Recent events in Asia show how drastically the crisis has worsened. Only months ago, the Ph.D. economists of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were praising the economies of Thailand, South Korea, and other Asian "tigers." Then, presto! Asian stock markets crashed between 40 and 60 percent. Asian currency values collapsed. Asian businesses are going bankrupt. Banks are failing. Millions of workers face layoffs or devastating wage cuts. Led by Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Wall Streeter Robert Rubin, the IMF I.M.F. had to organize a $57 billion bailout of the Korean economy, the world's eleventh largest, just to prevent Korean banks from defaulting immediately on their massive debts.
As Challenge-Desafío has pointed out many times, the cause of these developments is no n't a mystery. It's the capitalist system. Capitalism produces not for need, but for profit. Bosses fight with each other for maximum profit. Each boss seeks to outdo the competition in producing faster, more efficiently, and more cheaply. Markets are flooded with more commodities than can be sold. Karl Marx, the founder of scientific revolutionary communism, called this situation a "crisis of overproduction."
This analysis is the only way to understand present developments in Asia. We have often quoted liberal journalist William Greider's figures describing 35 percent overproduction in the worldwide automobile industry. They are more true for Asia. A year ago, Malaysian car buyers had to wait four months for a Malaysia-made Proton. Today, 40,000 of these cars are sitting in showrooms and storage lots. A year ago, Korean auto barons were making plans to crack the world's top ten. They borrowed billions from Japanese banks to finance their expansion. Today, there are at least 100,000 brand new Hyundais, Daewoos, and Kias with zero mileage.
But the auto industry is the tip of the iceberg. Steel overproduction is around 20 percent. Cement industries throughout Southeast southeast Asia had pumped up production and borrowed billions in the process to fill domestic demand for projects now on hold because of the collapse. Indocement, a company with 35 percent of the domestic Indonesian market, increased its capacity by 55 percent between 1993 and 1997. Today, its debts are nearly twice as great as its 1996 sales. Current cement surplus in Thailand of 5 million tons could reach 9 million by 2000.
Boeing and its European rival Airbus had been drooling and dueling over the Asian market. Now, Asian airlines are in the throes of the crisis. "The worst is yet to come," according to the head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Aviation. "We will see more over-capacity, lower yields, bigger losses, more price cutting, and even fewer passengers" (quotation and figures above from Asia Week, Asia Week, 1/9/98). Boeing Asian sales add to the crisis, because the Asian airlines get half their revenue in devalued local currency but have to pay for fuel and aircraft in dollars.
Some scribblers loyal to the Clinton/Rubin "Fast Track" strategy discount the possibility that the Asian rulers' economic collapse could trigger a similar development in the U.S. Their "evidence:" is only about a tenth of U.S. exports head to Asia. This is superficial, wishful thinking:
* *Asian bosses will try to turn a bad thing for them (the collapse of their currencies) into a good thing (more exports to the U.S. based on lower prices for their commodities). The openly fascistic Pat Buchanan sees this threat more clearly than many of the liberals: "These exports will swamp U.S. markets, drown factories, put downward pressure on wages and prices, and squeeze the profits of U.S. companies" (New York Post, 12/31/97). New York Post, December 31, 1997).
* *Everything has limits. Until now, the U.S. has been the market of last resort. But how long can U.S. workers continue to absorb cars, TVs, video cameras, and computers from Asia when real wages here are stagnating and household debt is at record levels? How high can the U.S. trade deficit go? It's racing towards $300 billion. How long can the U.S. economy continue to borrow abroad in order to pay for imports?
* *Japan is one of the U.S. economy's biggest creditors. Its stock market has plummeted to 65 percent below peak. Its financial houses are holding the bag for billions in bad loans to Korean and other bosses. The Japanese government recently announced a plan to pump $100 billion into the domestic economy. This money will have to come from somewhere, possibly the $300 billion the Japanese government is holding in U.S. Treasury Bonds. Alan Greenspan, the financial "genius" of the Federal Reserve, won't be smart enough to find buyers for these bonds at current rates. This means that a Japanese selloff of T-Bonds is likely to trigger a rise in interest rates to attract buyer. Rising interest rates mean a tailspin in the stock and bond markets.
So, led by the Japanese, Asian capitalists will try to flood the U.S. markets with goods and at the same time be forced to make capital harder to borrow. U.S. imperialists have a counter attack of their own. A Wall Street Journal headline trumpets: "Asian Crisis Presents Buying Opportunity for U.S. Firms" (December 19, 1997). Some of the biggest U.S. companies want to profit from their rivals' weakness by grabbing up devalued Asian companies at bargain prices. This maneuver intends to win them footholds in Asia's protected markets. These takeovers may happen, but the strategy reflects more wishful thinking. Who, among Asia's newly laid off and impoverished millions of workers, will buy Kias after Ford grabs the company from the Korean Development Bank? All the "solutions" the bosses concoct only deepen the crisis.
And the other shoe-imperialist China-has barely begun to drop. China's new rulers are deadly serious about "doing what is necessary to make their auto, petrochemical and other key industries competitive in world markets" (Washington Post, December 26, 1997). In the short run, China's fascist state capitalists have a big advantage over their U.S. rivals. They can out-subsidize U.S. industry, undercut U.S. wages, and beat U.S. prices. Every item they produce will also contribute to worldwide overproduction and sharpen interimperialist rivalry. This rivalry is intensifying on a daily basis, particularly over the control of oil, key to all capitalist production. The Chinese state oil company recently beat out a number of U.S. competitors for a $4.4 billion deal in Kazakhstan. The Chinese bosses are openly inking oil and gas deals with U.S. enemies Iraq, Iran, and Sudan.
