Capitalism can take workers only backward. It is a system in decay, a system in its fascist phase. Intensified racism is the cutting edge of the bosses' fascism. To move forward, to destroy capitalism and the racism it breeds, the working class needs communism.
Look at Chicago. Just a few months ago, nine-year old Girl X was beaten, raped, mutilated, poisoned, and left in the stairwell of a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) high-rise. Now another young black girl has been found beaten into a coma in another CHA building.
Next, a black woman in Cabrini Green, a building president known to all, was shot by a CHA cop at point-blank range. This shooting provoked sniper fire, pinning down the Chicago police and sending the CHA cops running.
Then came the racist beating of thirteen-year old Lenard Clark, by young Nazis in the Bridgeport neighborhood. While Lenard lies in a hospital bed with permanent brain damage, the lynch mob is home with friends and family.
Now the papers reveal the beating of a 25 year old black man by five racist cops in front of a "Cops only" bar in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Immigrant workers, meanwhile, face stepped-up raids around the city. There were four in one day in Rogers Park, where we will march on May Day. These raids aim to terrorize all immigrants.
A new jail is under construction at 26th and California. Prisoners now clean buses and trains for no pay. Union workers used to do these jobs, and raised families on their wages. One out of every four young black men is in the criminal justice system. And it is a criminal, justice system.
In Denver, Colorado, a black teenager driving a stolen car hit a police car. While he lay on his stomach, hands cuffed behind his back, Denver cops broke his neck.
In Miami, an ill immigrant worker committed suicide because he feared that new immigration laws would leave him on the streets without medical care.
If racist brutality and police terror are the left foot of fascism, then slave labor is its right foot: prison labor, workfare, downsizing, firings and part-time work. Welfare, education, and immigration reform, anti-terrorism laws, all mean more fascist terror and slave labor.
We know how it ended in Nazi Germany. This is how it started.
Six months later, a teacher was removed from Clemente High School for being a member of PLP. Then a white principal and some black staff used nationalism to spearhead an anti-communist attack on Challenge at Foreman High School, trying to undermine May Day organizing there.
And the PLP has been attacked at the University of Chicago Hospitals for leading a fight against the bosses and the Teamster Union leadership.
These attacks, while feeble now, are intended to isolate the Party and communism from workers and youth, especially from black workers.
*One door leads to religion and mysticism, giving up on this life, for a better one in the "after-life." A few weeks ago in San Diego, 39 lost souls thought this door led to a spaceship.
*One door leads to Farrakhan and a sea of nationalist, anti-semitic, racist division.
*One door leads to the union chiefs, who ensure that bosses, not workers, get what they need. This weekend they marched in the California strawberry fields, demanding five cents for farm workers. One lousy nickel is a cheap price for the labor peace the bosses need as they prepare for war.
*One door leads to the fascist death squads and militias of Timothy McVeigh and the killers of a black couple near a North Carolina military base. They will turn the Oklahoma City bombing trial into a political forum to spread fascist ideas.
Only one door leads to communist revolution and a world without money or bosses, races or borders. We can open that door because PLP is the key. Capitalism has nothing to offer but racism and terror, poverty and wars for profit. The working class can only realize its needs and desires with communist revolution. For all the Kevin Cedenos and Lenard Clarks, march on May Day!
Look closer, however, and a different picture emerges. The AFL-CIO didn't build this march alone. The New York Times threw in its weight--together with periodicals from the Atlantic to street papers like the SF Guardian. In short the publicity alliance of Rockefeller Inc. spotlighted California's strawberry pickers. And they made people angry.
You have to ask why? Clearly Rockefeller Inc. is very selective in what it publicizes. There has been very little coverage of prison or workfare slave labor. Yet those workers labor under worse conditions than even the farmworkers in California. Which leads us to an obvious conclusion: Rockefeller Inc. is not interested in the plight of any worker, let alone the strawberry workers.
What are they interested in? First, the strawberry fields, together with the rest of California's $22 billion agribusiness. Second, and more important, the building of a non-violent reformist movement among the country's youth.
Both interests are spurred on by the sharpening crisis of world capitalism--the crisis of overproduction. "One capitalist," Marx said, " kills many." Crisis forces the more powerful capitalists to eliminate their weaker rivals in periods of shrinking markets (See Box). Yet it also forces all capitalists to exploit workers more intensely. And, at the same time, it hastens the outbreak of world war, when national capitalists eliminate the productive power of their rivals.
