On February 23rd, Ricardo was depressed because he'd been laid off from work at a trucking company the week before. His wife came home to find him locked in the bathroom with a knife. He said he wanted to kill himself. She called 911 for help. Instead, the Sheriffs came with their guns drawn. As Ricardo came to the front door with two knives in his hands, he told the cops "go ahead, shoot me." But, after he threw down one of the knives, they shot 38 bullets, 28 hit Ricardo. Three minutes after they got to the house, Ricardo was dead. Almost 100 neighbors saw the cops kill Ricardo.
"They shot him down like a dog," said one of Ricardo's neighbors.
A teacher and member of PLP said, "The murder of Ricardo Close, like the murders of Amadou Diallo and Tyisha Miller and others are an attack on all workers. The bosses are waging war against all workers, from LA to Iraq. We need a system where the workers who make everything also run everything. We need communism." She invited everyone to march on May Day.
When the Sheriffs claimed the shooting was "self defense," neighbors of Ricardo called them "liars" and "assassins." Ricardo was 5`4`` tall and weighed 120 lbs and represented no threat to the cops according to neighbors. One woman told how, after Ricardo was already dead, he was shot him four more times.
Over and over they expressed their horror and anger at the cops. A member of PLP called the cops the armed death squads of the bosses. She called for a demonstration Saturday. While she was speaking, other members of PLP started distributing Challenges. One of the community residents took a stack of papers and began distributing them to everyone in the meeting.
Gloria Molina attacked the distributors as being "outsiders with a hidden agenda." She called for an independent investigation into the shooting. One woman said that we needed leaders who really represented the interests of the community. Another said that instead of an investigation, we needed a mass movement against such racist attacks.
Leaflets were distributed at a nearby school for Saturday's demonstration. At the demonstration, people chanted, "Lee Baca [the first elected Latin to the Sheriff's Department), you can't hide. We charge you with genocide." A group of Ricardo's co-workers had come to see his wife. They came to the demonstration. These workers told everyone that on the afternoon before the cops had murdered Ricardo, they had organized a group of workers to go to the company's main office to demand his job back. And they had won! "Imagine how I felt," said his co-worker, "when I called Wednesday morning to tell him the good news, and found out he was dead!"
Like many of the neighbors, the workers want to organize another, bigger demonstration to bring many more co-workers and neighbors who don't yet know about this racist murder. Some also said they would come to the May Day March in San Francisco.
The demonstrators went to Ricardo's house and then marched through East LA, along the busy Whittier Boulevard. The cops kept their distance as workers honked their horns in support and took leaflets and Challenges. We marched to the Sheriff station where one speaker denounced the idea that more Latin or black cops would make things better. She called for revolution to end police terror. The leader of the Brown Berets said Lee Baca should come and address the community. We passed a hat and marchers donated money for the family of Ricardo Close.
As the bosses' system proves incapable of meeting workers' needs, they are training their goons, the cops, to carry out open terror against the working class. The PLP pledges to organize workers to advance under attack. We will take this message to our jobs, schools and unions. The cops cannot be reformed! Pleading for capitalist democracy cannot end fascist terror! Only a revolution, which ends the bosses' domination, can end fascism.
Editorial:
King's death sentence was reported on the front page of the New York Times, along with a picture of a black and a white Texas State Trooper hugging. That night, ABC's Nightline ran a story on black cops who are "standing up" to racist police brutality. Days later, the head of the New Jersey State Police was fired for publicly stating their policy of targeting black and Latin motorists as suspected drug runners. This sudden "anti-racist cops," by some bosses, which has been brought on by the uproar against the slaughter of James Byrd and the execution of Amadou Diallo, is an effort to pacify us. These murders are barely the tip of the iceberg in the wave of racist police terror against black and Latin workers and youth.
The bosses made quick work of King to build support for "community policing," to give fascist terror a "kinder, gentler" face. The Big Lie is that King and the racists are the main bad guys while the cops and courts, and integrated juries are good and can be made even better. Amadou Diallo was killed by the NYPD in a hail of 41 bullets. Abner Louima was tortured by Brooklyn cops in the station house. Tyisha Miller and Ricardo Close were murdered by cops in LA. The list is growing in every city in the U.S., to the point that there are now organizations of families of victims of police terror.
The bosses want us to demand more black, Latin and women cops, and residency requirements. But cops can never serve the people; all cops are the hired guns of the racist rulers. Their job is to terrorize the working class, break strikes, and protect the bosses' property and system. Black cops and soldiers led the assaults on anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa. Jewish cops collected the guns from Jews who resisted in Nazi-occupied ghettos, and made sure all Jews registered and sewed yellow stars on their clothes. A leopard can't change its spots. A cop is a cop is a cop.
Compare the King trial to the O.J. Simpson trial. The daily-televised O.J. trial was discussed and analyzed on news and talk shows. We learned about DNA, criminalists, and the minutiae of criminal investigation. The O.J. trial became the focus of workers' conversations and debates, albeit from the viewpoints presented by the bosses' media. The ultimate and intended outcome of the O.J. trial was to build racism. This succeeded since the massive corruption and racism of the entire justice system, even though it was brought out at the trial it was glossed over and discarded by the media.
