Challenge, January 21, 1998
Index:
Editorial: Capitalism Crisis of Overproduction Deepens: Don’t Try to Fix a House Built on Quicksand
Fight Fascist Police Murder in Brooklyn: If They Attack Us, We’ll Keep on Fighting for Communism
Police Raid Exposes Bosses’ Fascist Rule
Crisis of Overproduction Hit Autoworkers in Argentina
Maquila Workers Need A Mass PLP, Not Another Union
Garment Workers Discuss What’s Behind the Racist Killing in Chiapas
PLP Brings Communist Politics to Rally Against Workfare/Slave Labor
Fascist Teachers Support Mass Genocide; Students Walk Out
Debate On The Current Capitalist Crisis
Letters
Amistad Review: British Navy, U.S. Supreme Court Did Not Free the Slaves
Editorial: Capitalism Crisis of Overproduction Deepens: Don’t Try to Fix a House Built on Quicksand
If you lived in a house built on quicksand, would you try to fix the leaking faucets or get out and build a new house? That’s the choice workers face as the crisis of the international profit system deepens every day. Are we going to follow the bosses into a holocaust of mounting unemployment, fascism, poverty, racism, cultural degradation, and genocidal war? Or are we going to break once and for all from capitalism’s house of horrors, build the Progressive Labor Party, and fight for communism?
These are the only alternatives available to our class. Trying to reform capitalism is like attempting to squeeze maple syrup out of a rattlesnake. The latest installment of the world’s overproduction crisis furnishes a case in point. Until very recently, all the imperialist bosses had looked towards investing in Asia as the world’s fastest growing region. The newly booming Asian middle classes were supposedly going to absorb the glut of commodities on the markets. Then, in October, the so-called Asian "tigers" went belly-up, their stock markets crashing between 40% and 60%. The U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) put together scores of billions of dollars in bailout packages. The key to these bailouts: brutal attacks on Asian workers’ living standards, in the form of layoffs in the millions and wage cuts in the billions. These "savings" would theoretically enable the Asian rulers to make good on their debts and, incidentally, give U.S. companies an opportunity to stick it to their Japanese rivals by gobbling up failing companies at fire-sale prices.
But "the best laid plans" don’t seem to be working out. Since the bailouts were announced, the Asian economies have continued their free-fall. The general meltdown is deeper and far faster than the U.S. stock market crash that started in 1929 (New York Times, 1/11/98). Hong Kong stocks lost 6% of their value on January 7th. Indonesia’s currency has plummeted over 36% since December 31st. South Korea remains a disaster. U.S. bosses’ more serious mouthpieces understand how thin the ice is. Business Week warns: "Asia could be sucked into…depression… ‘The biggest risk is that Asian instability will trigger a world crisis, as opposed to just a financial market problem,’ says David A. Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s DRI…" (1/19/98).
Even before the crisis took its latest turn, its toll on the international working class had already reached devastating proportions:
• According to the International Labor Organization, about one billion people, one-third of the active labor force, are currently unemployed worldwide;
• The crisis’ economic effects on workers in developing capitalist countries are worse than anything the U.S. experienced in the 1930’s;
• "Free market" capitalism has in some ways attacked the formerly socialist Soviet Union even more savagely than did the Nazis. In 1942, when Hitler occupied Belorussia and his Luftwaffe was bombarding Soviet industries, the Soviet Gross National product fell 22% compared to prewar highs. Between 1989, when the Soviet Union officially dissolved, and 1995, GNP in the countries replacing it fell by 44% (Le Monde Diplomatique, 12/97).
• Capitalism truly makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. The number of billionaires in the U.S. went from 13 in 1982 to 149 in 1996. The world "billionaires’ club" today stands at 450. Together, they hold a fortune greater than the Gross National Product of the poorest countries, in which 56% of the world’s population lives (Le Monde Diplomatique, ibid.).
• According to the New York Times, modern capitalism has brought slavery to all-time historic highs. It quotes Michael Platzer, head of the UN Center for International Crime Prevention: "Two hundred million people are victims of contemporary forms of slavery. Most…are children in sweatshops, domestic workers, migrants. During four centuries, 12 million people were believed to be involved in the slave trade between Africa and the New World. The two hundred million—and many of course are women who are trafficked for sex—is a current figure. It’s happening now. Today." (1/11/98)
But these atrocities pale before those that lie ahead. As the crisis deepens, competition among the bosses will intensify. Workers’ impoverishment will further deepen the oversupply of commodities. Rivalry among the big imperialists for cheap labor power, markets for sales, and control of energy resources will get more and more antagonistic. This is happening under our noses, as the next U.S. Middle Eastern oil war grows closer every day. World capitalism is now in a perpetual state of emergency, and war is its only treatment for its own diseases.
The more strategically-minded apologists for the main, Rockefeller-wing of U.S. bosses are desperately trying to enlist the working class here to carry out their long-range plans. Their approach is two-pronged. First: massive, racist police terror. Progressive Labor Party has taken the lead in organizing workers and working class youth against murders by the nazis in blue. Second: they have a campaign to convince industrial workers, particularly workers in key war industries (aerospace, auto, steel, coal) that imperialist war is in our class interests. To date, our Party has made some efforts to expose this deadly scheme, but they remain too hesitant and weak. We must improve on this score!
The Rockefeller gang is working overtime to prepare its long-range plans. In 1992, the Carnegie Endowment National Commission on America issued a report, "Changing Our Ways," published by the Brookings Institution. (The Brookings Institution is closely tied to the Economic Policy Institute, the think-tank behind Dick Gephardt, the Eastern Establishment’s latest "pro-worker" demagogue.) On the committee preparing the report were a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former World Bank president, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, the president of the United Negro College Fund, and other political, academic, and labor big shots with direct ties to the ruling class. In essence, the report called for state fascism and major foreign military intervention against "a major hostile power…in Europe and Asia," i.e. Russia and/or China.