All these forces come to bear on the lives of our youth. They don't come with the label of "capitalist crisis." Instead they come as low paying jobs or no jobs; increased racism and nationalism; poverty and instability; or being shipped off to a foreign war. No matter how they come, they end up creating anger, fear and discontent. That worries the capitalists. It can spell political instability.
And so on Sunday they launched an ideological offensive. A campaign to recruit youth to the pro-capitalist leadership of the AFL-CIO. This is the same AFL-CIO that supported the genocidal war in Vietnam and, more recently, the Death-Squad and Contra wars in Central America. On Sunday in Watsonville, it pushed Caesar Chavez, nationalism and non-violence. But, most importantly, it pushed the lie that capitalism can be reformed!
At a time of growing slave labor, fascist police terror, attacks by the Migra (anti-immigrant police), workfare and preparations for war, Rockefeller Inc. is offering our youth the AFL-CIO and five cents more per box of strawberries picked.
We are offering them and their parents a fight to end capitalism, its wars and wage slavery forever! We are offering them a fight for communism where the working class, organized into a massive communist party, directs production for the needs of a society where money and profit are items to be viewed in a museum.
And on Sunday, PLP too was present in Watsonville. We rallied and argued for communism. We leafleted and sold 650 Challenges and met a dozen or so new contacts. When the marshals put amplified chant leaders next to our rally we replied by changing the content of their chants. Their Question: "What do you want?" Reply: "A Union," got a new reply, "What do you want? --Communism! When do you want it?--Now!" While there were many weaknesses in our action, there was a spirit to it too that was emboldened by the openness that greeted our call for communism and revolution, not reform!
Among the members of the Commission are representatives of the biggest clothing manufacturers like Phillips Van Heusen, Nike, Reebok, (all real humanitarians!), and representatives of the union UNITE. After months of negotiations, the Commission has come to an agreement about "conduct" for companies that manufacture clothing outside the US. Some of their rules are:
1. Don't force the workers to work more than 60 hours a week;
2. Don't employ children of less than 14 years! (For these benevolent commissioners, at 14, you're ready to be a wage slave);
3. Respect the minimum wage of the country. (Its usually about $2 to $3 a day);
4. Improve the working conditions. (In Puebla, Mexico, workers who work for an LA company have the cost of the water they drink taken out of their salary);
Those who adhere to this conduct can put on their clothing "not made in a sweatshop." Supposedly this will help create better working conditions for the workers and embarrass those who continue to produce in sweatshops.
This is just the appearance. Clinton signed the racist immigration law, cut hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers off welfare to work for less than the minimum wage, and gave the green light to prisons to use slave labor. The Commission is not about improving the conditions for workers; it is the effort of New York bosses to strangle domestic and foreign competition.
The garment industry in LA has grown enormously. Its huge profits make it a center of garment production worldwide, thanks to cheap labor of recent immigrants, some of whom have been paid as little as $70 for 60 hours of work And these bosses have also sent production to other countries where they pay $2 a day, creating more profound poverty.
The LA garment bosses threaten the profits of the New York bosses and oppose their foreign policy. The New York bosses aren't against sweatshops. Bruce Klapsky, president of Van Heusen said, "I would like nothing better than to end sweatshops." But the Center of Labor Studies of U.S./Guatemala says Van Heusen owns sweatshops in Guatemala. They want to break the smaller and newer bosses by raising their production costs and lowering their profits. That's why they are pushing this Commission.
The New York bosses use the union UNITE--which they control--as another weapon in this struggle. UNITE launched a campaign against GUESS to help New York bosses defeat this LA company and control the profits of the garment industry.
They also use UNITE to control the workers and to have a stable work force. They use the AFL-CIO to build the idea that capitalism can be reformed to make it better. They are trying to sucker workers and youth to remain loyal to capitalism and accept growing fascism and wage slavery in exchange for the minimum wage.
Workers mustn't fall for these traps. The bosses, whether from New York or LA, see workers as labor power that they buy, like any other product, for as little as possible. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It has to be destroyed with communist revolution.
Under communism, we'll produce clothes of the highest quality for all the workers, but the main thing will be the needs, ideas, conditions, and relations between, these same workers. Communist revolution will eliminate all profits--for all bosses. Our goal is to organize hundreds of garment workers to march on May 3rd and to join PLP. Exposing the bosses' plans for war and fascism will help make this goal a reality.
The two local capitalists responded by starting a political movement in the area called THANKS. It advocates "Buy American," while opposing NAFTA and unionization. Shaw and King are supporters of Ross Perot. It's easy to see how desperate they feel. But they are not alone. A whole grouping of capitalists from aerospace to agriculture are being threatened or "killed" --especially in California.