The King trial was just a blip. Newspapers and TV reporters and columnists treated the lynching as an aberration, rather than the inevitable result of systemic racism. The media mentioned that King got his racist education in the Texas prisons, but failed to expose the role of racist prison culture, or the Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood in the prisons. They ignored the disproportionate number of black and Latin men who are victims of the criminal justice system, or the anti-working class and racist use of the death penalty. They covered up that prisons are the fastest growing industry in the U.S. and that the U.S. is becoming a nation of prisons.
Revealing the true nature of the criminal justice system would fuel anti-racist outrage. The fascist nature of society would be exposed if the links were made between unemployment, slave labor, attacks on immigrants and the slashing of social spending while pouring billions into prison construction. The media can never expose this. The people who own it, the capitalists, are the very people who commit and control these racist acts. They profit from the very racism they're writing about.
The swiftness of the trial and the death sentence has been hailed as a victory. Good riddance to King, but this is no victory for workers and we must not let it become a political victory for the liberal bosses. We don't want a society where black and white cops can unite to oppress us for their liberal masters, we want a movement of millions of workers united to get rid of the capitalist system that needs and profits from racism and racist terror. Join the Progressive Labor Party and commit yourself to destroying racism. March on May Day!
Many of the rulers view the Balkans as the "Western front of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East" (New York Times Op-Ed page, 1/2/96). Even before Bush's genocidal "Desert Storm" in 1991, the main wing of U.S. imperialism had been expanding its Middle Eastern military commitments under Carter.
What does Kosovo have to do with U.S. Middle Eastern oil interests? Plenty. Just look at the map on this page. Kosovo is right in the middle of the region where Europe joins the Middle East. If Kosovo blows up, Macedonia, Montenegro, Northern Greece, and Albania may all be quickly drawn into the fight. The same goes for Turkey and Russia. Road and rail routes are connected to the Middle East through the link between Turkey and the Balkans. Instability in the Balkans threatens the sea-lanes of the Eastern Mediterranean, which is linked to Middle Eastern oil via the Suez Canal.
Balkan expert Robert D. Kaplan warns further about the possibility that if U.S. imperialism can't pacify the Balkans, the Bulgarian bosses will "pitch their tents" with the Russians. Even worse for U.S. bosses, "With the Middle East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil. But we will not have those bases in the future if the Russians reconquer Southeast Europe" (Washington Post, 2/28).
Caspian oil and gas are also important to the new U.S.-Turkey-Israel axis. U.S. Big Oil wants to prevent its Russian rivals from dictating how the stuff will be transported and sold. U.S. imperialists just won a temporary victory in the fight for control over Caspian energy, when the bosses of Azerbaijan announced plans to allow gas from Turkmenistan to go though a U.S.-backed pipeline under the Caspian Sea to Eastern Turkey. Once the pipeline is built, Turkmenistan expects to pump 30 billion cubic meters a yearÑ14 billion of them for sale in Austria and Balkan countries (Wall Street Journal, 2/22). Obviously, widening war in the Balkans would reverse this U.S. victory and seriously threaten these oil and gas super-profits.
The entire Eastern Mediterranean is a tinderbox, with every local ruling class buying missiles for potential use against its rivals. Kaplan further warns: "Dangerous new alliances are forming, like before World War II. Preventing their growth means pacifying Kosovo." Rockefeller mouthpiece Thomas L. Friedman adds: "You cannot care about the future of NATO and the stability of Southern Europe, and then say we have no interest in Kosovo" (New York Times, 3/22).
If Clinton/Rockefeller don't succeed in establishing a "Pax Americana" in Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans, Russian rulers may well solidify their own axis, with Serbia and Greece, as well as Iran and even, potentially, Iraq.
The Balkan situation has many ins and outs, and we don't know nearly enough to explain them all. Rulers of these countries have been at each other's throats for years. But the reasons for the expanding U.S. presence there are clear. And the potential for sharpened conflict between U.S. imperialism and its Russian and German-French rivals is hard to miss. This is not a situation that promises peace. The struggle to control the Balkans, the Caspian energy treasure, the oil and gas pipelines, and the Middle East's energy reserves can only become more violent. The nature of imperialism makes war inevitable. Our Party must redouble its efforts to prepare the working class for a long period of armed struggle among the major imperialists and their local stooges.
So the challenge to build May Day this year puts us face-to-face against the dominant ideological force in the U.S. liberal camp. And capitalism with a kind face is championed by apparently "leftist" groups like the old "Communist" Party and the International Workers of the World (IWW) and so on.
Our first direct confrontation came at Laney College's Labor Club student meeting. The Department's administration forces clearly did not want student-endorsed PLP May Day.
In a packed agenda the debate was necessarily brief (we had discussed the May Days at a previous meeting, but had not yet voted on them). Reclaim May Day was a broad coalition, we were told. "Last year a march was followed by a festival in Dolores Park. That attracted 3,000. There was even a group of Pagan women who bought a May Pole and danced around it!" The ability to skip around the pole in some pre-feudal ceremony apparently impressed the speaker.
Surprisingly, the debate hinged around the MayPole. A young Asian student, holding the PLP leaflet she had just read, suddenly went against the flow. "I don't think we should endorse both May Days," she said. There was a silence. It seemed as if she was going to attack PLP. The administration forces were eager for her to continue "I don't like religion," she went on, "and we shouldn't promote a May Day that pushes it, like these Pagans!"
It was a stand on principle that took the steam out of the PL opponents. Although both May Days got endorsed, the revisionist one just barely made it.