Coupled with the crisis of overproduction, the competition for control of oil is headed in only one direction: war. War in the Middle East to protect the tottering Rockefeller energy empire is next on the bosses' agenda. B-1 bombers have just been added to the U.S. imperialist armada preparing to attack Iraq. The oil war can only sharpen all existing interimperialist rivalries and further deepen the crisis. The vicious cycle of booms, overproduction, deflation, depression, and war can't be solved within capitalist society's limits. Let the bosses have their illusions about reforming their rotten system. The working class has no interest in wishful thinking. Workers are realists, and realism teaches us that only communist revolution can solve bosses' crises. We can turn the current one into an unprecedented opportunity to build the Progressive Labor Party. We can eventually turn bosses' war and fascism into their opposite.
One woman jumped off a bus to join us, while a man who was ticketed for honking so forcefully in response to our "Honk if You Hate Racist Cops" sign, parked his car and joined in. The event was the result of a weeklong effort between the Party and the outraged residents of this low-income housing project.
William Whitfield, a 22-year-old black man, was murdered as he was walking from Glenwood Houses to a store to use the phone. Claiming that they heard gunshots on a nearby roof, two cops chased William into the store. They screamed at the customers to hit the ground and then shot William through the heart.
Killer cop Michael Davitt, it turns out, is number one in the entire NYPD for the number of times he has fired his gun and shot innocent workers. He has had 12 civilian complaints filed against him in his 14 years as a cop.
At the Brooklyn march several mothers whose children have been murdered by these killer cops spoke eloquently about the lessons they learned in such a painful way. Their greatest fear is not gangs, not other youth, but the cops.
In February this armed enemy of all workers is scheduled to officially take over the positions of Security Guards in all the public high schools. Workers, organized under communist leadership, must oppose this. Cops exist to create the climate for capitalism to flourish. They serve and protect the bosses' profit.
`This has got to stop and we have to put a stop to it'
Members of PLP responded immediately to the news of William Whitfield's execution. We held a demonstration at the sight of the murder on Saturday, Dec. 27th. Despite the cold, rainy weather we were the first to protest. We distributed several hundred leaflets and over 100 Challenges. The response of the residents was powerful. "This has got to stop and we have to put a stop to it," exclaimed one resident who invited us into her home to talk about plans for further action. People discussed plans for attending William's funeral and using it to announce the march for the following Saturday, Jan. 3rd.
We proceeded with plans to rally at William's funeral on Wednesday, Jan. 31st. While funerals are seen as a time to mourn, we struggled that they are used by ministers and politicians to distract workers' anger. A group of one dozen parents, teachers and students, carrying PLP signs, rallied and distributed leaflets urging workers to organize with us. Over 500 people attended the funeral in an outpouring of both rage and solidarity with the Whitfield family. As we leafleted most people were very open to our ideas. They were impressed by the stand we took. Just like the history of using funerals during the struggles against apartheid in South Africa, and against the death squads in El Slavador, we must use these as political moments to organize under the very eyes of the enemy.
While communists raised the need to attack all cops, and the capitalist bosses they serve, Al Sharpton, the opportunist who has made a name for himself as a so-called leader of the black community, held a press conference across town in Harlem calling on the courts to investigate and urging workers to trust the system to solve this crime. He spoke at William's funeral preaching the same message of asking the fox to guard the chicken coop.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, just celebrating his re-election as mayor, threw piles of phony statistics at workers about how few times his Nazis in blue fire their guns. The mayor and the bosses he represents are the enemies in gray suits who benefit from the work of the thugs in blue. Together they benefit by building terror as they squeeze more profits out of our class.
As we marched through the projects, residents of the area played a key role. As the march grew so did the cop presence. However, they were wary of the workers' anger. Although we did not have a permit for the bullhorn, the anger and resolution of these workers guaranteed that we didn't need one. The march ended with speeches from two of William's brothers. We all pledged to return next Saturday, Jan. 10th, for a larger march to the precinct.
Marches alone are not enough; We need communism
The question of which ideas will guide this movement against police terror is the key one for us as we pursue this campaign. Militant marches, as powerful as they feel, are not enough. Over 10,000 workers marched over the Brooklyn Bridge in August to protest the torture of Abner Louima. But that march was totally led by the Democratic Party with the aim of channeling our anger against a few rotten cops and convincing us to trust the rest of the system, demanding useless civilian review boards, and federal investigations.
These politicians are the most dangerous fascists because they use the appearance of calling for reforms and change to cover their role. In fact, they are dedicated to capitalism and will oppose our movement to smash this system wholeheartedly. We must win workers to see this. We must turn workers' anger at killer cops into hatred of capitalism and an understanding of the way to end it. The key is winning many to the PLP and fighting for a society without killer cops and racist rulers: communism.
Chicago cops, ordered by the Board of Education, searched and patted down every student entering the building that day. They threw many against lockers, insulted them, and groped them. Some students were strip-searched, and at least one young woman had a chunk of hair pulled out by the roots, leaving a bleeding scalp.