Most dangerously, the report said: "…our foreign policy must enlist the support of the American people.…Our crisis is essentially political. (pp. 7, 8)" In other words, the big bosses know that terrorizing workers at home is necessary but not sufficient. Their war plans also call for the working class’ willing, enthusiastic participation.
But getting workers to slit our own throats while we slit those of our class sisters and brothers abroad is far from a done-deal. As the mass response to our Party’s calls for action against racist police terror proves, the working class remains wide open to a revolutionary communist alternative. This is the only alternative that can work for our class.
The urgency of building the PLP has never been greater. This is the season in which our May Day organizing kicks into high gear. The crisis is deepening. Our efforts to fight for communism should keep pace with it. This is the only sane, objective reaction to world events. Every new Party recruit, every new subscription to Challenge-Desafío, every new commitment to march on May Day, every communist-led action, big or small, against aspects of capitalist oppression, becomes a weapon in the working class’ ultimate war to destroy capitalism and the hell it creates.
Fight Fascist Police Murder in Brooklyn: If They Attack Us, We’ll Keep on Fighting for Communism
BROOKLYN, NY, Jan. 10 — Members and friends of the PLP returned to Glenwood Houses today in a follow-up protest of the racist murder of William Whitfield by the NYPD fascists in blue on Christmas. Our militant and bold first march that involved over 200 workers and youth on January 3rd was reported in last week’s Challenge.
Black nationalists and liberal apologists for the capitalist system, who wheel-and-deal with the bosses and the cops called community meeting within The Glenwood Houses to convince workers that they can fix up the system to make it fair. They insist that most cops are good, and that only the "bad" white racist cops have to be thrown out. The Glenwood Houses are integrated—white and black workers struggle next door to each other to raise families and survive this system.
These puppets tried to warn the residents to stay away from our march. They want workers to believe that communism and revolution are bad ideas. This didn’t stop us, we marched anyway and will continue to. Every person we saw in the course of the demonstration openly welcomed us. We distributed over 400 Challenges.
The nationalists who are diverting workers’ anger have a long history and a lot of experience. Al Sharpton, who began his career as a paid informer for the FBI, and James Davis, a black cop who has organized the Guardians, claiming that more black cops are the solution to racist police terror, have influence over many workers.
While these mouthpieces sway workers, facts are stubborn things. In December, six black cops shot at and chased a black Brooklyn teacher onto the tracks of a subway train where he was killed. Students are harassed and attacked daily in schools run by black and latin administrators, deans and security guards.
Our demonstration this Saturday made clear to workers, and to us, that it is good to be attacked. It means we have frightened the enemy—the cops and their bosses. It means we are giving leadership to our class. As we marched through the neighborhood, windows were filled with faces watching, testing, and wondering about us.
Whatever lies the bosses spread about communists, the proof is in the pudding. Workers saw, and read, what communists have to offer. Now we must do more work—agitate, build a base and participate in the mass movement and class struggle—to develop deep personal and political ties with our comrades and friends in the Glenwood Houses. We must win our fellow workers and neighbors to understand the role of capitalism and imperialism in breeding fascist police terror. We must make political sense of those stubborn facts. We have many people to visit, who have already asked us to come back, and many more we need to get to know.
This is the process of winning workers and youth. It may not be quick, or feel simple, but we are on the correct road—the road to turn PLP into a mass revolutionary Party.
Police Raid Exposes Bosses’ Fascist Rule
CHICAGO, Jan. 12 — "They can’t treat us all like criminals. We have our rights!" declared a student still angry about last month’s police invasion of Foreman High School.
But we live under capitalism, where legal rights don’t reflect the needs or desires of the working class. As the capitalist crisis intensifies and Mideast war looms, the rulers are changing the laws to fit their need to impose fascism.
Nothing Illegal About Fascism
A year ago, the Chicago Board of Mis-Education declared that students arrested outside of school, even after school or on weekends, could be expelled. Last week the Chicago Police Department announced they would share juvenile arrest records with the public schools. Now, when a student is arrested, the police will notify their school. To enhance this fascist "spirit of cooperation," schools will make students’ discipline records available to the cops.
Increasingly, school "security" guards call cops to arrest students who violate school rules. This year students who talk back to abusive guards or defy their arbitrary orders have been arrested for "disorderly conduct." Seven students involved in a food fight in the cafeteria were charged with "mob action."
During the raid at Foreman, every student was held in police custody inside the building for three hours. As a result, 82 were arrested: 70 for having pagers, a couple for marijuana, and about ten with knives.
"How can they charge my daughter with illegal use of a weapon when she just had a boxcutter in her pocket?" a parent asked. "They can’t kick me out now," protested a student whose pager was taken. "I didn’t do anything and I’m supposed to graduate in June. How can they search me without probable cause?"
"They," the capitalists, can do all these things to us (and worse!) because they have state power. When the Nazis shipped 12 million people to death camps, they had the full force of German law—and the German capitalists—behind them. Slavery was legal for hundreds of years on this continent and recognized in the U.S. Constitution.
Capitalist Bosses: The Real Criminals
High school students today have few opportunities under capitalism. Young people are being turned into criminals to cover up the fact that capitalism only offers them unemployment, poverty and war. Ordinary activities like carrying pagers and cell phones to school, standing on a street corner with three or more friends, or coming home from work after curfew, all put youth at risk of arrest and target them for police harassment and brutality.
These same young people, especially black and latin youth, are crucial to U.S. capitalists’ war plans. The same bosses who arrest a student for carrying a knife will put a gun in his hand and order him to kill. The current "redesign" of the Chicago high schools, including police raids and mass expulsions, is part of the plan to train teenagers to go along with the bosses’ plans.
