Challenge, February 3, 1999

Since his State of the Union speech, Clinton has gained ground in the rulers’ impeachment dogfight. Maybe he’ll hang on to finish his term. Maybe his enemies will pull a "rabbit out of the rat" and find a way to dump him. Whatever happens to him, the deadly power struggle among big bosses will go on. Workers have absolutely no stake in backing any of these murderers. Our class interest lies in a lifelong commitment to the fight for communist revolution.

Clinton’s main advantage is his mass base against the Republicans.

After the speech, his approval rating rose higher than that of any President in 40 years. Many people see through the Republican’s lies and racism and back liberal Clinton because the Republicans appear worse. Sure, Barr and Lott are Klansmen; of course, Starr and his moneyman Richard Mellon Scaife are right-wing thugs; obviously, Jerry Falwell and the Christian Right might as well wear swastikas. They’re all dangerous, and they all have to be smashed by armed workers. But the biggest danger isn’t so obvious. The biggest danger is the killer who lulls you to sleep with smiles and promises and then slits your throat.

That’s exactly what Clinton tried to do in his State of the Union speech. He promised a grab bag of goodies for workers. What he gave us was a plan for fascism and war. First, he took credit for brutal, racist, anti-worker measures he’s already put in place: slave labor in prisons and in "Workfare," terror against immigrant workers, use of the military for oil war, "job creation," based on 600,000 industrial layoffs and the recycling of workers into low-wage misery, just to name a few. Then, he announced a blueprint for strong-arming all aspects of society. Here are some of the sharpest examples:

• His proposal to have Social Security put nearly $1 trillion in the stock market is really an attempt to give the federal government much more direct political control over Wall Street. That’s a move toward state capitalism. Many in the ruling class, including big liberals, disagree with the specifics of this idea. The important point for us that the bosses are more and more openly debating economic aspects of fascism. By the way, there’s a certain ludicrous irony in the proposal. Social Security is going down the tubes because capitalism is in crisis. Now Clinton is offering to "solve" the crisis by putting more of workers’ money in an already over-valued stock market that could crash at any time and will crash at some time. That’s like getting driving lessons from a drunk.

• Clinton’s promise to guarantee safety from terrorism and "weapons of mass destruction" is a well-developed plan to militarize all of society. Of course, there’s more irony here too, since U.S. rulers are the biggest terrorists and mass destroyers in history. Even as Clinton spoke, the U.S. military was bombing Iraqi civilians. The proposals he outlined would go further in that direction. On the home front, he bragged about already hiring 100,000 "community police" and wants to hire another 50,000. How are these cops supposed to "protect" us? By infiltrating schools, neighborhoods, and churches and squashing any militant struggle against U.S. imperialist policies. Clinton’s speech also called for "crime-mapping computers" and "digital mug shots."

• Following George Bush, Clinton has decided to become the "education president." He called for increasing the federal government’s influence on school standards. The proposal can only mean a big push to guarantee that the schools dumb-down further to indoctrinate working class kids in the Eastern Establishment’s plans for ground war in the Middle East. In case this seems like a stretch, shortly after the State of the Union speech, he also announced a plan to send retired military officers to "help" as school teachers and administrators.

• The clincher is the plan already under way to mobilize against "WMD" (weapons of mass destruction). Clinton was pretty vague about this in the State of the Union speech. The specifics have come out elsewhere. The November/December issue of Rockefeller policy mouthpiece Foreign Affairs magazine has an article by two former high-level Defense Department officials and a former National Security Council staff member. It calls for "elaborate measures and expenditures for dealing with (WMD) attacks….Whole new intelligence services are required, and crisis management plans, along with ‘repeated training and exercises,’ to be put into immediate effect regardless of constitutional rights (emphasis ours, Ed.)" (New York Review of Books, 2/4). The article proposes a National Terrorism Intelligence Center with access to all sorts of information the U.S. Constitution now protects. The program "would justify U.S. armed attack in any part of the world as ’prevention’ of sensed danger." Clinton’s current Defense Secretary, the liberal Republican William Cohen, is a big fan of this plan, shedding a few crocodile tears in a Dec. 8 speech about "giving up…individual liberties in order to be secure."

Remember: all this is coming from the liberals. Does it sound like a "lesser evil" than Barr, Lott, & Co.? We don’t think so. The liberals represent the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, and they have launched every major anti-worker attack and imperialist war in this century. The liberal FDR mobilized the population for World War II. The liberal Truman committed nuclear genocide, launched the Cold War, protected the Klan, and was a world-class red-baiter. The liberal JFK started imperialist mass slaughter in Vietnam, and the New Deal Democrat LBJ helped carry it out at the same time his cops were gunning down thousands of black, Latin, and white working class rebels in U.S. cities. Now the liberal Democrat Clinton, or whoever replaces and/or succeeds him, is gearing for mass terror at home and ground war for oil in the Middle East.

The rulers face many problems in carrying out these plans. As the impeachment brawl proves every day, they’re sharply divided among themselves. One reason they need fascism is to set their own class in order as they desperately try to reverse U.S. imperialism’s decline. Challenge has written extensively about these splits and will write more. Regardless of what the bosses do, however, the main question is what our class and our Party are going to do. Whoever wins the power struggle within the ruling class, the end result will be fascism and war. They are inevitable under the profit system.

