CHICAGO, IL. - They are children but they are called "super-predators."
Two boys, who were ten and eleven years old dropped a five year-old out a fourteenth-floor window to his death. The small boy had refused to steal candy for the others.
Now the two black youth are in a maximum security juvenile prison.
What kind of society has maximum security prisons for children?
What kind of society produces children who can do this? What kind of society fails children so miserably?
Capitalism.
These boys have suffered this system's oppressive racism. They are products of a throw-away society that has discarded them.
Unemployment and drugs have left them to grow up without stability in family and friends, a sense of sharing, a knowledge that society cares about youth; that young people have a future.
They have grown up in the midst of ruin; losing relatives and older boys to murderous cops, jail and death. In the absence of all that is positive in life they are victims and perpetrators of capitalism's cruelty.
The public advocate for these two children pleaded with the judge not to send them to prison. In frustration with the system, she cried "they are not animals." But the only alternative she could come up with was intensive counseling and shelter in a children's home.
No one assigned by the system to help these children has any solution to the wretched conditions that turn innocents into mindless killers.
Capitalism created the conditions under which these children live. It cannot be fixed. This system is organized for profit; it cannot help children like these because the drive for profit produces the desperate conditions that rob millions of young children of their humanity.
Capitalism has nothing to offer our youth except minimum-wage jobs, unemployment, gangs or imperialist war.
We can only protect our children by destroying capitalism and replacing it with communist society. The only way to do this is by building the Progressive Labor Party and fighting for communism.
Communism replaces the racism, unemployment and drugs that are so much a part of capitalism with the collective struggle to build a society of equality. This is what creates the conditions to develop nearly everyone into a useful person.
The Soviet Union in the 1920s was socialist, not communist. But under the dictatorship of the working class, a guiding principle of society was to fight for every child. The Soviet educator Makarenko was assigned to work with the "juvenile delinquents" of the time.
Orphaned by war and famine, these were children "grown savage in their own egoism," Makarenko wrote in his memoir The Road to Life. They were children "so brutally and humiliatingly mauled by life" that others had given up on them.
Makarenko organized these youth into collectives to do productive labor. They struggled with each other against the individualism bred into them in their pre-Revolutionary lives. Teachers and students lived together in the Gorky Labor Colony as comrades and equals.
Many of these young people developed into organizers and leaders of the working class.
We know who the real super-predators are: the Chicago Housing Authority and other slumlords who imprison youth in high-rise deathtraps; the financial giants who gobble up corporations and spit out our lives; the generals and State Department officials whose nuclear weapons will wipe out millions to guzzle up the world's oil. They are the ones profiting at the expense of our children. March on May Day for the future of the working class.
SEATTLE, WA., Feb. 10 - The union leadership and the company management were visibly shaken when Boeing workers rejected last November's contract proposal.
Said Boeing's spokesperson Russ Young at that time: "The union leadership gave us a guarantee that the membership would accept this contract."
"We showed them," some workers concluded. "We stayed out three more weeks and got a better contract."
Let's examine this "better contract." We still have no job security. The bosses will let us have jobs when they decide work is "available." We are obliged to create billions more in capital for Boeing during the life of this contract-as we have during all past contracts-in exchange for this "privilege."
Frank Schontz, Phil Condit and the rest of their top management cohorts will have amassed more millions, while we will still be living paycheck to paycheck when this contract ends on September 1, 1999 (if we're lucky enough to still have a job!).
A contract-better or otherwise-defines the terms of exploitation or wage slavery. We must rid ourselves of exploitation, not just negotiate the terms of exploitation.
The secret of a contract is that it means more than just wages and conditions. A contract enforces the unequal relationship between bosses and workers. When we accept a contract, any contract, we accept the dominance of capitalists over workers. Contracts are a legal manifestation of wage slavery.
Wage slavery is the system that chains us to the capitalists. In earlier agricultural societies, chattel slaves were restrained by whip and chain, but always fed and housed. In today's industrial society, workers-wage slaves-are economically restrained. Wage slavery makes us go "hat-in-hand" to the capitalist for the wages we need to feed, house and clothe our families. The bulk of the value we produce goes to the capitalist owner in the form of profits, value stolen from us who create it.
Some of us might have a union hat, some a non-union hat, some a black hat, some a white hat-but all of us go "hat-in-hand" to the bosses. Starting with "rolling thunder," the Boeing strike showed the potential for something different. We were going "fist-in-air," but we missed the mark. It was still "hat-in-hand." We were fighting only for "more humane" chains-a decent contract.
The wage system brings us together and separates us at the same time. The immense network of social cooperation needed to build a plane gets crowded out of our minds by paycheck worries. What often dominates our thinking is: how can this week's paycheck cover my car note, my mortgage, my rent, my utility bill.
