trusted Hitler." [!] But Ferguson never says how it did turn out -- the smashing of the Nazis along a 2000-mile-long front, occupying 80% of the German army, and saving the West.

No wonder Ferguson can't figure out that -- despite 50 years of an anti-Stalin orgy, from Khrushchev to Gorbichev to Yeltsin to Putin -- "53 percent of Russians still regard him [Stalin] as a `great' leader," according to a 2003 poll by the Russian Center for Public Opinion (which Ferguson appears to accept). Truly, no matter how huge their lies and distortions, the apologists of capitalism can always top themselves.

LETTERS

Cops Murdered My Son

On June 28, the police shot and killed my son Jeremy in his home near Lansing, Michigan. The police said he "committed suicide." The Medical Examiner later told us that he "didn't bother" to perform an autopsy because the police had told him my son was a suicide. Later we found that Jeremy had been shot once in the head and twice in the back. There were a number of irregularities leading to suspicions the cops had murdered him, and more seems to be coming out to confirm that.

My son will never receive justice under capitalism. Even if the police were caught on tape killing him, the chances are high that they'd escape punishment. I live on the other side of the country and have no base of support to mount any movement to avenge my son's murder in the area where the police killed him.

The Michigan police are the same as the police everywhere. They exist to serve the interests of the ruling classes. Part of that "service" consists of terrorizing the working class. What we all can do is organize to destroy the ruling class and their police forces. Get a job in basic industry or join the military. These are the places where the bosses are most vulnerable and where we can organize to finish off capitalism.

I dream about killing the police who ended my son's life and hope some day I'll be able to do it. But I know what's most important for victims of capitalism worldwide -- those that have been killed and we workers who are still alive and fighting -- is organizing to fight them collectively as a working class. Build and fight for communism!

Angry Fighting Parent

GI's Like CHALLENGE

When I sold CHALLENGE in a town near a military base, overall the reaction was positive. I was surprised the paper sold so quickly. After telling soldiers and their families I had a paper with an article about GI's resisting the war for oil in Iraq, most soldiers would take the paper. I then told them about the paper's analysis of racism in the U.S. and the rise of racist anti-immigrant groups. When I linked the racist war in Iraq and the growing racism at home, I noticed a special interest among the black, Asian and Latina/o soldiers. Several voiced agreement with the paper on the issue. They understood that racism is still a huge problem in the U.S.

A Summer Projecteer

Punk Anti-Racist Benefit Concert

Recently we had a successful backyard hardcore punk benefit in Los Angeles to raise money for those arrested at the anti-Minutemen demonstration (see CHALLENGE, 7/20). It exceeded expectations -- between 100-150 attended and contributed over $800. Some people hesitated about the suggested donation, but as soon as they heard how one of our comrades was unjustly arrested, beaten and is facing jail time, they were furious and full of support. There was an intense energy the whole night, and it was put into words during our friends' version of the song "Police Bastard" by Doom.

During the evening there were several political discussions. Some asked to be informed of future events and protests; a few new people decided to join upcoming study/discussion groups.

The event's outcome further reveals that these punk youth, with all their frustration, are incredibly full of potential. All they need is some attention and direction. Instead of shoving them to the sidelines because they may be "cynical" or "just trying to be different or rebellious," we should talk to them as we do to any other potentially fighting youth.

Benefit Organizer

Racism, Sexism:
No Laughing Matter

Humor is a powerful tool, and the ruling class uses its comedians to press stereotypes into our consciousness. Dave Chappelle, a leading black comic who didn't return for a second season on Comedy Central, was replaced by Carlos Mencia, a Latino doing a similar show: short skits, stand-up and sexist, classist, racist jokes.

Self-critically, I laughed at Chappelle when I first saw him, but then I analyzed what he was really saying, and it's not O.K., since he reinforces racist stereotypes, dividing people. Is it funny to say that it's now the "Arab's" turn to suffer racism since other groups have suffered such for centuries? NO! Racism should not be tolerated in any form, nor is it anyone's "turn." Are crack addicts a joke? NO! It's a serious disease caused by capitalism's corruption and inequality. Classism is not funny, nor is sexism (every other word out of Chappelle's mouth is the B-word). Just because he and Mencia are people of color doesn't make it O.K. for them to use racial slurs or poke fun at African Americans, Muslims or Latinos.

Some friends have said that these shows are a good way to start talking about race and gender with those we're trying to influence. I disagree. A better way is to bring someone to protest a Minuteman or Nazi rally! These demonstrate exactly what racism is (ugly and sick!) and how we do something positive about it and oppose it with our class analysis. Showing someone the reality of this hatred and racist slander is the best way to open discussion, not by making jokes. Emmett Till's mother wasn't laughing, Matthew Shepard's family didn't make jokes, and the countless other families of victims of police brutality, police murders, hate crimes and lynching were not smiling.

These shows get air time to promote divisive stereotypes. Just as the kkkourts protect the kkkops who protect the Nazis, the ruling class protects and promotes this kind of hate and racist thought through its propaganda and TV "programming." As long as we're divided, we'll always be defeated. The actions in Yorktown and New Jersey (see CHALLENGE, 7/20) are great ways to fight racism as well as organize to destroy the murderous capitalist system that fosters it. I applaud all those who participated in those actions and showed the fascists and racists what they're up against. Racism, sexism, fascism -- capitalism is the disease. Multi-racial, unified, militant workers and students, women and men, young and old, PLP --- communism is the cure! Not a step back!

A Comrade

Don't Name PL Union Prez?

The articles about the Party's activity at Metro in Washington, D.C. have been great. However, I think the repeated use of Mike Golash's name in these articles promotes individualism, which will ultimately be detrimental to the Party's work. It's important to recognize the strengths of our comrades; however, no one individual personifies the Party's work alone.

There is uneven development among comrades; we all have our strengths and weaknesses which are to be discussed with our clubs in criticism and self-criticism -- including Mike! If CHALLENGE continues to use Mike's name in articles, we risk making him a Party icon and elevating him above other members. All of us contribute to the Party in different ways; all of our work is important.

In combating individualistic ideology, let us look up to Mike's strengths and accomplishments rather than to Mike himself. Remember, in our history of struggling against cults of personality (such as those that were created around Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, often against the desires of these leaders), we decided to never sign our articles or letters, since all such items are social products, not individual ones. It's the same with "individual" accomplishments; they're really accomplishments of all of the people, activities and organizations that influenced, strengthened and taught that one "individual."

A Comrade

The Science of Cooking and Revolution

Recently my wife and I were watching a cooking show on TV. "Why do you like to watch this show?" she asked. "You don't even like to cook!"

"It interests me," I replied, "that if you combine the right ingredients in the correct proportions, your cooking turns out fine. That's science." And so it is with the science of making communist revolution.

A good friend who helped win me to PLP 30 years ago told me, "Do something every day that helps lead to communist revolution, even it it's only distributing one CHALLENGE." I've always remembered those words, because -- as in science -- quantity leads to quality. Every bit we do counts!

What does scientific analysis mean? Objectivity and collectivity are paramount in assessing the situation in the world, in the community and on the job. We must figure out the contradictions. It's important to assess the quantity and quality of our friendships: How many are political? How many took CHALLENGE? How many are involved in struggles? Can these reform struggles help bring out the contradictions which will lead to revolutionary consciousness?

Many of us were recruited to PLP during the mass reform struggles around civil rights and against U.S. imperialism's invasion of Vietnam. But the ruling class maintained state power and stole almost all these reforms from the workers. It's up to our class to scientifically analyze which are the correct ingredients which will lead to communist revolution.

From the Paris Commune to the Russian and Chinese revolutions, workers have moved the struggle forward. We have a world to scientifically analyze, and a better world for all workers to win!

Keep up the good work in CHALLENGE.

West Coast reader

It's More than Money

The letter "Money Under Communism?" (7/20) says many good things but misses the target by trying to equate the failure of socialism with economic policies like retaining money and Capital instead of concentrating on the real root of capitalism -- a class system based on bourgeois ideology that believes most people exist for the services they can provide for a relatively smaller group of "better people."

Socialism is basically a class system utilizing state capitalism. It could have even eliminated currency and cash and the state capitalists would still have been able to appropriate labor power to further their interests, privileges and power because they, their class system and ideology had become dominant in the communist parties. If we don't learn that lesson and struggle now to make sure bourgeois and revisionist ideas and values have no place in the Party and among the working class, we could defeat ourselves and negate any opportunity for revolution. Under communism workers will still create surplus value in their work but it will, as the reader says, be used for the collective needs of the working class.

A Comrade

What About Rural Areas Under Communism

I'm proud to be a young member of PLP in El Salvador. Repression is very strong here against youth, even traumatic for those who see no way out of this capitalist, fascist hell.

I like the new "Under Communism" column since it helps answer many of our doubts of how communism will work. Many friends have asked me, "If communism is so good, why doesn't it exist anywhere?" -- that it's like a dinosaur which we will never see again. When I can't respond, this column is very helpful.

I hope the column will deal with my main interest, rural areas under communism, since in countries like El Salvador they contain the majority of the exploited population -- many of whom have emigrated to the U.S. searching for jobs.

Fight for communism!

Red Youth

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Londoners: Iraqi cities see worse killing

We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately....

The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London...with more that 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they should be compared. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan....

Invading Iraq clearly made Britain a target. (GW, 7/21)

Immigrant high school whiz can't go to college

A recent front page story told the dramatic story of a Massachusetts high school valedictorian, who is an undocumented immigrant. The student, Juliano Foleiss, is returning to Brazil because he cannot afford college in the United States. As a noncitizen, he does not qualify for in-state college tuition rates, and without a valid Social Security number, he is ineligible for scholarships or loans. (Boston Globe)

John Brown sanely rebelled against slavery

...My concern is with John Brown and his meaning for America. In "John Brown, Abolitionist" I argue that Brown who fought for freedom and social equality for millions of enslaved blacks, was right, and America, whose laws and customs endorsed slavery and racism, was wrong. Most people in that era supported the American government's view that Brown was insane and criminal....A debate has raged for generations, with some...like the historian Allan Nevins, calling him insane. I'm delighted that [reviewer] Ehrenreich says my biography provides conclusive evidence of Brown's sanity.

I trust that my evidence is now on the historical record and that John Brown will be granted a special place in the pantheon of enlightened Americans who demanded justice for people of all ethnicities.

David S. Reynolds (NYT, 7/10)

African-aid celebration hides greedy reality

...The primary instrument of US policy towards Africa [is] the African growth and Opportunity Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy and raw self-interest....

Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is investment. But investment by many multinationals has not enriched its people but impoverished them. The history of corporate involvement in Africa is one of forced labor, evictions, murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and collusion with dictators. Nothing in ... the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes mandatory constraints on corporations....

From now on, the G8 would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa's best friends....

At the Make Poverty History march the speakers insisted that we were dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming toward our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs. (GW, 7/21)

Shaky US earners are in the red

For every $100 earned by individuals in the US, they are spending $108 -- not exactly a recipe for long-term sustainability. (GW, 7/14)

US crop-spray ruins Colombian Farmers

...In northern Colombia.... For 25 years the Vargas family survived by subsistence farming. Until the crop-duster lanes arrived. "Four years ago planes spewed potent herbicide over our neighbor's coca fields," said Mr. Vargas's daughter, Angela. "Our crops, cows and chickens died too...."

"It's unfair. We had nothing to do with growing coca."

The fate of the Vargas family is shared by thousands of farmers living under the flight paths of US-sponsored aerial fumigation programmes....

Aerial fumigation also raises health concerns...Medical records from a local hospital show a significant increase in skin and eye irritations, fever, abdominal pains and respiratory problems among patients living in fumigated areas....The US government disagrees.

In addition to the health and environmental effects of glyphosate, crop spraying is useless ....A US embassy spokesperson said...the amount of coca in Colombia was virtually unchanged....But aerial fumigations will continue... (GW, 7/14)

China general says US may face Nukes

Beijing, Friday, July 15 -- China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the Americans military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday....

General Zhu said he believed that the Chinese government was under internal pressure to change its "no first use" policy....

"We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese." (NYT, 7/15)

 

London Bombing: Imperialist Rivalry For Oil the Cause of Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism

• a href="#RACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool">"ACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool

PLP Leads Shutdown of Fascist Anti-Immigrant Meeting

Bosses Create Borders to Divide Workers

a href="#Liberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers">"iberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers

a href="#Spread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally">"pread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally

CHALLENGE A Big Hit At Immigrant Anti-Minutemen March of 10,000

Protestors Link Minutemen and Liberal Racists At Anti-Immigrant Rally

a href="#PLP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight">"LP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight

Ford, VW, GM, Mercedes Workers Block Highway, Shut Plants in Argentina

Boeing Contract Battle Should Teach Us How to Think As a Class

AFL-CIO Dogfight: Only Red Leadership Can Put U.S. Workers on the Offensive

Disrupt Army Flag Day Recruiting Spectacle

a href="#Boston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting">"oston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting

a href="#PLP’S Songs On One CD">"LP’S Songs On One CD

a href="#War’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s">Wa"’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s

Threat of Class Struggle Hangs Over EU Rulers

UNDER COMMUNISM: How Would Health Care Be Better?

LETTERS

Learning About Communism At Chicago March

N. Africans Suffer A Lot More Racism Than Oprah

Fight Nationalism, Privatization in Pakistan

Disagrees About Stewart Prosecution

• CHALLENGE Comment

D.C. Project Showed Power of Red Ideas

Youth Write About the NJ Anti-Minutemen Protest

Group Relations Influence Health

Inspired to Defy Fascist Cops

Money Under Communism?

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

• US, China will clash as oil runs out
• ‘Missile Defense’ is plan to control globe
• Recruiting: 4 times harder than year ago
• ‘Made in USA’ can still mean slavery
• White ex-prisoners: More job offers than never-arrested black men
• CAFTA: blood-sucking drug lobby plan
• US loves terrorists if they’re anti-left
• With 9/11 excuse, FBI gets your secrets

• ---

Imperialist Rivalry For Oil the Cause of Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism

A coordinated terrorist attack has hit several London Underground (subway) stations and a bus. Many have been killed and injured, presumably mostly workers. Supposedly, an Al Qaeda European cell has taken responsibility for this attack.

It occurred during the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. Tony Blair returned to London from the meeting while Bush condemned terrorism. All the world’s big bosses have condemned this attack. How hypocritical! These same bosses are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of workers and their families worldwide due to wars, poverty, starvation, lack of decent health care, mass unemployment, racist police brutality, and more - all created by a capitalist system driven by the need for maximum profits. This is mass terror.

Whoever is responsible for the July 7 London attack (either Al Qaeda—which represents a section of the Saudi bosses which want to control the oil wealth without sharing with Exxon-Mobil, etc.—or some rogue operators from one of the various imperialists’ spy agencies), one thing is clear: we live in a world full of danger for the international working class. Imperialist war for control of oil and other resources has put millions at risk, from Baghdad to Kabul to London. We in PLP condemn all forms of anti-working class terrorism, whether coming from reactionary groups like Al Qaeda or from the world’s big imperialists..

While the G-8 bosses have condemned the London attack, don’t hold your breath if you think the imperialist rivals of the U.S.-UK war in Iraq will help Bush-Blair in their troubles there. The rivalry among the imperialist blocs is sharpening. These bosses have inflicted war and tremendous terrorism on the world’s workers and their families. The only way to smash all forms of capitalist terrorism is to fight for a world without any bosses, a world run by and for workers: communism!

a name="RACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool">">"ACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool

With disgusting hypocrisy, U.S. rulers are portraying themselves as anti-racists, even as they build a racist police state at home and wage racist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. NYC Mayor Bloomberg vows "zero tolerance" for the recent baseball-bat assault on three black men in New York City. Mississippi finally convicts Klansman Edgar Killen in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. After 50 years, the FBI has resumed "searching" for the surviving killers of Emmett Till. The U.S. Senate has "apologized" for failing to outlaw lynching.

But believing that the rulers oppose racism would be a serious political error. Capitalists will never end racism, because they cannot do without the profits that racism produces. By oppressing one group of workers with particular viciousness, the rulers drive down the wages and living standards of the entire working class. Racist divisiveness undermines workers’ struggles on the job and in the community. And in their endless wars against rival capitalists overseas, U.S. rulers use racism to motivate working-class soldiers to kill.

Bloomberg rehashed the lie that "we have come a long way" in overcoming racism. In reality the rulers have integrated the power structure, which helps them control workers more effectively. There are now black and Latino cabinet members, politicians, cops, judges, military officers, principals and business executives. But for the working class, the systematic racism created by U.S. capitalism is as bad as, or worse than, the days of Jim Crow, by every measure imaginable. As they have for decades, black workers continue to earn one-third less than whites. Unemployment for black workers is more than double the rate among white workers. Schools have become even more segregated in many places. Black people can expect to live five years less than whites. Black infant mortality stands at 245% of the rate for whites. Amid a tripling of "persons under correctional supervision" from 1980 to 2003, one young black man in three languishes behind bars, compared with 10% of whites. Similar percentages victimize Latinos as well. And, just as the rulers brand black and Latino youths "criminals," they have jailed without trial hundreds of Arab-Americans as "terrorists."