The AFL-CIO is spending more money on its campaign to unionize the strawberry workers than any other project. It sure looks like it's siding with the biggest capitalists (who support NAFTA) and who can afford to move their plants to Mexico or any place else in the world for lower wages. On the other hand the Kings and Shaws of this world are committed to local production.
Neither group represents the interest of workers. King and Shaw want to lower wages through anti-union stances. The bigger capitalists want to undercut wages through the increased competition NAFTA brings about. PLP's solution is to abolish the wage system altogether along with all the capitalists it supports--both big and small ones!
Tosco lost no time terminating workers and reducing safety measures such as the Fire Department. Over 100 former UNOCAL oil workers have been cut loose in the last two weeks in this area alone so that Tosco owners can make bigger profits to invest in speculative ventures.
Just before the finalization of the $2 billion deal between UNOCAL and Tosco, members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union local in Los Angeles warned that it meant increased danger for workers and the surrounding community. The ink hadn't even dried on the April 1st deal when a fire broke out at the refinery in the "cracking" unit where members had been complaining to management for months about leaky seals on a pump. Supervisors determined on that very afternoon that the leak was "not significant enough" to justify shutting that portion of the system for maintenance, saying they would make arrangements to put in a "fix" with the system on-line. Unfortunately for the workers, the system couldn't wait until Tosco got around to approving a repair. That night a seal broke on a pumping unit causing a leak of heavy oil. Heat from nearby machinery ignited the fuel, causing a fire.
Refinery fires are dangerous even when a plant is fully staffed. When understaffed, a refinery fire can quickly get beyond the workers' control and devastate a community (an explosion in the mid-1980s just south of Houston blew out windows 20 miles away). The Tosco fire (the latest in a series of fires) occurred at shift change so there were just enough workers still around to put it out before it got out of control. Any other time would have proved disastrous.
The corporation lost no time in lying to the community. Plant manager Gary Gerstner told the obedient media that 25-30 in-house "firefighters" responded to the blaze. This is the same liar who only two days before had disbanded the Fire Department, leaving workers with shovels, fire extinguishers and extra underwear to deal with explosions.
One of the shortest roads to maximizing profits at a refinery is reducing the amount of time spent on maintenance. That means there will be more fires, explosions and deaths. But even after a major explosion, oil corporations still come out ahead financially through their policy of operating on the edge.
Today's cutthroat competition in the oil industry means "accidents" are certainties. The oil bosses are warring with each other over market share and profits and they're making the workers pay with their lives. A worker died in the explosion in Martinez, Ca. last year.
The Tosco deal sets a new low standard for the oil industry which will now demand further concessions in order to "stay competitive." The OCAW International Union will make similar concessions in the future though it probably won't receive anything significant for its surrender other than permission to continue to exist.
This situation is no aberration. It is advanced capitalism at work, squeezing every last cent out of workers' labor and replacing us with other workers once we are killed off by fires or toxic poisoning. Corporations "get away" with it because this is how capitalism is supposed to function. We are letting them get away with it unless we build the PLP so that we workers can take control of the situation and turn it into one that works for us: communism. Tosco doesn't even pretend to care what the workers want or need. They only care about the bottom line!
Capitalism is a killer. It can't be patched up. The safest thing workers can do is to join the PLP and dedicate ourselves to getting rid of these profit-hungry killers once and for all.
Racism is at an all-time high in the U.S. Police terror, workfare and prison slave labor, rotting schools, double and triple unemployment rates and poverty wages are the norm for millions of black workers and youth. But the capitalist ruling class tries to cover up these genocidal attacks by offering the illusion that you can make it out of this racist morass.
The bosses and their media are pulling out all stops in commemorating the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson busting the racist ban on black baseball players. There is also a movement to honor Paul Robeson with a U.S. postal stamp. Robeson was a hero to the international working class. He broke many racial barriers, but most important he used his talents to fight for the international communist movement. He never forgot his father was born a slave, and he fought racism and fascism worldwide. He sang at the front lines of International Brigades fighting the fascists in Spain in 1936-38. During the height of the Cold War he defended the Soviet Union and its socialist system as the only place he had ever felt free of racism.
For all this he was subjected to vicious anti-communist attacks, ostracized by the entertainment industry, denied work in the U.S. and denied a passport to prevent him from performing overseas. And now the same U.S. government that hounded him while he was alive may "honor" him on a postage stamp! What hypocrisy to try to cover up their own racism by trying to capitalize on the reputation of this working-class hero.