Having the endorsement has already opened up avenues for us to agitate and speak for PLP's Fight for Communism May Day March that would normally be difficult for usÑlike the demonstration on Friday, February 26th against the layoffs at Levi-Strauss. But we have no doubt that this is just the beginning of a sharp fight against opportunism and for communism that will make the struggle for San Francisco's PLP's May Day even more significant.
Last week, Levi Strauss joined the long list of U.S. companies downsizing: 5,900 Levi workers will lose their jobs in the U.S., joining the long list of garment manufacturers, like Polo, Guess, Nike, Calvin Klein, etc. Levi executives said the latest round of downsizing in the U.S., as well as in its operations in Belgium and France, "are caused by high cost of labor and overcapacity" (the crisis of overproduction).
Levi is moving its production to China, Philippines and Indonesia, where workers are paid 50cents a day (below the even the minimum wage there). In the plant in Indonesia the 3,000 workers who share just 10 bathrooms, suffer such harsh conditions that if anyone uses the bathroom more than three times a day, a day's wage is deducted. If any worker is out for a day, even for medical reasons, he/she is forced to wear a sign saying, "I won't miss any more days."
Levi's has a reputation as a "kind" company. In 1997, Robert Haas, the Levi CEO was honored by the UN for providing decent living conditions for Levi workers. On November 3, 1997, the same day he got that award, Levi announced the layoffs of 6,400 workers. Why does Levi win such praises as a "good boss?" Because the Levi family, one of the 12 richest families in the world, worth $12 billion, has given a small amount of their money, $20 million, to community organizations in the U.S. and 40 other countries, and even agreed with the UNITE garment workers union in the U.S. to unionize some of its plants. Levi is also claiming that each worker who will lose his/her job will get $6,000 in severance pay and face an uncertain future in a shaky job market, Thomas Tusher, Levi's chief of operations, is getting a package worth $125 million in stock options (including $20 million to pay his taxes).
There is no such a thing as a "good boss." As the saying goes, scratch a liberal boss, and find a vicious anti-working class beast. For years, these thousands of workers produced huge profits with their labor for Levi. Now that the bosses find their labor "too costly," they are thrown into the street. That is why communists call capitalism, the dictatorship of the capitalist class. On May 1st, PLP garment workers, as well as many other workers and students, will be marching to celebrate May Day, building our communist movement to smash the bosses' dictatorship and fight for workers' power, where there will be no Robert Haas or Thomas Tusher. Join us!
The Committee charged that the Guatemalan army, financed and trained by the U.S., waged a genocidal war against the country's Mayan population during the 36 years old civil war. Over 200 thousand were killed during the war. It specifically names the CIA as helping the Guatemalan military forces carry out their campaign of "scorched earth" policy, whereby over 400 Mayan villages were completely destroyed and its inhabitantsÑwomen, men and children - were savagely and brutally murdered.
The report also contends that the bulk of this genocidal activity took place during the administration of President Rios Mont, a "born again Christian." The Committee's choice of the word "genocide"Ñand not just "violations of human rights"--opens the possibility that those involved could be tried in the World Court as perpetrators of crimes against humanity. It is a blistering political attack against U.S. imperialism and its stooges, along the same line as the indictment of Chile's Pinochet. It shows the sharpening of the rivalry between U.S. and European imperialists. It is not coincidental that Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist, headed the Committee, and that its 18-month investigation was mainly financed by the European bosses.
The report also mentions that Cuba and other governments backed the guerrillas that fought the Guatemalan army. The "other" governments were the Russian and some European governments that waged a proxy war against US imperialism for the control of the area. That fight hasn't stopped. The Russians are temporary out of the picture but the European imperialists have shifted their tactics to supporting ex-guerrillas as political candidates, providing loans to the governments that have emerged in the region after the civil war ended and investing heavily in manufacturing and finance.
It is ludicrous to think that these bosses are interested in justice for the Central American workers that they cynically used and helped massacre. European imperialistsÑand German imperialists in particularÑhave a long and bloody history of genocide against the workers in of the world. Central American workers and others should not expect nothing else from Hitler's grandchildren except virulent racism, fascism and war, That's all that the imperialists and the local bossesÑbe they Russian, European, Asian or AmericanÑhave to offer the working class.
On what planet do these leaders live? The President of the Republic has never received workers in his house. He met us with anti-riot police, who had orders to attack the demonstration. But these dogs who protect capitalism also knew the organizational capacity of the workers to who came to march on February 24th on the streets of San Salvador. The leaders of the unions and farm workers tried to calm the anger of the workers against the capitalist bosses and their agents, and begged the workers not to confront the riot police. But the workers' enthusiasm and their anger against the police are here as they are all over the world.
With more than 10,000 workers, teachers and students, the demonstration ended two days of protests against the government of Calderon Sol and his politics and economic measures. There is a new public service law imposed by the IMF and other international organizations as a condition of loans to El Salvador. The projected effects of this law will be the layoff of over 75,000 state workers, this year alone.
On the February 23rd and 24th there were marches and strikes in the different government departments around the country, like the Ministry of Education, Health, Public Works, Economy and Social Security. Working class unity was strong. Workers saw that their movement has a lot of potential. We can show workers the need for a change. We're not talking about a change in the just the president, but a change in the bosses' system, since the capitalist system is not capable of meeting the needs of workers. The workers need an organization that gives them the tools and power they need to organize a revolution for communism.