The strike gave us a small example of what it is like to think as a class. The taste of power felt during rolling thunder and the marches through the plants was in stark contrast to the "survive for today" philosophy of the wage system.
Workers, with the leadership of the old communist movement, seized state power in numerous countries, but maintained the wage system. Past communists mistakenly thought a mobilized working class with state power could sufficiently restrict the tendency of the wage system to create capitalists and promote capitalism and its ideology. They were wrong. Socialism failed to produce communism.
Although we went from hat-in hand to fist-in-air and back to hat-in-hand, this strike has given us some valuable insights. When we seize state power, we must organize society along the communist principle "to each according to their need." Communist distribution creates a society where workers, thinking a s a class, will no longer tolerate the inequality of capitalism. We must abolish the wage system. We must go straight to communism.
LOS ANGELES, CA. - On Saturday, Feb. 3, a group of racist skinheads stabbed a 20-year old Native American youth 27 times near a life guard stand in Huntington Beach. The youth, George Mondrigon, has been reported in fair condition in the hospital.
One of the racists went so wild stabbing Mondrigon that he also stabbed another racist in the eye with his knife. Two of the three racists who were arrested for the stabbing are known members of a racist skinhead gang that hangs out in Huntington Beach. The gang attacked a 16-year old white youth in the past because she dated a Native American.
Gil Garcetti, the LA District Attorney, refused to prosecute either racist cop Mark Fuhrman or Masters, the racist who killed a youth for tagging (writing graffiti on a freeway piling). He and the capitalist system he represents are building and giving aid and comfort to these racist skinheads. Several brag that they're in the Klan.
PLP invites our friends and co-workers to join us in teaching these racists that the bosses' growing fascism will be met with determination to destroy racists and racism with a communist movement for revolution.
Organized religion, including the Catholic Church, has always been on the side of the exploiters. The Catholics embraced slavery and the Roman slave masters, then the feudal nobles and kings that came after them, and now it is one of the main pillars upholding the capitalists who rule the world today.
The Catholic Church's power and influence in capitalists' governments depends on how many millions of workers follow its leadership and donate money.
Traditionally, Latin America has had the greatest concentration of Catholics in the world. But in the last two decades, other denominations have more than doubled at the expense of the Catholic Church. Today about 20% -35% of all Brazilians, Chileans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans are Protestants, along with 18% of Salvadorans and 5% of Mexicans. The Catholic Church now has been forced to use different tactics to try to shore up their crumbling empire.
There was considerable political unrest and armed insurrection in Latin America in the 1960's. Workers' struggles were co-opted by Russia and other imperialist powers that were trying to take control of the region from U.S. Imperialism. There was debate within the Catholic Church hierarchy about how best to deal with this movement.
Some thought the Church should be at the forefront of the struggles so that they would not lose influence with the masses. They thought this would help them stop the spread of "communism." Others held that the Church should continue to do what it had been doing all along: keep supporting the repressive regimes of the region.
The Vatican did both. At the second Vatican Council in 1962, it instituted some reforms to give a "preferential option for the poor," better known as the Theology of Liberation.
The Theology of Liberation became a mass movement. Its followers organized religion-based communities that were very active in the daily struggles of the masses. Some joined the guerrilla groups.
Knowing that these guerrilla groups were not real communists, Pope Paul II gave the Theology of Liberation some leeway and appointed bishops sympathetic to liberation theology, like Arturo Damas y Damas in El Salvador. Thousands, including several priests, died under its banners.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the guerrilla movements, the Pope recently noted that Central America is no longer "a battlefield for the superpowers." Thus, he is leading the charge to eliminate the Theology of Liberation. All across Latin America he is replacing dozens of Theology of Liberation bishops.
In Nicaragua he appointed Alberto Mata Guevara, who on arrival at his diocese in Estli began the purging of "red clerics." In El Salvador he selected as Archbishop, Bishop Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, who was a Vatican liaison with the Salvadoran Armed Forces during the time when the army was busy butchering over a hundred thousand people in the recent civil war.
Sáenz is cozy with the fascist ruling party, ARENA (founded by the leader of the Salvadoran death squads), with the ruling class and with the upper echelons of the military. He received more than $2 million from the Salvadoran Government, the country's biggest businesses and the richest families, for the reconstruction of a cathedral.
The Liberation Theology was a movement to try to reform capitalism, not to destroy it. The only way the working class can achieve its liberation is by making a communist revolution. Under communism we won't have any bosses and churches.