They can be smashed! Millions of workers and soldiers, armed with guns and revolutionary communist ideas, can and will eventually get the job done. Communists in the Soviet Red Army wiped out Hitler. But they couldn’t wipe out fascism because the old Communist movement promoted deadly illusions about "lesser-evil" capitalists. We don’t have to make the same mistake! The entire profit system has to gož not just some of it. This is the perspective around which the Progressive Labor Party is mobilizing thousands to march on May Day, May 1, 1999.

Behind Iraq Bombing: Oil Rivals Prepare for War

Capitalism’s deadly contradictions are so bizarre that even Mel Brooks couldn’t invent some of them. Here’s the latest. The U.S. military keeps bombing Iraq. Although the bombings are hitting various locations, the main target seems to be the area around Basra in the South, because of its giant oil fields. As Challenge reported a few issues back, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish bosses have $16 billion in contracts for this oil, and U.S. imperialism wants to stop these deals. So the bombings go on, and many civilians are dying. U.S. imperialism will spill all the workers’ blood necessary to keep its competition from grabbing market share.

But hold on a minute. Guess who is, and intends to remain, the biggest buyer of Iraqi crude oil? None other than the giant U.S. oil companies-Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Valero-the ones with the biggest stake in keeping the Europeans and Russians out of the picture. The explanation for this seeming craziness "…is simple: Iraqi crude is cheap." (Reuters, 12/17). In a "glut," as the bosses call today’s overproduction crisis, whoever controls the cheapest sources of a commodity can dictate the market. That’s exactly what Exxon et al. hope to do with Iraqi oil. In a nutshell, it’s a strategy not terribly different from the one old John D. Rockefeller carried out to build his first empire.

Of course, it creates a small problem: whoever tries to monopolize an industry tends to make many enemies. This is happening with a vengeance to U.S. bosses both abroad and at home. U.S. imperialism is more isolated than ever internationally in the wake of its Iraq bombings. In fact, it has to buy Iraqi oil but can’t do so directly, because of the U.S. sanctions designed to keep this oil out of rivals’ hands. U.S. oil companies are making these purchases second-hand-from Russian trading companies, which get the business from Iraq as a reward for the Russian rulers’ anti-U.S. policy. This arrangement doesn’t promise eternal stability for Rockefeller & Co.

And Exxon’s purchase of cheap Iraqi crude is further driving down the price of domestic U.S. oil, thereby sharpening the already explosive conflict between Rockefeller and the Oil Patch (the independent oil producers) billionaires. "The Independent Petroleum Association of America estimates that a year of oil prices has cost the industry about 50,000 jobs and predicts that…some 500,000 barrels a day could be permanently shut down…While each (small) well produces less than 15 barrels per day by definition, taken together, they account for…roughly as much oil as the U.S. imports daily from Saudi Arabia…Smaller independent producers are measuring their future in months or even days…" (Reuters, 1/15). So the Oil Patch nazis are literally fighting for their survival. No wonder they’re hell-bent to destroy Clinton. Civil wars have been fought for less.

The Oil Patch isn’t going to commit suicide. The French, Russian and other European oil bosses aren’t going to sit still indefinitely while U.S. imperialism tries to control the market. Peace is not at hand.

Fight Fascist School Reform: Chicago Students, Teachers On The ‘CASE’

CHICAGO, Jan. 25 ž President Clinton’s State of the Union address praised Chicago schools as a model for nationwide educational reform. Reformed schools may better serve the capitalist rulers, but they’re bad news for teachers and students. PLP teachers are right in the middle of the growing fight-back.

"CASE" in pointž all freshman and sophomores just took the new "Chicago Academic Standards Exams" in math, English, science, and social studies. Once the system is in place, students will need to pass all their CASE tests to get from "junior academy" (grades 9 and 10) to "senior academy" (grades 11 and 12).

This year’s outrageous "pilot" tests infuriated many students and teachers. "I think this Algebra test should be for freshmen in college," wrote a high school freshman. Many math teachers agree. The student continued, "Requiring this test to pass to the next grade is crazy. Only public schools have to put up with this. It’s sad."

"It looks like they want students to fail," commented a guidance counselor. Last spring, 75% of the students who took the Algebra test did fail. An article in Substance (a teachers’ newspaper), concluded that "if this is how students’ mathematical proficiency is to be assessed, then school math in Chicago will continue to play its historical role in educational inequity."

PLP warned several years ago that "school reform" meant thought-control along with severe discipline policies to keep students and teachers in line. Now, with CASE, we’re seeing this happen. CASE’s official purpose is to make all teachers teach the same thing. The Board of Education is preparing daily lesson plans for all required courses. Teachers get the "topic of the day" plus readings and even the questions they are supposed to ask. For example, teachers are instructed to build anti-communism with the question, "How was Hitler like Stalin?"

The U.S. History and World Studies tests had multiple-choice questions with four, three, two, or no correct answers. Worse, many teachers realize "covering the material" would mean leaving out all critical thinking. "I should never have tried to teach to the test," remarked a history teacher who helped write a letter to the Board of Education complaining about CASE.

The English test requires freshmen to discuss fate in "Romeo and Juliet." These same freshmen are supposed to learn from Steinbeck’s "The Pearl" that "money doesn’t buy happiness." The bosses want teachers to encourage the fatalistic thinking that builds passivity in the working class. ("You’re meant to be poor, but don’t worry, be happy.")