The same anti-racist and anti-fascist worldwide movement led by the Soviet Union in World War II - in which Robeson was a leading fighter - set the stage for the breaking of racist barriers in the post-war U.S. While the bosses' media lauds Brooklyn Dodger owner Branch Rickey as the hero who "selected" Robinson as modern baseball's first black player, Rickey was actually driven (as are all bosses) by the profit motive.
Robinson himself was an anti-racist fighter. A Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, he had been driven out of the military because he refused to ride in the back of a Texas bus in 1944. He was forced to withstand racist attacks during his baseball career, especially in the first several years.
However, it should be clear that Robinson was no Paul Robeson. Before the House Un-American Activities Committee he rebutted Robeson's statement that it was not in the interest of black workers to support a U.S. war of aggression against the anti-racist Soviet Union. Robinson criticized Robeson as not speaking for black people. Years later he somewhat recanted his criticism of Robeson, possibly realizing he shouldn't have allowed himself to be used by the racist red-baiters.
For Robeson and communists, racism is the innumerable attacks on the black working class and, as a result of racist divisions among workers, on the entire working class. For us the struggle to end racism is a struggle to end all attacks on black workers, from workfare to low wage jobs, from police frame-ups and beatings to imperialist wars. The struggle to end racism is the struggle to end the exploitation and oppression of all workers. It is the struggle to end the capitalist idea of race. It is the struggle for communism.
The struggle to integrate professional sports and open up the professions to black people who had been excluded in the old Jim Crow system created opportunities for hundreds of thousands of black people who are police and politicians as well as professional athletes, doctors, professors, and businessmen. Racism diminished a little. But that very diminishment has made it stronger, more entrenched: people look at these black people who have "made it" and say, "You see, the opportunity is there. If you do not take advantage, it is your own fault." The attacks on black workers become more severe, and it is more difficult for people to understand them as racist because of the success of those black people who "made it."
Communists understand that reforms of capitalism, even "anti-racist" reforms that opened up opportunities for advancement, lock us into capitalist ways of thinking. The existence of "rights" and "opportunities" for a few obscures what is happening to the many. Jackie Robinson, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan represent the "anti-racism" that capitalism can accept, the right for black people to compete for success in a society of growing poverty, fascism, and movement toward war. Communists fight to destroy capitalism and racism. We don't fight for the opportunity to be the exception. We fight for a communist world that will develop the talents of all of us, where our talents can be used to advance the entire working class.
Now, what big tickets did Bibi have? After all, Israel is a tiny country of only a few million. Israel gets at least $3 billion annually from the U.S. government in military equipment and military hardware. Before and after Netanyahu told off Clinton, he met with various members and friends of the Christian Coalition, which ironically is openly anti-semitic. The main speaker at the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) was the "great defender" of the Jewish people, none other than Newt Gingrich. At this meeting, and in public statements, Gingrich pledged support for Israel's housing development in East Jerusalem and blasted the American press for spreading "Palestinian propaganda." (New York Post, 4/9/97)
Gingrich went on to attack Clinton and Gore for undermining Israel's security. "When the Clinton-Gore administration treats with moral equivalence Palestinian violence and Israeli housing, that undermines Israeli security." Gingrich also said that any hope of giving a portion of Jerusalem to Arabs is a "fantasy."
What is the economic and political basis for this growing alliance between Israeli and the U.S. New Money forces and the Christian Coalition? The New Money forces/ Oil Patch gang have at least two things in mind. They would not be unhappy about the Israelis creating another Mideast crisis which might result in another oil embargo, or weaken the traditional bosses' U.S. domination over Mideast oil. Another oil embargo could give New Money forces more leverage to end restrictions on new oil exploration and production. Old Money has kept them in check with all sorts of laws preventing new oil drilling using "environmental needs."
New Money forces would not be adverse to using a new Mideast crisis to penetrate in, a bigger way, more control over the Mideast oil which, for a long time, has been the big plum of their adversaries in the Old Money circles. Presently, Old Money--the Rockefeller types--control Mideast oil.
For some time, at least since Desert Storm, U.S. policy has been changing towards Israel. Remember during the Desert War against Iraq, the U.S. went to great lengths to keep Israel out of the war. The U.S. oil moguls were afraid that Israeli military intervention against Iraq would incite the Arab world into some alliance with the Iraqis. It would, at least, have weakened what passed for a U.S.-Arab alliance against Iraq.
