We refuse to promote reformist illusions about "good" schools under capitalism. On the other hand, we must avoid the cynical judgment that what happens in the classroom doesn't matter or that we can't do anything until after the revolution. This idea is a cop-out. A teacher who refuses to teach is as great a criminal as a doctor who refuses to treat disease or injury. Youth don't need reformists, nor do they need teachers who actively or passively encourage the anti-working class illusion that students can't learn. Unless we fight to teach, we can never hope to win students to the Party. The first step in base-building is to show in practice whose side we're on.
Many teachers in our Party have fought for the pro-working class approach to the job. When this attitude has been combined with communist politics, the results have spoken for themselves. It's no accident that one of the most successful May Day organizers in the schools is a teacher who coached her students to achieve spectacular results on the New York State Regents history exam. She taught them what they needed to learn in order to pass, and she taught them communism as well. In the process, she helped them write clear, well-organized essays exposing the bosses' vicious anti-communist lies about Stalin. It's no accident that many of these students have marched on May Day and defended this comrade against school board attacks. She had proved to them that she and the Party were on their side. We could point to other similar positive examples.
But not enough. Two lines on education are struggling with each other in our Party. Too often, we have baited ourselves by sounding purely negative and ignoring the opportunities for Party-building in the rulers' fascist schools. This is a dangerous weakness we must correct. The serve-the-working-class line must win out over the "it doesn't matter line."
We mustn't worship undisciplined, spontaneous militancy and merely applaud young people's understandable alienation of and hatred for the schools. Without communist politics, this alienation and hatred can easily leave young workers vulnerable to fascist demagoguery. We don't want to promote careerism. On the other hand, if the bosses make students take tests, we can't buy the liberal line that because the tests are racist, difficult, and divisive, we should take a hands-off approach. Sure, the tests are bad! But if we as communists merely help the students fail them, we are just as bad, because we are unwittingly helping the bosses create a self-fulfilling prophecy! The tests are here; our students will take them, and we must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the students as their advocates--just as we explain the bosses' motives and plans behind the tests.
We must immerse ourselves in the struggle to win youth to learn about the world and to want to learn more. Challenge should play a central role in this process. Using it takes our communist analysis into the classroom Reading and studying the paper arms teachers and students with communist ideas. But the Party press alone won't accomplish the job. We must also launch broad, content-related fights in every area, exposing the bosses' lies and watered-down junk and fighting for a scientific approach to every subject. We must turn the classrooms into political battlegrounds, training our young people to take on the curriculum--to master the material and take on its fascist character. More stories about these struggles should appear in Challenge.
We must undertake to educate all working class youth with whom we come into contact, not surrender the job to the enemy, whose rotten culture is mis-educating youth 24 hours a day by keeping them in ignorance or promoting vicious capitalist illusions. Students who don't challenge the drive to flunk them can't hope to be taken seriously as leaders of the working class. Teachers can't hope to provide communist leadership if they don't or won't teach.
The issue is sharpening every day. Factions among the bosses are vying to shape the schools to serve their own particular profit needs. As inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies, marching ever closer to wider war and eventual world war, the U.S. bosses crack their fascist whip over the working class. Different gangs of bosses have their own approaches to education. All are equally fascist. We have described for some time now the forms of open fascism crushing our youth in the bosses' schools--metal detectors, racist cops, repressive administrations, etc. We must advance our understanding of these fascist developments by analyzing the process of this takeover campaign, and the massive wave of testing it brings with it. Key here will be to expose the wolves in sheep's clothing, the liberal Rockefeller agents who promote educational reform, hoping to sucker young workers into supporting U.S. imperialism's grand strategy for world domination.
We obviously can't leave the field open to the bosses. The Rockefeller rulers know that politics is primary. They are committed to teaching a patriotic, nationalist, anti-communist ideology that builds support for the fascist centralization and control of schools. Their starting point is the patently obvious fact that the current schools are a nearly total failure. They use all their liberal think tanks and media to present these changes (from more testing to school uniforms) to workers as being "good for their children." It will, they point out, improve learning. And it may, but only to serve capitalism. It wants better educated, disciplined, pro-imperialist workers but with a much lower standard of living. Workfare and prison labor influence wages of the "best and brightest" of these young workers as well.
We can advance in the face of this fascist assault. It opens great opportunities for us, as it poses many problems for the bosses. That is the history of all communist struggles. We advance within the storm of fascism and imperialist war, if we understand our task and have the confidence to undertake it.
The driving force behind this takeover is the profit need of major U.S. corporations. U.S. capitalism is facing fierce competition from imperialists around the world. In the midst of a crisis of overproduction, the world's industrial powers are producing frantically and fighting savagely to outsell the competition. This is driving the imperialists into war. As this develops, they need U.S. schools to do a much better job in producing well-trained cogs for their companies, and for their war machine. The aim of the corporate takeovers is to modernize, rationalize and privatize some services, but basically keep the schools public.
