Today, over 34,000 people in the "Work Experience Program" (WEP) do much of the "grunt work" that keeps NYC running, but for far below the minimum wage. WEP has become a slave labor workforce replacing tens of thousands of workers cut from the city payroll. It offers little or no training and rarely leads to a full-time job. In fact, some laid off city workers forced onto welfare, are now doing their old jobs, at one-fourth their original wage! New York City is in the lead in its slave labor Workfare program, however this program exists in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles as well as in other cities.
The New York Times (4/12-15), which recently cut back its own workforce by introducing greater automation, just ran a four-part series, "Does Workfare Work?" They found "scant evidence that Workfare has accomplished one of its central goals: moving people from welfare to work." Further, they reported that, while over 200,000 people have been forced into WEP, only about 1,000 ended up with full time jobs. Why did the Times run this series? Are they concerned about the lives of black and latin workers? Are they worried about union busting? Are they anti-fascist? Not on your life!
The Times, representing the Rockefeller wing of the ruling class, looks to the long-term needs of U.S. capitalism. Like the German bosses of the 1930's, U.S. bosses need fascism to deal with their growing international economic crisis. In their desperate battle against European and Asian capitalists for control of resources and markets (imperialism), they must lower the living standards of the entire working class. An efficient, more fascistic Workfare is an integral part of fascism and war.
The Times, which previously beat the drums for Clinton's "welfare reform," is concerned that the way Mayor Giuliani is imposing slave labor is not producing complacent workers committed to the bosses' fascist system. Worse yet, it may provoke working-class rebellion. As Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal wrote (12/16/94), "If leanness-meanness goes on too long and American optimism finally dies, workers may one day fill the streets again...[and] American business will find out how very mean life can get." These "nice" Nazis want slaves with a smile. Meanwhile, they must prepare for the day when the five-year term limits kick in, and millions of workers, mainly women and children, are thrown off welfare. This requires more cops and more terror. Workers won't be smiling forever while they are being crushed.
But there's more. The Times knows that fascism is not just plain brutality, it also needs deceit, to create the illusion that a "better" Workfare will produce "decent" jobs for all--an impossibility under capitalism. The system of wage slavery requires a reserve army of unemployed. Capitalism cannot provide a decent living for all workers. It never has and never will.
While arguing for a "more efficient" Workfare, the Times also takes the opportunity to discipline their discredited agents in the mass movement. AFSCME's District Council 37's Stanley Hill, presiding over a union recently exposed for massive corruption and losing the allegiance of the workers, is raked over the coals for supporting Mayor Giuliani's claim that WEP workers haven't taken the jobs of city workers. With more fascist attacks and war on the way, the rulers need union leaders with the ability to control the workers. The bosses need lieutenants in the unions, churches, academia, etc., with enough of a base to build the patriotism needed to get workers to fight and die for U.S. imperialism in its oil wars.
PLP is fighting fascist slave labor/Workfare with our co-workers on the shop floor, in our unions, churches, schools and community groups. We have participated in demonstrations against Workfare. Among welfare workers, we have led fights against removing adults from welfare for trivial rules' "infractions." During the past three years in NYC, we have seen over 300,000 workers thrown off welfare. We are struggling with our co-workers not to become willing executioners for the bosses. Our campaign is exposing Workfare as a fascist attack by a system in crisis, paying for its wars with racist slave labor. Our goal is to win millions of workers to join PLP and the fight for a communist world. We don't need raincoats, we need power! It's time to fill the streets to destroy Workfare and abolish wage slavery. Only communism will meet our needs. The first steps towards this end is to march on May Day and join PLP.
Editorial 2:
On Sunday, April 12th, the NY Times, Rockefeller's mouthpiece, ran two sympathetic articles to help build the actions. One was about a speaking tour of two factory workers from the Dominican Republic, who earn pennies a day making baseball caps for Ivy League universities. Conditions in the Korean-owned factory are terrible. The workers won't be speaking to other groups of workers, but at Harvard and other such schools. The other article was about a community organizer in NYC who has organized black youth in his community center to demonstrate against NIKE. He says that instead of super-exploiting child labor throughout Asia, NIKE should build a factory in the Bronx, where unemployed black and latin workers could find jobs. At the same time, "radical" film maker Michael Moore just released The Big One, attacking NIKE, and demanding a factory in Flint, Michigan.