Wars for profit, health and welfare cuts, and prison labor—all part of growing fascism—treat human beings as disposable. The capitalists use us for a moment and then throw us away. These bosses are the real criminals!
Rebellious Youth Must Become Communists
We expect more for ourselves, for our class. But under capitalism, it will never be legal to make decisions based on the needs of the world’s workers. That day will come only when masses of workers, students and soldiers, join Progressive Labor Party and wage a revolutionary war for communism. Then the working class will hold state power.
Six Foreman students and two older relatives performed in a skit about the police raid at a citywide PLP forum last Friday. It concluded: "Times are changing. Look around. Look ahead. We’re changing!"
And it’s true. On the way home, three students told a PLP comrade, "Let us know whatever you’re doing, we want to be there." Two added that they were close to joining. Earlier that day, three other students engaged another comrade in a very serious discussion of the Party, our goals, and our military strategy.
The PLP is helping students who were arrested in the raid to obtain legal counsel. We are working to organize masses of students to go to court with them on January 23rd. Most important, we are struggling for all to understand the need for working class revolution to seize power from the fascist bosses.
Crisis of Overproduction Hit Autoworkers in Argentina: Ford, VW Welcomes 1998 with Mass Layoffs
ARGENTINA — The current capitalist economic crisis has brought about more attacks against autoworkers in Brazil and Argentina. In Brazil, tens of thousands of Ford and VW workers demonstrated in mid-December against the bosses’ plans to make workers pay for their crisis.
In Argentina, on December 24th, Ford sent telegrams to 524 workers telling them they were laid off. "When I was preparing with my family for Christmas, I got a telegram from the company telling me I am not needed. Can you imagine what that would have done to my wife and children during the holidays? I did not want to tell them anything," said a very sad Ford worker.
Ford plans to lay off another 1,000 workers in Argentina claiming that its exports to Brazil have been affected by the stock market crisis. That is the way capitalism works: in 1996 and until November 1997, when the market crashed, Ford’s profits increased, while workers’ wages were kept frozen. Now that the crisis has hit, workers must also pay.
Meanwhile, the General Pacheco VW plant laid off 160 workers at the end of the year. VW plans to eliminate 600 of its 1,900 work-force at the Pacheco plant.
SMATA, the autoworkers union, is also part of the problem. Pardo, leader of the union, spoke at a Ford workers’ meeting in December before the layoffs. He mentioned a Ford memo forecasting the layoffs. But Pardo’s answer was to tell the workers "not to publicize" the layoffs, when the workers were demanding for a "hard response" from the union. SMATA is more interested in serving Ford and the government, which claims to be solving the unemployment question, than it is in workers. No wonder, Ford workers don’t trust Pardo and SMATA.
What Should Communists Do?
The role of communists is to channel the autoworkers’ anger towards understanding the true nature of capitalism. It is an anarchic system based on maximum profits for a few bosses. The auto bosses knew before the current crisis that they could only sell 2.8 million cars in the Mercosur (which includes Brazil and Argentina) region, but Ford, GM, VW, Fiat, Toyota were building new plants with capacity to produce four million vehicles. Now that the markets are crashing all over the world, this crisis of overproduction is even worse.
Workers want hard answers to the bosses’ attacks. But the only hard answer is to organize a mass revolutionary movement to fight for a society based on workers’ needs: communism.
Maquila Workers Need A Mass PLP, Not Another Union
SAN SALVADOR, Jan. 12 — Recently, dozens of women working in a sweatshop were taken to the hospital due to poisoning caused by the large quantity of lead in the factory’s drinking water. The conditions of workers in the factories in El Salvador, as in other countries, are getting worse every day. Low wages, horrendous working conditions, harassment, speed-up and layoffs are all the order of the day.
Members and friends of PLP who work in the shops met to discuss how to organize ourselves into a union or cooperative organization to fight against the bosses. We also talked about our role as communists.
Jose said, "I don’t know, I’m a little confused. We know there’s a capitalist crisis all over the world. We won’t be able to get anything from the bosses. Even if they wanted to give us something, competition forces them to squeeze the maximum out of us. If we start a serious and militant struggle for a pay increase or to organize a union, the bosses could close the factories or move them to other countries. If that happens, some workers will accuse us of having made the situation even worse."
Maria added, "With or without a struggle, the bosses are closing factories and moving them, and laying off and killing workers. We must explain this situation to the workers. Of course, we don’t want to give workers the illusion that a union or cooperative will solve these problems, but many workers believe that this is an alternative. And that’s the level of the mass struggle right now. We get involved in that struggle and try to raise the level to one where the workers will understand the need for the destruction of the bosses and their capitalist system. In that kind of struggle we can expose capitalism even more and show the workers that the true alternative is the fight for communism."
Luz answered, "If we participate in the fight for a union in the factories, we can form committees of struggle with other workers. Working together, we will be able to develop relationships with them, and win them to read Challenge. participate in study groups, join the Party and help develop it and the revolution. Our goal isn’t a union or only higher wages, but to build the Party and the revolution. The bosses will use their courts, police, laws, politicians and even the leaders of these organizations to attack the workers and the Party. When that happens, we can expose the whole system, and many workers will understand the need for communism, just like we do—or even better."
The future that the bosses are preparing for us is one of poverty, fascism, and war. We can’t just sit back and let it happen. We don’t want to sit passively by, watching our families and class brothers and sisters die like flies. We are going to involve ourselves in these struggles, and we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes. The worst mistake would be not to do anything. What should give us confidence is that we understand that the economic crisis of capitalism is moving toward fascism and we should have confidence that the workers will understand communist ideas and make them their own. Of course not all workers will agree with every kind of struggle, but the majority can be won to participate.