Eighty-two students were arrested: a few for having knives, box cutters or some marijuana, and most for carrying pagers. Some were held well into the night. Even those who were not arrested were penned up under police guard in the lunchroom and the auditorium. Classes were canceled. The phones were taped up and students weren't even allowed to go to the bathroom.
For nearly three hours, the school was a jail.
All the students and many teachers were outraged. Within hours, three petitions were circulating at the school. One attacked the "no pager" law as stupid and unfair. Another angrily demanded some answers about what the cops had done, adding a complaint about two school employees (a dean and a security guard) who routinely mistreat students. The third petition simply said, "Walk Out!"
Several dozen students did walk out the next day. Many more were ready to, but a lack of clear leadership held them back from pushing past the administrators and security guards who were barring every door. Those who walked out were not discouraged by the small showing. They came back to school the next day with leaflets calling for a larger walkout.
This struggle is far from over. The cops will return, and the next time students will be better prepared, tactically and politically. Meanwhile, 12 students have been suspended and still face criminal charges and expulsion hearings. The PLP, along with other members of several school clubs, are organizing students and teachers to go to court with them on January 23rd.
As a PLP leaflet, written by students and headlined, "We Are Not The Criminals," put it: "They [cops and bosses] make it seem like they're the only people we can turn to and trust. But they're really there to make us scared of them, horrified of them. We need to try to trust each other and turn the guns on them. That's why we were all searched on Monday-because they are afraid of us."
A second leaflet explained more. "A society that cuts children off welfare and is preparing to send tens of thousand of youth to kill and die in a Mideast Oil War isn't sending police terror into the schools for the benefit of the students. They are building fascism.
"The bosses' profit system is in crisis and this crisis is leading to war. Bosses in the U.S. and around the world have a hard time winning workers and youth to be loyal supporters of a system with growing racism, unemployment and cutbacks in every social service from health care to education. So they must threaten students into submission."
In the hours after the police raid, dozens and dozens of Foreman students turned to PLP comrades for help in understanding what had happened and figuring out what they could do about it. Hundreds more, including teachers and parents, have talked with us since and read our leaflets thoughtfully. Some are thinking seriously about joining the Party, and we aim to double the Party club over the next few months. To do that, we need to train ourselves (younger and older comrades alike) to be better communist political leaders. We must intertwine our lives deeply with those of the students, parents, and teachers around us.
A slick ideology hidden behind the euphemisms of "quality of life" or "community policing" have been the latest police attacks and murders. These terms represent the fascist ideas of Rutgers University Professor George Kelling. James Q. Wilson, who co-authored Crime and Human Nature with Nazi Richard Herrnstein puts forward the idea that crime is linked to genetic structure. Anthropologist Catherine Coles and Kelling co-authored another book on "community policing" and "quality of life" policies called Fixing Broken Windows. These fascist spokespeople for the Old Money Rockefeller bosses provide the appearance of academic credibility to a vicious, anti-working class ideology.
Kelling & Co. claim, without presenting any scientific evidence, that the toleration of petty crimes and "disorder" in a neighborhood leads to serious crimes (rape, robbery and murder) in the same neighborhood. The Kelling gang tries to preach that the purpose of their ideas is to help police become "problem solvers" in the community. They stress "preventive measures" rather than the traditional 9-1-1 style of policing. In practice, however, this fascist rationale unleashes death squads into the city streets to do whatever they want. Since the implementation of "quality of life" policies, civilian complaints of police terror rose from 3,956 in 1993 to 5,596 in 1996 (NY Times, 11/19/97).
Workers cannot afford to let ruling class killer cops go unchallenged. The PLP is participating in and will lead the struggle to organize on the campuses and in the streets to fight the bosses' racist terror. In the middle of these struggles, millions of workers and youth will be won to PLP and will fight for a society without police terror and racist bosses: communism.
This was the third time the plant manager was telling us how important it is to keep the new bathrooms clean. Only this time people got tired of hearing it. One guy spoke first. "You want us to respect the plant but we aren't treated with respect. Half the writing in the bathroom is because the supervisors treat people bad."
After this fellow broke the ice others let loose. As one woman spoke she ground her foot into the floor "Every time we go to complain about one of the supervisors you just step on us and back them up."
Other spoke up to complain about the poverty wages and health hazards. What started out as a fifteen minute lecture by the bosses turned into an hour long attack on the working conditions. The bosses finally had to force people to go to work because every time they tried to end the meeting another worker spoke up.
The perversity of capitalism is causing havoc in the workers lives. The bosses have made a huge investment in machines and the factory and they have been trying to get the workers to work faster and faster so they can make their money back. Production has more than doubled over the last six months on many lines. But it's still not enough for the bosses to get their money back. They have said they want production to be 4 times what it was at the beginning of last year. Now, after their mad attempts to work us to death, orders are down and on some lines a whole shift has been laid off.
When the company laid off some people for a few days around the holiday a group of workers demanded a meeting with the boss to protest the layoffs. After the boss refused to come to the plant, the workers went down to the union hall. Grievances were filed about not just the layoffs but many other things as well. The workers wanted the business agent at the plant first thing in the morning. The union promised to "get right on it". When nothing happened the next morning workers chased down the head steward demanding a representative from the union come to the plant immediately. Eventually the union refused to fight the layoffs, adding fuel to the fire.