Why is Harvard, The NY Times, and other major ruling class institutions supporting the AFL-CIO "Day of Action" against NIKE? These are the same institutions that planned and carried out every major imperialist bloodbath from Vietnam, to the invasion of Dominican Republic in 1965 to the fascist coup in Chile, to Desert Slaughter in 1991. They are all planning another Mideast oil war as soon as they get their act together.
This is a period of economic and political crisis for world capitalism. The inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S., Europe and Asia, is the main contradiction in the world, shaping and influencing all others. The bosses are in chaos and at each others' throats. Within the U.S., Old Money is fighting New Money, and there are numerous in-fights among the Old Money forces. Last summer, UPS was swatted down when they tried to grab the Teamster pension fund from Wall St.'s banks. Microsoft is under attack by the government, and NIKE is allied with Microsoft.
The "Day of Action" is an attempt by the AFL-CIO to build a mass political movement of workers and students to defend the interests of U.S. imperialism. They are in a desperate struggle to keep Asian and European capitalists out of Latin America. The Pentagon has just raised the possibility of building a "Peace Force" to invade Colombia. That is why they have targeted Korean-owned factories in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, while saying nothing about Ford using its factory in Argentina as a torture chamber during the "dirty war?" Sweeney and other union sellouts are lined up with the forces of Gephart, Reich, and Harvard's Brookings Institute. This pack, as much as any other, has spent a lifetime defending U.S. imperialism at the expense of the workers of the world. NIKE is not just an easy target, but a modern-day Trojan Horse.
Workers don't need a new NIKE factory in Flint, the Bronx, or anywhere else. We don't need a "kinder, gentler" wage slavery. If the wages and conditions in NIKE's Asian factories equaled those of LA's garment center, or Clinton's Arkansas chicken factories, would life be any better? Would war in the Middle East be called off? Would the rise of fascism and racist police terror disappear? Not a bit!
Workers need to seize political power away from the warmakers and wield it in our own interests, with no bosses or profits. We need to abolish wage slavery. We need communist revolution. If you really want to rally for the international working class, march on May Day!
The first three deaths were reported in one article buried in the back of the local paper. It might as well have been "dog bites man." The article was mainly about the third killing on April 3rd. Two cops fired on a man who they say tried to run them over on the West Side. The same article mentioned that this was "the third fatal incident involving Chicago police officers in three days." The first two "incidents" were a South Side gang member killed in a sting operation, and a Northwest Side 17-year-old who allegedly fired on the cops. A few days later, a 20-year-old "was murdered in cold blood" in the Cabrini-Green housing project, according to witnesses protesting the shooting.
The newspaper stories offered little more. A mention of two of the victims' names, a little of the facts of their deaths. Not much about how they died. Certainly not the truth about their deaths, let alone their lives. To do so might reveal something about a system that took these four young lives in one week. Absolutely nothing about them. Nothing about their lives. Were they good people? Had they done good by others? Did they have family, hopes, and aspirations? The newspapers' lack of interest in the four victims shows the value that capitalism places on their lives. No obituaries here. The racism screams at you.
Maybe they had done bad things, had hurt other workers or youth. Maybe. But nothing they could have done was as bad as what was done to them. Black men are considered by the bosses to be the modern-day Untermenschen. That was the word--inferiors--that Nazi Germany used for Gypsies, Jews and others they considered "undesirable" in the 1930's. Their lives weren't worth much. They were less than people. U.S. rulers show similar regard with their unprecedented imprisonment, poverty, drugging, fascist gangs, open police terror and murdering of black men. The sole exit under capitalism for millions, the poorest of the working class, is to become cannon fodder for the coming wars and world war.
PLP members have to be more active in organizations fighting police brutality to point out that the issue is not reforming the cops, but the role of the cops as fascist assassins. The Mearday case, which will continue, since he was re-arrested on trumped up drug possession charges, has become the center of a struggle between different factions of police and politicians, with different approaches towards implementing fascism. The difference is basically between the iron fist, and the iron fist wearing a velvet glove. The glove is community policing.