To participate in or organize a reform campaign doesn’t mean that we only involve ourselves within the limits of the reform, that would be a big error of right opportunism. Our goal will be to talk to many of these workers about the fact that this capitalist system can’t be reformed, but must be destroyed. This will create hundreds and thousands of discussions (that is, ideological struggle) about the need for communist revolution. We’ll win many workers, and the revolution will be closer.
Garment Workers Discuss What’s Behind the Racist Killing in Chiapas
LOS ANGELES — The massacre of the indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico, infuriated thousands of garment workers in Los Angeles. "Murderers," "thieves," "mad dogs," were words that they used to describe the Mexican government and police.
There were dozens of discussions about this in garment factories at lunch and after work between Party members, our friends and Challenge-Desafío readers. These discussions gave us another opportunity to unmask the capitalist system, showing that the massacre is not an isolated incident, but part of the fight between the big imperialists—one more battlefront for the control of the world; our response is for workers to join the Party and fight for communism.
At M & M Fashion, while workers were eating lunch, some workers said, "These killings take place all the time and will never stop." Others were passive, as if this massacre had nothing to do with them. A comrade responded, explaining that racism has won them away from seeing these people as class brothers and sisters, as part of our own family; that these same bosses, who today kill indigenous people, will kill us tomorrow.
Their passive reaction is partly due to the bosses’ press and the liberals who use terms like "the poor indigenous" and their "fight for independence" as if indigenous people and workers were two different things. The comrade gave the example of immigrants to the U.S.: when the bosses use the word "immigrant," they are trying to divide immigrant workers from citizen workers.
Discussions in other factories pointed out that when the bosses kill black and latin workers, they are attacking the whole working class, just like their murder of indigenous workers worldwide.
"What can we do?" asked a worker. "Join the Party and help us distribute Challenge," we replied. "But how will we be able to make a revolution? The bosses have so much technology," our friend answered. The comrade responded, "Workers in the factories and the army are the ones who control this technology. That’s why the Party is organizing inside the army to win soldiers to our side to fight for revolution."
PLP Brings Communist Politics to Rally Against Workfare/Slave Labor
PATERSON, NJ, Jan. 12 — One hundred people rallied against Workfare in front of the Passaic County Bd. of Social Services (PCBSS) on December 10th, as part of the national anti-Workfare action organized by Jobs With Justice.
Over the past two years, the PCBSS has laid off over 100 clerks and demoted 130 other workers, while replacing them with CWEP (Welfare Employment Program) workers. This in a state where the welfare bosses brag about how the new welfare rules "protect the jobs of union workers." The stark picture of the welfare department paying top administrators salaries of $125,000 while forcing CWEP’s to work for their benefits at the minimum wage brought out chants of "Jobs, Yes! Slave Labor, No!" from the crowd. PLP connected slave labor to the growth of fascism.
Unfortunately, the reformist organizers of this rally, and several of the speakers, are not friends of the working class. David Weiner, the president of the CWA Local that did not put up any fight over the layoffs and demotions, had the gall to claim that a "victory" had been won because some of the workers were being recalled. Weiner also promised that the CWA would be "organizing" CWEP’s in the future. One of the speakers even attacked this as exploitation by the union hacks at the expense of welfare recipients.
Other speakers had a more militant veneer. A speaker from ACORN spoke about the mass campaign to organize Workfare workers in NYC. Bill Kane, president of the Industrial Union Council attacked Workfare as "racist" and "slave labor." However, Kane said the bosses must recognize that Workfare, downsizing, and other actions are putting the whole system in jeopardy. Kane called for heading off this trend before it’s too late.
PLP says that neither organizing CWEP’s into unions, going back to the old welfare system, or even fighting for jobs for all recipients can abolish poverty. The welfare system is a product of capitalism. The bosses’ system requires that some number of workers are unemployed so that wages are kept down and profits are kept up. Communism, on the other hand, would abolish the wage system. Every worker would be struggled with to work for the common needs of all. A system which forces people to work for the barest subsistence would be seen as unnecessary and barbaric.
There are now over 10,000 Workfare workers in NJ. We in PLP will be working inside the developing anti-Workfare movement to sharpen the struggle and to raise anti-fascism and the communist politics outlined above.
TORONTO, Jan. 8 — Members and friends of PLP participated in the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) between December 27-30th. The MLA is made up mostly of university teachers and graduate students. The main issue being discussed in the hallways was the crisis in academic labor—the fact that almost half the courses in higher education are taught by adjunct or graduate instructors earning minimal pay with no job security, and that at least 2/3 of current Ph.D. candidates will never have tenure-track jobs.
Some of us gave academic papers. Most were Marxist analyses of the role played by anti-communism in literary study. Others criticized feminism, postmodernism, post-Marxism and critical race theory—all opposed to class analysis. We also targeted sessions most likely to attract anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-elitist academics to raise aspects of PLP’s politics and sell Challenge. We distributed all we had (150) and could have gotten out many more.
We fought to pass an anti-racism resolution sponsored by the Radical Caucus. The resolution—approved by a large majority and going to the membership for ratification—called upon the MLA to urge its members to speak out against theories of "racial inferiority" and to take various actions against "Workfare, the massive incarceration of young adults of color, and the use of standardized tests in college admissions."
Together with various members of the Graduate Student Caucus, we sharply criticized the Committee on Professional Employment’s report, delegated by the Executive Council to study the current crisis in academic labor and come up with "solutions." It failed to target capitalism as the cause of the harsh working conditions faced by college teachers and essentially proposed measures that in reality only slightly cushioned their impact.
Most important is the development of the Radical Caucus (RC). Revived as an activist—and explicitly "anti-capitalist"—body at last year’s Convention, an RC meeting decided that debates about the "way out" from capitalism had to be part of its own agenda and its input into future MLA Conventions. (When a friend of PLP said that many were there not just because they didn’t like capitalism but wanted to live in an egalitarian society run by the producers, there were nods of agreement from many present.)