Then a group of workers started to confront whatever managers happened to be around. Whatever bosses wandered into the path of this group were immediately surrounded and got an earful from the workers. When one old boss tried to escape by claiming he is only an engineer the workers let loose about the engineer who walks around with a stop watch and harasses people.
The Party is playing a modest but significant role among the workers at the plant.Both politically and in organizing some of the activity against the bosses. There is a small readership of Challenge but some of the workers most active in confronting the bosses are regular readers. Through the activity of these workers the Party's ideas are reaching the workforce. Some workers are talking about the need for revolution. Now we are trying to increase the readership of Challenge among the workers and solidify a Party group in the plant.
PLP members attended both demonstrations. Though not part of the coalition that called them, the Party showed our seriousness in getting picket lines going, maintaining chants and talking to General Assistance (GA) and transit workers. In conversations, PLP'ers also moved the focus considerably to the left, leading some chants and distributing leaflets and Challenges to a receptive crowd.
The smaller demonstration occurred at a MUNI transit yard, where a new superintendent had made the lunch period impossibly short and was also preventing GA workers from using indoor toilets and washrooms.
Power/GA Rights Union, which aspires to organize GA workers to win full-time jobs with pay, benefits and protection, called this action. There were spirited picket lines, and GA workers talked about how angry they were because vital labor was extracted from them dirt cheap, and because managers and a few workers were treating them as untouchables. Several significant concessions had been won from MUNI earlier that day.
Unfortunately, the positive aspects of these demonstrations were weakened by the organizers viewing Workfare from a narrow union perspective. Instead of seeing workfare as a plan to restructure the entire economy around disposable workfare slaves, it sees Workfare as an attack on union workers and union work. Instead of seeing Workfare as a fascist plan to split the working class into "subhuman" Workfare slaves and "privileged" Workfare overseers, the organizers see it as a "two-tier system" that lowers wages for some and threatens the higher wages of others. Workfare and prison labor are not viewed as preparation for re-arming the U.S. for war.
These contradictions were much more glaring at the larger demonstration. It was co-sponsored by the same SEIU unions whose co-operation allowed Workfare into SF General Hospital, the MUNI transit system and the Department of Public Works in the first place. SEIU had recently signed a contract establishing a joint City-Union committee to administer Workfare in San Francisco.
As an angry SF General Hospital worker said earlier, "I know the housekeepers, in their hearts, hate working side-by-side with people barely scratching a life together, but the union tells them there's nothing they can do." In fact, the union's only concrete response to Workfare is to ask for a 5% wage increase for its own members who supervise Workfare workers!
At the larger rally, PLP members interrupted a speech by SF Labor Council president Walter Johnson, and attacked him as the orchestrater of the Workfare sellout. Another speaker attacked the union, saying if they were serious about fighting Workfare they would tell their members to refuse to work when the City tried to force Workfare into their jobs. Though the union hacks put up a brave front, they were visibly rattled. After Johnson made a fool of himself by shuffle-dancing to PLP's chants, they rapidly unrolled a huge SEIU banner and stood huddled together holding it between themselves and the crowd.
In the same way that unions regulate and negotiate the terms of our wage slavery, and therefore institutionalize wage slavery, a union-oriented anti-Workfare movement moderates and institutionalizes Workfare. We want to free our aspirations from the limits of unionism to what we really want: workers' control of society-communism.
We can do the same sort of thing at SF General Hospital. Wear the sticker that GA workers must wear!
Eighty welfare recipients work at SF General as housekeepers, laundry, and food service workers. SF General couldn't function without them, yet they get $345 a month, and no benefits.
Every day, SF General makes the GA workers wear the blue-bordered paper stickers: "Hello, my name is..." Flimsy, temporary badges of forced labor, For people forced into flimsy, temporary lives.
The rulers of this country say they want to get people off welfare. They are lying! Their system can't make real jobs for everyone on welfare. Their plan is to put us all on welfare-level jobs! When they force someone on welfare to do my job, I'll be on welfare. I'll have to displace someone else from their job. Soon the whole economy will rest on the backs of people with workfare-level jobs.
How can the rulers get away with this? Only by convincing people who still have regular jobs that welfare recipients are a subhuman underclass of parasites. Only by convincing people who still have regular jobs that they are superior and should be overseers of workers on welfare.
We won't be tricked into cutting our own throats! Regular workers and Workfare workers unite: Wear this sticker. Abolish Workfare! Abolish wage slavery
Actually many postal workers cheered this incident for finally giving this racist animal what he deserved. A worker at the Milwaukee PO said this supervisor "talked to you like you were three or four years old," and that almost sounded respectful compared to others.
However, this worker's shooting spree won't change the bosses' attitude towards the workers. This week workers here have been warning supervisors, "I bet you wouldn't treat me like that if we were in Milwaukee," but they haven't changed. Capitalism causes them to see us as a commodity, to be used and thrown out; the crisis of capitalism causes them to treat us like animals. Communist revolution and the overthrow of the system is the solution.
There's no doubt capitalism is in crisis right now. Challenge has detailed very clearly how the U.S. has lost ground economically to its principal competitors in Japan, China, Germany, etc. U.S. bosses are preparing for war in the Middle East and eventually for World War III. All this has caused a tremendous strain on the Post Office. The government no longer subsidizes postal operations. In the last five years or so it has become especially aggressive about turning a profit. The Postal Service has actually amassed a $4 billion profit in the last three years, $1.2 billion of it coming in 1997. Profit for whom?
