- PLP Red May Day
Communism Lives! - Indigenous Youth Leads PLP May Day Contingent in Mexico City
- San Salvador: Red Ideas `Like Hot Bread
in Mouth Of Workers' - Bogotá: 150,000 Workers March Against Death Squads
- Editorial
U.S.-China Relations Boiling Over Oil - One-day Strikes A Loser; Building PLP A Winner
- Fight Growing Over Texas School Racism
- PLP Teacher's `Crime': Inviting Students, Parents To May Day
- NJ Police Terror Proves
No Such Thing As A Good Cop - Communism Rides the NJ May Day Bus
- Conn. Strikers Block Scabs, But Cops, Guard Do Bosses' Job
- SOLIDARITY LETTER
- Your Philadelphia sisters and brothers in Local 1199C
- The Kerrey `ConfeSSion'
- The Boston Mafia-FBI Connection
- Protest Boston Cops' Racist Murder Of Two Youths
- Workers Student Alliance CHALLENGE Supplement
- LETTERS
Workers of the World, Write!
PLP Red May Day
Communism Lives!
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 28 -- "Fight for communism, power to the workers! "Bush, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide! Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world, unite!" resounded in English and Spanish as over 1,300 workers and students, black, Latin, Asian and white, immigrant and citizen, marched to the White House with PLP on May Day, the international working class holiday.
For the first time in 31 consecutive May Day marches, we were barred from picketing the White House. It was off limits in fear of protests against the Finance Ministers of the Group of 7 (the top imperialist countries) who were meeting in Washington that weekend. But that
didn't dampen the revolutionary spirit of the marchers. At the end of the march, when the Bush chopper was landing in the White House backyard. the marchers let loose with a chorus of boos at the current bosses' henchman residing in that rat's hole.
The marchers were emboldened by the recent struggles our Party has been involved in:
* Mid-West comrades who had gone to Cincinnati to support the anti-racist rebels there and helped lead a march at the funeral of Timothy Davis, the youth killed by the cops;
* Young comrades fresh from the militant anti-globalization protests in Quebec;
* Participants in the Living Wage sit-in at Harvard;
* Youth who organized protests against racist journalist David Horowitz;
* Philadelphia hospital workers who expressed their solidarity with striking nursing home workers in Connecticut;
* Youth from a Brooklyn high school who marched, despite being threatened by their principal and his suspension of their teacher, Joan Heymont, the day before the march.
The speeches and songs at the beginning and end of the march showed the growing anger of workers and youth against the attacks of capitalism. Workers are fed up with:
* Growing police terror -- the day before the march, the NYPD declared that the cops who shot African immigrant Amadou Diallo 41 times did nothing wrong.
* Layoffs -- in April, 223,000 jobs were lost in the U.S., the highest monthly total since 1991.
* Becoming cannon fodder in another imperialist butchery -- the Bush administration has been beating the war drums against China louder and louder.
Over 2,000 CHALLENGES were distributed among the marchers and during the march. Indeed, May Day 2001 was an important step towards fighting for a society without racist terror and imperialist bosses. Join the communist PLP!
LOS ANGELES, April 28--Shouting "Fight for Communism, Power to the workers!" four hundred workers and youth marched downtown today for an end to racist terror and imperialist war with communist revolution. When the marchers stopped at Parker Center, headquarters of the LAPD death squad, the mothers of Michael Fitzsimmons and Michael Ealy spoke. Their sons were killed by the racist police -- the first in LA, the second in Seattle. Mrs. Ealy called the hundreds of riot-clad LAPD present, "Murderers! Murderers!"
Every marcher was furious. Then she challenged the crowd to continue the fight against racist police terror and asked, "What are you going to do about it?" The marchers chanted back, "Seattle cops, you can't hide! We charge you with genocide" , "LA cops, you can't hide..." and "The only solution is a communist revolution!"
High school and college students marched side by side with garment workers, janitors, Boeing workers, bus drivers, mechanics, teachers and others. One teacher marched for his friend who was recovering from surgery. He said her commitment to her students, to PLP and May Day was an inspiration to him. A Bay Area bus driver called on the marchers to fight for revolution. A striking garment worker from Hollander Home Fashions told of scabs breaking their strike, thanked the PLP for our support and asked for more workers and students to join the picket lines. A comrade waved the very first issue of CHALLENGE with the headline, "Police Terror in Harlem" and called on one and all to read, subscribe and sell our communist newspaper.
Over 1,000 CHALLENGES and 1,500 leaflets were distributed as thousands viewed the march, many walking on the sidewalk along with us. Despite a huge police presence, some spectators did join the march.
A student PLP'er described fights against racist Horowitz (see centerspread) and for communism at the Democratic Convention and at school. He emphasized the importance of youth leading the revolutionary movement and building PLP, urging all marchers to join the Party and deepen our fight for communism in the classroom and the mass movement. Another PLP'er said that the bosses and their agents in the unions and mass organizations are incapable of changing to serve the interests of the workers. But PLP is learning daily how to fight every attack, to build the fight for communism -- on the shop floor, in the classroom, the barracks and the mass movement. Several people joined the PLP at the march and others have asked to be in Party study groups.
While the march was smaller than last year, the struggle to build it and the leadership given by youth and young workers to all aspects, represents the huge potential for our Party to grow as we fight the bosses' increased racist terror, unemployment and wars. Let the bosses and their agents push racism, nationalism, reformism -- all in the service of imperialism. We have the answer -- fight for communism!
Indigenous Youth Leads PLP May Day Contingent in Mexico City
MEXICO CITY, May 4 -- "When indigenous people join the fight for communism, the bosses tremble from the factories to the Mountains," chanted a group of indigenous youth who joined our Party's contingent at the union-organized May Day march here. The PLP communist contingent was twice the size of last year's. The bosses' growing fascism did not intimidate us. We showed it is crucial than ever to spread our communist politics to confront the bosses and their imperialist partners.
The indigenous youth who joined the PLP May Day contingent was the best response to the "new indigenous law," approved by the Mexican Congress, which only perpetuates racism against 10 million indigenous people, divides the working class and strengthens the property rights of the racist landlords. This law smashes the illusion built by the Zapatistas, who last month implored the same racist Congress to protect the rights of the indigenous people. The new law will only make it easier for imperialist bosses to control the oil in Southern Mexico, particularly under NAFTA and the coming Free Trade Zones of the Americas negotiated in Quebec. But the imperialists will be fighting each other for this control over the workers' dead bodies. Today more than ever the indigenous people need to unite with the working class against local bosses and various imperialists trying to enslave them.
Industrial workers chanting "We Are One Working Class, Under One Party; Workers of the World, Unite!" marched with PLP protesting still another fascist law approved by the Supreme Court. This law, supposedly meant to break the monopoly of the CTM (the old union federation) and allow other unions to organize, in reality gives bosses more flexibility to impose fascist working conditions and smash any union organizing. This is one campaign promise President Fox has kept.
In the last 10 years, the minimum wage has been devalued by 43%, while the military budget has doubled in five years. The Army grew from 175,000 to 250,000. Meanwhile the crisis of capitalism forces 35 million people to survive on less than $2 a day.
UNAM students in the PLP contingent chanted "Fox, fascist, imperialist butcher," rejecting his new budget cuts under the guise of "finance reform." This will impoverish workers even more, forcing them pay for capitalism's crisis.
A few days after May Day, the government blamed the loss of 96,000 private-sector jobs on the economic slowdown in the U.S. Delphi Automotive Systems slashed 7,600 jobs; DaimlerChrysler shut down its engine and transmission plant in Toluca, cutting 2,600 jobs; Goodyear is closing its 50-year-old plant near Mexico City; Motorola is cutting 1,000 jobs, etc.
"The coming war is for markets," cynically announced Carlos Slim, Mexico's richest boss and owner of Telmex. Fascism and war are the bosses' answer to their crisis of overproduction. That's why our communist march grew in importance. We spread the message of the need for communist revolution to thousands of workers. We reaffirmed our commitment to build a mass party of millions to take on the capitalists and destroy them.
San Salvador: Red Ideas `Like Hot Bread
in Mouth Of Workers'
SAN SALVADOR, May 1 -- Over 50,000 workers from every corner of this country marched through the streets of the capital to celebrate the 115th anniversary of May Day. Workers from Chalatenango, Morazán, Santa Ana, La Unión, San Miguel and Usulután joined in the march to honor the Chicago Martyrs. Many protested against the dollarization of the economy. Others demanded better working conditions. But many opportunists pushed "democracy" and "voting" to "improve the capitalist system." Faced with all these bosses' views, PLP's communist ideas were like hot bread in the mouths of the poor!
Hundreds of DESAFIOS and PLP May Day stickers, and thousands of leaflets were distributed to the masses of workers, who await us anxiously year after year. "Give me the paper; don't you have any more?" was heard on all sides. "Damn, I'm a Party member, and I don't have a single sticker left; you have to get me one, at least," said one Party member.
Many workers flooded the streets with graffiti like: "Long Live May Day"; "Long Live the Working Class"; "Long Live Communism."
It wasn't easy to get to the march, but police barricades on all the highways couldn't stop the working class from coming and celebrating this powerful historical event. " Every bus must have farmworkers, students, teachers and workers combined so the cops can't suspect we're going to the march," suggested a PLP member. "The experience of the guerrilla war taught us how to evade these police barriers; we mustn't let ourselves be stopped. We have to get to the march on time for the beginning," said a PLP member to the leaders of the teachers and students.
El Diario de Hoy, the country's most fascist daily newspaper, ran a picture on the front page of a worker painting one of those famous graffiti slogans. The impact of communist ideas terrorized the bosses, who for days spewed forth hatred and poison about our class, calling the working class "delinquents" because they respond with revolutionary violence to the capitalist system.
The day before the march, the editorial of this fascist rag begged, "We hope that the Salvadoran workers don't fall into the trap of subversion and class struggle." This call by the enemies of the working class defies history -- the class struggle is in every work place where there is a single worker oppressed by the capitalist system.
Participating in this historical working class event is an opportunity to grow quantitatively and qualitatively in the struggle for the system of the working class: communism.
Bogotá: 150,000 Workers March Against Death Squads
BOGOTA COLOMBIA, May 1 -- Over 150,000 workers in three different marches converged on the Plaza Bolivar here in the biggest May Day march in recent history. Workers came out to protest:
* The recent murders of dozens of union activists by the military-supported death squads;
* The anti-working class economic policies of President Pastrana, following the austerity measures imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund;
* Plan Colombia, the war program of the U.S. government and the Pastrana regime oppressing the working class.
A PLP contingent distributed 3,000 communist flyers and sold 300 DESAFIO-CHALLENGES. Our communist literature and banners were like a beacon dispelling the confusion reformism, class collaboration and "peace"-with-our-murderers line of the union leaders. We called for workers to organize and build a movement to replace this living hell of capitalism with a society where workers rule -- communism. Many chanted our slogans, asked us to stay in contact with them and want to continue reading our communist paper.
Editorial
U.S.-China Relations Boiling Over Oil
Some of the Bush administration's recent flip-flops over U.S. China policy reflect tactical disagreements among the big bosses over dealing with rising Chinese imperialism. But a general trend is emerging. Despite these internal differences, the U.S. ruling class is charting a course that will eventually lead to a war for world domination. The profit system makes such wars inevitable. However long the next one takes to materialize, we should have no illusions about the amounts of working class blood the capitalists must spill in order to hold power. And we should build our Party as the only weapon that can smash them.
Bush's policy looks like the "brinkmanship" game U.S. and Soviet bosses used to play during the Cold War: push the other side to the edge and then pull back. So on April 30, U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announced that Washington would stop all military contacts with the Chinese. Then the Defense Department retracted the decision.
This maneuver followed Bush's promise to do whatever necessary, including using armed force, to defend Taiwan. Many liberal media pundits called Bush to task for his stupidity in revoking 30 years of U.S. foreign policy. But although Bush is certainly no mental giant, his policy advisors put those words in his mouth as part of a calculated plan.
Taiwan is strategically crucial. The map shows it commands the oil shipping routes from the Middle East to China and Japan. Exxon Mobil and its Saudi oil billionaire pals are building a big refinery in China's Fujian province, which sits on the Taiwan Strait--a great excuse to keep the U.S. Seventh Fleet patrolling the area.
For the past 30 years, U.S. presidents haven't threatened to defend Taiwan militarily, based on the estimate that the mainland Chinese rulers were too weak to invade it. However, things are changing. The Chinese bosses were already beginning to make noise under Clinton. They have embarked on a significant military build-up across from Taiwan, deploying an average of 50 surface-to-air missiles per year, in addition to the 300 they had before starting the build-up. China's overall defense budget for 2001 is up nearly 18%, the largest hike in 20 years. As CHALLENGE has frequently mentioned, the Chinese rulers have also developed a strategic plan to build a deepwater navy, which can eventually challenge U.S. imperialism's supremacy on the high seas.
So Bush's threat must be viewed in the context of Chinese imperialism's attempt to become a key U.S. rival. The Chinese are still not strong enough to meet the U.S. head on. The Bush gang's approach seems to be to force them into an arms race their economy can't afford. So, for example, Bush recently approved a large arms package for Taiwan, although the headlines emphasized that the U.S. had decided not to sell the Taiwanese the Aegis radar-equipped destroyers they'd been demanding. But this decision will not slow down the arms race. Just the opposite: "Focusing on the Aegis destroyers...misses the unfolding reality. Taiwan will get key capabilities...that would degrade China's military capabilities in a battle for Taiwan...[and China] will respond accordingly" (Stratfor, 5/4).
U.S. rulers are therefore making a cynical gamble in their drive to keep China in the second rank of imperialist powers. They know that Chinese capitalism, whose energy consumption is rising by 4.3% a year, needs "a peaceful domestic and regional environment conducive to its sorely needed social and political development"(Brookings fellow Bates Gill in Foreign Affairs, July/August 1999). But for now, Washington holds a big trump card. "The United States can influence [China's] Persian Gulf oil supply," warned Gill.
Forcing the Chinese rulers to allocate a growing amount of production to their military--and then threatening to deny them Persian Gulf oil--is an attempt to weaken this economic development. Many U.S. businesses have significant investments in China. The U.S. is China's largest export market, and the U.S. balance of trade deficit with China is second only to the one with Japan. But investments and trade deficits are one thing. Dealing with China as a potential economic superpower capable of challenging U.S. domination of world markets and energy supplies is another. The Bush arms race with China could be viewed as a tactic for bankrupting the Chinese rulers before they reach this stage.
Bush & Co. may reason that the same approach more or less worked under Reagan in the last days of the Soviet Union, when the cost of the arms race administered a final blow to a socialist economy that had long since become corrupted by the profit motive. Rumsfeld's push for a strategic missile defense--even one that doesn't work--may be a ploy to sucker the Chinese into committing large amounts of money for a similar program to keep pace with the U.S. military.
All these calculations by U.S. rulers are based on the assumption that things will stay the same and that the U.S. will continue to dictate the course of events to a perpetually weak Chinese ruling class. But things change. Forces are growing within China that "increasingly view the United States as a threat to the structure and stability of the Chinese state" (Stratfor). The logic of this situation shows a future of increasing, and increasingly sharp, confrontation between U.S. and Chinese imperialists.
We are in a new period. The U.S. "new world order" is rapidly turning into a struggle in which the self-styled "super-power" must face a variety of long-range challenges to its domination. The arms race over Taiwan is just one of several. All of them will lead to shooting wars, although we can't predict the exact timetable. In the crucible of these inter-imperialist slaughters, our Party can and must grow. This is the challenge we and our class must meet and conquer.
One-day Strikes A Loser; Building PLP A Winner
SEATTLE, May 7 --" Five of the six union members on our unit stayed home without pay to respect the picket line!" exclaimed a University of Washington (UW) employee, a long-time member of SEIU/CSA 925. "I never thought we could do this, but we decided we would all do it together, and we did!"
This was just a one-day strike, one of a series of rolling strikes AFSCME's Washington Federation of State Employees (WFSE) was conducting across the state. To support the UW picket line, some Contract Staff Association (CSA) employees refused to go to work on April 20. Both WFSE and CSA workers were protesting the legislature's "offer": a 2.2% cost-of-living "raise" (the Consumer Price Index rose 3.7%, making this "raise" a pay cut), as well as a huge cutback in our medical benefits.
Some CSA Local 925 members had fought within the union's strike committee to support the WFSE strikers. The CSA leadership had the usual sellout arguments: "Not enough time to contact the members; illegal for state workers to strike; won't get enough support; and it will make us look worse." But we pushed the strike committee hard enough to put it before the Organizing Council. Although this proposal was defeated, the fight for it helped us win CSA members to honor the picket line.
Since then WFSE is re-starting its rolling strike. The teachers in many Western Washington counties had a one-day strike. In a straw poll, more than 50% of the members favored a strike authorization vote, which will happen next week.
While this show of solidarity which overrode the leadership is excellent, one-day strikes are a loser. They are designed to influence the legislature and elect Democrats to Congress, as "the way to win." We've seen what the Democrats give us -- wars and Workfare. PLP members and friends have a different job.
We must build unity with students, other State employees and workers in other job classifications. We need to fight racism and sexism by struggling arm-in-arm with immigrant workers and workers from lower-paid jobs. Because of these bosses' ideas, UW workers in the lowest-paid jobs at the University tend to be black and Latin women. We must fight for leadership from these workers to expose racism and nationalism as losing strategies for the working class. By doing this, we will learn how to fight harder and better, how to win some small battles and prepare for class war.
To arm workers with the ideas to conduct class struggle and relate them to the need for revolution, we must sell CHALLENGE. We want workers' worldwide struggles to be common knowledge among our class and win more of our friends to become sellers, not just readers.
It is important to bring workers today the history of the massive class struggles waged by U.S. workers against brutal working conditions: the Seattle General Strike, the Everett Massacre, teachers' strikes in other states, the fight for the 8-hour day and many more. What if all State employees struck simultaneously? Think of the class understanding to be gained by seeing who is protected by state power, what role solidarity can play, how racism and sexism destroy our ability to fight.
All this would help fight the cynicism built by the union leadership. They demean the membership as being "uninterested," and then use this as an excuse to limit communication and meetings and lead us straight into the arms of the legislature. When workers honor the picket line in large numbers, it fights cynicism.
Out of all this we must recruit to and build the Party Ultimately, it is the Progressive Labor Party that will lead the workers worldwide in the only fight from which the working class can truly emerge the winner -- a communist revolution. Every worker, student and soldier we recruit to the Party brings us one step closer to that goal.
Fight Growing Over Texas School Racism
LUBBOCK, TEXAS, May 3 -- Workers here are organizing to stop the racist plan of this city's School Board -- flunkies of big real estate developers -- to close or reorganize six schools in black and Hispanic working-class neighborhoods. Black and Hispanic ministers and many others formed the Concerned Citizens of Lubbock (CCL) to fight back.
The CCL immediately organized several mass meetings and militant attendance of hundreds at Board assemblies, school boycotts and demonstrations at Board members' homes. Once local bosses nervously ordered police to drag a black minister from the podium and into the parking lot. The entire audience cheered his return. Politicians and police have tried to stop questions from CCL and others.
Recently the group joined the Black History Day Parade, with banners proclaiming "Fight Racist School Closings --Our History is One of Struggle -- Unite to Fight Racism." The CCL has emphasized multi-racial unity, inviting participation of Texas Tech University students who had organized workers and students here to support the struggle against the racist arrests of young black workers in Tulia, Texas.
So far CCL's mass actions have halted the closing of one junior high, but several schools are still slated to get the axe. This will aggravate other problems -- excessive discipline against black and Latin students, overcrowding and inferior education in remaining schools, physical segregation inside magnet schools, 2nd class education caused by over-concentration on state test preparation and the channeling of these youth into ROTC programs for war preparations.
The racist School Board claims declines in poor neighborhood school populations caused funding shortfalls, but white flight to neighboring districts was the real cause. While white schools enrollment declined, only minority schools were closed. In fact, school officials were awarded big raises while major new construction was under way at white schools.
The local developers who dictate school policy are using school funds stolen from working-class families' education to gentrify neighborhoods near Texas Tech University, building new homes for new faculty. The latter will teach Tech's new E.O.Wilson/Stephen Rockefeller "business-friendly" genetic superiority curriculum and will do research in Texas Tech's new germ warfare laboratory. These events, all in this small city, show that U.S. rulers have a plan, based on racism and war, to profit from exploitation of workers everywhere, to maintain U.S. world domination.
School closings throughout the U.S. are part of a larger plan to destroy or re-segregate working-class neighborhoods, forcing all workers' children into jail-like schools and bootcamps, with no books, no homework, and no future, except to become the first to die as U.S. rulers prepare for oil wars in the Mid-East. As the bosses' economy declines, education cuts will worsen.
School closings and re-segregation reveal once again that racism is always the cutting edge of the capitalists' efforts to survive and grow. Many become cynical and hesitate to join the struggle because they see each battle for reform, each battle to save a school, as temporary and will quickly be reversed if they win at all. It is here that the ideas of PLP, especially as expressed in the increased circulation of CHALLENGE, and the Party's immersion in the class struggle, become crucial. This makes being won to revolution all the more possible, especially to those in the most exploited communities.
Hoping endlessly to reform capitalism and allowing revolution to "wait for later," or never, leaves the bosses in power. When workers rely on themselves and use multi-racial unity to organize as a class against the bosses' racism, they pose a great danger to billionaire capitalists. The only greater danger for the bosses is workers fighting to take it all, for a true communist society that destroys capitalism and racism altogether.
PLP Teacher's `Crime': Inviting Students, Parents To May Day
BROOKLYN, NY, May 7 -- Joan Heymont, a science teacher at Boys and Girls H.S. here, and a member of the Progressive Labor Party, was removed from the school on April 27. Her crime? Inviting her students and their parents to our May Day march in Washington, D.C.
Teachers, parents and students have been outraged and dismayed. How can inviting students to join this march on a non-school day be wrong? Joan is a committed and excellent teacher whose students will be taking end-of-the-year Regents exams in just a few weeks. Obviously the school doesn't care at all about the students!
We're contacting dozens of parents, students and teachers, asking parents to call and visit the school to protest. Students and staff are circulating a petition which already has several hundred signatures. We've leafleted the school and rallied on May 5, drawing a great response. We also distributed stickers demanding Joan's return. We will rally outside the monthly teachers' union Delegate Assembly meeting and at the Board of Education.
There is tremendous intimidation and harassment of both students and staff at the school. They've threatened to suspend students or to change their transcripts so they can't graduate, or even to report immigrant students active in the campaign to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Despite all this, many people have come forward to help and to organize the fight to return Joan to her school.
NJ Police Terror Proves
No Such Thing As A Good Cop
IRVINGTON, NJ, May 5--Once again the reality of racist police terror has snuffed out the life of another worker. Bilal Colbert, 29, a black worker, was killed by an Irvington cop last Monday. Colbert had stopped at a store, while driving his girlfriend's daughters to school to get something to eat. Cop William Mildon brutally shot him in the neck in front of the girls when Bilal supposedly "didn't get out of the car and tried to flee." Mildon lied that he shot Bilal to save himself and the life of one of the young girls, who he said was trying to get out of the car!
Four years ago, Mildon got away with murdering another black man, Keion Williams while he was also in a car. He was vilified by the cops and bosses' press as a drug dealer who tried to run Mildon over.
The Colbert family called for a 9 A.M. protest march to the Irvington police station. PLP members helped lead a rally and then a march from the intersection where Colbert was killed. We chanted, "Racist Cops You Can't Hide, We Charge You With Genocide!"; "The Cops, the Courts, the Ku Klux Klan, All a Part of the Bosses' Plan"; and "Racism means...Fight Back." Workers and youth grabbed our leaflets and CHALLENGES. Many people on the street joined our chants or raised their fists in support.
When we reached the police station by 11:30, our numbers had grown to about 60. The New Jersey NAACP and the People's Organization for Progress (POP) had called for a noon rally. A young woman yelled disgustedly at the racist cops because they tried to cover up the killing by accusing Bill of being a drug dealer. Others spoke angrily about the racist harassment and terror that is a daily occurrence in their neighborhood. After the head of the New Jersey NAACP spoke, Fred Bost, a councilmen for the ward where the shooting occurred and the husband of Irvington's mayor, said he was a law-abiding citizen and expected everyone to act similarly. He then had the audacity to say he would push for "sensitivity" training for the cops. This hack was booed and heckled off the bullhorn.
Because we had not built enough of a base in the mass organization in which we are active, we were unable to mobilize scores of people in these groups to march. Therefore, when Bost was attacked, we couldn't take the offensive to explain the role of police in a capitalist society as protectors of private property and servants of the ruling class. We needed to do a better job connecting the shooting of Bilal to the mass jailing of black and Latin youth, "community policing" and the growth of fascism in general.
POP's Larry Hamm said they were calling in the U.S. Justice Department, never mentioning the latter's exoneration of the cops in the Amadou Diallo murder.
By this time, POP and the NAACP's supporters had arrived, and the crowd had swelled to about 300. Hamm then led a demonstration around the block, changing our militant chants to "Stop Police Brutality" and simply calling out Bilal and Keion's names. Later, Hamm was joined by Delacey Davis, head of Black Cops Against Police Brutality (BCAPB). Hamm hugged Davis and told the crowd, "See, we're not against all cops. We're for law and order. We're only against the bad cops."
But the reality is that racist cop terror is a necessary part of capitalist rule. Ultimately, the bosses hold power at the point of a gun. They know militant black workers present the gravest potential threat to their continued domination. POP's program calls for civilian complaint review boards, the hiring of black and Latin cops and federal investigations in the grossest cases of police murder. Al Sharpton, who arrived later, implied that police terror and racist attacks can only be fought through reforming the system. The leaders of the NAACP, POP and BCAPB reinforce the idea that capitalism can be fixed to serve the interests of the workers. But it never can be.
As police killings in Cincinnati show, police terror and racism are increasing, part of the bosses' fascist plan to prepare for war and squelch any fight-back against capitalism's crisis by an angry working class.
We sold over 75 CHALLENGES and distributed over 200 leaflets. People were open to our ideas. Scores of drivers honked their horns in support of the fight against police terror. Our main goal must be building the Party's base in mass organizations. Then we can fight Hamm, Sharpton & Co. for the leadership of this movement. Carrying out this plan is the key to our advance in the near term and crucial to smashing the class rule behind the racist cops who are murdering our brothers and sisters.
Communism Rides the NJ May Day Bus
NEWARK, NJ, April 28 -- This was one of our best May Day bus rides to Washington yet. We brought two nearly-full buses from New Jersey, about what we expected. Although our numbers were modest, our marchers had a great common experience, especially on the return trip.
Many of our riders came to May Day through our long-time political activity at a local housing complex near an elementary school where one comrade works. Many of them are black and Latin, men and women, young and old, who in their daily lives experience all the ills of capitalism. They have seen homelessness, AIDS, drug dealing, murder, the ravages of unemployment, police terror, lousy schools and mass incarceration of local youth. The racist nature of capitalism is a very real element in their lives. These families, and quite a few other people on our bus, are loyal supporters of PLP and have marched on May Day many times in the past.
On May Day morning, not everyone from the complex showed up at the bus on time. We were short of transportation to the buses and one of the adults who came was sick, and had to take time to get her medication. Though we knew the bus drivers would be reluctant, we asked them to make a special trip to the complex. These families have shown their commitment to the Party over the years; we decided to respond in kind.
On the way back, we asked all marchers to take the bus microphone and say what they thought about the march. Initially most people were hesitant, possibly out of fear or shyness. Slowly but surely, a trickle of speakers turned into a stream. One after another of the young people came up to relate how much they had enjoyed the march, and that they would be returning next year. A few began to ask questions about communism.
At this point, an experienced comrade began to break down in systematic fashion what communism is and how it relates to the lives and experiences of the relatively newer marchers. It was clear that many of the young people were listening intently as the comrade described the "beautiful new world" we are trying to build. Other experienced comrades added short comments as well.
Even though we could have done a better job on the bus ride down explaining what PLP stands for, the march itself helped us and our friends change that on the way back. Seven of the young people agreed to join a study group, and four of those expressed interest in joining the Party. We're determined to "hang" with these friends through the ups and downs of all our lives, and win them to the cause of communism. The feeling of collectivity on our May Day bus was electric. We have a great future!
Conn. Strikers Block Scabs, But Cops, Guard Do Bosses' Job
HARTFORD, CONN., May 7 -- The strike of 4,500 workers at 40 nursing homes throughout the state resumed on May 3 following a one-day walkout last month (CHALLENGE, 4/11)). That action turned into a four-day lockout at many of the homes.
Strikers have blocked vans and buses carrying scabs into the homes, howling at them and poking at the vehicles with their bright yellow flags. But state troopers, the National Guard and local cops are escorting the scabs past the picket lines.
The state government has been bankrolling the bosses' strike-breaking efforts by paying for the scabs' hotel rooms, supplying transportation to the homes and by helping to foot the bill for the $280 per day each scab gets for crossing the line. That would add up to an annual salary of $70,000, more than double what most workers are paid. Strikers say if this money was used to increase staff (their major demand) and raise wages, instead of trying to break the union -- District 1199, New England Health Care Employees, SEIU -- and destroy the workers' living and working conditions, the strike could be settled immediately. But that's not the way things work under capitalism.
One striker at the Salmon Brook home said the bosses threatened the workers just prior to the walkout. "We work hard," she declared. "We suffer in there. Our residents suffer because we don't have adequate staffing." Another striker at the Connecticut Institute for the Blind/Oak Hill asked, "If they've got the money for scabs, why don't they put that money in the budget" for us?
Progressive Labor Party has played a modest role in the strike. In last month's strike/lockout, workers were cheered by PLP support leaflets and CHALLENGES they received. Then, on the bus ride home from the April 28 Washington May Day March, Philadelphia hospital workers involved in sharp struggles at their own Jefferson Hospital drafted a support letter for the Connecticut workers -- not on strike at the time. Comrades in Connecticut brought the support letter to the picket lines, along with copies of CHALLENGE and bagels, and received a rousing response from the people on the line. After reading the letter, one woman exclaimed, "We want to be on that march next year!" A similar support greeting came from workers at a Brooklyn, NY hospital.
The strikers are generally in good spirits and are determined to prevail. There is great potential for supporting the strike. Many people honk their horns in support driving past the lines. However, years of give-backs and sellouts by the AFL-CIO leadership has weakened the union movement to such an extent that little union support has been organized for these workers on the front lines.
For many strikers, the CHALLENGE they received was probably their first contact with communist ideas. One comrade said as he distributed papers on the picket lines, "We want communism. We want the workers to run society. We want the workers to run the nursing homes for the benefit of the residents and dump the owners who run them for their own profits." We urge all workers to take these ideas seriously and join the PLP.
BULLETIN: As we go to press, it was reported that one nursing home operator has signed an agreement that adds staff and increases wages at seven of its homes. However, workers at these locations said that after their shifts they intend to join the other 4,000 striking workers on the picket lines.
The strike is expected to spread to 2,000 other workers who care for mentally ill patients at private agencies. They are paid far less than their counterparts at state agencies doing similar jobs.
SOLIDARITY LETTER
Hello, fellow union sisters and brothers of Local 1199.
We are writing you in support of your struggle for more staff and better pay. We are workers in environmental services (housekeeping) and laboratory animal services at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.
We just attended a May Day March in Washington, D.C. and are writing this letter to you on the bus back to Philadelphia. We came to the march to find out different ways to unite people. We need to fight back as a stronger movement. We need to make our workplace better. We need to get the bosses off our backs!
We work at a hospital in Philadelphia where they use part-timers and temporary workers instead of hiring full-timers. Part-timers work full-time schedules, but don't get health care benefits. Some part-timers go 13 years before they get a full-time job.
Last April we started to organize for full-time jobs. We had meetings and passed out flyers. We started "solidarity lunches" in the cafeteria. By the third one, two hundred workers showed up. The bosses tried to stop the rallies, but they couldn't. The workers kept coming and signed petitions (which were illegal).
We did it without the union, but after 200 showed up, even the president of 1199 jumped on the bandwagon. At a city-wide union rep meeting, he said that the solidarity lunches forced the hospital to schedule a special negotiations meeting for full-time jobs for part-timers. We won 50 new full-time jobs!
ONWARD WITH THE STRUGGLE!
Yours in solidarity,
Your Philadelphia sisters and brothers in Local 1199C
To: The striking workers at Connecticut nursing homes
From: The workers at a Brooklyn hospital
We support your demands for higher wages, staffing levels and other working conditions.
The workers on strike have taken a strong stand to insure better staffing for the future.
The nursing home bosses are only interested in making profits from the patients and are NOT interested in patient care.
We are also aware that our brothers and sisters from 1199 SEIU are joining the picket line.
At our hospital, workers toil every day to take care of the wards, crowded with patients and to keep a safe and clean environment.
We have fought very hard in the past against sub-contracting and layoffs. Our contract expires on October 31 and everything we've fought for is up for grabs: our wages, job security, benefits, pensions, staffing levels and other working conditions.
However, workers are always waging battles with the hospital and nursing home bosses to keep whatever little benefits we have and for better patient care.
We must fight the bosses' system by uniting workers across all borders to wage war against capitalist exploitation.
The Kerrey `ConfeSSion'
The rulers are trying to use the "confession" by ex-Senator/Governor/war "hero" Bob Kerrey (and now college president, naturally) to prepare today's working-class youth for the "war-is-hell-but-we've-got-to-fight-and-die-for-`our'-country" syndrome. The massacre of unarmed civilians by Kerrey and his Navy Seals -- and his current attempt to justify it with the crap about the "confusion" of war --once again highlights the fact that arch liberals like Kerrey are just as fascist as, and therefore even more dangerous than the open right-wingers.