The U.S. rulers, led by Old Money, realize their weakening grip on Mideast oil. More and more they are coming to realize that their one-sided support of the Israelis is boomeranging. Israel, rather than keeping the Arabs in line, is creating the conditions for an uprising against U.S. domination.
What do the Israelis want? How do they view this budding alliance with the world's biggest open anti-semites? They are at least looking for new big capital to expand their hi-tech industries in the Negev Desert. The Israelis, led by the Likud faction, want to use the more highly technically trained Russian immigrants to be the backbone of their growing hi-tech industrial base.
But, the Israelis also want more living space, "Lebensraum," and increased control and distribution of the Mideast oil. Just being the "hired-gun" of the U.S. is not enough. Money and more political power is the Israeli goal. They are not seriously interested in the notion of being the "land for peace." They want war and provocation for profits.
So, it is in this evolving situation that the seeds of contradiction grow between the U.S. and Israel. All machinations are speeding up the development of a Mideast war. Workers here and in the Mideast have nothing to gain and much to lose over which group of domestic or Mideast bosses control the oil. The oil and the land belong to the workers. They must band together and take it themselves. They must use the looming oil wars to turn them into civil wars for communism.
PHILADELPHIA, April 14 -- About 1,000 people, mostly angry black workers, marched through Gray's Ferry, a southeast Philadelphia neighborhood today, to protest the recent beating of a black woman and her children. Most white workers of the area were won by racists, including the Aryan Nation (a white supremacist group) to be part of an American flag waving demonstration against the marchers. Hundreds of white workers stood with their backs to the march as a sign of objection to the black workers. Their signs read, "Where is our equality?"
These events were a defeat for the working class. They deepened racial division. They obscured our common interests as workers in destroying racism and making communist revolution. But many workers on the march responded positively to our Party and communism. PLP members distributed 40 copies of Challenge and 25 copies of the Smash Racism pamphlet and could have distributed more if we had brought them.
Only the modest presence of Challenge offered a way out of the racism--communist revolution. The PLP members were self-critical about our role in the march. PLP has to respond boldly to these developments! We must sharpen the fight against racism on our jobs, in our schools and communities, and show how the bosses use racism to attack all workers. We must also expose the other side of racism, nationalism. Farrakhan and his kind are part of the bosses' arsenal to divide workers and prepare us for fascism and war.
The march had originally been proposed by the racist/nationalist Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. But Farrakhan and Philadelphia Mayor, Ed Rendell, made a deal to kill the march and instead hold a rally in a church in the southeastern Philly neighborhood. Rebellions are the last things that bosses want as they attempt to win workers to the vision of a better capitalism based on volunteer labor. Thus Rendell and Farrakhan joined to quell the rebellion.
Rendell has been concerned about negative publicity that may be given to his city on the eve of the "Volunteer Summit." Led by President Clinton, George Bush, and Colin Powell, the "Volunteer Summit" is a social-fascist conference aimed at persuading workers to donate free time to provide free labor to the bosses' institutions. Cutbacks have reduced social services for workers. The openly fascist plan is to provide some of these services with forced labor--workfare and prison labor. But the bosses also need to channel the idealism of workers, their desire for a better life, into a plan to make capitalism better. This is where volunteerism comes in.
But the black workers were angry and marched despite the attempt to pacify them in church. Many others did attend Farrakhan's speech, however. Some white people were present at the march, and seemed to be well received by the workers. As one worker told a white PLP member in the march, ".this is not about hate, it's about living together." This worker, as many on the march, prove that they are still not won to fascism and that we can win the class war and build an international communist party!
We also leafletted the 600-strong march and vigil led by Democratic Party politicians. The aim of this This vigil was to basically to cool down the workers' and youth anger angry at the many killings by the cops.
On Saturday April 12th, PLP held a protest at 157th St. and Broadway, a few blocks from where Kevin was murdered. We made contact with several people who want to come to May Day, including some George Washington HS students who knew Kevin. We sold 50 Challenges and gave out hundreds of leaflets in spite of a heavy rain.
One weakness in our response to this racist killing was that we did not vigorously raise the issue of racist cop terror against black and latin workers and youth in our unions and in our workplaces. The best way to raise the consciousness of workers is to show them the relationship between the issues that affect them outside their jobs and the downsizing, workfare, and other attacks on them by a system that makes workers pay for the bosses crisis; to make clear the rise of fascist police terror and the need to build our revolutionary communist movement to smash the system.
My name is Shanda I go to Foreman High School. This is my first time here.I had a chance to come last year,but I was not that interested then. But now I am. The government is affecting my life, and so I would like to tell you what is going on at my school, and about things which are going on in our society.We should not hide from the things we see that are wrong. We can't keep running away from our problems, because theres no where to go. We can't keep letting the system tear us down.