Well, right now they've been paying off a huge "debt" to the banks, but that's virtually finished. The real profit goes to the Postal Service's main customers, those who spend millions annually on postage. The Postal Service has been able to keep rates low for these companies, lower than inflation rates in some cases. In others, such as bulk and pre-sorted first class mail, the rates have been lowered. So the postal bosses help these companies save money and remain competitive. And who are these companies? The same ones who are fighting for their economic lives in this period of capitalist crisis.
A few years ago, the Postal Service devised a simple strategy to accomplish its financial goals: bribe the supervisors. If the area, unit or district accomplishes its goals, the supervisor in charge receives a bonus, sometimes up to 10% of his/her contract. This year's bonuses totaled $193 million! If the supervisor is unable to meet the goals, then he/she is replaced by someone who will.
The result is fascism, as these supervisors become modern-day Nazis. For some they are black Nazis, overseeing black workers. No days off when requested, mandatory overtime when needed, no talking and no radio playing, to name a few of the existing fascist working conditions. One racist Chicago supervisor, who's still on the job, slandered an employee with the "n" word. The standard operating procedure is trying to fit a square piece into a round hole: move a certain amount of mail per tour, or overtime must be at 7%, or whatever. The supervisor tells you to make it happen, or else.
Without the Party, and something concrete to fight around, most workers just deal with it on their own. Carriers hide the mail in their garages; clerks take to the bottle; or we try to live in a fantasy world based on drugs or religion. This particular worker in Milwaukee said, "F--- it!" and came in shooting.
Building the Party is the goal here and that's what we're doing. We will smash this system that treats us as commodities at best, and usually no better than dogs. We will replace it with communism, based on living for a new future where we work for the good of society, not the bosses' profits. We distributed a PLP flyer around this issue at the main Post Office, and many workers stepped forward to help get out 10 or 20 of these. The PLP postal club here in Chicago has grown modestly in the past six months. We're now preparing to put out a regular Postal Challenge. There's much to do, and we need help with all of it. So don't go "postal"; go PLP!
"Maintain the current IVA (tax on value added) to overcome the severe conditions of poverty," declared Guillermo Ortiz, Sec'y of Finance, before the Deputies. Contrary to these declarations of the Secretary of State, maintaining the IVA at 15% and the budget for 1998 approved by the Congress, will bring more poverty and inequality for the workers. 74% of the IVA is taken from wages and three times more of the new budget will be used to bail out more banks than on programs to fight extreme poverty.
The electoral process demanded to lower the IVA, but with votes we cannot smash the capitalists. The inclusion of the five parties in the congress resulted in no change in the taxing policy. The discussion of the budget and the IVA among all the electoral parties showed that the fight for power was merely a fight to see which bourgeois group would gain control. At the end, the PRI and PAN joined forces to save the current capitalist model. The PRD pretended to oppose aspects of the plan only to gain votes "in order to avoid disillusioning the electorate" declared Lopez Obrador, leader of the PRD. Then Cardenas, newly elected Mayor of Mexico City approved other increases for Mexico City, including raising property tax and tax on cars by 19%. To smash the bosses and all of their paid agents in the congress, the workers need to join PLP, the Party of the working class that is organizing for communist revolution.
Bankers and companies which produce for export seem optimistic because the GNP (gross national product) and exports are growing. David Rockefeller, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and the World Bank talk of the stability and recovery of the economy. They even dare to recommend to the South Korean bosses that they follow the example of Mexico to get out of their current crisis. But their euphoria and their economy are put together with pins. The financial collapse in Hong Kong led to the devaluation of the peso by another 10%. The bankruptcy of the Yamaichi house caused the rest of the markets to fall. The fragility of the worldwide financial system was again clear for all to see, showing that the capitalists cannot control the crisis. Globalization is nothing but the sharpening of the war for markets-at the expense of the world's workers. The frequent black Mondays are the result of the crisis of overproduction, and they bring closer the possibility of a world wide recession, which will overnight stop the export bonanza and bring down the GNP, the only measures the Mexican bosses use to judge their economic success. This will speed up the fight over shrinking markets and lead to world war.
Capitalism goes from crisis to crisis. It creates death, poverty and increases the exploitation of millions of workers. Communism is the only solution to save the working class, by abolishing production for profit, the market where workers are forced to sell our labor power, speculation, competition and wage slavery. Communism will distribute the wealth created by the workers according to our needs. Let's take advantage of the fights between the capitalists and their financial crises by building a mass PLP to bury all the bosses once and for all!
Understaffing is worsening at a hospital where we have a PLP club. Nurses in a five-bed ICU (Intensive Care Unit) have taken lots of abuse. Sometimes two nurses cover five patients. Often this means no break during a 12-hour shift because, supposedly, one nurse cannot be left alone. But things worsened recently. On one shift, supervisors left a nurse alone with four patients. On another, with two nurses for five patients, two patients went into cardiac arrest within minutes of each other. Both died.
The night schedule has only two nurses on most days. If one gets sick, only one remains. The nurses decided they'd had enough and demanded a union meeting. They began filling out protest-of-assignment forms and calling the union, day or night, when staffing levels were unacceptable. Supervisors pleaded that the institution was "in crisis." They tried intimidation, with little success so far. Temporarily, staffing has improved slightly.