The New York Times editorializes (April 26): "The nation...must stick with the ongoing task of remembering the horrible lesson of the physical and psychological damage to people on both sides when a great power undertakes a war without a rationale." (How neatly the Times equates "people on both sides": three million Vietnamese dead and 58,000 U.S. deaths.) Now, implies the Times, there must be careful justification of any future war by this "great [imperialist] power" so that what happened in Vietnam doesn't happen in Iraq. Of course, the Times conveniently forgets they did present a rationale to the world at that time -- "saving Vietnam from communism." However, while U.S. rulers were driven from Vietnam militarily, U.S. imperialism won out because the Vietnamese leadership had a nationalist (essentially capitalist) outlook, not a communist one. So Ford, Nike & Co. are now in Vietnam paying workers $2 a day and Vietnam is a capitalist country.
Kerrey told ROTC cadets at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) that his massacre of the Vietnamese "could be justified militarily": "the people we killed were probably enemy sympathizers." No kidding! The "enemy" was the entire population of Vietnam, fighting a people's war, defending themselves against a Nazi-like invasion by the world's most powerful imperialist power, bent on making Vietnam a source of U.S. corporate exploitation and low-wage labor. (Unfortunately, the latter is the current result.) Since the Vietnamese were (Kerrey's) "enemy," and in his mind "sub-human" anyway, it's O.K. to slaughter them. But there were hundreds of thousands of GI's who were not "confused" and did not view the Vietnamese as the enemy. In fact, they saw the Kerreys as their enemy, and killed hundreds of such officers (see below).
In his VMI speech, Kerrey quotes a career Army officer friend defending the drafting of 18 to 25-year-olds: "Give me power over when and how much a young man can eat and sleep and I believe I can get him to do anything I want. After 25, they start to ask questions. And...[then] they're no good to me anymore." Then the liberal Kerrey shows his true colors, saying, "My friend was right."
Not so fast. Opposed to Kerrey's (ruling class) "morality" were plenty of those 18 to 25-year-olds who not only refused to fight the "enemy" -- over half a million deserted -- but who turned the guns around:
* GI's hurled fragmentation grenades at officers ("fragging"), killing at least 551 by mid-1972 according to the Pentagon, not including killing countless others by rifle fire in combat. In the Americal division alone, fraggings were running at one a week in 1971. According to Marine Colonel Robert Heinl, bounties were raised by GI's chipping in "anywhere from $50 to $1,000...put on the heads of leaders whom the privates...wanted to rub out." Says Heinl, "Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs at certain units."
* The U.S. War Department reported 503,926 "incidents of desertion" from July 1966 to December 1973. Instead of following orders of "search and destroy," said Heinl in a 1971 article entitled, "The Collapse of the Armed Forces," the watchword had become, "Search and evade (meaning tactical avoidance of combat by units in the field)...now virtually a principle of war."
* With the "near mutinous" resistance so widespread that U.S. commanders hardly had any reliable ground armies to send into battle, the brass chose massive air power to "bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age." But sailors on the Navy's seven largest aircraft carriers put a huge dent in the carpet bombing of north Vietnam by disabling the USS Constellation, Coral Sea, Kitty Hawk, Ranger, Midway, Forrestal and Ticonderoga operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. At one point, five of them were tied up all at once in San Diego for repairs due to sabotage by rank-and-file sailors.
* In Oct. 1972 black sailors on the carrier Kitty Hawk led a major rebellion, including hand-to-hand battle with Marines sent to break up a meeting on board. Four days later the fighting spread to the ship's oiler, forcing the carrier back to San Diego and its removal from the war altogether.
* Reconnaissance crews of the 6990th Air Force Security Service in Okinawa staged a work stoppage bordering on open mutiny, refusing to warn bombers about Vietnamese air defense communications. During this stoppage they cheered whenever a B-52 bomber was shot down. Some were later court-martialed. (from Seymour Hersh's 1973 book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House)
No wonder Marine Colonel Heinl wrote that "morale, discipline and battle-worthiness" were "worse than at any time...possibly in the history of the United States." Interestingly, he could only compare it to "the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917," which led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
This "collapse of the U.S. Armed Forces" was a major factor -- other than the biggest one, the heroism of the Vietnamese themselves -- in forcing U.S. bosses out of Vietnam: increasingly, U.S. soldiers and sailors wouldn't fight.
U.S. rulers, now planning how to fight the wars that will secure their profits worldwide, want youth to follow the liberal Kerreys, not the rebellious GI's who turned the guns around. Without a reliable military, U.S. bosses would be hard put to carry out any of their imperialist wars. That's their biggest worry. It's up to us to win the youth to understand who the real enemy is -- not our brother and sister workers abroad, but the ruling class on Wall Street who exploit all of us.
(For more information on the GI rebellions against the Vietnam war see the Challenge Military Supplement of Jan. 2001--to be reprinted in the new Communist magazine, coming in June)
The Boston Mafia-FBI Connection
The U.S. ruling class is the deadliest gang of criminals ever to roam the earth. So when the rulers' press exposes vice and corruption, watch out. Both of Boston's major newspapers, the Herald and the Globe, as well as CBS television, have recently decried the unpunished wrongdoings of James "Whitey" Bulger, a fugitive South Boston gangster. For over 30 years, protected by the FBI, Bulger has committed murder, rape and extortion and trafficked in prostitution, drugs and guns. Now the media "demand" Bulger be brought to justice. But for decades they had idolized him as a "Robin Hood." The reason for the sudden change of heart lies in the shifting needs of the main U.S. capitalists. The rulers' move towards tighter, more fascistic control of the FBI and other law enforcement is only one part of a larger story.
In the 1960s, the Kennedy-Johnson administration was launching a massive, genocidal war in Vietnam and escalating the Cold War against the Soviet Union and China. To free up resources for operations overseas, the Pentagon shut down hundreds of military installations in the U.S., including a big shipyard and army base in South Boston. Workers there suffered a body blow to their living standards. As the better paying jobs evaporated, so did working class support for the liberal politicians. South Boston had solidly backed Roosevelt and Kennedy. Now it voiced hatred for the Kennedy clan. Boston's bosses, needing to re-gain control of these workers but no longer having the old liberal diet of trade unionism and imperialism, began feeding them gutter racism, crime and drugs.
Whitey and his brother Billy, a conservative politician, led the transition. While Whitey supplied the drugs and violence, Billy tried to attract workers to overt racism by opposing busing for school integration. From this newly impoverished section of Boston, racist leaders like Louise Day Hicks and Jimmy Kelley sprang up to join Bulger. These open fascists got indispensable help from the media, which covered their every word, and from the Kennedy-run Democratic Party, which never censured them. In the mid-1970s, PLP battled these racist forces in the streets, exposed their connection to the main rulers and brought down their chief organization, ROAR. We won many white workers away from the racists.
The Bulgers and the rest have always served the interests of the biggest capitalists. Whitey remains free because of his role as a high-level "protected informant" for the FBI. He has done some of the rulers' dirtiest work. In 1981, the main wing of the ruling class was trying to rob the Soviet Union of revenue by keeping oil prices at rock bottom. But the move punished domestic U.S. oil producers, too, and they were near rebellion. To send a clear message about state power, Bulger orchestrated the murder of Roger Wheeler, a Tulsa oil man whose business partners included executives at major domestic Oil Patch firms like Phillips and Williams. Bulger's FBI ties exempted him from prosecution.
Brother Billy serves the same masters. In 1997, as a reward for misleading Southie's workers, the Kennedy clan had him appointed president of the University of Massachusetts, which houses the JFK Library. At Bulger's installation, the chairmen of both General Motors and General Electric paid homage to a man whose followers had thrown stones at black schoolchildren.
But elevating Billy knocked him off his politician's soapbox. And the liberal press now makes Whitey Public Enemy Number One. It once used to say things like, "You needed shoes for your kid? Whitey took care of it" (LA Times, 9/23/99). Today's U.S. ruling class has marginalized the Bulgers because, as it builds for war, it requires allegiance to a nation, not a neighborhood. One purpose of the assault on Whitey is to discredit the mayoral candidacy of Peggy Davis-Mullen, an avowed fan of both Bulgers, who is campaigning for "neighborhood," that is, segregated schools. Such two-bit racism is not enough for U.S. rulers who plan to retake Iraq's oilfields by force and some day confront China's growing military might. They need soldiers ready to commit imperialist genocide. Under capitalism, cracking down on corruption often means disciplining
society for war.
Protest Boston Cops' Racist Murder Of Two Youths
BOSTON, May 9 -- In the wake of the Cincinnati rebellion against killer cops, 50 students and several professors packed into a classroom at Roxbury Community College on April 25 to hear family and close friends of Ricky Bodden and Carlos Garcia talk about the murders of these two young men at the hands of Boston cops. The room was filled with sorrow and anger as speakers revealed the same old story--lying police and young black and Latino victims who are criminalized.
Ricky Bodden was shot in the back of the neck as he was running from the police. Witnesses say he was unarmed, but the police "found" a gun. Carlos Garcia, unarmed, was shot in his car seven times after the police finally trapped the car, and Carlos couldn't get out because of a jammed door. They called it a "suicide," citing as "evidence" despairing lyrics they found in his wallet!
Another speaker exposed the true role of the police as the "security guards of the rich" and the ruling class's first line of defense against the working class. She gave overwhelming evidence that the police cannot be reformed because the courts and the government systematically protect their crimes. Discussion followed on what can be done to stop police terror. Students were invited to join Progressive Labor Party's May Day March.
Today, a follow-up meeting planned a fund-raising event to raise money for a headstone for Carlos Garcia. We also aim to publicize the Grand Jury's decision to charge the Cincinnati killer cop who murdered Timothy Thomas with a misdemeanor!
Workers Student Alliance CHALLENGE Supplement
STILL NEED TO SHUT DOWN HARVARD!
CAMBRIDGE, MA, May 9 -- The student sit-in in Massachusetts Hall calling for the elimination of poverty wages at Harvard University has ended. For 21 days, students had occupied Mass Hall demanding a $10.25 minimum wage plus benefits for all Harvard workers. They courageously exposed "liberal" Harvard's hypocrisy as a corporation getting rich from oppression of its own workers. Dining, clerical, custodial and building service workers walked the sit-in picket line shoulder to shoulder with students.
But we should make no mistake about it--all that Harvard bosses "agreed" to was a committee of 19 (including only three workers) to make "non-binding recommendations" on wages and benefits. In other words they agreed to exactly nothing. Harvard's workers are still making poverty wages. "Non-binding committee studies" are nothing new. They've been screwing workers for centuries. Only a general strike by all Harvard workers and supported by thousands of Harvard students can force these liberal fascist bosses to give up even a tiny part of their billions.
Beware of any "settlement" worked out by Harvard bosses and AFL-CIO lawyers and supported by liberal ruler Kennedy and John "massacre man" Kerrey. The AFL-CIO has been selling out workers for 46 years and they're not about to change. And Kennedy, Kerry & Kompany, like Harvard, are servants of the dominant Eastern Establishment wing of the U.S. ruling class. They oppress billions of workers throughout the world. They preach "support" for workers' rights -- they "backed" the sit-in -- in order to win students and workers to support U.S. imperialism and its prospective oil wars in the Mid-East. They're not about to offer a living wage to any workers, much less those at Harvard. Their job is to make profits, not give them away.
During this period, workers and students have fought much more militantly, which is why this "agreement" has been worked out, to sap that militancy. On May 3, dining workers took a unanimous strike authorization vote. They've held two rallies where over 250 workers and hundreds of students picketed Mass Hall and stopped traffic. One banner read, "Workers and Students Unite to Shut Down Harvard." These dining workers, in particular, are fed up with Harvard's terrible treatment of them. If encouraged and supported, they could force a call for a campus-wide strike.
But they're up against a local union leadership that, following the antics of the national AFL-CIO, allowed the bosses to divide the workers into a patchwork of various separate unions, enabling them to pick off groups of workers one at time. The previous dining workers' union leadership accepted a two-tier wage system, denying most workers wages and even unemployment insurance during the summer; accepted a 5-year contract with a no-strike clause; allowed the bosses to force workers to take vacation time during school vacations and pay the workers for eight months instead of nine.
The growing specter of worker-student unity forced Harvard to move to break it up. They handed out a 3-day suspension without pay to a custodian who was very outspoken in his support of the sit-in. He has addressed many rallies and been very open to PLP.
Throughout the sit-in, we boldly and repeatedly indicted Harvard as a long-time bastion of racism, capitalism and imperialism. We put forward the need to smash capitalism and replace it with communism. We have continued to work with friendly students and workers, though too sporadically. They have been open to PLP's analysis. We have distributed thousands of PLP leaflets and more than 100 CHALLENGES (which could be a lot better).
Students have defended us against red-baiting attacks. The response to our communist analysis from workers has been very positive. No rank-and-file worker has attacked our communist line in this struggle. We were able to win six workers to attend our last worker-student unity meeting. Most importantly, one Harvard dining worker marched on May Day. He liked it and said he wanted to return next year and bring his friends. Strengthening our ties with this worker and the other workers and students will mark a small but important step on the road to communist revolution which would eliminate the elitist, racist, pro-imperialist Harvard.
Racist Horowitz Shouted Down At U. of Washington
SEATTLE, WA., May 1 -- When racist journalist David Horowitz came here today to the University of Washington, he got more than he bargained for. As he tried to spew his fascist filth, anti-racist students defied a mass of cops and a somewhat pro-Horowitz audience and openly challenged him from the floor. The anti-racists' reading of CHALLENGE also played an important positive role in the outcome.
Horowitz was sponsored by the College Republicans. His topic was "freedom of speech" because some campus newspapers chose not to print a racist ad he submitted. (See previous CHALLENGES for a description of Horowitz's racism.) We wanted to oppose him.
Beforehand, a group of black, Latin and white students discussed our strategy. The group's leaders advocated "letting him speak" and simply carrying protest signs. A few of us thought this was wrong. A comrade emphasized that racist speech led to racist actions and that "free speech" is determined by those who hold power. People understood this and were angry at being silent while Horowitz would be spewing his racist garbage. One protester even wrote "No Free Speech For Racists!" on her sign.
Some discussion about communism and reparations (for slavery) caused much debate, but as we walked into the hall, we were silent. We simply sat down in front with our signs and were quiet.
Armed police and security guards were present. Soon it became obvious who they were protecting. As soon as we sat down, a cop told us we couldn't sit there. We moved to the back. Once these cops made it quite clear which side they were on, it encouraged the pro-Horowitz people in the audience to ridicule us. They yelled at us to "sit down" or laughed at us. This angered the protesters, which increased when the question-and-answer part of the program was explained: Horowitz would not give up the mike to allow debate on his answers! People discovered that "free speech" was the last thing Horowitz wanted.
Almost all of his talk was distortion at best and racist lies at worst: "no one in America is oppressed today"; "if it wasn't for the White Christians in the North, there would never have been an anti-slavery movement," etc. We were mad, interrupting him however we could. Every time he'd say something stupid, we would laugh. Cell phones began playing "Yankee Doodle" and "The National Anthem." We shouted to expose his lies.
Horowitz had trouble spreading his garbage so he started insulting us, saying we "needed to learn some manners" and implied we couldn't count. He called us "campus fascists" and said we all got into college "through Affirmative Action." We stood up to debate him while he was talking, despite being "barred." When cops tried to kick out those of us standing, they realized there would always be someone else popping up. They couldn't stop us. Horowitz had no answers for us.
Ignorance is hard to fight, but the response of the militant anti-racists who came to protest him was encouraging. Every one read PLP's leaflet or CHALLENGE. That affected the outcome of this event, even though there was only one comrade there. Others asked to learn more about the Party. Fifteen papers were sold.
We must continue to try to stop racists like Horowitz and work with those people who want to get rid of racism wherever it exists.
Workers Studies Conference Needs Action
PLP will be well represented at a May 16-19 conference at Youngstown State University of teachers, workers and artists who will discuss the crisis facing the working class from the attacks by bosses and their police in Ohio and across the nation. Our members and friends aim to prominently present the long history of the international working-class fight for communism.
Past conferences have defined Working Class Studies as one of recovering and preserving working-class history and culture but missed the purpose of such study of the working class: the abolition of the social relations of capitalism, and the institution of communist-led workers power. While we recognize the importance of preserving and recapturing working-class history, the former is more crucial to workers worldwide.
The conference site is less than 300 miles from the fascist shooting of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed 19 year-old Cincinnati black youth. This is the 15th shooting of a black person there since 1995. Anti-racist rebellions followed the latest shooting (see Challenge April 28). It was the first major race rebellion in Cincinnati since Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. Black workers and youth in Cincinnati appeared willing to resist capitalist violence with working-class violence.
The rebellion was a cumulative protest against racist discrimination by Cincinnati's bosses who had systematically stolen work from the city's black workers. This shooting follows a whole spate of killings in major cities throughout the U.S. It continues a history of attacks on black workers from the slave trade to lynchings and "criminal justice" frame-ups. They are often carried out by cops who represent the bosses' strategy of a divided working class which maximizes profits while minimizing the chance of working-class unity.
Like Cincinnati, Youngstown's working-class is under attack. Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube shut their doors and threw tens of thousands of workers into the streets. Capitalist overproduction and rivalry with Japanese steel bosses caused this crisis. Many fled Youngstown looking for jobs. Today, Youngstown's unemployment rate is about twice the rest of the state and the nation. Youngstown's working class has nowhere to turn.
Youngstown's biggest industry today is prisons. The nation's largest private prison company opened one several years ago. Prisoners essentially are sold into long-term bondage. Meanwhile, thousands of unemployed black and white workers laid off when the steel mills closed down live in dire poverty in Youngstown, right between the burned out mills and the new private prisons.
Friends of PLP who live near Youngstown should come to the conference to win participants to a pro-working-class understanding and support the struggle to build communism.
LETTERS
Workers of the World, Write!
Soup Kitchen Eats Up May Day
The weeks leading up to May Day were exciting ones in our church soup kitchen. Twelve of the regular volunteers pledged to march and to reach out to friends and family. We also presented our guests with a May Day leaflet that grew from a discussion about what a world would be like under workers' control. The kitchen volunteer, who distributes 10 Challenges in her apartment building, and I canvassed two floors there and met some very nice and interesting people. The priest even put the March notice in the bulletin, announcing it two Sundays in advance.
Importantly, there was some class struggle occurring simultaneously. Our church has been pressing for a boycott of Spanish tourism because of a union leader there who was fired for exposing brutal intimidation of immigrant women workers in Granada. (One marcher carried a poster: "Rehire Miguel, Fascists go to hell!") We've also taken a leadership role in fighting racist police brutality and discussed linking up with an anti-racist church in Cincinnati for joint communication and action. Most important, though, are the friendships that have grown in supporting each other in joyful and difficult times and in carrying out the mission of the kitchen.
By 6:30 on May Day morning, 25 marchers had shown up at the church! The day was glorious. One worker proudly carried a poster from our learning center: "Workers are smart, Workers are capable, And when we read and think, Our power is inescapable!"
Feedback from the marchers was very positive. The great spirit of a militant, multi-racial presence in a working-class neighborhood, the active participation of youth and children, the quality of the speeches -- all were applauded.
On the real May Day ("St. Joseph the Worker") Tuesday, we had an ecumenical prayer service to share experiences of exploitation and oppression and to unite the neighborhood to fight racist unemployment. Alliance with religious people is not only possible, it is essential. Four more people want to join PLP or be in a study group.
In struggle (For Jeez and Cheese),
The Red Churchmouse
S. African Worker Felt At Home On May Day
A friend of mine, raised in South Africa, drove to the Washington May Day March. He had to leave early, and we didn't get to speak to each other at the march. Afterwards, I said it was very different from most anti-capitalist marches in the U.S., much more militant and openly revolutionary. I asked him what he thought. He said he liked it a lot. "I felt at home--reminded me of all the marches and protests and demonstrations I participated in or witnessed at home over 15 years, or so."
Considering that he was comparing this May Day to the militant, heroic marches in South Africa of the 1980s and '90s , that's a mighty strong compliment! When the experience and knowledge of the past is taken up by militant young workers, there is no stopping the revolutionary movement!
Red Marcher
More Marchers?
It's Up to Us
We had a great group of students and teachers from several New York City high schools on our May Day bus and shared good conversation both down to Washington and back.
On our return, our bus co-captain, a new marcher and new member of PLP, suggested we ask everybody on the bus to pose a question (to encourage people to talk). Brilliant idea! Almost everybody participated in a lively exchange.
Some examples of questions we posed were: Why were there no other political groups on the march? Why couldn't we march in front of the White House? What were the bystanders thinking? Although we march every year, why don't things change? Why weren't there more people? What does the red flag symbolize?
Some interesting answers and comments included: one comrade said our May Day march is the only one explicitly for communist revolution. Our Party -- in contrast to the old communist movement -- believes the working class is capable of fighting directly for a communist society. We openly connect struggles for reforms in the system to the necessity of revolution. Other so-called revolutionary groups put communist politics in the distant future, if they talk about them at all.
Someone else noted that the red flag traces back to 1871 and the Paris Commune, where tens of thousands of communists were lined up in the cemetery and shot. The red in the communist flag came to symbolize the blood shed in the fight for communism. Although one comrade said he loved the sea of red flags, another marcher suggested next time we make more signs explaining to bystanders exactly what our movement represents and fights for.
Several marchers commented on the generally warm welcome we received on the streets of Washington, with bystanders chanting with us, pumping their fists, and even joining the march. We also discussed how the goal of our march is not to "change" Bush or any other capitalist politician's mind but rather to mobilize our forces and strengthen ourselves for the fight ahead.
The overall mood of our marchers was enthusiastic. We realized there are many more people we could draw to our movement. Although some people we invited at the last minute could not attend, others did come, and we realized we need to start planning earlier. We estimate we could double our turnout next year.
The answer to the question of why there were not more people? It's up to us!
High School Reds
Workers Fed Up
I'm a member of PLP and did not bring as many people as I would have liked to the Washington May Day March but I must say those who did come were very enthusiastic about the turnout and the response of the people watching. As we marched I saw a woman on the roof of a church waving her fist in support.
I spoke briefly about the need to organize ourselves as a class to confront the bosses and their system of exploitation. People came to the mike and agreed with those sentiments. On the return trip, I again asked people to take the microphone to share their impressions of the march. I felt great when these workers said they want to be part of this movement to fight back against this system of misery and exploitation. I think workers are becoming fed up with the ruling class's attacks. They're realizing their only alternative is to join with us to get rid of capitalism once and for all with a communist revolution.
New York Taxi Driver
CPUSA Made Right Choice In Scottsboro Case
The May 9 CHALLENGE supplement contains a fine review of the Public TV documentary about the 1931 frame-up of nine young black men -- the "Scottsboro Boys" -- in Birmingham, Alabama. They were convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death for a "rape" of two white women that never occurred. The review reveals that the documentary itself committed a rape by deliberately obscuring and massively downplaying the primary role the Communist Party (CP) played in leading the defense, exposing the frame-up and eventually --after a seven-year struggle -- saving all nine from being hanged. That was well brought out in the review and absorbingly written.
However, I feel the reviewer erred in claiming the CP made a "mistake" by hiring a "famous trial lawyer," Sam Leibowitz, for the re-trial because "he was anti-communist and close to the Democratic Party, the party of Southern segregationists." This decision must be objectively evaluated in the context of the times in which it was made.
Given the defenselessness of the Scottsboro boys, being framed in a deeply racist South where black people were tortured and killed, could the CP have told these nine young men that although it had halted the death sentence...for the moment, and could obtain an excellent, nationally famous trial lawyer for their re-trial, that they wouldn't hire him because, (1) he is an anti-communist and "we are communists," and (2) because he is close to the Democratic Party that is supported by a majority of the voters but not by us (the CP)?
Could the CP have refused to hire Leibowitz despite the difficulty of finding someone as able and as willing as he? I think not and the CP correctly did not take that approach, and did hire Leibowitz.
Leibowitz, an "anti-communist," agreed to unite with the CP under the national glare of general anti-communist and racist attitudes. Such a public decision certainly had a positive influence on many sections of the population and added to the CP's courageous efforts.
Finally, some people who become involved in fighting racism can definitely move to the Left, especially if communists are present and influencing the situation, as happened here. True, Leibowitz did not move in that direction, but one of the two women who falsely accused the Scottsboro Boys of rape did! Ruby Bates "became a defense witness, admitting she (and other witnesses) lied," and then became pro-communist in her activity and politics, if not an actual member.
PLP's movement into mass organizations, unions, etc., is based on this factor -- people can be won over in groups filled with anti-communism and whose members belong to the Democratic or Republican parties.
People who commit their time and efforts to the fight against racism and ally with communists are worthwhile having anytime.
A New York reader
Fight Anti-Chinese Racism
The arrest of two Chinese computer scientists, Hai Li and Kai Xu, accused of industrial espionage, is not an isolated incident. They worked for the New Jersey-based Lucent Technology. The FBI charged them with selling software for voice mail over the Internet to Datang, a high-tech company owned by the Chinese government. It's being called "one of the most devastating case of industrial espionage ever."
These arrests occurred just a few weeks after the U.S. spy plane landed in Hainan Island, China. It's still there. The arrests followed a couple of days after Bush announced his Star Wars Lite plan to build a limited missile defense system against "rogue" states (China, North Korea, etc.).
All this has spawned a rash of racist anti-Chinese incidents. Last month, the national syndicated cartoonist Oliphant filled a drawing with racist Chinese stereotypes. A radio talk show on WQLZ in Springfield, Ill., called for the U.S. government to intern Chinese-Americans in concentration camps as it did with Japanese-Americans during World War II. The hacks from the United Association of Union Plumbers, Pipefitters and Sprinkler Fitters spent $500,000 in radio ads during baseball games urging a boycott of Chinese products. This type of racism, making China the focus of all that is wrong with globalization (imperialism), sucks in many in the anti-globalization movement. Racism has always been part of the bosses' war plans. Workers and students must fight them both.
A NYC Anti-Racist
TO OUR WEB READERS: This issue of CHALLENGE includes another special supplement, on the film "Scottsboro" and how it deliberately hides the role of communists in that anti-racist struggle. Again, we ask our web readers to help us keep both versions of our newspaper (the digital one and the printed one) spreading communist politics as an antidote to the poisong of capitalism and all its different ideologies. You can help subscribing to the printed version of the paper or sending a contribution. One year sub to CHALLENGE cost 15 dollars. You can send a check or MO made out to Challenge periodicals and mail it to PLP: GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202, USA.
CHALLENGE, May 9, 2001
Communism lives! March on May Day!
Rebellion Rocks Racist Rulers!
a href="#‘Listen to the Youth: Fight Back!’">‘L"sten to the Youth: Fight Back!’
Continue Struggle Vs. Police Terror!
a href="#Strike Against Ltv, Union Bosses’ Gang-Up!">"trike Against LTV, Union Bosses’ Gang-Up!
SSEU Protests Cincy Cop Murderer
Quebec Militants Must Be Won to PLP
a href="#‘The Hands That Labor No Longer Want to Serve Any Boss’">‘T"e Hands That Labor No Longer Want to Serve Any Boss’
a href="#PLP Leads Resistance To Horowitz’s Racist Roadshow">"LP Leads Resistance To Horowitz’s Racist Roadshow
Worker-Student Unity Hits Liberal Harvard Hypocrites
IN MEMORIAM: Grandell "Tony" Pollard
a href="#Cabbies Rip Taxi Cops’ Brutal Beating of Driver">"abbies Rip Taxi Cops’ Brutal Beating of Driver
Young Rebels of Ethiopia Need Red Leadership
CIA Bay of Pigs Fiasco Hatched Generation of Terrorists
"Whither Cuba?" – from a friend in Cuba
LETTERS
Cincy Rebels, PLP Need Each Other
Capitalism Breeds Prostitution
a href="#Film Distorts Communist Action In Freeing ‘Scottsboro Boys’">CH"LLENGE SUPPLEMENT: Film Distorts Communist Action In Freeing ‘Scottsboro Boys’
a href="#KKK—A Racist Beast Unleashed By Steel Bosses of Birmingham">"KK—A Racist Beast Unleashed By Steel Bosses of Birmingham
Another Racist Cross Burning in Indiana
Communism lives! March on May Day!
Thousands of May Day marchers, under the Progressive Labor Party’s banners will prove it on April 28, in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, CA, and on May 1st in Mexico City, San Salvador, Dominican Republic, Bogota, Quito and Calcutta.
The bosses love to boast that communism has died. They are wrong. The specter of communism will haunt them for as long as it takes to drive the last capitalist from the face of the earth. True, our class has endured a terrible defeat. The old communist movement, which carried out great revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, destroyed itself with its own internal political weaknesses. Capitalism now rules over every country in the world. But the rulers who gloat over this setback won’t have the upper hand forever. Every day their system exposes its disgraceful inability to solve the atrocities it creates. Here, in part, is the sorry record the capitalist world and its "only remaining super-power" can boast of in the ten years since the Soviet Union’s collapse:
- Nearly three billion people in the world live on less than $3 a day;
- Slavery is as strong as ever in many countries;
- AIDS ravages the entire continent of Africa, plus many other countries;
Today’s "peace" has dozens of wars all over the globe, forcing workers to become cannon fodder for the profit interests of old and newly-made billionaires. U.S. rulers are gearing for their next oil war in the Persian Gulf. Their "peace process" has turned the Middle East into a bloody tinderbox. Chinese, Russian and European rulers are trying to overtake the U.S. in a rivalry that must ultimately lead to another world war;
Racism and police terror have become the order of the day in most countries. U.S. rulers are intensifying their preparations for strong-arm fascist rule. Their slave labor-style "Welfare reform" is a sign of things to come.
- The U.S. ruling class has criminalized unemployment by jailing 1.3 million non-violent "offenders" and creating the world’s largest prison population, exceeding two million.
- Over 350,000 layoffs in the US since January. In Mexico, workers’ wages average 25% less than in 1980.
The profit system will never produce anything better than this! But even worse than the horror of daily life under capitalist dictatorship is the illusion that things can’t change. This Big Lie, more than any law or act of state terror, keeps the bosses in power and ruling over us.
Our Party’s marches and actions this May Day should be viewed in light of their potential for growth. Our present numbers fall far short of the millions needed for revolution.
However, we can grow, perhaps slowly for now, but always planting the seeds for dramatic growth in the future.
Already the signs are pointing to a period of increasing class struggle. Thousands of workers in Cincinnati rose up against racist police murders of unarmed black men. Tens of thousands of students and others have been conducting militant struggle in Quebec against "globalization," the bosses’ name for imperialism. Campus movements are gaining steam against the exploitation of workers by university bosses and by certain U.S. companies. Workers are striking — from garment workers in Los Angeles to Domino refinery workers in Brooklyn to brewery workers in Bogota to mass transit workers in LA to Seattle newspaper workers to healthcare workers in El Salvador and on and on. In some of these strikes and in several other struggles, PLP has played a leading role.
These struggles, and others sure to erupt as the contradictions of capitalism sharpen, are fertile ground for our Party’s growth. Participating in them and putting forth our revolutionary communist politics will influence many. Our activities in Cincinnati prove this again. A handful of Party comrades who brought our ideas to thousands of rebellious workers there, created the possibility of winning some and establishing a continuing presence. Our daily participation on the job, in unions, on campuses, at schools, in the bosses’ military and in various mass organizations teaches us how to learn from our mistakes and earn the right to call ourselves the leadership of the working class.
If we don’t do this, the bosses will continue to use these movements to mislead the working class into supporting them and their plans for war.
The spreading of our ideas through the mass sale of CHALLENGE can give the working class the tools of revolution.
Capitalists talk about the "bottom line"—profit vs. loss. They think only in terms of money. We communists have a bottom line too—the growth of the Progressive Labor Party. We think in terms of people—the international working class and its needs. We must not be deterred by the defeats of the past, from which we can learn many lessons. But especially, we must never give the bosses the victory of conceding the future to them. The future belongs to our class and will be communist! The future begins now, with the decision to join and build the PLP.
Let every May Day marcher not yet in the Party, as well as many others who didn’t or couldn’t march, consider this. Becoming and remaining a communist is the most profound and best choice one can make in life. We invite you to make it. Join PLP!
Rebellion Rocks Racist Rulers!
CINCINNATI, OH, April 13 —"To see the fear in the faces of those cops for those few minutes was good. I’ll always remember that," declared a black youth describing hundreds of workers and youth chasing the cops out of the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood. They were rebelling against the racist murder of 19-year old Timothy Thomas. The rebellion, and the warm response to PLP, is a sure sign that the racist rulers will have a tough time building a loyal, committed army willing to kill and die for their oil profits.
Timothy was unarmed, with a three-month-old son, starting a new job and planning to be married. He was killed over outstanding traffic warrants, many of them for "not wearing seatbelts." The cops have killed fifteen black men here in the last five years, five since November.
The average annual income in Cincinnati is $14,420 per person, but in Over-the-Rhine it's just $5,359. Some 48% of area residents are on public assistance. Over the past five years, the unemployment rate for the greater Cincinnati region has averaged 3.8%. But the jobless rate among black workers in Over-the-Rhine is nearly 30%.
Militant workers and youth surrounded and took over the City Council for three hours. They shattered the glass entrance to the police station, and ripped down the American flag. They repeatedly stood up to the cops’ use of rubber bullets, beanbag shotguns, police horses and live ammunition. "If they keep killing us, it ain’t gonna be peaceful," declared one protester.
After four days the mayor admitted, "Despite the best efforts…the [rebellion] is uncontrolled." He imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew, called in State Police reinforcements and threatened to call out the National Guard. Workers had to get passes to leave their homes to go to work.
PLP members from Chicago went to support the rebellion and build the revolutionary communist movement. We distributed 2000 fliers and 200 CHALLENGES. Forty people gave us their names to be contacted.
Cops serve the racist rulers. They are strikebreakers and terrorists, protecting the factory owners and slumlords, bankers and politicians. Integrating the police force, "sensitivity" classes and black police chiefs will not change this basic fact. Detroit has a black mayor, city council and police chief, and the highest ratio of police murders in the country. The bosses have unleashed their killer cops to terrorize black and Latin workers and youth into accepting a future of poverty and war.
The rebels who attacked police headquarters and City Hall, the centers of capitalist power, have the right idea. Racist police terror will never end as long as we are wage slaves under the dictatorship of the billionaires. Only a mass armed movement for communist revolution can put our class in power, and end this racist system.
a name="‘Listen to the Youth: Fight Back!’"></">‘L"sten to the Youth: Fight Back!’