Although in appearance this mobilization was not an election rally, the leaders of this mobilization organized these protests against the government of Sol two weeks before the presidential election. They attacked Sol but not Facundo (candidate of the FMLN). PLP has to show the workers that there are no lesser evil capitalist politicians. Building a mass PLP to fight for revolution is the only way workers will meet our needs.
Several members of PLP went to the march with a group of teachers who belong to the union ANDES. During the trip to San Salvador, we were fearful of talking to these teachers about the need to fight for communism. We thought that they were only thinking about the coming elections. That's what the conversations were about. We even started doubting that we could take out the Challenges we had brought. So when they asked us what we had in our backpacks, we said it was a gift for a friend in San Salvador.
But how wrong we were! As we joined the march, our conviction in communist ideas made us bolder. We started to take the Challenges out of our backpacks and that's when we saw that Salvadoran workers are anxious to have communist leadership. Hundreds of workers came around us when they heard we were distributing communist literature. "I'll help you pass it out," said a worker and began doing it. "Give me another to take to my colleagues at the school where I work," said a teacher. The workers on the bus with us complained that we should have given them the paper during the trip. In all, we distributed 160 Challenges and there were thousands more workers who wanted it.
The return trip at night was inspiring, we felt stronger because of what happened in the morning we started the discussion about communism with the teachers. The discussion continued for several hours in an atmosphere of camaraderie. These teachers said they agree with the Party's line and what they needed was a good political-ideological education about what communism is, since the FMLN "leaders" never thought it was important to teach the theories of Marxism-Leninism. These "leaders" said that only they needed to know these things. They didn't teach these communist ideas to the rank-and-file, since that would lead to problems. The teachers said they would come to the May Day March and that we should bring more Challenges to distribute to the workers. They would like to keep receiving Challenge to learn more about our communist ideology.
A TOSCO corporate statement found the incident "deeply regrettable." They are good at "regret." On January 21, 1997, another TOSCO worker, Mike Glanzman, was killed in a plant accident. "We regret the terrible tragedy," TOSCO said.
Seven workers have died in "accidents" at TOSCO since 1983, yet company President Dwight Wiggins calmly stated, "I don't consider the refinery unsafe." Capitalism has a logic of its own!
The Board of Supervisors claims it has no legal power to shut TOSCO. And the union (Paper Allied Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers), reacting to the Supervisors' sham move for a "temporary" closing, whined, "It's unfortunate the Board of Supervisors appear to be rushing on this. We don't yet know what it will take to fix the refinery." Surely, this is an argument that must comfort Wiggins and his profits. Only the communist PLP is calling for workers to act as a class. How about a general strike for safety? After all, the U.S. has the most dangerous worksites of any advanced industrial country.
In fact, TOSCO workers are heroic for risking their lives daily at such a fatal worksite, in order to support their families. Yet it tells us, too, that heroism is not enough. The growth of a revolutionary class consciousness among industrial workers is literally a matter of life or death.
TOSCO President, Dwight Wiggins, is worse than a serial killer--he's a capitalist! And capitalism, the system that serves him, is in crisis. Oil, steel, auto, aerospace, and industry after industry are caught between the worldwide falling rates of profits and a crisis of overproduction. As a result, capitalists like Wiggins resort to the most brutal cost-cutting attacks on workers.
It makes sense to them. If they own a business that will soon be bankrupt, why not cut preventive maintenance, save costs and boost short-term profits? Truly, ruthless capitalism has a logic of its own.
The TOSCO accidents are caused by the crisis of overproduction--capitalism. The deaths of the Bay Area oil truck driver (victimized by a deregulated industry); the deaths of 1,000 villagers in the 1998 oil disaster in Jesse, Nigeria, (due to the notorious lack of preventive maintenance and rush for profits); the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis by the U.S.-led bombings and sanctions, have all been caused by the crisis of overproduction--capitalism. In fact, the U.S. strategy to keep Iraqi oil off the world market helps to maintain domestic profits at a sufficiently high level to allow marginal refineries like TOSCO to operate--temporarily. In short, the murder of Iraqi workers in the Gulf allows TOSCO to burn workers to death in California. More capitalist logic.
The latest four deaths in this cost-cutting-refinery-from-hell can act like a spark for revolution and workers' power. Few workers look to Dwight Wiggins or his capitalist class for leadership, but the local politicians and unions may fool some of us. However, their legal hesitations and utter servility in these murders serve their masters, the bosses. Our class needs political power and has to develop its own revolutionary Party, the PLP, to get it. All workers should circulate letters on their jobs, expressing sympathy to the families of Ricardo Enriquez, Ernie Pofahl, Rollin Blue and Raynold Rodacker and send them to PLP to forward to their families. We must organize safety strikes. There must be an outpouring of anger and class solidarity as a result of these murders. The resolve to march in PLP's May Day in San Francisco is a great expression of those feelings!
Nearly 20 workers helped sell tickets, many to workers who wanted to donate to May Day. This event was made possible by the collective labor of many of these workers who contributed food, supplies, in addition to helping with decorations, setting-up and cleaning-up.
A PLP steelworker told the crowd about this year's May Day plans, and encouraged all present to become organizers to bring the message of communism to the nerve center of the U.S. bosses' system. He told all present that the May Day March is an important step on the road to smashing racist police terror, the build up of the next war in Europe or the Middle East, a step toward communist revolution. He explained that only under communism can we create a society where all workers can live, work and play together in a way similar to the way we did it this evening.