The struggle against CASE has developed on many levels. Teachers sabotaged the tests by letting students use their books, giving them answers, or giving away high scores on "constructed response" questions. They know that the Board will blame teachers if their students score poorly. Questionnaires even asked students whether they had been taught the material.

The Board expected teachers to grade the exams on their own time. At one school, teachers refused to do it. Their union delegate published a memo noting that the contract prohibits mandatory overtime. The angry principal responded by allowing more school time for the job, plus overtime pay for anyone who asked.

PLP teachers have emphasized that the main problem isn’t that the tests are stupid, burdensome, and badly constructed. It’s that the rulers need their schools to justify and intensify inequality, and to prepare the working class for war. Students who don’t "make the grade" will be pushed out into low-wage jobs, into the streets (then jail, then prison labor) or the infantry when the rulers need cannon-fodder. Teachers who don’t go along with this fascist program will also be attacked.

PLP teachers are giving leadership in this struggle, and extending our reach by working in citywide teacher organizations. The campaign against CASE is an opportunity to build unity among teachers, parents and students, and to raise our line on education and school reform. We are laying the basis for increased Challenge distribution and for greater participation on May Day, this year and in years to come.

Fight Racist CUNY Cuts, Expose Role of Universities in Rulers’ War Plans

NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 26 — The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) passed a resolution that will phase out and then totally end remedial classes at the senior colleges. Nearly 400 students, including members of PLP and friends, demonstrated at the meeting. These cuts represent racist attacks on the mainly black and Latin working class student body.

The mass, militant, anti-racist and anti-war movement of the 1960’s, in which PLP played a leading role, scared the hell out of the U.S. bosses. The liberal-Old Money capitalists decided to pacify angry workers and students with some reforms like affirmative action, open admissions and remedial courses, among others. Now that capitalism has entered into one of its deepest crisis in recent history, the rulers need to save as much money as possible to keep their profits up and pay for the war machinery. So some of the crumbs they gave to the masses during the 1970’s are now being taken away.

Many students at the demonstration are being misled by the brazen opportunism of groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which is limiting the struggle to stopping or changing the decision of the Board of Trustees. The ISO hides from the students the explanation of the real reasons for the BOT’s cutting remedial classes, along with the role of Universities as think-tanks for the bosses and their war machine.

As communists, we in PLP must not only participate in these struggles, but at the same time win these militant youth to our politics, to the line that capitalism is the enemy. At a Northeastern PLP college students’ meeting this past week-end, we made plans to get more involved in the organizations in our schools and fight these fascist attacks on the entire working class. The bosses are stepping up their plans to use colleges for their war plans, sending the CIA to recruit college students to be the next wave of spies. We in PLP must counter these warmakers by building an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist pro-communist worker-student alliance.

At Anthony Báez Foundation Meeting:
Debate Over How to Fight Racist Police Terror

BRONX, NY, Jan. 23 ž Tonight PLP members took part in a meeting of the Anthony Baez Foundation. We thought this would be a large meeting to build for a rally scheduled for March. Instead it was a small committee meeting to plan a workshop for February 27th on what to do if you are stopped by a cop, what to do after someone is brutalized by the cops, and how to push criminal and civil cases against the cops.

While it is certainly not bad to have the legal and tactical knowledge that the workshop will give people, this information by itself can only lead people down a dead end street. Without an understanding that police brutality is a necessary part of capitalism and can be ended only by communist revolution, the fight against police brutality can never succeed.

Even in building for the workshop there was a variety of positions among the committee members. The person leading the meeting wanted to keep the workshop small and controllable with no new people to be invited. A high school teacher thought it important to involve youth in the workshop, "They are the main ones the cops are always brutalizing". This same teacher agreed with us when we raised the role of police brutality in capitalism.

Meetings like this are learning experiences for most of us. While we have experience in agitation and in working within Party-led groups, we have too little experience working within groups that we do not lead. At this meeting we did get out Challenges to most of the people there and we did raise some points. The teacher there recognized one comrade from other meetings and demonstrations as a PL member and said that even though in the past she had always considered PLP to be "too far left," she had begun to respect and like the Party and what it does. She says she will try to come to the Bronx May Day Dinner on February 6th, at 6PM. Call 1-800-330-9953 for more information.

Mexico: Pope Says ‘Euro Yes, Dollar No’

Hidden behind all the religious ceremonies lay the true reasons for the Pope’s trip to Mexico: to build up the Catholic Church and promote the European Union’s influence in Latin America by attacking U.S. imperialism’s economic policies there. His condemnation of communism combined with his slashing attacks on unbridled capitalism "that considers profits and the law of markets as the only parameters," objectively allies him with the "Third Way" theory of European ruling class politicians like Blair in England and echoed by Latin politicians such as Chavez in Venezuela and Cardenas in Mexico.

During the Reagan Administration, the Pope forged an anti-communist alliance with the U.S. to halt the spread of Soviet influence. The Pope’s role then was to help dismantle socialism in Eastern Europe and to eliminate from the Catholic Church the exponents of the theology of liberation. The latter combines Marxism and Christianity to justify the Church’s participation in the class struggle on the side of the poor.

A few years ago, after transferring bishops, closing down seminaries, and appointing conservatives to high church positions, the Pope proudly declared, "It seems that I’m the only liberation theologian left." To this he may add, "I no longer need to ally with the U.S." Now the Pope came to the U.S. to condemn Clinton’s bombing of Iraq and the embargo against Cuba.