The federal government and many state governments are key players in this educational takeover. The federal government aims for national influence through Title I, national standards and testing. It backs New American Schools, formed with $140 million from Xerox, IBM, Boeing, AT&T, Ford, and GM. New Jersey's Governor Whitman has engineered the takeover of the Newark, Jersey City, and Passaic school systems. California's Governor Wilson took over Compton and Richmond schools. Governors in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan handed over Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit schools to a corporate model under the control of the mayor. Former army generals were made "CEO's" of the Seattle and Washington, DC schools.
When Moises went to the Chicago Vocational Career Academy (CVCA), to confront the principal on the charges and the nature of the investigation at a Local School Council (LSC) meeting, the principal ordered him thrown out by the police. A friend who was there told three other teachers at the meeting, that she couldn't believe they just sat there while this was going on. She pointed out that Moises was railroaded, and that if it could happen to him they might be next.
Moises had been reporting to the Board since January 15. On Friday, he was told to leave since he was suspended without pay. Before leaving, he spoke to his coworkers about this attack. Almost everyone agreed that we needed to fight the attacks against students and school workers. Moises then gave a speech on the fascist nature of the Board and their investigators. Again he was thrown out. But this time it was the director of Vallas' own special police who threatened to "take him out."
PLP teachers have been organizing against fascism for a long time so we have to understand why the Board is taking these actions now. The big reason is that the bosses are reshaping the schools as indoctrination centers for their future cannon fodder in the military and wage slaves. The bosses are worried about the education of their future workers in some of their high-tech industries and for their more advanced military hardware. They are improving their training in the schools, for a small cadre of students. For the vast majority, there are schools which are holding pens for students with little or no teaching going on, transitional centers, the streets, juvenile detention centers, jails, the army and slave labor.
Communist teachers and school activists who organize against these assaults on students and teachers are being systematically attacked and weeded out. In October 1998, CEO Vallas established his own special police called the Department of Investigations. Their job is to investigate critics and activists of the current administration and come up with something to charge them with. Then the Board suspends them without pay for months while waiting for a dismissal hearing.
At this point many people resign or retire, joining the ever-increasing number of unemployed teachers thanks to the wholesale termination of the teachers in the reserve pool. The Office of Accountability has neatly and efficiently streamlined the process for firing teachers.
The desired result is to intimidate those who remain in the schools. The pressure on them to conform and follow the rules is much greater. But this will not work. There is growing anger among teachers, parents and students. Teachers are fighting the firings, parents are putting up a fight in the LSC's and PTA's, and students are protesting the racism of the standardized tests. PLP is active in all these struggles, and we must coordinate our counterattack against this viciously racist administration. We must point out why the bosses need fascist control in the schools and why the only solution is communist revolution.
Our continuing plan around this case is to take on the fascist Board as our responsibility. We will broaden out our struggle and link it to the other ongoing struggles against the Board. For example, recently we went to a demonstration against the CASE exams and presented our case to the demonstrators. In addition, we were invited to the offices of an educational reform group that wants to interview Moises on their cable show. We will also reach out to teachers, parents and students at the CVCA who have been willing to help in the past and to anyone who would like to help now. Above all we will use this opportunity to build the only growing force that will put an end to these fascist tactics and attacks, the Progressive Labor Party!
Learn the ABC. It won't be enough, but learn it! Don't be dismayed by it! Begin!
You must know everything.
You must take over the leadership.
Learn, man in the asylum!
Learn, man in the prison!
Learn, woman in the kitchen!
Learn, sixty year olds!
You must take over the leadership.
Seek out the school, you who are homeless!
Acquire knowledge, you who shiver!
You who are hungry, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
You must take over the leadership.
Don't be frightened to ask, comrade!
Don't be talked into anything.
Check for yourself!
What you do not know yourself you don't know.
Scrutinize the bill,
It is you who must pay it.
Put your finger on each item, ask: How did this get here? You must take over the leadership.
Another worker agreed to second the motion against the war. When the union president opened the floor for "new business," the first worker rose to ask for a moment of silence for our co-workers in southern Europe in the oil storage depots, oil refineries and chemical plants who have been killed by NATO bombs. After everyone stood in respect for these fallen workers, the president reluctantly ceded the floor for discussion. Where there had been a low background hum throughout the entire meeting before this moment, the noise suddenly stopped for the motion.
"This war has nothing to do with humanitarianism," said the worker. "The simple fact alone that the U.S. is firing missiles coated with depleted uranium directly into urban areas proves this. We don't have to be scientists to know that those exploded shells turn the uranium into dust in the air stream. And scientists tell us that depleted uranium has a half life of four million years. Just like in the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, the aftermath of the U.S. war in southern Europe will be unprecedented cancer across the board. Some humanitarians!" A few sounds of disgust were heard from some workers.
The worker presenting the motion, mistakenly thinking he was about to face a political attack, hurried to his next point. He explained the origins of the conflict in the area and dispelled the lies that the workers there are simply more "prone" to ethnic hatred resulting in war. "These conflicts are driven by IMF austerity programs," he said. "By the Structural Adjustment programs of the World Bank and by further deliberate plans by the U.S. government to ethnically isolate groups of people....and all were initially resisted by workers across ethnic lines in spite of the calculated policies designed to turn them against each other." Now the workers in the hall were getting angry, but not at the worker presenting the motion. They were nodding their heads in support.