While they preach equality and democracy, U.S. rulers actively promote racism to serve their imperialist needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pacifying those countries for the likes of Exxon Mobil requires soldiers willing to kill Arabs and Muslims in large numbers. As a "condition for success," the Army War College demands of the troops "a primordial hatred" resulting in an "impulse to destroy the enemy." (Parameters, Summer 2005) Aiden Delgado, an Army reservist, recalled receiving a thorough racist indoctrination, orchestrated from the top down, before shipping out to Iraq: "I remember Army chants. We sang in cadences. And the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads, killing the Taliban. Our drill sergeants would give us motivational talks to pump up our fighting spirit. The theme was the need to get revenge, to go to the Middle East to fight Arabs…. My own commander was infamous for anti-Arab speeches." (Online Journal, 4/1/05)

With larger conflicts looming, the rulers are seeking more widespread loyalty to the government. By harking back to the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, they hope to repeat the political coup they pulled off then when they duped millions into viewing the state as a "protector" against racism. The harsh reality remains, however, that the state employs racism to enforce the rulers’ tyranny over the working class. The troops that "integrated" Southern schools were soon carrying out the rulers’ genocide in Vietnam — although many GI’s there rebelled against these racist orders — and brutally suppressing workers’ anti-racist rebellions in Detroit and elsewhere.

Following the lead of any capitalist politician on racism is suicidal for workers. Racism is inseparable from capitalism. Racism will never be wiped out until the working class, through communist revolution, eliminates the profit system and takes power for itself. That is the eventual goal towards which our Party is continually building.

PLP Leads Shutdown of Fascist Anti-Immigrant Meeting

BRIDGEWATER, NJ, June 25 — The Progressive Labor Party organized 70 militant protesters to shut down the recruitment meeting of the United Patriots of America (UPA), a racist, fascist organization that — under the guise of "Homeland Security" — blames immigrants for U.S. economic woes and equates undocumented immigrants with "terrorists."

While anti-racists chanted and marched with banners outside, ten people including PLP’ers, infiltrated inside and completely disrupted the meeting, stunning the fascists.

The UPA — affiliated with the infamous "Minutemen Project" that places armed vigilantes at the Arizona border — advocates closing all U.S. borders to "illegal aliens," enforcing English as the only language spoken, supporting fascist educational policies of "traditionally American curriculum" and monitoring the activities of "liberal" or "left" teachers.

Outside the arena, the police, working as tools of the ruling class to protect the racist UPA, descended on the group of approximately 60 chanting protestors to force them from the Sports Arena property. Defying police commands, two PLP members were arrested while the rest of the group was aggressively pushed and prodded to the road below. But the cops’ intimidation only motivated us more to continue demonstrating.

Meanwhile, inside the 10 anti-racists, including PLP members, raised hell. Initially posing as "supportive and interested" persons, they responded to a leadership signal during Minutemen Ed Whitbred’s speech to about 35 listeners, standing up and unfurling two huge banners while chanting, "SMASH RACIST DEPORTATIONS! WORKING PEOPLE HAVE NO NATION!" As they militantly marched to the front, the cops and attendees were frozen in shock while Whitbred dashed from the podium. Action proceeded quickly: the microphone cord was ripped from its socket, a comrade moved to the front to belt out a speech, and local police and the County SWAT team quickly filled the room. The PL speaker was arrested as the rest of the group was pushed out the door and down the stairs. A brutal attack on the staircase by the Somerset County SWAT team — armed to the teeth in full riot gear — left one member with a broken shoulder. He was subsequently arrested on false allegations of simple "assault."

The remaining eight infiltrators emerged from the building chanting just as the 60 protestors were marching back up the grassy hill. They joined forces in the Sports Arena lot.

The youth led the day, both outside and inside, showing great determination, courage, discipline and commitment. This leadership bodes well for the future of our Party.

The effective disruption of the UPA meeting was only made possible by the unending leadership and organizing efforts of every PLP member present — just as it will take the unending leadership and organization of the entire working class to successfully fight for the end of racism, of artificial borders, of fascist police control and of capitalism itself. This event marks one more step forward for PLP and the international working class.

We will fight these charges and the fascist police attacks on our comrades, in the courts, in our mass organizations and on the streets. We will raise money from our friends and will recruit more members to PLP, to bring closer the day when the bosses, their homeland security police state and their gutter racist supporters will be a forgotten chapter in history.

Bosses Create Borders to Divide Workers

Borders are a bosses’ creation to mark their nation-states. They use nationalism and patriotism to portray workers who live outside these borders as "foreigners" or "aliens." However, when it suits them, the rulers ignore these borders, always searching for the cheapest labor, no matter its origin. Imperialism requires that capital be exported outside the "home country." And bosses’ wars send one side’s armed forces to invade the "territory" of the other side.

The working class is one class, worldwide, with one class interest — to seize the world away from the profiteers who run it now and to make communist revolution all over.

UPA publicly calls for "border control" and mass deportations. They want to spread the "Minuteman Project," enlisting vigilante "volunteers." They falsely portray themselves as the voice of "middle America" and "the forgotten little guy." But behind the UPA is an openly fascist anti-immigrant ideology, decrying "the loss of American culture and values" resulting from a "foreign invasion." Their platform dovetails with the rulers’ current push to win a mass base for a Homeland Security police state. UPA and others like them are potential foot soldiers for U.S. fascism.

a name="Liberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers">">"iberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers

Borders are a bosses’ creation to mark their nation-states. They use nationalism and patriotism to portray workers who live outside these borders as "foreigners" or "aliens." However, when it suits them, the rulers ignore these borders, always searching for the cheapest labor, no matter its origin. Imperialism requires that capital be exported outside the "home country." And bosses’ wars send one side’s armed forces to invade the "territory" of the other side.

The working class is one class, worldwide, with one class interest — to seize the world away from the profiteers who run it now and to make communist revolution all over.

UPA publicly calls for "border control" and mass deportations. They want to spread the "Minuteman Project," enlisting vigilante "volunteers." They falsely portray themselves as the voice of "middle America" and "the forgotten little guy." But behind the UPA is an openly fascist anti-immigrant ideology, decrying "the loss of American culture and values" resulting from a "foreign invasion." Their platform dovetails with the rulers’ current push to win a mass base for a Homeland Security police state. UPA and others like them are potential foot soldiers for U.S. fascism.

a name="Spread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally">">"pread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally

YORKTOWN, VA., June 25 — With militant chants, powerful signs and the only speeches with political content, a group of PLP’ers gave communist leadership today to protesters demonstrating against a rally of a new Nazi-KKK coalition. The racists chose the historic battlefield where the U.S. War for Independance ended to promote their goal of ridding the U.S. of Jews. "Just as Washington kicked out the British, so shall we kick out the Jews" was their Hitlerian motto. The Nazis and their supporters, numbering less than 90, were protected by police barricades keeping protesters — Progressive Labor Party militants, anti-racist anarchists and supporters of U.S.-Israeli nationalism — more than a football-field-distance away.

PLP comrades, young and old, truly challenged these fascists with our political speeches, offering our bullhorn to fellow anti-racists who were dissatisfied with the religious pacifists and partisan nationalists. We chanted "I don’t know but I’ve been told, These Nazis getting way too bold, Time to put them in their place, Kick a Nazi in the face!" and "Death, death, death to the Nazis, Power, power, power to the workers!" We held signs like, "The Progressive Labor Party, kicking Nazi ass since 1962" and "Which pig is which?" with a pig dressed in a combination Klan/police uniform.

Amnesty International members from Norfolk attended the rally, and discussed our chants and speeches with us. All bought CHALLENGE. PL also had a contingent at the rally exit, distributing the paper to all who passed, while chatting about revolutionary politics.

The cops searched everyone with metal-detectors, filming and photographing only the protesters, for future attacks on anti-racist radicals. One cop being told, "You got your gun and your nightstick, but where’s your noose?" responded, "In my car." One young comrade explained how cops never break down big corporations’ doors to fight for workers’ interests, but are always there to protect the bosses and break strikes. We also linked police brutality to the courts’ compliance with racist cops.

Almost 30 media people sat in the front row for 90 minutes listening to the racist group’s fascist ranting, before recording five minutes of token footage of the anti-racists’ action. Thus, the police and the media provided direct auxiliary support for these racist terrorists. Our chant, "The cops, the courts, the nazis and the Klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan," pointed out these ruling-class connections.

PL youth and supporters had a sign-making party preparing for the rally, discussing how PLP militantly disrupted past rallies. The most disturbing moment was dissecting the Nazis’ National Socialist Movement ideology, explaining how advocating the mythical superiority of some workers over others can be twisted into a barbaric capitalist war machine.

Communists show that all workers deserve sustenance and should use their abilities in the interests of the working class as a whole. In response to the pacifists and other-worldly mystics, communist revolutionary love of human-kind will prevail over the fear of oppression and over the capitalist oppressors themselves.

CHALLENGE A Big Hit At Immigrant Anti-Minutemen March of 10,000

CHICAGO, July 2 — Today more than 10,000 workers, students and youth marched for immigrant rights on the Southwest Side. PLP distributed 1,100 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS and 1,000 leaflets in under an hour. Many responded enthusiastically to our anti-racist line, helping us distribute literature and listening eagerly to what we had to say. Many joined our chanting, "Este puño si se ve, los obreros al poder" ("This fist you see means the workers are coming to power"). Workers selflessly donated hundreds of dollars for PLP comrades arrested in New Jersey (see front page) while protesting the racist Minutemen.

Several Spanish radio hosts organized the march, responding to a local Latin woman who invited the Minutemen to speak here. The March leadership was incredibly nationalist and opportunist. Many workers and youth waved Mexican and U.S. flags, chanting, "Viva Mexico!" We struggled against these classless ideas, pointing out that the bosses manufacture national borders to divide us. We chanted, "Stop Racist Deportations, Working People Have No Nation!" and "La Lucha Obrera, No Tienen Frontera!" ("The Workers’ Fight Has No Borders!"). Workers enthusiastically joined us, taking up our internationalist line. A young woman comrade made a speech in Spanish explaining the role of groups like the Minutemen, how nationalism divides the working class and how all workers are exploited under capitalism.

A close friend of the Party said, "I couldn’t believe the response of the workers to the Party. People just came up to me and took CHALLENGES right out of my hands." She saw how welcoming the working class could be to the Party in action. She got out 50 CHALLENGES "accidentally." When asked, she said that all the people who got the paper came up and asked her for it

Newer comrades took most of the leadership throughout the march, leading chants, making speeches and other decisions. Self-critically, we collectively felt that we could have given more effective political leadership with more people, especially Spanish speakers, with more literature, and with better political preparation. This event brought more of our friends closer to the Party and inspired one young woman to want to become more of a leader as a communist and a Party member.

The politicians and clergy, who attacked us for spreading communist ideas, cannot and will not lead workers to smash racism. All these tricksters will lead us down the dead-end road of reformism. Our experience today shows that we should have confidence the workers will see through their lies. Communist leadership will lead the struggles against racism towards communist revolution and a world without borders.

Protestors Link Minutemen and Liberal Racists At Anti-Immigrant Rally

BALDWIN PARK, CA., June 25 — About 800 workers and students protested a rally by anti-immigrant racists called "Save Our State" and the Minutemen. These racists were demonstrating at a monument that says, "These were Indian lands, then they were Mexican…and they will be again." The racists alleged this would bring an "invasion of immigrants."

Hundreds of the anti-racist protesters and Baldwin Park residents enthusiastically received PLP leaflets and CHALLENGES, contrasting with the liberal and nationalist politics of other groups there. We exposed the Minutemen as being part of a long history of attacks on immigrants to divide the working class. We also showed how the liberal Dream Act and the McCain-Kennedy Bill are ploys to induce immigrant youth to fight and die in the bosses’ war in Iraq.

The PLP helped organize a neighborhood march of over 100 people, trying to get to the racists, who were protected by over 200 cops armed to the teeth. At one corner the police formed a line to stop the marchers. As they called in reinforcements, several youth gave speeches attacking racism, the war in Iraq, and bosses’ borders and calling for communism.

After demonstrating in front of the cops, they joined the main group of protesters at a cultural event to try to get to the racists via another route. On the busy street, their chants rang out: "La clase obrera no tine frontera" ("The working class has no borders"); "The workers, united, will never be defeated"; "The cops, the courts, the Minuteman, all are part of the bosses’ plan." Many drivers honked in support while others joined the march.

Many protesters re-grouped with others closer to the racists, but hundreds of cops protected them. Still, the crowd took up chants like, "SOS, Policia — la misma porqueria" ("SOS, Police — the same crap"), contrasting with those only saying "SOS — go home." When the cops tried to clear demonstrators from the street to let the racists through, the anti-racists refused to leave.

While this was very positive, the main gain was the political struggle waged in schools and factories to bring friends to this action. The anti-racist fight is part of the long-range struggle for working-class unity and the building of a revolutionary movement for communism, which will bury all the racists and the system that created them.

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The intensive drive to organize a strike of 1,100 workers at our large hospital defied the management’s demands to wreck our health plan — the major dispute — and led to a contract settlement that hugely increased the bosses’ payments to the union benefit fund, needed to maintain the present level of our health benefits. We also won annual 3% wage hikes for the next three years in a 5-year contract, with wage and benefit-re-openers in the last two years that will possibly necessitate a strike then. We also prevented the bosses from carrying through a doubling of worker payments to the health plan, resulting in a lesser amount spread over the next three years. The workers approved the settlement 500 to 50.

Ultimately, what can turn out to be the biggest victory for the workers is formation of two PLP study groups. One began functioning during the contract fight. They include several union activists who’ve become CHALLENGE readers. The paper’s circulation rose slightly; one new reader and study-group member said, "The way I’m feeling now, I’m agreeing more and more with that paper!"

Smaller contract victories included vacation, sick and holiday time for hundreds of part-timers, many of whom work almost full-time hours. Without vacation or sick time, they were a valuable cheap-labor source. Until recently, none were active because they had few benefits. But now a group has come forward and will be developed to lead their fellow part-timers. Also, now those retiring will take unused sick time with them.

Without the union members’ militant strike-preparation response to the bosses’ attacks — the best in the union’s history here —the final settlement would have been a disaster for the workers. Strike teams were organized. Every other week hundreds of workers attended solidarity meetings. An early June rally drew over 400 workers, the largest turnout ever. Union delegates were constantly being pulled into conversations or secret meetings. The hospital buzzed about a possible strike. Security was on alert. The workers voted for a strike 700 to 100.

Organizing for a strike meant uniting a diverse group of workers — largely black but also white, Latin and Asian, young and old, full-time and part-time. But the more we politicized and developed men and women rank-and-file activists of all ages and colors, the better we overcame any potential divisions. An anti-scab campaign appealed to thousands of non-union workers.

The union delegate group leading the strike preparation was the largest and most militant ever at this hospital. Black workers from the inner city, white tattooed ex-bikers from the surrounding states, Vietnam vets, ex-Marine Corps Sergeants, middle-aged church-goers, workers from other countries — this was the diverse group whose unity and differences were sharpened as we organk zed. We also had to deal with weekly BS from our union hall — personal rivalries among the full-time organizers, confused and contradictory decrees from the union leaders, and downright sabotage of the rank-and-file organizing.

Amid this whirlwind of activity, PLP had a crucial role, and responsibility to grow and expand our political base. The workers’ main internal weakness reflected capitalist ideas: racism, sexism, passivity, obedience to the pro-capitalist union leaders, nationalism, patriotism and anti-communism. The main external problems involved the capitalist state: anti-working class laws, courts and cops, and pro-boss media, with possible deployment of the Army and National Guard waiting in the wings.

While daily organizing was truly intoxicating, the most important victory required resolute concentration on advancing the Party. PLP’ers were involved in the strategic and tactical leadership of the struggle, while trying to turn the fight into a school for communism.

Initially, PL’ers struggled with workers to broaden the contract issues into strike demands against capitalism. The 30-member delegate group endorsed a demand of "No cuts due to the Iraq Oil War" but the union leadership omitted it from the official demand list. We championed a fight against the attacks on patient care, advocating improving it by hiring more full-time workers. We said the demand for more jobs would also fight the epidemic of unemployment-fueled violence killing our youth. But the fight to preserve health benefits overwhelmed this demand.

We tried to link various questions to the need for communist revolution. For example, after the successful march of 400 workers to the city-wide strike authorization meeting, some union delegates wanted to organize a larger rally at the hospital. The union leaders derailed this plan by citing possible conflict in the law’s 10-day notice requirement for the June 27 rally vs. the 10-day notice required for a June 30 strike. The rally was cancelled. One delegate commented, however, that if our recent march had drawn 800 workers, we could have forced the rally no matter what the legalities, "and burned down the union hall!" PL’ers then explained how the bosses’ laws and their government are weapons against our class which is why we need to seize power with communist revolution. THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES.

Ford, VW, GM, Mercedes Workers Block Highway, Shut Plants in Argentina

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, June 30 — A powerful march in early June of thousands of workers from Ford, VW and Mercedes-Benz that blocked Pan American Highway traffic for six miles was symptomatic of the anger and militancy gripping this country’s workers as they pressed for strikes to recover part of their wages stolen by bosses here, especially since the December 2001 economic collapse. The workers must fight the companies and the government as well as their own union hacks.

Autoworkers are leading the fight-back. The auto industry has recovered, and production is double of what it was in 2001, but wages are the same as 20 years ago.

Just before May Day, delegates from Ford, GM, VW and Mercedes Benz met to demand higher wage hikes than the bosses offered. At mass meetings, workers from different companies united against the bosses’ threats of firings and discussed work stoppages leading to an industry-wide walkout. When GM announced the firing of 320 contract workers, a strike was planned.

Then the union hacks began their sabotage. Stoppages were carried out for only two hours and only in certain sections of plants. Despite this, Ford and VW workers shut down two plants. When workers began organizing an all-out strike, José Rodriguez, national leader of SMATA (the autoworkers’ union) called for a 10-day cooling-off period, with no concessions from the bosses, succumbing to pressure from President Kichner’s Labor Minister. (The bosses, the government and the union hacks are all part of the ruling Justicialista [Peronist] Party).