But the worldwide crisis of capitalism has so impoverished the Latin American masses that the Pope is forced to speak out against the "injustices of unbridled capitalism." At stake is the survival of the Church itself, being torn apart by "new age" religion (people consider themselves Catholics but rarely go to church or follow the church’s mandates) and by the inroads of pro-U.S. Protestant sects. In Chiapas 30% of the population has already converted.

The Pope is also forced to defend capitalism by simultaneously attacking and promoting it as the only solution to the evils that capitalism creates! With the Cold War over, the Pope feels comfortable using this line to try to convince masses of Latin-American workers to continue to look to the Catholic Church and to the European-leaning Social-Democratic politicians as their only saviors.

That’s why, while sharing the podium with Mexico’s President Zedillo, he sharply attacked neo-liberal free-market capitalism and the poverty it has wrought in Mexico. He also condemned repression and a military solution to the poverty of the poorest Mexicans, instead calling for a "dialogue" and an end to "human rights" violations. Later, Cuautehmoc Cardenas, Mayor of Mexico City and PRD candidate for President in the year 2000, made his strongest attack yet against neo-liberalism and repression in Mexico while offering the Pope the Key to Mexico City. The Pope was not scheduled to speak on this occasion, but departed from the plan in order to congratulate Cardenas on his speech.

It’s no coincidence that the Pope chose Mexico to make his call to "stand up against the globalization of social injustice, with the globalization of solidarity within the church." For the Vatican, Mexico is the key country in the Americas, where more than half of the world’s one billion Catholics live. The Pope hopes Mexicans will help rout "new age" religion and Protestantism and recruit more priests that the Church desperately needs to keep pace with the region’s population growth. He also hopes Mexico will lead the way politically by embracing, and putting into practice, the Church’s proposals to deal with social problems like Chiapas and the ravages of free market capitalism.

To accomplish this the Pope calls for a "new evangelization of the Americas...that can help the Americas overcome poverty..." The Pope talks of "preferential love for the poor." But the rich—no matter what color, creed, or nationality—only exist by exploiting and discriminating against the poor. The Catholic Church is no exception. The Sunday mass given by the Pope before a million worshipers is a blatant example. At the event, organized by the "ultra rightist religious corporations Testimony and Hope, and Christ Legionnaires, a small elite was comfortably seated around the Pope, while a gigantic mass of second-class citizens stood in a dusty, filthy field, packed behind iron bars like cattle, and other hundreds of thousands were completely excluded from the grounds" (La Jornada, 1/25). This demonstrates that the Church and the "third-way" capitalism it espouses are no less racist or brutal than U.S. imperialism. The fact that the Pope had to attack "unbridled capitalism" shows that the crisis in Mexico and Latin America is deepening, and that European imperialism is on the offensive. Masses of workers are no longer able to live in the old way. This represents a huge opportunity to show that crisis, poverty and war are the very essence of capitalism and that only a mass PLP fighting for communism revolution can eliminate them.

Cover Washington, DC in a Sea of Red Flags on May Day

NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 22 ž "Workers of the World, Unite! Abolish Wage Slavery! Fight for Communism, Power to the Workers!" These chants ring in our heads as PLP members and friends begin mobilizing for May Day. In this period of capitalist global economic crisis, brutal fascism, increasing racism and imperialist war, the glorious history of the international working class and its bright revolutionary potential chases away our lurking pessimism and lack of confidence in the working class. In spite of our small forces and obstacles, the Party unites, feels the strength of the collective and locks hands in struggle with workers around the world.

We are sober, too. Our members and our many friends, and all workers, are in an intense, long-range, struggle with its up and down strugglež a battle to profoundly understand the current capitalist period, the history of the international communist movement, our line and how to fight for it. Bourgeois ideology and practice, particularly of the liberals, sometimes seduces and blinds us. Challenge and other PLP literature, like the new political economy pamphlet orient us. The philosophy of dialectical materialism is our guide. Basebuilding is our method, our most powerful weapon in the class struggle.

May Day pushes us to do those things that are necessary to build a mass communist Party. Meanwhile, the fight rages for ideological understanding. Dialectical materialism teaches us to understand that practice will illuminate theory. So in this time of May Day mobilization we examine our base and our basebuilding. We expand our limits to creatively reach larger groups of workers, youth and others. We plan recruitment to the Party and are open to all possibilities that develop. We welcome all who agree with making communist revolution for workers’ power to join PLP, while we struggle about having the necessary leadership to consolidate all of these people. Developing and relying on the leadership of youth and black and Latin workers, is key.

We meet with May Day committees of workers, youth and their families, on and off the job, in homes and over meals. Challenge is our tool to read and study together. The distribution of Challenge must increase, whether on the streets, in stores, or through hand-to-hand networks. Challenge, and what we write for it, clarifies our understanding and helps us bring communist analysis, ideas and goals to the mass organizations and class struggles in which we are becoming more deeply involved. All this adds up to a mass approach to mobilizing for May Day.

In Upper Manhattan, this period of intense activity includes a number of projects thoughtfully planned and carried out with as much revolutionary optimism as possible. In our leadership collective and clubs, we are examining our close and extended base and each comrade is making a plan to contribute to the collective May Day effort. A new class in dialectical materialism has begun with much enthusiasm. It promises to be helpful in recruiting new members, developing more leadership and building a mass May Day. Making a May Day committee out of our fledgling youth group will help solidify it and make it grow.