On to May Day 1999.
CHICAGO, March 1 -- Last Wednesday, about 40 teachers challenged the Board of Education about the firing of 137 teachers, with more to come. A demonstration was organized by PACT (the ProActive Chicago Teachers), a caucus in the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU). Teachers picketed outside the meeting, with signs saying, "Rehire Fired Teachers," and "Bring Back the 137."
Many of the fired workers had taught for 30 years, but were discarded like old textbooks. Some were from schools with low-test scores, where the majority of teachers were thrown out during "reconstitution." Others were laid off from schools with declining enrollment. It used to be that such teachers were assigned elsewhere. Now they have 10 months to find a position, or they're out.
One of the fired teachers spoke eloquently about his years as a teacher and against the firings. He said, "I will keep fighting until I die, if necessary. What else can I do?" Board President Chico said the speaker "didn't deserve a response!"
While this teacher spoke, 15 of us went to the front of the room to cheer him on. We pressured Chico into allowing the PACT leader and another fired teacher to speak. Despite an earlier warning, we held up our signs. We yelled at Chico when he said, "Sorry, we don't hire the teachers, the principals do." "But you fire them, don't you?" we taunted. We tried to raise some hell. The experience motivated one teacher to say, "Now we have to figure out how we're going to fight against our principal."
The PACT caucus developed during the last union election. PACT lost the major offices, but won six executive board positions from the high schools. This was a blow to the UPC caucus, which has dominated the CTU for years. As conditions for teachers and students continue to worsen, many union members are totally disgusted with the current leadership and are hoping PACT will make a difference.
When CEO Paul Vallas took over the schools, CTU leaders invited him and Gery Chico to address the Union's House of Delegates meeting. They've been in bed together ever since. Union President Tom Reese showed up at last week's Board Meeting, to apologize for the PACT demonstration telling the Board what a great job they're doing.
Working in PACT gives PLP more opportunities to raise our ideas and influence union members. This provokes many discussions of the Party's line, and can lead to mass recruitment of teachers, and their students. It helps establish us as leaders in the class struggle. Other teachers are beginning to come to us with problems, suggestions, ideas and questions, and taking our ideas to others, but there's a lot more work to do.
In building for the demonstration at the Board, we had many conversations with teachers in PACT and in our schools. These included the nature of fascism, the purpose of demonstrating, our view of unions, our analysis of the High School Redesign Plan, how math would be taught under communism, and more. Communists must lead the class struggle to expose the big picture. We must fight for workers' jobs and we must fight to win, even though most times we may "lose" the specific demand. But we will win as more workers see that we have to destroy the whole system with communist revolution.
We've also taken our case to PURE, a group that organizes around educational issues and advocates for parents and students in the Local School Councils. This group organized a press conference, where we pointed out the recent attacks by the Board and CTU leadership. We sold Challenge and exchanged phone numbers. We were interviewed on PURE's public access cable show, and have been invited back to have a parent and student come and air their complaints against the principal as well. More importantly we met other activists in other schools. We are broadening out the struggle, and deepening our ties with our base. We have opened up new possibilities for more mass participation in May Day.
We also raised this issue in the Local School Council. The principal, the main perpetrator of the reassignment, was not present. We were still able to ask the council to think about what kinds of schools they wanted for their children. Did they really want their kids dragged out of their classes and interrogated by Board investigators without their consent? Did they want schools where all pro-working class teachers and defenders of the students were thrown out?
Soon we will be publishing an article about the situation at CVCA in Substance, the opposition newspaper that the Board is trying to shut down. As the struggle against fascism intensifies, PLP will lead the way with consistent continuous class struggle. We must plan very carefully and skillfully to gear all this work towards our biggest May Day March ever.
The overwhelming majority of workers we asked signed the statement. Numbers of workers expressed their gratitude that someone was doing something against the racist murder, and they could be a part of the protest. Many told stories of friends, relatives and/or themselves having been victims of brutal cops. Most of these victims were black or Latin; two were white. Typically, most discussions focused the blatantly racist murder of Mr. Diallo; several led to other interesting political questions, including the upcoming May Day March in Wash., DC. The normal Challenge sale of 25 rose to 35.
On February 17th, the statement (with an introduction and a few modest steps for publicizing it) was presented as a formal motion at the monthly membership meeting of the New York Metro-Area Postal Union (APWU). There was strong applause after the motion was read to the meeting of over 100 workers. They are mostly shop stewards who always vote overwhelmingly to support the union leaders to whom they feel some degree of loyalty.
The union president asked to delete the part about publicizing the statement because it might draw a libel suit against the union if the cops were not convicted. Others loyal to the leadership spoke similarly about the entire motion.
Unintentionally, they revealed some fundamental truths about the unjustness of the "justice system" in capitalist America. First, they recognized that the four cops may not be convicted (like so many before them) despite their obvious guilt. Second, the "justice" system could be used against workers who merely seek justice. "Justice" in capitalism is for the rich. This is one more example of why workers need to join PLP in the struggle for communism: lasting justice for workers can only be achieved when workers collectively control the entire system.
The motion against racist police violence was defeated by a vote of about 40 to 20, with many abstentions. After the meeting, several workers asked to sign the statement, including at least a couple of workers who voted against the motion. Copies of the signed statement will be sent to several major NYC papers and to the family of Amadou Diallo.