Fearing workers’ anger, Rodriguez made a deal with GM, while the other plants were on strike. Workers are irate at the sellout which was less than their 2,000-peso monthly base-pay demand (about $900).

The angry workers continued their fight-back, forcing the union to agree to a 2-hour stoppage. Then SMATA reached another separate deal with VW-Cordoba for 1,500 pesos base pay. The workers booed Omar Dragun, union head in Cordoba. They accused the hacks of joining the bosses’ fear mongering of threatened firings if the strike continued. The hacks managed to jam through ratification by a 55% to 45% margin.

Workers throughout the country then demanded union buses to take them to a mass protest in Buenos Aires, while the top union leaders were meeting with the government and the bosses’ association. National union head Rodriguez tried to divide the rest of the autoworkers from the militants from VW-Cordoba.

But in early June, workers at VW-Pacheco, angered because they weren’t paid for the previous two weeks, refused to enter the plant and stopped any supervisor or manager from going in our out. Many workers from the neighboring Ford-Pacheco plant supported the VW struggle. Both groups, along with Mercedes workers, voted to carry out the mass march that blocked the Pan-American Highway. It was the most militant and powerful autoworkers’ march in 15 years. Young and old workers united to flex their muscles. Some workers wanted to seize the plants, but the hacks prevented it.

The government, fearing these angry workers could ignite more working-class struggles, told the bosses to give a little more than originally offered. It wasn’t quite what the workers wanted, but the struggle continues.

Fittingly, this month is the 20th anniversary of the historic Ford-Pacheco sit-down strike. In June-July 1985, 4,500 workers took over the plant for 18 days, causing country-wide tremors. At a mass assembly, only 17 workers decided to leave the plant. Mass support guaranteed the feeding of all sit-downers. Rank-and-file delegates played a leading role in organizing workers in all departments. Workers were opposing the Plan Austral, economic attacks carried out by President Alfonsin. And aping the fascist military dictatorship of the mid-1970’s, the "democratic" Alfonsin government attacked the workers, sending 3,000 cops to evict them.

Then, during the economic collapse of 2001, after the bosses abandoned hundreds of plants, the workers decided to continue production without any bosses, foreshadowing the hundreds of plants occupied by other workers today.

We in PLP believe industrial workers are the key to fighting the bosses’ attacks against our entire class. Just last month saw general strikes in Greece and South Africa (where autoworkers played an important role). When those workers grasp revolutionary communist politics and turn their struggles into schools for communism, then the bosses and their hacks will have plenty to fear.

Boeing Contract Battle Should Teach Us How to Think As a Class

SEATTLE, WA — International Association of Machinists (IAM) District 751 will hold its strike sanction vote on July 13. The result is a forgone conclusion. Almost all these Boeing workers will authorize a strike, as all the union misleaders will brag how "tough" they’ll be during negotiations. The actual strike vote will be Sept. 1 when the old contract expires.

Most of us know it will take more than wearing a T-Shirt that says "Do the Right Thing" or "supporting your negotiators" to ward off disaster. Big cuts in wages, health care, pensions and work-rules marked all recent IAM aerospace negotiations. Lockheed workers lost medical benefits for new hires when they retire. United Airlines defaulted on their pensions, then cut wages and benefits for the third time. Just last month, the Boeing Wichita plant was sold to Onex; then a new contract cut wages and benefits, gutted work-rules and eliminated the Boeing pension plan. In each case, the IAM local leadership, backed by the International, railroaded these contracts through despite initial rejections and even a short strike at Lockheed.

When rank-and-filers moved to build solidarity with each of these groups, they were stonewalled by the local and national IAM leadership. Isolated, each group eventually gave in.

In fact, Jerry Calhoun, Boeing’s chief negotiator, reported to Auburn, Wash. managers that he was "impressed" by the way things were handled during the IAM/Onex negotiations. When you get praise from sources like this, you know you’re in trouble!

But the collaboration between the union leadership and the bosses goes beyond praise from the company mouthpiece. The country’s biggest bosses plan to reorganize basic industry to pay for their "stunningly expensive" wars to secure Mideast oil, which they intend to use as leverage against any up-and-coming imperialist challenger. They are hell bent on eliminating defined pensions, rationalizing medical care and reducing wages to a bare minimum to finance this reorganization in preparation for "small" wars now and bigger wars later. The chairman of the Council of Foreign Affairs, the bosses’ main foreign policy think-tank, warns we have to choose between "retirement security and national security." "[It’s] weapons or walkers," he says. Goose-steeping right in line, the AFL-CIO industrial conference focused not on the unprecedented attacks on our brothers and sisters, but on China’s military potential.

Let’s have no illusions! This contract battle is part and parcel of an overall attack against our economic survival so the bosses can prepare for more deadly imperialist wars. That’s all this system has to offer us. Trying to negotiate our way out of these attacks has been an abject failure. Building class solidarity and rank-and-file militancy that inspires our fellow workers is the only way out of this death spiral. Using PLP’s ideas can teach us, even in this difficult period, how to employ our strength to put an end to this bosses’ nightmare with communist revolution.

AFL-CIO Dogfight:

Only Red Leadership Can Put U.S. Workers on the Offensive

With the upcoming AFL-CIO Chicago convention about to witness a possible split-off of unions comprising 40% of the federation’s membership, various "pro-labor" pundits are lamenting the sad state of affairs in the labor movement and remembering those days when workers were on the move. One such advocate, sociologist Ruth Milkman of UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations, wrote an op-ed piece in the N. Y. Times (6/30) in which she recalled a previous "time of trial for organized labor," in the early 1930s during the Great Depression when "Employers impos[ed] wage cuts and speed-up on their workers while the AFofL [stood] by helplessly."

She then points out that "a few years later" the CIO, "an insurgent group within organized labor…set off America’s greatest surge of unionism." She says that the present move by four of the largest unions — the SEIU, the Teamsters, Unite Here and the UFCW — to triple the funds for organizing the unorganized and combine competing unions could "restore labor" as the force "it once was in an era" of "remarkable gains…for all Americans."

Ms. Milkman conveniently forgets the central feature of the 1930’s surge: communist leadership.

It was communists who put over a million workers on the streets on March 6, 1932 in the battle that eventually produced unemployment insurance and welfare relief for 17 million jobless workers, one-third of the work-force.

It was the communists who were the major force in building the CIO, who championed industrial unionism to organize millions of workers in the basic industries — auto, steel, electrical, rubber, mass transit, chemical, longshore and the rest.

It was the communists who led the fight against racism and for unity of black and white workers in the multi-racial CIO, in contrast to the lily-white craft unions of the old AFL.

It was the communists who organized and led the sit-down strikes in auto that swept the country and forced the giant corporations — GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, US Steel, Republic Steel among many — to agree to unionization and the 8-hour day.

In the key strike — the sit-down at GM in Flint, Michigan — that sparked the organization of four million industrial workers in four years into the CIO, six of the seven members of the Committee that ran that strike and mobilized 40,000 workers from four states to surround the struck plants were members of the old Communist Party.

Compare that record to the likes of the Teamsters’ James Hoffa, the SEIU’s Andrew Stern, and their ilk. This latest crop of labor "leaders" see as their main role "rescuing" the unions to be able to serve the bosses’ capitalist system — which they defend — a lot more effectively than John Sweeney & Co.

It is ironic that the achievements of that communist-led industrial union movement should produce the components of what the ruling class now "proudly" refers to as "the American Dream": the 8-hour day, regular wage increases, health insurance, home ownership, etc. Unfortunately the old Communist Party fell victim to reformism. It did not turn its gigantic organizing efforts into "schools for communism." It did not build for revolution, but rather ended up supporting the liberal, Roosevelt wing of the ruling class that was out to save capitalism from a communist revolution that would eliminate the profit system.

But with the rulers’ massive attack on the working class’s wages, hours, health benefits and the rest, with the drive for imperialist wars in which the rulers use young workers as cannon fodder to keep control of Middle East oil and fend off their imperialist rivals, the "Dream" is becoming a nightmare, especially for the super-exploited black, Latin and immigrant workers who produce super-profits for the racist bosses. It will take a new communist movement, led by a mass PLP, to produce a workers’ society that will be a nightmare for — and destroy — the ruling class.

Disrupt Army Flag Day Recruiting Spectacle

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., June 14 — A crowd of anti-war protesters, including a PLP contingent, disrupted an orgy of patriotism today as the U.S. Army combined with the city government in attempting to turn a Flag Day celebration into a recruitment drive from the local high schools. The extravaganza included police SWAT teams cordoning off the area, Blackhawk helicopters circling the Common, National Guard groups displaying military vehicles — all trying to wow the spectators, mostly grade school children and their teachers.

The black-suited SWAT teams herded protesters into a "Free Speech Pen," but the PLP’ers outmaneuvered them, taking their banner and bullhorn outside the security perimeter and concentrating on selling CHALLENGE and injecting sharp political chants into the demonstration. When some black-suits confronted a PL leader demanding the bullhorn, she steadfastly refused to surrender it and carried it off to a safe place.

The protesters greeted the main speaker, an Army Undersecretary, with angry chants denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Iraq war, disrupting the program. When six flag-bearing parachutists jumped from the Blackhawks and floated to the ground, the protesters’ booing dominated the scene, lasting through the singing of the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance. One person snuck into the audience of mostly schoolchildren and soon had 50 of them chanting anti-war slogans! Then the black-suits arrested seven demonstrators who tried to break into the podium area.

When the ceremony ended, its purpose became clear: the Mayor and Deputy Secretary signed an agreement bringing Cambridge into the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success (PaYS) to improve its recruitment at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High Schools. The nationwide PaYS program dupes youth into joining the military with promises of training and jobs in participating corporations — how the bosses directly combine with the Army to get cannon fodder for their oil wars.

We learned that rank-and-file demonstrators are eager to hear our ideas on imperialism, racism and fascism and are ready to follow our leadership. But we must try to move these actions beyond simple protest and booing to a higher level — which in this case could have been leading them to break out of the infamous "Free Speech Pen." This could inspire all those school kids to join with us in the struggle when they come of age.

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Recently the striking NSTAR gas and electric workers were voting on a proposed contract. A few PLP’ers distributed a flier entitled, "Vote No on the Contract!" It broadened the perspective on the decision facing the workers, stating that company attacks on pensions and benefits are part of the "life-and-death war between ...the capitalist class...in crisis...and the working class...[that] must fight not just for its livelihood, but for its life."

The flyer called on workers "who are ready to up the ante and fight the class war against capitalism...[to] see the proposed contract for what it is — a trick to keep the workers’ struggles confined to a narrow legal process that the bosses control — and vote it down.... But however they vote, the important thing is that they begin to fight as members of the working class."

The workers gladly took the leaflets, eager for any analysis about their struggle. Soon the Utility Union hacks threatened us, ordering us off the property, and calling the cops. They baited us McCarthyite-style, telling the workers to "Rip that up! That’s the communists! It has nothing to do with the union!" This, however, inspired more workers to take the leaflets. Not one worker was seen throwing it away or ripping it up. They carefully began reading them setting them aside in their cars, defying the hacks.

This experience showed again that strikes are important opportunities to politicize workers. The union hacks, desperate to get the sellout agreement passed, were freaking out mostly because the flier called for a "no vote." They’re running scared and must lie to prevent workers from thinking things through. But many NSTAR workers are starting to see that the attacks on them are part of a broader attack on their entire class. They couldn’t have missed the fact that it was communists who had enough respect for them to present a real analysis and long-range program for victory.

Comrades, strike support and boldness will go a long way!

Boston Reader

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The 1970’s PLP LP’s "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers — in English and Spanish — such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.

Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202

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U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez has been charged with killing two superiors, Lieutenant Louis Allen, his operations officer, and Captain Philip Esposito, his company commander. On June 7, the two officers were in their quarters when four explosions rocked their room in Forward Operating Base Danger, near Tikrit Iraq. Initially the Army thought the two deaths were caused by enemy mortar fire, but army munitions and explosives specialists later determined that the bomb patterns were more consistent with fragmentation grenades and claymore mines.

Some reported that Capt. Esposito and Lt. Allen had previously disciplined Staff Sgt. Martinez. The exact motives for the killings are unclear but some general political implications are apparent. The occupation of Iraq is beginning to strain the military.

Since the war started, over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, the vast majority by the U.S. military. Over 40,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded or mentally disabled enough to be removed from Iraq. Over 1,700 U.S. soldiers have been killed.

The enormity of the destruction of human life has moved well beyond the "small" wars to which the U.S. has limited itself since Vietnam. While this is nowhere near the number of casualties suffered in WWII or even in Vietnam, it has caused many people to question the motives for the war.

When young soldiers are ordered to kill children, smash down doors of families and drag them into the streets and shoot wounded men lying on the ground, it induces some of them to ask why and others to crack under the pressure. We don't know if Staff Sgt. Martinez killed those two officers, but we do know that murder has become a way of life in Iraq.

U.S. imperialists are having difficulties in building all-class unity within the armed forces. In October 2004, an entire platoon of the 343rd Quartermaster Company refused to go on a mission in defiance of their commander who felt delivering contaminated fuel over a dangerous road with slow, poorly-running vehicles was worth risking their lives.

The military has been trying to reduce the tension between working-class troops and their chain of command by using civilians for everything from mercenaries to cleaning porta-potties in order to ease discomforts of earlier wars. Racism against blacks and Latinos, once practically an open policy, is now more subtle as U.S. rulers depend on blacks for nearly half of their non-commissioned officers and half of female officers. Latinos, facing racist unemployment and super-exploitation, are expected to fill the military's shrinking enlisted ranks.

But no matter what the bosses do, they can't hide class antagonisms, nor will they be able to cover up racism too much longer. Imperialism asks the poor to fight the rich man's war. Every soldier, marine, airman and sailor who lost their lives died because some commanding officer found the risks acceptable to U.S. interests. Every operation that brings praise is another medal for career-climbing, resume-building officers and another day of danger in the desert for lower enlisted personnel. Pentagon officials, the general of Abu Grahib prison and the commanders of the MP units caught torturing Iraqis supposedly "had no idea of what was going on" while the enlisted soldiers collect years in jail.

The bosses need workers to commit murder, torture and occupation on their behalf but it's the bosses who reap billions while our families reap the casualties.

Threat of Class Struggle Hangs Over EU Rulers

(Part I discussed the snag suffered by the bosses of the European Union when the French and the Dutch rejected the proposed EU Constitution, and the fact that workers have no interest in either bosses’ side. It revealed two contradictions: one involving the high-tech countries like Germany vs. export-industry countries like Italy who must compete with low-wage China; and the second pits European rulers against their U.S. rivals — both of which are difficult to solve. The final one follows.)

The third contradiction reflects the 800-pound gorilla in the room: class struggle, the fight pitting workers against bosses. This was the real shadow hanging over the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution. Leaving aside the openly racist forces, led, for example, by the fascist Le Pen and his National Front in France — who predictably mobilized against unity with Turkey and against immigrant workers — this vote reflected more than anything the workers’ disapproval of a U.S.-style "free market" economy with few social concessions. The European bosses would love to reach this stage. They envy U.S. bosses’ ability to slash health care, education, etc. They took due note when Clinton, a liberal Democrat, ended welfare and replaced it with a slave-labor scheme known as "Workfare."

For many years workers in France and Germany have been able to count on a social security system with affordable medical care, unemployment insurance, retirement benefits and lengthy paid vacations. But these reforms didn’t fall from the sky. The massive class struggles in France during the "Popular Front" period of the 1930s brought them about. French rulers at the time were split. Some felt that granting significant reforms was the only alternative to communist revolution. Remember, the Soviet Union was in its heyday 70 years ago. Other French bosses took the hard line and preferred junior partnership with Hitler to the Popular Front. The second group won out in the short term; the first won in the longer term. After World War II, newly resurgent German bosses decided that throwing some crumbs to the working class was the best way to stifle class struggle and co-opt the threat of communist organizing. Again, this was at the height of the Cold War.

Well, the Cold War is over. The old communist movement has died of its own opportunist political weaknesses. The former Soviet Union is now a capitalist Russia hell-bent on becoming a major imperialist. So the rulers of France and Germany would love to move more quickly to grind down workers’ living standards and keep the profits for themselves.

But the French referendum sounds a warning signal. Voting is one thing. Militant class struggle is another. In 1968, a rebellion by French university students spread like wildfire throughout the working class and shut down the entire country for three weeks. French and German bosses haven’t forgotten it. Neither should we.

The memory of this rebellion provides the second lesson our class must draw from the European bosses’ disarray. The specter of communism continues to haunt the rulers. It made them grant the reforms they now want to take away. It gave rise to the 1968 revolt which occurred in the international context of anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Rebuilding a new communist movement in Europe must now become the rallying cry of workers throughout the European Union.

Despite the claims of the European fake-left, the "No" vote is not in and of itself a victory for workers. Our class can never win anything in capitalist elections. Rather, it is a sign that workers are thirsting for an alternative to this system.

Working with its European friends, our Party accepts the challenge and responsibility of helping provide this alternative. The specter of communism can and will eventually become flesh and blood. Even in the direst of periods, like the present, it will continue to haunt the rulers. Over time, it will destroy them. We should take advantage of the rulers’ momentary disunity to increase the boldness and vigor with which we build international working-class unity for communism.

UNDER COMMUNISM

How Would Health Care Be Better?

(This column continues a new CHALLENGE series on how life under communism would differ from life under capitalism; how it will represent the interests of the international working class and our allies. We invite all readers to contribute both questions and answers to this column for discussion, relying on either history, examples from our own lives, or hope and imagination.)