The well-attended RC meeting also decided to increase (35 signed up for committee work) their attendance at various regional MLA conferences, the Summer Institute of the Marxist Literary Group, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (both will be held in Chicago this Spring and Summer).
Room For Improvement
We have noticed the following weaknesses in our work at these conventions:
• We have not yet developed a communist analysis of the crisis facing academic labor in terms of contemporary capitalism. For example how does the current crisis relate to the Old Money, New Money split in the ruling class;
• We have not fought hard enough for a sharp class analysis to be included in the Radical Caucus’ statements and resolutions;
• We have not educated the average MLA’er to the fact that fighting racism is an economic and political issue, not a "moral" one;
• We have not continued our basebuilding between conventions;
• We have not guaranteed the maximum effective use of Challenge.
Despite these weaknesses, the positive reception of many college teachers to aspects of PLP’s line indicates we can build a mass base and recruit communists, as higher education increasingly exhibits features of fascism.
Fascist Teachers Support Mass Genocide; Students Walk Out
PASADENA — The slaughter of over three million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 American troops, almost entirely working class and poverty-level men and women—has often been horribly rationalized by many as a failed, yet necessary, sacrifice against the supposed threat of communism in Vietnam and Indochina as a whole. But recently, I found myself thoroughly disgusted by yet another class-collaborationist argument. A guest speaker—himself a Marine Corps veteran who voluntarily served two tours of duty in Vietnam and is now an English teacher at Los Angeles Valley College—joined the ranks of my liberal, anti-communist history teacher at Pasadena City College (PCC) for a presentation of the " existential experience of war." But without any hesitation or attempt to disguise his politics, the speaker began a lecture on the ultimate morality of the war. His thesis was that the war in Vietnam was a "good" war because communism is an "evil" enemy. I tried to intervene. The U.S. bosses were fighting for profits and power. Real communism means an end to wars for profits.
Threatening any criticism of him with patronizing remarks, he and the other professor attacked students who disagreed with his lack of analysis and the reduction of complex historical events, with essentially economic and political roots, to an argument based on morality.("God is on our side"). The two so-called authorities responded by belittling students who disagreed with them in front of the class, calling them both narrow minded and ignorant. He then urged us to understand that we, as citizens of such a "great" and "good" country, have an "obligation and duty to defend our country" against the threat of its enemies. Ironically, his narrow-minded and undialectical failure to separate the interests of those who own the means of production from those who work in them, did not fool several students who saw the greater message behind his nationalistic defense of U.S. imperialist: propagandization of working-class students against their own interests for those of their exploiters.
Deciding to make our statement clear after attempts at dialogue were crushed by their petty despotic attacks on critical students, several other students and I gathered our things and walked out past the teacher and the guest speaker. Afterwards we met and talked about why schools put forward these lies defending the government. Now we plan to set up a Forum on Panama Deception and the nature of education as well as a newsletter. We plan to bring a group of PCC students to May Day to show we can organize against these lies. Students can fight for the interests of the workers of the world!
DEBATE ON THE CURRENT CAPITALIST CRISIS
What is the nature of the current economic crisis?
Dear Challenge:
Several recent articles have endorsed the liberal argument that unemployment is caused by workers being paid too little, so they cannot afford to buy all the goods they make. (For instance, the December 3rd Challenge quoted approvingly this view from the book, One World. Ready or Not by William Greider).
This nonsense leads to the reformist conclusion that capitalism would work fine if only the bosses were nicer—if only they realized where their true interests lie and paid higher wages, then all would be okay. This argument is usually called Keynesianism, for the British liberal economist Lord Keynes who argued that higher wages and higher government spending was the way out of the Depression of the 1930’s (in Marx’s day, the theory was called under-consumptionism).
The Party has fought hard over the years against this "let’s persuade the capitalists to save themselves" view. We have upheld the scientific analysis of Karl Marx, who explained more than a century ago why capitalism inevitably ends up in economic crises. Marx’s view is more complicated than the simple—minded liberal view, and that tempts us to take the deadly short-cut of presenting the reformist argument.
A quick scientific explanation of economic crises is:
• Workers produce all value, but the bosses own the products we make. They sell the products for much more than the value they pay us. That difference—surplus value—is the source of profit. This is true whether wages are high or low. The problem with capitalism is that the bosses control the factories, not that they pay us low wages. The technical term is that the capitalists have a monopoly on the means of production, so workers have to work for them. We communists do not want higher wages: we want to seize the means of production.
• Capitalists are always competing fiercely against each other for more profit: capitalism is chaotic, without any planning. The capitalists compete by investing more and more in new factories (what Marx called capital accumulation). But these factories do not produce surplus value—surplus value only comes from the labor of workers. So the total amount of surplus value (profit) is relatively fixed (it only grows as more workers are employed or as workers are more exploited), while the capitalists are investing more and more.
• With profit growing slowly and investment growing quickly, the ratio of profit to the capital invested drops. That ratio is the rate of profit. Inevitably, no matter how much capitalists sell (even if they pay high wages or have their government spend so much that everything they produce gets sold), eventually their mad race to compete with each other forces the rate of profit down. The falling rate of profit is the source of capitalist economic crisis. Capitalist economic crises can only be resolved by the destruction of capital, which gets rid of the excess capital and restores the rate of profit. That destruction of capital can come by means of bankruptcies or by physical destruction in war. Lenin showed that in the modern era—the era of imperialism—periodic wars are inevitable, but that is the subject for another article.
The Marxist analysis shows that crises are inevitable under capitalism. No matter how high wages are raised, the basic driving force of the system remains capital accumulation (the competition among capitalists to invest more and more). So eventually capital grows more quickly than does surplus value, and the rate of profit falls. Sure, the reformist Keynesians are sometimes able to postpone crises a few years, with government programs that introduce a little order into capitalist chaos. But that only heightens the competition among the capitalists of different countries, and makes the crisis eventually worse as capitalists of different countries go at with each other.