The murder of black men by cops is not new. The history of capitalism is, in large part, the oppression and murder of blacks. But the crisis of the U.S. economy today sharpens that oppression, accelerating the fascist attack. The bullets of fascist police death squads fly with accompanying justifications. University academics have invented the "underclass," a mumbo-jumbo theory to explain the failure of capitalism to provide for workers' needs, thus creating generations in poverty. The fascist mentality of inferiority has saturated the popular culture pushed on black youth by billionaire recording, motion picture, and TV moguls. The "n" word is a common label; "dog" another. The newest slang slur with the same kind of tag is "ghetto."
Our Party is fighting to destroy this system of unparalleled inhumanity. This May Day, black workers, soldiers and youth will march behind red flags. Hundreds of thousands more have been reached by our Party with its anti-racist, revolutionary communist ideas. In the midst of the bosses most vicious racist attack in many decades, thousands are responding to the call for building a communist movement that can overthrow the murderers and their system. That's the answer to the case of four black men gunned down, and millions more in the rulers' cross hairs.
Last Saturday a group of friends who are garment workers had a bar-b-que under the shining sun to discuss fascism, war, May Day and the need for communist revolution. Every PLP club in the garment industry here has had one or two such dinners.
While a group prepared the fire to cook the meat, others stoked the fire of communism, as we watched the PLP movie, "Communism is Dead. Long Live Communism." At the end of the film, a new friend asked, "What is the difference between a union and the Party?" We explained that at the present time we are living under fascism as the bosses prepare for war. The unions, community organizations and churches are being used by the bosses to implement their ideas and their fascist laws. They want to win workers to support the mass jailings of black and latin youth, and to look the other way when they deport immigrants. And they want us to send our children to the army so they can be cannon fodder in the bosses' war for profits.
The unions tell the workers that the solution to our problems is to get support of a Democratic Party politician. To get this support we have to vote and join the electoral circus. These politicians support the same system that exploits and attacks us. But we need to join these organizations to win workers to reject these plans and fight for the only solution to growing fascism: communist revolution.
The Party's goal is to build a communist society where we will work according to our commitment and receive according to our needs. The fight for this will not be easy. We're going to encounter many obstacles and contradictions. But we don't have any alternative in the face of fascism and war. Our goal is millions of workers, soldiers, and students learning about and fighting for communist ideas.
But this goal can't be open to the eyes of the bosses. That's why we need to join their same organizations and do the work, exposing fascism and war and building a mass Party to fight for communist revolution.
This political-social gathering had the goal of struggling with our friends to invite their friends and co-workers to the communist May Day March on May 2nd. Several workers took extra Challenges and others said they would struggle with their friends and families to come to the March. The food was delicious, the discussions very friendly and the building of our March and Party took a step forward.
These were just some of the responses to an editorial printed in the John F. Kennedy HS (JFK) newspaper, The Eternal Flame. The editorial was an outright attack on the Progressive Labor Party. Principal Silvestri ran this article because he is getting nervous about the growing political work we are doing. The Eternal Flame has ignored many past incidents that students have felt strongly about. Last year, when the cops pepper-sprayed students in the school, the newspaper wrote nothing. Police brutality against youth is increasing throughout the city, and nothing appears in the paper. In fact, several student writers have told us that Silvestri tells them what topics they can and can't write on. He decides what goes into the paper, not the students.
It is no coincidence that this article appears now. During the past several months our political organizing at JFK has begun to grow. More than 150 Challenges are distributed there each week. Teachers from Kennedy helped to attack the New York State's new standards for graduation during a recent staff development day. A fired communist teacher spoke at the school as a guest of the local chapter of the UFT. And two communist teachers in the school continue to organize the fight against the attacks on our students. While these are small steps they have made the administration nervous. So Principal Silvestri used a student's anti-communism to attack PLP.
The administration has mis-estimated the anger of workers and students in the school, and the effect of our consistent small amount of political work. While we are not in a position to organize mass student protests over this article, it has sharpened discussions and struggles with our base. Many teachers and students say they will write responses to the paper ranging from the ideas of free speech (from liberals) to an outright defense of communist ideas from people closer to us. A few teachers are talking about organizing a forum on communism. Most importantly, several teachers and students have decided to become more active with PLP. We will have a joint student/teacher study group that will begin meeting before May Day.