Now that the Vatican thinks communism is dead, it feels it no longer has to pretend to be fighting for the interests of the poor against that of the rich. As Archbishop Sáenz puts it, the "preferential option for the poor" should not "transform the church into a church based on classes, nor limit itself to an economic concept of the poor. The church should minister to all of those suffering from spiritual poverty, regardless of their social strata." He adds, "Jesus died for our sins and if we free ourselves of sin, all injustices will disappear."
But this mumbo jumbo has never freed anyone-from the time of slavery to today. The rich and the poor exist because the capitalists have state power. The Church, a big landlord and capitalist itself, wants things this way.
Workers can't pray away this inequality and the misery it causes. Only communist revolution can and will put an end to class society by exterminating the capitalist class. The working class will run society, producing and sharing production according to need.
In order for this to happen we must build the PLP. We must be involved in the struggles in which the religious members of our base are participating. We must work to win workers away from the leadership of the churches.
We must counter the bosses' religion, reformism and anti-communism with communist theory and practice. This is the only way to free our class from its addiction to religion "the opiate of the masses."
Dear Challenge:
Racism is a basic part of Purdue University Calumet, Indiana. This year many students on campus have become fed up with campus racism.
After confronting the president of the Student Government Association (SGA) and forcing him to remove a racist anti-affirmative action poster from the SGA office, students from the Black Student Union decided to hold a public forum to expose campus racism.
Two hundred and fifty students came and heard speaker after speaker denounce the racism of the Student Government president as well as other aspects of racism on campus. When the affirmative action officer tried to defend the university's behavior, the response of many students was anger and outrage.
It was especially good that the forum did not become racially polarized. There were many white and minority students who argued the need to fight racist abuse and build unity.
Many of the students at the forum read Challenge, and the Party has been involved in the struggles against racism on campus. However, our work could be much better. Members and friends of PLP were not organized to sell Challenge in a mass, public way at the forum, nor did we have a specific leaflet for the forum about how only communism can defeat racism.
Two hundred and fifty people expressing concern and opposition to racism can be a step forward, but it will be a waste of good effort if we do not build the PLP. Even active opposition to racism can't destroy it unless there is the understanding that capitalism is its root cause. There also needs to be the determination and organization to destroy capitalism, which creates and nurtures racism.
Indiana PLP has already begun plans for more aggressive communist organizing, leading up to our most successful May Day contingent ever. As we involve ourselves more deeply in the struggles of the working class, we also commit ourselves to a more determined effort to build the PLP here in the center of the North American steel industry.
Indiana organizer
NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 9 - If anyone ever had any doubts about the role of schools under capitalism, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York has made it crystal clear.
In current contract negotiations with the high school teachers' union, the Church is insisting on a clause that says: "The union and its members pledge that they shall not engage in any actions or statements which challenge, protest or interfere with the Mass" or with Cardinal O'Connor's "rights and obligations as Archbishop of New York."
Nor is this strikingly new. Just a "refinement" of earlier contracts says the Church (New York Times, 2/9). But if a teacher doesn't agree with this "religious mission," he or she will be fired. That's pretty clear.
Thus, the Church could easily view anyone exposing the Church's support of fascist governments-such as Chile, Guatemala, and Mexico-as "interfering" with the Church and subject to firing. Any teacher who explains how the Church invests in corporations that mercilessly exploit workers, including the Church's own employees, or someone who champions a communist solution to that exploitation, would certainly be "excommunicated" pronto and fired immediately.
The New York Archdiocese is merely putting into writing what the public school system does through its choice of textbooks, teacher-training and racist handling of a student population that is 80% black, latin or asian.
Schools teach the values of capitalism: "look out for yourself"; "get ahead" [of your classmates?]; "if you're unemployed or stuck in a minimum-wage job, it's your own fault" [blame the victim, not the capitalist profit system].
If the Church supports U.S. imperialist wars (as Cardinal Spellman did in Vietnam and O'Connor did in the Persian Gulf), "actions or statements which challenge, protest or interfere" with the Church's position means you're fired!
The teachers' union in the Church's eleven high schools vowed to resist such a clause, possibly by striking. More power to them-but to really overturn such teaching rules would mean overthrowing the bosses (in this case, the Church itself ) who use their schools to teach defense of their system. That would mean a communist revolution-and that's certainly "interfering" with Cardinal O'Connor's "obligations as Archbishop of New York" to maintain capitalism.
NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 6 - Thirty student occupied the office of the Dean of Students at Columbia University on Feb. 6, protesting the racism of the university and demanding more ethnic studies programs.
During the office takeover, and at a mass meeting of 150 and a confrontation with the administrators, the Party represented communism better than we ever have before.
Our primary task is to build a Party of workers and students committed to communism. At Columbia University we are learning through practice how to do this.