In early February we will mail May Day letters and ticket books to 800 workers and youth. A series of meetings and dinners, in the homes of workers who are mass organizers, will discuss the Clinton impeachment, war in Iraq, and the need to join PLP and distribute Challenge. Some of these workers are involved in fights against police brutality, workfare, racist research and exploitation in the factories. Comrades can help each other to plan these events. We can solicit the help of these workers in visiting others. Then there is mass outreach: visits to many more homes of co-workers, friends, Challenge readers and May Day marchers. These workers can become May Day organizers. There are members and friends setting up a telephone tree, to contact a larger number of workers on the mailing list.

Over the last year, some of us have become more entrenched in various organizations, institutions and schools. We are leading, and initiating class struggle on a couple of fronts, raising aspects of the Party’s analysis and ideas. In these struggles, we are working with a core group of Challenge readers and sympathizers. Some are slowly making the transformation to becoming communists. We will have May Day marchers from this organizing, but not yet in large numbers.

We will have an area-wide May Day dinner and forum in mid-March to pull together our members and families, our various May Day organizers and as many people as possible. This can put on the front burner all of our efforts and emphasize the importance of Party recruitment in the final organizing stretch and on the buses to and from May Day. We’ll also get large numbers of May Day leaflets and stickers to these people and others. We will place leaflets and ticket information in neighborhood stores where Challenge is distributed.

Our leadership collective has been modestly strengthened over the last two years. We are considering our May Day goals, goals for recruitment and the increase in Challenge distribution. We are examining new leadership and new clubs. A sober long-range outlook, attention to basebuilding and ideological clarity, determination to put our plans into practice, and revolutionary optimism must fill our minds and hearts. Then those May Day chants ringing in our heads will come to pass.

Local 371 AFSCME Delegate Assembly Endorses May Day

NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 20 — Tonight, the Delegates Assembly of AFSCME Local 371 voted to encourage its 14,OOO members to participate in PLP’s May Day March. The resolution said:

"Whereas, May Day is the international holiday of the working class; and, "Whereas May Day demonstrates the fighting unity of the working class; and,

"Whereas, members of this Local have traditionally participated in May Day events; and,

"Whereas issues like the threat of war, slave labor Workfare, police brutality and racism affect all members of this Local and must be fought; therefore,

"Be it resolved that SSEU Local 371 urges its members to participate in May Day events including the March on Washington organized by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) on Saturday, May 1st; and,

"It is further resolved that SSEU Local 371 publicize May Day events in The Unionist" [our union newspaper].

We also urged the Local to buy 50 tickets to the March but this didn’t pass.

Last year the delegates also endorsed May Day. That endorsement, however, came in April and had little impact. This year we raised the resolution much earlier to make PLP’s May Day March much more of an issue in the Local. In addition to asking individuals to come to May Day with friends and family, we hope to build May Day organizing committees at several job sites, write an article for the union paper about the March, and call for a union-wide May Day organizing committee.

US Bosses’ Economic "Miracle’ Built on Millions Working for Nothing

According to Federal Reserve czar Alan Greenspan, there’s a big mystery about the U.S. economy: with wages "rising" and unemployment "low," inflation should be going up (bosses should be raising prices to cover a "higher" wage bill). But inflation appears negligible. How come? Greenspan says there’s some kind of "invisible productivity" whereby workers are so efficient in their labors that the bosses are getting more production for the same wage, so they don’t have to raise prices to maintain profits.

But there’s a simpler explanation: millions of workers are working part of their day for nothing!

Now we in PLP have always pointed out that capitalist profit is based on stealing. In capitalist production, all new value is created by the labor workers put in at the point of production. While a worker may feel he or she is being paid a full day’s for a full day’s work (say, 8 hours pay for 8 hours work) in reality the worker produces the value of that wage in far less than the 8 hours—in maybe 3 or 4 hours, or even in the very first hour worked. The value of the production from the rest of the work-day goes to the boss. After paying all his other "expenses"—for raw materials, machinery, rent, utilities, interest to banks for loans, etc. (which become profits for these other boss-suppliers)—what’s left is the boss’ profit, what Marx called surplus value. So "normal" profit is that part of the value workers produce which does not go back to workers in the form of wages. But even that is not the whole story of capitalist stealing.

While U.S. workers work harder, for longer hours and with more stress than workers in virtually all other industrialized countries, it’s often assumed that "at least they get paid more." But the bosses are not even paying at the "normal" robbery rate of "8 hours pay for 8 hours work"; in tens of millions of cases they’re paying 8 hours pay for 9 hours work, or 10 or 12 hours. Stealing on top of stealing! According to the experience of a Chicago labor lawyer as reported in the New York Times (1/24):

• Teen-agers at fast-food restaurants on the North Side of Chicago are paid until closing time—but then they spend another hour "cleaning up" the place, off the clock. A free hour for the boss.

• At a big transport company, the boss hires "part-time" supervisors (all with college degrees) for a 25-hour workweek. But most of them work 40 hours or until the work is done. Those other 15 hours are free for the boss.

• In supermarkets, hotels, clubs, nursing homes, etc., "There’s a good chance the staff is working for nothing some of the time."