I was one of the students at Foreman High School that sold Challenge. They(the administration) did not want us to sell or read a communist paper. They tried to intimidate other students at Foreman. So, these students started comming to me, telling me, that they are going to get kicked out of school, or they were being threatened with suspension. I would tell them that "I am not scared, can't nobody intimidate me because, I have a strong mind." If we are not going to change the situation, who will? If we keep running away, what are we going to have for ourselves? What about the generations that comes up behind us?
If the rich bosses cared about society. Then why is there so much racism? Why is there so much pain? Why is welfare being cut off ? Why are all these people going into the unemployment lines? I think we need a revolution.
My advisors, they would always ask me how I felt about what was going on in society.I am a young mother. I have to travel from the far south side of Chicago to school every day. I have seen things in this society which many teenagers may not see. There is too much wrong around here I think that there should be a revolutionary war. I see what is facing me and my friends everyday, and I am going to stand up. If they ask me if I sell Challenge newspaper, I am going to say, yeah, because I don't see anything wrong with it.
We must finish this fight we all must become one. we all must stand up, don't hide, don't be scared, keep moving, keep going, have faith in ourselves, never back down. I have never had a chance to express what I felt and I just want to thank you all for listening to me.
ALL OF US OR NONE
Slave, who is it that shall free you?
Those in deepest darkness lying.
Comrade, only these can see you
Only they can hear you crying.
Comrade, only slaves can free you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
You who hunger, who shall feed you?
If it's bread you would be carving,
Come to us, we too are starving.
Come to us and let us lead you.
Only hungry men can feed you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
Beaten man, you shall avenge you.
You, on whom the blows are falling,
Hear your wounded brothers calling.
Weakness gives us strength to lend you.
Come to us, we shall avenge you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
Who, o wretched one, shall dare it?
He who can no longer bear it.
Counts the blows that arm his spirit.
Taught the time by need and sorrow,
Strikes today and not tomorrow.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
On the front page of the last issue of Challenge, we saw the words, "Demolish Capitalism with Communist Revolution" over the picture which shows the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
My fellow workers and I did not get the point of the relationship between the words and the picture. It looks like we support this act of terrorist aggression. However, the editorial clearly shows the deepening crisis in the capitalist system.
Therefore, all pictures should show the way we are building for communism and exposing the fascist attacks of cruelty on the working class.
Brooklyn Hospital Worker
The letter from "Brooklyn Teacher" is absolutely right to say that capitalist schools exist solely to meet the needs of capitalism. Those needs are complex, but fundamentally, the schools are propaganda machines for the ruling class. The main purpose of the schools is to promote individualism, patriotism, and racism. Along with this, the schools seek to get students used to submitting to the bosses' discipline: to follow the rules, be on time, obey the teachers.
It is also true that deplorable physical conditions exist in most schools.
But there's another side. Some schools are getting fixed up. Some of the rulers want the schools to do a better job of being propaganda machines and think it's worth spending a little money to do so. After all, they spend money on prisons, so why not schools?
This doesn't imply that schools are getting better or that they ever were any good. Workers should fight the thinking that any of the so-called school reforms will make schools better for our kids. But to convince them of this, communists can't just say, "the bosses don't want to spend money on the schools." There's more to it than that. Spending more money is bad for our students, not good, because the rulers do it to control their minds. Young people must be part of the fight for communism if they want to have a decent future.
There are many differences within the ruling class over educational policy. These differences reflect Old Money/New Money conflicts but are not limited to it. It's true that we need to look into this more.
It's also true that conditions could be "ripe for the winning of a mass base to fascism." But what do we think is most likely? Of course students won't automatically come over to the communist side. We have to fight to win youth to communism and our enemies are not sitting on their hands. But if we can't win working class black and latin young people to communism, who can we win? Let's not get carried away in our efforts not to be one-sided and portray everything as equally likely.
A Communist Parent
Recently a letter from Red Youth asked how to respond to the question that the paper doesn't print "diversity of opinion...minor deviation or open struggle."
First off, there is much debate in Challenge. Look over the Letters Page for the last several months to see this.
But secondly, all issues have only two sides, the bosses or the workers. We live under the dictatorship of the bosses. The class struggle, that is the conflict between the working class and its exploiters, is what moves all human history.
All the media under capitalism carry the "other point of view"--that is the bosses' ideas and politics. They only print all the news they see fit. PLP has led many events, demonstrations and marches involving thousands of workers, yet no capitalist newspaper has seen fit to print a report on them.