The movement against racism is heating up, we didn't have to initiate it and we were not in a position of "shouting from the sidelines" because we have always stood on the front line of all anti-racist struggles at Columbia.
During this struggle, we have been bolder in our attack on capitalist education, instead of spreading the illusion that getting rid of this or that racist professor will make the university a better place. We defended Joseph Stalin and communism in a leaflet when a professor lied about Soviet history. We have been selling Challenge and Jailbreak-successfully-at all the planning meetings that led up to the Feb. 6 action.
We put out a leaflet called "Reform vs. Revolution," and gave it to all the students who were protesting. The leaflet was strong in showing the relationship between education and class dictatorship. We have to be clearer on showing that winning "Asian-American or Latino Studies" program won't make Columbia's role in society less racist, imperialist, or sexist.
Our Party still needs more of an open presence at the campus. That means we need more Party forums and that we should have rallies against capitalist dictatorship to build for May Day. We have a base, and we need to activate it more to help us build the Party. Many people know the Party, now we need to show them that building and joining PLP is in their and all the working classes interest. We are learning what it means to win.
Racist police violence is on the rise. In New York, hardly a week goes by without news about another cold-blooded murder of a black or latin worker by the NYPD.
In fact, New York has become an international model of capitalist policing. Police chiefs from all over Europe and Asia have come to get tips in terror from NYPD commissioner Bratton.
The cops are the system's front-line storm-troopers. Their job is to protect the bosses' property and profits by stifling rebellion and, ultimately, revolution. So, as the crisis deepens, and the rulers throw growing numbers of workers onto the streets, racist police mayhem inevitably increases against the most oppressed workers.
But this increase isn't spontaneous. It represents a conscious policy at the highest levels of the state apparatus. The bosses hold political power. They make careful plans to use it in their class interests. Typically, the plans involve a collaboration among elite universities and the federal government.
Here's how the process has worked.
George Kelling is a professor of "criminology" at Northeastern University and a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 1982, he co-authored an article called "Broken Windows" in the magazine, Atlantic Monthly. His writing partner was James Q. Wilson, another Harvard professor known for his racist pronouncements about crime and genes.
The article was an argument for systematic police terror. Kelling and Wilson advocated giving the cops a blank check to use violence against "minor disorders," and strongly implied that shooting to kill on suspicion of a misdemeanor was the right tactic.
All of a sudden, a ratpack of upward-bound young police executives started consulting with Kelling. They included former NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly, LAPD chief Willie Williams, and Bratton himself. Kelling remains Bratton's close advisor.
The Kelling-Wilson plan had two aspects. First was get more cops. It's being carried out regardless of who is in the White House or City Hall. Since 1990 when the Republican Bush was president and the liberal Dinkins was New York's mayor, the NYPD has added 7,000 more blue-suited klansmen to its payroll. In his 1994 State of the Union address, Clinton called for hiring 100,000 new cops nationally.
The second aspect of the Kelling-Wilson strategy involved whipping the cops into shape. The Mollen Commission hearings several years ago in New York showed that the big bosses were serious about getting the police to do their real job-terrorize workers-full-time rather than devote themselves mainly to profiteering from drug-dealer shakedowns and other forms of graft.
Remember Giuliani's racist mayoral campaign? His big issue was getting the squeegees off the street. Squeegees are unemployed workers forced to eke out a living by washing car windows at major intersections. Well, guess whom then-NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly had already invited to "take a look" at the "squeegee problem." You got it right! None other than Professor George Kelling.
Giulani-Kelly were merely implementing the first stage of Kelling's "Broken Windows" plan.
Then Giulani made racist Bratton his police commissioner. Bratton immediately started implementing the next stages of Kelling's strategy. He calls it "community policing." The cops' recent murder of Leonard Lawton in the Bronx on suspicion of petty theft is a prime example of putting Kelling's theories into practice. In the first eleven months of 1994, New York City misdemeanor arrests increased by 32% over 1993. Most of the people arrested hadn't violated any laws. Between January and June of 1994, civilian complaints about cop brutality rose 46% over 1993.
So the rise in anti-working class terror is both a bi-product of the capitalist crisis and the result of conscious planning. A Harvard professor comes up with a racist idea. The idea happens to fit the bosses' needs like a glove. All of a sudden, every candidate for a major metropolitan police commission has to study at the feet of the professor. But the results are far from academic. They can be measured in workers' blood.
The Kelling-Clinton-Bratton partnership is a rich lesson is the workings of capitalist state power. It shows the essential class nature of the police, the White House, and the universities. Under capitalism, nothing is neutral! The entire system has to be smashed.