It is good to be attacked, if we can learn how to turn these attacks to our advantage, by bringing students, schoolworkers and parents to the May Day March. At JFK HS this fight is just beginning.
The crisis of overproduction, the huge and increasing foreign debt, and the emergence of the Euro currency limit the maneuverability of the US ruling class. Like rats on a sinking ship, the bosses are battling amongst themselves--trying to find a way out. The war between Old Money imperialists and New Money domestic oil producers intensifies, but divisions have also arisen within the Eastern Establishment.
Although Stevens favors domestic oil production, it would be a stretch to call Lockheed a New Money firm. It is not, however, as solidly in the Rockefeller camp as Raytheon and Boeing. Lockheed Chairman Norman Augustine is a Director of Proctor and Gamble and of Phillips Petroleum. Proctor and Gamble has ties to the Old Money Morgan family, but Phillips was burned badly by Mobil (Old Money) in a fight to acquire Getty Oil a few years back.
Boeing, on the other hand, works hand-in-glove with the Rockefeller KKKlan. For example:
Rocky's henchman Henry Kissinger, advising Boeing CEO Condit on the Asian crisis, warned that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have to ease up on its demands or friendly dictators like Indonesia's Suharto could be overthrown. Condit then left for Indonesia (supposedly to talk about aircraft orders). The Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed that Condit, before meeting with Suharto, phoned the White House and told Clinton to get the IMF to back off. The next day the IMF "decided" to be more flexible.
Lockheed is "defending its merger as a way to keep Boeing in line."(New York Times, 4/11) It fears that without Northrop electronics, it will lose the contract to build the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). McDonnell-Douglas was forced to merge with Boeing when it lost in the first round of the JSF competition.
Nor has the Justice Department decided to put a halt to the "defense" industry mergers. "There are sectors where we have more firms than we are able to afford," Jacques Gansler, U.S. Defense Undersecretary for acquisition and technology, told the Financial Times.
Gansler warned Europe not to create a single large weapons producer in partnership with Airbus. He wanted the European arms makers to be second-tier subcontractors to US firms. Fat chance!
Boeing is better suited to answer Airbus Plus! because Boeing can generate profit from its commercial side. The expense of a "pure" defense aerospace producer is enormous when considering the size and commercial sales of Airbus Plus!--not to mention alliances with the low-cost producer, Russia.
"The chief vehicle for support for NATO expansion is a group called the U.S. committee to Expand NATO, which is backed by the arms industry. The committee president is Bruce L. Jackson, who is director for strategic planning for Lockheed."(3/30 p. A1)
Lockheed--unlike Boeing--has no commercial production to fall back on, so it is desperate for military orders now. Lockheed has made the unpardonable sin of putting its commercial interests above the strategic interests of Rockefeller, Inc.
The Justice Department is enforcing fascist discipline on a divided ruling class. The competition from Airbus Plus! is forcing the acceleration of this process in aerospace. The crisis, the huge foreign debt, and the emergence of the Euro has made fascism-to-prepare-for-war the only option available to Rockefeller, Inc.
The bosses have made their decisions; we must make ours. Ruling-class democratic reforms will be used to consolidate fascism in this period. We have to reject reform for revolution. Capitalism is leading to fascism and war. The clearer we see this, the more important is our participation in May Day.
Bernard Schwartz, chairman of the now pared-down Loral Space and Communications company, was the largest personal contributor to the Democratic National Committee last year. In February of this year, Clinton approved the sale of similar technology to the Chinese by the Loral Space and Communications.
The Justice Department complained bitterly because Clinton's actions undermined it's investigation and prosecution of Loral for the 1996 sale. Apparently, Clinton will get into bed with any company that waves a few million in his face. The Justice Department hasn't hesitated to step into the breach when Clinton lacks the necessary resolve.
The leaflet criticized the union leadership's pro-company policies, including the new five-year agreement signed with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association last December, nine months in advance of the contract deadline. The miners demanded the elimination of forced overtime, opposed job combinations, and attacked the decline of living standards, medical benefits and pensions. While union membership is shrinking, many miners are forced to work nine or more hours a day, six or seven days a week.