The June 8 issue described some of British surgeon Joshua Horn’s experiences in China from 1954 to 1969. In his book "Away With All Pests," Horn describes the progress made then in burn treatment.

In 1958 a Shanghai steel worker, Chiu Tsai Kang, was splashed with molten steel causing severe burns over 89% of his body. British and U.S. medical experience at the time would have given Chiu no chance of survival. But despite being technically backward, the Chinese refused to accept such a diagnosis. They were able and willing to provide better treatment to workers than other countries gave to monarchs and billionaires.

A constant stream of workers gave blood to save Chiu’s life. The hospital workers built him a room with air under positive pressure to prevent infection to his open wounds. His nurses cut off their braids to lessen the spread of germs. Anyone entering his room bathed and changed into sterile clothes.

Meetings of doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners and maintenance workers developed treatment plans. They provided Chiu round-the-clock care. When Chiu became discouraged and refused to eat, Shanghai chefs sent him tempting food, while his comrades urged him to eat. Daily bulletins kept the whole country informed.

To keep his wounds draining, and to keep him as comfortable as possible, Chiu needed an air mattress that could be inflated in sections. In the middle of the night Horn and a colleague went to a nearby plastic raincoat factory. The workers met, designed such a mattress and, based on everyone’s suggestions, modified the drawings. By dawn they had produced a 12-section inflatable mattress.

Chiu recovered. The experiences gained from his treatment greatly improved burn care, not only across China, but worldwide. In 1961 a U.S. expert, Dr. T. G. Blocker, wrote in the Journal of Traumatology that the Chinese mortality rate from severe burns was 30% lower than in the U.S.

Thus, in a communist system, the tremendous attention and care given by thousands of working people to one injured steelworker saved the lives of countless people throughout the world. Still today in the U.S. some 50 million people have no health insurance, while companies massively slash employee health coverage. Why? It doesn’t make profits for the big capitalists. You tell us, which is the better system for workers?

LETTERS

Learning About Communism At Chicago March

I want to publicly thank the young comrades who organized our Party’s participation in the anti-Minutemen protest today (see p. 3 ). It was so energizing to be amongst people who literally took leaflets out of my hand, asked for Desafio and generously donated money. To think I almost didn’t go because I was "too busy"! Congratulations also to the comrades on the principled way they handled one group of marchers’ anti-communism. They advanced our line forcefully but politely, trying to "win the person, not just the argument." PLP turned what could have been just a nationalist, anti-Minutemen march into an exciting, provocative invitation to learn about communism and join us. We, and everyone who heard us or inter-acted with us, were able to glimpse a future society without bosses or nations.

Older comrade

N. Africans Suffer A Lot More Racism Than Oprah

When Oprah Winfrey was denied entrance to a Paris department store, she received only the slightest taste of the racism that hits North Africans here. The Canard enchaîné reports (6/22) that when 18-year-old Haroun jay-walked in Sucy-en-Brie on June 4, the cops started beating him up with their flashlights and Billy clubs. Three neighborhood youths and Haroun’s brother got mixed up in it and were beaten up as well. Haroun’s mother arrived to get smashed in the face with a flashlight. Haroun’s father was maced.

In all, eight people were arrested, suffered cuts requiring stitches, slight concussion and bruises and spent three days in jail. Seven of the eight have been charged with "insulting a policeman" and "rebellion." They go to court September 6.

This is what Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s top cop, means when he says he’s going to "clean up the poor neighborhoods."

Comrade in France

Fight Nationalism, Privatization in Pakistan

(In our last issue, the initial part of this letter reviewed the exploitation of workers in Pakistan, especially the brutal oppression of women, how the bosses use the fundamentalists, and the role of PLP.)

The bosses use "nationalist" slogans in Baluchistan, Sind, NWFP (Northwest Frontier Provinces) and the Saraikee territories to divide the working class and to protect their rotten system. Meanwhile, the rulers exploit the masses’ emotions to divide them by nationality, territory, "race," religion and sect to prevent a united fight of the working class against wage slavery, inequality, illiteracy and fundamentalism. This is a worldwide tactic of capitalism, especially in this less industrialized region. China’s bosses are investing a lot of money in Baluchistan’s industries. This is a threat to U.S. rulers who want to create chaos there to ward off the Chinese. Autonomy for these provinces does nothing for these workers. It only diverts them from their real problems: poverty, exploitation, unemployment and injustice.

The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service between India and Pakistan is another attempt by these bosses to strengthen their capitalist economies. They need markets to sell their commodities. But their colliding interests won’t allow peace in this region, Actually, if Kashmir’s workers had no bosses’ fight to contend with, they might direct their struggle against their exploitation, which would be a real threat to the bosses’ economy. We communists are the real force fighting for internationalism. We stand for opening all borders in a communist world; these borders just protect capitalist interests.

Pakistan’s rulers are privatizing all industries, making workers’ lives even more miserable. While workers do fight this greed, their union leadership plays the role of puppets of the bosses. The telecommunications workers are resisting the privatization of the state-owned PTCL, making it difficult for the government to sell it to the bosses. Our comrades are playing a revolutionary role in this strike and are standing firm against bosses’ privatization moves. We believe they will fight back if we provide them real communist leadership.

Our Party is struggling for communist internationalism, serving the working class. We ask the working class all over the world to join us.

Comrades from Pakistan

Disagrees About Stewart Prosecution

Lynne Stewart's client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, is a vicious, racist, religious fanatic and a murderous fascist. He is not merely an "anti-government" client. The charges against the lawyer Stewart were not an "attack on anyone who seriously challenges capitalism." Neither he nor Stewart is militantly opposing imperialism, racism, or other attacks on the working class, as suggested in the Challenge article of March 19. Abdel-Rahman was in prison under a tight lockdown and prohibited from communicating with his fanatic followers, much the same as Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale who tried to have a federal judge killed.

The fact that both Abdel-Rahman and Hale promoted racist holy war on the working class was not enough under capitalism to land either of them in jail. Like with Osama Bin-Laden, the FBI & CIA ignored Abdel-Rahman when he was "only" promoting fascist slaughter in the Mid-East. Hale was not seen as a threat as long as he "only" organized for racist attacks on African-Americans. The ruling class does not consider being an active fascist a crime. The prosecutions came only after Abdel-Rahman was involved in bombing the World Trade Center and Hale tried to have a Federal Judge killed. Attacking the ruling class itself is considered a crime by their state apparatus.

The charge against Stewart is not a frame-up. To act as Abdel-Rahman’s civil (not criminal) lawyer, she had to sign agreements to abide by the prison rules and to not smuggle messages out for him. His other lawyers refused to smuggle messages, just as Matt Hale’s lawyer refused to carry coded messages out of prison for him.Stewart foolishly smuggled out of prison and released to the press a call by Abdel-Rahman to his followers in Egypt to withdraw from a ceasefire and return to military attacks which in the past had focused on slaughtering unarmed "infidel" tourists to further the goal of an Islamic theocracy. By then, Egypt had become a more important ally of the U.S. in its war planning. If we held state power, we would not treat either Abdel-Rahman or Stewart less harshly. Stewart took an active part in Abdel-Rahman’s fascist plans. She was not prosecuted for being an activist lawyer.

None of Abdel-Rahman’s other lawyers were prosecuted, as they refused to get sucked into his fanatic scheming.

Stewart did not just commit an ethical violation, or break prison administrative rules. She did not merely improperly smuggle personal or fund-raising messages out to her client’s family or friends, or violate the rules in seeking to rally public support for his legal position. She smuggled out his call to his supporters to return to a fascist armed conflict.At some stage in her legal career, Stewart may have believed herself to be fighting against an oppressive government by legally defending her clients. She crossed a major line when she sided with her client by providing direct tactical support to his pursuit of a religious war. We could conclude that Stewart was once well-intentioned, but Stewart does not deserve our political support. We should waste no energy on Stewart, not because of who her legal client was, but because of her own later choice to give active support to religious-based fascism. Stewart may have deluded herself into believing that she was aiding a liberation struggle. We do not have to join in that delusion. Capitalism is at best oppressive; in bad times it is vicious.

When cornered, it turns to fascism. But to call every exercise of capitalist state power a step toward fascism minimizes the inherent every-day brutal nature of the capitalist state. Worse, it trivializes the qualitatively different and pervasive use of state terror that defines fascism.

Red Lawyer

CHALLENGE Comment: We thank Red Lawyer for his letter. He seems to disagree with PLP’s position that fascism is growing in the U.S. Presently, under the guise of "fighting terrorism," it is taking the form of a legal structure which allows the ruling class to do away with, or circumvent, rights that are supposedly "guaranteed" by U.S. law. The rulers would like to build a mass movement to support this Homeland Security police state. It is in this context that the Stewart case must be viewed.

Stewart is not a fascist, as Red Lawyer implies, although we have many sharp disagreements with her politics. Nevertheless, we believe the Stewart case is one more step, among many others, toward a full-blown fascist U.S. We think it would be a serious error not to make that point to all our friends and readers, and not to organize workers and others to fight this type of legal fascism.

D.C. Project Showed Power of Red Ideas

My experience in the Washington, D.C. Summer Project, especially the rally against police brutality and in meeting the Metro workers, was eye-opening and a big boost for the Party, the Metro workers and the anti-racist Coalition for Police Accountability.

Organizing a multi-racial mass of young and old supporters at the rally energized the Coalition. For the first time, we appeared in force with a truly militant attack on the capitalist system which uses the police and racism to oppress youth and the working class. When a cop threatened us with a police dog if we did not move, maybe it was because this time we were a force to be reckoned with. I think the mother of the murdered Archie Elliott III was impressed by the youth turnout, the energy and support at the rally.

The Metro work was also effective. Riding the buses, talking to the drivers and passengers, helped us learn how to share our ideas with the masses, and was of huge significance for Metro workers themselves. To see so many people, especially youth, come out and support them, to take the time to ride the bus and talk to them about their day, their families, their daily struggles, the grind and ups and downs of driving a bus — all this showed the workers we do care and that we’re united in solidarity with them, in fighting the bosses but also in fighting the capitalist system that chains all workers in the shackles of wage slavery.

Our actions during the Summer project brought more workers closer to the red-led union, closer to the Party and has raised class consciousness to a level not seen since the 1978 strike. It highlighted the crucial role played by industrial workers.

Project Participant

Youth Write About the NJ Anti-Minutemen Protest

Traveling to this protest, we really didn’t think we’d have this much of an impact on the police. Those protesting for the first time felt excited and happy to be part of a coalition of the working class.

Preparing for the protest we were told we could get arrested. Running through our minds were thoughts of lawyers, parents and that we were way too young to be jailed. After realizing the rally’s importance, we quickly got over it and were ready for the challenge. Workers of the world united as the fascist Bridgewater police came to support the racist "Minutemen."

As we approached the arena, police quickly identified our New York plates and our multi-racial passengers and followed us all the way to the parking lot. They were expecting trouble from us, and they were right!

Exiting the car approaching the entrance, we chanted, "Obreros unidos, jamas seran vencidos!" (Workers united will never be defeated). The cops immediately demanded we move off the property. We stood firm at the entrance. Then two of us were arrested. The police expected this would intimidate us and we’d run home but little did they know we came to send a message and weren’t going to be pushed around like their little puppets.

We rallied on the road down below, excitedly chanting many great slogans. Then people from local anti-racist and immigrant groups arrived and began chanting with us. Our protest grew, it was HOT but we were dedicated and determined to be heard. Racism and fascism are growing. As communists we believe capitalism’s chains must be broken.

While outside chanting, more police cars showed up, calling for more and more back-up. Now look who was scared! When the cops appeared with tear gas and guns, it just made us chant harder. We were dedicated, willing to put ourselves on the line. We must fight back against the "Minutemen" and their fascist propaganda. The people of the world will one day stand up and dismantle the capitalists’ poison.

******************

Today was a truly inspiring day, workers united against fascism and racism. These racists are the modern-day equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Our first goal was to oppose the injustice directed against immigrants. It was over 90 degrees, but that didn’t deter us. As soon as we began protesting, the Bridgewater cops tried to disperse us. Two members were arrested and subjected to police brutality. These fascist cops slammed one of our elder members onto a car. We only protested harder.

It was truly inspiring to see people randomly joining the demonstration. We were truly united. Police SWAT teams and an excessive amount of cops showed up, but we would not be moved, not be pushed down or away. We stood strong and continued to fight for the cause.

******************

Before the protest, I must admit I was a little nervous. But the possibility of being arrested only showed me that participating was essential.

When I actually arrived at the protest, the experience was surreal. We, especially the students, showed that we would express ourselves no matter what the police tried to do.

The truly beautiful thing was that so many people — Asian, Latin, black, white — protested and got our message across. We united around the idea that workers of the world have the power to unite to change society. It starts with one person taking a stand one day, one moment to make a difference and we all can work together to do our part.

Group Relations Influence Health

I was very pleased to see a series on life under communism, but I think the first article (6/8/05) was written more for health professionals than for the rest of us. It would have been stronger if it had drawn the conclusion that we should all be part of collective groups wherever we work so that everyone would help each other take responsibility for the work of society. These groups would be a safe place where we would struggle with each other to improve our relationships and our work.

Research has shown that the interpersonal relationships we have with people have a big effect on our health. (For more information, see a book which summarizes many studies, written by Dean Ornisch, a well-known doctor who has reversed heart disease through diet.)

I think the bigger picture related to health is sanitation, clean water, availability of medical care and how it will be paid for.

I want to contribute to this discussion, as well as life under communism, in more detail in future letters.

A regular reader

Inspired to Defy Fascist Cops

When I arrived at the anti-Minutemen protest in NJ, I saw three of the racist nationalists cradling rolled-up U.S. flags and carrying anti-immigrant signs. I started to open up my car door to attack them. The only difference between me, as an Hispanic male, and the undocumented workers is that I have U.S. citizenship. These patriots were trying to organize against workers like my grandmother who slaved in a sweatshop so that my father and uncle could eat.

As I was about to jump from the car and pound these patriots with my red rage, I was told to wait and follow the agreed-upon plan. With the communist understanding of the importance of discipline and following the collectively decided-upon plan, I refrained from attacking them.

No sooner had we assembled in the parking lot and moved to protest in front of the center, the cops surrounded us, told us to move and then arrested one comrade. As she pounded on the squad car with her free hand and shouted to fight the fascists, she inspired all of us to continue protesting. A cop then told me to leave or I would be next. I saw what the rest of my comrades were doing, still shouting and protesting, so I shouted the same slogan at the cop. I was quickly arrested.

While I was being hand-cuffed, I heard three racists saying I was probably one of those "illegals" who came here to steal jobs and cause trouble. I recognized one as a guy I saw from the car, and told him he's lucky I didn't get at him. He quickly shut up with a look of shock and surprise when he heard my English.

At the police station I was asked a series of questions that led me to believe a special database is being kept on left-wingers.

This was my first arrest, but it was a small price to pay in the long struggle for communism. Our Party will continue to fight the fascists, the bosses and any patriots who dare to organize against the international working class.

Defiant Red

Money Under Communism?

"What would the role of money be under communism?" is a question I've heard many times. The answer is simple: there won't be any. No currency, no cash, zero, zilch.

To understand why money must be abolished, we must consider why money exists in the first place. Cash is a medium of trade that simply represents a portion of wealth created by labor. What a nation's currency is based upon varies. The U.S. dollar is the de-facto currency for oil. The Euro is based upon gold. But mainly, money is used to steal working-class labor. This labor is the real value of anything.

Under communism, the only goods produced would be that which the working class needs. A major failing of socialism was that it required cash to operate. The only way to get currency is by extracting the surplus value the working class creates. Commodity production for trade eventually overrides the agricultural, medical, educational and residential needs of the working class. The socialized capitalism that earlier parties fought for can never lead to communism because it didn't remove the root of capitalism — Capital!

By destroying the base of the bosses' power and reorganizing society based on producing for need, we can construct a world of "from each according to ability, and to each according to need." We will build a society to share and meet needs, not create surplus value. For communism to exist, all forms of currency must be destroyed. We don't seek to redistribute wealth; we seek to destroy it.

A Reader

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

US, China will clash as oil runs out

…In 30 years oil production could be down by 75%....

This is a staggering figure . . . A world without oil is bound to represent a massive economic, social and political shock.…There will be a power struggle over dwindling oil stocks. Already, there are signs of a new cold war emerging as the US and China seek to curry favour with poor African countries that are seen to have potential as oil suppliers. It could get a lot worse than that. The oil junkies of the West will be like heroin addicts suffering from cold turkey. (GW, 7/7)

‘Missile Defense’ is plan to control globe

In order to sell this space warfare program to the American people, the Pentagon has labeled it "missile defense." But in reality the program is all about offense. It was first spelled out in the 1997 Space Command plan, "Vision for 2020," that called for U.S "control and domination" of space.

The Pentagon and its aerospace corporation allies understand that they cannot come to the American people and ask for hundreds of billions of dollars for offensive weapons in space. Thus the claim of "missile defense"….

…Federal expenditures on missile defense [are] about $ 10 billion per year—enough to provide health insurance for every uninsured kid in America. (Distributed by MinuteMan.Org)

Recruiting: 4 times harder than year ago

…Marine recruiters are spending an average of 12 hours per recruit they enlist, up from about 3 hours a year or so ago, Marine officials say. (NYT, 6/30)

Pol: US prisons worse than Guantánamo

…As a response to increasing calls to shut down the…facility, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the panel’s ranking Democrat, said that Guantánamo was in many ways better than state and federal penitentiaries… (NYT )

‘Made in USA’ can still mean slavery

…The Northern Marianas, DeLay said, was no haven for cruelty but a "perfect Petri dish of capitalism."