CHICAGO, IL., Feb. 9 - Along with patients, families and co-workers of two fired pediatricians, Progressive Labor Party held a demonstration of 45 people in front of Cook County Hospital (CCH) this afternoon.
Many protesters were angry that CCH bosses had fired these two veteran doctors without warning. These doctors had been opposed to the hospital's new relationship with the wealthy Rush Presbyterian hospital.
Many protesters saw the firing of these doctors as another small attack, part of the current wave of attacks in the hospital's drive to slash health care for poor workers.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party see Cook County Hospital and the entire capitalist health care system as the problem.
The bosses' capitalist system creates the mass diseases-cancer, heart disease, AIDS, tuberculosis-that workers die from. The bosses then try to make billions selling treatment for these diseases while distracting us from the true causes.
If they can't profit from selling us care, they warehouse us in hospitals like CCH. When their system is in crisis, they cut these hospitals to the bone. We need to get rid of the whole system.
Some workers called for rehiring the fired doctors. Communists called for the abolition of the profit system. One nurse carried a sign saying "Communism will end racist health care" while the sign carried by the doctor walking next to her called for "Justice for Dr. Gordon." "Babies before profit" marched next to "Want good health care? Fight for workers' power!"
Hundreds of hospital workers and patients saw our spirited, multi-racial and international picket line, listened to our speeches and took leaflets. We sold 80 copies of Challenge-Desafío.
About 2,000 PLP leaflets were distributed in the hospital in the week prior to the demonstration. The flyer emphasized how capitalist dictatorship makes attacks like this firing inevitable. And we tried to show a glimpse of communism, to show what life and health care would be like if workers ran the places where we worked, including the hospitals.
Communism has become a more frequent topic of discussion at the hospital. Serious struggle over ideas has replaced superficial exchanges. We have found ourselves struggling over religion, voting, communism and nationalism.
We are unearthing disagreements with our friends that we needed to address for years but which have remained hidden. These deeper conversations with key people in our base are probably the most valuable development in this campaign so far. Maintaining the new intensity of this dialogue, building for May Day, and taking up other fights will lead to some of our old friends joining the Party.
As the leaflet from the demo put it, we need much more than rehiring these two doctors to have decent health. We don't want better capitalist health care! We want to destroy this disease producing profit system, and its parasitic health care industry. Workers' health is destroyed in their factories, by a polluted environment, and by stress, as our labor is stolen to produce profits for the rulers. Then they steal our last few pennies to pay for treatment, which is often ineffective, for the diseases they have caused.
Under communism our labor will not be stolen from us. We will use our labor and resources to produce what the working class needs to preserve life. The conditions of our labor and our environment will be made safe. When workers fall ill, health care will be provided solely based on need, not bank accounts or insurance status. We must fight to build the Progressive Labor Party, and fight for communism, and eradicate the disease of capitalism forever.
PARIS, Feb. 12 - Remember how in December, millions of workers and students were on the move in this country fighting against the massive cutbacks imposed by Prime Minister Alain Juppe? The country was on the verge on a general strike, and the government was forced to make concessions to the workers and students.
Capitalism in France, like the rest of the world, is suffering from a crisis of overproduction. The bosses need to cutback more to make workers pay for this crisis. And Juppe is back again trying to push his austerity program.
But the massive protest movement of December has become dormant. This past weekend, demonstrations were organized to force Juppe to drop his austerity plan. Only a few thousand demonstrators turned out in Paris, Marseille and Lyon to begin a "week of action" against the Juppe plan.
What has happened? Did the bosses rely on racist cops or fascist goons to intimidate these workers in the same way they try to scare immigrant workers and youth? No! The bosses used their trusted agents in the union movement.
Louis Viannet, the head of the CGT, the country's largest union associated with the treacherous "Communist" Party, did not even attend the mass protests on Feb. 11, even though his union organized them.
The union hacks have spent more time fighting each other than the government. Last week, Marc Blondel, head of the Workers Force Union Federation, said his Federation would sit out the "week of action."
Nicole Notat, head of the Confederation of Democratic Workers of France, is also too busy fighting with Viannet to find time to fight the cutbacks. She was the first of the union leaders to support the deal made with Juppe in December.
France has almost the lowest percentage of unionized workers in Europe and the imperialist world-less than 10%. Many of the protests in December were spontaneous, and at the beginning were out of the control of the hacks. But they soon took over the leadership, many times with the help of Trotskyite and other fake leftists inside these movements.
The main lesson here again is that workers need a mass revolutionary communist party to turn their anger against the bosses into mass revolutionary action against the capitalist system. Communist revolution is the only way to cut the chains that enslave all workers.
Here's a question: who gets to decide what's a crime and what isn't? I guess the answer is pretty obvious-the government. Let me tell you a story about two events, and you tell me which one is the real crime. Both of these are true events, by the way.