Some workers say, "I realize the hospital has to save money, but...." Why does the hospital "have to save money?" For the ruling class, if the cost of health care can be cut, corporations can compete better globally. These same bosses don't bat an eyelash at spending $50 billion of our money annually to prepare for an oil war in the Middle East. But spending on health care for elderly and poor workers is a crisis to them.
These "spend-less" forces finance the right-to-die movement. Like the Nazis, they want to minimize spending on the dying, the elderly, the infirm. At our hospital, this "spend-less" section of the ruling class is represented by the new medical director. On her first tour of our ICU, she pointed to patient after patient, saying, "This is futile care. This patient should not be in ICU." She knew that a transfer out of ICU was a likely death sentence. Her mission is to pull our hospital into a "spend-less" economy.
These spend-less bosses are divided into two camps. One favors managed care. The profit motive drives HMOs to decrease the amount of care permitted: early discharges; bans on certain treatments and tests; lower pay for health care workers. These forces want workers with private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid in HMOs. They claim HMOs have an economic stake in preventive care. But a recent New Jersey study found 43% of children in HMOs were not fully immunized by the age of two!
Then there are spend-less forces like Senators Gephardt and Kennedy and some of the union bosses who think costs can be cut by some form of phony "socialized" medicine. (See Challenge editorial, 1/7/98) They point to England where per capita health spending is much less than the U.S. But many types of care are denied to working people there. This plan also diffuses worker disenchantment with capitalism. After all, how interested will 40 million uninsured workers be in risking life and limb in a Middle Eastern war to protect a system that cannot provide even the most basic health care for themselves and their children?
Of course, there are many bosses who use the health care system to make themselves rich: drug companies, insurance companies, the medical technology industry, etc. Columbia HCA, a $20 billion for-profit hospital chain, has just been hit with civil and criminal charges by the more powerful spend-less bosses for wholesale bilking of Medicaid and Medicare.
The Rockefeller wing of the ruling class disciplining another wing is one sign of fascism. Workers cannot side with any of these bosses. We must resist every attempt by the bosses or the unions to make us accept less for ourselves or our patients. We should spread the fight against understaffing throughout the hospital. But as long as we live under a system organized to guarantee profits, we will always be fighting for crumbs. The best preventive medicine is to destroy capitalism and organize a communist society where there is no profit, no money; where goods and services are distributed to meet the needs of the working class.
The Bronx/Westchester PLP clubs had a successful fundraising dinner on Dec. 13th for the Mary Lonergan Defense Fund. Thirty people attended, including teachers from seven high schools and two colleges, and three neighbors. We raised $500, and a PLP study group of teachers was formed.
Mary's speech about her case encouraged people to organize collectives in their schools and for teachers to reject the idea of the criminalization of our students. A lively discussion followed during which other examples of school repression were brought up.
The first session of the study group went well. Four teachers from four high schools attended plus one other worker. We discussed many political ideas, issues and the PLP. We also discussed how to organize students and teachers. An important step was to produce a leaflet about the growth of junior ROTC programs in the Bronx high schools. We discussed the links between these programs and the building for war around the world. We want to have this leaflet distributed at several Bronx high schools. We all agreed to continue meeting and to bring more teachers to the next study group meeting.
PLP Teacher/Student Club
People have asked me how to sell the paper better. I find that if a person has high on-the-job sales, they also sell to many strangers. Challenge is not the variable so much as the political attitude of the seller.
The secrets to selling the paper combat the anti-communism of both comrades and those outside the Party:
* A "Not now" or even a "No" dialectically approaches a "Yes" because that person is opening a door of discussion.. It is our job to deal with their misconceptions, and this best done by using an article.
* Your attitude about an article conveys your level of investment in a vital solution. There should always be at least one article in an issue that you see as essential. See it as the way to widen the doorway. Once the door is opened wider by your interest and their mind is receptive to issues everyone is discussing, you have a dialogue.
* There isn't much time for dialogue on the street. I walk along with the person I'm trying to interest in the paper because walking beside them affords the only opportunity for talk on the street that there is!
Socializing regularly shows that you care enough to let folks know your vulnerabilities as well as your fun sides, and consistent job sales flow less mechanically. Dialogue about the paper with folks at work will continue on and off the job for years. Sometimes people comment very little about articles. Or don't give money for weeks. But they may not take more than one paper. Certainly they never will if we don't ask.
Write articles regularly Talk about your articles in the club to make writing collective. Solicit ideas for articles that would help the work and that friends could write. Prepare for mass sales by discussing an article together. While you read each issue, write your friends' names alongside articles they might enjoy. You never find out what people think about the paper unless they get it, and get used to you getting it to them.
Challenge is full of life and death situations. Articles attack the knottiest problems. Our struggles are sincere attempts to strategize solutions. Challenge is the best vehicle we have for conveying our Party in a mass way. If we don't try to distribute many Challenge-Desafíos every week then we're taking the subjective path of cynicism. We're withholding the face of the Party from the very audience that must become the Party.
A Comrade Who Enjoys Selling Challenge
The following was written by hospital workers in a Philadelphia PLP study action group:
More work is put on us. We get less money and benefits. Workers are disciplined more for not keeping up with the work. More temps are hired because they get no benefits. Patients are forced to leave early. One man was bleeding from his side in the wheelchair as he was leaving.
There is too much to sell and not enough buyers. The U.S. is losing money.