CINCINNATI, OH April 14 — There were tons of riot police at Timothy Thomas’s funeral today. The scene outside the church was one of quiet anger. Another racist cop killing; the tip of the iceberg of all those destroyed by unemployment, prison, drugs, wars and poverty — life under capitalism.
But there was another side. Many workers and youth had said, "Enough!" They marched on City Hall and fought the police. They started thinking about what it would take to bring about permanent change. One man had been part of a group who encouraged the youth to stop fighting, to protect them from the police. He said he knew he was wrong when a youth told him, "We die for drugs, we die for clothes, now we’ll die for freedom." They didn’t need protection. They needed support.
A woman brought poster boards and encouraged everyone to make signs. "We’re tired of crooked cops killing blacks. Fuck the police." "Shoot back." "Listen to the Youth." "Time for Our Curfew to end, Time for the Pigs Curfew to start." "Bush is part of this too, he belongs with the cops."
At the end of the block, some drummers attracted a big crowd. A PLP leader started chanting on the bullhorn, to the beat of the drums, "Racist Cops, You Can’t Hide, We Charge You With Genocide!" More and more people gathered around her. She passed around the bullhorn. One woman spoke about breaking the curfew. Another spoke eloquently about the need to stop the police from killing our sons. We chanted, "We’re Ready, We’re Ready, We’re Ready, " and "Racist Cops, You Can’t Hide…!"
There was not a "black leader" in sight. They were all in the church and in front of the TV cameras. But there was plenty of black working-class leadership.
The PLP leader gave an impassioned speech about the need to bring an end to the whole racist capitalist system and to march on May Day. Applause, more chanting, more speeches. Someone suggested we march. A guy from the NAACP was soundly booed when he said a march would be "too provocative." P. started the rally off. MJ stepped forward, spoke on the bullhorn and we were marching. Everyone on the street followed. As we marched, we picked up more people. Cars honked in support. We had a taste of power. For a short time, the streets belonged to workers and youth.
Then reality hit us in the form of dozens of police, rifles pointed at us, blocking us from going further. We continued the rally in Washington Park. Many said what they had to say. There were disagreements and passion. Some favored violence, others didn’t. Some saw white people as the enemy, others as allies. Some wanted to "civilize" the police, others said that would never happen. This was a day none of us will ever forget. Sometimes change happens slowly, and sometimes quickly. This week was one of the fast ones.
Continue Struggle Vs. Police Terror!
The only riot that took place in Cincinnati was a police riot against the mostly black anti-racist rebels. Police repeatedly shot rubber bullets and beanbag shotguns into unarmed groups at point blank range. Men and women were shot with their hands in the air. Tear gas and pepper spray were used totally indiscriminately. At Timothy Thomas’s funeral, a carload of cops used beanbag shotguns in a drive-by shooting of unarmed mourners. They have been given time off for a "stress leave."
Thousands of workers and youth were arrested. As we go to press, about 65 felony indictments have been issued, and the city prosecutor says he will seek the maximum penalty. Over 600 remain in jail.
PLP members returned to Cincinnati and met with more rebels who want to continue the struggle against racist police terror and free all those arrested. Most are interested in our Party and were invited to May Day. We urge all members and friends to raise resolutions of support for the rebellion in your unions, schools, churches and other mass organizations. Send copies to PLP, PO Box A3156, Chicago, IL 60690. We’ll make sure they get delivered.
a name="Strike Against Ltv, Union Bosses’ Gang-Up!">">"trike Against Ltv, Union Bosses’ Gang-Up!
GARY, IN, April 24 — The bankrupt LTV steel bosses have given us an ultimatum: give up concessions in retirees’ health care and pensions, health care costs, vacations, work rules and however many jobs they see fit, or they will close the doors by the end of the month. These industrial terrorists want us to pay a huge ransom to save their ass.
LTV is trying to survive the crisis of overproduction. The worldwide steel industry has 300 million tons of excess capacity. The collapse of the Russian and Japanese markets, and the slowing of the U.S. economy has left the capitalists with too many steel mills. They are fighting tooth and nail for markets, resources and especially cheap labor.
Eventually this imperialist rivalry must lead to war. This has not been lost on the union leaders and politicians who say that without the steel industry, U.S. bosses won’t be able to "defend the national interest." Only communist revolution can end the cycle of crises and wars that is the very fiber of capitalism. Production for profit must be replaced with production for need.
‘Stand Up For Steel! Bend Over For The Bosses!’
In the face of this emergency, the union leadership is like a deer caught in the headlights. No union meetings have been called; no plans have been made to fight back. Rumor has it that the union has agreed to cut our benefits in return for a seat on the Board of Directors. "Stand Up for Steel" has become "Bend Over for the Steel Bosses!"
Today was a "Steel Forum" day at Indiana University Northwest (IUN). A rogue’s gallery of bankers, businessmen, politicians, academics and union hacks whined about stopping cheap imports, blamed the crisis on bad trade policies, and repeated the chorus, "We’re all in the same boat!" Right — just like the slaves and the slave traders!
About 25 LTV workers crashed the party looking for answers, but didn’t get any. A retired Inland worker took the floor and asked the experts, "What about our pensions? Why are you attacking us?" An IUN professor of economics arrogantly replied, "What are you so angry about?"
The union leaders, bosses and politicians all want to blame foreign steel. But it wasn’t Japanese steel that killed two Bethlehem workers, or Russian steel that killed two Inland workers in deadly explosions last winter. Where was their "restraint" when the bosses imported the technology to wipe out tens of thousands of jobs and increase worker productivity by 174%? Where were they when USX bought a mill in Slovakia to pay workers $2.00 an hour?
We must prepare to strike for our jobs, pensions and health care. Begging for mercy and throwing retirees to the wolves will only make matters worse. We should take a page from the workers and youth in Cincinnati who took to the streets to fight racist police terror. The industrial terrorists deserve no less.
SSEU Protests Cincy Cop Murderer
NEW YORK, NY, April 18 — Tonight, the delegates assembly of Social Services Employees Union (SSEU) Local 371 overwhelmingly passed a resolution introduced by a PLP member instructing the Local to send a message of "sympathy and outrage" to the family of Timothy Thomas, a victim of racist police murder in Cincinnati, Ohio. This occurred during a discussion of how to organize against the latest sellout contract facing city workers. As aspects of fascism grow — increased racism, intensified attacks on and disciplining of the working class and mass organizations — PLP must attempt to answer them.
Five years ago the corrupt and pro boss union leadership of the District Council 37, who bargain for most non-uniformed city worker unions here, used massive vote fraud to force through a terrible five-year contract. Scores of corrupt union officials and staffers have been convicted of this fraud and others await trial.
That contract: (1) allowed the city bosses to use workers in the slave labor Workfare program as replacements for salaried unionized city workers; (2) Froze wages for two years; (3) Instituted a two-year below-entry wage rate for newly-hired workers; and, (4) Instituted give-backs in fringe benefits and work rules.
During this same period, racist NYC cops had tortured Abner Louima and murdered Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond and others. Countless more had suffered the indignity of being stopped by the police for the crime of BWBB, "Breathing While Being Black.
SSEU members are angry! We don’t want to accept another rotten contract. We don’t want to see union rate jobs replaced with Workfare. We don’t want to see ourselves, our children or someone else’s child become the next victim of racist police murder! We must weave the seeming separate fibers of class oppression into a fabric of class-conscious understanding which can turn righteous anger into class struggle for communist revolution!
Quebec Militants Must Be Won to PLP
QUEBEC CITY, CANADA April 21 — PLP members from Boston University (BU) and St. Lawrence University (SLU) joined thousands of workers and students protesting the Free Trade Area of Americas plan (FTAA) at the Summit of Americas. This city was a war zone as a highly militarized, fascist police force protected the capitalist leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations. The U.S. hopes to use the FTAA as a weapon against the penetration of European and Asian imperialists in Latin America.
Friday’s meeting was overshadowed by fierce street battles between protestors and heavily armed police. Hundreds of youth tore down a section of the several-mile-long security fence surrounding the summit. Everyone cheered. Then we toppled the inner fence. Protestors grabbed metal barriers and used them to battle the cops. Cries of "Revolution!" were everywhere. The police used tear gas and pepper gas, but protesters hurled the gas canisters back at them.
When the cops finally began forcing people back, we began smashing the sidewalk and hurling small pieces at them. They answered with concussion grenades and small explosive devices. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the cops, but were pretty harmless. Amid this battle, a small group of "peaceful protesters" formed a line in front of the police, to keep us from throwing rocks, but the rock throwing continued.
Before and after the many battles, we passed out a PLP leaflet in English and French titled, "Whether Free or Fair Trade, Capitalism is about Exploitation and War." It called for worker/student unity to eliminate global capitalism and march on May Day. This is in stark contrast to the pro-capitalist leadership of the anti-globalization movement, including the Global Exchange, whose agent Danaher we exposed the week before when he spoke at SLU. As a result, several SLU students are building for May Day.
While driving to Quebec City on Saturday, BU students were searched by Canadian Customs police. We had to get rid of all literature, including PLP anti-globalization pamphlets. We had to show ID as they ran background checks on us. Each van was searched for 35 minutes. All bags and jacket pockets were opened and searched. All notebooks and loose papers were read for protest information. After this fascist search and seizure, it was on to Quebec City.
We joined thousands of students from Laval University in Quebec and the Canadian Federation for Students. Laval is one of Canada’s major public universities. FTAA will threaten public education (just as NAFTA sparked the 18-month UNAM student strike in Mexico City in 1999). We marched to the Plains of Abraham (the site of Friday’s street fighting), and joined the Operation Quebec Printemps march, dominated by the Quebec separatist movement.
We talked with many marchers about internationalism and the need to fight all bosses, including those in Quebec. We pointed out the need to destroy capitalism, not just the FTAA. Many agreed that capitalism doesn’t work, and liked the sign in French calling for a worker-student alliance and "No to the FTAA and to capitalism." "National liberation" only plays into the hands of European imperialists and will not end capitalism.
The march then joined over 30,000 Canadian and U.S. workers in the union march, while others left to take direct action against the police. Many workers wanted to participate in this action, but the union leaders would not support anything "illegal." A PLP member urged workers to support the students and called for a worker-student alliance.
On Saturday evening, we joined with the other BU students. The cops fired tear gas, quickly engulfing us. Hundreds of students formed a solidarity ring and chanted, "The Cops, The Courts, The Ku Klux Klan, All a Part of the Bosses’ Plan," and "This is what democracy looks like! That is what fascism looks like!" while pointing to the wall, and the cloud of gas. We spoke with many fighters about the rise of fascism in the U.S., Canada and throughout the hemisphere, and how those in power break their own laws whenever they’re threatened.
The mass militancy was inspiring. But many of the protesters identify with anarchism because they don’t believe communism can work. Anarchism will never lead to the end of capitalism. We must win these fighters to a long-term perspective of building a mass communist PLP with the deepest ties to the working class. We have to oppose the growth of prison labor and smash racism, the main tool the bosses use to attack all workers. Communist revolution is the only real, long-term solution to eradicating oppression and exploitation.
a name="‘The Hands That Labor No Longer Want to Serve Any Boss’"></">‘T"e Hands That Labor No Longer Want to Serve Any Boss’
LOS ANGELES, CA, April 24 — The following letters are part of a discussion with a group of workers who’ve been striking Hollander Home Fashions for nearly 50 days.
Dear CHALLENGE,
I’ve been working for Hollander Home Fashion for over 25 years. The struggles against these bosses haven’t been easy. In 1979 when we unionized into the ILGWU [now UNITE] the bosses called the Migra [Immigration Service] and deported many workers. But despite this, the union won.
Workers like myself, slaving away here for many years, have left part of our lives in these dangerous machines that produce thousands of pillows a day. Even though my bosses are rich with money, they’re poor in their hearts. They lack intelligence because with what they’ve lost in this strike, they could have paid us a pension plan or a 401K.
Bernard Hollander began by selling pillows door to door. He’s the son of Jewish immigrants who fled Nazi persecution in Europe during World War II. Now, thanks to the sweat and blood of thousands of workers, Hollander has a U.S. empire of eight plants, with over 1,000 workers and annual profits topping $200 million.
I want to express through CHALLENGE that I feel proud of all my striking co-workers, especially the women who’ve shown courage and anger against the bosses and their injustices.
We hope all workers and students who read this article help and support us however they can. Thank you,
Zorro
Dear CHALLENGE
I’ve worked at Hollander for 20 years. I’ve left my whole youth in this factory. Ever since I started I’ve seen so many injustices that, for me, this strike answers all of them. They’ve always made us work overtime. The speed-up is unbearable. The minimum wage is our average pay. Our struggle for a pension plan or 401K is just.
The bosses say they’re offering a "good contract": 15¢ an hour for the first year; 25¢ the second; and zero the third year — nothing!
But I don’t understand why the boss, who has so much money to buy new machines, refuses to give us a retirement plan or a wage increase. And worse—the new machines enabled him to cut our pay 50% at the beginning of the year. Fifteen years ago three workers operated one of these machines and we earned more. Then they lowered it to two workers per machine. Now only one worker operates it and we make less money. What is this?
Discontented Worker
Dear CHALLENGE,
CHALLENGE brings news of the struggle, the idea of uniting workers. We’re on strike to fight for our rights. As long as the oppressor exists, we’ll be ready to defend our struggle with our fists and make it worthwhile.
"Let the drums of struggle sound, and with them the beat of our hearts. It’s the song of the hands that labor, and that no longer want to serve any boss."
We’re going to the May Day March to let thousands of other workers and students know about our struggle.
The Poet
CHALLENGE comment:
The bosses exist to make maximum profits by exploiting workers to the fullest. All the bosses are thieves who rob the value we produce. It doesn’t matter if they’re Mexicans, Salvadorans, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Chinese or Anglo-Saxon U.S bosses.
Bosses buy new machines to reduce costs and make more profits, not to benefit workers. They must increase production, reduce wages and sell more products to pay for the machines. In essence, the workers are paying for these new machines.
Under capitalism, this robbery is legal. If workers rebel, as in this strike, the bosses try to smash it using their state apparatus — the courts, the police and their laws, including anti-union restrictions.
That’s why Progressive Labor Party is building a mass revolutionary communist movement out of the workers’ daily struggles, to smash exploitation and the whole capitalist system. As we support this and other strikes, we’re fighting to build a new communist society in which workers produce for the benefit of our entire international working class, not for the bosses’ profits. No matter what the outcome of this strike, we call on Hollander workers to continue fighting for a secure future for their families by joining PLP and the long-range fight for a communist society.µ
a name="PLP Leads Resistance To Horowitz’s Racist Roadshow">">"LP Leads Resistance To Horowitz’s Racist Roadshow
DAVIS, CA, April 16 —Anti-racists, led by PLP’ers, blasted racist journalist David Horowitz when he appeared here today to again spew his fascist filth at the Univ. of California/Davis campus. Horowitz had taken out advertisements in college newspapers across the country claiming that black people "should be thankful" for what this country has done for them (yeah, racist terror and living conditions); that "White Christians" organized the anti-slavery movement and that poverty and unemployment were due to "defects" in black people’s character, not because of the bosses’ profit drive.
When Horowitz recently appeared at the Univ. of California/Berkeley, we only protested outside. But today at UC/Davis we learned from that. Here it was a different story.
The entire front section of the room where Horowitz was speaking was dressed in black, organized by "100 Black Scholars" to protest Horowitz’s racism. While a majority were black, it was truly a multi-racial group.
We got into the room and when Horowitz took the mike, we began to chant loudly, "Horowitz, Cops, and the Ku Klux Klan, All a part of the bosses’ plan!" Although some of us were very nervous, we overcame it. When we let up, Horowitz tried again, but we started chanting once more. Many anti-racist students gave Horowitz the finger.
We also raised the banner that our East Coast comrades had sent us: "Horowitz Is The Racist Of The Year." Though forced to leave, we kept chanting. The majority of the audience cheered us loudly.
Later, all the other protesting students walked out in the middle of Horowitz’s speech. We had plenty of CHALLENGES. Many people asked us, "Could I get one of those?" "What newspaper is that?…" We said it was PLP’s communist paper. We distributed 80 CHALLENGES. More than 75% of the protesters got the paper. About 15 people signed up to find out more about May Day and PLP.
Outside the hall, students gave spontaneous speeches exposing Horowitz as a racist and a liar. One speaker, who signed up for May Day, blamed the capitalist system for racism. A PLP speaker said Horowitz was only a little racist; the big ones were those who paid for Horowitz’s cross-country "tour." The PLP’er invited everyone to march on May Day against racism and capitalism.
Later we discovered that Horowitz has received $3.5 million since 1988 for advancing his fascist views. (The Nation, 7/3/00). Being a racist pays millions in capitalist society. Under communism, racists like Horowitz will pay — and be wiped out.
This anti-Horowitz protest showed anti-racists in action. As the song goes, "Black and Brown and White Unite on May Day." That’s the road to communism.
Worker-Student Unity Hits Liberal Harvard Hypocrites
CAMBRIDGE, MA, April 23 — Recently the struggle against poverty wages at Harvard University has reached new heights. About 50 Harvard students have occupied Massachusetts Hall since April 18 demanding a $10.25 minimum wage plus benefits for all Harvard workers. They have courageously exposed "liberal" Harvard’s hypocrisy as a corporation enriching itself from oppressing its own workers. They’ve also exposed how the boom of the ’90s was achieved by cutting workers’ standard of living. Dining workers and custodians have walked the sit-in picket line shoulder to shoulder with students. The potential for unity is far-reaching.
Harvard is outsourcing (subcontracting) jobs to non-union companies, cutting workers’ wages and benefits. Outsourcing also helps maintain sub-minimum, no-benefit jobs. It attacks all workers. Harvard uses outsourcing to threaten all workers with firing unless they accept a contract with lower wages and benefits. The dining workers contract comes up for re-negotiation this June, the custodial workers in 2002. We need to shut down Harvard to get it to stop all outsourcing now.
Harvard has always been a bastion of racism, capitalism and imperialism. It serves the interests of the dominant Eastern Establishment wing of the U.S. ruling class. Harvard’s Board has Directors from Exxon-Mobil, Chase Manhattan Bank, Enron and leading ruling class think-tanks — the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution.
Another important way Harvard serves the ruling class is by producing academic scholarships used to justify racist attacks against workers. Former Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein wrote many racist tracts, including The Bell Curve (1994), advancing the racist lie that black workers (and workers generally) were genetically less intelligent than their bosses, and thus "deserved" to live in poverty. This racist trash justified Clinton’s repeal of welfare with slave labor Workfare. Another Harvard professor, E.O. Wilson, has spewed forth his "Sociobiology — now called "Consilience," — the main form of fascist biodeterminism, a Nazi-style theory of society that influences everything from university science departments to TV programs like Survivor.
PLP members and friends have participated in this struggle. One has been meeting with the Harvard Living Wage campaign — the group conducting the sit-in — for two years. Other comrades have been picketing and distributing leaflets exposing Harvard’s racist role, calling on everyone to march on May Day and linking attacks against workers to increasing inter-imperialist rivalry. We organized a discussion on the 1969 Harvard student strike and how to build a worker-student alliance. A few workers have expressed a desire to go to May Day. Several students want to learn more about communism and PLP.
We have sharpened the class struggle here by encouraging worker/student unity, fighting students’ illusions about liberals like Clinton Secy. of Labor Robert Reich, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Ted Kennedy (who have "supported" the sit-in). We exposed their loyalty to the ruling class as they preach "support" for workers’ rights in order to win students and workers to support U.S. imperialism’s next war in Iraq or elsewhere.
The Harvard bosses are not budging on workers’ demands for a living wage. We must hit Harvard where it hurts. We are struggling with Harvard workers and students to understand that Harvard is our enemy. Moral persuasion or "shaming" Harvard won’t do. We need to fight the enemy, not try to convince them. Instead of destructive hunger strikes, or bringing in millionaire, ruling-class politicians like Kennedy, we must stop Harvard from functioning as much as possible, if not shut it down completely.
The students have begun this by taking over Mass Hall and hindering administration functioning and occupying a growing section of the Harvard yard with a tent-city. However, workers are not being fully mobilized. On April 21, while students protested Harvard President Rudenstine’s speech to incoming freshman, they did not call on students and workers at the general rally to join in. Such a force could have silenced Rudenstine and won a victory for the Harvard Living Wage campaign.
All Harvard workers need to support the students and build the budding worker-student alliance to bolster worker/student unity in the fight of the dining hall workers and the next one involving custodial and building service workers. We are calling for a general Harvard strike if the cops smash the sit-in. Bringing our communist ideas into this struggle can produce the kind of victory the rulers fear the most, the building of the revoutionary movement that can destroy them.
IN MEMORIAM
Grandell "Tony" Pollard died on April 22nd, losing his battle against lung cancer. He was 49 years old and is mourned by a large extended family and friends. Tony had a hard life, suffering many of the horrors of racist capitalist society. He loved May Day and respected fighters for a better world. We will miss him.
a name="Cabbies Rip Taxi Cops’ Brutal Beating of Driver">">"abbies Rip Taxi Cops’ Brutal Beating of Driver
NEW YORK CITY, April 23—Three weeks ago some 300 medallion taxi drivers (yellow cabs) demonstrated at the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), protesting the beating up of cab driver Hisham Amer, an Egyptian immigrant, by two TLC inspectors. Amer nearly died. They also demanded the resignation of TLC Chairperson Diane McKechine.
A PLP driver, one of many speakers at the protest, urged all workers to continue fighting this brutality and to unite multi-racially and internationally against the system which creates these rotten conditions, and uses brutality to try to control us. Many others expressed similar sentiments about the abuses suffered by drivers.
Cabbies are fed up with the TLC because it has refused to suspend or fire the inspectors who beat up Amer. The TLC has even refused to talk to the media about the case. Now there are rumors that the TLC Chair may be forced to resign. When workers unite and fight back, temporary gains may be made.
For years, taxi drivers have been fighting these types of attacks by city officials, including constant police harassment. The attacks increased after a successful taxi strike last year. That action followed mass protests in the last few years by construction and transportation workers.
When this rally ended, a driver congratulated the PLP’er for his speech. We want this driver to come to the May Day march in Washington, D.C.
A few days later, the PLP driver called on the taxi driver group which organized the TLC protest to celebrate May Day in NYC. He was told that a group has invited them to a celebration on May 1, and asked our comrade to represent it at the planning of this event. This opens the door to bring PLP’s communist politics to this group, and to show that May Day shouldn’t simply call for some reforms, but should fight for the only solution to the hell of capitalism—communism.
Young Rebels of Ethiopia Need Red Leadership
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA, April 24 — Thousands of students shut down Addis Ababa University last week, protesting the TPLF government’s fascist policies. The TPLF is a former guerrilla group from Tigray province, then allied with U.S. bosses, which is now in power. Forty youth were killed by police, several hundred injured and over 2,000 jailed. The rebellion spread to the city itself, where hundreds of youth joined the students.
Hunger and disease ravage Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa. In addition to hundreds of thousands of deaths from malaria and AIDS, 40,000 children will die of measles this year. These are preventable diseases, but capitalism is unconcerned with solving such problems. The news media barely mentions these things, while they chatter about so-called human rights abuses elsewhere.
The old ruling group (the Dergue) led by Col. Mengistu, allied with the former USSR and established a corrupt dictatorship. The TPLF overthrew them, made and broke alliances and split people along ethnic lines, enabling it to stay in power.
They jailed tens of thousands, including labor leaders and journalists, and killed many opponents. Then they went to war with former "friends" in Eritrea and also warred among themselves. Meanwhile, they kicked thousands of students out of the university, replacing them with students loyal to the regime. Now even these students are rebelling!
Russian and U.S. capitalists are trying to buy allies, with the Russians sending them arms and U.S. bosses wanting to use Ethiopia against the Sudan. Simultaneously there are uprisings by ethnic nationalists in the south and in the east near Somalia.
These uprisings show the limits of U.S. influence, which seems unable to stabilize many areas of the world. Ethiopia influences central Africa as well as the Middle East and is important militarily. The uprisings also show the limits of rebellion without communist leadership. Lacking that, all these movements will either be used by the big imperialist powers, and/or will remain narrow, nationalist movements that only benefit a few ethnic bosses.
We need to build strong ties with workers and youth from Ethiopia and all over the world as the first steps towards building an international movement that can destroy capitalism worldwide.
CIA Bay of Pigs Fiasco Hatched Generation of Terrorists
It was 40 years ago, April 17, 1961, when 1,500 Cuban exiles of the so-called National Liberation Army 2506 Brigade landed at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba to "free the island from communism." They aimed to establish a beachhead, form a "Provisional government" and call for direct U.S. military intervention to topple the Castro regime,
Two days earlier, several B-29 bombers piloted by U.S. and Cuban CIA agents bombed Cuba from a Nicaraguan base, destroying several of the few planes Cuba had available.
When the invasion began, the Cuban government mobilized the National Revolutionary Militia forces near the Bay of Pigs. Soon 15 light infantry battalions from the Militias, forces from the Rebel Army (the regular army) and the National Revolutionary Police were sent to attack. The Castro government knew it needed a quick victory over the enemy to avoid direct U.S. intervention. The Revolutionary Air Force only had 10 ancient planes and seven pilots who had never seen action. But these pilots were able to down five CIA planes piloted by exiles, sink four ships, stop two invading battalions from reaching land and sink most of the invaders’ supplies.
Meanwhile, the militias, outgunned by the invaders, advanced inch by inch even though they suffered huge casualties. The invaders were disoriented by the bravery of these ill-armed militias who just kept on advancing chanting "Palante" (Forward). And young gunners, 14 to 20 years old, dueled with the invaders’ planes, shooting down several.
Two days later the invaders were on the verge of defeat. Two U.S. Navy destroyers, which had escorted the invading force, sent small rescue boats, mainly to save the invasion leaders. The Militias’ batteries were aimed at those boats, thinking it was another invasion force. The U.S. Navy rescue operation failed.
At that point the invading force surrendered. Many fled into a nearby marsh. When captured most of this mercenary force claimed they "were deceived" by the CIA.
It was the biggest CIA failure ever. From the beginning, the invaders, trained and armed by the CIA in Guatemala, were doomed. U.S. President Kennedy’s promise of air cover never came. The so-called uprising which the CIA said the invasion would spark never materialized. The fiasco just consolidated the Castro government, which allied itself with the Soviet Union.
CIA and Cuban Exiles: Terrorists-At-Large
Sometime later the 2506 Brigade invaders were exchanged for tractors and food supplies. Many then became terrorists and right-wing extremists in the U.S. One of them, Jorge Mas Canosa, founded the Cuban American National Foundation, which financed the kidnappers of Elián González.
The CIA put dozens of other Brigade members to work in "Operation Mongoose" to kill Fidel Castro and topple his regime. They created groups like Omega 7 and Alpha 66, involved in hundreds of bomb attacks on pro-Castro targets in the U.S. and Latin America. Cuban exiles provided the explosives used by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet that blew up Chilean exile socialist Orlando Letelier’s car in Washington, D.C. in 1976. That was the worst case of terrorism involving a foreign government in the U.S. capital. Two former Brigade members are in jail for that murder.
Two weeks after Letelier’s murder, a Cubana Airlines plane was blown up taking off from Barbados, killing all 73 passengers. These included 19 members of Cuba’s national junior fencing team, mostly teenagers, returning from Venezuela. Two Cuban exiles were jailed in Venezuela for that explosion. One was Orlando Bosch, who had left the U.S. after being paroled from a 10-year sentence for firing a rocket at a Polish ship in Miami’s harbor. The other was Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA agent trained as a demolition expert for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He escaped a Venezuela jail disguised as a priest and later surfaced in El Salvador where he became part of the Reagan-Ollie North covert operation to supply the mercenaries fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Posada’s boss at the Ilopango Salvadoran air force base was Felix Rodríguez, the notorious CIA operator who was working inside Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was later sent to chase Che Guevara’s small guerrilla group in Bolivia.
Posada was arrested in Panama last November trying to kill Castro at an international summit meeting. During a 1998 New York Times interview, he admitted masterminding a 1997 wave of bombings of Havana tourist areas from his El Salvador base, killing one Italian tourist. He conceded that Mas Canosa and the Cuban American National Cuba Foundation financed these bombings as well as his escape from Venezuela.
U.S. rulers like to point the finger at "terrorists" and "rogue states." But just look at the long trail of blood left behind by the Cuban exiles or the Osama bin Laden gang (trained by the CIA to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s). When it comes to terrorism, the U.S. is number one.
PLP Routed CIA-Trained Alpha 66 Thugs
On June 19, 1971, PLP organized marches all across the U.S. to protest racist cutbacks and unemployment. The NYC march in Upper Manhattan condemned the racist care and layoffs at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, the area’s biggest employer. The neighborhood was in transition. For many years it was known as "Little Escambray," because of the many right-wing Cuban exiles living there. (A group of anti-Castro guerrillas financed by the CIA had operated a few years back in the hills of Escambray, Cuba.) Alpha 66, the CIA-funded Cuban exile terrorist group (led by mercenaries from the Bay of Pigs invasion) had an office on 181st St, 13 blocks north of the hospital.
As immigrants from the Dominican Republic moved into Upper Manhattan, the Cuban "gusanos" (worms, as they were called) began leaving for Miami or New Jersey. The new Dominican immigrants arrived with an anti-imperialist tradition. A few years before, right-wing Cubans had viciously attacked a demonstration by Dominican leftists protesting the U.S. Marines invasion of that country.
Alpha 66 organized to stop the PLP communist march. When the PLP sound truck parked at 138th St. and Broadway, about two dozen gusanos gathered on rooftops across Broadway and began hurling eggs at our truck. Most of the eggs fell on the helmeted cops supposedly sent to "keep order." When that failed, the gusanos tried to storm the trucks. They were beaten badly. One exile was hit so hard by a muscular Dominican comrade that he fell down the steps from the street to a basement. Not even the cops, sent to protect the exiles, could save them.
Our march of 600 workers and youth proceeded to Columbia Presbyterian. The few right-wing Cuban exiles who dared to follow us did so from a very safe distance. It was the last time Alpha 66 tried any terrorist attacks against us or any other anti-racist and anti-imperialist gathering in that neighborhood.
As the march approached the hospital, the cops tried to prevent us from getting too close. CHALLENGE reported on the cops’ attempt to stop the march: "They feared the workers and patients would hear a program that would combat the lousy conditions there, [but] the demonstrators defied their edict. One PLP’er leaped to the hood of a truck to make that point and others. When he was arrested, the cry of ‘asesinos’ [murderers] was leveled at the cops-flunkeys."
Whither Cuba?
The following is part of a letter sent to a young PLP member by a friend in Cuba.
Unfortunately I believe my country, Cuba, is moving more towards capitalism than towards communism or even socialism. There is a trend towards private corporations even if they work with state-owned companies. This ties us more to the world economic market. Also, the younger generations of Cubans, of which I’m a part (although I don’t think that way) forgets what we’ve fought for and want the cars and houses they believe young Americans have. For this they’re willing to become puppets of the U.S.
As far as I’m concerned I’d rather starve to death than accept the U.S. morality (or lack of it). When I’m feeling optimistic I believe we’re working towards socialism, and will get there some day. When I’m pessimistic I’m afraid it’s just a matter of time before we’re invaded by the rest of the world and must surrender. Of course, if this happens those of us who believe in the revolution will just have to begin again.
About 20% of the population belongs to the Communist Party of Cuba. No other party is allowed. Being a Party member is a privilege. We must maintain a standard as a political guide to other Cubans. A member must have an impeccable record of serving the country. I am very proud of being a member. To become a member one must be recommended by another Party member.
Well, this is for now. I will try to talk about China and the former Soviet Union in other correspondence with you.
A Friend, somewhere in Cuba
Doctors Prized for Profits
BROOKLYN, NY — The March 27th New York Times reported, "Doctors Punished By State, but Prized At Hospitals." At one hospital here, workers were surprised to learn it has more doctors who’ve been disciplined or investigated for negligence than any other in the city.
The article stated that hospitals employing doctors with such records are among the top 20% revenue-generators of all hospitals. These doctors bring in millions of dollars to the hospital industry. One worker pointed out that capitalism is responsible, in its drive for maximum profits.
In a 1999 report, the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences concluded that such negligence kill 44,000 to 98,000 patients each year. NYC hospitals are among the worst in the state at reporting medical mistakes.
The people killed by mistakes are doomed by the capitalist-run healthcare system, although these reports try to shift the blame to healthcare workers. This system puts profits ahead of patient care. Most of these mistakes happen to uninsured black and Latin workers. Some examples:
A 38-year-old woman complained to her doctor of pain in her side and lumps in her abdomen. Without consulting the radiologist who had taken a chest X-ray, the doctor performed a hysterectomy. But afterwards the X-ray revealed a problem with the patient’s lungs.
In another case, a doctor performed a hysterectomy and terminated a woman’s pregnancy — a pregnancy she was unaware of — without conducting proper tests to determine why she was bleeding.
In still another report, a baby suffered brain damage after a doctor tried unsuccessfully to deliver the infant using forceps.
Most patients rarely know about a doctor’s past problems. Hospitals will not discuss doctors’ records. The rulers blame the doctors and the hospital industry for the inefficiencies but the root of the crisis is the many consolidations and competition for worker-patients. Patients and hospital workers are like commodities, being bought and sold, with needed facilities often closing because of lack of profits.
While in China from 1954 to 1969, Dr. Joshua S. Horn wrote, "A doctor’s attitude to mistakes should be: prevent them, admit them and learn from them."
Under capitalism, hospital interns work very long hours for low wages. The hospitals make millions from their labor. By the time the interns complete their residency, most have profits on their minds, not uniting with workers to fight the capitalist healthcare system.
Under a communist society, our vision for health care is to improve the quality of life, not to make profits. This means we, the working class, will make healthcare decisions based on our needs.
LETTERS
WORKERS OF THE WORLD, WRITE!
Dialectics of May Day
We tried to apply dialectical materialism to bringing people to the May Day march. Potentially, many people have expressed an interest in marching but the actual will emerge with the unfolding of the process; i.e., how many folks actually get on the bus.