Event number one: an eighteen year old black high school student steals a box of ice cream bars from the school cafeteria.
Event number two: a family burns to death from using a faulty space heater because the gas company shut off their gas when they didn't pay their bill.
In both these cases, someone was punished. In the first one, the kid was convicted of theft and sentenced to jail time. In the second one, the people who didn't pay their bill got executed-and their baby, too.
The thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is, the gas company executives paid no penalty. The killings they committed weren't against the law.
So, what do you think? Who committed a crime here?
The gas company's actions resulted directly in the death of three people. For anyone else, this would be murder, or at least manslaughter. But here's how it goes: the government makes the laws; the capitalists who own the gas company (and their fellow capitalists) own the government; therefore, the capitalists can't be guilty of a crime. Our government today is a dictatorship of the capitalists. They make the rules, they're not going to make rules against their own normal behavior are they?
Killing workers is the capitalist's normal behavior. Every year, hundreds of people die in fires because they are trying to get through the winter with their heat cut off. As far as the capitalist government is concerned, if you don't pay your bill, you deserve to get your gas cut off. The fact that you might have to choose between paying your rent, buying food, and paying your gas bill doesn't concern them. Everything under capitalism boils down to money.
Want to know what I think? I think the gas company is a bunch of criminals. When the working class overthrows the bosses' dictatorship, we'll set up a dictatorship of the working class. Then we'll make the rules. The gas company and the whole capitalist class are bunch of murderers, and should be dealt with as such. Capital punishment for capitalist criminals, that's what I say.
There won't any money under communism. No money, no bills, no problem. If you need heat and there's gas available, you get it. Period. And you know something else? I don't even think the kid who stole the ice cream is a criminal. After all, the labor that went into making it was what gave it value. That value was stolen from the workers by the ice cream bosses so they could make a profit. That's the purpose of capitalist laws. Under the dictatorship of the working class, communism, selling things will be a crime. That's because everything will belong to the working class. Anyone who is selling things will be stealing from the working class.
So, when you hear about crime on the news, ask yourself: How can I build the PLP and get rid of the murderous, capitalist criminals forever?
LOS ANGELES, CA., Feb. 13 - Kaiser workers had a wage cut of 2.5% per year for four of the five years of their contract. But nurses can recoup 50% of their lost wages if they meet Kaiser's goal to reduce membership costs by 3% a year per patient-a figure that amounts to $800 million over the next five years.
At the same time, Kaiser has cut back on the number of nurses and is giving more work to each nurse. Some nurses have responded by saying that they will not give fewer vaccinations to children, or refuse to move patients to avoid bed sores, etc. to get a bonus. Said another, this plan "puts frontline nurses in the position of making a choice between inoculating a child and having less money to pay their rent."
For Kaiser it is profits first, last and always. For patients and workers, it's a life and death battle against the rule of profits!
Clearly, this is a cynical attempt to break the fierce loyalty of nurses to their patients. It's an incentive for nurses to let their patients die, something worthy of the Nazis.
If you were to ask nurses, or other health workers what would we really like, the vast majority of us would say we want to be able to provide good health care for our patients without interference from the hospital, and we want to know we will have food, shelter, medical care, education and free time for our families and our friends. That's what communism is about.
Think about it. If capitalism is working: why is the biggest hospital chain in the nation bribing nurses to discharge sick patients? Forty one million of us have no medical care. Yet the University of California at San Francisco's Pew Commission predicts that by the year 2000, half the hospitals will be closed and 100,000 to 200,000 doctors, 200,000 to 300,000 nurses and 40,000 pharmacists will be unemployed. This is murder.
A system that cannot supply health care and jobs doesn't deserve to exist. To that end our May Day demonstration in Los Angeles on Sat., May 4th has taken on a more urgent meaning. We want masses of workers and patients to join us!
Why all the hype over award-winning movie, "Leaving Las Vegas Well-acted, fairly interesting, and well-written., it's also as depressing a movie as you're likely to ever see. But right-wing liberal critics can't. stop raving about it.
The political message of the movie isn't an obvious one. Of all things, a Gannett newspaper- review helps explain though the reviewer loved the film.
The plot concerns Ben, played by Nicholas Cage, a writer. Fired from his job for alcoholism, he moves to Las Vegas, meets Sera, a prostitute played by Elizabeth Shue, and they fall love. He warns her he will not reform and in fact intends to drink himself to death.
Appearing a cheery drunk, he rapidly proves to be an obnoxious vomiting, pretty repulsive one. But being kind to Sara, he earns her loyalty, and their story is a moving one in its way. But she and we learn that he is quite deadly certain about destroying himself. That's pretty much the plot.