Life Is Beautiful starts out as a romantic comedy in Italy during World War II. Roberto Benigni, the director, writer and star of the movie, courts and marries a woman (his real-life wife) in the course of which he captures the audience with his Chaplinesque acting, bubbling over with life.
Half-way through film, the comedy turns to tragedy. The Nazis cart him, his wife and 5-year-old son to a concentration camp, along with thousands of other Jews. To supposedly shield the boy from the terror of the camp and its genocidal final solution, Benigni turns every aspect of the horror into a game for the boy, with a "tank" as the "prize" for the winner at the end.
Benigni does not survive, but his son and his wife do, with the boy being greeted by a GI driving his tank (the "prize") into the camp just behind the fleeing Nazis. Yes, "life is beautiful." (Of course, thousands of communists, Jews, gypsies, altogether more than 13 million others, were murdered in the death camps.)
The film tends to suck you in with its joyousness, comedy and acting in the first half--and then tries to show that if you have faith, and love life enough, it will be beautiful.
Yet Benigni has absolutely no relationships with anyone else in the camp (which is hard to believe). Prisoners view his antics with a sort of detached air. And the Nazis are "too dumb" to know what's going on! There is absolutely no depiction or thought of anyone organizing any kind of fight-back. Like Schindler, the Nazi to whom "his" Jewish slave laborers looked for salvation, Benigni looks to his individual talents to outwit the Nazis and fool his son into thinking the whole thing is a game, so he will not have to face the prospect of imminent death.
A lot of this becomes quite a stretch in many of the scenes. It's hard to believe the Nazis could be as stupid as depicted here.
This fantasy belies the true story of thousands of concentration camp inmates organizing mass fight-backs and hundreds of escapes during the war, killing plenty of their Nazi butchers in the process. The made-for-TV movie, Escape From Sobibor, is an excellent antidote to these "don't-fight-back" movies. It is based on the true story of an organized, mass escape in October, 1943 of 300 from the camp in which one-sixth of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were murdered. A combination of heroic inmates and heroic Jewish Red Army prisoners-of-war organized that escape, killing plenty of Nazis on the way out.
Life Is Beautiful garnered seven Academy Award nominations, and is the foreign language film that is being nominated for best picture. Benigni is emerging as a Hollywood hero. No wonder the billionaire movie moguls and the ruling class are lauding Life Is Beautiful. Its message is that only as an individual is there a chance for a "beautiful life." Forget about fighting back collectively with your fellow workers, prisoners, etc. And no wonder this movie's on the Vatican's best-of-all-time list, the same Vatican that told people not to fight back during World War II, allowing Hitler and the Nazis to rampage through Europe in the name of anti-communism.
Our youth are also being indoctrinated with a passive outlook towards fascism. A children's book titled, The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen is another fictional story that is written for a young adolescent audience. It has received the highly acclaimed Newberry Prize Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Thousands of children have read this story and it continues to appear in classrooms across the nation. It is about a young girl that travels back in time and imagines herself in a Nazi concentration camp. The book's main lesson is explained in the epilogue of the story. The author quotes a Jewish historian by the name of Emmanuel Ringelbaum, "Not to act, not to lift a hand against the Germans had become the quiet passive heroism of the common Jew." The author adds, "That heroism--to resist being dehumanized, to simply outlive one's tormentors, to practice the quiet, everyday caring for one's equally tormented neighbors. To witness. To remember. These were the only victories of the camps.".
This is nothing but a lie. On the previous page, she cites the death tolls of all the major concentration camps. Yolen fails to explain whythe death toll of Sobibor was 250,000 versus Treblinka with 840,000, Chelmo with 360,000, and Auschwitz with 2,000,000. That would have been a history lesson worth telling to middle school aged students.
Real life, not Hollywood's tinsel-town crap, taught us that it was the organized might of the Red Army, millions of Soviet workers, communist-led partisan underground movements in Nazi-occupied countries of
Europe which defeated fascism and saved tens of millions from Nazi genocide. Only the collective power of a communist-led working class can eliminate the horrors of fascism, spawned by capitalism, and thereby make life beautiful for our class.
Recently another comrade and myself spent an hour distributing several hundred leaflets and selling Challenge outside a Brooklyn bus barn to bus drivers who work for the New York City Transit Authority. The workers seemed very interested in PLP's views on the issue discussed in the leaflet, the murder of an African immigrant worker, Amadou Diallo, by four New York cop-assassins. One worker who had just finished reading the leaflet began pointing out particular paragraphs to one of his co-workers who had just started reading it.
All in all, 27 workers took Challenge. Three workers in a row gave me a dollar each for the paper. Many workers donated more than the usual quarter. Two workers noted the May Day sticker reproduced in the leaflet and said they wanted to go to the March in Washington, DC. A number of drivers stopped for extended discussions.
We will be returning on a regular basis to this bus barn, with leaflets, Challenge, May Day ticket books and contact sheets. We will be bringing some youth with us to enable them to meet these workers. The comrade with me is a high school teacher and the workers seemed very ready to talk with her about the plight of children in the public schools, drawing the link between what's happening there to the problems of transit workers.
These bus drivers are facing accelerated speed-up on the job. The increase in ridership without a corresponding increase in buses and drivers has put real pressure on the drivers to maintain schedules. We will be discussing these issues with the drivers and showing their relationship to the bosses' "solution" to their economic and overproduction crises--war.