• Although the law says workers must be paid time-and-a-half for all hours past 40 in one week, the law "doesn’t apply" to millions of workers, such as whatever the boss chooses to call "professional" or "managerial" work. All those signs for "Assistant Manager wanted" often put workers operating the same machines or loading the same trucks as the workers they’re "managing"—and for nothing.

• Even for the hourly workers who are "covered" under the law, bosses simply ignore the law, as many as 60% in some industries. An Employers Policy Foundation "conservatively" estimated that in 1996, only one type of violation led to $19 billion worth of illegally denied overtime pay—and that was considered a vast underestimation.

• Hotel workers are often forced to work through their "break time," but that time is still deducted from their hours worked and therefore goes unpaid.

• Of course, on top of all this is the more "public" stealing that occurs: Workfare, in which welfare recipients are forced to perform work for their welfare checks at an hourly rate about one-fourth or less of what is normally paid for that work; and,

• Prison labor, where tens of thousands of inmates are working for less than a dollar an hour for outfits like Boeing, TWA and Annie Sez on work that normally is paid from $10 to $20 an hour

If we were able to estimate all of these free hours worked (economists ignore these factors when figuring wage statistics), the actual hourly wage for the working class as a whole would be far less than reported. A fast-food worker being paid $48 a day—$6 an hour for an 8-hour day—but working a 9th hour for nothing, is actually earning $5.33 an hour. A "supervisor" at that transport company making $250 for a 25-hour week ($10 an hour) but who is really working 40 hours—15 hours for nothing—is really being paid $6.25 an hour ($250 divided by 40 hours)!

With all this free work, no wonder wages and productivity are reported "rising without inflation." Billions of unpaid hours are being worked every year. The stealing potential of capitalism knows no bounds. Such a monstrous fascist system, causing untold misery and poverty for tens of millions of workers, certainly deserves to be smashed. The only rational society for the working class, which produces all this value, is communism, the only society in which workers can and will receive the full fruits of our labors, distributed according to need.

Union Hacks Join Ford, VW in Attacking Autoworkers

SAO PAULO, Jan. 21 — The crisis of overproduction has brought mass layoffs and more misery to workers all over the world. Here in Brazil, the latest domino to fall in the current crisis of capitalism, Volkswagen workers demonstrated in solidarity with Ford workers, 2,800 of whom were laid off by Ford at the beginning of the year. Laid-off workers have been going to work every day even though the machinery is idle (see last week’s Challenge).

As usual, in these workers’ struggles, union hacks play the role of serving the auto bosses. The main "demand" of the union leadership at the Ford plant to "fight layoffs" is to accept wage cuts, as the union leadership of VW did earlier.

A similar situation is happening among autoworkers in Buenos Aires, Argentina. On January 18th, during a union meeting to discuss Ford’s plan to make workers pay for the crisis, union members who disagreed with the union sellouts gathered outside the union meeting to present their position to the many workers coming to the meeting. Cops and union goons, led by Ianella (a member of the national leadership of SMATA, the autoworkers’ union) came out, some of them showing their guns, to intimidate the dissidents. A sound car of the dissident was burned down.

There was a lot of pushing and shoving. A union hack told a woman worker, "Where are you from, black bitch?" She wasn’t intimated and responded, "What is the problem with me being black. You are a traitor to your class, why don’t you go to attack the boss?" Workers came out in her support.

Capitalism and crisis go hand-in-hand. The bosses, along with their agents like the union hacks, will make workers pay for this crisis with mass layoffs, fascist terror and war as long as we, workers, let them. It is time for workers dump this system and all their frontmen goons and fight for workers’ powerž communism. That is what PLP is fighting for.

From Hurricane Mitch to Hell of Border Patrol Terror

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 ž "This must be the saddest experience a person can have, to leave his children...I don’t have words to describe this pain. But I have to make this sacrifice for them," said José, a farmworker from Honduras, when he began his long trip North to the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of families were left homeless on the streets after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch. This was the final blow to what the bosses and their governments had been building for decadesž death and unbearable poverty for millions of workers and their families.

Thousands of Central Americans are undertaking the journey North. Many lost family members and their few possessions. Others lost their jobs. The Chiquita Banana Company, one of the major employers in Honduras, laid off thousands of workers after Hurricane Mitch. These workers hope to find work in the North and save their families from starvation. Many are even traveling with "certified letters," signed and stamped by local mayors or priests, saying they are good people who lost everything in the hurricane and deserve refuge and help.

Many lose their lives trying to cross the border. Others are robbed, beaten, jailed. Women are raped. "Back there, there is nothing for us. We must continue ahead," said one Central American worker. "If they catch me 1,000 times and deport me 1,000 times, I’ll try another thousand times...I’d rather die of hunger trying yet again rather than watching my wife and children die of hunger," said another immigrant.

Alejandro Carrillo, a Mexican immigration official, said that this year the number of arrests has doubled and that the majority is from Honduras, the country most affected by Mitch. Doris Meisner, the U.S. Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said, "We want to do whatever is necessary to avoid a massive influx." Meisner deserves the award for Nazi-of-the-year!

The Puebla Group, composed of the heads of the Immigration Services from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and each Central American country, met this week in San Salvador to develop strategies about how to detain workers who want to go work in the U.S.