A certain quantitative amount of work will produce a certain quantitative and qualitative result. Many will actually march. Some will join PLP. Others will become more committed.
About 75 people attended a May Day jazz fundraiser at a local church where we have a modest base. Nine people from the church attended, including Wilma, a black woman who expressed anti-communist ideas about us being members of the church. But she said she decided to support our efforts because we are dedicated church members, not just mechanically using the church to pick off a few recruits. We raised almost $1,000, had a great time, and demonstrated PLP’s multi-racial unity. Wilma was "impressed by the number of black folks you have around your group."
Next was the May Day dinner, with plenty of food and drinks and a political program. About 70 people showed up at a community center in a Latin neighborhood where we’re involved in immigration issues. This event reflected the developed leadership of one of our key women leaders, Anita.
First came a skit about the amnesty issue. Then Rosa, another PLP leader, reviewed the international scene, especially related to Latin America. Then we presented a pageant celebrating three great May Days in our Party’s history: our first, in 1971; the march that took on the Nazis and cops in Marquette Park in 1979; and the 100th anniversary of May Day in 1986.
English and Spanish speakers, side by side, narrated using short bursts of information, first in English, and then in Spanish. Simultaneously we projected a movie about the Marquette Park march on a back wall.
The high point of the evening was a great speech by Dolores, renewing her commitment to the Party after having dealt with many personal/political problems. Then a young white worker joined the Party. We concluded by singing that great hymn of the communist movement, the Internationale. All in all, we saw quantity turning into quality, and the potential into the actual. Now we’ll see how many seats are filled when the May Day busses start to roll. On to Washington!
Midwest Reader
Cincy Rebels, PLP Need Each Other
I drove with the Chicago PLP members to Cincinnati to pay our last respects to Timothy Thomas and join and support the rebellion against racism. The workers received us very well. We had many good conversations about the rebellion and the need for revolution. The workers were definitely not toeing the NAACP’s line. They had their own ideas and were expressing them in their practice. When the rally started, they called for more action, marches and for breaking the curfew. When the NAACP sent someone to "calm" them down, they listened but didn’t stop the rally.
There was a mix of black nationalism/anti-racism, anger at the police and the mayor and a desire for fairness. There was much anti-capitalist feeling, though that’s not what they called it. There was an acknowledgement that the system has never served the black masses. There was a sense that without militant rebellion, the mayor and the rulers would not change. They knew their housing needs were being submerged by gentrification. They cheered our call for revolution. They were inspiring as they marched in defiance of marshal law.
As we approached the riot cops blocking downtown, the rebels calmly and thoughtfully struggled with themselves against adventurism. They decided to turn back and rally at the park. They correctly predicted that the cops were waiting for a provocation. They estimated the forces at play. We did not then have the numbers or the organization to take on the cops.
To sustain the rebellion workers need PLP’s revolutionary program. In order to sustain the revolutionary PLP we need these anti-racist rebels to join and lead our movement. Capitalism will never serve the workers. Its endless crises will impel workers to rebel. The rulers’ use of racism to divide us will become increasingly evident and workers will fight back. We must dig deep roots among the workers to lead even larger numbers.
Our potential is incredible. We invite the anti-racist rebels to lead our May Day march in Washington. We invite them all to join PLP and develop the long-range outlook to eradicate this murderous system.
Chicago comrade
Capitalism Breeds Prostitution
Recently the Dominican Republic press reported that thousands of young women from that Caribbean country are emigrating to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and becoming prostitutes. Such news is no longer so shocking. Lately there’s been a tremendous upsurge of women (including children) leaving countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe, induced by offers of phony jobs and then forced into prostitution. Many do it knowingly because it’s the only way to survive.
A correspondent from the Ultima Hora daily of Santo Domingo writing from Buenos Aires reported that: "It seems like a coincidence that just as in Santo Domingo the Dominican women in Buenos Aires who work in the ‘world’s oldest profession’ do it near the Congressional building where senators and other politicians work. Our Porteño (as Buenos Aires residents are called) taxi driver, a very enlightened man, told us jokingly ‘hold onto your wallet’ as we passed by the Congressional building."
An article in another Dominican daily explains why so many young women had to sell their bodies to survive: "Recession in the USA causes mass firings; 10,000 jobs in the Corporation of the Industrial Free Zone of the city of Santiago will cease to exist because of the drastic reduction in the sales of their products in the U.S. market….The job losses in these duty-free garment shops will affect all free trade zones in the country, although Santiago will be hardest hit."(Listini Diario, 4/9).
Last year, Hipólito Mejía was elected President of the Dominican Republic, promising "improvements" in workers’ lives and an end to the rampant official corruption of the previous government. But things have just grown worse. The world crisis of capitalism has made life a living hell for workers from Santiago to Buenos Aires.
Organizing for a new society, without any bosses and politicians, is the only solution. Join the communist PLP and make that happen!
A Comrade
CHALLENGE SUPPLEMENT
a name="Film Distorts Communist Action In Freeing ‘Scottsboro Boys’"></">Fi"m Distorts Communist Action In Freeing ‘Scottsboro Boys’
In 1931, nine black young men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama. The poor youths, ages 13 to 19, were riding the rails looking for work. They were quickly convicted by an all-white jury. Eight were sentenced to death, another cruel episode in a long history of lynchings and frame-ups. However, the U.S. Communist Party (CP) initiated and led a world-wide struggle involving millions to free the "Scottsboro boys."
This struggle was the subject of a documentary, Scottsboro, An American Tragedy," nominated for an Academy Award and broadcast recently on Public Television. It contains fascinating film footage of the trials and the mass demonstrations in support of the Scottsboro boys. The best sections are interviews with communists active in the case, such as Mary Licht, the CP organizer who met with the parents of the nine jailed youth and explained that the International Labor Defense (ILD), established by the CP, would not just conduct a legal defense, but would organize mass support for their sons’ release. The parents appreciated the way Party members treated them with respect and equality, in contrast to the NAACP, which tried to take over the case and called the parents "ignorant" when they rejected their anti-communist pleas. The parents spoke at dozens of CP-organized rallies in a worldwide campaign to win freedom for their children.
Despite these interviews, the documentary echoes the anti-communism of the NAACP, which accused the CP of excluding it from the defense in order to "exploit" the case for its own "revolutionary agenda." The documentary ignores the fact that the NAACP initially refused to support the young men and never had plans to wage a mass campaign. The NAACP’s leaders only became interested when the ILD took the case. However, neither the ILD nor the NAACP lawyers could win the case in Alabama’s courts, where the verdicts were predetermined. Only a mass movement in the streets could ever free the young men.
A week after CP organizers in the South learned of the arrests, the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker, editorialized that the Scottsboro frame-up was "part of a campaign of terror against the Negro workers and impoverished farmers and sharecroppers of the South, to ‘teach the n——- his place,’ lest he join with his natural comrades, the white workers and poor farmers of America in their struggle against starvation and boss rule."
The international communist movement organized hundreds of rallies and marches, in scores of U.S. cities, as well as Europe, Japan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. The Scottsboro case became known to hundreds of millions worldwide. One Baltimore minister summed up the opinion of many blacks when he said that "the Communists go out and fight for Negro rights. The International Labor Defense is communism in action for Negro rights and Scottsboro is the supreme example." Blacks and whites united in hundreds of fundraising events and demonstrations under the banner of "Black and White, Unite and Fight!"
This was the "agenda" that the film attacks, but to its credit, the CP did use the case to expose the system of racist oppression in both the South and the North, including the racist "justice" system. It also used the case to advance black-white unity in the fight against a capitalist system that had thrown millions onto the unemployment lines and into dire poverty. The CP pointed out that capitalism had created and benefited from the racist hell suffered by millions of black workers and that the fight to free the Scottsboro boys was just one battle in the war to end capitalism and build a society without racism.
The CP explained to white workers that class solidarity was absolutely necessary to fight capitalist exploitation, and that the first step in forging this solidarity was to fight against the special oppression of black workers. Every Party member was responsible for raising the Scottsboro case in whatever union, neighborhood group, or unemployed council he or she belonged to. Hundreds of these organizations passed resolutions and donated money in support of the struggle. The CP’s focus on the case was indicated during a confrontation between a CP-led Unemployed Council and a Bronx, NY landlord who exclaimed, "I’ll fix the plumbing and paint the halls, but I can’t free the Scottsboro boys!"
The CP’s expert legal team ripped apart the shabby prosecution case. The medical evidence showed conclusively that the women had not been raped. Ruby Bates, one of the two accusers, became a defense witness, admitting that she and Victoria Price had lied. The lawyers took the case twice to the Supreme Court which, in response to the mass movement, overturned the convictions and ordered new trials, but new all-white juries again returned guilty verdicts.
The CP did make mistakes, including hiring Samuel Leibowitz as defense counsel for the retrial. Although Leibowitz was a famous trial lawyer, he was an anti-communist and close to the Democratic Party, the party of Southern segregation. Before the case was finished, Leibowitz would attack the CP. In 1937 and 1938, the CP, in its "popular front" period, abandoned radical mass protest and relied on liberals to negotiate a pardon for the remaining defendants (four were released in ’37) with the Governor of Alabama. The last defendant, Haywood Patterson, escaped to freedom in 1948.
Since it was virtually impossible for the film to ignore the presence of the CP, it is presented in a way that feeds anti-communism. The "tragedy," the film says, is that no one was really concerned about these nine young black men as human beings. Yet had it not been for the mass campaign organized by the CP, the Scottsboro boys would most certainly have been executed. That is the "agenda" the film avoids like the plague.
a name="KKK—A Racist Beast Unleashed By Steel Bosses of Birmingham">">"KK—A Racist Beast Unleashed By Steel Bosses of Birmingham
Birmingham was "founded after the Civil War, the heavy manufacturing mecca of the South…built by post-Emancipation slaves. Under a system popular all around the Old Confederacy known as the convict lease, the state of Alabama hired out half its prisoners to the tuberculosis-breeding coal mines of Birmingham’s founding industrialists. The ‘crimes’ of these mine slaves—the vast majority of them black—were often nothing more than gambling, indebtedness or idleness….The system had ‘all the evils of slavery without one of its ameliorating features,’ as one critic noted, like the slaveholders’ vested interest in keeping their property alive. Slackers were hung on crosses…with ropes….Fugitives were mauled by bloodhounds and then whipped with leather straps until they begged for death. Those who got their wish were dumped in a common hole in the woods, saving the superintendent the nuisance of a funeral appearance. The [convict] lease…provided the industrialists a cheap, strike-proof workforce." (From Carry Me Home, Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter, Simon & Schuster, 2001; all quotations are from this book.)
Birmingham was a classic example of U.S. fascism, built on racism, segregation and the ruling class using and building the Ku Klux Klan to divide and rule black and white workers. The fortunes of U.S. Steel and J. P. Morgan were extracted from the enslavement, torture and murder of tens of thousands of mainly black people, working untold numbers to death. For them, Birmingham was Auschwitz.
"Birmingham’s saloons — the most per capita in the country — had been safeguarded by the industrialists’ anti-Prohibition crusades as an essential ingredient of the three Ds of ‘labor tranquility’: Depress ‘em, disperse ‘em and drug ‘em. The first two were fulfilled simultaneously by the isolated company villages, with their communal outhouses hunched over open typhoid-hatching ditches. Epidemic disease was the leading cause of death in Birmingham..."
The city’s reputation of such horror was so widespread that it inspired popular stories: a black man in Chicago tells his wife that Jesus came to him in his dream and said he should go to Birmingham. She objects: "Did Jesus say He’d go with you?" Her husband replies, "He said He’d go as far as Memphis."
Every aspect of life in Birmingham was controlled by the owners of a few large corporations, led by Tennessee Coal & Iron (TCI), a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. These barons were known as the "Big Mules." And black workers "were the cornerstone of their success. Segregation—with its…life force, racism—had kept their workers divided, wages depressed. The industrialists…had honed [segregation] into the ultimate money-making instrument."
Their "worst fear…was that their labor force might organize into a union. In their exertions to prevent that…—forbidding workers to grow corn in their gardens, lest the tall stalks serve as a cover for union-organizing meetings—they had built a stunning example of… the ‘latent fascism’ of the American South."
These corporations used every feature of their state apparatus. "U.S. Steel had virtually invented industry’s union-beating game plan during the great, failed national steel strike of 1919, when its private detectives infiltrated the workforce and supplied the propaganda that fueled that year’s Red Scare," the infamous Palmer Raids on radicals. "The point of the propaganda was to equate organized labor with ‘bolshevism’ and organized money with ‘Americanism’."
Texas Congressman Martin Dies, their "point man against the CIO," followed the lead of these corporations by creating the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the late 1930s. One example of their extreme anti-communism emerged when, during an investigation of the Federal Theatre Project’s production of 17th century playwright Christopher Marlowe, Alabama’s representative on the committee, Joe Starnes, "asked…if Marlowe was a Communist." (HUAC recieved its deathblow in the late 1960s when PLP defied its witch-hunt of the anti-Vietnam war movement and sent it six feet under.)
In 1907, when J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel—then the world’s largest corporation—bought Birmingham’s TCI mills, it became the centerpiece of "The elite establishment of the city…[that] nurtured the Ku Klux Klan." In the 1920s, the Klan claimed four million members. McWhorter reports that in the 1940s the Alabama attorney-general wrote to Alabama Senator Lister Hill, "The Alabama Klan IS unquestionably and undoubtedly…directed from one certain tall building." And McWhorter says that was "U.S. Steel’s corporate offices on First Avenue, which issued the paycheck to E.E. Campbell [the head of Klan], a skilled worker in TCI’s Fairfield plant."
These Mules counted on the Klan: "As long as their ‘native-born’ laborers were fighting the large Catholic-immigrant portion of the workforce, there was no danger of union solidarity even among the whites, let alone across color lines."
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Klan’s leadership directed its members to disrupt the CIO….Between the Klan’s ‘boring from within’ work and the employer’s race-baiting…the CIO’s flagship union at TCI, the United Steelworkers of America, was…essentially an arm of management."
When in 1944, during World War II, the Klan was forced to disband nationally because it could not pay its back taxes, "U.S. Steel set up a League to Maintain White Supremacy to spread ‘the white supremacy gospel’…among…its workforce." But two years later, "One of the Big Mules’ old Christian American tabloids called for the revival of the Klan." They had their man in City Hall, the infamous police chief Bull Conner, later the leader of violent attacks on the Civil Rights movement. And "The vigilantes to whom the industrialists would now assign the hands-on anti-union fight—under cloak and hood….would answer to…the man the Big Mules had put there, Bull Conner." Conner, the Klan’s "patron saint," had already remade the police force into "his personal militia."
The corporate baron’s and Connor’s political battle against the Communist Party and civil rights activists to maintain racist segregation in Birmingham in the following two decades, and the struggles of black and white miners to unite against the coal barons there, would require another lengthy article. Suffice it to say here that the Klan’s role is not that of "crackpots" acting on their own. They have been organized, financed and protected by sections of the ruling class to spread the rulers’ racist ideology among the working class. In many areas they function right in the plants. It is the duty of all anti-racists and communists to smash them as best we can and expose their links to the ruling class that oppresses us all.
Another Racist Cross Burning in Indiana
GARY, IN April 12 — Another family has been victimized by a cross burning here. Debra Dominguez found a partially burned wooden cross in her front yard in the Chesterton area. This latest racist attack comes just two weeks after a cross was burned in a black family’s backyard in Valparaiso, and is the second in four weeks since 300 riot cops protected a KKK rally.
Debra said the cross burning may stem from a problem between her daughter and other students at Chesterton High School. She said the school has not responded to her calls, and the school’s director of security said there’s no connection between the school and the cross burning. The Dominguez home has been vandalized for weeks, with shaving cream, eggs and toilet paper put on or around the house.
These cross burnings are a direct result of the Klan rally held here. This is why PLP says, "No Free Speech for Fascists!" The Klan has applied for a permit to rally in downtown Gary on May 19. Mayor King says they can have the permit for $5,000. The ACLU has come to the aid of the fascists, saying there is no connection between racist speech and racist action.
There are plenty of angry steel workers here, the victims of plant closings and threatened shutdowns. There are also plenty of angry young people here, fed up with racist police harassment. Most of all, there is a growing PLP here. And workers and youth have taken note of the anti-racist rebellion in Cincinnati. If the Klan gets their permit, we’ll have something for them.
TO OUR WEB READERS: This issue of CHALLENGE includes a special supplement on the racist sociobiology "science." How it has spread to all areas of the academic world and its effects on our daily lives. Again, we ask our web readers to help us keep both versions of our newspaper (the digital one and the printed one) spreading communist politics as an antidote to the poisong of capitalism and all its different ideologies. You can help subscribing to the printed version of the paper or sending a contribution. One year sub to CHALLENGE cost 15 dollars. You can send a check or MO made out to Challenge periodicals and mail it to PLP: GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202, USA.
CHALLENGE, April 25, 2001
a href="#Spy Plane Deal Can’t Hide Sharpening Imperialist Rivalry">"py Plane Deal Can’t Hide Sharpening Imperialist Rivalry
KKKops Protect KKKross-Burners
a href="#Union Leaders, Bosses Push Fascist ‘Solutions’">Un"on Leaders, Bosses Push Fascist ‘Solutions’
Rebellion Against Racist MurderousKKKops
a href="#Students Indict Horowitz: ‘Racist of the Year’">St"dents Indict Horowitz: ‘Racist of the Year’
Salute Brown U. Students For Anti-Racist Action
a href="#Free Trade=Battle for Profits From Workers’ Blood">"ree Trade=Battle for Profits From Workers’ Blood
Anti-Globalization Protests in Quebec and Tijuana-San Diego
a href="#Viva Democracy Cry Won’t End Racism In Mexico">"iva Democracy Cry Won’t End Racism In Mexico
Jobless Benefits: An Endangered Species
a href="#Wanted For Murder—Litton Bosses">"anted For Murder—Litton Bosses
Worker-Student Alliance Backs Garment Strike
Fight Fascist Slavery In NY Welfare
LA Janitors Fight Corrupt Union, Plan for May Day
Salvadoran Workers Headed for May Day
a href="#A Seattle Mother Fights Racist ‘Justice’">A "eattle Mother Fights Racist ‘Justice’
a href="#Psychiatric Rx For Kids’ Problems: ‘Just Say Yes!’">Psyc"iatric Rx For Kids’ Problems: ‘Just Say Yes!’
Census Spawns Racist Divisions
Bosses Blow Fuse; Workers Get Shock
a name="Spy Plane Deal Can’t Hide Sharpening Imperialist Rivalry">">"py Plane Deal Can’t Hide Sharpening Imperialist Rivalry
The deal made by the U.S. and Chinese bosses over the recent collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet will not end the sharpening of a rivalry that will ultimately lead to a war for world domination between these imperialist gangsters.
Workers must focus on the long-range nature of this contradiction. We mustn’t place our class’s future in the hands of imperialists, whose only peace is the "peace" of the grave. As our Party prepares for May Day 2001, we must win every marcher to understand that a world without profit wars is impossible under the profit system. The spy plane incident should heighten our awareness of the need for communist revolution and our commitment to fight for it.
The Bush White House is telling the rest of the world to behave or else. Chinese, Russian and Iraqi rulers are Bush’s main targets. Barely a month after becoming President, Bush launched a particularly heavy bombing raid on Iraq and threatened the Chinese for helping upgrade Iraqi air defenses. Then came the flap over Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent arrested for peddling U.S. security information to the Russians. Bush retaliated by expelling 51 Russian "diplomats" and by telling the Russians the U.S. would no longer finance Russia’s missile destruction program.
Now comes the latest incident with China. Bush, Powell and Cheney are hypocritically pretending to be shocked that the Chinese take a dim view of U.S. spying over their borders. What they really mean is that the U.S. ruling class wants to keep China from behaving as though it has the potential to become a key rival to U.S. control of international markets, energy resources and shipping lanes. Clinton had already tried to deliver this message in 1999, when he ordered a bomb dropped "accidentally" on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the U.S./NATO air war in the former Yugoslavia. Chinese rulers couldn’t counter that provocation with more than verbal protest.
They aren’t ready to go to war with the U.S. over the spy plane incident either. However, they are deepening their resolve to include Taiwan as part of their empire by extending their deployment of missiles across the Taiwan Strait. Simultaneously, Bush has threatened to increase arms sales to U.S. buddies in Taiwan. This conflict has the potential to sharpen seriously in the coming period.
Some of the bosses’ media, including the liberal New York Times, believe that the current U.S.-China "mix of tensions and mutual dependence" will continue indefinitely without leading to war (April 8).
True, U.S. rulers have extensive economic ties to China. Chinese bosses export billions worth of merchandise to the U.S. market. Important U.S. companies like Motorola, General Motors, Boeing and the AIG insurance group have huge investments in China. The restoration of capitalism in China has encouraged some U.S. companies to dream of super-profits there. But investment doesn’t preclude eventual war. U.S. firms had enormous positions in Germany in the 1930s, and the U.S. still fought World War II. Furthermore, the U.S. ruling class sharply disagrees over doing business in China. The companies involved want to protect their investments and bottom lines. The more strategically-minded bosses, particularly those around Exxon Mobil, who intend to rule the world by maintaining control of energy supplies and shipping routes, see these deals as self-destructive "trading with the enemy." The Clinton White House reflected this struggle. The Bush White House has yet to resolve it.
The Chinese are drawing their own conclusions. As the usually accurate Stratfor intelligence report says (April 4): "Beijing will continue to refrain from direct confrontation, as it is not yet ready politically, economically or militarily challenge the United States in Asia. China will, however, plan for that day."
There’s an immediate objective element as well. As thousands of workers know from the harsh truth of daily layoffs, the long 1990s U.S. boom is over, for the time being at least. This downturn may well set the tone for the rest of the world in the period ahead. The U.S. economy accounts for 30 percent of global output and 15 percent of global trade. As U.S. companies try to solve their overcapacity crisis by liquidating inventories, the U.S. market is likely to absorb fewer imports than in the past. This won’t help Chinese bosses’ export strategy.
The U.S. economy may not recover in a hurry. If it continues to tank, it will drag down the rest of the world’s main economies. Global capitalist profit crises don’t lead to love-fests among the big capitalists but to the opposite: "As economic hardship reduces incentives for political cooperation and raises competition for money and markets, international politico-military crises will become more frequent and intense" (Stratfor, 4/4).
World war is not necessarily around the corner. The U.S. rulers remain in command, if not in full control. However, the current deal between U.S. and Chinese bosses should not encourage illusions about a future of peace and stability. Imperialism always leads to war. We must prepare now, in every possible way, for the day when our class can smash imperialist war with communist revolution. A successful May Day 2001, with new recruits to the PLP, will advance that goal.
If the shoe was on the other foot:
SHOOT TO KILL
When a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane flying 32 miles off the Chinese mainland provoked a confrontation with Chinese fighter pilots on August 23, 1956 and crashed into the East China Sea, killing all 16 aboard, President Dwight Eisenhower told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
"We seem to be conducting something that we cannot control very well. If planes were flying 20 to 50 miles from our shores, we would be very likely to shoot them down if they came in closer, whether through error or not." (New York Times, April 5)
Anti-Oil War GI Shakes Brass
Recently I enjoyed a visit with friends in the military. I didn’t realize how much I missed the place until this week-end visit, which was very productive.
These friends are the closest to the Party. They went to May Day last year and are enthusiastic about coming this year. We watched a great documentary, "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq," exposing the horrific consequences of sanctions against Iraqi workers.
A friend said he’d been reading CHALLENGE and decided to show it to one of his closest friends, who likes to discuss politics. This is exactly what the Party needs, having the courage to introduce the paper to another soldier. Building political relationships in the military is vital for Party members and friends. We need more Party members in the military and to talk about politics there.
Inter-imperialist rivalry is sharpening. The Army blots out world politics; they fear the truth will come out, a problem for their war campaigns.
An example of the latter occurred in a discussion at a recent National Guard week-end drill on the quality of food being served. Then a soldier switched things, wanting to know our company commander’s opinion on the spy plane in China. His reply sparked a wider conversation. He said there was no way the U.S. would go to war with China, but that U.S.-China relations are unstable. He then questioned the public’s response to U.S. casualties. He said currently it’s harder to gain public support for sending troops into battle abroad, as in Kuwait and Kosovo.
Soldiers were eager to discuss all this. Then something extraordinary happened. A soldier spoke up exposing the interests of major oil companies in the regions mentioned above. He said, "People don’t want to go to war for the oil companies." This comment startled the company commander. The discussion was getting heated. He quickly put an end to it. He had gotten a taste of working-class consciousness. Then, in a shaky voice, the commander asked, "Well, do we want to sit around and talk about world politics or go home?" The soldiers, there for the weekend, were ready to go.
This is a good lesson for all of us in the military. The brass will never tell the truth about politics, but our Party’s politics are in the interest of all soldiers, especially those involving the military’s goals. Organizing in the military is critical. The kind of discussion my friend started with his buddy can spark great political discussions among soldiers.
This is why it’s important to take May Day seriously. Marchers should not only be enthusiastic about celebrating May Day, but should also consider joining the Party and making a concrete commitment to PLP. We invite soldiers to join PLP and discuss politics, in the barracks, in the fields and with our closest friends.
A Red soldier
KKKops Protect KKKross-Burners
GARY, IN, March 27 — Two weeks after an army of riot cops protected a KKK rally, a black family in Valparaiso (about 15 miles from here) had a cross burned in their back yard. This racist attack came after a group of swastika-adorned racist skinheads menaced a 15-year-old black youth at a bowling alley.
Police arrested three youths for the cross burning, but claim it was not racially motivated! The cops don’t only protect Klan rallies but also cross burnings, labeling them "kids’ stuff."
Black residents walked to City Hall to meet with the mayor and police chief. They used the racist cross burning to take aim at racism in general and the cops in particular. They complained that the police follow them or visitors from out of town. Mrs. Alexander, whose home was the scene of the cross burning, said a majority of the police treat blacks as "less than human."
It’s no coincidence that the Klan is more active, and the cops are more protective, as the economy slides deeper into the dumpster. For decades, U.S. Steel in Birmingham, Alabama, financed and directed the KKK. (See CHALLENGE [4/11] and Carry Me Home, by Diane McWhorter.)
Now Bethlehem Steel could go under, while Republic and LTV (steel) have filed for bankruptcy. Thousands of LTV workers will lose their jobs and tens of thousands more will lose pensions and medical coverage. Over a dozen steel workers have been killed in recent years by murderous cost-cutting policies. American Steel is closing down, and U.S. Steel is moving 25% of its global production to Slovakia where wages are $2.00 an hour.
a name="Union Leaders, Bosses Push Fascist ‘Solutions’"></">Un"on Leaders, Bosses Push Fascist ‘Solutions’
What choices does the system offer? One union leader said that war production could produce more jobs! They push nationalism against workers from other countries. Gary bosses want to build a $20 million minor league sports stadium to complement their gambling casinos and beauty pageants. Cops work with the drug dealers to keep workers stoned. This follows the Nazi pattern when they were coming to power in Germany!
The Gary Klan rally failed to get its message out, so now they want to rally in downtown Gary on May 19. If they do, there will be an even larger group to oppose them. But our overall strategy is to smash capitalism completely.
The Indiana PLP has grown modestly, and we expect a good turnout for May Day. The cross-burning KKK and the economic crisis are sure signs that the bosses are on the road to increased fascism and war. This May Day can be an important step in building a stronger Party and a more powerful revolutionary movement!
Rebellion Against Racist MurderousKKKops
CINCINNATI, OHIO, April 11 — "If they keep killing us, it ain’t gonna be peaceful," declared Hosea Thomas, 27, outside police headquarters here during two days of rebellion by hundreds protesting the racist murder of a fourth black man in the last five months. Timothy Thomas, 19, unarmed, was shot by a racist cop chasing him, allegedly because of warrants for traffic violations and misdemeanors.
The cops were forced to cordon off police headquarters and City Hall after protestors — including Mrs. Thomas — surrounded and took over the City Council for three hours, rallied and threw bottles, and rocks at the police station, shattering the station’s glass entrance and ripped down an American flag. The cops fired rubber bullets and rounds of beanbag shotguns and mounted police rode their horses into the crowd. The demonstrators then marched through downtown streets shouting anti-police slogans.
This latest racist murder follows a long line of similar police actions in cities throughout the country in an attempt to terrorize black and Latino workers and youth who refuse to accept the racist conditions imposed on them by the bosses’ profit system.
a name="Students Indict Horowitz: ‘Racist of the Year’"></">St"dents Indict Horowitz: ‘Racist of the Year’
BOSTON, MA, April 2 — PLP students and friends from Boston University (BU), Harvard and MIT and Boston area workers demonstrated today outside the lecture at BU by fascist journalist David Horowitz to protest his racist ad in college newspapers around the country. Horowitz angered thousands of students with his ad entitled, "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — And Racist Too!" He claims that black people should be "thankful" for what the U.S. has "given" them; that black poverty is "the result of failures of individual character rather than...of racial discrimination and a slave system"; and that "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one." (!) He uses the "reparations debate" as a cover for his racist lies.
We worked for a mass protest against Horowitz at BU, raising the idea with members of Students Together Against Racism, and Unite, a progressive coalition of BU student groups. Their leaders said students should peacefully question Horowitz’s views.
PLP was the only group at BU to publicly protest Horowitz. It began shortly before his "lecture." We distributed CHALLENGE, handed out about 400 PLP leaflets and carried signs, all of which proclaimed, "No Free Speech for Racists/Reparations for the Whole Working Class = Communist Revolution," calling on people to march on May Day. We chanted, "Brown students lead the way, Shut this racist down today!" (See box.) We raised a large banner naming, "David Horowitz, Racist of the Year." We explained why Horowitz is dangerous, and talked about the intensifying racism in the U.S. and on campuses, in particular. We also pointed out how racists like Horowitz help spread fascism in the U.S. today.
We were unable to get inside the hall to raise our banner and shout him down as we had planned — something we should always try to do, no matter how small we are. But many BU student friends and supporters also unable to get in stayed outside, took our leaflets and CHALLENGE, watched our demonstration and debated the issues. While some were afraid to publicly condemn him, they agreed he was a racist and should be opposed, but many still believed he has a "right to free speech."
Ironically, everyone entering the hall was searched to prevent any public display of signs or banners protesting Horowitz’s racist filth. Meanwhile, dozens of cops guarded him — just like they do for the KKK — so he could spread his garbage. So much for "free speech."
The next day we continued to pass out the same leaflet. Some students approved our protest and one took 20 leaflets to show to friends. We clearly had a positive, anti-racist impact at BU. We remain in contact with the Brown U. students and will go back soon to help them fight racism. We will raise the importance of marching on May Day as the best immediate way to help smash racism and capitalism, the system which breeds it.
Salute Brown U. Students For Anti-Racist Action
BOSTON, April 7 — The Brown University students who last month trashed the Brown Herald containing the racist filth in the ad paid for by fascist David Horowitz have become a beacon in the fight against racism on all campuses.
The Brown students invited Boston PLP students to yesterday’s Brown student/community meeting on fighting racism. It was the most inspiring and intense mass meeting of recent memory. We met black and white students with great courage and commitment to fight back against racism. In accepting their invitation, we had told them, "We look forward to meeting fellow anti-racist students and applaud the work of all Brown students who participated in the protesting of the Brown Herald placing Horowitz’s racist ad against reparations by removing the Brown Daily Herald press run."
However, while many want to fight racism, they have limited experience on how to wage a long-term fight against it. A racist climate of fear has developed at Brown since the Horowitz ad. Some black students have been threatened physically by racists. We are supporting them in fighting back against this racist terror. We will try to win some of them to join the May Day March in Washington on April 28.
a name="Free Trade=Battle for Profits From Workers’ Blood">">"ree Trade=Battle for Profits From Workers’ Blood
BUENOS AIRES, April 6—Chanting "No ALCApitalismo, No ALCAos y ALCArajo" — "No to Capitalism, No to ALCA Chaos, ALCA go to hell (ALCA are the Spanish initials for FTAA or the Free Trade Area of the Americas) — 15,000 workers and anti-globalization activists marched today past the Sheraton Hotel. Trade ministers from 34 countries of the entire hemisphere (except Cuba) were meeting here to discuss if, when and how to establish this FTAA by January 2005. Many see it as just another NAFTA deal, favoring the U.S. bosses.
The demonstrators included trade unionists from neighboring Brazil and Uruguay, even though the border was closed at the last minute and 20 busloads were barred entry into Argentina.
There are sharp disagreements over FTAA. U.S. bosses wanted FTAA to begin in 2003, but Brazil led the opposition to push the date to 2005. The Brazilian bosses also want other big changes in the FTAA, to prevent it from becoming just another tool for U.S. imperialist control over Latin America. Said BBC News (4/8): "Brazil said it wants the FTAA to be an option, not destiny. It wants to hold parallel talks with the European union, with whom it trades more than the U. S….Latin-American countries want sharp reductions in U.S. agricultural subsidies as a condition for a free trade pact—something which is expected to get a rough ride in the U.S. Congress. U.S. farmers oppose negotiations on domestic subsidies of the FTAA, because it would not require other developed countries like the European Union and Japan to make similar cuts."
FTAA has become an important battleground among the world’s imperialist bosses. It represents a market of 783 million people from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, 40% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product and 20% of world trade. As the U.S. stock market tumbles and the Japanese economy stagnates, many investors are looking towards Latin America as a "young emerging market." Brazil’s public trading, for example, grew from $40 billion to $700 billion in the last decade (Prudential Insurance investment report).
As CHALLENGE reported (April 11), European bosses are make inroads into a region the U.S. has considered its "backyard." The U.S. Plan Colombia (equipping Colombia’s death squad army to war on anti-U.S. guerrillas) and a U.S.-controlled FTAA are part of the U.S. fight to keep the European imperialists at bay in the region.
Brazil, the hemisphere’s second largest country after the U.S., is now a leading recipient of Germany’s exports and capital and therefore leads the opposition to the U.S. version of the FTAA. The trade union leadership of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, along with other anti-globalization forces demonstrating here, believe that the European imperialists are "better" than the U.S. They declare that free trade á la U.S. imperialism has meant more exploitation for workers. But the European bosses don’t want to end that exploitation. Rather they want to control it.