The current Asian economic crisis is a crystal clear example of Marx’s point. What caused the crisis in Asia? The falling rate of profit: Asian capitalists invested so much in new factories, while the number of workers was barely rising, that the rate of profit fell like a rock. That is what set off this crisis. It had nothing to do with how much Asian workers being paid too little to buy the products they make. In fact, most of what the Asian workers make is sold abroad, especially to the U.S.—workers in places like Thailand and Indonesia have never been able to buy the products they make (the story is more complicated in Korea).
The liberal theory sounds nice and is easy to shout through a bullhorn, but the Marxist theory is correct and the liberal theory is not. Plus, the liberal theory leads to reformist politics—raise wages or spend more on government services—while the Marxist theory leads to revolutionary politics—workers have to seize the means of production. Let’s be more careful about how we explain economic crises.
An Old Economist
There Is a Crisis of Overproduction
Challenge Replies: The writer is right to warn us that Greider’s book, which Challenge has quoted, carries reformist conclusions. We should make it clear we have no agreement with Greider’s conclusions, but his research is very useful. Marx wrote voluminously on crisis. It’s hard, then, to condense what he wrote. The fact is he wrote something that reformists could (and do) mis-construe as a "higher wages" will-make- everything-fine type argument. He wrote:
"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces in such a way, that only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." As Marx explained, declining purchasing power is, in fact, a feature of the crisis of overproduction.
This gives us a clue to what is missing in your argument. It appears from your scenario ("...capital grows more quickly than does surplus value....") that surplus value is automatic.
But surplus value doesn’t materialize until the commodities workers have made are sold. If they cannot be sold the circulation of capital is stopped and there is a crisis of overproduction, of which you make no mention.
This is an aspect of crisis that helps us understand the capitalist necessity for war (and fascism). Capitalism over-develops "the productive forces." Only war can destroy them. The crisis of overproduction brings politics to the fore. Economic solutions—like a fight for jobs or a shorter workweek—will be blindsided by the political developments induced by a crisis of overproduction. This really has been our point in using Greider’s book. Its research on the over-productive aspects of the crisis is excellent.
Capitalism is based on competition between different capitalists for maximum profit. Capitalist "A" must improve his production techniques so he can take over the market of Capitalist "B" or else Capitalist "B" will take him over. All capitalists need to make the maximum profit to stay in business.
A few years ago, the bosses were bragging that the countries of Asia, like Indonesia, S. Korea, and Thailand were the new frontier in a dynamic, expanding, global capitalism that would mean more jobs, stability, and profits. But that expansion was based on paying workers in Asia low wages (just like the opening of factories in Mexico). These wages would not permit workers to buy back even a fraction of what they had produced. We are not suggesting that the solution is to raise wages worldwide. The bosses cannot grant this reform on a mass scale during a crisis—they must maximize profits. Suggesting they will gives workers dangerous illusions. It is precisely as this crisis unfolds that communists show that capitalism is incapable of meeting workers’ needs. Capitalism spreads poverty, destruction, fascism and war to every corner of the globe. As the bosses compete, they do drive wages lower. The number of people who can buy what they need drops. Markets shrink. Competition for those markets increases. This leads to war—small and big wars, world war.
The letter writer, "Old Economist" explains that the rate of profit declines because of profit growing slowly and investment growing faster. Investment grows faster because the amount of capital that it takes to build, say, an auto factory increases. The organic composition of capital increases (machines or fixed capital vs. labor power of workers or variable capital). This fact makes many investors turn away from investing in production and turn toward investing in speculation—stocks and bonds, derivatives, investing in Thailand’s money, for example, to make a quick buck. That also contributed to the Asian crisis, as well as to the crisis in Mexico a few years ago. Marx called this the "oversupply of capital." He meant that more and more capital goes into speculation and not production. These investors act like predatory vultures thirsting for easy profits built on a house of cards. They enter an area, speculate on the currency, pump it up, and then use their muscle to bring down a currency which they regard as weak, undermine economies, and ruin the lives of millions of workers.
Challenge has used Greider’s facts to help show that capitalism is a system of crisis, that has long ago outlived its usefulness, and that the workers of the world need to destroy it with communist revolution because it is hell-bent on destroying us with fascism and war.
LETTERS
Ice storms don’t kill, the utility companies do
Dear Challenge:
I’m sure most of us have heard about the terrible ice storms in the Northern U.S. and Canada recently. These storms knocked down power lines all over the region, leaving millions without electricity and heat.
I was talking to my sister who lives in Toronto and she told me that one of the reasons so many people were so horribly affected was that many people now are heating their homes with electricity. HydroQuebec had campaigned in the last few years to convince people to convert to electric heat from oil or natural gas, because it was "cleaner" and "safer." Actually, the problem was that HydroQuebec had a surplus of electricity it had to sell and therefore it needed to get more people to buy it.
Of course, I don’t know for sure that fewer people would be without heat if they had oil or gas, but I’m sure betting they would, since these fuels are delivered by underground pipes. And, while this is the worst ice storm in recent memory, at least according to the television news I’ve watched in the last few days, Quebec is a place where there is often snow and ice. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that overhead power lines would be the least reliable delivery system in a cold climate? Does to me.
So once again--the utility company kills.
Brooklyn Comrade
Chaos in schools caused by capitalism
Dear Challenge:
I am a teacher and the anarchy in my school has reached the level where the Assistant Principals act as though it’s all normal. Seven teachers have, in one way or another, been attacked by students over the last three weeks. The attendance rate is down to 55%. Even the teachers who really care are discussing the idea of mass school safety transfers for teachers. And a young girl student was just taken out in handcuffs by the police for no other reason than that nobody paid much attention to her. Somebody just said to me, "The chickens have come home to roost with a vengeance."