So why all the raving? According to the admiring reviewer, Jack Carner, the screenplay (by director Mike Figgis from the late John O'Brien's autobiographical novel) "makes a noble attempt to understand the self-destructive personality. Figgis demonstrates the strange sense of relief - of a sort of freedom - that comes with giving up any struggle. It helps us understand and perhaps have more sympathy for those without the heart or strength to keep fighting."
Garner's right on target here, but the problem is this is nothing to admire. In a capitalist world that is chewing up millions of lives a day - through exploitation, starvation war, poverty, and disease - the movie's lesson is that there's something somehow noble about just giving up. When Ben is fired from his job as a screenwriter, his boss gives him severance pay which prompts a remark about the boss's generosity. This may have literally happened and still be morally a lie, for look around you: How many laid off, fired, or "early-retired" workers are nicely treated - especially when you consider they've lost their livelihood? But we're given the image of the good boss sympathizing with the unreliable drunk he's forced to fire.
The story doesn't ever really touch on why Ben's a drunk. There are pressures that wear people down to the point where, yes, they may simply give up. Aren't we living in a country and world where a person's labor is quickly replaced or erased at the whim of the boss? Having worked with alcoholics, we all know how difficult they can be, how hard it is to work with them. But shouldn't there at least be (as in the rarely shown movie "The Days of Wine and Roses") some indication of what job pressures reduce people to chemical or alcohol dependency.
But, the real question is, what is learned from this movie? And the answer is that somehow there is something sort of admirable about giving up the struggle.
That's a lie.
Karl. Marx, the great theorist of communism, was once asked by a reporter "What is?" and Marx simply answered: "Struggle." Without struggle people don't exist, don't progress, and it's easy to understand why the bosses these days wish that fate on all of us.
A recent letter in Challenge-Desafío commented on the W.W. II movie, "The Seventh Cross." Despite being made by MGM and having some of its message perverted, that is a great movie precisely because it addresses the contradictions of a man who has given up on communism, the working class, and struggle. The movie shows what brings him back to the fight against fascism and the bosses - in other words, back to the struggle.
That is a lesson we should try to teach all workers, not one that tells them to give up, roll over and die.
Dear Challenge:
Wow! I had such an exciting experience in my classroom today. I teach high school social studies, where I have used Challenge in the classroom for many years.
It's become an accepted part of my teaching, but I realized that just injecting communist content into a capitalist classroom did not teach students the difference between communism and capitalism.
I began to explore the possibilities for shifting the entire form of the class in a more communist direction. These students are juniors and seniors studying American History. They are under pressure to pass the New York State Regents tests in June or be denied a diploma.
I started the first week of the semester using Challenge-they read the recent editorial on Affirmative Action and we discussed it in class. We also read about, and discussed, left and right political ideas. But. there was no excitement to the work; communism didn't come alive for the students. Then, I made a plan to conduct the class like a Party club meeting instead of a classroom.
I presented the particular political issue, which was how to use the textbooks: Should the students do the readings at home or should we organize the lessons so we do it together in class? I initiated a discussion, making it clear that the group's decision would be for the semester.
This issue is important because many students work, raise children of their own, or are needed to help in their families. For many of them, homework is an oppressive task that bars them from full participation in the class. Others, however, need solitude to read and comprehend. If reading is to be done in class, then everyone would have to agree to create an atmosphere for it.
As the students spoke, I struggled with them to listen to each other. About half-way through, the inevitable comment came up, "Well, let's just vote and be done with it." I argued that we didn't want a vote, that we wanted to do what would be the best for the entire group.
I explained that communists reject the false appearance of voting in capitalist "democracies." After all, I asked, if the class time was spent just hustling up enough votes to "win," would we have listened to the needs of each other and tried to reach a common good?
A student blurted out, "Well, I suppose you're going to tell us there is a left and a right to this discussion!" We decided that the left position would be considering the needs of the collective rather than the personal preferences of particular students. That the right-wing position would be refusing to listen to each other and persisting in wanting a decision for selfish reasons.
This led to a lively discussion about the limits of representative democracy, and the better method of democratic centralism, because we also discussed how those whose choice was not accepted would cooperate with the collective decision and struggle to help it succeed.
The students grasped communist principles of democracy quickly when they were applied to a situation that affected them. Their enthusiasm and their embracing of this method as logical and useful gives me great hope for the Party and for spreading communist ideas to the whole working class.
Discussions such as these make it more possible that our youth club from Flatbush will meet our goal of bringing l,000 marchers to May Day in Washington, D.C.