Clinton, his government, and the Old Money U.S. liberal bosses are not planning to welcome thousands of immigrants. On the contrary, Clinton’s Administration has deported more workers, put more border patrol officials on the border, and made immigration laws stricter than any U.S. President in recent history. Neither Clinton nor the Democrats nor the Republicans are friends of immigrant workers. We cannot be friends with those who have killed thousands of workers from Iraq, Chiapas, Colombia, etc., and who have helped Central American governments massacre and exploit millions of workers. Clinton and his gang are part of the Old Money ruling class which is preparing a great massacre of millions of workers in a war for control of oil profits.

In Los Angeles—the goal and hope for many immigrants—hundreds of factories are closing and moving to countries where they pay $3 to $4 a day. Even though the bosses and their government say that unemployment has fallen, in the streets of the garment industry you can find thousands looking for a low-paying job.

Capitalism—based on profits for the few—produces worldwide mass unemployment. The working class produces everything of value and the bosses take most of it for themselves. We must destroy this criminal system that is killing millions of workers around the world.

These workers, the victims of capitalism and Mitch, must not be allowed to die of starvation! We are encouraging organizing in the unions, churches, schools and mass organizations to demonstrate to expose the murderous bosses, their crisis and their fascist laws. We will bring communist ideas to fight fascism and fight to build a communist society based on meeting the needs of the working class, where we’ll all work and receive what we need to live.

As the capitalist crisis spreads throughout Latin America, more workers will be forced to look for work wherever they can. The PLP welcomes all these workers to join our ranks and hasten the day when the working class will smash all borders and the system of profit for the few and poverty for the many.

The best way to build this fight is to bring more workers, their families and friends, to the May Day March on May 1st in San Francisco. This March, the internationalism and revolutionary spirit it builds, are important steps in the fight to build a mass PLP to end the capitalist nightmare with communist revolution.

Letters

Never Say Never

Dear Challenge:

Last week’s editorial (March on May Day-Build a Mass Base for Communist Revolution) clearly defined our political Challenges as we start to build for this year’s May Day March. One small point I think needs some clarification.

The editorial says that the "rulers can’t trust their army to fight for them….The Vietnam Syndrome is alive and well, and they may never field a reliable army again."

As the editorial correctly states, this wouldn’t stop the bosses from trying to launch a ground war to secure Middle East oil. This is a tremendous opportunity for our Party and the working class.

It is possible this particular set of circumstances will not last forever. The German army after WWI was also unreliable. The German ruling class responded by building the Nazi movement and an army committed to a fascist ideology. Ultimately, the Soviet Union led the defeat of the Wehrmacht, but not before the deaths of tens of millions of workers.

I raise this to emphasize the urgent necessity that we take advantage of the opportunities of the day. The editorial hits the mark when it declares, "Personal ties, forged especially through unity in class struggle, create the basis for the political process that will transform the working class, and ourselves, training us for the seizure of power." March on May Day!

Red Veteran

Anti-Fascist Music Against Rancid Capitalist Culture

Dear Challenge:

This is in response to an article in Challenge about pop artists carrying out acts of violence against people who didn’t glorify them or their music in magazine articles. One of those you mentioned was Marilyn Manson who uses the Nazi SS lightning bolt symbol for show. His music is garbage but he is making his bucks. One of his biggest hits, "Sweet Dreams (are made of this)" was just a remake of a song by Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. You claim in your article that people should not support any of these so-called "artists" since they have nothing to say to those oppressed by capitalism.

I would like to point out that there are groups out there who do make statements against the injustices of capitalism and corporate dominated America. Most of them are either rap or punk.

The punk rock group Rancid in their new album, Life Won’t Wait, which combines punk, rap, funk, and reggae, has a number of songs that make statements against the system. One of the songs is titled "Black Lung," and talks about the union being in bed with the company, and how it’s time for workers to put on their gloves and "sock it to ’em". There are other good songs on the album also.

Another great political group is the punk rock band, Bad Religion, which has some of the best lyrics going these days. One of their best albums, Recipe for Hate, is filled with songs that lambaste the system and religion. One song, "American Jesus," goes: "He’s the farmer’s barren fields, the force the army wields, the expressions on the faces of the starving children, the power of the man, he’s the fuel that drives the klan, the motive and the message of the murderer, the preacher on TV, the false sincerity, the form letter that’s written by the big computers, the nuclear bombs, the kids with no moms.…"

Then there is Rage Against the Machine, which combines rap and heavy metal and powerful political lyrics. In a song about Desert Slaughter, they say, "You wear a yellow ribbon instead of a swastika. You’re just another victim of the in house drive-by, they say jump, you say how high." In another entitled "Take the Power Back," they state: "Fuck the culture, the culture lost, stealing our minds in due time. Ignorance is taking over, yo, we gotta take the power back." So there are some artists out there trying to make a statement against the increasingly fascist order.

Red Punk

Uncivil to Workers

Dear Challenge:

I just saw the movie, Civil Action, and it’s a good reform movie. It doesn’t call for communism and that of course is its biggest weakness. A number of children have died of leukemia because of polluted water, the parents hire a lawyer, Jan Schlichtman, played by John Travolta. Schlichtman changes from someone just interested in making a financial killing to fighting the big corporations responsible and the giant law firms who represent them, to fighting for a cleaner environment no matter what. So, aside from Travolta and his lesser-hero partners, the big hero becomes the U.S. Environmental Agency (EPA). The EPA eventually brings down large fines on the companies after the small law firm headed by Schlichtman settles for a sum of only $8 million to be divided among all the parents and the law firm.