The main speakers at the union rally were UMWA President Cecil Roberts and former president Richard Trumka, now Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO. These two have presided over the demise of the union for the past 15 years of capitalist crisis, embracing labor-management cooperation to boost productivity and reduce labor costs. When Trumka and Roberts took control of the union in 1982, there were 120,000 working miners in the UMWA. Now there are 40,000. The percentage of coal produced by union mines continues to plunge. Not since the coal region depression of the 1950's and early '60s has there been such levels of poverty and unemployment. Trumka and Roberts tossed out the miners' long-standing tradition of industry-wide strikes, isolating and defeating one struggle after another, from A.T. Massey in 1985 to Pittston in 1989-90, to the BCOA strike of 1993.
The attack by the UMWA leadership reflects its weakness and isolation. Most union miners, not to mention the tens of thousands more who are unemployed or forced to work in non-union mines, hate their union leaders. This is nothing new. More important, coal miners have always warmly embraced our Party, from the Hazard, Ky, miners' strike of the early 1960's, to the Pittston strike 25 years later. Coal miners, like all workers, must get off the endless treadmill of reform, and get on the road to communist revolution. As the crisis of capitalism gives rise to fascism, poverty and war, our Party is again going into the coal fields to build the revolutionary communist movement. We have every reason to be optimistic.
Tony Flint, a British soldier in the Gulf War, said, "I'm 50 and I won't live until 60. I have emphysema, asthma, glandular fever, terrible memory problems and chronic fatigue." His wife and stepdaughter suffer also, from chronic fatigue and glandular fever. This is common in families of soldiers with GWS. Doctors have not explained why this happens.
Some doctors believe that the anthrax vaccine which was untested at the time is one of the causes of the Gulf War Syndrome, along with many other vaccines given to the troops. Flint also says, "It has been shown that soldiers who didn't go to the Gulf, but who had been vaccinated have succumbed to the syndrome, while others who were not vaccinated have not suffered." The U.S. military is in the process of giving the Anthrax vaccine to every soldier, sailor, marine and airman. About a dozen people have refused to take the vaccine and are facing military disciplinary hearings.
A study at Duke University, financed by Ross Perot, has concluded that a combination of organophosphates and some pills against nerve gas, called Npat, along with the use of some very strong insecticides used during their stay in the Gulf, all added up to an explosive chemical cocktail in the bodies of many soldiers who went to the Gulf.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences came to the same conclusions. Last week, the Pentagon announced that they wouldn't use the anti-nerve gas pills called Napt, as a preventive measure (as they did in 1991), but only in case of an actual attack with this type of gas.
"To know that the bad things that have happened to us were caused by our own governments is the last straw," said Pauline Tooze, the wife of Brian Tooze who was affected by the Gulf War Syndrome. Neither the Old Money bosses who sent the troops to Desert Slaughter to kill over 500,000 Iraqis for their oil empire, nor other bosses like Ross Perot, care about the well-being of soldiers and their families.
We will probably never know exactly what causes GWS because Old Money bosses are trying to downplay it, and the New Money bosses are trying to use it for their own purposes. But what is for certain is that, like the 500 million Iraqis who have died as a result of U.S. sanctions since the end of the war, GWS significantly changes the U.S./British casualty figures for the Gulf War, which the military, likes to claim as only about 250; try more like 100,000 plus family members.
In both the U.S. and Britain, key documents in the investigation of GWS have disappeared. In Washington, ex-Secret Service Agent James Tuite denounced the disappearance of 36 of the 200 pages of a secret report about the detection of chemical and biological agents released by U.S. bombs during the Gulf War. In 1997, Tuite accused the Secretary of Defense of "conspiring to hide information from Congress" about the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. Both the U.S. and England refuse to admit the existence of GWS, but they are quietly paying pensions to those soldiers who are making a fight over it.
Soldiers come from the working class. As long as racist capitalism and imperialism exist, soldiers' lives will be expendable for the bosses' profits. The profit system is our mortal enemy! Soldiers from the U.S. and England have everything in common with Iraqi soldiers and nothing in common with the bloodthirsty warmakers who gave them Gulf War Syndrome. The interests of all soldiers lay in refusing to follow murderous orders against other workers, turning the guns on the warmakers, and organizing to smash imperialism with communist revolution.