Anti-Globalization Protests in Quebec and Tijuana-San Diego
On April 19-22, the rulers of these same 34 countries will meet in Quebec, Canada, to continue discussing the FTAA. Thousands of anti-globalization forces and trade unionists will demonstrate "in the sprit of Seattle 1999, D.C. and Prague 2000." The rulers are preparing for these protests with measures unseen in Quebec since the War Measures of Act of the early 1970s, when the army occupied Montreal after the Quebec Liberation Front kidnapped several officials. Protests in solidarity with the Quebec demonstrations are also planned along the San Diego-Tijuana border, with the demand to "Stop the FTAA." But even some who call themselves anti-capitalist tend to push the idea that without FTAA or NAFTA, "things would be better." Others just see U.S. imperialism as the only enemy.
The fact is that all these trade agreements are part of the sharpening rivalry among the different capitalist and imperialist forces seeking better deals for their particular group as they all scheme to make workers pay even more for the deepening crisis of capitalism. This rivalry lays the basis for another world war. The only alternative to FTAA, NAFTA, etc. for workers and their allies is to fight to destroy capitalism and build a society without any bosses: communism.
a name="Viva Democracy Cry Won’t End Racism In Mexico">">"iva Democracy Cry Won’t End Racism In Mexico
MEXICO CITY, APRIL 5 — Esther, an Indigenous woman commander of the Zapatista movement, spoke late last month before Congress here exposing the racism ten million Indigenous people suffer in Mexico. This dramatic event ended the trek by the Zapatista leadership from the jungles of Chiapas. To speak to Congress, the Zapatistas had to overcome the opposition of right-wing PAN (ruling Party) politicians like Senator Diego F. De Cevallos. But the massive anti-racist feeling sparked by the Zapatista presence here finally forced Parliament to let them speak.
Esther’s anti-racism developed from fighting the oppression of Indigenous people. She revealed how malnutrition and lack of essential services kill tens of thousands of children every year. In extreme cases some parents sell their daughters like commodites and marry them to whomever the father chooses. These conditions have led to many rebellions among Indigenous people. (In addition, alchoholism affects 4.6% of all Mexicans between 18 and 65, overwhemingly males.) The Zapatistas were here demanding a law to end this racist and sexist oppression. They also want to maintain the collective ownership of land in the Indigenous communities.
Commander Esther trusts a law enacted by the capitalist Parliament to liberate the Indigenous people. To rely on the oppressors never solves oppression and reflects a lack of communist understanding of the racist and criminal nature of capitalism. The bosses invent "races" to divide workers and oppressed people, and to make maximum profits. The enemy is not only the PAN and other right-wing bosses, but the whole racist system. Our struggle should not be to give it a humanitarian mask but to destroy it.
It is good to take up arms as Indigenous communities did in Chiapas, but the real solution lies in winning the entire working class to an armed revolution to eradicate capitalism and build a new system — communism — that eliminates the basis of racism, profits.
Collectivizing the land and work is an advanced demand of the Indigenous movement, opposing capitalist private property. That’s why many politicians disapprove of — or at least want to modify — the law proposed by the Zapatistas. But we have no illusion that a ruling class law will allow the collectivization of land to survive in the Indigenous communities.
Currently a fierce struggle exists among local bosses and U.S. and European imperialists over control of the rich resources and low labor costs in Southern Mexico and its Central American neighbors. No matter who wins, this fight will only increase racism and exploitation in the region.
The lack of a class analysis by commander Esther and the entire leadership of the EZLN (Zapatista movement), their denial of class struggle as the engine behind all social changes and their reliance on bosses’ laws, condemn the very people they seek to protect to a life of more racist oppression. The EZLN then becomes an ally of one or another of the various bosses’ factions fighting to enslave Indigenous people and control the oil wealth of the region. Our goal should be communism, not a mask for capitalist democracy.
Jobless Benefits: An Endangered Species
U.S. bosses and their apologists are always boasting that their capitalist system is "depression-proof" because of the "social safety net" in place. Well, that "net" now has more holes than net.
Official figures are showing the largest one-month job loss in ten years. But a combination of changes in the unemployment insurance (UI) laws, a massive shift in the workforce towards part-time, temporary and low-paid workers and the gutting of welfare means that the vast majority of these workers will get no benefits when they lose their jobs. Four decades ago half the unemployed were eligible for UI and millions more for welfare. Now less than one-third receive UI (the lowest of all the industrialized countries) and virtually no one who had been forced off welfare and managed to get a job will be able to get back on welfare.
For these millions of workers it’s not a recession but an absolute DEPRESSION.
The "millions of new jobs created" in the 1990s, about which Clinton was always boasting, are the very ones that have created this vast pool of 34 million workers virtually unprotected by unemployment or welfare benefits — the low-paid, the part-timers and the "temps." Of all of Clinton’s "new jobs," over 40% pay less than half of a livable wage. In fact, with temporary jobs at a record level, it has created a $72 billion industry. The largest employer in the country is a temporary job agency!
A new feature involving these unprotected workers is the "independent consultant" category, exempt from UI, largely the "dot.com" group that plunged into the ’90s looking to become instant millionaires in what they thought was a permanently expanding "new" economy. Now tens of thousands are out on the street with no UI as the dot.coms downsize and fold altogether. Such is capitalism’s current version of "pie in the sky."
The changes in the UI laws under Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Gore have made it more difficult for all workers to qualify for benefits, especially for the low-wage/temporary/part-time sector. Unless laid-off part-time workers are ready to take new full-time jobs, they are automatically ineligible for UI in most states. Part-timers comprise 20% of the total workforce, 70% of whom are women. These jobless women, most with children, have particular child-care problems which make full-time jobs (outside the home) impossible. And given the racist nature of unemployment — the jobless rate for black and Latin workers is more than double that of white workers — the impact on such workers is especially hard.
Most workers forced off welfare won’t qualify for UI because they won’t have earned enough or worked long enough. Even if they do qualify, they will net a pittance. In Georgia, a worker on a minimum-wage job for half of the year prior to being laid off, would receive a total of $672 over 13-weeks. In Florida, such a worker gets zero. In Texas under the new standards, only one in five workers overall is eligible for UI, and only one in ten within the low-wage/part-time/temporary category.
The bosses have a vested interest in keeping workers ineligible. The fewer eligible for UI, the lower the tax rate for the boss paying into the UI fund. Georgia has already cut this rate 73% and established a moratorium on any payments for the year 2000, saving the bosses $700 million. Then, when unemployment rises — as is happening now— there is less money in the UI fund to pay workers. Ain’t capitalism just grand!
Even this "social safety net" of which the bosses so proudly boast — and which they are now destroying — was never handed to workers on a silver platter. It resulted from mass struggle in the 1930s, led by communists. But this is just one more example how limiting the fight to reforming capitalism will always see the bosses taking back these reforms one way or another. They have state power and use it to enforce their drive for maximum profits, especially in times of crisis, like now. The working class’s only answer is to build the communist PLP to lead a revolution that will destroy this unemployment-driven system with one that banishes profits and therefore joblessness forever.
a name="Wanted For Murder—Litton Bosses">">"anted For Murder—Litton Bosses
NEW ORLEANS, LA, MARCH 24 — The bosses are getting away with murder in their race for oil profits while building the Navy to protect them. Litton Avondale Industries paid a meager $80,000 in fines for the deaths of three shipbuilders last summer. The toothless Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited Avondale for damaged electrical cables, improperly grounded high-voltage power boxes and failure to ensure safety procedures. In 1999, OSHA fined Avondale $717,000 for 63 safety violations.
On May 24, Clarence Rhyans was killed when his neck was pinned against an overhead beam. He was working on the deck of the USNS Mendonca, a ship under construction for the Navy. On June 27, Faustino Mendoza died of head injuries when he fell 60 feet from a scaffold. He was working without fall-protection equipment. In 1999, Avondale was cited for unsafe guardrails on scaffolds. On July 18, "E.J." Bourgeois was electrocuted while checking a power panel. He was working on a double-hulled oil tanker being built for Polar Tankers Inc. The panel had not been disconnected from its electricity source, and there were damaged power cables and faulty grounds. He had no protective gloves.
OSHA initially fined the company $89,950 for this killing spree (with no criminal charges), but lowered even that paltry sum after Avondale "promised…to make the shipyard safe." Prior to this, hard hats, safety glasses and steel-toed boots were not required.
Avondale is the Gulf Coast’s second-biggest shipyard, with 4,500 workers. Seventy percent are black. Average pay is about $9.00/hour. Many young workers and single mothers make less than $7.00/hour and work two jobs to support a family.
In 1993 the workers voted to join the Metal Trades Union. Twenty-five workers were fired for pro-union activity. The bosses used Pentagon contracts to finance a six-year fight in the courts and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Of all the black workers who were observers in the 1993 union election, only one remains.
When Litton bought Avondale, they made a deal to grant recognition to the gangster union in return for keeping out the fired workers, even though they won their NLRB cases. Last December, the company and the union saddled the workers with a four-year "partial contract" that excludes pension and health care benefits. What’s more, the racist New Orleans Metal Trades Council dispersed the workers into twelve separate local unions, rather than have them be the largest and potentially strongest local.
The struggle for one local union, and against the racism of the company and the Metal Trades Council has the potential to rally the support of the whole working class. Against all odds, and the whole capitalist system, the embers of working class rebellion continue to burn among Avondale workers. CHALLENGE can fan those flames.
Big Warmaker Becomes Bigger
On April 4, Northrop Grumman Corp. completed a $3.8 billion merger with Litton Industries, creating what it calls, "a $15 billion, top-tier global defense industry enterprise." This new global aerospace and defense giant is now the largest supplier of non-nuclear surface ships for the Navy. Litton also bought the Avondale shipyard for $529 million in 1999, joining it with its former competitor, Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Miss.
Northrop Grumman expects revenues to double to $15 billion in 2001 and reach $18 billion in 2003.
Worker-Student Alliance Backs Garment Strike
LOS ANGELES, April 3 — Last week at Santa Monica College (SMC), PLP students in the SMC Progressive Alliance helped organize a labor forum to inform students about current workers’ struggles and why and how students can and should play a role in them. Students participating with workers’ fight-backs exposes them to the reality of workers’ resistance to bosses’ abuse and exploitation, the essential role cops play, etc. — that is, to class struggle.
The forum, attended by nearly 50 students, was moderated by a PLP student who began by speaking about the importance of building an alliance between students and workers. Next, a garment worker representing a committee of fellow workers described the conditions they face here and in their struggle to build a workers’ organization within the garment industry. Then a garment worker with the union UNITE reported on a strike of nearly 500 workers at her factory, Hollander Home Fashions. She stressed the importance of students joining the picket line to show support.
A hotel worker outlined the fight to organize a union at local hotels. She described the support received from the community and asked the students to get involved. Finally, a transit union bus mechanic explained how the capitalist system causes the exploitation workers face and criticized the unions’ leadership and politicians for defending capitalism instead of the working class. He emphasized the importance of fighting for workers’ power within the union and building a revolutionary working class movement. He concluded by inviting students to march on MAY DAY.
Following that another garment worker in UNITE came to the front and voiced his agreement. Pointing to the bus mechanic, he said the real union is the one between workers marching side by side on the strike picket line.
Students signed up to support the strike. Several expressed interest in coming to May Day. We have confidence that many of these friends will march.
Strikers have applauded high school and college students joining the picket lines. When they’ve announced over their bullhorn, "Here come the students," cheers go up.
Scabs continue getting in. Strikers have been arrested trying to stop them, or just for being on the picket line. The union leaders advise workers to be cautious and obey the law. But workers challenged the cops, "Why don’t you arrest the owners for exploitation?"
The strikers and their student supporters see the cops defending Hollander’s huge profits and attacking the workers. Marching on May Day to fight for a system that outlaws exploitation is the best way to quickly answer these attacks.
Fight Fascist Slavery In NY Welfare
NEW YORK CITY, April 9 — As CHALLENGE has said for several years, the ending of welfare benefits for millions of the poorest workers — over 70% women and children — and the building of mass slave labor Workfare programs are parts of the development of fascism. Exaggeration—or a reality millions face every day?
• A 1997 Citizens Budget Commission study, "The State of Municipal Services in the 1990’s," found that new welfare applications procedures caused "otherwise eligible indigent New Yorkers to be denied cash benefits." Data showed in 80% of all contested cases (98% where families had some legal representation), case closings were reversed.
• The study "Who Feeds The Hungry?" (www.food for survival.org) shows that between 1995 and 1998 Emergency Feeding Programs (EFP’s) grew from 735 to 971; meals served monthly increased from 2.7 million to 5.2 million; people served per month increased from 309,280 to 615,858. Over half of those eating at EFP’s are children or the elderly. During 1998 one-third of EFP’s report they were forced to turn people away.
• By 1999, 40,000 Workfare workers were working for the city of New York. According to "Workfare: The Real Deal II" (July 1997) by the Community Food Resource Center, eight times as many workers are now jobless, without welfare, as there are workers who’ve obtained real jobs.
The next step towards ending "welfare as we know it" is taking place here. Offices that used to be called Welfare Centers, then "Income Support Centers," are being changed into "Job Centers." Programs that used to offer public aid as a last resort to individuals and families with no other income are now subject to rigid time limits and slave labor Workfare requirements. As stated by NYC’s Human Resources Commissioner Jason Turner’s October 2000 proposal to create the Job Centers, the focus is "on self-sufficiency." This new "focus" translates into a new center for "disruptive clients" due to open in East Harlem. Anyone who fights back against wrongful closing of their case, assignment to slave labor Workfare or any of the many demeaning events occurring in a center daily can be kicked out of their neighborhood center and forced to travel (up to two hours) to the East Harlem Center.
At the March membership meeting of AFSCME Local 371, representing many workers in the welfare industry, there was a heated discussion of the Job Center proposal and the new civil service title of workers employed in these centers. On the one hand there was the narrow trade unionist view of which of three unions would represent the new title. The leadership of each union wants the dues of the workers in the Job Centers. Such workers were concerned with their safety.
A veteran PLP’er rose to declare that if he was the head of a family being wrongfully denied assistance, he would certainly fight back. It was wrong, he said, to ignore the content of what the Job Center workers would be doing. The PL’er pointed out that during strikes of this local in the 1960’s, welfare clients had mobilized to support the strikers by demanding that the city provide needed services at once. Worker/client unity had also been built by workers supporting client demands in the welfare rights movements. In fact the first contract of this local, in 1965, contained clauses guaranteeing the issuance of school and camp clothing for children when receiving welfare. Safety for workers, he concluded, was in building worker/client unity, not in calling for cops. This talk shifted the discussion away from "safety" and towards a broader analysis of where welfare reform is leading and the role of welfare workers within this.
In this period, we in PLP must struggle to win our co-workers to critically evaluate what they’re being asked to do and not blindly cooperate with these fascist developments. Rather we must organize against them.
LA Janitors Fight Corrupt Union, Plan for May Day
LOS ANGELES — A year ago the janitors made history here with a mass, militant strike. The union leaders, Democratic and Republican politicians, liberal organizations and churches praised capitalist democracy and the change to "a new Los Angeles unionism." The union’s slogan was, "A penny to rise up out of poverty." On the outside, everything looked rosy, but on the inside this whole process was corrupted. Strike donations were lost; strikers never received food collected for them that was later sold at the 99¢ stores. Traps and tricks punished the most militant strikers. The following is an interview with one of the rank-and-file strike organizers.
PLP: What’s new at work?
Janitor: Local 1877 has a new plan of "dues for self improvement" which is really another trap. They want to charge every member an extra $4.30 a month for five months, about a million dollars extra per year. They say they’ll use the money for classes in computers and English, and for child care during marches.
PLP: What do most workers think of this plan?
Janitor: They’re mad and have every reason to be. Look, people who make $7.50 an hour are paying $27.50 a month to be members and a dollar extra for strike funds. Now with a small wage increase, we’ll have to pay $1.80 more to the union. Altogether we’ll be paying $34 a month in dues. Apart from this, they wanted us to pay $3 a month for three years to help the bosses’ politicians. They filled us with propaganda from all the politicians who had their pictures taken with us during the strike, and now tell us, "These are your friends; now they need us to pay them something back for what they did for us. "Many people told them "NO!" Some said, "You are Democrats. We’re not Democrats or Republicans."
PLP: Do you and your friends have a plan to struggle inside the union?
Janitor: Certainly. These "dues for self improvement" have been imposed on us. Once they take the money out of our checks we’ll demonstrate in front of the Local to expose them as corrupt. They made a mistake with all these charges. They think they can fool the workers with this "self improvement." Instead they’ve got an angry membership.
PLP: How can we win the workers to be more political, to fight these attacks, and to turn more to revolutionary politics?
Janitor: With more leaflets and struggles in the work centers, with CHALLENGE and with political marches.
PLP: Last year, many janitors made revolutionary history by marching on May Day in San Francisco. How can we bring a large group this year here in Los Angeles?
Janitor: May Day is the workers’ day. I think they must come. We’ll invite them and explain the importance of the march, and show why the fight for workers’ power is the alternative to the bosses’ and union’s corruption.
PLP sent a May Day March invitation to all the janitors who read CHALLENGE. Many responded enthusiastically. A worker called to say, "I want to become a May Day organizer." We’ve been visiting and calling many janitors, to win them to participate in the march. Also, a motion was put before an opposition group in the union to endorse the march. They’ll decide at their next meeting whether they’ll come as a group or only call on the workers to march. There is great potential for a big group of janitors at the May Day March. We must sharpen the struggle to make this potential a reality.
Salvadoran Workers Headed for May Day
EL SALVADOR — May Day 2001 is being celebrated here amid growing misery and pain for a working class devastated by earthquakes and rotten conditions caused by capitalism. Thousands of workers from the cities and rural areas will be joining the official union May Day marches. Workers will not only honor the Martyrs of the 1886 Chicago General Strike — where May Day was born — but also will protest the current government’s anti-working class policies. Unlike previous May Days, intellectuals and professionals — now seeing they are not exempt from the bosses’ attacks — will march this year.
We in PLP are also preparing for May Day. Comrades will be travelling long distances from mountains and distant towns, passing through police check-points, to come to the capital city for a PLP May Day planning meeting. "It is important that each Party comrade understand why we march on May Day, to bring to the marchers our communist politics and to make newer comrades more aware of the meaning of our ideas," said a comrade teacher.
CHALLENGES and our communist leaflets, red flags and banners will be present at the march in San Salvador. Fight for communism on May Day!
Dinner Boosts N.J. May Day
ORANGE, NJ, March 24 — Fifty-five people attended the annual May Day Dinner and Cultural Evening here tonight, boosting our May Day organizing. The multi-racial crowd of workers and students included many who had never been to one of our events. Nearly $400 was contributed for May Day tickets and for lots of literature.
Our cultural presentations included poetry and prose, some of it original, forceful speeches and songs, both rehearsed and ad-libbed. The May Day presentation reviewed the executions of the Haymarket radicals in 1886 following the Chicago general strike for the 8-hour day which gave birth to May Day. The decision to kill these revolutionary heroes reminded us of how the legal system has always served the bosses. But as August Spies declared on the gallows: "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices that you strangle today."
The Morristown case here continues that criminal injustice system. Like those who came before us, we will answer the rulers’ attacks by building our revolutionary movement. But we will not be content with a "reformed" capitalism. Our goal is the seizure of power, the destruction of capitalist wage slavery and racist oppression, and the creation of a communist world where our working-class culture will flower.
The event was organized and led by some of the newer PLP comrades, a step forward for the Party here. Although we needed more participation from younger comrades and friends in the cultural part of the program, still the dinner set a good tone for the following five weeks.
Our increased turnout was due in no small part to an increased commitment of Party comrades. The struggle to increase literature distribution has sharpened the question of whether we are serious about our revolutionary goals. Nothing less will do in the face of growing fascism. Two eight-year-olds from a grade school in Irvington were recently arrested, questioned for five hours and then charged with making "terroristic threats." All this for playing "cops and robbers" with paper guns! The Newark school superintendent wants video cameras in every high school. We are building the fight against fascism in mass organizations while explaining to our friends there about a communist view of the police and legal system.
a name="A Seattle Mother Fights Racist ‘Justice’"></">A "eattle Mother Fights Racist ‘Justice’
[A letter in our April 11 issue reported the brutal racist murder by two Seattle cops of Michael Randall Ealy, a 35-year-old African American. Neither an inquest nor a civil suit brought by Michael’s mother produced any justice for Michael. The following is an interview with Mrs. Ealy.]
Challenge: What do you think of this system?
Mrs. E.: You could be innocent, or you could be guilty, but there’s no justice. The judicial system shows that more every day. People think they are safe, but they aren’t. If there aren’t poor people or people of color, then the cops get whoever else is around. The person who is more powerful always gets off. Even if it’s proven that the cops are guilty, they are still found innocent.
Challenge: Why is it this way?
Mrs. E.: In most of the cases in Seattle and other cities around the country, the police have been found innocent, but we know that’s not true. We hope these cases will be reopened, as where DNA has shown that the people are innocent, even though they have spent many years in prison. I am hoping that someday it will be fashionable for a jury to say that when anyone committed a crime, they will be accountable for their actions; this includes the police.
Challenge: What are you planning to do next?
Mrs. E.: We are hoping for a retrial/appeal, but that is very expensive. It will cost nearly $10,000 to get the trial transcripts. Still, we are determined to continue the fight. I want to get the families of the people who have been murdered in the Seattle area together, because we are stronger with greater numbers.
What I have to ask: Is there such a word as justice?! That word should be stricken, because we know there is no justice for people of color, poor people and other "undesirable" people,
Challenge: There is no justice for workers as long as we are bound by capitalism. That is why we organize for a revolution. We are hoping Mrs. E. will join us on May Day, to tell us about the continuing fight against cop murders and to make our numbers stronger.
a name="Psychiatric Rx For Kids’ Problems: ‘Just Say Yes!’"></a>"sychiatric Rx For Kids’ Problems: ‘Just Say Yes!’
NEW YORK CITY, April 6 — Last Sunday a half-day conference at a local church here explored the question: Are too many children being diagnosed as "mentally ill" and treated with psychotropic drugs? The conference was timely because the psychiatric profession, pediatricians and government health agencies are spreading the notion that, within any given year, 20% of children are mentally ill and that these "illnesses" are nearly all biologically-based and therefore best treated with medication. The most common diagnoses are Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, anxiety and depression. Over five million children are on psychiatric drugs in the U.S., primarily Ritalin. Now a multi-site study is underway to evaluate the effect of Ritalin on 3-year-olds!
A well-known psychiatrist and former department head at the National Institutes of Mental Health described the massive drug-company influence over psychiatry. He noted that the drug companies spend twice as much money on marketing as on research; that they sponsor over half of the country’s medical research and influence what gets published. Consequently, psychiatry has turned completely away from "talk therapy" and interaction with patients to treatment with medications only. The speaker was disturbed enough by these trends to resign from the American Psychiatric Association.
The second speaker, a child psychiatrist, pointed out that drugs like Ritalin are often sought by middle class parents as a way to improve their children’s "performance," without really dealing with their problems or accepting their abilities. He did indicate that for some children, Ritalin combined with school and family adjustments may be helpful for a short time.
The third speaker was a psychologist who works with the NYC public schools. She pointed out differences in how Ritalin is used. Among the well-to-do, mostly white suburbanites, it is viewed as a short-term agent to "enhance performance." Meanwhile it is pushed on poor working-class parents, both urban (often black and Latino) and rural, as a means of controlling children. In both cases there is no analysis of the many factors influencing behavior. Parents may not even be informed that their child is being evaluated. Often if they object to medication they are threatened with charges of "neglect" and removal of their children.
Although presenting a factual picture about current child psychiatric practices, the speakers mostly failed to place this emphasis on controlling children’s behavior into a social context. During the discussion period several PLP’ers pointed out that the need to pacify children rather than improve schools or attack poverty is part of the current move towards fascism and war. Intellectually, biodeterminism is infecting all areas of academic life (see CHALLENGE supplement, April 11). It claims that our genes and body chemistry — rather than the social system in which we live — determine our happiness, abilities and success in life. Not only are children being held responsible for alleged behavioral or academic "deficiencies," but they’re being chemically controlled to make them passive and malleable.
This conference can be a stepping-stone to intensify the fight-back among teachers, parents and social workers in several organizations and unions also alarmed about this trend. Another demonstration against the drugging of toddlers is planned at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. PLP’ers will continue to give political and organizational leadership in this struggle.
Workers of the World, Write! John Brown Play Gets it Right
CHALLENGE readers and friends should see a new play on John Brown if and when it comes to their area. It allows for audience discussion after the show. John Brown played a major role in the fight against slavery. He was one of the few white abolitionists who was not merely against slavery but actually believed in racial equality. Besides participating in the Underground Railroad, he lived with free blacks in Ohio and New York State. Anti-racists in Internaitional Commitee Against Racism and communists in PLP in the Washington, D.C. area have organized trips for many years to Harper’s Ferry to draw modern-day lessons from John Brown’s raid. The trips emphasized several aspects of his life: (1) the multi-racial unity he exhibited; (2) the support of many workers around the country; and (3) the necessity of violence to overthrow slavery.
Some friends and I in attended the two-person play, "Sword of the Spirit," by Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino, based on letters John and Mary Brown wrote while he awaited execution for leading the Harper’s Ferry insurrection against slavery. Their words lift the veil of lies written about John Brown. Most history books, if they mention John Brown at all, call him insane. As one woman who attended the play declared, "My father told me ‘of course they thought John Brown was insane. Here was a white man fighting to free the slaves!’"
The play depicts the passion and courage of his convictions, and reveals the depth of devotion both his wife and their children had for the cause. Their marriage was strengthened by their political commitment. The play will be touring all the places where John and Mary Brown went.
Much discussion ensued about John Brown and the role violence plays in social change both during audience participation after the play and in inviting our friends to attend. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks was mentioned as a book NOT to read because of its false portrayal of John Brown. It says he was an authoritarian father whose belief was "spare the rod and spoil the child." In fact, the two actors who researched letters for this play said this was untrue. An older son commented on how John Brown was very devoted to his children. His wife mentioned how he would nurse them through their various illnesses.
D.C. Comrade
Census Spawns Racist Divisions
The 2000 Census figures show that Latinos are becoming the largest minority in the U.S. Instead of building unity among black and Latino workers and youth, some forces are playing the old-fashioned racist game of divide and conquer. The Daily Challenge, a black newspaper in Brooklyn, NY (absolutely no relation to this paper), ran an incredible KKK-type article entitled, "Blacks Have Reservations About Influx of Hispanic Immigrants" (April 5). It quotes a computer engineer from Charlotte, NC (where the Latino population is only one-fourth that of blacks) as saying: "Hispanics come over here, start businesses and multiply like rabbits. It is no surprise they outnumber us because they have a baby every year." [!] The article repeats distortions and lies which could have been taken right from a KKK rag. This paper claims to fight racism.
Not to be outdone, many Latino politicians are trying to use the growth of the Latino population to build themselves up. They push similar lies like, "blacks got theirs; now it’s our turn." They, of course, mean black politicians and Latino politicians.
Meanwhile, racism is increasingly rampant. Low wages and rotten working conditions and jobs affect black and Latino workers as much as ever. While a small number of politicians, artists, athletes and a very tiny number of business owners have snatched some crumbs from the racist system, building illusions among many black and Latino workers and youth that the system works, the reality is quite the opposite. One telling example: there are two million in jail, two-thirds of them black and Latino males.
The best antidote for this racist crap is the unity of black, Latino, white and Asian workers and youth marching with PLP on May!
NYC Comrade
Bosses Blow Fuse; Workers Get Shock
The deregulation of power in California helps us to somewhat understand how capitalism works and why it can never serve the interests of the working class.
The California State government declared that prices the California utilities pay for power (to companies outside the state) be subject to supply and demand. Meanwhile, ostensibly to protect consumers (mainly California's working class) from higher bills, the State put a cap on the prices the in-state utilities could charge.
So this was the set-up: the State government allowed (or couldn't prevent) prices the in-state utilities pay to rise without limit. At the same time, the State prevented the in-state utilities from raising their prices higher than they were charged for the wholesale power. On the surface that sounds like a way to protect the consumer, but that's only if the in-state utilities could stay in business.
The State government has not given itself the legal authority to force the utilities to stay in business, and even if it did, it can't get blood from a stone. If the utilities are operating at a loss, they cannot pay their workers. Nor will the banks lend them the money with which to buy more power, because the utilities would be unable to re-pay the loans. In other words, this set-up, with its built-in losses, forces the utilities out of business.
Neither has the State given itself the authority to prevent the utilities from shifting money between itself and its parent companies, outside of California. But even that would not save the utilities from going bankrupt. And if the utilities do go out of business, that wouldn't help the working class either. If prices were forced down, that only helps if the power is available.
Since the State doesn't give itself the authority to keep these utilities in business, its only alternative is to become the supplier of energy itself, buying power at the outrageous prices charged by the out-of-state wholesalers. Where would the State get the money to buy the power? Through its authority to tax the citizens, mainly workers. But then the workers would be paying for the higher prices charged by the wholesale power companies. These out-of-state power companies are beyond California's jurisdiction, so the State government could not control the prices it would have to pay.
No matter how you slice it, workers could get the needed energy at reasonable cost only by owning the State and giving themselves the authority to take over the energy companies, right through to the sources of the energy. That's the only way workers could maintain the supply at a cost low enough so they're not forced to choose between heat and food. But if the workers owned the state they would not need to charge themselves any price. Rather they could simply provide everything they need for themselves. But that's not capitalism, that's communism, and to get there will take a revolution.
An energy user
TO OUR WEB READERS: This issue of CHALLENGE includes a special supplement on the racist sociobiology "science." How it has spread to all areas of the academic world and its effects on our daily lives. Again, we ask our web readers to help us keep both versions of our newspaper (the digital one and the printed one) spreading communist politics as an antidote to the poisong of capitalism and all its different ideologies. You can help subscribing to the printed version of the paper or sending a contribution. One year sub to CHALLENGE cost 15 dollars. You can send a check or MO made out to Challenge periodicals and mail it to PLP: GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202, USA.
- Spy Vs. Spy Shows
U.S.-Russian Bosses on Collision Course - Rulers Want Latino Mayor For
L. A. to Curb Class Struggle - SCABS, NATIONAL GUARD
BREAK NURSING HOME STRIKE - Boeing's Top Bosses Leave Town:
Are They Taking our Jobs and Pensions with Them? - Ford Workers Fight for A Better Idea
- Europe's Bosses Invading U.S. `Backyard'
- Pipeline Politics Fueled Balkan Bombing
- Garment Strikers Fight Scabs, Welcome CHALLENGE
- Transit Workers' Unity Jails
Sexist D.C. Boss - Jobs Cut, Profits Rocket, Capitalism Kills 91 Oil Workers
- UCLA: Take Affirmative Action To Smash Bosses' Racism
- `No Free Speech For Racists!'
- Capitalism's No Accident; Murders Two More Steelworkers
- LETTERS
Workers of the World, Write! - Zapatistas March:
Can't Reform Bosses' Racist Rule. - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Special Effects Make History Disappear
Editorial 1
Spy Vs. Spy Shows
U.S.-Russian Bosses on Collision Course
The recent "spy vs. spy" finger-pointing between U.S. and Russian bosses confirms that the main political trend in the world today is sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.
In the wake of revelations that an FBI agent had been handing U.S. security secrets to the Russians for years, Bush ordered the expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats. The Russians retaliated. Both groups of rulers will eventually limit this particular incident. Regardless of its short-term tactical result, however, the incident itself shows that U.S. and Russian bosses are on a long-range collision course. U.S. bosses want to rule the world. After all, the Russian bosses still have one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals and the largest country in the world. They don't want to be ruled by other bosses.
When the old Soviet Union self-destructed in 1991, many U.S. capitalists thought they could take advantage of a super-profit bonanza. They rushed in with loans and investments. They succeeded mainly in wreaking economic terror against the Russian working class by helping Russian vulture capitalists strip it bare of broad protections and benefits workers had enjoyed for decades under Soviet socialism. But the U.S. business pipe-dream was short-lived. Led by current president Putin, a group of Russian nationalist politicians and generals grabbed power away from the Yeltsin clique, who had favored deals with the U.S.
Many in the U.S. ruling class have done an about-face over policy toward Russia. One of the most important is Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. As C.E.O. of aluminum giant Alcoa, he tried to take over the huge Russian aluminum industry during the Yeltsin years. Putin gave O'Neill the bum's rush, preferring to deal with the French aluminum company, Péchiney. Now O'Neill calls further loans to Russia "crazy" (New York Times, 3/25).
O'Neill reflects Bush & Co.'s overall hawkishness toward Russia. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz made hostile statements to the British press about Russian arms deals with Iran. In February, Bush National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice called Russia "a threat to the world in general" (New York Post, 3/25).
This sparring isn't just verbal. The Bush administration intends to expand NATO to include the Baltic nations on Russia's border, a clear attempt to surround Russia and prevent it from becoming an imperialist threat to U.S. world domination. Further trying to humiliate Putin & Co., a Bush State Department official will meet with the foreign minister of the Chechen nationalists with whom Russian rulers have waged a brutal war for the last year and a half.
The Russian bosses have a long road to travel before they can confront U.S. imperialism as equals. However, they are mapping out such a strategy. "Despite Russia's economic weakness...[Putin...is rebuilding] relationships with...former Soviet republics in hopes of slowing NATO's expansion" (New York Times, 3/25). The Russians are re-establishing toeholds in other strategically vital areas -- the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, Korea and even Cuba.
The Russians aren't alone. As the Times grudgingly admits, the U.S. may still be the "lone superpower," but the "world is starting to get in its way" (3/25). The "world" includes the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, China and Western Europe. U.S. efforts to impose "peace" on Israel and the Palestinians are fizzling. Saddam Hussein still holds power and continues to thumb his nose at Exxon Mobil. Differences between the U.S. and Chinese bosses are growing. And "the U.S. and the European Union are on the brink of a major trade and economic conflict," according to C. Fred Bergsten, head of the Institute for International Economic Studies (NYT, 3/25).