Brooklyn teacher
Dear Challenge:
Last week a racist nut carrying a backpack and wearing a baseball cap and dark sunglasses wandered through the third floor lunchrooms of the students and teachers at Foreman High School in Chicago.
When he made a racist comment to a table of teachers, he was immediately escorted out of the building by several teachers and a security guard.
When more students and teachers heard what happened many were outraged. Why wasn't this guy arrested? Why didn't security stop this guy before he made it upstairs? Don't they know he could have hurt someone? What's the job of security anyway?
Everyone's job under capitalism is to serve the bosses. If you don't have a job directly making money for the boss then you have a job that maintains or protects them and their system. So what about the security guards at school?
Every morning they stand at the school's doors and tell the same students to put on their ID's and take off their hats. They spend the rest of the day chasing students out of the halls, away from their lockers, out of the bathrooms, out of the lunchroom and into class.
The main job of security is to enforce the rules. They protect the school from the students. This nut was no dummy. He didn't spout his racist filth in the student's lunchroom.
Under communism, all of us will serve the working class. But what about now? Now we have to build the Party-the communist Progressive Labor Party. Just like the slaves who knew they couldn't rely on the master to protect them from the overseer's whip, the bosses will never protect us from their system. We don't need protection, we need to build our own army-a Red Army.
Chicago high school student
Dear Challenge:
Some of the articles and letters in Challenge recently interpret fighting for communist revolution to mean that our main role as communists is winning people away from struggling around particular demands.
This is just as serious an error as only struggling around reform demands, and just as damaging to the Party's ability to grow. It is by providing militant leadership with concrete demands in individual battles that we get workers to accept communist ideas.
The responses to the letter from "NYC Teacher" in the Jan. 17 issue of Challenge show how dangerous to the Party and the working class mechanical anti-reformism can become.
One letter criticizing "NYC Teacher" in the Feb. 7 issue of Challenge said that workers should be won immediately to communism and therefore we don't need to fight for better conditions in the schools. Really? When angry parents confront the school administration for smaller class sizes, will it build the Party to say it is irrelevant if their children are crowded into a room with 40 other students so long as we live under capitalism?
When teachers demand better working conditions, will it get them to read Challenge if we argue that fighting to remove asbestos is a waste of time since we will only get decent education under communism?
Another letter in the same issue stated that "Our Party's strategy for work in the union should center on how to make the case for communist revolution based on teachers' own experiences. It should not be to call for a general strike around reform demands." In fact, this strategy would isolate the Party. To ignore specific demands gives the workers no organized alternative to the union in fighting the bosses. Our analysis can only be convincing if it is borne out through our participation in the class struggle. As communists working for revolution we need to fight like hell for better conditions in the schools.
"NYC teacher" was absolutely correct. Every article in Challenge about a particular struggle needs to point the way to fight in that situation. It is not enough to look at past struggles where communists-including ourselves-have buried the call for revolution under reform demands and say that therefore these struggles are useless.
Individual struggles are not detours on the road to revolution. These struggles are the road to revolution, if we fight to lead them and use them to show the need for overthrowing capitalism. It is up to us. But communist ideas cannot become mass ideas unless we back them up with more than past history and future visions.
Boston comrade
Dear Challenge:
The New Jersey Transit train wreck that killed three and wounded 160 is already being blamed on "human" error.' This should come as no great revelation to workers because how often in many similar 'accidents' have we heard our slave-driving bosses admit that they were pushing their workers to the point of mental and physical breakdown? Never! And you never will.
For workers, the most important facts are: the crew involved in the train wreck had worked double shifts for the last three days and was getting only four hours sleep a night-in a railroad car; and that same crew had been working 14 1/2 hours straight before the crash.
For the bloodsucking bosses the most important fact is that a 40-year veteran of NJ transit who was being blamed for the crash had made a record of errors of judgment during that long career. Working under such horrible stress it would be impossible not to make errors of judgment over that period of time.
But this is what all bosses have to do to stay in business. They must speed us up and kill us if necessary to keep the profits rolling in. And along the way they know that we must make a record of errors which they quickly pull out (called a "record review") whenever there's blame to be handed out.
You could give similar facts in all kinds of occupations, like doctors forced to work over 100 hours a week resulting in the "accidental" murders of countless patients. But this is how capitalism has always been and this is how it will always be - until we smash it with communist revolution.
Under communism there would be no 25 million unemployed in the U.S., or 800 million jobless worldwide. Everyone would have a job which would make the workday shorter, easier and safer. There would be no need for speedup, long hours or profits because communists would eliminate the bosses and their money.
Communists would use the value created by our labor to meet the collective needs of our class. The bosses understand what they have to do and workers must realize what we have to do - join the PLP and fight for communism.
Former transit worker
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Dialectical Materialism:
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