…Garment industry sweatshop workers and sex slaves in the Northern Mariana Islands — a U.S. territory — were exploited in a system that resembled indentured servitude.

Brokers — traffickers, really, in human beings — brought thousands to work in sweatshops for as many as 70 hours per week. They lived in crowded barracks; some were locked behind guarded fences. And because the territory is a U.S. possession, garments bore this seal of approval: "Made in the U.S.A."

Some who failed to get work were forced into the sex trade, though they may not even have been paid for prostitution since they still owed the brokers. (Wash. Post)

White ex-prisoners: More job offers than never-arrested black men

White men with prison records receive far more offers for entry-level jobs in New York City than black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often — if not more so — than black men who have never been arrested, according to a new study by two Princeton professors.

The study, the first to assess the effect of race on job searches by ex-convicts, also found that black men who had never been in trouble with the law were about half as likely as whites with similar backgrounds to get a job offer or a callback. (NYT, 6/17)

CAFTA: blood-sucking drug lobby plan

…Washington’s biggest and wealthiest lobby, appears to have succeeded in the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement would extend the monopolies of drug makers and, critics say, lead to higher drug prices for the mostly impoverished people of the six Latin American countries it covers….

…In Guatemala,...poor AIDS patients have marched in the streets to protest. (NYT, 7/2)

US loves terrorists if they’re anti-left

Colombia has just passed a law to demobilize paramilitary fighters that the government calls the "Justice and Peace Law." It should be called the "Impunity for Mass Murderers, Terrorists and Major Cocaine Traffickers Law."

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary armies, one party in a 40-year civil war, have massacred thousands of people. They control 40 percent of Colombia’s cocaine exports….

The new law, which reflects the paramilitaries’ considerable political power, will block the extradition of paramilitary leaders wanted for trafficking to the United States and allow them to continue their drug dealing, extortion, land theft and other criminals activities undisturbed. Even those responsible for the most heinous crimes against humanity may go free because of strict time limits for prosecutions. The few who are convicted will likely serve sentenced of only 22 months….

The Bush administration could have pushed President Alvaro Uribe to pass a good bill. Instead, Ambassador William Wood enthusiastically backed the new law, giving Washington’s endorsement to…a terrorist mafia. (NYT, 7/4)

With 9/11 excuse, FBI gets your secrets

The Social Security Administration has relaxed its privacy restrictions and searched thousands of its files at the request of the F.B.I. as part of terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, newly disclosed records and interviews show….

…The Social Security agency agreed to an "ad hoc" policy that authorized the release of information to the bureau for investigations related to Sept. 11 because officials saw a "life–threatening" emergency, internal memorandums say.

The Internal Revenue Service also worked with the bureau and the Social Security agency to provide income and taxpayer information in terror inquiries, law enforcement officials said.

" But an ad hoc policy like this is so broad that it allows law enforcement to obtain really sensitive information by merely claiming that the information is relevant to the 9/11 investigation….There appears to be very little oversight." (NYT, 6/22)

1. PLP Youth Spreads Red Ideas
   D.C. Metro Workers Confront Transit Bosses
2. Liberals' Exit Strategy Means More War
3. `Dream' Act A Nightmare for
   Undocumented Youth
4. GI's in Iraq read CHALLENGE
5. Capitalism's Contradictions Trip Up Euro Bosses
6. PLP'ers, Anti-Racists Expose Lying Liberal State D.A.
7. Racism `Birmingham-style'
8. AFL-CIO Dogs Fiddle While Workers Burn
9. Must Oppose Liberals' Lesser-Evil Line
   At NEA Convention
10. Union's Racist `Strike' Threat A Loser At Northwest
11. Anti-Racist Fight Nets
    More CHALLENGE Readers
12. UAW Presides Over GM
    Job Massacre
    1. GM GETS CUT DOWN TO SIZE
13. Bolivia's Mass Rebellion Betrayed Again;
    Need Revolutionary Party
14. Discussions on Communism
    `Mind-blowing' To Youth
15. Campus Rally Poetry:
    Weapon Against Imperialist War
16. Memories of World War II
    `Stalin's Soviet Union will be no pushover, son...'
17. UNDER COMMUNISM
    WHOSE FACTORY IS IT?
18. Movie Review
    CRASH, Just Another Racist Movie
19. LETTERS
    1. Garment Worker Mom Learning Through Class Struggle
    2. Students and Teachers Enthused by D.C. Summer Project
    3. Drown out Democrat
       Hack Ferrer
    4. Colombia PLP Excites Young Comrade
    5. CHALLENGE COMMENTS:
    6. Salvador's Rulers Are The Real Criminals
    7. Bush's Pakistan Pal Enforces State Terror
    8. Racism Made French Bosses Rich
    9. `Rude' Teachers Not the Problem
20. RED EYE ON THE NEWS
    1. More $$ -- but it all goes to the richest
    2. Maquiladora workers fight gov't-union deal
    3. Pension laws show who runs the show
    4. Abuse of Islamics needed high planning
    5. Liberal media help imperialist warmakers
    6. `Big 8'nations profit from Africa poverty
    7. Pakistan, a close US ally, brutalizes woman

---

PLP Youth Spreads Red Ideas
D.C. Metro Workers Confront Transit Bosses

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 9 --For two hours in a blazing summer sun, over 120 transit workers from Metro, joined by over 100 supporters from the PLP summer project and several other unions, boisterously challenged Metro, demanding they negotiate honestly for a decent contract. In a dramatic moment, we angrily confronted the Metro Board of Directors, shoving our signs in their faces as they tried to slip past us. We also are demanding a serious commitment from ourselves and our brothers and sisters as the wave of capitalism's crisis breaks over our heads. There must be no step backward in this struggle!

Distribution of a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE to everyone on the picket line created a strong communist presence at the march. Even some of the union's more conservative Executive Board members appreciated our presence, which emphasizes the value of a unified working class.

A diverse group of Metro workers from virtually every department marched today -- young and old, black and white, bus drivers, mechanics, station attendants, and maintenance. Rail car maintenance and the Northern bus garage each brought 15-20 workers.

Although this was a relatively small action in a local of 9,000 members, for the last 25 years the union leadership has trained the membership to be passive, always backing away from sharp struggle, accepting contract arbitration and usually neglecting workers' needs. This business unionist approach has intensified racism in the ever-lengthening 2-tier wage progression (now at 7 years) as the workforce changed from mostly white to mostly black. For a generation Local 689 has lost the basic working-class concepts of class struggle, solidarity, militancy and unity. With the recent election of PLP'er Mike Golash as president, a communist with a well-developed strategy for reversing these losses, new possibilities have emerged. The subterranean fire of class hatred and militancy is beginning to surface, even as the bosses have begun to sharpen their knives as they look for cost savings by slashing workers.

The Washington Post has attacked Metro workers for earning "six-figure salaries," while the life-deadening 75-hour work-week of the handful of workers who made this amount is ignored. The workers answered these attacks at the rally, condemning management for its efforts to shift the blame for Metro inefficiencies onto the union. It will take more than just a few months to turn the union around, but the downward spiral has been slowed, hope is in the air, and workers are beginning to feel their long-lost power.

Dialectics teaches us that the quantitative changes of 30 years of consistent communist agitation and base-building lays the foundation for a qualitative advance. Materialist philosophy teaches us that Metro workers know they are oppressed by capitalism and are open to learning the scientific truth about how to defeat the bosses.

This demonstration can be the beginning of the qualitative transformation at Metro as workers regain their hope and optimism of defeating the bosses, and begin to join the PLP to make this a reality. The next big step is creating a substantial PLP club of Metro workers. This is crucial because no matter how militant the union becomes, the bosses will retain the upper hand since they control the whole system. The role of PLP'ers would be to show workers their local struggle must be linked to the struggle against the war in Iraq and the Homeland Security police state. The latter could be used to smash a Metro strike, claiming it's against the (bosses) "national interest" because it affects the capital of U.S. capitalism. Once workers understand this, we become a key force in fighting for a society based on our needs: workers' power.

The PLP summer project organized a couple of dozen activists to leaflet the entire city, politicizing and radicalizing workers. We've had long talks with many bus and train operators, station managers, mechanics and custodial workers. We've also seen, first-hand, the response of the bus riders; support was expressed everywhere we went.

The future is bright for working-class solidarity! But the hard work lies ahead.

Liberals' Exit Strategy Means More War

Liberals in Congress are feigning shock at recently-leaked British documents showing Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses and without an "exit strategy." Some are demanding the U.S. begin drawing down its forces as of October 1, 2006. But don't hold your breath waiting for the troops to come home. The liberals serve the dominant imperialist faction of U.S. rulers. GI's will continue to kill and die in Iraq as long as it retains strategic importance for U.S. imperialism.

The liberals' exit-strategy furor actually promotes the rulers' war aims. It helps divert sincere anti-war sentiment into futile e-mail-your-congressman politics. Rep. John Conyers, with the help of MoveOn.org, gathered 560,000 electronic signatures for a letter scolding Bush for the Iraq quagmire. Founded in 1999 by Larry Rockefeller, among others, MoveOn's original goal was to shift Washington's focus from the Clinton impeachment scandal to more pressing issues, like the war in Serbia. More importantly, the exit strategy flap revives the rulers' main criticism of the Bush gang: it failed to militarize the nation following Sept. 11. Consequently, Bush & Co. could muster less than half the troops needed to accomplish the rulers' goal of ousting Hussein and controlling Iraq's oilfields. Larry Diamond, a senior official in the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, writes in his new book, "Squandered Victory," that deploying an adequate force "would have necessitated an immediate mobilization of the military reserves and National Guard."

Commenting on the British memos, Sen. Jay Rockefeller called for a more effective war machine: "the American people deserve answers. Only then can we provide a full and complete accounting of the mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq and what changes are necessary to fix them." (New York Times, 6/14/05) The liberal Times' Thomas Friedman thinks he has the solution: "before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground." (6/15/05) But the rulers have a problem. Army and Marine recruitment is falling far short of its targets. So "anti-war" Conyers has joined Rep. Charles Rangel in proposing restoration of the draft.

Max Boot, senior fellow at the rulers' Council on Foreign Relations, openly pining for the armies of the Roman, British, and French empires, has another idea: "I would...offer citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve a set term in the U.S. military. We could model a Freedom Legion after the French Foreign Legion. Or we could allow foreigners to join regular units after a period of English-language instruction, if necessary" (Los Angeles Times, 6/16/05)

Rather than seeking an exit from war, U.S. rulers are constantly searching for the means of waging broader and deadlier conflicts. A study done by the Army War College weighed prospects for a World War II-scale military mobilization of the U.S. in the near future. Amid the rulers' planning for World War III, however, lie signs of promise for the working class.

Along with deteriorating infrastructure, a shortage of skilled workers in basic industry, and Bush's tax policies, the Army found "diminished civic militarism as an obstacle to such efforts." It noted "formidable political resistance among citizens to...serving in the military. The widespread support for military action following the 9/11 attacks did not translate into an equally widespread willingness among Americans to enlist." (Parameters, Autumn 2004) This lack of "civic militarism" is a legacy of the Vietnam era, when the anti-war movement, led in key sections by PLP, laid bare to millions the profit motive behind imperialist war.

Our Party, understanding that the profit system itself ceaselessly causes -- and needs -- this carnage, has an exit strategy. We're building for the only way out of the ever-worsening spiral of imperialist wars. That's a communist revolution that will someday eradicate the capitalist butchers. History has twice shown, in Russia and in China, that when the profiteers engage in global conflict, the working class, united by a communist party, can seize power.

`Dream' Act A Nightmare for
Undocumented Youth

One answer to the bosses' need for "more boots on the ground" (see editorial, front page) -- and their eventual need for a "mass mobilization" to fuel their imperialist wars -- seems to be a neo-Bracero "guest SOLDIER" program! The DREAM Act points in this direction. It targets children of undocumented workers, offering them citizenship after graduation from high school and two years of military service.

The rise of nativist fascist groups like the MinuteMen Project works in the bosses' favor, impelling immigrant workers to find the fastest ways to become "legal" residents and citizens. The bosses are more than happy to help, making immigrant workers "prove" their patriotism by fighting and dying in U.S. imperialist wars. While liberals try to separate themselves from open racists like the MinuteMen, citizen and immigrant workers shouldn't be fooled into thinking these liberals have their interests in mind. Sure, immigrants are just fine -- for cannon fodder and to be super-exploited! This should make us even more committed to reaching out to young people with all of PLP's ideas. These youth can think and can help fight for the interests of the international working class.

GI's in Iraq read CHALLENGE

The picture (see PDF version) shows GIs somewhere in Iraq reading CHALLENGE. In fact, the Vietnam Syndrome is still haunting U.S. bosses. Despite Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice claims that "all is going well," Iraq is increasingly becoming a quagmire, and the Democrats' call for "more boots on the ground" will only sink it deeper. Army Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez, has been charged with "fragging" -- hurling a fragmentation grenade -- killing two of his superior officers near Tikrit, Iraq. This is the second reported such incident since the U.S. invasion began. During the 12-year Vietnam War there were more than 800 such "fraggings," especially as the U.S. was losing the war and GI rebellions spread more and more. (More on what's happening in Iraq and a short history of Vietnam fraggings in our next issue.)

Capitalism's Contradictions Trip Up Euro Bosses

Only yesterday, European bosses seemed poised to launch their "Union" as a political entity capable of harnessing their economic clout and competing with U.S. rulers for world domination. That dream may yet materialize. But momentarily it's hit a major snag. Workers can learn two important lessons from this fiasco.

Firstly, when capitalists have a dogfight, the working class doesn't have a dog in the fight. Our job remains the task of building our own forces, the most important of which is our revolutionary communist Party, the PLP. We have one goal: to overthrow the entire capitalist class and its murderous profit system and replace them with a workers' dictatorship and a decent society.

Recently, the much-vaunted "European Constitution" fell flat on its face when voters in France and then Holland rejected it by overwhelming majorities. In the wake of this vote, European rulers began battling among themselves over money. Under capitalism, it's always about money. British, Polish and Scandinavian bosses are lining up against their French, German and Italian counterparts over two tactical visions of European capitalism. The first group wants to push as quickly as possible for "free trade"; the second wants more governmental control over the economies. In some ways, the bickering reflects the current standoffs in the U.S. between the Liberal Eastern Establishment and "conservative" bosses.

Three contradictions lie at the heart of the matter. The first two concern the capitalism's dog-eat-dog, competitive nature, even among supposedly close pals. For example, the euro as common currency now forces Italian capitalists to compete "on the same playing field as Germany." But Germany makes high-tech industrial equipment and high-end automobiles. Italy's main export industries "are in sectors like shoes, textiles, and clothes that are particularly vulnerable to Chinese competition." (New York Times, 6/19) With the euro, trade issues are now handled at the European rather than the national level, and so Italian shoe magnates have little wiggle room. Yet their need for maximum profit remains. The creation of the euro hasn't solved this contradiction and dozens like it, any more than the creation of the United States of America eliminated competition among the rulers of different regions or states (i.e., Northern capitalists vs. Southern slaveholders).

The second contradiction pits European rulers against the U.S. This rivalry isn't new. In fact, it's as old as the existence of the U.S., which has already fought two wars on European soil. During the Cold War, U.S. imperialism used the threat of communism to keep the major European powers in line. For several decades, the aspect of unity overshadowed competition.

But competition is now dominant, and the Europeans face the dilemma of putting their differences aside for the sake of building a united front against the U.S. As events are proving, honor among thieves is difficult to establish.

But there's a third contradiction, and it reflects the 800-pound gorilla in the room: class struggle, the fight that pits workers against bosses. This was the real shadow hanging over the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution. (To be continued next issue.)

PLP'ers, Anti-Racists Expose Lying Liberal State D.A.

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MD, June 7 -- Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? The ruling class, that's who! A fatigue-dressed K-9 cop used his dog to harass us Birmingham-style (see box) at our courthouse rally demanding accountability for the 12-year old murder of Archie Elliott III by the County cops. He threatened arrest if we didn't stop, but we roared our anger over the bullhorn at the racist attacks. This time, at least, when the workers stood up, the bosses backed down! The highlight of the rally came in a face-to-face confrontation with the lying State's Attorney.

Over 20 youth from the PLP D.C. Summer Project joined local Maryland activists with the communist message that racist police brutality is inherent in capitalism because the bosses need racism to intimidate and divide workers so they can keep churning out profits. Linking racist killing by cops to the vicious worldwide exploitation of workers, these youth presented the alternative vision of a communist system based on meeting people's needs, not meeting capitalism's quarterly profits.

The Summer Project youth had earlier attended a forum on the historical fight against racism in the D.C. area. Now they brought their revolutionary energy to Prince George's County, whose cops killed more citizens with impunity than 50 of the country's largest police departments over an eleven-year period.

Today's rally was protesting the killing of unarmed Archie Elliott III by County cops twelve years ago while handcuffed in the front seat of a police cruiser. Dorothy Elliott, Archie's mother, requested the files pertaining to her son's death. The State's Attorney, "Mr. Liberal" Glenn Ivey who once worked for liberal Congressman John Conyers, claimed the files were lost! Dorothy filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to demand the files and asked the People's Coalition for Police Accountability to support her in this courthouse rally. The Coalition responded. The Summer Project distributed over 2,000 leaflets county-wide, at subways, malls and parking lots, informing residents about the case and rally.