Winning transit workers to communism--workers on whose jobs the life of the city depends, not to mention the profits of most of New York's bosses--is a crucial goal in a city like New York.
Brooklyn Red
There have been a lot of articles recently about how the U.S. bosses are worried about whether they can have a reliable army to fight the ground war they will need to hold on to a share of the oil and power.
Most of the articles talk about the "Vietnam Syndrome," and how the bosses are afraid that they won't be able to count on the troops to fight, and on how the public will react if thousands of U.S. soldiers come back in body bags from an oil war.
An article in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out another aspect of the bosses' troubles in keeping their army going: over 75,000 soldiers are single parents, and many more are married to other soldiers. The article asks how the public will respond when the war suddenly creates thousands of instant orphans. The article also points out that at any given moment, the equivalent of a full combat division is pregnant.
The author suggests three possible solutions for the bosses: win more youth to join the army for patriotic reasons (unlikely), or raise pay and benefits enough to recruit unmarried soldiers (expensive), or-guess what? Bring back the draft.
This is not to underestimate the power of the bosses; they still have state power and (sometimes) know how to use it, but they are weak in so many ways that it is clearer every day that they can and must be taken.
A Reader
I am a student at Franklin High School in Seattle, Washington. Two weeks ago, after school one day, the bus driver pulled our bus off to the side and told students who didn't have a bus card (or weren't assigned to the bus) to get off. Most had no idea who she was talking to, so no one left. She used this as an excuse to call security. When security arrived, we expected her to ask everyone on the bus if they were assigned to it or had a green bus card, I mean a bus card. She did not. Instead, the security guard asked her to name people who she felt did not ride the bus. Everyone she named was black! I found out later that there were other students (white and Asian) who also did not ride the bus but whose names were not called. They had been riding as long and as often as the black students who were kicked off. The school authorities have done nothing, of course.
The next week, I passed out a leaflet at school explaining the incident and why it happened. I pointed out that what the bus driver did was racist, but she did it because society has taught her to be racist. She assumed that the students who most likely would be breaking the rules were black, and mostly male. This is a clear example of how racism is taught to us in society. The leaflet linked this incident to the other racist murders in New York, California and Texas. It also stated that there was to be a PLP meeting that day at lunch. The student body was incredibly receptive. No leaflets were found on the ground or in the trash. (At Franklin, this is the highest respect.)
That day I was approached several times by students about the incident, and the lunch meeting was a success. The group (which was multi-racial) talked about the reason for racism in society and the discussion led to communism. The students agreed with a lot of the ideas raised and a few gave their phone numbers. People from the bus came and agreed to come to other meetings.
We are discussing writing a petition to get rid of the bus card rule and to stop other acts of racism around the school. I am hoping to get some of these students to come to May Day. One student came to our forum about Rwanda and has already decided to help us pass out Challenge in front of school. He enjoyed the forum so much, in fact, he agreed to convince his history teacher to show a documentary about it and have a discussion on it, which I will most likely go to.
This incident made me very angry, but it also woke me up to the necessity of communism and I am reminded why I am fighting for it. I am happy with the quick response of the Party up here, for it has helped my base building a lot, as you can tell. When we respond quickly to any incident, no matter how small, the results can be big. We need to stay on top of struggles like this one because, when the masses are exposed to more and more fascist and racist incidents, we have to be ready to give leadership and an option that will work. Keep struggling, comrades!
Red (and Yellow School) Bus Rider
I am a retired worker, member of Local 371 AFSCME, around and in the Party for 32 years. On February 17th, I went to the Local's Delegate Assembly meeting and helped my comrade who is still working, sell Challenge. It turned out to be a very exciting night as we sold 43 papers and another 10 were taken by a worker to sell on his job. I also noted that we collected about $22 which was more than double what we used to collect per paper in the old days. No longer do we say "25cents" and that has been a wise decision.
I listened to the delegates speak on their individual issues from the workplace and to the Local and the International leaders, and noted how the big picture was missing. It was Giuliani's fault, not his administrators, that Stanley Hill, the former DC 37 leader wasn't that bad a guy, that the grievance against this one worker was unjust and how the protective workers had too high a caseload. For some reason, it was clearer to me than in the past that a tremendous lack of class-consciousness existed among the workers with the possible exception of DC 37's new leader who knew very well what his class-collaboration role was.
It reminded me of Lenin's dictum in What Is To Be Done that a true analysis of events comes only from communists; that instinctive hatred of oppression does not explain why things happen, nor point the way towards what needs to be done, that only communists through their newspaper can analyze, evaluate and move the workers onto the right path towards communism.
The fact that Challenge is now doing this was what made my visit to the 371 meeting worthwhile. The main issue this night was the Diallo murder by the NYPD cops whose 19 bullets hit him out of the 41 bullets shot at him. While the union decided to march on Wall Street on March 3rd against those fascist killers, they still need to know that those bullets drilled into Diallo was no accident and that the entire system is already fascist. It's not only those four cops, but Giuliani, his police commissioner, the liberal Clinton and their masters from Rockefeller to Mellon to Morgan who belong behind bars as the source of all the murders by the cops, encouraging them with their policies which make such murders absolutely possible, if not probable.