Twelve years ago when I started to teach, there were no metal detectors, no students waiting out in freezing weather to come to school. The school was not a paradise because the education was the usual bourgeois rubbish, completely anti-working class, but it wasn’t yet a prison.
PLP has organized a committee for teachers and students which has been meeting to discuss ways to raise the morale of students and staff, make the school a little more human, and create an organization that can lead the school. About 15 teachers and some 10 students have come to various meetings. We have sent delegations to every PTA meeting to raise different points to help organize and have had a Christmas party. We had a campaign declaring that "Our school should not be a prison," and "None of my students are criminals." Approximately 10 Challenges have been sold each issue to teachers and a few to students. A regular Union Delegate’s newsletter is put out monthly.
The committee allows ideas to be raised and for people to act within the chaos. When a teacher organized a class trip to see Amistad, it was approved by the principal, it was turned down by the district superintendent. The students acted in an organized and orderly revolt (some teachers joined them in different ways). The pressure on the superintendent finally allowed the students to go to the movie and the superintendent’s office even paid for the tickets.
The struggle in the school is difficult, but many teachers and students are serious about trying to change things for the dignity and safety of our students, teachers and staff. Of course the main problem is what would we be changing it to—a better bourgeois education? The racism inside and outside the school make "education" a joke anyhow. Certainly part of the chaos is due to people fighting back against the conditions in the school, against the educational system, but without organization and a clear idea of changing the school system to a communist education, whatever victories we have (even though it is wonderful to have a victory for the moment) will ring hollow.
We organize, and the battle goes on. The growing difficulties and arguments within the U.S. ruling class as they face more and more world competition will eventually lead to these students being sent to slaughter or be slaughtered in some part of the world (probably the Middle East). Clearly we have to educate our teachers and students to understand this, and give more leadership.
Teacher Organizer
U.S. government supported slavery
Dear Challenge:
I just want to make a few comments about the movie, Amistad. [For a Challenge Review, see page 8] There were two articles published in the LA Times that had a few interesting facts that further exposed the Spielberg’s attempt at rewriting history by portraying the U.S. government as being anti-slavery. In October, 1841, just months after the Amistad’s slaves were freed by the Supreme Court, the slaves aboard the Creole, a U.S. slave ship, mutinied, killed most of the crew and forced the rest to sail to the Bahamas. For 17 years the U.S. Government tried in vain to get the British Government to hand over the "ship and the slaves" as the property of U.S. citizens. The exact same issue as in the case of the Amistad!
The other Times articles had to do with John Quincy Adams. He was no fighter against slavery. He took the case when it went to the Supreme Court because it had already been won in the lower courts by the abolitionist lawyer, and it represented an opportunity to get back at the Democrats—in those days the Democratic Party was the party of the slave owners—who had doomed his second bid for the Presidency.
Another had to do with the U.S. Constitution. When the Constitution was written, there were 700,000 slaves in the U.S. Under the Constitution, the greatest number of slaves were purchased, swelling their ranks to four million.
The main reason for the production of this movie is to win black workers in particular, and anti-racists in general, to identify with and support the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class, the Rockefeller gang, in its imperialist wars. After seeing the movie a black woman told me, "We have come a long way." I have seen the movie and have used it to discuss its hypocritical and dangerous rewriting of history and to introduce coworkers to Challenge and communism. I urge everyone to do the same.
LA Movie Goer
Newsies, example of bosses’ distortion of working class history
Dear Challenge:
There was a letter in Challenge (1/14) about Disney’s film, Newsies, (about the 1899 newsboys’ strike against Pulitzer) which made some good points, but missed the snow job the bosses’ media uses to teach us the wrong lessons about working-class history.
The letter unfortunately romanticized the role of the newsies, who sold newspapers on the street before newsstands. It says they "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."
Well, first off, if they helped make the bosses’ lies more believable to the masses, that was not good thing! But this is not true at all. The newsies, who were mainly between the 9 and 14 years old, were not employed by the papers. They were mostly runaways and orphans, forced to sleep in the streets, in areaways, on loading docks or over-crowded, sleazy rooming houses, not the lovely dormitory shown in the film.
They bought papers from the news companies, and sold them on the streets at locations set by the company—never in working-class neighborhoods, because that’s not where the customers for these papers were. The newsies had to prepay for the papers they took. They kept about 4¢ for every ten papers sold, and got nothing back for unsold papers. Top sellers made about $1.20 a day.
The strike was triggered by Pulitzer’s raising the price to the newsies, while keeping the price of the paper the same, thereby moving an extra penny from the pockets of the starving newsboys into his own pocket. As the letter points out, the support of big politicians is a total fiction; the real power of the strike was in the support of newsboys all over the city and in cities with other Pulitzer papers in Upstate NY, in New Jersey and New England. And Pulitzer’s managers told him "the people seem to be against us; they are encouraging the boys and tipping them…" Incidentally, the strike was covered throughout its length Pulitzer’s rivals New York Times and The Sun. One thing that shines through the details is the ability of these young workers to organize themselves in the face of tremendous odds (police, "citizens committees," bribery and threats) and to "win" the strike, which left Pulitzer with the price hike to the newsies, but agreeing to take back the unsold papers.
Of course, Newsies is only one of the many films these days in which the bosses "correct" our sense of history: Currently, they are selling us Amistad, a movie that centers on a falsified version of a court case rather than on the rebellion of the slaves who were on trial. [See review page 8] We really do need to get the news out!