The participants chanted, "The Cops, the Courts, the Klu Klux Klan, all a part of the bosses plan!" and heard militant speeches! An older friend of Dorothy's explained how Archie did nothing wrong that night. A comrade reported that many officers ("The Dirty Dozen") were still on the police force after committing atrocious brutal acts, some killing again and again, according to one of the victims -- Prince Carmen Jones -- who was a former student of his. A younger Latino comrade linked this fight to the international struggle against racism, connecting it to U.S.-trained torturers in Columbia, Paraguay and Bolivia, showing how the cops globally serve fascism and imperialism. A sister comrade, a Summer Project leader, exposed the gross injustice within the County and the need to fight back.

When the State's Attorney arrived to blow smoke, he said let's meet right now. As communists having no illusions about capitalist-serving liberals, we said, fine, we'll meet right here on the bullhorn, and then we put him on trial. We read the FOIA letter aloud, demanded he comply, and then shoved the mike in his face for his answer. This slick liberal suddenly became incoherent, mumbling he'd "try." When he said he'd comply, we knew he was lying since shortly afterwards, Dorothy received a letter from him dated the day before the rally stating the file no longer existed -- the County had destroyed it after the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Dorothy Elliott then fired up the crowd with her determination to continue the struggle until justice is done. She thanked the Summer Project from the bottom of her heart for spearheading the effort, and gave a "shout-out to the PLP." She focused squarely on the County Government and vowed that her son would have his day in court. She reminded everyone that it took over 50 years for Emmett Till's murder to get to court. Emmett, a 14-year-old African American male was brutally tortured and killed by Mississippi Klansmen for allegedly "whistling" at a white woman. An autopsy was performed, after the mother, the jury and all but one of the perpetrators were all dead. This is "justice" under capitalism, about as meaningful as 80% of the U.S. Senate "apologizing" for supporting lynching for 80 years. (And 20 even tried to prevent that token gesture.)

Under communism, we won't wait 50 years to administer justice against racism and all forms of oppression! 

Despite the predicted dishonesty of the State's Attorney, we sharpened the struggle and demonstrated to the coalition members that the true role of government under capitalism is serving the bosses, not the workers. Strikingly, two veteran members of the People's Coalition for Police Accountability vowed to increase their efforts to educate and mobilize youth, and invited the Summer Project youth to help them do that.

Racism `Birmingham-style'

Over 40 years ago (1963), the face of police brutality in the U.S was Birmingham, Alabama Sheriff Bull Connor who put canines and full-power water hoses on non-violent/unarmed black protesters, a large percentage of whom were high school students. Today, the faces of many of the cops have changed (the County Sheriff and Police Chief here are both African American), but the system has remained the same.

AFL-CIO Dogs Fiddle While Workers Burn

CHICAGO, IL, June 15 -- Today the presidents of the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in threatening to quit the AFL-CIO at their convention here in late July. Together they represent nearly one-third of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members.

Along with the Laborers' International Union of North America, these five unions are forming a coalition, allegedly to promote more aggressive union organizing among non-union workers, even talking about taking on Wal-Mart.

But when Teamster president James Hoffa is leading the reform movement, Alice has stepped through the looking glass. Last fall, the pro-Hoffa Teamster leadership of Local 743 joined University of Chicago bosses in firing a dissident worker after they stole a local election his slate had won. A few years ago, the Teamsters left the Supremo workers, all Latin immigrants, to twist in the wind after calling them out on strike to win a first contract. The company hired scabs and fired the most militant workers, while the Teamsters never mobilized even their own membership to shut the factory down. What's more, there are thousands of black and Latin Teamsters working in small factories around the city, making poverty wages.

While the Teamsters bring a reputation for being "tough," the real stars of this coalition are SEIU and UNITE-HERE. With over three million members combined, they've made the biggest inroads in "organizing" black, Latin, immigrant and women workers in the service industry. Campaigns like Justice for Janitors have attracted many college students and would-be organizers, giving these unions the aura of a social movement. But the reality is far different.

June 15 marked the second anniversary of the UNITE-HERE "strike" at the Congress Hotel. Some of the workers have crossed the lines and returned to work while most of the original strikers were forced to look for other jobs. UNITE called a picket line to "celebrate" the two-year strike, which could only muster 500 people (last year's first anniversary had 1,000), and gave "bravery medals" to the 31 remaining strikers. The picket line was very lively and integrated, but politically rotten. The hotel has never been shut down, not even for a day. No attempt has been made to stop the scabs or occupy the hotel. Despite their "bravery medals," UNITE's cowardly leadership is afraid to wage class war and unleash the workers' fury. Instead they re-enforce the workers' fears, keeping them loud but passive.

Andrew Stern, president of the 1.8 million-member SEIU, is the former protégé of AFL-CIO boss John Sweeny, but they're no longer buddies. Under the guise of "not being taken for granted by the Democrats," Stern has donated thousands of dollars to the Republican Governor's Association, a notorious anti-union right-to-work group. (Indiana's Republican governor recently stripped all state workers of collective bargaining rights.) Stern supported Pataki for governor in NY, and was given the O.K. to sign up tens of thousands of home healthcare workers into the union. A similar scenario was played out in California. So while more than 100,000 home healthcare workers now have purple T-shirts and union cards, the vast majority of these black and Latin women workers have no contract, no health insurance and still make poverty wages. What's more, hundreds of Cook County health care workers are trying to decertify SEIU.

Because of the union honchos' pro-capitalist outlook -- constant concessions and give-backs to the bosses, refusal to fight mass layoffs and racist unemployment -- less and less workers are following them. This becomes a problem for the main section of the rulers since they need these labor misleaders to control the workers and prevent them from directly confronting the bosses over these attacks. But if, because of their class collaboration, the union hacks can't deliver enough workers, especially to the Democrats, they lose their usefulness to the ruling class.

The Stern-Sweeney battle is a dogfight among thieves over how to stay in business while serving a U.S. imperialism bent on war and a police state. Their patriotic, anti-communist, pro-capitalist outlook and practice has brought the labor movement to the brink of extinction.

PLP is organizing a Summer Project to build a revolutionary communist worker-student alliance, and a mass international PLP. We will show industrial, postal and health care workers that we have no dog in the fight at the AFL-CIO Convention.

Must Oppose Liberals' Lesser-Evil Line
At NEA Convention

LOS ANGELES, June 20 -- Ten thousand delegates representing 2.6 million teachers and support personnel will hold the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA) here in July. The NEA is the country's largest union. Teachers and public employees, along with all workers, are under serious attack. Politicians propose to cut their pensions, following the example of United Airlines and other corporations. No Child Left Behind and other measures blame teachers for the failures of the schools, so teachers and other educational service providers (ESPs) -- para-professionals in the classroom -- are faced with stricter requirements to keep their jobs. This is accompanied by a mandate to (1) leave no child untested; (2) prescribe scripted, often inappropriate curricula; and (3) tighten graduation requirements. All this while funding is slashed.

Politicians talk about improving the quality of education, but then cut social services in order to pay for a permanent war budget. According to http://costofwar.com/, the War in Iraq will cost $207.5 billion by September 20, 2005. This doesn't reflect the ongoing cost of military bases worldwide, base pay for soldiers, the cost of the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan or the Homeland Security police state apparatus.

Teachers who are committed to high standards of excellence, and the belief that all students can learn, support the existence of highly qualified teachers and the expectation that students will be proficient in subject matter at graduation. We must fight to give students the tools to understand the world. But recent calls for doubling ground troops in Iraq and increasing Green Card soldiers (see editorial, front page) indicate more of our students will become soldiers. Many more will be in arms factories as industry is reorganized for expanding low-wage war production.

Capitalism, despite the "highly-qualified" and "no-child-left-behind" rhetoric, is really about attacking teachers and ESP's and forcing more students into low-paid factory jobs and the military. We must expect students to learn everything they can, because the youth in the military and in the factories will be the generation that can and will change the world. While the bosses need a few proficient young people, U.S. capitalism's intensified crisis mainly means war, attacks on workers' standard of living, increased racism and a police state.

As these attacks unfold, the response of the NEA and the entire AFL-CIO has been to blame Bush and the Republicans, who are currently leading the charge in an ongoing sharp attack on working class that began in the 1970's. Starting with the Carter administration, U.S. rulers' stated policy has been that maintaining control of Middle East oil is in the bosses' "national interest." Neither liberals nor conservatives call for dismantling U.S. military bases in over 60 countries.

The problem is capitalism and its sharpening crisis, not which political party is in office. From Carter to Reaganomics to Bush, Sr. to Clinton killing welfare with workfare, these anti-worker attacks have gone unchecked. It is the most dangerous illusion to think that electing a Democrat will end the war and funnel the money to schools, hospitals and pensions.

Teachers and other workers have enormous potential to fight the attacks on the working class, if we shift our efforts from backing bosses' politicians to uniting to use our power -- on a state and local level -- as organized workers in strikes against the cuts, the war in Iraq, racist cop terror and anti-immigrant vigilantes, as well as supporting students' interests

Workers are the key to capitalism -- economically, militarily and politically. Our future lies in building a revolutionary movement of all workers, students and soldiers, not in voting for "lesser evil" politicians. Together we'll forge the long-term commitment to fight for communism, utilizing to the fullest the creative power of the working class. That's PLP's goal; join us.

Union's Racist `Strike' Threat A Loser At Northwest

TWIN CITIES, MN, June 9 -- "We would be striking for our survival,"said one worker today as hundreds of Northwest Airlines mechanics, members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) picketed Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, distributing fliers warning of a possible strike.

Northwest has lost about $3 billion since 2001 and wants to reduce labor costs by $1.1 billion annually by year's end. They want to lay off 2,000 mechanics, cut pay of those remaining by 25%, while outsourcing the work to low-wage non-union shops. They also ran to federal court after United Airlines was allowed to trash its four employee pension plans, to seek the same treatment. Northwest has slashed the AMFA workforce from 9,300 to 5,300 in five years.

Ironically, mechanics at United, Northwest and other airlines recently decertified their old union, the IAM, in favor of the "independent" AMFA, but switching pro-capitalist unions has failed to save pensions or stop layoffs and wage-cuts.

What's more, AMFA is trying to build public support for a possible strike based on union mechanics being U.S. citizens who "can pass FBI background checks." Their flier read, "In March 2005, the FBI arrested 27 illegal aliens working at TIMCO, one of the biggest outsourced shops. One had been working on planes there for 10 years, using false papers." This flagrant racism, implying that undocumented workers are a terrorist threat, totally plays into the bosses' hands. A racist strike against undocumented workers, instead of an anti-racist strike against capitalism that builds international solidarity, would surely be smashed by the same fascist Homeland Security police state AMFA leaders embrace.

Also today, the National Mediation Board rejected Northwest's request to declare an impasse in contract talks that began last October. Negotiations will resume on June 20, but the airline is recruiting scabs in case of a strike.

An impasse ruling would have left the union free to strike after a 30-day cooling-off period. We should reach out to Northwest workers wherever we can and offer a revolutionary alternative to the pro-capitalist union leaders.

Anti-Racist Fight Nets
More CHALLENGE Readers

Airport workers won a hard-fought partial victory in the anti-racist struggle for better treatment for part-time workers. The company transferred the majority of the part-timers, mostly African immigrants, to full-time status on a new third shift. This came from over a year of the workers' constant political pressure on the union sellouts and the bosses to reach an agreement. It's a small partial victory because the institutional racist structure of color-coding part-time jobs with immigrant labor still exists.

This struggle united full- and part-time workers, black, Latin and Asian, men and women, immigrants and citizens from the US, Mexico, Central America, Africa and Asia.

This struggle had its weaknesses. More workers could have been involved, but enough had the political understanding that the bosses' racist attacks on any group of workers are an attack on all of us. The leadership came mainly from regular CHALLENGE readers and distributors.

But no sooner did we win one small battle, than the first-shift shop steward was fired for reasons still unclear. He had helped workers circulate a petition protesting the company policy forcing them to wear faulty "safety glasses" that actually blur their vision.

The bosses tried to keep the firing quiet, but word spread as workers distributed flyers in Spanish and English. One worker posted it on the time clock! Soon the bosses wanted a meeting with the second-shift shop steward to find out as much as they could about what the workers were up to. When the steward declined, the bosses sent their flunky supervisors to spy on the workers.

It will take a protracted fight to win our brother's job back. He's a good guy, but being somewhat isolated from the workers made him vulnerable to attack. Especially in this time of growing fascism, the fight for communist revolution means having a mass base of friends and political supporters.

These struggles occur in the context of much larger struggles in the airline industry. (See Northwest article above) Throughout the struggles here, CHALLENGE readership has increased, sparking much better discussions with the workers. Winning workers to draw revolutionary conclusions from their involvement in the class war, and winning them to PLP, is laying the basis for a mass communist movement in a critical U.S. industry with many international ties, that can ultimately ground capitalism forever.

UAW Presides Over GM
Job Massacre

DETROIT, MI, June 13 -- On June 7, GM unveiled a plan to cut 25,000 jobs by 2008, more than 22% of its U.S. hourly work force. This will be followed by nearly $2.5 billion in annual cost cuts, including numerous plant closings when the union contract expires in 2007. Unimpressed, a Wall Street auto analyst with Standard & Poor's said, "...there's more they need to do." GM lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and Wall Street is demanding steep cuts in health care.

GM is the largest private provider of health care benefits in the country. It will spend $5.6 billion this year, covering 1.1 million workers, their families, retirees and survivors. GM has more than 2_ retirees for every U.S. worker. This ratio will grow with the job cuts, as about 60% of GM's workers are eligible to retire in the next five years. The cuts will not increase market share, but they might increase profits.

Two days later, the United Auto Workers (UAW) gave its blessings at an emergency meeting of GM and Delphi local union officers. (Delphi, the largest auto parts supplier, was spun off by GM in 1999, but is part of the GM-UAW national agreement.) In Solidarity House "double-speak," the UAW said they "will not reopen the contract," but will participate in the job cuts and plant closings, and negotiate health-care cuts and other concessions within the context of the current agreement. The union only "objected" to the end-of-the-month deadline when it became public. (In another example of this "double-speak," UAW "job security" contracts have reduced union membership by more than two thirds at GM, Ford and Chrysler since the late 1970s.) Not "re-opening the contract" also avoids a risky ratification vote.

GM says it wants to close the gap between the 7% union workers pay for health care and the 27% paid by salaried workers. It also wants to impose monthly premiums on retirees. Recently, the union allowed Chrysler to impose deductibles ranging from $100 to $1,000 a year for 35,000 workers and retirees.

But the fact remains that all the money spent on health care, and the creation of health care itself, comes from the wealth produced by the labor of industrial workers. We produce everything and own nothing, and we are locked in a constant struggle with the bosses to get only a small part of what we produce. This basic contradiction will only be resolved when the working class, led by a mass international PLP, destroys the bosses with communist revolution.

Like pension money, health care is part of our wages, which we have more than earned, and even then had to fight for. The attacks at GM, coming on the heels of United Airlines, its government and courts ripping off the pensions of 135,000 workers and retirees, will ripple far beyond the auto industry. More than one million jobs are directly tied to GM. Every one of them will be affected and they will affect others.

GM GETS CUT DOWN TO SIZE

Reflecting the fortunes of U.S. imperialism, the largest automaker has the most to lose, and the inter-imperialist rivalry is cutting GM down to size. GM still sells more cars than anyone else, both in the U.S. and globally, although Toyota is closing in on the top spot. In 1990, GM sold 5 million vehicles in the U.S. Last year, it sold 4.6 million.

In 1986, GM closed 11 plants with 29,000 workers. In 1992, it cut more than 70,000 jobs and closed 21 plants in the U.S. and Canada. Since 2000, it has cut 30,000 U.S. jobs. After the new round of cuts and closings, GM will be down to about 23 plants and 85,000 hourly workers. Oldsmobile is gone and Buick or Pontiac may follow.

In the 1950's, GM had 46% of the U.S. auto market, Ford and Chrysler 44%, and everyone else combined just 10%. Today, GM has 27%, Ford and DaimlerChrysler combined have 32%, and other automakers, 41%. The international competition is bigger than GM, and in a case of "be careful what you wish for," almost 50% of the "foreign" cars sold here are made here.

DaimlerChrysler is investing $40 billion in North America over the next five years, including a new assembly plant in Illinois and expanding factories in Ohio and Michigan. According to the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, in the last two years Toyota, Honda, BMW, Nissan and other global automakers have created 55,000 non-union factory jobs in Ohio, California, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama. About 800,000 cars and trucks will be built in Alabama this year. The flag-waving UAW leadership is so tied to the U.S. auto bosses that they have failed to organize one "transplant" assembly plant.

The bosses are ruthlessly driving down the wages and living standards of all workers as they fight their imperialist rivals for world supremacy. The oil war in Iraq and the Homeland Security police state are crucial to this struggle. The pro-capitalist union leaders are leading us to more wars and fascism. Seventy years of reform struggle are being stripped away as the rulers prepare for the next world war. We have no stake in backing any boss. Our allegiance is to the international working class and communist revolution. Autoworkers are in a better position than most to make this happen.

Bolivia's Mass Rebellion Betrayed Again;
Need Revolutionary Party

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA -- After several weeks of mass protests, highway blockades, occupation of this capital city by teachers, gas refinery workers and miners, the struggle by Bolivia's workers, peasants and youth have again been betrayed.

Once President Mesa was forced to resign by the mass rebellion demanding nationalization of the gas industry (the second largest in Latin America), the Catholic Church, the U.S. embassy, Petrobras, Enron, BP, Repsol, Total and politicians like social-democrat Evo Morales all put aside their differences to reach a compromise.

First, the U.S. ambassador's choice to replace Mesa with right-wing cattle rancher Vaca Diez (head of the Senate), failed. When Vaca Diez moved his Presidential swearing-in ceremony away from the masses occupying La Paz to the calmer city of Sucre, the masses followed. Army troops shot up a miners' contingent en route to Sucre, killing one, but this didn't intimidate them. They took over the Sucre airport and other key locations, and surrounded the site of Vaca Diez' swearing-in ceremony.