One negative aspect of Schlictman is that he ignores the duties his partners have to their own families and the fact that these partners continue to stay with him all the way. Another negative thing is that the EPA is painted as the good guy and not as the protector of one section of the capitalists as opposed to another. Thirdly, the hero and the main players are all lawyers, the workers whose children have died from the contamination, or the workers who helped expose the companies’ evils are just marginal.

I remember being part of the Party’s Summer Project in the San Joaquin Valley in 1988. The wine bosses had been spraying the area extensively for years and children were dying there, too. The Party and the farm workers were the main fighters against the grower murderers. I don’t remember any lawyers being involved in that fight. If that happened later I’m sure it was negligible and never a big factor. The nature of Hollywood and 99% of bourgeois art is to make lawyers and individuals the keys to victory.

This movie comes out of a book and a true story. But pollution, deadly pollution is growing in the U.S. and elsewhere. Only communists don’t side with one section of the ruling class against the other. If cancerous pollution is to be really wiped out, then the profit system has to be totally wiped out.

Travolta does a good acting job as do all the actors, and the film is not too long.

The Return of the Red Critic

CHALLENGE RESPONDS: Quote is Confusing

We are a little confused by this movie review. The writer says it is a good reform movie. The writer than goes on to point out the movie’s key aspects.

• "The hero and main players are all lawyers."

• "The EPA is painted as a good guy," and

• The hero "ignores the duties his partners have to their own families and the fact that these partners continue to stay with him all the way."

We agree that these significant aspects are all bad, but we can’t see how the writer can characterize the movie, Civil Action, as a "good reform movie"

MidEast Editorial Confusing, Says Reader

Dear Challenge:

Last week's editorial used a quote the New York Times Op-Ed writer who I assume is a Rockefeller mouthpiece. I think Challenge used the quote to point out that the Rockefeller interests (Big Oil) are fearful of a ground war in the Middle East and are desperate to remove Saddam Hussein and install a pro-U.S. government in Iraq. The quote makes this point but then continues on to say that if the French and Russian imperialists take Saddam and his henchman out of the country, they (Iraq) can do all the business they want.

The Party's line is that the U.S. ruling class wants to keep Iraqi oil off the market and out of the hands of its imperialist rivals. I don't think Challenge needed to print that part of the quote for the editorial to be effective and it only served to contradict our line and create confusion (for myself, at least) that is not answered elsewhere in the editorial.

A Comrade

From Russia with Class Struggle

Dear Challenge:

The following was received in a letter from a Russian comrade. Although the details are sketchy, it is clear that workers in Russia (as in those participating in similar strikes recently in Rumania and China) will not give up. What they need is a genuine communist party to lead their struggle to the revolutionary end.

Struggle is going on in Yasnogorsk, a small town in the Tula region where the workers from YMZ (Yasnogorsk machine-building plant) sacked the administration and took power at the plant and in the town last September. Two of the workers’ leaders were accused by the regional administration led by the pro-capitalist Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) of organizing mass unrest and were arrested in December. Since that time the workers have been on strike.

The local authorities did not dare use police against organized workers and tried to persuade them to stop the strike by promising new appointments and pay of the wages owed. In December, around 4,000 workers were paid. In January, both leaders were set free and a new director was appointed by the owners of the plant. But that has not stopped the strike. The newly appointed directors could not enter the administration building; they were not let in because there was no authorization from the Workers Committee.

At their general meeting the workers decided to fight to the end. They want to be the masters of their plant and their town. "We don’t want to be slaves anymore," they say. "Revolution is what we really need." They do not recognize any private owners or shareholders and are determined to keep the control over the plant and the town in the hands of the Workers Committee led by a 35-year-old molder, Andrei Guan-Tin-Fa.

The first steps have been made to get support and solidarity from other plants and set up a Tula regional strike workers’ committee. Yasnogorsk workers are backed by local bus drivers and are now discussing the further measures to be taken together. Yasnogorsk is just one example of the workers’ self-government in Russia. In Vyborg, Kronstadt and other places, plants and towns are now under control of workers committees.

Russian Comrade

Wrong Headline

Dear Challenge:

I think there was a mistake in the headline in Challenge (1/27) article about the Madison anti-KKK rally. It said, "300 Anti-Racists Cause Klan to Chicken-Out." That was the line put forward by the liberals who organized the rally, and by many of the marchers, but it’s not true. As the article said, if only it were that easy! Why would the Klan cancel because of a few hundred college students, led by a group (the ISO) that has always tried its best to keep people from attacking the Klan? Especially when the federal courts had ordered the State of Wisconsin to grant the Klan a permit? And with 400 Madison cops, plus state police, ready to protect the racists?

In reality, the particular Wisconsin KKK’er in charge of this rally has about a 50% record of not showing up. Chances are he just figured he’d already gotten enough publicity and had won his point in court. Or maybe the ruling-class liberals found some other way to pay him off. The "we stopped the Klan" line builds illusions that peaceful protests can head off fascists, at least the KKK gutter-type fascists. We have a lot of experience—from Indiana to Illinois to Wisconsin—that proves this false.

Midwest Reader

CHALLENGE RESPONDS:

Thank you for your comments. The chicken out headline was just the kicker, the main headline clearly stated: "Now Let’s Smash Their Masters’ Racist System." Which we think makes our politics clear on this situation._