The workers don't yet understand that, but because Challenge exists and is thriving more and more they can come to understand it. The instinctive hatred they have for exploitation and repression must be turned into a consistent class position that holds under all circumstances. Lenin knew this and taught it and today the Progressive Labor Party is doing the same thing. That is why I was energized by going to the delegates' to the meeting and helping in the sale of the best paper for the world's proletariat today.
One Who Learned Marxism-Leninism From PLP
John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx is a large, overcrowded, factory looking building. When school started in September there were more than 5,000 students jammed into a building designed for 3,400. It is supposed to serve students from four neighborhoods, Inwood, Marble Hill, Kingsbridge and Riverdale. Marble Hill and Inwood are working class immigrant neighborhoods, while Kingsbridge is an integrated working class neighborhood. Riverdale is a mostly white neighborhood made up mainly of professionals, with some stock market people and business owners thrown in.
For several years there has been a push by the Riverdale Co-op Owners Association (RCOA) to have the Local School Board change the designation of the local middle school from grades 6 through 8 to a middle school/high school combination with grades 6 through 12. That way, the students from Riverdale could have their own school, one that would be mostly white. The RCOA has made no bones about it. They feel that having their children in a school with working class, black and Latin, and immigrant students hurts their property values.
Over the last 20 years, as the population at JFK has become poorer and more black and Latin, the residents of Riverdale have abandoned the school. As more black and Latin students came to JFK parents in Riverdale gave in to racism and pulled their children out. They refused to fight for better education and services at the school. They wrote letters to local papers putting out some of the most vile and racist garbage about the students at JFK. Now they want to complete their secession from the Bronx. They are caught in this growing fascist ideology that gets people to believe that the only thing they should worry about is themselves, not other people. Ultimately this fascism will make it easy for the bosses to pick us all off one-by-one. The more wedges that are placed between people, whether by race or class, the harder it is for all workers to fight back.
This is not to say that JFK is a haven of education. It is overcrowded and rundown. But most importantly, JFK and the proposed Riverdale Academy will teach students that capitalism is great. They will both teach children that if they don't make it, it is their own fault, not the fault of a racist system that is set up to fail students and keep them out of the workforce. Neither of these schools will teach children or their parents that we need to get rid of capitalism. That the only way to guarantee a good education and a decent life is working together to build a communist revolution.
Red Riverdale Reader
I have been following closely the brutal murder of a black immigrant man by the NYC police, who fired 41 shots at him and hit him 19 times.
I have read articles in other left-wing papers, such as the People's Weekly World of the Democratic Party ass-lickers Communist Party, USA. They call for Civilian Review Boards and community control of the police. I think that's crazy.
I agreed with your article on the killing. The police are the defenders of the capitalist state. I am reading The State and Revolution by Lenin, and he points out that the capitalist state must be smashed. Didn't these other so-called Marxists read him? As you pointed out, the police are there to terrorize the poor and workers and keep them in line for the bosses to continue to rule and make profits.
I also agree that we need a mass communist Party in this country that can win people to the need for a revolution against capitalism to get rid of cops killing and terrorizing us.
But I have some questions. You call for "Power to the workers" and then claim that the Party will run everything? Is "Workers Power" the same thing as the Party running everything? I read a book by an Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci; he talks about workers' councils where the workers would make decisions at their workplace.
Also, when I look at some places where one party runs everything like in China, I can see that the workers don't have real power but the party does, even controlling the police to repress workers, probably since there is a lot of unemployment and sweatshops in China. So I believe that communism must be just what it says: "Workers Power."
What kind of police force will there be in communist society as you see it and how will police abuse of people be avoided? I want a communist society where equality exists and where working people will truly be free and not have to live in fear. Maybe you could clear up my confusion by responding to my letter. Thank you.
Red Punk
CHALLENGE RESPONDS: It's elementary Marxism, that the police as the racist goon squads of capitalism. The attempt to reform the cops, to try to change bit its nature as servants and protectors of the racist bosses is another of the many ways opportunist groups like the CPUSA exposes its anti-Marxism. The same is true about the current government of China, which is not communist and is a far cry from what used to be called Red China in the 1950's and '60s. Today, the government of China is the main enforcer of "market socialism," the name given to the return of capitalism there.
So the role of cops in today's China is very similar to that of cops in the U.S.Ñto oppress workers and protect the capitalists. Under communism, the role of any kind of policing will be the opposite of that under capitalism: the police will be part of the power of the communist working class and will protect workers' interests against whatever criminal activity might survive the revolution, as well as against the capitalists who survive and will try to recover their power by any means necessary.
Gramsci's proposal of workers' councils, where workers can make decisions at their workplaces, has a major flaw: it builds localism as opposed to the collective interests of all workers. Without a revolutionary organization leading all workers, local workers' councils could make decisions that would favor them above other workers. For example, let's say that communists have liberated a region like part of North America. The Party decides that autoworkers in a Detroit plant must send part of their production to help workers in Mexico or Alabama who are still fighting their oppressors. It is then possible that workers at the Detroit plant will decide against this, saying they need more cars in their area, or for any other reason. If that happened an international communist Party made up of masses of workers would struggle with these workers to overturn their decision because it is counter to the class interests of millions of other workers.
Finally, workers will only be free and live without fear when they stop being wage slaves, when they stop being just another commodity selling their labor power for the profits of a few bosses. Communism means abolishing wage slavery and is indeed the only real workers' freedom.
Hope this short answer helps the thinking on the important questions you raise.