Then, all the anti-working class forces united and chose Supreme Court Judge Eduardo Rodriguez as the new President. Key to this was Evo Morales, the so-called "radical" friend of Chavez and Castro and leader of the "Movement Towards Socialism." Morales agreed to have Rodriguez as interim President for six months until new elections are held. Morales' party is now Bolivia's leading opposition force and he expects to become Bolivia's first Aymara ruler.

However, none of the protestors' demands were met. The gas industry is still controlled by the international energy companies; racism and super-exploitation of the mostly Aymara, Quechua and Guarani population is still rampant; and the same ruling class still rules.

Why? Because despite the militancy and anger of the masses, and their desire for a worker-peasant revolutionary government, this can't happen relying on Morales or the more "militant" union leaders, and their Trotskyite allies. They think a "dual power" situation was being created -- workers and peasants rule through People's Assemblies -- building the illusion that a real revolution can occur without a revolutionary communist leadership.

The present calm is temporary. The racist-fascist bourgeoisie in the Santa Cruz region is still planning a referendum to seize autonomy from the central government (most of the gas deposits are there, away from the Andean region mostly inhabited by indigenous people). The oil companies still control the gas industry. The united front among the various capitalist factions and Big Oil won't last long. (Brazil's Petrobras is now a big player in South America's energy industry, competing with U.S.-owned oil giants.) And the masses are still angry and want real changes.

Again, the struggle will continue and the key task remains, to turn these struggles into schools for communism, forging a real revolutionary leadership to fight for workers' power.

Discussions on Communism
`Mind-blowing' To Youth

NEW YORK CITY -- Building off the excitement of May Day, over 40 high school students and teachers from New York and New Jersey spent a day in a park discussing communist politics and practicing communist culture.

We read the new CHALLENGE column "...Under Communism," bringing to these youth the potential of an entirely new world outside of capitalism. The discussion moved in many different directions, posing how the school system would be different (delighting many of the students...and teachers); how we would decide the culture that would be accepted under communism; and how we would function without money or wages.

Although two young comrades led the discussion, the most important point of all was that most of the questions and answers came from the students themselves. At times they got so excited talking about communism that others could barely get a word in. One participant noted, "Many young comrades took leadership today in answering other youth's questions, especially a few young women. Today was a great example of what we want to build."

These discussions are important because workers and students need to know what kind of world PLP is fighting for, and that they must play an active role in the decision-making. On the bus ride home, one student said, "The discussion was mind blowing to me because I never looked at the world like that. Now that I know a bit more than before, I'm gonna try my best to learn and understand more about it." One student "demanded" weekly study groups instead of bi-weekly ones.

Besides discussing the type of world we want to create, we also try to practice it as communists, understanding that there are limitations. Students and teachers played soccer and basketball and went swimming and hiking together. We did everything as a collective, whether it was cleaning up or ensuring everybody had enough to eat. It's great to see our communist ideas actually put into practice.

After playing soccer, a student asked if there would still be sports under communism. He imagined a world without any sports, or any competition for that matter. A comrade replied, saying there could still be sports and friendly competition, but with no material benefits for the "winners." Just as we did today, we can still compete, as long as the goal is to improve at the sport and have fun with your friends, not to win a prize.

When leaving the park, we discussed summer plans. Many wanted more such social events, while still doing more agitational work and organizing in our areas. Although the bosses aren't yet worried about the working class taking state power, one day they will be. The youth are tired, angry and looking for change. As one student said, "I felt very happy hearing about communism because this is a very hateful world." He's not alone. When millions of students and workers worldwide learn about communism and the Progressive Labor Party, the bosses will really have something to worry about.

Campus Rally Poetry:
Weapon Against Imperialist War

NEW YORK CITY -- In May, a long silence at our campus here was broken by a volley of antiwar poetry. The rally was inspired by the March 5 Educators to Stop the War conference, and built on an April teach-in. It initiated an alliance of the antiwar faculty and staff union with students to fight recruitment, the draft, military research and economic attacks due to the war budget. It also commemorated three student soldiers who died in Iraq.

A dozen speakers condemned the war's lies, racism, torture, slaughter of civilians, theft from the social budget and plans for U.S. domination. The campus student paper said a PLP student's speech analyzing the reasons people were against the war as symptoms of capitalism, "stood out the most. . . For the students who wish to end injustice, his words were clear: have a working-class movement to end all these issues."

PLP thinks antiwar students and teachers must understand that the Iraq war and occupation are necessary for U.S. bosses to maintain their eroding position in the world as they combat their imperialist rivals. To stop such wars we must end imperialism itself. Otherwise we're doomed to build one antiwar movement after another.

The campus newspaper reporter's response showed people are open to such ideas, and will unite with us to stop this war, despite ingrained anti-communism. More people wanted to speak than we had time for. An Afghani student's poem described her family's suffering under U.S. occupation. It spoke to her mother in Afghanistan about "the torture of death [that] sets across your skies," but the title still proclaimed that "Some Lives Can't Take All of Life."

How many more victims of U.S. imperialism have migrated to our city to escape atrocities like the torture death of Dilawar, a poor Afghani taxi driver, at the hands of the U.S. military? ("The Bagram File," New York Times, 5/20) They're all potential recruits to destroy the system that has disrupted their lives but not their hopes.

Another student poem honored a friend who died in Iraq, in a "motor accident caused by bad weather," the military said. The poet, however, saw the war and his friend's death not as "bad weather" but as "a condition of our climate." To honor two other dead student soldiers, Nigerian immigrants, we read a militant Nigerian poem protesting Shell Oil and its fascist government enablers in the Niger Delta: "They may kill all/But the blood will speak/They may gain all/But the soil will RISE."

Our rally poetry indeed made the blood speak, like the exiled daughter imagining her Afghani mother watching it "rain in blood throughout your land." It's our job to make the soil imperialism has drenched in blood and oil rise like an earthquake, in Kabul, Baghdad, Port Harcourt, Nigeria and New York.

Memories of World War II
`Stalin's Soviet Union will be no pushover, son...'

The CHALLENGE series on World War II brought back memories of wartime when I was growing up in Brooklyn. I was 11 years old when the previously unbeaten Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Raised in a communist family, I was old enough to know that this was going to be a titanic fight. The papers were full of stories about how Hitler's hordes would be in Moscow in six weeks. But my father told me, "Not so fast, sonny boy. Stalin's Soviet Union will be no pushover." How right he was.

As the invaders moved deeper and deeper into the world's first working-class state, people here became edgier and edgier. The U.S. was not yet in the war and the Nazis had previously run roughshod through virtually all of Western and Eastern Europe. Whether you were pro-communist or anti-communist, most everyone worried about what it would mean for us here if Hitler captured the vast resources of the Soviet Union.

Woolworth's 5cents&10cents store (the 99cents stores of that era) was selling maps of various "theaters of war." I bought one of the Russian Front. It came with tiny flags on pins, some with swastikas and some with hammer and sickles. I would listen to the radio (no TV then), get the daily reports from the front, and then set up the flags facing each other along a 2,000-mile line from the Artic to the Caspian Sea. (2,000 miles! That's like from Maine to Florida!)

Soon the military "experts" were found to be not so "expert." The Red Army began pushing the Nazis back, and I moved my little flags accordingly.

Every day my parents would come home from work and look at my map, smiling when they saw the hammer and sickles pushing the swastikas westward. "You were right, Pop," I told my father.

After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, the entire communist-led labor movement in New York began pushing for a "Second Front." Petitions were signed, rallies were held filling the old Madison Square Garden, all calling for the U.S. and Britain to invade Europe from the West, to relieve the burden on the Soviets in the East, who were carrying the war against Hitler all by themselves. We knew that the West didn't like the Socialist Soviet Union and would have loved to see it destroyed.

When I was 12, my mother took me to my first demonstration, 250,000 strong, filling Union Square in September 1942. I had never seen so many people in one place. They were all chanting, "Open Up the Second Front!" It was the same theme in the May Day marches during the war.

In July, my mother would take my sister and myself to a small town in the Catskills, Monticello, New York, where we worked all summer. My sister used to stand outside the movie theatre holding collection cans asking for donations for "Russian War Relief." They would be full in no time. The town sheriff would stand nearby, smiling. In different times, he probably would have arrested her -- "how dare you collect money for those damn communists!" But now the Soviet Union was the hope of the world. Even the sheriff had joined us!

As the world's workers watched breathlessly, the Red Army surrounded the Nazis at Stalingrad and smashed the cream of the German army. Even then people called it the turning point of the war. People here danced in the streets when they heard the news.

Now my flags on the map kept moving westward. The Red Army tanks were moving at a 40-mile-a-day clip, onward through the Ukraine and Western Russia, into Poland and towards Germany itself. Finally, the U.S. and Britain invaded western France in June 1944. By that time it looked like the Soviets might liberate all of Europe if there were no Second Front.

Then, on my 15th birthday, I went to my map and planted the hammer and sickle flag on Berlin! It was a far cry from the "experts" prediction four years ago, about "six weeks to Moscow."

When I got married ten years later, my wife told me how her Russian-born parents -- having migrated to the U.S. around 1908 -- used to come home from their garment and millinery shops during the war and immediately turn on the radio to get the "latest from the front." In those days, the Red Army was looked on as the saviors of the world. Stalin's picture was on the front of Life Magazine, hailed as "The Man of the Year." GI's slogging through Italy were told by their commanders, "Don't worry. Uncle Joe will save you!"

The bosses' media are trying to bury this history with all the lies about how the U.S. "won the war" and "saved France and Europe." They try to hide the fact that 80% of the Nazi army was battling -- and defeated by -- the Soviets in the East. But at least those of us who lived through that era know differently.

We in PLP should spread the truth far and wide about how the world's first communist-led workers' state saved humanity from fascism.

An old-time red

UNDER COMMUNISM
WHOSE FACTORY IS IT?

Much ink has flowed analyzing the June 16 Wichita Boeing plant sale to Onex Co. Some spoke to workers' anger, having lost wages, benefits and even 1,100 jobs. The best pieces called for class solidarity and militancy, citing similar attacks, sales and spin-offs throughout basic industry. CHALLENGE ran articles for the last two issues, reporting small, initial attempts to build such a movement. Nonetheless, even our paper has only hinted at the underlying question we workers should be asking: "What gives the bosses the right to sell a plant built with our labor?"

This question seems silly to some. The bosses own the plant. Herein lies the secret of exploitation and the power of Capital. We produce eight hours of value every day. They return a small percentage of that back in the form of wages and benefits. A quick calculation, using the 2004 annual report, pegs this number at 24%. The bosses appropriate the rest, what Marx called "surplus value."

Some of this surplus value is profit and exorbitant executive "compensation." Some, a decreasing percentage, funds the bosses' government which enforces the rules that keep the capitalists in power and wages war to maintain their imperialist empire.

Boeing bosses "owned" the Wichita plant because they "bought" it with part of this surplus value. Every machine, every building, every production process was paid for with our labor, but under this system we don't own the fruits of our labor.

But we agreed to work for Boeing. What choice did we have? Throughout modern history, the bosses have legally stolen the majority of the value we've created, consolidating their hold on the means of production. Despite any harbored petty-bourgeois illusions, we either work for some boss or starve. Under capitalism, we've become commodities, bought with just enough to produce a new generation of wage slaves.

But what if we, the working class, took back the fruits of our labors? Under communism, the working class would collectively "own" the Wichita plant and all the industries built with our labor. We would run them in the interest of our class, not for the profits of the bosses.

A communist government would enforce rules outlawing the trampling of workers' livelihood for the profits of a few ruling class-exploiters. We could organize and re-organize industry for the benefit of our class.

"Selling" factories would become a historical artifact. We could organize production for need, not for sale and profit.

The profit system not only pits company against company, but worker against worker. Today, the bosses sell and spin off plants and offload work to take advantage of cheaper wages.

In a communist society, organized around production for need, we would welcome any helping hands. As we collectively advance, we could cut back on the hours of work. We could use the extra time to decide not only how to produce but what to produce. We could devote more time developing the political knowledge necessary to run society. We could work to eliminate the divide between mental and manual labor. Our experiences would help us think as a class, fighting the dog-eat-dog mentality of capitalism, defeating racism, sexism and nationalism along the way.

The U.S. bosses are reorganizing basic industry because they must find a way to pay for "stunningly expensive" high-tech wars to control Mid-East oil, the key to their empire. The lives and livelihoods of the industrial working class are being sacrificed on the altar of imperialism.

A communist revolution would take this industrial might out of the hands of the imperialists. We could use our production to defend the interests of the world's workers.

Whose plant is this anyway? No boss has the right to sell the fruits of our labors. Now, there's a system worth fighting for!

Movie Review
CRASH, Just Another Racist Movie

Crash" is a movie made by the author of "Million Dollar Baby." In this case Paul Haggis wrote, directed and also co-produced it, so his fingerprints are truly all over the work.

Although there are many interwoven story lines that converge at different points, the essence of "Crash" is the story of a cop so racist and vile that, when we first see him, we find him grinning tauntingly at a husband he's wrongly pulled over. The husband is forced to stand silent (or, it is implied, be beaten up and/or arrested) while the cop sticks his finger inside the husband's wife.

Even the cop's partner is horrified by this. (Later he applies for a transfer, but the author thinks it hilarious that this "good cop" must state openly that he farts in the car and thus wants to be alone. Yes, sort of funny, but what became of his indignation? It got lost in a poor "joke.")

The bad cop, extremely well played by Matt Dillon, is then shown being kind to his aging, ill father. This is the first sign that cops aren't as bad as they appear.

This movie seems to call everyone racist. The people under attack include blacks, Irish, Iranians, Asians, most whites, some cops, nasty hospital administrators and higher-ups among black and white police and politicians. What's missing in this indictment is the fact that it's the rich who promote and most profit from racism. That fact can't be found in almost any Hollywood movie ("Bulworth" is about the only fairly recent exception. It's also the only movie where the word "Socialism!" is yelled out with approval.)

There are contradictions, also, among poor black characters, but most of them are engaged in anti-social acts. So when we finally see the Matt Dillon cop perform a noble and heroic act, we understand he's a "complex character." His complexity makes him noble; the complexity of poor blacks and an Asian family ultimately show them to be pretty rotten people -- especially the Asian woman.

The "gassy" cop "unwittingly" commits a terrible act against a young black

man (afterwards conveniently hiding what he's done). An enraged Iranian goes after the one really admirable black man in the movie, and the scene ends with a miracle so ridiculous that it works better than a finger down the throat.

Two final related points: I think I have a pretty decent grasp of the propaganda value of movies, but when I read the CHALLENGE review of "Hotel Rwanda," I realized that PLP as a collective is much smarter than any one person -- because while I knew something in "Rwanda" bothered me, I couldn't put my finger on it. A collective discussion resulting in a review is better, generally, than that which any single person could write.

Secondly is what I suggested earlier: people should watch cop shows and movies (I feel "Crash" is just a cop show in drag) in order to discuss them with others, to analyze them and enable people to understand the dangers in the propaganda.

Not long ago, when I was putting down "Law and Order" as reactionary, someone commented that the show often spoke up in favor of the Bill of Rights. But throwing "complex, multi-sided issues" into a story is the best way for Hollywood and TV networks to con us into thinking they're on our side. They're not. They want us to think -- as they do with the "good Democrats" vs. the "bad Republicans" -- that they're offering us an "alternative."

However, our alternative is the creation of a working-class culture to counter the crap they constantly throw at us. Though they sugar-coat it, it's still bullshit.u

LETTERS

Garment Worker Mom Learning Through Class Struggle

I'm a garment worker, mother of two, one a 6-year-old who needs to be in a state-funded day care program for low-income families. My city's school district informed us that starting in July, we'll have to pay $315 per month per child. Otherwise, we're out of the program. Another woman is helping me in this struggle, showing me how to organize. She sought out other mothers with the same problem, and then we asked for help from a church involved in community problems.

In a meeting one day, I got a big surprise. The woman who was helping me was sitting next to me and had a PLP May Day sticker on her purse. I had many fears, but then remembered a friend of my 12-year-old daughter had seen one of her teachers with an old May Day sticker. She asked her teacher how she'd gotten it and then offered her the latest sticker. The important lesson for me was to talk more openly with someone with similar beliefs, making it clearer on how to build the Party's work.

We've gone to the School District with more parents, taking our younger children, carrying signs and chanting slogans. Although fearful, I spoke at a School District meeting. I described the need for child care programs for low-income families, for education of our youth, and building a society that's conscious of the need to keep our children off the streets, out of gangs, a society without the social problems we confront today. We don't want our kids' childhoods spent in front of the television, or playing video games glorifying war. That's why we're demanding no to the school cuts, no to the war and no to racism.

Red Worker and mother

Students and Teachers Enthused by D.C. Summer Project

We came to D.C. not knowing what to expect. We joined a spirited and militant picket line of Metro transit workers and many young supporters. We heard transit workers and others talk about the power of the working class. Transit workers, led by communists, could shut down the capital of U. S. imperialism. Many of these workers seemed to understand the potential power they had.

We picketed while waiting for the Metro Board of Directors to exit their "big shot" meeting, and they got quite a reception. As they got on their free bus, the young people rushed forward, booing and chanting at these big shots, plastering signs against the bus windows. We put the fear of workers' power into these bosses, whose smiles quickly disappeared. For many of us, this was the highlight of our trip. As one transit worker said later, he was re-energized for the long struggle for workers' power.