None of the above furnishes a recipe for peace and tranquillity, particularly if the worldwide profit system's current economic slump continues. Like the Russians, the Chinese and Europeans are a far cry from the strength they will need to unseat U.S. imperialism. But contradictions between U.S. rulers and their rivals are slowly sharpening and U.S. isolation is increasing.
Competition among imperialists for markets, resources and cheap labor makes war inevitable. As CHALLENGE has often noted, all the world's rulers are secretly planning for this war, even if it lies in a still-undetermined future. We, too, must make our plans as a class. As the drift toward world war accelerates over the coming decades, the progress we make today and tomorrow in building our Party and in sharpening the class struggle will enable the working class to understand the necessity to turn imperialist war into class war for communism.
[Editor's note: The Bush administration is also retooling its foreign policy to treat China as a strategic enemy. Regardless of tactical disputes among U.S. bosses about which of the two looms as the primary threat to their domination, the trend is toward treating each as a strategic foe. Future CHALLENGE articles will examine the growth of these two rivalries.]
Editorial 2
Rulers Want Latino Mayor For
L. A. to Curb Class Struggle
About two dozen candidates are running for mayor here on April 10. Only six are considered serious contenders. Of these, only two will remain for a June run-off that's virtually inevitable with such a large number of candidates. The run-off will most likely be between James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa. Hahn is the city attorney and son of the late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, remembered kindly by many liberals and black voters, particularly in South Central LA. Villaraigosa is the former speaker of the California State Assembly.
Hahn is white. Villaraigosa is Mexican-American. In a city over 60% minority, of which the majority is Latin, Villaraigosa is the candidate of choice of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, the Eastern Establishment. Not surprisingly, he has been praised by the New York Times, and endorsed by the LA Times, Gov. Gray Davis, the LA County Federation of Labor and by many black liberal politicians and religious leaders.
He is proud to describe himself as a "product of the American dream," a poor boy from the barrio, whose abandoned mother's efforts and affirmative action put him through college and on the road to success. He is charismatic and, as the LA Times writes, has "the highest potential to take up the unifying mantle of the late Tom Bradley." Bradley made "history" as the first black elected mayor of LA.
But Villaraigosa, 48, is not without blemishes. Besides having Clinton-style marital relations, after being appointed to his first public position by County Supervisor Gloria Molina, one of his first acts was to grant Molina's husband a contract for $193,000.
But none of this worries the ruling class. Their politicians' rampant immorality in both private and public life is common knowledge. What does worry the rulers is his claim that sometimes he leads "with my heart instead of my head," as he said to explain his letter to President Clinton to pardon Carlos Vignali. Vignali was a big-time drug dealer whose father was a hefty contributor to Villaraigosa's political campaigns. Another main concern is that, although he is an able coalition builder, "Does he know the line between trying to forge coalitions and trying to please everyone all the time?"asks the LA Times (3/25) "As Mayor, will he be able to say no to them [the unions] when necessary?"
Nevertheless, he's their best choice for implementing their plans for war and fascism. According to the same LA Times editorial, the main problems to be addressed are "rehabilitating the LAPD,.... saving the public school system, [and] the racial and class resentments simmering just below the surface." War is not mentioned, but the U.S. military has a major propaganda blitz to recruit more Latino youth. The ruling class hopes that Villaraigosa will be able to dampen the class struggle, maintain fascist police terror through community policing and get Latino and black youth to willingly fight and die for U.S. imperialism.
But capitalism is driven by its own internal laws that no boss or politician can correct. Voting for any of these politicians won't change a thing. The deepening economic crisis inflicting misery and havoc on the working class, plus a racist police state mowing down young black and Latin youth in the streets, terrorizing and imprisoning tens of thousands, does not bode well for "peace and harmony." Communists in PLP will fight to turn that "simmering racial and class resentment" into a fight for communism.
SCABS, NATIONAL GUARD
BREAK NURSING HOME STRIKE
BLOOMFIELD, CONN., March 27 -- "This is supposed to be these people's golden years," declared a locked-out nursing home worker at the Alexandria Nursing Home here. "It's impossible to do the kind of job that will allow this to happen," she said. She was one of 4,500 nursing assistants and food and maintenance workers, members of District 1199 of the New England Health Care Employees Union, who walked out last week at 40 nursing homes throughout the state in a planned one-day strike.
The workers' main demand was for increases in per-patient staffing levels. Here there is only one nursing aide assigned to 40 patients on the night shift.
Gov. John Rowland immediately called out the National Guard to break the strike by escorting the bosses' hired scabs into the struck workplaces. Rowland pledged $6 million to cover the cost of those scabs.
SOLID MULTI-RACIAL UNITY
The strikers here are largely black women whose overwhelming feeling is concern for their patients who they treat "like family." But when they headed back, the racist bosses, with no feeling either for the workers or their patients, locked out 1,500 statewide for the next four days while the scabs continued to work their jobs. Then the bosses threatened to refuse to take back the mostly white LPN's altogether because they're seeking union recognition. But the predominantly black aides and maintenance workers vowed, "We'll all stay out together. Everyone in or no one in!" This multi-racial solidarity resulted in the LPN's returning with everyone else. Workers grabbed whatever CHALLENGES a PLP member had as they told him to make sure he brings this next issue with their story.
Rowland's attack follows Bush's latest blocking of a Northwest mechanics walkout and pledge to break any strike by 100,000 airline workers whose contracts expire this year. (See CHALLENGE, March 28.) Under capitalism's class rule, government (State) power is the bosses' biggest weapon to make strikes illegal and force workers to knuckle under to their profit system.
The Governor claimed it was necessary for the State to pay the scabs (with workers' tax money) to safeguard the nursing home residents. But he hasn't appeared worried over the threat to their safety caused by understaffing and sped-up workers the other 51 weeks a year.
Despite all the hoopla about budget "surpluses", the bosses face a crisis, trying to re-coup falling profits in many industries while planning for costly wars in the Middle East and the Balkans. Maintaining a huge naval armada in the Persian Gulf to control oil routes costs $50 billion a year -- a billion dollars a week!
This kind of 1-day walkout the union called won't cut it. It reveals to the bosses the union leaders' refusal to wage an all-out battle. The unions, while calling strikes here and there, are loyal to the bosses' profit system and refuse to mobilize the entire working class to back particular groups of workers on the front lines. That kind of class war will only happen with communist leadership that doesn't operate within the bosses' laws. Through that kind of political struggle workers can learn, and act on, the necessity to get rid of the whole damn system.
Boeing's Top Bosses Leave Town:
Are They Taking our Jobs and Pensions with Them?
SEATTLE, WA, March 25 -- Last Monday we were debating if the Boeing bosses suckered us by offering 401k's instead of adequate guaranteed pensions with a cost-of-living escalator. On Wednesday, CEO "Lyin Phil" Condit announced corporate HQ was moving to Chicago, Denver or Dallas. On Friday, we got the "good news": Boeing was not going to sell the commercial division "for the foreseeable future," but 500 manufacturing jobs would soon be eliminated and the 757-fuselage assembly would be gone from here.
The week was not so bad--for some. Lyin Phil got a 400% raise, pulling in a hefty $18.7 million. Boeing president Stonecipher got $16.2 million, while Alan Mulally, CEO of the Commercial division, netted a "meager" $8.5 million.
While some workers on the shop floor seemed baffled, soon a theme emerged: capitalism had pushed the aerospace industry into a crisis of overproduction. The anarchy of the bosses' system was destroying our lives.
Even The Bosses Admit What The Workers Know
"Boeing...is...a company that is generating a flood of cash," said Wolfgang Demish, an investment banker and a long-time Boeing specialist. (New York Times, 3/23) "The critical issue from a corporate perspective is how do you deploy that cash for the benefit of the shareholders."
"I listened to Condit," said a machinist, using wisdom gained through class struggle, "and all I heard was shareholders, shareholders and profits, profits, nothing about employees."
It's true we made oodles of money for the bosses. The "financial markets" (i.e. the biggest capitalists) demand huge profits from the investment of this capital. Boeing can't make that kind of profit building airplanes because "it can no longer dominate the market for airplanes, as it once did." (Reuters, 3/22) Too many jets are chasing a shrinking market. Orders have dropped more than 50% the first quarter of this year.
Lyin Phil's answer is to dump money into the "new economy" and speculate in the stock market. The company has spent more than $3 billion of the money we made for them buying back its own shares. More billions have been sunk into airborne Internet schemes, but "airlines enthusiasm for in-flight Internet has cooled."(New York Times, 3/23) Boeing has also expanded aircraft maintenance services, but run into competition from some of its big customers, like United and Northwest. Meanwhile, European Airbus has invested $10 billion in their new Superjumbo jet--which is already replacing Boeing's cash cow, the 747.
Boeing is forced to look for places to generate bigger profits so it's moving its headquarters to free itself to make more of these speculative investments, financed by gutting its manufacturing base. "It's a lot easier to slaughter the cow when it's not in your own back yard," observed a machine operator.
During the last year and a half, Boeing stock would rise every time the company announced one of these "asset reductions." Interestingly enough, last week's announcements saw Boeing stock sink. You can only go to that well so many times. The absurdity of capitalism is becoming all too obvious.
A Strategic War Asset
Boeing is a strategic war asset, necessary to the dominance of U.S. imperialism. Ultimately, U.S. bosses won't allow Boeing to collapse--no matter how many of us they have to destroy. The situation is even more urgent since, "The European Commission and aerospace industry executives have unveiled `A Vision for 2020' which calls for a $93 billion investment over 20 years to obtain `global leadership' in aeronautics," reports Aviation Week and Space Technology (3/05).
The crisis in commercial aircraft production has put U.S. bosses between a rock and a hard place. Commercial production helps war production with technology and capital, but as commercial production becomes less profitable, the benefits rapidly disappear. The Pentagon intends to aid Boeing in a desperate gamble to "free up" capital for military production. The Air Force is telling the airlines to buy C-17 military transports from Boeing, subsidized by the Pentagon and use them for commercial freight shipments. But if war comes, the airlines must lease them back to the Pentagon. All this means the C-17s will be virtually given to airlines at taxpayers' expense, while the Pentagon's Defense Science task force recommends a dozen ways to lower our wages.
The union leadership says they will fight for every job. To them that means calling another press conference. To us that means organizing class struggle pointing the way to the only sensible solution--communist revolution. We'll advance this struggle on many fronts, including flooding the plants with May Day leaflets. Each and every May Day marcher will help us organize for the coming battle against this exploitative system. To Lyin Phil and his gang, we say, "You can run, but you can't hide!"
How Did CHALLENGE Know?
"How did you guys know about Corporate's move before the announcement?" asked a Boeing CHALLENGE reader.
"We didn't."
"But I read that article about how you have to pay attention to the primary contradictions of this system, just like you can't ignore faults in the ground."
"Oh! We were just talking about the crisis of overproduction and inter-imperialist rivalry in general."
"I guess I'm going to have to study that paper more carefully," concluded the now-avid CHALLENGE reader.
A few others that we know have also decided--on their own--to take CHALLENGE more seriously. Their faith in this system has been shaken. How many more will read, sell and contribute to our paper, given the present circumstances, if we consciously campaign for a bigger circulation? Let's find out!
Ford Workers Fight for A Better Idea
MEXICO, March 26 -- In order to maintain its position in the sharpening competition for markets, Ford is trying to impose its fascist production program (FPS). Ford bosses want to nullify labor contracts and make class struggle illegal. This is a stage of capitalism called fascism. The new Fox government, like the PRI before it, has opened the door to legalizing the Ford program.
For three years they've tried to get workers at a Ford assembly plant here to submit mind, body and soul to the interests of the company. But rank-and-file workers are resisting. Ford said, "Accept or you're fired," but only a minority wears the company shirt. In a February audit to guage its progress, Ford reported reaching a level 3 on a scale of 10. But even this is fictitious.
The local union committee opposes FPS. Ford and the gangster leadership of the national union (CTM) decided to get rid of it. They tried to win the support of the workers, but the majority repudiated them. In spite of this massive rejection, Ford dissolved the local committee.
The committee called an assembly. Ford and the national union attacked and intimidated the workers but half of them attended the meeting. The fired committee has rejected the national CTM and declared itself independent. The fired committee has accepted the support of another labor federation which unfortunately is just as fascist as the CTM, converting it into a fight of gangsters vs. gangsters for power. Meanwhile, Ford persists in imposing the CTM national committee.
A rebellious worker asked CHALLENGE, "What's happening?" We answered, "Capitalism is in a crisis of overproduction, which leads to increased work-loads, layoffs, fascism and war. We can't win with pro-capitalist gangster union leaders. We need a communist party to confront the bosses and destroy them."
This worker showed his agreement by singing a stanza of a song calling on the workers to fight. He promised to write a song about the Party and the revolution. This kind of response makes the decaying atmosphere of capitalism livable.
Europe's Bosses Invading U.S. `Backyard'
Since President Monroe's 1823 Doctrine of "America for the Americans," proclaiming the Western Hemisphere as the U.S. sphere of influence, the U.S. has considered Latin America its "backyard." In 1845, the U.S. annexed Texas. The ensuing war cost Mexico a fifth of its territory (including California).
In 1898, the U.S. provoked a war with Spain by having its own agents sink the U.S. battleship Maine in the port of Havana, Cuba. Spain lost the remainder of its empire -- Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines -- to the U.S. In 1903, the U.S. supported a rebellion to separate Panama from Colombia. Then it built the Panama Canal. Throughout the last century U.S. rulers sent the Marines to country after country, installing the most brutal dictators in power (Trujillo, Somoza, Batista, Pinochet, the death squads governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, etc.). In the second half of the 20th century, as the U.S. launched its cold war against the former Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands were murdered by the anti-communist death squads and right-wing governments imposed by the U.S. in Central America, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Haiti, etc.
Now U.S. bosses have launched Plan Colombia, spending $1.7 billion to maintain the Monroe Doctrine in Colombia, using the "war on drugs" as a cover. It was begun by Clinton and is now being continued by Bush. But instead of sending the Marines, the White House uses mercenaries (mostly former U.S. Special Forces) and local death squads. Since closing the Panama Canal military headquarters of the U.S. southern command, the U.S. has used bases in other countries (like the Manta air base in Ecuador) to pursue its Plan Colombia.
European Imperialist Inroads in Latin America
European imperialists are increasingly exploiting the cheap labor and resources of Latin America. Spain's banks are the leaders. From 1995 to 1998, the Spanish bank BBVA bought banks in Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil and Puerto Rico and became partners with the Bhif bank of Chile. In 2000 it took over Mexico's Bancomer, its biggest acquisition in Latin America.
In the last year BSCH, Spain's largest bank, spent $8.4 billion to acquire three banks: Banespa, Brazil's third largest private financial group and Banco Serfin and Banco Caracas, the fourth largest banks in Mexico and Venezuela respectively.
The Boys from Brazil
This financial "invasion" is part of the growth of European investments. Previously they were centered in Brazil and Argentina, but now Europe's annual investments have virtually equaled those of the U.S. Latin America draws 60% of Germany's overseas investments, 52% of Holland's and 44% of Britain's. Europe is now Brazil's main trading partner. Germany accounts for 27%, ahead of the U.S. at 20%, in trading with Latin America's largest country.
BP, Elf-Totalfina, Repsol and Shell are among the European energy companies expanding into the U.S. "backyard," along with auto giants like VW, Peugeot, FIAT and Renault. They represent intense competition for U.S. companies.
U.S. bosses still have many aces up their sleeve to protect their empire, including the expansion of NAFTA into the so-called Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, to try to keep out the European bosses. The competition among these imperialists will continually sharpen.
(Coming articles will deal with various aspects of this struggle, including the price paid by workers and their allies because of imperialist rivalry, the role of opportunist forces allying themselves with the different imperialist forces and how can we build a revolutionary communist movement to fight these imperialist butchers.)
Pipeline Politics Fueled Balkan Bombing
A special report appearing in the British newspaper Guardian (2/15) confirms CHALLENGE'S analysis of the Balkan war as a struggle for control over oil pipelines. It documents a project "little-reported in any British, European or American newspaper," the Trans-Balkan pipeline, whose "purpose is to secure a passage for oil from the Caspian Sea....likely to become the main route for the oil and gas now being extracted in central Asia. It will carry 750,000 barrels a day.
"The project is necessary, according to...the U.S. Trade and Development Agency because the oil coming from the Caspian `will quickly surpass the safe capacity of the Bosphorus [Strait, through Turkey] as a shipping lane.' The scheme, the Agency notes, will `provide a consistent source of crude oil to American refineries, provide American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor, [and] advance the privatisation aspirations of the U.S. government in the region.'"
The Guardian reports that Clinton's Energy Secretary, Bill Richardson, said in November 1998 that, "This is about America's energy security,....about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values....
"We would like to see them [Central Asian countries] reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going the other way. {Russia] We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right."
The Guardian also stated that the pipeline "featured prominently in Balkan war politics. On December 9, 1998, the Albanian president...noted `that no solution [to the pipeline scheme] confined within Serbian borders will bring a lasting peace.'" "The message," says the Guardian, "could scarcely have been blunter: if you want Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan pipeline, you had better wrest Kosovo out of the hands of the Serbs." That was exactly the main purpose of the U.S./NATO Balkan bombing: to oust the Serbs from Kosovo. In fact, the Guardian reports, "In July 1993...the U.S. sent peacekeeping forces to the Balkans. They were stationed not in the conflict zones in which civilians were being rounded up and killed, but on the northern borders of Macedonia...."-- precisely where this pipeline project was headed.
Concludes Guardian reporter George Monbiat, "I can't tell you that the war in the former Yugoslavia was fought solely to secure access to oil from...central Asia. But in light of these findings, can anyone now claim that it was not?" Enough said....
Macedonia: Pipeline Politics II
Fighting over export oil pipeline routes for Caspian oil continues to fuel violence in the Balkans. In 1999, when the U.S. and its NATO allies rained "humanitarian" high explosives on Serbia, CHALLENGE revealed that the Western powers' real goals were to protect a U.S.-backed pipeline project that would run through Macedonia, within ten miles of the Serbian border. Another U.S. aim was to prevent strongman Milosevic from building his own Russian-sponsored pipeline network to export Caspian crude to the West through Macedonia and Serbia. (See article left.) Gun battles have now broken out inside Macedonia between Albanian nationalists (people of Albanian background living in Macedonia) and the government right along the route of the major U.S. pipeline.
The shooting is centered just to the west of the Macedonian city of Skopje. Halliburton -- Vice President Cheney's old company -- is building a line to move Caspian crude from Bulgaria through Skopje to Albania and from there to Western Europe and North America. BP Amoco and Chevron support this route. But Skopje also serves as a strategic junction for competing projects. Russia's Lukoil and Greece's Hellenic Petroleum plan to pipe Caspian oil from Thessaloniki to Skopje. And before the NATO bombardment, Milosevic boasted of a grand design to pump Russian-produced Caspian oil from Skopje through Serbia and then to Croatia for export to the world market. The ousting of Milosevic and the current occupation of Kosovo by U.S.-led NATO troops puts this scheme on hold for now.
But Moscow's influence in the Balkans has been growing ever since Russian troops seized Kosovo's main airport at the close of NATO's bombing campaign. Today, Washington appears forced to tolerate the Albanian fascists -- who want a bigger slice of the pipeline profits for themselves -- because they are sworn enemies of the Russians and Serbs. For the warlords, both the local nationalists and the big imperialists, too much is at stake for the pipeline question to be settled peacefully.
The endless battle in the Balkans shows that the capitalists are willing to spill barrels of workers' blood for a secondary source of petroleum. We must also be ready for a bigger, more deadly, showdown over the grand prize, the oil of the Persian Gulf.
Garment Strikers Fight Scabs, Welcome CHALLENGE
LOS ANGELES, March 25 --"We're tired of so much injustice, that's why we're on strike," declared a worker from Hollander Home Fashion. These workers, who make curtains, bedspreads and mattresses, have been out for over two weeks.
"We produce everything. You need us more than we need you!" charged an angry worker when a bosses' agent came out to speak with the strikers. The bosses have refused to negotiate. In January they sharply attacked the workers, cutting their wages in half while bringing in new machines to speed up the work and lower costs. Then over 450 workers in two plants in Vernon (a small city near here) struck for decent wages, a pension plan (they have none) and an end to harassment by supervisors. Workers with 25 years seniority earn between $7.50 and slightly over $8 an hour. These workers have been represented by the UNITE union for many years.
The strikers, especially the women, are very militant. They welcomed CHALLENGE with open arms and asked for extra copies of a PLP leaflet. It related a struggle in another garment factory and called for workers to fight for power and to March on May Day.
Several strikers spoke at a nearby high school, asking students for support and explaining that workers create all value. The strikers have welcomed the support of other garment workers, students and other workers. We are urging workers and students to raise money for the strikers and join their picket line.
The bosses are using scabs. When the scabs discover they're breaking a strike, many don't return. The union leaders obey the bosses' laws. When the strikers stopped a scabs' bus for ten minutes, the union opened a path for the bus to go through.
Many workers resist this, and want to use workers' violence to stop the scabs. Many agreed that the laws serve the bosses' interests, not the workers'. And many workers agreed that workers must break the bosses' laws to win anything. The bosses' State -- cops, courts and laws -- exist to keep workers exploited.
The entire capitalist system and its crisis of overproduction, not just the Hollander bosses, are attacking these workers. The fierce competition among the bosses driving for maximum profits has cut workers' wages or jobs in California while thousands of workers in China, Mexico, Central America and elsewhere, are forced to work for $2 to $4 a day.
Strikers said they're interested in coming to the May Day March on Saturday, April 28, to unite workers against the bosses' attacks and fight for workers' power. This strike shows capitalism cannot meet workers' needs. Our alternative is to fight together for a communist society where a decent retirement for workers is a priority--not expendable on the alter of the bosses' profits.
Transit Workers' Unity Jails
Sexist D.C. Boss
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 20 -- A Metro senior supervisor was convicted here in Superior Court of sexual assault on a northern bus operator and given a 90-day jail sentence. This was the latest battle in an ongoing struggle against sexism at Metro, the city's mass transit system.
For several years women drivers have stood up to management's sexual attacks. In each case, the bosses have refused to take any serious action against the supervisor involved and have intimidated the workers making the accusations.
Men and women workers have circulated petitions to fight this management sexism. This has emboldened other women to fight back. In this particular case -- because of the support of her fellow workers -- this woman withstood an all-out attack on her credibility and the portrayal of her as a "disgruntled" worker trying to get back at management by "making false charges" against them.
Will this end sexism at Metro? No! The conviction was the result of a liberal woman judge, a very arrogant supervisor, some obvious lying by management and a very credible victim. The bosses who control the judicial system will not let this happen very often.
Sexism is very important for the bosses. It divides the working class and prevents many women from leading class struggle. Sometimes the bosses are willing to let one of their stooges go to jail to maintain their system's credibility.
Sexism, like racism will only end when workers make communist revolution and take political power away from the racist and sexist rulers. Because of the PLP's involvement in this struggle for many years, some workers have learned the above political lessons and have moved closer to the Party. Others believe the system can yield justice for women workers. But this is the nature of any reform effort. Without engaging the bosses in a struggle, no lessons can be learned.
Jobs Cut, Profits Rocket, Capitalism Kills 91 Oil Workers
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL, March 16 --Today, an oil workers protest denounced the real causes behind the off-shore sinking of the state-owned oil company Petrobrás' biggest oil rig into the Atlantic Ocean. At least one worker died and ten are missing. Yesterday, three explosions within a few minutes of each other sank oil rig 36, located 125 kilometers (78 miles) off the coast here.
The United Federation of Oil Workers, which organized the protest, blamed Petrobrás for the "accident" with its policy of using contractors and cutting labor. In 1990 Petrobrás employed 60,000 workers. Today it's down to 34,000. Rig 36 opened in 1999, with a daily capacity of 180,000 barrels. Later that year it was producing a record one million barrels daily. Between production speed up and rising oil prices, profits shot up, but 91 oil workers paid with their lives. Twelve died on Rig 36 in 1999 alone. These non-union workers have less training and, of course, are paid less.
Capitalism and its industrial "accidents" kill workers from Inland Steel to off-shore in the Atlantic.
UCLA: Take Affirmative Action To Smash Bosses' Racism
LOS ANGELES, March 21 -- On March 14, PLP youth participated in a demonstration at UCLA for affirmative action and for the repeal of SP-1 and SP-2, the policies that ended affirmative action on University of California (UC) campuses. About 3,000 people came from all over the state, including many local high school students. About 140 CHALLENGES and nearly 1,000 leaflets were distributed that, as one comrade told people, "shows you need a revolution to get rid of racism." The march was spirited, rallying to chants like "U C Regents, We see racists!"
Despite the militancy and numbers, it did not force the Regents to vote on the issue. This left many students frustrated and angry. Others were more optimistic, saying that the effort caused several Regents to agree to put the vote on their agenda for their May meeting. While this is true, PLP is working to spread a critical communist approach to affirmative action, to explain why it was created and why it's been removed. Students involved in this struggle wrote a PLP leaflet about the racist nature of capitalism and the need for revolution to end it, calling on students to march on May Day.
Participating in this struggle is reaping results. Several local junior college students came and, for the first time, helped distribute PLP leaflets. We also met others from another UC campus that we've been working with who agreed to help with May Day. Friends of other comrades at different schools got the leaflet as well. This can inspire them to build for May Day on their campuses. PLP's presence also helped the Party at UCLA, where many students are linking the fight against racism to the fight against capitalism. All this will hopefully help bring a bigger college contingent to May Day this year.
Affirmative Action was a compromise won through student struggles. It helped integrate the colleges and universities. Faced with massive social unrest from urban rebellions and anti-war demonstrations at the end of the 1960s, the ruling class felt it could allow certain reforms like Affirmative Action. The U.S.' relative position of dominance in the world and the growing post-World War II economy convinced the rulers that not only could they allow more women and black, Latino and Asian students into the universities but they could turn them around and use them to defend the capitalist system and teach patriotism and loyalty to the U.S. bosses. California State Speaker of the House Bustamante spoke at the rally in favor of affirmative action. He represents the liberal politicians who want more black and Latino youth to go to college and to graduate believing that the system works.
As long as capitalism controls the schools, they will try to produce people from these groups who make racism and sexism legitimate while serving the bosses. But now that capitalism is in crisis, it is sucking the schools dry of needed resources and funds in order to pay for the bosses' global war plans. The bosses have fewer crumbs to give to youth and workers. So their need for more pro-capitalist black and Latin graduates conflicts with their need to divert funds for social programs, including affirmative action, into investments and wars to dominate their imperialist competition.
PLP fights this system's racism, for a world without racism, sexism, exploitation, bosses, or borders...a communist world. An attack on any one of us is an attack on us all. All students fighting racist attacks must understand that racism was born with capitalism. The only real end to all forms of racism will come destroying its creator, the capitalist system. Marching on May Day is one step towards that goal.
`No Free Speech For Racists!'
BERKELEY, CA, March 15 --"10 Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks are a Bad Idea for Blacks-And Racist Too!" Right-winger David Horowitz placed advertisements in college newspapers across the U.S. with this headline. When he came to speak at the University of California here, PLP'ers rallied outside, distributed nearly 200 leaflets with the headline, "NO FREE SPEECH FOR RACISTS!" and made communist speeches. We said the best reparations for racism is destroying the capitalist profit system that needs it. We ended by inviting all students to march on May Day for a communist world.
Horowitz claimed black people should be "thankful" for what the U.S. has "given them," and that "the failures of the black `underclass' are failures of individual character." Topping this racist garbage, Horowitz lied, "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Englishmen and Americans created one." Mass slave revolts in Brazil created an independent communal society. In Haiti ex-slaves drove out the French slavemasters and then smashed Napoleon's invading hordes. In the U.S. over 400 slave revolts occurred before the Civil War. The 180,000 freed slaves who joined the Union Army became the decisive forced that defeated the Southern slaveowners.
However, calling for reparations for slavery and segregation, but not for an end to job and housing discrimination, police terror, incarceration or sub-standard schools is also a mistake. It implies racism no longer exists. It is true that slavery under capitalism was one of the cruelest forms of murder and exploitation in history, but ever since societies were divided into classes, the exploiters have murdered and brutalized the exploited masses, stealing the fruits of their labor. Today's bosses will never pay us that debt. That's why we need revolution.
The campus reactionaries say they invited Horowitz because he should have "a right to free speech." Well, he sure did: he was defended by cops and bodyguards and was interviewed on the evening TV news! Free speech is a question of power. The bosses have more free speech in their TV, movies, newspapers, schools and universities than workers will ever have under capitalism. On top of that, the cops defend racist speechmakers but attack demonstrators and striking workers. Speech and action are not unrelated. Spreading racist ideas leads to racist actions.
At this event we met friends and acquaintances who we'll see in "Students for Justice in Palestine" meetings or back in our classes. There we'll discuss the need for militancy.
We did not go in and disrupt the speech. This was a big mistake. We compromised our ideas by not doing our best to shout him down, mainly because we worried about not getting enough support. Next time we'll organize to do this and will struggle to mobilize groups from our mass organizations to join in.
Capitalism's No Accident; Murders Two More Steelworkers
EAST CHICAGO, IN, March 16 -- Ronald L. Robinson, 45, and Norman L. Brown, 53, were killed in a fiery explosion at Ispat Inland Steel. Both workers, with more than 25 years seniority, were burning out ductwork in the mill's No. 4 shop by cutting steel pipes with hand-held torches. Dan Kado and Mike Davis died in a similar explosion Feb. 2 at Bethlehem Steel's Burns Harbor plant.
The explosion occurred when the workers cut into a 12-inch high-pressure oxygen pipe that feeds oxygen to the furnace. The oxygen pipes are painted green, but years of grime and dust made them indistinguishable. The oxygen pipe was not shown on the building's blueprint and was the same size in diameter as other pipes in the area.
Before the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration had any time to investigate this double murder, United Steel Workers Local 1010 president Hargrove said, "We're not laying blame on anyone. We have a good safety program."
This is what it's coming to. Gambling casinos and beauty pageants. KKK rallies protected by hundreds of riot cops. Plant closings, layoffs, and funerals for murdered steel workers. This garden of weeds is bringing fascism and war, and must be pulled out from the roots. Steel workers have two more reasons to march on May Day and build PLP.
LETTERS
Workers of the World, Write!
They Can't Stand
the Truth
The article describing the "racial profiling" of babies at Cook County Hospital in the last CHALLENGE is causing a stir. Most people who read that newborns get their urine tested for drugs without anyone telling their mothers agreed with us -- it's terribly wrong to make criminals out of our patients and cops out of us medical workers. But administrators and doctors in charge of the program were furious, especially after 1,500 copies of the article in leaflet form filtered through the hospital last week. One clinical director saw some on a secretary's desk and asked angrily, "What are you doing with THOSE?" She replied coolly, "I'm planning to distribute them in my community. People need to know what's going on."
One of the doctors opposed to drug testing seems to be getting blamed for the leaflet. Of course! The bosses would assume no "mere" worker could be behind writing a leaflet. The head doctor, his boss, refused to speak to him. When he mentioned this to a nursing assistant friend, she said, "They can't stand it when the truth comes out."
Some people object to controversy. Why should we get everyone upset and cause tensions? Because if you rest comfortably while others are oppressed, it's only a matter of time before they come for you, too. Struggle, although stressful, gives knowledge, life and hope.
Some of those on the newborn ward have jokingly started calling each other "comrade." Not a bad start.
Red Hospital Worker
Smack C.R.A.C.K.
The Ad Hoc Coalition Against CRACK, organized a community forum opposed to the group Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (CRACK). The latter is a private organization paying $200 to women with substance abuse problems who verify they've been sterilized or use long-term birth control methods. The Coalition is concerned with drug policy, women's health and racism.
Last summer CRACK opened a chapter here and placed subsidized ads on Metro buses serving the black and Latin communities. Several organizations immediately circulated petitions against the ads. Metro unions and the American Federation of Government Employees passed resolutions condemning CRACK. Last November, the American Public Health Association (APHA) passed an interim resolution opposing CRACK's approach to women who use drugs (see http://www.mwpha.org under Issues, and the March 2001 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, page 516). We urge other unions and organizations to use this resolution. In Seattle, organizers are plastering anti-CRACK messages over the CRACK advertisements.
At our meeting, speakers from the National Black Women's Health Project and the South Carolina Advocates for Pregnant Women spoke eloquently about CRACK's dangers. They explained how poverty and racism cause many of the problems that encourage self-medication or drug use, and how CRACK uses racial profiling to deal with this problem. For example, they don't try to reach women who use tobacco, which is much more widespread.
They also related CRACK to eugenics, the attempt to select "good genes" for reproduction and to limit "bad genes." During the 1920s and '30s, over 30 states legalized involuntary sterilization for those considered "mentally defective." Population control measures have been used on welfare recipients during the 1970s. Today, we see many groups linking inattention, violence or depression solely to biological causes rather than social conditions.
Black and Latin women are especially stigmatized for drug use. In many states, pregnant women who test positive for drugs can be arrested for inflicting harm on the fetus. Black and Latin people who use drugs are disproportionately arrested and jailed under harsh drug laws.
There are no quick fixes to drug addiction, but people can change with compassion, support and treatment. While we would support people who fight for that outlook, PLP believes that only a society free of exploitation for profits can eliminate drugs and addiction. We encourage all people opposed to CRACK to march on May Day on April 28 in Washington, D.C.
Participants at the Coalition meeting planned to organize an anti-CRACK campaign by holding more community forums, notifying clergy, meeting with City Council members and distributing the statement.
CRACK is also organizing in many other cities. Check their web site at http://www.cashforbirthcontrol.com to see if it's in yours so you can take action also.
D.C. Comrade
Fighting for
Our Children
Parents, teachers and a school nurse at an urban school have united to retain a free dental program and win safety rumble strips on the street in front of the school. The nurse found out which residents of the housing complex across from the school wanted to be involved through a regular neighborhood CHALLENGE route.