Challenge is the only paper that views the world from a working class communist perspective. The purpose of our paper is to report on struggle (both within the Party, and among our co-workers) to explain, teach, and analyze events in order to lead to action to build for communist revolution.
Debate and disagreement are essential to this. We need to involve many more people in the debate over how to make revolution and how to build communism.
What if Red Youth invited his teacher friend to meet with Party students in one of the schools where they are struggling against fascism and anti-communism? If that is not possible, how about inviting the teacher to help organize for May Day? It is possible that these proposals might trigger a bit of struggle, which if reported in Challenge, could prove helpful to other comrades in similar circumstances.
A Reader
This past Sunday, I went with a group of about 20 comrades to a march being held in Watsonville, California. The march was being held by the United Farm Workers (UFW), a mainly Mexican union, as the beginning of a drive to unionize the strawberry pickers. They are calling for better wages and conditions. As of now the strawberry pickers work long hours in pesticide-filled fields. The UFW wants to get them a pay raise by imposing a price increase, instead of cutting the growers' profits.
The UFW showed their true faces when they allowed a man with an American flag to hold up a sign that read, "Close All Borders"--a message much like that of the fascist anti-immigrant Voice of the Citizens Together. The leadership did not protest his sign or presence until PLP pointed him out and accused him publicly over the bullhorn of being a fascist. When people around us realized what we were yelling about, the leadership had no choice but to boo him and tell him to leave. But if they had not been faced with the choice of either being exposed as sellouts or protesting him, they would have happily let him walk around.
We were able to make 12 contacts and get out 600 Challenges.
The next day, in school, I was talking to my history teacher about the march. We got into a discussion about the UFW. I told him about how Caesar Chavez and the rest of the UFW leadership had sold out the grape workers in the '70s. When a neighboring farm that was organized by the Teamsters Union went out on strike, Chavez told his workers to cross the picket lines and work on that farm. The UFW farmworkers questioned him and said they should show solidarity with the neighboring farm, after all they were their brothers. Chavez responded by telling them they were not their brothers, they were Filipinos.
After opening my teacher's eyes, our conversation was on a whole different level. He now saw the UFW leadership and Caesar Chavez from a different perspective. It's very important that we continue to expose these unions for what they really are, and say that no union can make capitalism work for us. Only under communism will we be able to work under good conditions and not to make our bosses rich.
Bay Area Comrade
On April 10th, some 150 people gathered at The City College of New York (CCNY) to commemorate the massive student strike of 1949. The strike's aim was to get rid of two racist faculty members. One discriminated against Jews and the other discriminated against black students.
While a broad coalition of student organizations helped organize the strike, it was the unceasing years-long effort of hundreds of communist students on campus that made the strike possible. Working with students in many campus groups, they continually agitated for the removal of the racists and pressured the Student Council to hold a strike referendum. And it was the communist students, many of them World War II veterans, from campuses all over the city who, for the most part, made up the initial picket lines.
Most of the CCNY students waited on the sidelines to see what would happen. However, when the police tried to break up the picket line by arresting students, everything quickly changed. Those on the sidelines joined the picket line en masse and the strike was solid.
This illustrates the importance and potential of multi-racial unity in carrying out militant actions. Students from Hillel, the Frederick Douglass Society, and the NAACP were united to fight racism and, under the leadership of communists, carried the day. At the same time, the whole affair makes clear the limitations of such reform struggle. While the two racists were gone from the campus in a relatively short time, and almost 50 years of anti-racist struggle followed, today, students are under sharper racist attack.
In 1949, when the City College campus was 85% white, there was no tuition; now, when the campus is mostly black and latin, there is a substantial tuition and it is growing. In addition, tens of thousands of CUNY students are being forced out of school and into slave labor workfare. These are blatant racist onslaughts. They will not be ended by reformist actions, no matter how militant, though militant actions play a vital role in building a revolutionary movement. Racism will be ended only by communist revolution.
The college administration, in charge of the commemoration, did very little to attract students to the meeting (there were only 10 there) so they did not hear some of the above lessons as presented from the floor by two PLP 1949 strike participants. However, over 1,000 students did read about it in a leaflet distributed by Party members on the campus.
CCNY Strike Reds
The stories that keep leaking out about TWA Flight 800 demonstrate that the split within the U.S. ruling class is leading toward civil war. A recent news item mentioned that three commercial pilots had reported seeing a missile in the area at the time that TWA 800 went down. This is the one theory that the mainstream media have consistently ridiculed, even when advocated by former White House spokesman Pierre Salinger.