******************

My main goal in attending this rally was to spread my knowledge of communism and support the working class. Workers are the cornerstone of society. This was a great day to be a communist! I witnessed hundreds of people, both young and old, supporting these transit workers. It felt great to know that we in PLP are creating an environment for people to stand up against capitalism. More rallies and demonstrations can help change many people's minds. In their day Rosa Parks and Malcolm X took extreme measures to prove a point. Now we need a revolution; we need to introduce more people to our organization. This may take many years, but this experience inspired me to fight back.

********************

When I attended the Metro rally in D. C. with students from my local high school, I was really impressed by the militancy of the drivers. We teachers could learn a big lesson from the Metro workers. Last month our union misleaders (UFT in NYC) organized what seemed to be a big bash at Madison Square Garden with music and politicians. It was a disgrace, given the horrendous conditions we and the students face and the fact that we haven't seen a contract in over two years!

******************

I've been to a few rallies before, but this was the best by far. It showed that if people fight back against injustice, they'll get support. If more people support one another we can get a lot done. I'm really glad I participated and hope we can do more to support others who are being oppressed.

******************

Drown out Democrat
Hack Ferrer

Fifteen teachers and paraprofessionals from my Bronx, NY high school attended the June 2 teachers' union rally at Madison Square Garden, sitting up front. We watched an endless parade of union hacks and politicians. One who said his mother was a teacher and he "understood what we were going through" had the nerve to tell the crowd, "we're not going to pay you what you deserve, but we'll try to get you a little more." We booed union head Weingarten as loud as we could.

When Fernando Ferrer --a Democratic mayorality candidate -- came on, we booed so loud he decided not to speak and walked off the stage. He returned, but now walking hand-in-hand with Weingarten, who kissed him and handed him the mic, expecting a warm welcome. But teachers and paraprofessionals from my school started shouting, "Racist! Racist! What about Diallo?!" Our loud chanting drowned out his speech. Teachers from schools around us joined in. Ferrer gave us dirty looks.

Only one newspaper, the Spanish-language daily Hoy, reported that "Ferrer was prevented from speaking." They failed to mention why.

Ferrer, as a Latino, secured a majority of the black and Latino vote until publicly saying, "the police were justified in how they handled the Amadou Diallo situation."

Ferrer is just another example of why bosses come in all colors, as do workers. Just because Ferrer is Latino doesn't mean he'll be on the workers' side.

We in and around PLP can do more to sharpen the contradictions with the union leadership and politicians, who did not talk strike at the rally. Any small increase from a starting salary of $39,000/year can't compare to the $1 billion a week spent on the current imperialist adventure in Iraq.

Bronx Red

Colombia PLP Excites Young Comrade

When traveling through South America I visited with comrades in Colombia. Sharing such international experiences can only help us grow as a Party.

I attended a great May Day with the Colombian comrades. Their courage and the strength of their mobilization were impressive, especially given the level of fascism there. At one gathering a 9-year-old girl read a Desafio article, and then the group discussed it. Very inspiring to say the least! This is how we need to raise our children if we want to truly smash capitalism. I was very moved by the fact that the comrades are able to struggle and do so much with so little.

Many comrades in the U.S. are not suffering economically as hard as workers in countries like Colombia, so we struggle because we can, whereas in Colombia, many of the comrades are unemployed and struggle because they have to. There's no other choice. From this we can learn commitment, resolve and courage in the face of a genocidal and oppressive capitalist system. I met one comrade who, when not having bus fare to make club meetings, walks hours to get there, with only Desafio in his hands.

In Colombia, I learned a great deal about struggle, revolution and the many faces of fascism, which isn't that different from the fascism in the U.S. Colombia is what the U.S. could be like in several years. Instead of DAS (intelligence agency in Colombia), the U.S. has the CIA and FBI; instead of paramilitaries the U.S. has patriot groups and militias. Instead of Uribe, there is Bush. We can learn about security, communist culture as well as how to struggle under a fascist police state.

I thank the comrades for their hospitality, trust, revolutionary love, courage, and inspiration, as well as taking the time to teach a comrade about struggle. It's important to see that our fight is international, that people all over the world believe in and are fighting for the same communist society that we are. This experience has only strengthened me and provided more reason to struggle. All Power to the Workers!

Red Traveler

CHALLENGE COMMENTS:

Thanks for your letter, it is very inspiring. Just one point, PLP comrades in Colombia, or anywhere else, don't struggle for communist politics because they are poor, but because they have been won to PL's revolutionary internationalist line. If political consciousness would depend solely on economic hardships, billions would be fighting for communism worldwide now

Salvador's Rulers Are The Real Criminals

"Plan `Super Hard Hand' will put an end to all the problems of the country," El Salvadoran President Tony Saca announced noisily a year ago. Then he sent thousands of cops into the streets to seize anybody who appeared "suspiciously" like a gang member or a criminal. Of course, the "most suspicious" have always been the children of the working class.

The jails have overflowed with their new "guests." Meanwhile, the level of crime makes the war of the 1980's looks like child's play. And the real criminals, the big bosses, have the run of the land.

"El Salvador is the land of opportunities," shouts Saca again, but for whom? For the Miami-organized mafia that launders millions of dollars or for the big supermarket owners who invent hurricanes to sow terror in the working class so they can sell their expired merchandise?

"We can no longer put up with this system," says a professional worker, "one that sells us illusions of "prosperity" and the opening of mega-plazas of up-scale stores where we can only look, and when we do, the security guards freak out, raising the alarm that we look `suspicious'."

The Salvadoran Association of Manufacturers wails that El Salvador can't keep declining economically at the current rate. The present government is ending its first year of suffocating the working class, and Saca comes out like an electric light, morning, noon and night, breaking ground for public works. He's on TV serving capitalism more than when he was a sports commentator. The capitalist system and its propaganda machine have turned a football announcer into the champion of lies and oppression of workers.

This past June 1, thousands of Salvadoran workers, doctors, farm workers and students marched through the country's main streets, denouncing the bosses' oppressive system. But the working class can't trust the siren song of the FMLN or other electoral parties. The fight to change the system doesn't interest those who sell the sweat, blood and tears of comrades fallen in combat against capitalism.

Bought with a fist-full of dollars, these politicians of the false left fight against our communist ideas. "Why do you go around passing that out?" an FMLN leader complained angrily to a youth on May Day. "Don't you see that you're attacking us?" These formerly poor sellouts now live like the petty-bourgeoisie serving the bosses. When they're no longer useful, they'll be bounced. Until then they'll appear at Saca's side, announcing hurricanes to win the sympathy of the ruling class.

PLP will always be on the side of the working class. CHALLENGE is our ideological arm; the working class must organize, and read and study it, understanding the vision that communism is the only system that meets workers' needs.

A comrade from El Salvador

Bush's Pakistan Pal Enforces State Terror

The poor people of this subcontinent, Pakistan, are suffering from ruthless poverty while the bosses enjoy a luxurious life. Many workers commit suicide because they have nothing to eat, wear or a place to live. Capitalism does its best to bring more misery to workers - rotten ideas, exploitation, slavery, illiteracy and injustice - making the poor even poorer. While the bosses say they're planning to eradicate poverty, they're doing exactly the opposite: eradicating workers' lives.

In Pakistan, the working class faces layoffs, cutbacks, low wages, no medical care, no job security, no pension nor even insurance covering on-the-job injuries. Their so-called union leadership serves the bosses, collecting dues for their own enrichment. Recently the power loam workers in Faisalabad struck against low wages and for job security but will be unable to hold out since the union leaders won't support them. The bosses are privatizing many industries to strengthen their economic control.

[Editor's note: "Homeland Security" Pakistani-style -- As of June 18, over 1,000 telecommunications workers have been arrested for striking against government privatization of the state-owned phone company (PTCL). Bush's "anti-terrorist" buddy Musharraf's Interior Minister says strike leaders could be tried as "terrorists according to the law."]

Women in Pakistan suffer brutal capitalist oppression. Many die due to lack of medicines and maternity care, "honour" killings and commit suicide after being raped. Like Shazia of Faisalabad, Mukhtar Mai, Dr. Shazia Khalid, many more are gang-raped daily, with no protection from the capitalist authorities. Many of these women don't tell others because they fear being exposed as having been raped which could lead to being killed by so-called traditions like "karokari."

Religious parties ruling two provinces do nothing to protect women because they themselves - the "mullahs" or preachers - rape many girls and boys in their sacred "madrassahs." Even the minister for religious affairs and the daily papers report this but it continues because they're backed by the MMA party in Northwest Frontier Province. In the city of Haripure, authorities banned female phone operators for "immorality." Although this is a violation of articles 18 and 34 of the constitution, which states that "every citizen shall have the right to enter upon any lawful profession or occupation," these women are still deprived of their right to a job. The majority of Pakistan's population are women but the bosses use their puppets, the "mullahs" (religious leaders), to keep women illiterate and less able to challenge their exploiters.

We in the Progressive Labor Party here condemn this discrimination. Both men and women have equal rights to live in the society. Only communism can eliminate this discrimination. Everyone, whether female or male, will have a job and produce value for the society as a whole.

The "enlightened" and "moderate" rulers say they're against "fundamentalists" but it's very clear that the CIA, Saudi Arabia and the ISI (Pakistan's powerful military intelligence service) financed Osama bin Laden and the tens of thousands of "jihadists" (holy warriors from the Muslim world) and organized them to to fight the Soviet army and the pro-Moscow Afghan government in the 1980's. Today, they also use "mullahs" as rulers in two provinces to reap profits for themselves and continue exploitation of the working class.

We in PLP believe that without a revolutionary communist struggle we can't eliminate these evils which were planted by capitalism during the Cold War era, so we're trying to organize an internationalist communist party - PLP - in this region. (Next issue: Nationalism and The Role of PLP.)

Comrades in Pakistan

Racism Made French Bosses Rich

An historian from Marseille here in France, whose specialty is the history of colonialism, was interviewed on March 23 on the radio station France Culture. He claimed "a debate over colonial times in this country simply doesn't exist."

He charged French authorities with refusing to erect a museum on the subject, and referred to an article stating that "after all the French colonial era has been a positive experience." "Positive" means that their marvelous motorway or their giant companies would be smaller without that sucked blood.

At a Congress years ago, some African leaders demanded Britain and France repay money for the damage from slavery. Their answer? "Those things were done by others in the past." But these rulers still eat the fruits of it.

This mock attempt to cover their bloody hand doesn't deceive those who know well these bourgeois faces (similar worldwide). In fact, if we only "count the bodies" the way, for example, BBC's World Service does (Stalin called western radio invading Russia "a sky of lies"), we can charge French imperialists with some 200,000 civilian lives during the 19th century in Haiti. (Le Monde, 2/29 and 3/01/2004) Often the life expectancy for the new slaves was just five years after arrival. There were possibly two million deaths in the colonization of Algeria up to its 1960's war; the list goes on. In that war, after the French attempt to "win people's hearts and minds," torture of civilians to get information on rebels and terrorizing girls and children became the rule, as shown last November by TV France 3.

But in Haiti, Algeria, Vietnam, and last year's uprising in Ivory Coast, French imperialism met bitter, unexpected opposition.

The French government regenerates racism: I've seen the way police "handle" asylum-seekers in the port of Calais, beating them up. Also "positive" is the way army officers among their "cousins" in Belgium treat the black soldiers in Republic of Congo (still really colonized), exploiting the lack of a decent school system to humiliate them at every step, as shown in October on Belgian state TV, shamelessly of course.

The long wave of state racism is easy to see among mounting popular right-wing extremists in Europe: the infamous parties of the NPD in Germany, BNP in England, Vlaams Block in Belgium, Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy (now ultra anti-Muslim/Chinese), all as bad as last year's deep anti-Arab feelings on the French isle of Corsica, not to mention the neo-Nazis gangs, who seem to be particularly fertile in Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Racism is everywhere. It's one of the major challenges for communists.

Italian red trucker

`Rude' Teachers Not the Problem

The interesting June 22 column on how schooling would be better under communism is timely. Teachers are under assault nationwide. No Child Left Behind drastically changes funding, credentialing, and gives the military access to the addresses and telephone numbers of high school youth.

The article's main point was that, "education under communism will not have to deal with a small class of rich and powerful racist exploiters using students as future sources of profits (which is also the basis for racism). Rather, the purpose will be to enrich the lives of each individual student so that they, in turn, can enrich the lives of everyone around them -- the entire working class."

In my mind, the purpose of education under capitalism is to create workers or managers who will enforce the rules of capitalism, be it at war, on the job, or in the neighborhood -- that is, to indoctrinate the population with a capitalist-oriented, pro-imperialist education.

The article mentions the important idea that communist-oriented education would rethink not just the size of schools and the relationship of teacher to student, but the entire relationship of school to society.

However, far too much emphasis was given to teacher rudeness, which is not universal, nor is it the core problem with capitalism's education system.  We must address how specific disciplines -- science, art, physical education, mathematics, health, language, music, dance, etc. -- could be expanded in their focus and orientation under communism.

Aspects we should retain, however, include universal public education, publicly funded. Education should still be mandatory for children under 18 (unless it can be determined that 18 is too old or too young to require compulsion).

Communism should close and expropriate all private schools, religious and non-religious, along with the private university system. 

Under communism, true equal access to education will exist for all, from kindergarten through college, and for free. This would be possible because the money currently financing the military, as well as the wealth stolen by the bosses, would be available to the masses through the communist revolution.

A reader

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

More $$ -- but it all goes to the richest

...It is hard to imagine anyone supporting the notion of taking money from programs like Medicaid and college-tuition assistance, increasing the tax burden of the vast majority of working Americans, sending the country into crushing debt -- and giving the proceeds to people who are so fantastically rich that they don't know what to do with the money they already have. Yet that is just what is happening ....

...From 1980 to 2002, the latest year of available data, the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 percent of earners more than doubled, while the ... share of the bottom 90 percent declined. (NYT, 6/7)

Maquiladora workers fight gov't-union deal

"They shouted at us, they did not let us go to the bathroom, they gave us food that made us vomit," said Ms Ávila, 21, reciting a litany of indignities she said she had suffered at the factory, in Tepeji del Rio ....

What started out as local struggle may now shift its focus to the American toy giant, Mattel, which licenses the Barbie label to the plant's owner....

The dispute has followed what has become almost a standard script in maquiladora labor conflicts over the past decade. Workers try to form their own union, only to find that they have been represented -- often without their knowledge -- by a union that is part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, the old-line federation that was a pillar of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which, ruled Mexico for 71 years....

"It's clear that the old-line labor groupings have worked out a modus vivendi with the Fox government....You can count the number of independent unions in maquiladoras on one hand and still have fingers left over," (NYT, 6/12)

Pension laws show who runs the show

Government officials reviewing United's plans have noted that the airline performed calculations -- all in compliance with the law -- that made its pension plans look robust when their true economic condition was worsening rapidly. On the basis of its measurements, United did not make any cash contributions to the plans for several years. That, too, was legal....

Since the federal pension rules permit all companies to do the same type of calculations United did....many companies had misrepresented the condition of their pension funds, and were contributing inadequate sums of money as a result. The 1,100 pensions in worst shape...were $353.7 billion short of what they need to meet their promises to workers. (NYT, 6/11)

Abuse of Islamics needed high planning

We are officially told that the abuse of detainees in American custody -- who were stripped naked and beaten, forced to simulate sexual acts, their beards shaved, leered at by women interrogators who rubbed their breasts against them, or smeared them with fake menstrual blood, or grabbed and sometimes kicked their genitals -- is the handiwork of a few rogues who are duly punished when caught. To accept this as true we must also believe that these average kids from average American towns are experts on Islam, so well-versed in its strictures about sex that they dreamed up these methods all by themselves.

This makes no sense to Ann Wright....

"It came from the minds of some of the senior interrogators who are very well-versed in Arab cultures," Wright told me...

...No young military reservist could possibly have concocted the strategy... (Newsday, 5/25)

Liberal media help imperialist warmakers

It has become popular to describe the U.S. invasion of Iraq as some kind of anomaly, a departure from Washington's previous record of seeking peaceful alternatives to war and refusing to engage in aggression....

But during the last half century -- when, for days or months or many years, U.S. troops and planes assaulted the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq again -- the rationales from the White House were always based on major falsehoods....

PBS -- the "Frontline" show, [was] airing a report about Iran's nuclear program. Every word of the May 24 broadcast may have been true -- yet, due to the show's omissions, the practical effect was to participate in laying media groundwork for a military attack on Iran. (Creator's Syndicate, 5/29)

`Big 8'nations profit from Africa poverty

For the past six years the G8 has been preaching relief yet maintaining vicious trade sanctions against Africa and Asia. It has denied them markets for their produce and flooded them with surpluses...destroying local industries and impoverishing populations. This has nothing to do with the corruption or lethargy of `ungovernable Africa'. It is economic warfare by the G8 against the poor..." (London Sunday Times, 6/5)

Pakistan, a close US ally, brutalizes woman

When Pakistan's prime minister visits next month, President Bush will presumably use the occasion to repeat his praise for President Pervez Musharraf as a bold leader "dedicated in the protection of his own people...."

On average, a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan, and two women a day die in honor killings....

While Ms. Mukhtaran and Dr. Shazia have attracted international support, most victims in Pakistan are on their own. Earlier this year, for example, police reported that a village council had punished a man for having an affair by ordering his 2-year-old niece to be given in marriage to a 40-year-old man.

In another case this year, an 11-year-girl named Nazan was rescused from her husband's family, which beat her, broke her arm and strung her from the ceiling because she didn't work hard enough.

Then there are Pakistan's hudood laws, which have been used to imprison thousands of women who report rapes. If rape victims cannot provide four male witness to the crime, they risk being whipped for adultery, since they acknowledge illicit sex and cannot prove rape. (NYT, 6/21)