Jobs go where workers make less so the bosses make more money. There will be a war when the U.S. fights other countries to keep the money coming in.
Philadelphia Hospital Workers
After reading the positive review in Challenge of the Off-Broadway play "The Mother" by Bertolt Brecht. 36 members and friends of PLP went to see the production on Dec. 19th. It is not often that young people get an opportunity to see a form of entertainment that encourages being involved in the communist movement. The students that attended the play found it entertaining and inspirational.
The best part of the evening was the way in which we were received by the cast. They rolled out the "red" carpet to us. They had a member of the PLP participate in the play and mentioned Challenge in the dialogue. At the end of the play they allowed one of our members to speak about the PLP. We distributed approximately 25 Challenges to the cast and audience and received some generous donations. Members of the cast thanked us for coming and bringing such a large crowd.
We are currently trying to get in touch with the cast to see if they will perform at a PLP event. "We need to see more plays and movies", said one young PLP member. We are setting up a date to see another play or movie, and plan to have a follow-up discussion.
It was indeed an educational and fun evening for all.
NYC comrade
What follows is taken from a personal letter, written last December, about observations in Geneva, Switzerland.
A Comrade
Yesterday, there was a demonstration of more than 300 students that began at one of the University buildings and ended nearly three hours later at the Geneva City Hall. I was quite impressed by the numbers, but I was told that this manifestation was nothing and that they're usually bigger.
What was the cause for all this ear-piercing whistling, hand-clapping, and maniacal yelling? The city assembly decided recently to raise the yearly fee students have to pay to attend the university. But the main provocation was the assembly's decision to downsize or cut the number of student assistants (considered teachers' assistants in the U.S.). This would be a major blow for the Faculté des Sciences. It would be impossible for just a handful of assistants to supervise all the labs-especially when there are as many as 30 or more to each lab section.
I was impressed by how militant the students were. I think that in the U.S., we students would have reacted passively if not just simply grumble and complain amongst ourselves. However, I was disheartened to see that only the male students had organized and led the march.
I was also impressed by the absence of the police. Someone explained that they only appear at bigger manifestations, and that they would only come at the end-which they did. But they did not appear to be threatening. They appeared to be indifferent. In the U.S., knowing that hundreds of youth had taken to the streets would have caused the police to arm themselves to the teeth. Despite their supposed harmlessness (the Geneva police), I have not lost sight of their purpose in this capitalistic society.
Ciao for now
Newsies is a TV movie about a turn of the century newsboy strike against Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the NY World, which was considered to be a crusader against corporate corruption. The part that impressed me most was the newsboys' (newsies) collective understanding as unbelievable as it sounds, that it was they who "made" the news and not the NY World. The newsies knew their neighborhoods and customers like they knew the back of their hands. They gave the boss-controlled capitalist propaganda a working class interpretation that related the news to the daily realities of poorhouses, hunger, exploitation and ghetto existence. In essence it was the newsies creativity and base building among the people that was responsible for the newspapers' success.
But Pulitzer was faced with competition from other newspapers and had to demand a cut in the bed rock poverty wages of the newsies in order to deliver more profits to his stockholders. This provoked a strike by the newsies who could tolerate no more hardships. Pulitzer the "anti-corporate crusader" used the usual capitalist weapons; terrorizing the newsies and their families with beatings and kidnappings by hired gangster goons and getting the cops to protect the scabs and look the other way when the bosses' goons attacked. A reporter from a competing newspaper wrote a few articles supporting the newsies but when a giant newsie anti-boss rally threatened a citywide worker rebellion, the reporter had to tell the newsies that he was being reassigned overseas and that the newsie rally in effect never happened because none of the newspapers would report it. The newsies reorganized and used an old leaflet machine and their ties to the workers to get out the news of the rally and potential rebellion.
The movie has a BS ending with the Governor and the U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt (a friend of the reporter) coming to help the newsies win the strike. A more likely scenario was that the newsies had already won the strike and the politicians were called in to prevent a rebellion. This movie is important for communists because when the bosses decide to shut down ours newspaper Challenge, our own newsies can still be the tribunes of the workers if we build strong ties with them and join their struggles.
A Comrade
However, a "Black Book of Capitalism" would have been more to the point. After all, if you're writing about the destruction of people, why not learn from the past and present master-U.S. imperialism-which waves the flag of democracy to cover the evil empire of capitalism. Here's a quick look:
* Only six years ago the U.S. rulers wiped out over 500,000 Iraqis in a fight over control of Mideast oil. The UN estimates that up until this very moment tens of thousands of Iraqi children are being destroyed by the vicious embargo imposed by U.S. bosses.
* Prior to the year of genocide in Iraq was the Vietnam War. Three million Vietnamese were incinerated by U.S. imperialism. The U.S. military dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did in the entire World War II in Europe.
* In WWII, when the Japanese fascists were about to surrender after most of their Army was defeated by the Soviet Red Army in Manchuria, Truman ordered the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, immediately killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, as while many more have died in its murderous aftermath. The U.S. rulers have been the only ever to use nuclear weapons in war.
* A few years later, the U.S. went to war in Korea, laying to waste to much of that country. And a decade later, following in another anti-communist bloodbath, the CIA organized the massacre of over 1,000,000 people in Indonesia so that the Suharto family could become billionaires owning that country.