The firm handling the deadly cargo is Pollution Control Industries (PCI), which has a staggering 15-year record of environmental crimes and mob connections. PCI was given the $2.5 million "recycling" contract by the Battelle Institute, a Navy contractor with its own horrific record of human radiation experiments. East Chicago is a poor city and with a population that is more than 80% black and latin. It is in the most polluted corner of the fifth most polluted state in the U.S. Area residents suffer from high rates of cancer, heart and lung disease, asthma, and infant mortality. They are not happy with the Navy's plans.
Residents were forced to evacuate their homes at least three times in the past few years, due to explosions or fires at PCI. People living near the plant have seen "bubbling mud," and the snow in their yards turn blue from a plant spill. PCI had workers patrolling with jugs of bleach in a futile attempt to turn the snow white again.
A series of stories in The Times, a local newspaper, reported that in recent years:
* Workers were ordered to clean up cyanide, with no protective gear, following an explosion in three drums.
* Several workers who suffered chemical burns were told by a company doctor that they had "poison ivy."
* PCI ordered workers to reuse gloves and other materials that had been exposed to toxic chemicals.
* A worker said he witnessed a PCI boss change a decimal point on a report on the chlorine content of a company waste shipment, dramatically lowering the toxicity level.
* Chemical fumes are severe and a constant complaint of workers and residents.
Two oil companies charged PCI with illegally selling them waste oil contaminated with PCB's which cause liver damage and cancer. The case was settled out of court. One of PCI's owners, Kevin Prunsky, was convicted of bilking the government out of $60,000. He had a contract to remove toxic waste from a Chicago factory and haul it to dump sites in Texas and Ohio. Instead, he labeled the shipments "non-hazardous," and dumped it at unauthorized sites in Chicago and Indiana. PCI's operating permit expired more than a year ago because of its hideous record. It is currently operating on an interim permit, trying to get past state inspectors.
As recently as January 7th, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management found numerous problems at the plant, including waste held in "severely damaged" containers, 55-gallon drums of ignitable waste held within 50 yards of the property line, "unfastened or open" storage drums, and more. It's hard to imagine how PCI could have been selected to handle 23 million tons of napalm, until you look at who selected them. Between 1963-73, Battelle helped the Pentagon run experiments in the Pacific Northwest, where 131 prisoners had their genitals bombarded with high levels of radiation.
The state of Indiana rarely prosecutes environmental crimes, and those who commit them are in little danger of serious consequences. A few years ago, Fisher-Call Chemical contaminated groundwater by illegally storing hazardous waste, resulting in a multi-million dollar federal clean-up site. The state charged a top official with 26 felonies. He was allowed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor and pay a $15,000 fine.
Capitalism is a sick and dying system in chaos and crisis. Our lives mean nothing to the bosses, especially now. Only communist revolution can clean up the deadly mess the bosses have created, because we will start by eliminating the racist rulers and their system of wage slavery.
PCI's president Campbell has come "full circle," since starting his career with Dow Chemical, which produced napalm for the Vietnam War. Napalm, like the Nazi death camps, invokes ghastly images, from the scenes of flaming jungles to the famous photograph of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl in a panic after napalm burned her clothes off her body. Like Campbell said, "It's just happens to be that word and that picture of that 9-year-old Vietnamese."
As Challenge pointed out several weeks ago, foreign investors' marriage to the dollar may soon be headed for divorce. European capitalists will launch the "euro" next year, a united currency, that won't be saddled with trade deficits. The euro could eventually replace the dollar as the capitalist world's reserve currency. At the very least, it could become a realistic alternative. We can't say for sure that this will happen, or when. But if it does, the U.S. trade deficit would become very hard to finance, and Wall Street will come down with a gigantic thud. This is one of the more likely of several possible scenarios for a stock market crash.
The Russians are flexing their muscles in other ways. Challenge readers may remember that Clinton had to back down from his plan for genocidal bombings of Iraq, partly because Yeltsin warned of a nuclear World War III as an eventual consequence. The Russians are continuing to flex their muscles in the Middle East. They just concluded a major missile deal with Cyprus, that has the potential to undermine NATO. Cyprus and Turkey, both NATO members, have competing interests in the Mediterranean, and the Russians selling one of them missiles spells more instability and trouble for the U.S. It also reflects the rise of Russian imperialism, despite their many internal contradictions.