Reconstruction of the plane has pretty much ruled out the terrorist-bomb theory. The rulers are now grasping at straws, such as the notion that a cloud of natural gas rose from the ocean and engulfed the plane.
Based on the Party's analysis of the sharpening conflict among the U.S. capitalist rulers, it seems clear that the New Money faction is using the TWA 800 episode to undermine Old Money's war plans. If the TWA 800 problem was mechanical failure, so much the worse for Old Money Boeing, the key military contractor for the Rockefeller wing, and the better for its Airbus competitors. If it was a friendly-fire missile, as seems increasingly likely, the disaster becomes evidence of the incompetence of the U.S. military.
Salinger, who as Kennedy's press secretary, once spoke for the Rockefeller wing, has always maintained close ties with the French bourgeoisie. With the gap between the French and U.S. rulers widening, he seems to have jumped ship and is now speaking for the interests of Rockefeller's enemies, such as Airbus.
The dispute between the FBI and the federal air traffic safety agency over the handling of the investigation probably reflects the New Money/Old Money split. If the missile theory is correct, it suggests the speculation that New Money forces within the Air National Guard deliberately shot down the plane as an act of war against Old Money.
A Comrade
There has been a lot of incisive commentary in Challenge recently about sharpening global rivalries, the movement toward war, and dogfights among the U.S. bosses. Discussion of the last has been particularly helpful in pointing out how fascism involves the bosses' class disciplining themselves--also in showing how the capitalists have internal divisions that shape the course of world and national events.
But Challenge has made various assertions that need further argument and evidence. The headline about impending civil war in the April 16th issue is a case in point. Even if it is true that the militias have "tens of thousands" of members, it is a leap to say that they get significant support from any sector of the ruling class. The editorial says, "This New Money faction probably even finances the militias," but this is not proof. Nor is it clear how the militias differ from other right-wing groups that have been in the U.S. --like the KKK--without precipitating anything resembling civil war.
Civil war in the modern era is a big deal occurring only when (1) modes of production are in conflict, as in the U.S. civil war; (2) current governments no longer serve the interests of the main sector of the ruling class, as presently in Zaire; or (3) class struggle of bosses vs. workers tears the country apart, as in the fledgling USSR after World War I. Bosses don't start civil wars lightly. The editorial draws an analogy between the militias and the SA Brown Shirts. But there was no civil war in World War II Germany--just a lot of nasty spatting among bosses and crushing of the left and the unions. So the example does not bear out the argument.
Challenge also may be oversimplifying current alignments in the ruling class. Is it simply a matter of "Oil Patch" nativist, isolationist, militia-aligned, New Money bosses, largely Republicans vs. Middle East-oil-invested, cosmopolitan, superficially less reactionary but actually more dangerous Old Money bosses, largely Democrats? And can these groupings be reduced to affiliations with different sets of oil companies--New Money Texaco, Arco, Coastal, Pennzoil, vs. Old Money Exxon and Mobil?
A recent article in the Nation calls this neat bipartite division into question. (See Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, "Teapot Dome, Part II: The Rush for Alaskan Oil," 4/7/97 pp. 20-24) The article points out that Arco, British Petroleum and Exxon are the three main investors in Alaskan (that is, Oil Patch) oil; that the recent removal of the ban on exporting domestic oil was engineered by a lobbyist for Exxon, Mobil, Shell, and Arco; that major lobbyists and CEO's for Oil Patch oil are best golfing buddies with Bill Clinton and his circle; that Arco pumped big money into both Republican and Democratic coffers in the last election. Aren't many of the big oil companies invested in both the Middle East and the Oil Patch? Let's recall that it was the Exxon Valdez, not an Arco tanker, that ruined the Alaskan wilderness a few years ago. And what makes Texaco a New Money company? Wasn't it around during WWII shipping oil to the fascists?
To say that the U.S. bosses are not neatly aligned into Old and New Money interests is not to say that they don't have their differences, that they don't squabble, or that war over oil in the Middle East may not occur. But by claiming that the bosses' infighting determines just about everything these days--from the debate over immigration laws to the Texaco racism scandal--and that this infighting is leading to civil war, Challenge may be going off the deep end.
We think that civil war in the U.S. will occur only when the revolutionary communist movement, led by PLP, gets strong enough to lead millions against the ruling class--and then to be sure the bosses will bury the hatchets of inter-boss warfare and unite against the workers.
Some NJ Comrades