* Remember the Native Americans? The people who initially occupied what is now known as the U.S.? By waging genocidal warfare, the newly emerging U.S. bosses wiped out most of the American Indian population. The few who were left were stuck in concentration camps, known as "Reservations." Here the "lucky ones" survived in endless misery and poverty. A tiny number have made it to the highest level of U.S. culture by opening gambling casinos in their concentration camps.
* So the U.S. was built on genocide but it continued for centuries, based on slavery. The new democracy imported millions of slaves, many of whom died on the slave ships. Once here they slaved away in bestial conditions on plantations. Hundreds of thousands died because of these conditions.
* Eventually the slaves were "freed," and became the lowest paid wage slaves-if they were lucky enough to have a job. Today more black workers are imprisoned in the U.S. than all the so-called victims of the "Gulag." About one in three black males are in and out of the prison system while the cops kill and kill more in the ghettoes. Ghettoes are an updated form of keeping black families in a concentrated area to better control them.
* The concentration camp method was applied during World War II when the liberal Roosevelt uprooted hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent both, those who had been born in Japan as well as those born in the U.S. out of their homes and herded them into "internment camps"[read "concentration camps"] because of possible "disloyalty."
* Various colonialists raped Africa. The Belgian bosses, with U.S. ruling class support, slaughtered 15 million in The Congo holocaust. U.S. corporations sucked billions in profits out of the fascist apartheid system in South Africa which killed half of all black children under five. Tens of millions of Africans still suffer and die at the hands of the imperialists. Today this staggering mayhem is being carried out by one nationalist stooge or another. Because of competition and exploitation, the French and U.S. rulers are still responsible for genocide in Africa. (Of course, the "enlightened" British colonialists have fallen by the wayside.)
* The toll of U.S. imperialism is not confined just to Africa. In the 1960's, Castro pointed out in his Second Declaration of Havana speech that the U.S. is responsible for at least two million deaths each year in Latin America. From 1898 to the present, U.S. troops have invaded virtually every country south of the Rio Grande, leading U.S. Marine commander Smedley Butler to declare that he "was a racketeer for capitalism, making Nicaragua safe for the National City Bank," etc. This neo-colonialism still exists causing even more poverty and more deaths.
* In the "prosperous" U.S., starvation among sections of the populations runs rampant and is continually rising. Older people are forced to eat pet food in order to survive. Even U.S. Congressional investigators admit that for every 1.4% increase in unemployment, 30,000 U.S. workers die because of stress diseases, suicide, etc.
The crimes of imperialism are endless. And it is these butchers who ask us to believe their tales of anti-communism. Billions worldwide suffer daily in one way or another as a consequence of capitalism. U.S. bosses are quick to yak about "human rights" and democracy. But the "rights" they are really speaking of is the right to murder and exploit. The crimes of imperialism are incalculable. This is but a brief accounting; the full story is yet to be told.
Chiapas is one of the richest states of Mexico in natural resources: oil, cattle and agriculture. This state produces 60% of the electricity for the whole of Mexico, but more than 33% of the houses in Chiapas have no electricity. While the bosses live like kings, the indigenous people die of hunger.
The massacre in the community of Acteal, Chenalhó, Chiapas is not the uncontrolled action of the death squads acting on their own. Nor is it a mistake or excess in the effort to terrorize the EZLN or its followers. It was a well planned criminal act. It shows a change in the strategy of the government of President Zedillo to escalate the war of extermination and to maintain control of the zone where oil is plentiful. "Massacre of civilians" serves the government as a way to justify the presence and intervention of the army. 5,000 more soldiers have arrived in Chiapas.
The peace accords that have been and will be signed between the EZLN and the government have become vehicles to trap and kill, to commit genocide, as the latest actions show. Therefore while they "dialogue", the rulers have been forming every kind of paramilitary group and death squad. Even as this occurs, all the liberals insist on the need to renew the dialogue!
Chiapas is part of the imperialist fight for oil and markets, which has converted the highly desired peace for the indigenous peoples into the "peace" of the cemetery! About 2 million barrels of oil are extracted daily in Campeche, neighboring Chiapas. A million barrels a day are exported to the US and the sale of the whole petrochemical industry is being negotiated. Marcos, supported by European social democracy, converted the Zapatista uprising into a battering ram against NAFTA and Neoliberalism. At the same time, the European Union is accelerating the process of establishing a commercial agreement with the Mexican bosses which gives them access also to the wealth of oil and other markets.
Unfortunately these kinds of massacres will continue in Mexico and many parts of the world, like the Middle East. The U.S. army is now giving secret training to the Mexican army to "fight drugs"-really to help fight to keep European and Japanese competitors from the oil. These local massacres are part of the build up to World War III . Peace, equilibrium, treaties, dialogues, tranquillity, and respect for human rights that many liberals of good and bad faith preach, are not possible in a capitalist world where the imperialists fight for every barrel of oil, every dollar of goods. Capitalism in crisis doesn't permit stability or balance, only war to the death for power and the extermination of millions of workers on the altar of capitalist profits. For us workers, the only alternative is revolution, not for "democracy", which is only another trap to keep our oppressors in power. We need a communist revolution. To take power, millions of workers, students and soldiers must see the need for communism, where production will be to meet the needs of the worlds' workers, not the profits of the bosses. Today is the time to join the PLP and organize for communist revolution that will free us once and for all from this capitalist hell.