War will eventually result from these and other contradictions. Capitalism and periodic blood-letting for profit are inseparable. The Middle East is still a good bet for the next U.S. intervention, although other possibilities also exist. The armada that Clinton assembled to attack Iraq is still sitting in the Persian Gulf. It isn't there for show. U.S. rulers will not peacefully hand over power and profit to their main rivals. Their political and economic weakness will soon force them to launch a military adventure. Like everything else they do, it will lead to wider imperialist slaughters and fascist terror against the world's workers.
They attempted to scare the working class with one of their old tricks. The Klan is useful for the rulers. The thinking is that, "If the white working class will blame blacks and latins for the problems that we've created, then we can continue to exploit all of them." The Party was there to let everybody know that the real problem is capitalism and the rulers' fascist plans, and the only solution is communist revolution.
We told the 200 people who were protesting the Klan that communism was going to put an end to racism. It's very clear. Under communism we would have no place for the Klan.
Racism would not be tolerated. It will not exist, period. People there were skeptical, but we explained told them about the plan the Party has for building a society where things are done based on the needs of people, not based on profit. This would wipe out the basis of racism, the need for the ruling class to superexploit some (blacks and latins), while exploiting the rest of the working class with their backs against the wall. This is especially evident today, as the ruling class increases their fascist terror in their time of crisis.
We faced some stiff opposition. The church was represented, telling people that the protest wasn't for communism, it was for religion. One guy yelled out, "I'm not here for no religious protest!" He told the churchwoman to get out of the way so he could here about communism. Religion will oppose communism, even when it seems that their interests are the same, in this case opposing the Klan. Don't be fooled, religion is dangerous and keeps us from fighting back. The cops opposed us when we were on the bullhorn, saying that we were trying to rile up the crowd, that we couldn't assemble without a permit.
This made it more clear to everyone why the ruling class had to stop communism. We want to destroy their system, destroy their racism. These same bastards in blue left religion alone. Religion is no threat to their fascist plans.
We made a lot of contacts at this rally. Our real victory will come as these contacts begin to organize for May Day and the Party. They are the future leaders of the Party and they will also lead the fight against the Klan. They will lead the fight for communism in the face of fascism.
Why was it only the Soviet Red Army that was able to defeat the Nazi's, while the French and other capitalists caved in and collaborated with them? During World War II, when push came to shove, all the capitalists wanted the Nazi's to defeat the communists. Their biggest fear was that the fight for communism would spread. Only communists saw fascism as the mortal enemy of the international working class and organized workers to crush it.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis--capitalism ruling with more and more violence. It cannot be defeated by more capitalism. Fascism demands that the Party grow. It brings us face to face with the reality that power in class society rests on force and military might welded together by a single minded ideology. If the working class is not going to be in organizational and political disarray in the face of fascism, workers need a revolutionary communist Party. The development of fascism cries out for it. And a Party that does not organize among soldiers and industrial workers cannot lead a revolution. A Party that does not understand the life and death nature of the fight against fascism, and organize to thrive under all conditions, will not be able to organize under fascism.
Capitalism is failing workers. It is strategically weak. But tactically it treats its enemies as enemies. That means that we need to be open with workers and soldiers, but not open to the bosses and their liberal lackeys in the mass movement. It means we should have complete confidence in the workers, while having no illusions about the enemy.
Fighting fascism has many faces, from organizing to physically smash the Klan or Nazi rallies, to winning our co-workers to attack Workfare schemes, growing use of prison labor, mass jailing, deportations and attacks on immigrants. It means understanding and exposing the nationalism and pacifism that the leaders of the mass movement put in the path of workers and youth. We must win our base to understand that these are all manifestations of fascism and preparations for World War. Our base needs to realize that fighting fascism undermines capitalist preparations for World War and that only a fight for communist revolution--workers' power--can wipe out fascism.