Brooklyn Red
AMISTAD Review: The British Navy and the U.S. Supreme Court Did Not Free the Slaves
In 1839 fifty-three West Africans, who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery broke free of their shackles, overpowered and killed all but two of the officers of the slave ship Amistad, off the coast of Cuba. The spared officers were ordered to sail towards Africa, but instead sailed northward until a U.S. navy ship intercepted them in Long Island Sound. The Africans were imprisoned in New Haven, Connecticut. They gained their freedom after a two year legal battle. Churches eventually raised enough money to pay for their return to Africa.
The movie Amistad brings to light these previously neglected historical events, depicts the murderous cruelty of the slave trade, supports the right of enslaved Africans to free themselves through violent revolt, and features an African actor portraying a committed, skillful leader of that revolt. You might think this is enough to justify at least grudging admiration for Steven Spielberg’s efforts, but the movie is like the slave ship for which it is named: its anti-racist cover sugar-coats its actual treacherous and deadly racist functions.
The explicit message of the movie is that capitalist politicians and lawyers (former President John Quincy Adams, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the British Government) led the fight to end the slave trade and slavery because they realized slavery was wrong. The implicit message is that racism today is merely an unfortunate historical legacy of slavery that we have not yet put to rest. The first message is an enormous lie about capitalism’s racist past, while the second is an even bigger lie about capitalism’s racist present.
To begin with, Adams and the Supreme Court were not opposed to slavery, but only to slave-trading by the Spanish. Fifteen years after Amistad, the same Supreme Court declared in the Dred Scott case that a "fugitive slave" was still a slave, even in a so-called "free" state, and that, in effect, all U.S. states were slave states. They opposed the slave trade not for moral but for business reasons. The continuation of the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the 19th century kept the price of slave labor low for European plantation owners in the Caribbean and South America. This kept the prices of their sugar, cotton, and other commodities low and allowed them to compete effectively against U.S. and British capitalists. Then, as now, racist bosses of different countries fought each other for economic advantage.
This competition threatened both the investment of U.S. slaveholders in their slaves, as well as their growing slave breeding business. British capitalists faced not only competition from rival European capitalists, but they also depletion of the supply of native labor from the colonies they were establishing in Africa. Thus, black anti-racist scholar and fighter W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote his dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, declared, "Negro slavery and the slave trade were abandoned in favor of colonial imperialism, and the England which in the 18th century established modern slavery in America on a vast scale, appeared in the 19th century as the official emancipator of slaves and founder of a method of control of human labor and material which proved more profitable than slavery" (The World and Africa, NY: Int’l Publishers, 1946, p. 64).
The British also tried to Christianize "recaptured" Africans and train them to serve as agents of British imperialism in colonial Africa. Such compradors became important actors in the British system of "indirect rule" used throughout the British Empire. This system worked in a fashion similar to the U.S. today, as black capitalists and politicians such as Ward Connerly or Colin Powell put a black face on racist and imperialist attacks against the working class.
When Steven Spielberg ends Amistad with a scene in which the British naval artillery destroys a coastal fort used for holding African slaves, he is utterly misrepresenting the character of British imperialism. And although Spielberg describes the horrendous conditions of the "Middle Passage," he hardly shows us the reality of slavery in the U.S., its brutal exploitative character, the slave revolts on the plantations owned by Supreme Court justices and politicians, and their suppression. Nor does he point out that the revolt aboard the Amistad was unusual only in its success. Attempted revolts occurred on at least one of every ten slave vessels, and massive slave rebellions occurred on virtually every island in the Caribbean, the largest and most successful of which took place in Haiti at the beginning of the 19th century. Slaves in Haiti not only defeated the slaveholders but the mighty army that Napoleon sent in to crush the rebellion. As a result slavery in Haiti was abolished.
The true abolitionists in the U.S. and Europe are marginalized and caricatured in Amistad. Pacifist-praying, primly-dressed white women, a cynical white man who suggests that it would be better for the cause of abolition if the Africans were killed, and a lone fictionalized "composite" black abolitionist are all we see. In Amistad, it is the lawyers and politicians who energetically argue (in the courts) for freeing the Africans. In fact, by 1839 many U.S. abolitionists had already become much more militant, building the Underground Railroad, organizing mass meetings and demonstrations. Most abolitionists sharply attacked American and British schemes for returning freed slaves to Africa as a colonial racist strategy that denied black people any rights in the U.S. During the 1840’s and 1850’s, under the leadership of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown, the abolitionist movement increasingly became an interracial revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, in Europe, Karl Marx and other working class leaders launched Abolitionist campaigns that climaxed with massive actions during the U.S. Civil War to block European trade with the Confederacy and support abolition. But Steven Spielberg will never make a movie about any of this.
Spielberg’s Amistad cannot even hint at the truth about why U.S. and British bosses suppressed the slave trade, because they cannot reveal the dirty secret that capitalism must be racist, and that racist chattel slavery was replaced by racist wage slavery. Colonial plantations, mines, and factories have super-exploited workers all over the world since the middle of the 19th century and have produced more profits for the bosses and more death for workers than chattel slavery ever did. The two world wars that British, U.S., and other bosses fought over for control of their empires killed some 100 million people. Colonial workers were drafted as cannon fodder, super-exploited to produce goods for these wars, and died by the millions from the poverty and epidemics spawned by imperialist wars.
Spielberg’s movie (Schindler’s List) depicted a German capitalist as a hero who saved Jews from the Nazis. Spielberg purposely covered up both capitalist responsibility for genocide, as well as the role of the communist movement in saving most of the three million European Jews who survived World War II. In Amistad, Spielberg does the same by depicting the U.S. Courts as "the saviors of the slaves." This director has a lot of confidence and trust in the capitalist system. He is a big financial contributor to Clinton and the Democrats. Like Clinton’s hypocritical apology for the Tuskegee experiment, "initiative on race," and symbolically holding open the door in Central High School in Little Rock, Amistad is a gesture to condemn the racism of the past in order to distract workers from the much greater racist assaults the bosses are carrying out now and planning in the near future