We faced many obstacles. While the authorities revealed how little they care, we persisted to achieve these immediate benefits. However, the fact that fatal accidents still occur and that our dental program is still in jeopardy demonstrates that we need a strong communist party to fight for a system where children will be our priority.
When a car crashed through the apartment complex, a parent who is a regular CHALLENGE reader and contributor alerted the school nurse, a communist, to begin a safety campaign. Only two other schools in the area have rumble strips. One has a very active parent-teacher coalition with communist involvement. At the other a student was killed despite the strips. Funds have been available for several years through a state grant for ALL the schools.
We asked the principal if we could circulate a petition for the rumble strips inside our school. She said it was a "community" affair, that we should take our case to the parent advisory council. The council (most of whom had never been public school parents) initially said a petition in the school was impossible. Two days later they called the school nurse saying we could go ahead. Evidently, they had second thoughts, worrying they would look bad if someone got hurt.
Even after hundreds signed, asking for traffic lights in addition to the strips, it still took many follow-up phone calls before the strips were installed (but no lights and no school signs). Just a few weeks later a speeding car killed a fourth-grade girl. The City then said it would have to do a survey because signs were so expensive. Today there are signs but still no traffic lights at the school corner.
Conditions have worsened since the state take-over of our schools. The dental program provides for buses or vans to take some children every week to get their teeth fixed. However, the dental bus attendants were privatized and then removed altogether. Now parents volunteer as unpaid attendants to keep the program running. When such a parent attendant has an emergency and can't escort the children, dozens are denied dental care. A fight possibly could be made to restore the original attendants. Still, the ongoing volunteer effort by parents and grandparents (most don't even have children in the program; many must go to Workfare sites), shows that communism won't need money and wage slavery to induce people to work to meet society's needs.
We have experienced first-hand that even though we put band-aids on the capitalist system, our children continue to bleed. Yet if we don't unite and fight, the rulers rip off whatever little monies are due us. Under the cover of state "supervision," school administrators have already stolen millions, while ceilings are literally falling on our children's heads.
As we PLP members lead class struggles, we must expose the nature of the capitalist system. CHALLENGE is an important tool. Two mothers have agreed to take five and three copies respectively for friends and folks in a Workfare program. This is all part of re-building a new communist international. We can begin now by marching on May Day, asking our friends to come, and join PLP.
Concerned parents, teachers,
aides and nurse
U.S. STEEL, KKK
Go Way Back
CHALLENGE readers are familiar with the March 10th KKK rally in Gary, Indiana. The police staged an overwhelming show of force to protect two dozen Klan gutter racists. It was especially outrageous given the high level of racist police terror directed at young black and Latin workers, and the crisis in the steel industry that means plant and mill closings, job cuts and a rash of workers killed in explosions. But really, this is nothing new.
In her new book Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter covers Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 when she was growing up. She reveals "the long tradition of enmeshment between law enforcers and Klansmen," including the FBI, state and local police.
She writes that in the 1920's, the coal and steel bosses used the KKK to get U.S.-born Protestants to fight immigrant Catholics so there would be "no danger of union solidarity even among whites, let alone across color lines." U.S. Steel and other corporations kept Klansmen on their payroll as anti-union thugs. When the owners of industry, known as the Big Mules, were no longer willing to dirty their own hands, they used "the racism they had fomented whenever the have-nots threatened to organize across racial lines," McWhorter writes. "Rather than give specific orders to the [KKK], they would delegate political intermediaries to oversee...racial violence."
Birmingham's police chief "Bull" Connor ran the Klan on behalf of the murdering Mules. Among the racist terrorists under Conner were Troy Ingram, who learned about dynamite while working for Charles DeBardeleben's coal mining company, and Robert Chambliss, who organized the infamous 16th Street church bombing that murdered four black children, using a device rigged by Ingram.
Conner was picked to be the center of an alliance of the Big Mules, the judges, the police, the politicians, local newspaper editors and the Klan. When Freedom Riders arrived in an integrated bus in 1961, he kept his police away so Klansmen could beat defenseless protesters. When children marched peacefully, Connor had them met by snarling police dogs, high-pressure fire hoses, cattle prods and clubs.
So the steel bosses and the KKK go way back. Old friends. Then as now, communists saw the struggle against racism as crucial to the liberation of the whole working class. And then as now, "The Cops, The Courts, The Ku Klux Klan, are all a part of the bosses' plan!"
Chicago Comrade
Vietnam: Turning
The Guns Around
A recent CHALLENGE supplement summarized the history of working-class revolts inside the bosses' military during the Vietnam War. We received the following letter from a long-time PL'er, a college professor. He tells of a comrade who was drafted after refusing the military deferment available at the time to college students and who entered the army to organize for communist revolution.
On the day this comrade was inducted into the army, I was one of those detailed to keep the MP's out of the room so he and fellow PL'ers could give speeches to the other recruits. When the MP's finally threw me out, they ripped off my pants, and I had to take the subway wrapped in newspaper. I heard the speeches were good, though. When M... returned from Vietnam a couple of years later he told this story. He was stationed in Pleiku and some guy fired quad 50's at him. He assumed the guy was trying to kill him because the guy disliked his politics. Later he confronted the guy, who apologized profusely, saying he had thought M... was an officer who they all hated! I still use this story with students from time to time.
A Comrade
Murder in Seattle By Racist Cops
On December 28, 1998, Michael Randall Ealy, a 35-year-old African American, was brutally murdered by two Seattle cops, McLaughlin and Traverso, and two American Medical Response (AMR) attendants. Michael had been calling for help; he was ill, very weak and unable to stand on his own. Some passersby called 911 to try to get help for him. Cops McLaughlin and Traverso arrived on the scene, as did Danny Hill and Brett Munsey in the AMR ambulance, which had been called to transport Michael to Harborview Hospital. Something happened on the way to Harborview, and Michael was DOA. He had intrusions, scars and bruises all over his body, and died of brain damage from suffocation.
It took 85 days to get an inquest. When one was finally called, it was composed of five white men and one white woman. There was no justice for Michael at this inquest.
At the end of last year, Michael's mother sued the four men involved, hoping to focus media attention on the case and get the King County police officers and AMR employees to be accountable for Michael's death. However, the jury voted 11-1 in favor of the murderers.
Challenge interviewed Michael's mother (see next issue). She has been very active in continuing the fight to determine what happened to Michael, to bring the responsible parties to justice, to organize the families of other people murdered by the police and to fight against this ever happening again.
Seattle Comrade
CHALLENGE SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT
Nazism 101--
Sociobiology: Genes For Genocide
With this special supplement, CHALLENGE is reinvigorating our Party's struggle against the murderous theory that genes determine society. This idea starts as a "scientific" discussion, but its consequences are far from academic. In the first part of the 20th century, millions of workers died as victims of policies first developed by Harvard "eugenicists." Hitler could never have carried out his "Final Solution" without first establishing "racial science" in German universities. More recently, the U..S.imperialist war of genocide in Vietnam, racist budget cuts, the fascist Workfare slave labor scheme and many other body blows against the working class owe a lot to the Big Lies of genetic determinists like Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Like the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, they all have close ties to Harvard. Wilson's "Consilience" (Consilience, a little-used word, roughly means "being on the same page.") is just the latest disguise assumed by this many-headed monster. Exposing and smashing this trash in a revolutionary manner is, quite literally, a matter of life and
death for our class
A recent CHALLENGE editorial (2/28) described the report of the U.S. Commission on National Security as a bosses' "blueprint for fascism" -- to centralize and strengthen the state apparatus, unite the capitalist class, increase attacks on the working class and indoctrinate us for war against rival capitalist countries. The rulers need the support of millions of college students and professors. The most important blueprint for the colleges is the 1997 book by Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
The ruling class is striving to make its government totally consilient in its preparations for "homeland security." Similarly, Wilson and the ruling class want to make all academic disciplines consilient, to effectively indoctrinate students and the general public by updating the Hitlerite lie that putting millions in concentration camps and carrying out genocidal wars is the highest calling of a genetically-based human nature. For example, Wilson claims the recent genocide in Rwanda and "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans were rooted in genetically-based "tribal instincts, ethnic rivalry, and religious dogmatism," calling Rwanda "a microcosm of the world."
Ant specialist Wilson's 1975 Harvard-published book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, updated the old social Darwinist ideology that there is an underlying biological basis for all human social behavior. The bosses showered Wilson with publicity and praise, transforming him from an obscure investigator of ant colonies into an academic celebrity.
Four years ago they extolled Consilience as the crowning achievement of a visionary elder scientific statesman. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal lavishly praised his call for the subjugation of the social sciences and the humanities to the natural sciences.
Last June, a 3-day a New York Academy of Sciences conference, "Unity of Knowledge: The Convergence of Natural and Human Sciences," based itself on Wilson's book and featured him as keynote speaker. It involved prominent supporters of sociobiology, discussing how to promote consilience.
An example of this promotion occurred last month in New York. Senior administrators from Texas Tech University (TTU) met with Steven C. Rockefeller, chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Ken Chenault, CEO of American Express and E. O. Wilson who has helped develop the TTU program in natural sciences and the humanities. They wanted funding for, (1) a new inter-disciplinary major in "natural sciences and the humanities," and (2) an environmental institute for government research on germ warfare.
Since the 1890s, the Rockefeller family has used philanthropy to influence how the world is organized and to shape the direction of education. The Rockefellers' financed the field of "industrial relations" to promote reforms that would quiet U.S. workers unrest and radicalism. Here Rockefeller and Wilson were looking to establish a beachhead for Wilson's views within the university and develop a pro-business environmentalism.
They told TTU officials that campuses like theirs could become the cutting edge in reforming liberal arts education according to Wilson's Consilience ideas. They apparently viewed TTU as receptive to consilience and as "business friendly."
These developments reflect a broader consilient trend in universities. Biological anthropology and sociobiology have marginalized cultural anthropology. Evolutionary psychology, a disgustingly sexist update of sociobiology, has made significant inroads into psychology. Behavioral genetics and biological psychiatry have displaced social explanations for alcoholism, mental illness and violence.
Worse still, sociobiology has been applied in practice with horrific consequences. New York psychiatrists Wasserman and Pine have drawn blood samples from, and given fenfluromine to, young black and Latin boys to test abnormal serotonin levels in the brain as a "cause" of violent behavior. These children had no history of violent behavior and were subjected to risky experimentation without informed consent. These studies are part of a larger program of U.S. government- funded research once known as the "Violence Initiative."
Further, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and geneticist James Neel experimented on the Yanomami, indigenous people living on the brink of extinction in the Amazon basin of Brazil and Venezuela. Beginning in the 1960s, they bribed the Yanomami with metal goods, incited internal warfare, exposed them to epidemics of infectious diseases and dislocated villages, all to obtain 12,000 blood samples to test their sociobiological and eugenic theories.
In the 1970s, Wilson invented sociobiology based on Chagnon's lies about the Yanomami as "the fierce people" to support his claims that men are genetically predisposed to fight each other over access to women. Last year, British journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado, exposing the genocidal crimes scientists like Chagnon and Neel committed or justified against indigenous Amazonian people. The book has provoked sharp struggle in the field of anthropology. The ruling class values sociobiology enough to mount a concerted attack against Tierney. (See review of Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado, next page.)
These examples of racist medical experimentation on minority children and indigenous Amazonian people offer a glimpse of capitalism in crisis moving toward fascism and world war. After all, U.S. genocidal sanctions have killed 1.2 million Iraqis, imprisoned two million workers at home and forced hundreds of thousands into slave labor in prisons or welfare Workfare programs.
Our Party fought against sociobiology in the 1970s. We led modest struggle against the racist Bell Curve in 1994. Recently we've built a more sustained campaign against the Violence Initiative. We need to increase our efforts to build a broad movement against the rulers' fascist ideology and strategy of consilience. This should include campus-based struggles against local sociobiologists, classroom struggles against sociobiology curricula and exposure of consilience at academic meetings.
These beliefs that everything is genetic have become very mainstream in the U.S. Every day we hear people say that intelligence, racism, nationalism, obesity, mental illness and children's behavioral problems are genetic. Such fascist ideology is being promoted throughout popular culture -- movies, songs, TV shows, etc. We must expose it and organize many more workers, students and professionals to learn through this battle the need to join and build the PLP in order to destroy the system responsible for fascism, capitalism.
Capitalist Anthropology:
`Science' of Extermination
The science of anthropology has just been rocked by its worst scandal in 50 years. Patrick Tierney's book Darkness in El Dorado charges prominent scientists with genocidal crimes.
During the early 1960's the Atomic Energy Commission funded research into mutation rates of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the Cold War objective of establishing "tolerable" nuclear radiation dosages. As an unexposed "control" group, it chose the Yanomami, semi-isolated Indians living on the brink of extinction in the Amazon basin of Brazil and Venezuela. Geneticist James Neel, program director, and Napoleon Chagnon, then an anthropology graduate student, collected 12,000 blood samples from their "research subjects," bribing them with steel axes and pots.
Chagnon depicted the Yanomami as unusually brutal warriors, calling them " the fierce people." He claimed murder and trickery were rewarded in Yanomami society, and that they typify human society before agriculture. Actually, today's Yanomami are survivors of once-large Amazonian populations decimated by colonial slavery. After E.O.Wilson published Sociobiology (1975), Chagnon applied this new biodeterminist theory that human behavior is genetically inherited, falsely claiming that Yanomami men who kill have more children and are more likely to pass on their genes. When gold was discovered in Amazonia, Brazilian rulers -- seeking to carve up Yanomami land for profit -- used Chagnon's portrayal of Indians as bloodthirsty killers to justify genocide. By 1990, Chagnon, hated by Yanomami activists, was barred from Yanomami territory. His research was enshrined in popular films and college textbooks but attacked by other anthropologists who studied the Yanomami.
Guns, Germs, Steel and Anthropologists
According to Tierney, Neel and Chagnon carelessly or deliberately used an obsolete vaccine to spread a lethal measles epidemic among the Yanomami. This charge has grabbed headlines, and drawn angry rebuttals by Chagnon's supporters. But even more serious are charges that Chagnon became a village headman and created the very warfare he described by bribing Indians with sought-after steel goods and stirring up enmities. Chagnon's frequent trips to remote villages to gather blood samples and genealogies ignored the health of Yanomami, who lacked immunity to urban diseases and died by the thousands.
At one point "Chagnon's village" actually made war on "Lizot's village" run by another corrupt anthropologist! During the early '90s, Chagnon conspired with the crooked mistress of Venezuela's president Perez and gold mining bosses to create a Yanomami reservation which would allow unlimited access to minerals and to Chagnon's human research "subjects." Obviously Chagnon's "research" is scientifically worthless.
(Incidentally, this is the same President Pérez who, in 1989, sent tanks to murder hundreds of workers and youth who had rebelled against an austerity plan imposed by him and the International Monetary Fund. The reservation scheme was derailed when Pérez was ousted and imprisoned for being a crook and helping oil-rich Venezuela go broke.)
BACKLASH
Chagnon's crimes have shaken U.S. anthropologists, who tend to be more left-leaning than most academics. Their national association began a formal investigation last month. But leaders of the academic right, who regard Chagnon's "research" as the poster child of human sociobiology, launched a pre-emptive strike against Tierney's book even before it was published, according to a Science magazine investigative reporter.
Chagnon's defenders campaigned by e-mail to discredit Tierney, lining up sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, philosopher Daniel Dennett, zoologist Richard Dawkins of "selfish gene" fame, psychologist Steven Pinker and science writer Matt Ridley. These men have no expertise in anthropology, human genetics or the Yanomami, and had not even seen Tierney's book. They are all hardcore biodeterminists; each is celebrated for pushing the idea that genes rigidly control human behavior.
This struggle is clearly very important to the ruling class and its academic bloodhounds. Our Party can give the leadership exposing the political motives and inevitable spread of fascism behind such "science".
Zapatistas March:
Can't Reform Bosses' Racist Rule.
MEXICO CITY -- The Zapatista march from Chiapas to Mexico City attracted masses. It dramatized the poverty, racism and oppression of the indigenous communities. Yet they sought protection from the bosses' constitution and used the rulers' flag as their banner. The EZLN's (Zapatista) nationalist alternative is "good democracy," a "just nation" and a world where all fit in. This creates the illusion that this exploitative capitalist system offers something beneficial to the working class. Yet for 500 years, millions of indigenous people have been subjected to the most brutal oppression. Without class content, the Zapatista movement becomes an obstacle to the liberation of the indigenous people.
All this politically disarms the oppressed in the face of growing fascism, a result of fierce imperialist competition for the natural resources and low-paid labor of Chiapas. It's no accident that President Fox is trying to negotiate with the EZLN in order to stabilize the southeast region and begin huge profit-making projects (see below).
In 100 days of rule, Fox and the group of fascist bosses he represents, have raised the price of everything, pushed speed-up in the work-place and aims to tax everything, while lowering wages. (Real wages have already declined 25% since 1980 -- LA Times, 3/25)
The indigenous people suffer the most rabid and brutal racism in the world today. They've been so marginalized that urban workers are either ignorant of, or passive and indifferent (sometimes accomplices) of the discrimination and terrible conditions of the indigenous people. "The worker in the white skin will never be free while the worker in the black skin is in chains," said Karl Marx. This applies to the indigenous communities, which provide the cities with domestic slave labor and forces the abandonment of children to the streets.
Up to now, the North has been the primary source of low-paid skilled labor while the South supplies oil and electricity. But now the Puebla-Panama project will employ indigenous slave labor to develop Southern Mexico in order to produce low-cost goods for the Central American market and act as a brake on emigration to the U.S.
Historically the indigenous people in Mexico have fought back the hardest. Today, they are the most willing to take up arms, to sacrifice their lives to end oppression. The rise of the EZLN publicized the racism afflicting the indigenous people. But its political alternative will lead to alliances with one or another capitalist/imperialist gang.
PLP must spread our communist politics to the rebellious communities. We're convinced that only communism can liberate them and the whole working class from racism and exploitation. We must win these communities to make the fight for communism their fight. CHALLENGE is distributed in some indigenous communities and has sparked discussions and study groups about communism. This is the beginning of the fight for liberation.
[Editor's note: Using the term "Zapatour" in our last issue was an error. "Zapatour" is a term created by the right-wing racists who degrade the indigenous rebellion.]
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Special Effects Make History Disappear
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the recent multiple Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee attempts to play off two film genres: the Hong Kong-based martial arts melodrama and the "yakuza" saga. Yakuza culture (gangster samurai serving the ruling class in one form or another) is Japanese, and Crouching Tiger is Chinese, but the analogy holds. These films are really about mythologies of violence, revenge and redemption in which the central character is provoked into using his/her martial arts skills in defense of an aggrieved sense of communal moral outrage. In the case of Crouching Tiger, the main achievement is not the awesome and breathtaking special effects, but the way in which the film makes the oppressive "communal" bonds of feudalism and early mercantilism in China completely invisible.
One interesting aspect of this film is its use of complex female characters in prominent roles. As a matter of fact, these women are far more interesting than the men! In martial arts films, women are usually either sex objects or the victims of male action; rarely, are they the subjects of the plot. Although Ang Lee deserves some credit for nodding in the direction of women's independence, the women are eventually circulated back into the male-dominated social relations of a feudal culture. The female protagonist, played by the actress Michelle Yeoh, owns a private security business which guards shipments of commodities and currency from place to place in China. The male protagonist (Chow Yun Fat) is the alienated (exiled? retired?) leader of a yakuza cult, formerly in service to the same ruling class. Yeoh's character is like an ancient Pinkerton or rent-a-cop! What's totally absent and romanticized beyond belief are the class relations of feudal, semi-feudal, and emergent mercantile economies. There is also the distorted history of the warlords -- glorified gang leaders posing as military officers -- who also use the yakuza/samurai/martial arts cultists for the same purposes as the various Chinese dynasties and ruling classes do: extreme repression and coercion to guarantee their own personal power and that of their allies, available for a price, of course.
So the film uses impressive cinematography and special effects to lull the audience into a sense of wonder and awe at its beauty and the exotic allure of seemingly bizarre and distant Chinese cultures of the past. "Oh, how inscrutable, how beautiful, how honorable, how loyal, how romantic! It took my breath away!" While the audience gasps in temporary, but pleasurable, cardiopulmonary distress, ideologies of primitive capital accumulation, murder, racism, rape, pillage, etc., go unobserved or are so disguised as to be unrecognizable. This, I think, is the point of the film--to create a world elsewhere, to distort history. In this sense, the film reminds me of the Godfather trilogy and the current HBO hit, The Sopranos. With one or two exceptions, mainstream films about organized crime romanticize the violence of the criminals, disguise their relationship to big capital, and lure us into fuzzy thinking about the nature of crime, honor and loyalty.
By the way, none of the above is meant to suggest that we should avoid these films. My breath was taken away at some of the scenes in Crouching Tiger, and I laugh at some stuff on The Sopranos. All the more reason to see such films with our friends and discuss the political nature of art with them.
To our web readers:
For the benefit of many of our readers who cannot get the printed version of CHALLENGE-DESAFIO, Progressive Labor Party communist newspaper, we place the entire content of the paper in the web. We thank you for reading our paper. If you agree with what we do, analyze the world and the struggles of the international working class from a communist point of view, please help us continue and expanding what we do. Subscribe to the printed version of CHALLENGE, it is only US$15 a year. Or send us a contribution. Any amount helps. Our address is GPO Box 808, NY, NY 10001, USA. You can make checks or money orders payable to Challenge Periodicals.
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- U.S. Bosses Fight For Control
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Demopublican Strikebreakers Begin PATCO;
NY Welfare Workers Endorse May Day, Blast Workfare
Union Hacks Sweeten Pot for Domino Bosses
Angry Workers Tell Off Union Hacks
Bavaria Class Struggle School For Communism
Harvard University: 360 Years of Racism and Counting
a href="#Capitalism Won’t Crumble Until Workers Rumble For Communism">"apitalism Won’t Crumble Until Workers Rumble For Communism
Anti-Racists Link Clinton Diallo Decision To Fascism
CHALLENGE Sparks May Day Buzz In LA Garment Shop
Fired Daewoo Workers Battle Cops
LETTERS
a href="#ESL’ers Learn the Language of May Day">"SL’ers Learn the Language of May Day
Jury Duty: Make-Believe Justice
May Day, Class Struggle: A Winning Combo
Fight APHA Award To Drug Moguls: Health Professionals Resist Sellout
Racism Rules Roost in Newark Schools
Editorial
a name="Bush’s Tax Cut Scheme:Billions for Billionaires—War for Workers"></">Bu"h’s Tax Cut Scheme:Billions for Billionaires—War for Workers
When a politician or boss says he’s giving us money, look out! They normally give it with one hand and take it back — and more — with the other. Capitalism, by definition, gives nothing to the working class. The bosses are always on the take.
Bush’s 1.6 trillion-dollar tax cut bill is a transparent give-away to the big business pals who helped steal the presidency for him. But let’s not fall into the trap of joining with the liberal rulers who oppose it. This is a major tactical fight among the bosses. We have no stake in supporting Bush or his opponents.
As the tax bill moves from the House to the Senate, it has outraged the main wing of the ruling class, the Eastern Establishment liberals. On a daily basis, the New York Times has printed editorials and columns attacking it. "The richest one percent of tax payers would get 43 percent of the benefits," thunders the Times indignantly. "Fifty-five percent of African-American children and 56 percent of Hispanic children would receive nothing from the proposed tax cut," the Times adds (3/1). The paper warns that the Bush plan puts Medicare and even Social Security at risk. But make no mistake. The editors of the biggest capitalists’ leading mouthpiece haven’t suddenly become anti-racist and pro-working class. They have an ulterior motive.
The Real Worry? Money For War
The rulers’ main wing is worried that Bush’s cuts will impair its ability to control society and wage war. As CHALLENGE’s reporting on the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century shows, the major U.S. capitalists are seeking a more cohesive and disciplined state apparatus that will enable them to remain "the world’s only superpower." But that requires trillions of dollars. When Bush revealed his plan to repeal the estate tax, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, David Rockefeller Jr., Steven Rockefeller, billionaire George Soros and others protested that, "the billions of dollars in state and federal revenues lost will inevitably be made up...by cutting Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection, and many other government programs so important to our nation’s continued well-being." While they’re worried about Bush cutting social programs too much, they’re even more concerned about the danger Bush’s scheme poses to "increasing defense spending" — according to Congressional testimony by William Gale, a scholar from the liberal Brookings Institution.
Rockefeller & Co. also fear for their own foundations: "Repeal would have a devastating impact on public charities." Groups like the Rockefeller, Ford — and now Gates and Soros — foundations exert tremendous influence on what gets taught in schools, how heath care is administered and how the police patrol the cities. These bosses don’t want Bush to weaken their leverage.
Rockefeller Forces Organize For Bi-Partisan Tax Cut Limits
On March 7, a bi-partisan group of representatives and senators with strong links to the main wing of the ruling class called for limits to the tax cuts. Concerned that the government wouldn’t have enough cash for "national priorities," they demanded "triggers" that would hike taxes if the U.S. budget surplus fell below a certain level.
One Republican in that group, Rep. Amo Houghton of New York, is an heir to the Corning Glass fortune. His brother James sits on Rockefeller’s Exxon Mobil board. Joining Houghton is fellow Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who’s in the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations. She proved her loyalty to them by crossing party lines to vote against convicting the impeached Clinton. Rep. David Bonior, a Michigan Democrat, also opposes the tax cuts. His 1999 minimum wage bill was formulated by the liberal Economic Policy Institute and financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
U.S. Bosses Fight For Control
Major challenges confront U.S. capitalists in the near and far term. They must forcibly reassert control over Persian Gulf oil and prepare to confront the eventual emergence of rival superpowers based on one coalition or another of European, Russian and Chinese forces. These are vast and costly military undertakings that require the biggest capitalists to impose economic discipline on the others.
But the profit system drives individual capitalists to pursue their immediate interests. The fight over Bush’s tax program shows just how hard it is to get capitalists to see beyond their own companies’ bottom lines. Bill Gates indicates he’s joined with Rockefeller to oppose the tax reductions; he now invests in naval shipbuilding as well as software. But Gates came on board only after Clinton had hauled him into court and Wall Street had relieved him of $30 billion during the 2000-01 technology market swoon.
Disunity within the bosses’ ranks persists despite their serious efforts to reverse it. This disunity and many other factors temporarily hinder the rulers’ war plans. We should see these difficulties as a chance for us to organize our Party, especially to expose the liberals as the warmakers and fascists. We must rely on ourselves, not on them. Organizing masses of workers and youth to march on May Day is an important element in achieving this goal.
Why Liberal Bosses Up in Arms Over Bush Tax Plan
The list of big-gun liberals opposed to the Bush tax package is growing. Two former Treasury Secretaries, Clinton pal Robert Rubin and long-time Rockefeller stooge Paul Volcker, attacked Bush’s plan as "too large and risky for the nation’s economy" (New York Times, 3/13). They made this statement at a news conference sponsored by the Concord Coalition, a "bipartisan" group opposed to budget deficits. The group is chaired by Warren Rudman, the same former Republican senator who co-led the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. Rudman is "very nervous" about Bush’s tax plan because it threatens the big bosses’ plan to militarize U.S. society and prepare for a period of major wars. Workers’ interests can never be served by rejecting one enemy—Bush—only to unite with an even more dangerous one, the liberals planning a future of mass terror against our class.
a name="Hundreds Defy KKKops and Klan:"Stop Singing—Start Swinging!"">">"undreds Defy KKKops and Klan:"Stop Singing—Start Swinging!"
GARY, IN, March 10 — Despite overwhelming police intimidation, hundreds of angry workers and youth demonstrated their hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and the cops, rattling the cage we were placed in. It was like a scene out of Nazi Germany (well, not quite yet), as the fascist Klan rallied in an empty sports stadium in a remote corner of a park. The government went all out to prevent any protest. Newspapers withheld information. Several unions and fake radical groups cancelled their plans to protest, as afraid of the workers as they were of the cops.
To get inside Gilroy Stadium, every anti-racist was patted down and passed through a metal detector — no coins, watches, jewelry or pens permitted. No cell phones or cameras. No literature or picket signs. Inside and around the stadium, about 300 cops, sheriffs, state police and federal agents were armed with rifles, tear gas grenade launchers, shields, sticks and dogs. They had an entire motor pool of cars, vans and trucks, and three helicopters. All this to protect the Klan. "Free speech," brought to you by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Outside the stadium, a PLP member was arrested for carrying a bullhorn, while one cop shouted racist insults. A youth was later arrested for "intimidating" a group of armed cops!
Inside, we had to walk a narrow path into a holding pen, surrounded by dozens of riot cops and under the constant view of police snipers. They held us in the pen while they gave the Klan a motorcade out of town with a helicopter escort. After the Klan was safely out of the stadium, anti-racists were forced to walk a narrow gauntlet of armed riot cops. The working class of Gary experiences racist police terror every day. But this open display of fascism helped many understand the true nature of capitalism.
Despite this intimidation, the protestors were militant and determined. More than 250 entered the stadium, including about 60 under PLP’s leadership.
For over an hour, the KKK was completely drowned out. Much of the anger was directed at the cops. One of the most popular chants was: "The Klan in White, the Klan in Blue — F___ YOU!" When a "Jesus Saves" minister tried to pray for love and the KKK, militant youth chanted, "STOP SINGING—START SWINGING!"
However, we could have done better at thinking on our feet and providing overall political leadership. In the holding pen many discussions and debates took place in between verbal barrages against the fascists. We discussed May Day, nationalism, fighting for jobs, the need for mass violence and many other questions. But we gave very few May Day speeches to the anti-racists.
Over 70 CHALLENGES and hundreds of leaflets had been distributed at a nearby shopping center a week earlier. We leafleted the neighborhood and a nearby high school the day before and distributed another 40 CHALLENGES and 1,000 leaflets the day of the protest. Overall, about 3,500 PLP leaflets were distributed in the community and the Purdue campus. A number of people asked to be contacted about future activities, and many black residents expressed a strong respect for our multi-racial group.
We raised the issue in steel and SEIU local unions. At the protest, steelworkers and Cook County Hospital workers met fellow hospital workers and union members who had been on strike last year. There was a bold and militant group of high school and college students, young workers and others. The overt display of fascism helped deepen their anger and renew their confidence in the Party and the working class.
We were all disappointed at being unable to physically smash the KKK. But we should be clear about winning and losing. We will not be able to prevent the development of fascism, but what we do will strengthen our forces and weaken theirs! Doing the day-to-day work to build a mass PLP will ultimately destroy the KKK along with the racist profit system spawning it. With all our limitations, this effort was a step forward. Now we can strengthen the Party by building for a strong May Day.
Demopublican Strikebreakers Begin PATCO;
Airline Workers Must Break Law
On March 8, strikebreaker Bush appointed a Presidential Emergency Board to block a strike of 10,000 mechanics at Northwest Airlines. The executive order extends the strike deadline to mid-May. Bush said he would take "the necessary steps" to prevent strikes by more than 70,000 workers at other airlines. Northwest mechanics immediately picketed the White House to protest Bush’s strikebreaking.
In February 1997, Clinton used the emergency board to order striking American Airlines pilots back to work, five minutes after they walked out. Democrat or Republican they’re all strikebreakers, and workers must be prepared to break their laws when we take them on.
The Northwest mechanics took pay cuts in 1993 to save the fourth-largest US airline from financial collapse. They have been without a contract since 1996. Negotiations have been going on for 4½ years.
At United Airlines, 26,000 members of the Association of Flight Attendants are beginning a job action called "CHAOS" (Create Havoc Around Our System), after their contract talks broke down. They and 14,000 mechanics in the International Association of Machinists (IAM) want some job protection when United merges with US Airways.
Contract talks also broke down between Delta Airlines and the 9,800 members of the Airline Pilots Association. Baggage handlers and others picketed Southwest Airlines to protest an "unacceptable" contract offer.
American Airlines got a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order against the Transport Workers Union. American claims a slowdown by mechanics forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights at New York’s Kennedy Airport. The Supreme Court recently upheld American’s claim for $45.5 million in damages against the Allied Pilots Association for a 1999 sick-out — one of the largest fines in U.S. labor history. In the original District Court decision, Judge Kendell threatened the pilots that, "If the activity and consequent damages continue...all the assets of the union, including their strike war chest, will be capable of being stored in the overhead bin of a Piper Cub."
What’s more, American is demanding that TWA’s 16,000 mechanics, flight attendants and service workers grant major concessions before it buys the bankrupt airline.
The sharpening attack on 100,000 airline workers grows out of the intensifying competition among the bosses. United’s "merger" with US Airways and American’s takeover of TWA are reflections of the big fish eating the little ones. With every merger and acquisition, thousands of jobs are destroyed and profits soar. This "consolidation of capital" is a hallmark of developing fascism. So is the more open use of state terror to settle labor disputes.
Since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers (PATCO) in 1981, the past two decades have been a trail of broken strikes and unions. Some of the mile markers on the road to fascism include Greyhound, Hormel, Staley and Caterpillar and more recently, the Detroit newspaper strike (despite overwhelming popular support). It has become legal to fire strikers and permanently hire scabs. For the overwhelming majority of workers, including most of the 13.5 percent in unions, it’s illegal to strike!
Despite a minor face-lift, this is the same union leadership with the same outlook that left the air traffic controllers hanging back in ’81. Although 16 million jobs have been created since 1992, union membership is at its lowest point in over 60 years. The union leaders have been unable to stop the closing of unionized factories, mines and mills. They’re not looking to wage class war. Like the other small fish, they’re trying to stay in business. This may put them in conflict with the bosses, but above all else they are loyal to the profit system and wage slavery.
In contrast, communist leadership would meet the current crisis with a general strike of all airline workers, grounding every flight and shutting every airport. The government, courts and cops would be mobilized to attack the strikers. The army and National Guard would be used to break the strike. Whole sections of the working class could be mobilized to defend the strikers, defy the courts and hold the airports and jumbo jets hostage.