We must not underestimate the use of the fascist "We." It is deceitfully based on building nationalism to hide capitalist domination. The capitalists need a divided working class, won to putting the blame for their crisis on other workers, rather than on the bosses. Nationalism still has the power to fool workers into thinking they can rely on "our people" to get by. But the communist slogan is "Workers of the World, Unite! Fight for Communism." Our strategy is based on the power of the entire working class to unite against fascism, to destroy capitalism, and to build a classless society. History has shown that the call for workers' unity against the fascist bosses has the potential to release powerful collective action. No power on earth can defeat the working class united by communist ideology and leadership.
Building the Progressive Labor Party is the most important thing we can do. In building our Party in the face of growing fascism, we are making a conscious break with the old communist movement, which raised the opportunist strategy of a fight limited to anti-fascism. It is a big challenge for us, but understanding fascism clarifies our strategies:
* Organize youth-military work.
* Build a Party that can withstand the enemy's attacks.
*3 Emphasize the expansion of Challenge and Challenge sellers . This means the Party is taking the offensive to win anti-fascist workers to communism. We will take advantage of capitalism's ideological retreat by understanding the primary importance of raising the need for communist revolution.
A growing number of working class families have experienced the fascist attacks of the bosses firsthand. Many have tremendous hatred for the bosses. They and others are open to our line now. The bosses' fascist terror can be their downfall if we fight fascism, building a mass communist Party in the face of their fascist attacks. It can and must be done!
PLP's May Day Marches are key steps to building a mass Party capable of thriving and growing under fascism and organizing communist revolution.
To the people, a message by the people. Our government is growing more dangerous every day while we the people grow weaker. Police have grown more brutal while Congress steadily passes laws behind our backs.
We are the working class. Without our class there would be nothing. We are the backbone of humanity. Yet we sit motionless, with our eyes closed, while the rulers pump drugs into our young, while they prepare for war in the Middle East to wipe out millions of our children. On our jobs, from my own experience, conditions become increasingly threatening and demanding, while my paycheck stays mediocre, and my rich employer grows richer and more fascist.
We must understand that the increasing oppression of the working class and the growing demands of the capitalists are worldwide conditions. We must understand that to do nothing for the communist cause is to do a multitude for the dogs of the ruling class. There are but two roads, the fascist way of the rich, or the communist way of the working class. On my job we are struggling to build the revolutionary communist movement of PLP to take back control of our own lives and to secure the future of our children.
But we must look inward to ourselves to know that we are doing all that is necessary to unite the working class before it's too late. The time is now to truly secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and for posterity. The time is now to urge our brothers, black, brown, red and white to stand up and be heard. The time is now to push back the fascist evil of the enemy. We must now stand up against police brutality, the increased oppression on our jobs, and we must undermine and sabotage the pending war by any means necessary.
We plan to have our voices heard on May Day, May 2nd. To build this movement everyone must bring at least one other oppressed voice to the March and make them know that there is a way.
A Worker
I grew up in a Jewish family. My parents taught me a lot of religion. But more than anything else they taught me to hate the Nazis. The losses suffered in the Holocaust in World War II were meant to be grieved as a personal tragedy.
My 8th grade Sunday school class spent a year watching movies of the concentration camps and Nuremberg trials. I read book after book. I was obsessed. For years to come I developed a deep sense of regret that I had not lived in Europe in the 1930's. I wasn't relieved to be living in the 1970's. I wanted to fight the Nazis. I used to judge the people around me by imagining them in Nazi Germany. Would they have fought back or "followed orders"?. Which Jewish friends would have gone quietly or, worst of all, been part of the Judenrat? Would they have fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the Sobibor escape?
My education was a nationalist one. Germans were responsible for fascism. I didn't learn till much later, around the time I met people in PLP, that there was more to fascism than killing Jews. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. Fascism is winning workers to line up behind one set of bosses who promise us the world if we'll just turn our backs on and eventually murder another group of workers.
I've been a communist and a member of PLP for the last 12 years. I am proud to identify now with the millions who fought to crush the Nazis. But the responsibility of destroying fascism today rests with us. I don't wonder anymore what role I would have played in 1930's Europe. Fascism is growing now. And now is our chance to fight. We have many examples to follow and mistakes to learn from. Read Challenge, march on May Day, join the Party and help build it. This time we won't have the chance to look back.
Chicago Comrade