But even with this scenario, we could break the laws and still lose the reform demands. Look at PATCO I or the Daewoo auto workers in South Korea! Leading the masses to break the law stands in stark contrast to the politicians, preachers and union leaders who want us to fight for better labor laws and trade accords. Exposing the class dictatorship of the bosses helps prepare our Party and our class to make revolution.
We should raise the need to break the bosses’ laws in our factories, schools and barracks. We can raise resolutions in our unions, encouraging airline workers to defy Bush and the courts. We can make contact with them at local airports and invite them to march on May Day. We can win regular CHALLENGE readers and distributors to spread the word that we must replace the dictatorship of the bosses with the dictatorship of the workers.
NY Welfare Workers Endorse May Day, Blast Workfare
NEW YORK CITY, N.Y., March 6 — Tonight, Social Services Employees Union (SSEU) Local 371 voted to endorse May Day organizing, including PLP’s march in Washington, D.C., and agreed to buy 50 tickets for members, family and friends who wish to attend. A long-time union member introduced the following resolution:
"Whereas, May Day is the international holiday of the working class, and,
Whereas, May Day demonstrates the fighting unity of the working class, and,
Whereas, members of this local have traditionally participated in May Day events, and,
Whereas, issues like the threat of war, prison labor and slave labor Workfare, police brutality and racism affect all members of this Local and must be fought;
Therefore, Be It Resolved that SSEU Local 371 urges its members to participate in May Day events including the March in Washington organized by the Progressive Labor Party, and,
Be It Further Resolved that this Local purchase up to 50 rickets for members, family and friends who wish to attend."
Anti-Workfare Outburst Stuns Bosses
The following day, rank-and-file representatives on the union’s negotiating committee erupted during a bargaining session between the union and city bosses. When the latter sought to shoot down the workers’ demand that, "No work performed by employees covered by this contract shall be performed by non-city employees, including Workfare participants and Wildcat workers," most members of the 60-member union negotiating committee broke their silence and loudly yelled their support or clapped for the fight against slave labor Workfare, clearly stunning the bosses’ hired guns.
Normally, members of the union negotiating team speak in the union caucuses but are quiet as the bargaining process unfolds, limiting themselves to an occasional remark. However, when the union negotiator responded to the bosses’ put-down of the anti-Workfare proposal, saying it "was an important demand and that this local would fight to keep these jobs" (as union rate jobs), the sentiments of the rank-and-file committee representatives rang out loud and clear.
These contract talks affect some 16,000 workers among the Social Service and Related Titles. Currently, contracts for 300,000 city workers have expired, and negotiations have proceeded at a snail’s pace. Secret negotiations between top union and city boss honchos will undoubtedly seek to establish a wage pattern for all city unions. It’s up to the rank and file to break any back-door deals.
PLP has played an important role in making the fight against Workfare a mass issue in Local 371. We know one outburst won’t stop slave labor Workfare any more than resolutions will fill a May Day bus. The combination of spreading communist literature and ideas, encouraging and participating in class struggle, and building communist ties among co-workers can establish the basis for a mass pro-communist movement led by PLP that can smash the bosses and their system once and for all!
Union Hacks Sweeten Pot for Domino Bosses
BROOKLYN, NY, March 5 — The 20 month strike at the Domino Sugar refinery ended when workers voted 56 to 48 to accept a contract and return to work. The new contract cuts 110 jobs, shatters seniority and the 40-hour week, and speeds up production with fewer workers, "wiping out the protections people fought for, for 50, 60 years." (New York Times, 3/6). This plant once employed 1,300 workers. It will now dip below 200.
The 300 workers were forced back to work, abandoned by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney’s "new labor movement," the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the NYC Central Labor Council.
The strikers symbolized the international solidarity of the working class. They included U.S.-born workers, black and white from the North and the South, and immigrants from Egypt, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Caribbean. Their ranks were solid. From June 15, 1999 to April, 2000, not one worker crossed the picket line, even though they received no strike benefits and lost $14.3 million in wages. The same solidarity existed during their five-month walkout in 1994. Last April, 104 demoralized strikers returned to work.
They were fighting the British firm Tate & Lyle, the world’s largest sugar and sweetener company. Over the last two decades, this global conglomerate has made billions in world-wide profits. With holdings in 21 countries, from Australia to Zimbabwe, this is the same company that busted the Staley strike (a T&L subsidiary) in the mid-’90s. While Sweeney is always ranting about multi-national companies that pit workers against each other worldwide, he did absolutely nothing to defend these courageous workers. Zero, zilch, nada.
PLP members joined the picket lines every week, distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES and talking with the strikers. Several of them now receive the paper regularly. Our worker groups should have organized more strike support, including demonstrations and forums. This might have given some of our co-workers, and possibly some strikers, a clearer understanding of the long-term struggle to defeat capitalism, and drawn them closer to the Party.
The fate of the Domino workers is a glaring example of the limits of fighting for reforms. Domino workers battled for better conditions for 60 years only to see them and 1,100 co-workers wiped out. Why? The bosses hold state power. Over time they will always take back whatever gains we force out of them. As the bosses prowl the globe looking for cheap labor, markets, and resources, more workers will be victimized by fascist attacks. Only a system run by and for workers — communism — will enable the working class to live a decent life. We call on Domino workers to join the fight for workers’ power. March with PLP on May Day, the international working class day.
Angry Workers Tell Off Union Hacks
BROOKLYN, NY — A group of a dozen disgusted Domino Sugar rank-and-filers descended on their union leaders to read the riot act to them after they betrayed the workers’ 20-month strike. The 12 angry workers shouted and screamed at the union hacks that while they were mad at the company they were even madder at the union, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA).
"We lost the strike," said Bobby Horn, a company mechanic for 27 years. "Our union didn’t support us. They didn’t help us in any way." The workers were angry with the union for not having provided any strike benefits and for failing to rally other workers to their side. Horn was furious at ILA president John Bowers for never even visiting the picket line in one of New York’s longest, hardest fought strikes in decades.
"I always thought the ILA was a real powerful union," said Horn. "I guess we all learn."
Bavaria Class Struggle School For Communism
Colombia—Workers at the union meeting of Bavaria brewery workers here in Colombia were angry as hell. They damned Minister of Labor Angelino Garzón — ex-union leader and ex-member of the old "Communist" Party — as a traitor to the workers for sending the strike to arbitration. Workers know arbitration means the bosses will win easily. But despite that, workers recognized the limitations of the situation: if they rejected the deal the government would ban a strike and workers were not ready to directly confront the cops and the army that would have been sent to force us back. So most voted to return to work, to continue the struggle inside the plant.
For 72 days, workers and their relatives shared each other’s lives. We sang together — union songs and The Internationale, the revolutionary workers’ anthem; shared food, wine and a place to sleep; and developed close friendships. We also organized conferences, watched videos about things like Plan Colombia, the U.S.-Colombian governments’ war plans for the country and had sharp discussions about the world’s labor movement. We realized that our problems at Bavaria were similar to those faced by workers internationally.
We received support from many other workers and unions. We built trenches around our strike tent, with bags of sand, rocks and even barbed wire. Workers bravely kept guard, armed with lead and rubber pipes and bats. We constantly chanted against capitalism.
All these images reminded one of the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, Russia, in 1917 described by John Reed in Ten Days That Shook the World. Indeed, for over two months the strikers’ tent became a center for workers fighting the bosses’ fascist drive.
All this time we shut down 18 breweries owned by one of the biggest capitalist groups in Colombia (the Santodomingo family), causing them millions in losses. We marched into the plants and took them over. We broke up secret scab meetings, confronted the bosses’ mass media lies and refused to be intimidated by the constant threats from the cops. When workers unite lots more can be done.
When tractors demolished the tents a lot of workers cried. "The tents come down but the strike continues," said many defiantly. Now the bosses and the arbitration board are taking away some of the gains we’ve had for decades. The union executive board exposed itself more by building illusions that were shattered.
We have won a lot politically. For many workers it was the best school in class struggle they’ve ever had. PLP is proud of being part of it. Our literature, videos and leaflets were there all the time. We tried to give political leadership at decisive moments. Many workers in several breweries are now reading CHALLENGE. We’ve made new friends and new comrades.
Finally, we thank all the people and unionists who showed political and financial solidarity with the strike. This support helped us maintain this anti-capitalist struggle for 72 days.
Bavaria Workers
Harvard University: 360 Years of Racism and Counting
Harvard students are outraged by the racist comments of government professor Harvey Mansfield who spread the racist lie that the admission of many black Harvard students in the early 1970s was the sole cause of a supposed "lowering of standards and grade inflation" (Boston Globe, 2/7). Mansfield continues a long Harvard tradition of defending racism and imperialism. It was founded from the profits of the slave trade. Its more recent racist/imperialist faculty includes Henry Kissinger, George Kelling (the father of community policing), and Richard Herrnstein, author of the notoriously racist tract, The Bell Curve and head of the Harvard psychology department when he wrote that trash.
On Feb. 13, more than 60 students held a silent sit-in in Mansfield's class, organized by the Black Students Association (BSA). A member of PLP participated. Although a number of students took a PLP leaflet, no student in Mansfield's class confronted him about his racism.
Mansfield asked the protesters if we wanted to talk, but, because the BSA leadership explicitly called for a silent protest, no one spoke. Mansfield should have been prevented from holding class.
The BSA leadership's reasons for a silent protest were, (1) acceptance of Mansfield's "right of free speech," and (2) the threat of expulsion. Prior to the sit-in a comrade pointed out to BSA rank-and-filers and leaders that racist words lead to racist acts. Moreover, while the expulsion threat for stopping Mansfield's class is real, not attempting to do so out of fear only spreads demoralization and only helps the racists. From the Social-Democrats of the 1920s and '30s who handed Germany over to Hitler, to the Al Sharptons and John Sweeneys of today, misleaders have used fear of the bosses' retaliation to keep workers and their allies from fighting back.
We believe the BSA leadership is choosing what they believe is the best way to combat the racism. However, opposing militant struggle against racism only ensures its triumph. Indeed, had Harvard expelled militant, protesting students, it would have sharpened the class struggle and raised the consciousness of many more about the true nature of Harvard. Also, more militant tactics might have had a better chance of silencing Mansfield and/or forcing Harvard to fire him.
Before and after the protest, I distributed about 100 PLP leaflets calling for communist revolution to destroy racism. The leaflet exposed Harvard's long history of defending racism, fascism and imperialism. The leaflet also called on all students to unite to fight racism in the interest of all workers and students. It also invited students and workers to march on May Day. I also made a new student contact and raised the struggle against Mansfield and his racism in the classroom.
This experience shows the importance of PLP members joining a student group. I've been active in the BSA for several years, building social ties with other members. I've also tried to sharpen anti-racist struggle, attempting to involve BSA in fights against racist police terror and prison labor. To have more of an impact on such protests, I need to give more leadership in them and be involved in their preparation.
We will follow up our new contact and learn from these experiences how to unite all workers and students, a prerequisite for successful communist revolution.
a name="Capitalism Won’t Crumble Until Workers Rumble For Communism">">"apitalism Won’t Crumble Until Workers Rumble For Communism
SEATTLE, WA., March 3—"I didn’t think Seattle would ever have much of an earthquake," began our May Day dinner speaker, quoting an 18-year veteran flight controller at Seattle-Tacoma airport. After the control tower collapsed around him, the flight controller admitted: "I guess I was wrong."
"This controller learned you can’t ignore faults—primary contradictions," continued our speaker. "Even if you can’t predict exactly when the next ‘big one’ is going to hit."
"Just so, capitalism is riddled with contradictions that can’t be ignored—like overproduction and inter-imperialist rivalry. We can’t predict exactly when the next depression or world war will come, but just as assuredly as that control tower came tumbling down, so capitalism will eventually lead to depression and war."
Even as we dined on the delicious food prepared by our comrades and sipped good Seattle coffee, our speaker described the first tremors of economic uncertainty and the rumbles in the manufacturing sector. Key Mid-West states, like Michigan, are officially in recession. Basic industry has laid off hundreds of thousands.
Stresses are building internationally. The lead article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the magazine of Eastern Money’s foreign policy think-tank, warns of "America’s Two-Front Economic Conflict." The U.S. bosses are heading for "double trouble," says this article, in uncharacteristically blunt language. Asians and the Europeans are on the "brink of major trade and economic conflict" with the U.S.
Trade wars eventually lead to shooting wars, while the shooting wars seem to be spreading. Plan Colombia has spilled over into neighboring countries, according to the New York Times. The Middle East continues to be the mother of all hot spots.
Locally, the bosses’ media is building racist hysteria over the fights at Mardi Gras. Every major paper has run half-page pictures of black youth beating up partygoers. Where are the pictures of the racist cop assassins that murdered the son of our friend at the dinner?
While all this is happening, the King County Labor Council (KCLC), AFL-CIO, has endorsed demonstrations to reform the upcoming Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)—the plan to extend NAFTA to the whole hemisphere. Changing the language or even abolishing these trade accords will not eliminate the contradictions of capitalism. The KCLC wants to apply a new coat of paint to the same old rickety shack, and then tell us its earthquake proof.
"To deal with the faults—the primary contradictions," concluded our speaker, "we have to build a movement to end capitalism with communist revolution. Unlike the control tower, capitalism won’t collapse of its own internal weaknesses without the efforts of conscious revolutionaries with a long-term outlook. Building this communist movement and developing those revolutionaries is job #1 of May Day. We have limited numbers so let’s concentrate. For the next two months, we can do no better than to build for the May Day March."
At the dinner new comrades signed up to march. Others had sharp, but comradely questions. After tonight, we have a shot at bringing one of the largest Seattle contingents ever to May Day. Hard work over the next two months will make the difference.
Anti-Racists Link Clinton Diallo Decision To Fascism
Newark, NJ February 15, 2001—A small, but dedicated group of anti-racists held a lunchtime rally at the Federal Building here today. We were protesting the Clinton administration’s decision refusing to prosecute the NYC cops who executed Amadou Diallo two years ago.
People from several local organizations came to the rally. Speakers exposed how the bosses’ government allowed this racist atrocity to stand, connecting it to deepening fascism. One student speaker eloquently explained that she’s viewed as a criminal by the Newark police merely because she happens to live in a high-crime neighborhood. Many people stopped to listen. Thirty CHALLENGES were distributed.
PLP has begun a campaign in some of the organizations represented here today to expose the creation of a police state in New Jersey, NYC and elsewhere. We will link this growing fascism to the need for communist revolution.
This police state has many components: the explosion of "community policing," spearheaded by Rutgers professor George Kelling; massive racial profiling by the NJ state police; police murders like that of Earl Faison (killed by Orange, NJ cops); links between local cops and federal plans to suppress demonstrations under the guise of "fighting terrorism"; the mass jailing of mainly black and Latin youth; and the use of prison and Workfare slave labor.
The Diallo case reflects several of these trends. After Diallo was murdered, Kelling wrote several high profile articles in NYC newspapers basically saying the cops "made a mistake" and should walk. The court system in New York State made sure that happened.
Then "community" leaders and politicians like Al Sharpton misled thousands of angry demonstrators by calling for a federal civil rights investigation. Clinton’s Attorney-General Janet Reno deliberately withheld the no-prosecute decision until after the Bush inauguration. According to a NY Times article, Reno/Clinton did this to limit the number of angry anti-racists who otherwise would have joined the thousands who had already planned to protest at the inauguration.
We in PLP must take advantage of this anger of the masses against growing racism, fascism and war. If we persistently build our Party among the honest people in mass organizations, we will move ahead. A big step along this road will be bringing these people to the May Day march in Washington, D.C.
CHALLENGE Sparks May Day Buzz In LA Garment Shop
LOS ANGELES — "Last night I prayed to God that the boss would read this CHALLENGE article, so that she would shake with fear, because we’re tired of all this harassment!" declared a garment worker. She was referring to the article in the March 14 issue about the successful struggle to stop the firing of a worker. Despite our disagreement over religion, this religious co-worker respects our Party’s commitment to defending the workers and fighting the bosses.
The workers’ response to the article was magnificent. Some workers read it to others. Still others asked, with respect and admiration, "who wrote it?" The article provoked many discussions inside and outside the factory. This has created the basis for more struggle to mobilize more workers to march on May Day.
Conditions in this factory and in the city’s entire garment industry are sharpening. The bosses continue to move production abroad where they pay workers $2 a day. This competition drives bosses here to lower wages even more. Many mid-level bosses can’t compete with the big manufacturers who send their production to other countries. One garment boss told a group of workers, "The Korean Association of garment bosses wants to increase restrictions on imports." The main way they try to resolve their crisis is to attack workers here even more.
Now, with the increase in the minimum wage to $6.25 an hour, the bosses have sped up workers to produce more and make them pay for their "wage increase."
During the successful struggle against firing the worker, the boss declared, "I’m the owner of this factory and I do what I want" — if the workers let her. Under capitalism, the bosses own the factories, but we workers produce ALL the value and their profits. For example, if the boss pays even $1,000 a day for a machine, it still won’t sew a stitch of clothing by itself, nor make any profit for the boss. Only if a worker sits at the machine and sews the clothing will new value be created. A small part pays the worker’s wages —as small as the boss can get away with; the rest becomes the boss’s profit. This is the key to capitalism—the bosses’ robbery of the sweat and blood of the workers.
Under communism, the working class as a whole will own the factories. We’ll produce to meet the needs of the international working class, not to fill the pockets of the greedy bosses. Garment workers will work to clothe all workers and their families. Today there are thousands of stores full of clothing while millions of people worldwide barely have a shirt to cover themselves.
We have a long road to travel to achieve a world where workers control society. But with increased struggles in the factories, the discussion and spreading of communist ideas through CHALLENGE and a mass May Day March, we will advance towards our goal. In uniting with our co-workers in class struggle, we welcome disagreements whose resolution will become a key to building a revolutionary communist movement.
Are Humans Naturally Selfish?
A review of Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, by Frans de Waal.
Azalea, a rhesus monkey at the Wisconsin Primate Center, was born with an extra chromosome and multiple disabilities. Slow-moving and slow-witted, she can’t figure out the rules of rhesus society and would never have survived in the wild. But others in her group protect her and overlook her social blunders. To treat Azalea so tolerantly, monkeys must have qualities rarely attributed to animals—empathy, to grasp that she functions differently from them, and sympathy, to make them want to help her 1.
Frans de Waal, Dutch-born scientist who studies the behavior of non-human primates (monkeys and apes), uses stories like Azalea’s to argue that human morality has deep evolutionary roots. His lively books challenge the conventional wisdom that human nature is innately selfish, male-dominated, and warlike.
Konrad Lorenz, Austrian founder of ethology, the study of animal behavior in nature, argued in "On Aggression" (1967) that humans had an innate drive to violence, at best feebly suppressed by "civilization." (Lorenz may have been justifying his own past: he would later be exposed as one of Hitler’s professors, who taught during WWII that Jews should be exterminated.)
Similar ideas have flooded popular culture. The 1950s novel "Lord of the Flies," still a staple of high school classrooms, features shipwrecked boys who revert to "killer ape" instincts and vote each other off the island with sharp weapons.
Sociobiology and its current alias, evolutionary psychology, echo Lorenz’s ideas, invoking genes for rape, war, racism and sexism. If, as sociobiologist E.O. Wilson says, our genes keep us on a short leash and make us mean, there is not much hope for transforming the world.
Despite de Waal’s inconsistent and often reactionary political ideas, his writings are useful in countering this cynical, unscientific view of human nature. De Waal’s chief contributions are a more balanced approach to animal behavior, an explanation of the role of reconciliation in primate societies, and evidence for culture in animal societies. ("Culture" in this context means nongenetic transmission of behaviors and inventions.) He points out that many complex behaviors are not properties of individuals, but are aspects of interrelationships between individuals. Aggression, for instance, does not belong to a chimpanzee, and is not inherently good or bad, but is a socially imbedded interaction. This is a step toward a dialectical understanding of animal societies.
According to de Waal, acts of reconciliation between two chimps, following an act of aggression, are just as important to their relationship as the aggression. Shortly after a fight, the combatants often hug and kiss each other, while other chimps may intervene to prevent fights from arising in the first place Sociobiologists are one-sided in their neglect of reconciliation, which de Waal considers the essential glue that holds primate societies together. Some of de Waal’s open-mindedness may stem from his experience studying bonobos (a rarer ape species related to chimps). Bonobos are more egalitarian and peaceable than chimps, share food, and have female-centered societies that use sex to promote social cohesion 2.
Culture and behavioral flexibility, once thought to be exclusively human, are found throughout primate societies. In a revealing experiment, young rhesus monkeys were housed with slightly older stump-tail monkeys. On their own, rhesus tend to be aggressive, fighting at slight provocation. Stump-tails are more peaceful. After months of co-existence the rhesus adopted the easy-going behavior of stump-tails. Even after separation, the rhesus retained these friendlier behaviors. De Waal’s experiment shows that behavior can be culturally (not biologically) transmitted, and can change within a generation. It also suggests that conciliatory behavior has a social usefulness apparent even to monkeys.
De Waal’s research argues against a narrowly deterministic view of ape (and human) behavior 3. Without culture and history, there is no human nature. We say that capitalism, not biology, encourages wars, racism and sexism.
While his optimism about human potential may help us counter cynicism, don’t count de Waal as a political ally. He is crudely anti-communist, railing against formerly socialist East Germany and China. He prefers Adam Smith (father of capitalist economic theory) to Karl Marx. He is often sexist, suggesting innate gender differences in our ability to sympathize with others, and racist, speculating that "an impoverished social environment" may rob poor children of peacemaking skills 4.
De Waal accepts sociobiological assumptions even as he undercuts their foundation. Indeed, one sometimes wonders whether he has read his own books." It is remarkable," Marx noted drily, "how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his own English society with its competition, opening up of new markets, and the Malthusian struggle for existence 5." De Waal, who naively praises the European Community as a model of peacemaking 4, seems to recognize among conciliatory apes the shaky "peace" deals and shifting alliances of European imperialism.
1
de Waal, F. (1996) "Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals." Harvard University Press.
2 de Waal, F., and Lanting, F. (1997) "Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape." University of California Press.
3 de Waal, F. (2001) "The Ape and the Sushi Master." Basic Books.
4 de Waal, F. (2000) "Primates: a natural heritage of conflict resolution." Science 289: 586-590.
5 Marx, K. (1862) Letter to Engels.
Fired Daewoo Workers Battle Cops
INCHON, SOUTH KOREA, March 7 — About 1,500 workers fought thousands of cops in the streets with rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails as the Daewoo auto factory reopened today. The plant had been closed for three weeks to reduce excess inventory and slash 1,750 jobs.
The 7,000 workers still employed at the plant had to be brought in on 100 buses from four different pickup points. About 200 workers tried to block the buses while others tried to enter the plant grounds. More than 9,000 cops did what cops are paid to do: protect the bosses and scabs from workers.
Surprising the police, the workers marched about a mile to Inchon University of Education, where about 500 students joined them. A scuffle broke out and a dozen workers and students and six cops were injured. They tried to redirect the march toward the Pupyong railway station, but lines of police blocked them.
In 1999, Daewoo Motor collapsed under a debt load of more than $10 billion. Since then they have slipped from second to third place among South Korean automakers. The creditors who control the bankrupt company want to sell to General Motors. But GM is demanding more massive job cuts before making an offer.
The South Korean rulers’ struggle to increase profits by restructuring the economy and coping with a huge debt threatens more job cuts, which is spawning more resistence from workers. Bank workers have protested mergers in the banking industry, trapping one chief executive in his office for several days. Cutbacks in auto and shipbuilding industries are being met with sit-down strikes and mass militancy.
At the time of this battle, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung was in Washington and Chicago assuring U.S. bosses they shouldn’t worry. GM Chairman Jack Smith introduced him to a luncheon at the Chicago Hilton. To attract investors, Kim, the bosses’ Nobel Prize winner, boasted that his government had cracked down on illegal labor actions, saying he will not tolerate union violence. He said that foreign investment totaled $24 billion in the three years before he took over but it’s now at $41 billion. Bush and GM should award him the "Piece Prize" for giving them a bigger piece of the action.
One of the dismissed workers said, "GM will close this factory if they take over Daewoo." He may be right. Factories at Kunsan and Changwon are much more modern than the 29-year-old Inchon plant. In this global crisis of overcapacity, the weak will be swallowed by the strong. Just as Daimler grabbed Chrysler, GM will keep what is profitable from Daewoo and destroy the rest.
Workers Have No Nations
This same worker added, "We have to struggle for our survival, for our lives, for our nation. I don’t like foreigners to take over." Here he is dead wrong. Unlike union leaders from Detroit to South Korea, we can use this fight to build international solidarity and the revolutionary communist movement. Nationalism is a completely reactionary idea because it ties workers of one nation to our exploiters. "Buy Korean" is as bad as "Buy American." Imperialist competition for markets, resources and cheap labor inevitably leads to war. Autoworkers must unite across all borders, against all bosses.
We salute the mass heroism of the Daewoo workers. All PLP workers’ collectives, especially in basic industry, should organize letters of support at our jobs and in our unions. And when we march on May Day we will tell this Daewoo worker, Korea has never been nor will it never be "your nation," but it can be your world!
LETTERS
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I work part-time in a Chicago community organization, preparing immigrants for the U.S. citizenship test. Most of my students are adults who speak little or no English.
My PLP club discussed how to invite my students — and many others waiting for an amnesty and their immigrant papers — to participate in the May Day march in Washington, D.C. All my students and those working in the center (including the director) know CHALLENGE and PLP.
One day I was preparing my students for the exam, and simultaneously presenting a working-class view of history. A week before we had discussed May Day and they all had tickets. I said they should all come to the March and invite their friends and relatives. I told them I wouldn’t be teaching this Saturday (March 10) because I’d be in Gary protesting a KKK rally. I invited them to participate. Immediately a 65-year-old woman added, "Yes, it’s important because those killers should not be allowed to speak. If we don’t fight them they will continue murdering people at the border and all over. I am sorry I cannot go because I can hardly walk."
A student then said he wanted to pay for the May Day ticket and gave me $60. Another gave half the ticket money, and even though she couldn’t go she said she wanted to pay for someone else to go. We continued talking even after class.
Later, a cousin of mine said she’d received a call from one of my students, who happened to be a relative of hers, inviting her to May Day!
I learned workers can relate things quite well. They link the fight against the racist KKK to marching on May Day, to the fight for an amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and so on. Sometimes we don’t do our job of explaining the relationship between all these struggles. Talking and listening to workers I can see how we are all part of the same working class with a common interest. Fighting for communism is the best we can offer workers, the best way to win workers to our Party. The struggle is just beginning.
Juana Gallo, Chicago
Jury Duty: Make-Believe Justice
Recently, I was called as a potential jurors in a police brutality case. Some of us were asked to explain why we had stood in response to any of the questions the judge posed earlier.
I said I believe the police serve capitalism, and that capitalism requires the police to be racist and brutal. The judge then asked, would my beliefs prevent me from rendering a fair and impartial judgment. I said I would surely be fair, but not impartial! (Are the cops impartial when they choose who to brutalize?)
That did it! The judge removed me on the spot from the pool of potential jurors.
Apparently, in cases like these, "jury of one’s peers" means excluding anyone who doesn’t feel some peer kinship with the cops. Anyone with a little awareness of police brutality and its roots in capitalism is quickly excluded. I suppose we’re not reliable actors on the stage of make-believe justice.
A majority of the population in Baltimore is African-American. One might think that white people living in a majority-black city would have a better-than-typical understanding (for white folks) about police brutality. However, when the judge asked if any potential jurors would be prejudiced about any cops testimony as witnesses — either favorably or unfavorably — virtually every white person who stood said they would believe the word of a cop more than other witnesses. Clearly, we in Progressive Labor Party have a major job ahead of us, winning white workers to understand that racism is real and must be fought!
Finally, I met up with a friend and former colleague was also assigned to jury duty for that day. She said a family member of hers had been a cop working for an internal unit investigating other cops. He had shown her papers revealing that the police chief himself was getting large, routine payments from major drug traffickers.
When my friend was asked, as a potential juror, if she would be prejudiced about the testimony of cops as witnesses, she said loudly and clearly that she wouldn’t believe anything the cops said!
When I was leaving the courtroom my friend and I smiled to each other, and so did a new acquaintance who had gone to lunch with us.
Capitalism creates its own grave-diggers — throwing workers together in large numbers, thus helping us organize and spread the truth! All in all, a pretty good day!
A Baltimore Comrade
May Day, Class Struggle: A Winning Combo
Early one morning two workers are huddled in an out-of-the-way corner at a major hospital. From their pockets come wads of crumpled money and some unsold tickets for the area’s PLP May Day dinner. "Yeah," says Jewel, "Billy says she’s coming and Angela says she can take the train to the job, but she’ll need a ride from here." "I saw Marilyn when I punched in today," says Lenny. "She told me you also sold her a ticket and did a good job of explaining what the dinner was about."
Jewel is selling the May Day dinner tickets like she’s got some kind of fever. Many, many workers are buying them. Some are planning to come to the dinner and are interested in coming on May Day. But then there’s a large group who are buying a ticket because they like Jewel. We can always use money. But part of our organizing this year is to work with Jewel and figure out how to win more of these workers to actually come to our dinner and to the March. Thanks to Jewel we are now talking about May Day and PLP to many workers for the first time.
During lunch Linda and Izzy meet casually on the street and appear to be watching the traffic go by. But Linda and Izzy are actually meeting to organize a group of women with young families to confront a hospital boss. Some had to leave work early because their children were dismissed from school due to a snowstorm scare. This boss then threatened to fire one of the women.
Izzy had written a rough draft of a letter from the workers demanding a meeting with the boss. "Me and the other women didn’t like what you wrote ‘Viejo’," Linda says to Izzy. "You made us sound like we’re whining."
"So write it the way you want it," answered Izzy, "I just want us to get this fight on!"
Linda and the other women are taking this fight very seriously and are doing a good job of preparing for it. Linda started reading CHALLENGE during our involvement with our union’s contract struggle last year. She missed the March then. This year Linda’s more involved with workers’ fights on the job and therefore with us in PLP. We’re fighting harder to ensure she and her friends join us in Washington.
Later that day Lenny meets with a group of black and Latin women workers who feel they’re being passed over for full-time, higher-paying jobs. Ronnie, one of the black women, is the most outspoken and has decided to run for union delegate in the department. Lenny, Ronnie and the other workers develop a plan to deal with the department’s union delegates who don’t want to confront the boss. They don’t want to rock the boat. Later Lenny laughs and says to Ronnie, "It’s a small world."
Ronnie’s uncle "JJ" had been a PLP member for several years and is still very friendly. Ten years ago JJ and Lenny were side by side when PLP organized a fight that stopped a KKK march in a small nearby town. Now we’re in a fight side by side with JJ’s niece. We will introduce Ronnie to PLP, CHALLENGE and May Day.
PLP members participate with our co-workers in many fights, big and small. But through them all we struggle with our co-workers to do three things: read CHALLENGE, march on May Day, join PLP.
A Hospital Comrade
Fight APHA Award To Drug Moguls: Health Professionals Resist Sellout
A fight has erupted at the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) governing council for the maternal and child health section (MCH) over a new award to be named after Glaxo, an international drug company that’s raking in profits over the dead bodies of AIDS victims in Africa. This is extremely offensive.
Many of us in APHA want to "serve the people" in some capacity. The main thing transnational corporations serve is their bottom line —profits. They may produce some good medicine, but money controls which ones and how much.
The major health problem today is capitalism. Profit-driven health care is NOT the best way to serve the needs of the greatest number. Capitalism is very good at accumulating capital. Sometimes it’s even good at promoting innovation. But it is not designed for distribution to the people according to their needs. Only communism is.
At APHA meetings I see many who protested U.S. imperialism in the anti-war movement. This is where the old civil rights protestors have landed decades later. But with the collapse of the old communist movement political forces are pulling people so far to the right that naming an MCH award after a multinational corporation seems almost OK.
Glaxo has billions to entice professionals to its side. Communists offer love and respect for the masses of people. Most people are either cynical or misled about communism so they can’t see how to eliminate capitalism. We may not be able to prevent its flagrantly murderous excesses. But we don’t have to embrace it, bow down and worship it and name the finest efforts of colleagues after its corporate icons. With a long, hard fight, many intellectuals and professionals will be won over.
Red Doctor
Racism Rules Roost in Newark Schools
I am the parent of a high school student in Newark, New Jersey. Many years ago, Newark schools were "good" by ruling class standards. One high school was considered one of the country's best. Then the Newark rebellions of the '60s, led to "white flight" from the city. Services of all types declined. Once Newark's population became mostly working class black and Latin, the ruling class dropped its school funding far behind the predominately white suburbs. Even the New Jersey Supreme Court, unable to justify the disparity, ordered equalized funding.
But the state legislature refused to fund city schools at that level. The schools' decline continued. In a last ditch effort to appear "concerned," the State took over Newark's schools six years ago.
The State's first "improvement"? Metal detectors in all high schools! Some well-meaning parents, teachers and students believe this will ensure students' "safety," but it merely continues ruling class efforts to get city kids used to being treated like criminals and believing they're "bad." In fact, the president of the State's school psychologists' association said metal detectors actually make students feel less safe!
Recently, the State-appointed Superintendent of Newark schools decided to install video cameras in all high schools. Students will be continually videoed in all common areas - hallways, stairwells, cafeterias and gyms - with a security guard watching the video screens all day. Talk about schools feeling like prisons! This is happening after statistics show violence actually declined in Newark schools by 50% during the 1998-99 school year.
It's no accident this is all occurring precisely when the bosses are pushing more "community policing," the U.S. prison population is the world's highest and the federal government - in line with the Hart-Rudman Commission report - would consolidate all governmental law enforcement agencies. This is fascism, U.S. style.
It's critical for parents, students and teachers to unite to stop this increasingly repressive criminalizing of our children. Communists understand that the criminals are the rulers, not our young people. It's true that many students are less passive and more angry nowadays. Unfortunately, some of that anger is misdirected towards fellow students and teachers, rather than against this violent, racist, capitalist system which causes all this harm. We must point out that only a communist society will enable children to direct their energy and exuberance towards positive, collective goals, beneficial to the working class.
A Newark Mom