"In fact," he continued, "this war is to protect oil, like the pipeline to Vlore, Albania that goes right through Kosovo. The bosses can't take `their' oil from the Caspian Sea north into Russia because it defeats their purpose of keeping it away from the Russian bosses. They certainly don't want it going east to China for the same reason, and taking it south through Iran and Iraq is unthinkable for them. Their only solution is transporting the oil westward to the Mediterranean. They have to protect the trillions of dollars in profits that will fall into their pockets if they successfully monopolize the oil market and isolate their competitors."
The worker distributed maps of the area and a magazine article from the National Geographic to make the point even clearer. "Even this month's National Geographic knows what this war is about," he said as he flipped open to a page showing workers in the Caspian area wearing hazardous cleanup suits that everyone in the meeting were intimately familiar with. `Where Exxon goes, Uncle Sam follows' says the caption under the picture, which means to me that U.S. troops will be sent where Big Oil identifies its interests. What's more, the New York Times published a map of oil routes earlier this year. Taken together, its clear that this war is for oil and for protecting the profits of the bosses. I move we condemn this war as a war for profit that is against the interest of workers everywhere."
Several workers stood to support the motion. One held up a copy of the map from the New York Times, saying, "Brothers and Sisters, it is interesting to see, when you look at the map of these pipelines and oil routes, that these are the same lines Hitler tried to hold in World War II. I support the motion to condemn!" The president, unable to find a dissenting opinion, called the vote on the motion, and the oil workers unanimously voted to condemn this war as a war on workers.
"We no longer need these giant facilities to make steel. Minimills are building sheet plants and making life miserable for the big guys. We're talking about a long, drawn out endgame for Big Steel."--A steel expert at the Brookings Institution
"We did everything we needed to do to make our mill the best. But this has a lot to do with economics and world affairs."--A laid off third-generation steelworker.
GARY, IN, May 3 -- Today 250 workers and union hacks picketed Senator Lugar's office as part of the "Stand Up for Steel" campaign. Big Steel is behind this campaign. The USWA (steelworkers' union) leadership is organizing busloads of steelworkers to deliver the bosses' message; impose quotas on imported steel and roll back imports to pre-1998 levels.
It was the anti-May Day! Every worker was given either an American flag or a red, white and blue picket sign. While the crowd was integrated, probably two-thirds were white men. On May Day we brought to life the slogan, "Workers of the World, Unite!" At today's rally, the steel bosses, politicians, and the union leadership paraphrased Hitler's slogan, "American Jobs for American workers." With contract time rapidly approaching, Stand Up for Steel is an all out effort to shift the blame of layoffs and mill closings onto the Japanese or Russian steelworkers. It undermines workers' unity, sabotages any effort against striking steel bosses, and lines steelworkers up for war.
The steel industry is reeling from the economic collapse last year in Asia, Russia and Brazil, which sent cheap steel flooding to the U.S. Over a two month period, the price of flat-rolled steel fell from more than $320 to $250 a ton. U.S. steel consumption reached a record 138 million tons in 1998, up from 96 million tons in 1987. Most mills have been running at up to 95 percent of operating capacity, but that still is not enough to meet demand. For the last decade, steel imports have filled the gap. Steel imports account for more than 20 percent of the domestic market. U.S. steel companies buy 25 percent of this foreign steel--mainly raw slabs that become finished steel.
"It's not that we haven't done things right....We just can't compete with slave wages."--A Weirton steelworker.
"We used to have an influx of young bodies. We'd have 20, 25 guys in the hot mill. Now it's eight. You can walk for long periods in the mill and not see anyone."--A high seniority steelworker
The main threat to our jobs and future comes from the bosses need to maximize profits with increased production, lower wages, and fewer jobs. Steel is shifting to low-cost minimills like Nucor Corp., turning cheap scrap metal into steel with electric-arc furnaces and non-union workers.
Over the last decade, to compete globally, Big Steel pumped $50 billion into modernization, increased productivity, and wiped out 350,000 jobs. Twenty years ago, it took 10 man-hours to produce a ton of steel. Today, that is down to under four. At minimills, it is under two man-hours a ton.
This current global crisis, has led to two current wars--one to keep Iraqi oil off the market, and the other for control of oil and gas pipelines in the Balkans. The bombs are falling on workers in Iraq and Yugoslavia, as the bosses "Stand Up for Oil." This campaign is headed in the same direction. Our enemy is not in Tokyo, Moscow, or Rio. Our enemy is in the corporate offices of Gary, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.
The current period of war and global crisis opens tremendous opportunities to build a mass communist PLP among steel workers, and to extend our reach to steelworkers around the world. We are fighting to expand the circulation of Challenge in the mills and build a strong base among steelworkers. We will organize steelworkers to sign statements of solidarity with steel, auto, and refinery workers killed by NATO bombs in Yugoslavia. And we will continue to push forward our efforts to strike the steel bosses this summer.
After developing thin-slab casting in 1989, minimills started making flat-rolled steel that only big mills like LTV and Bethlehem Steel produced before. Minimills had a fraction of domestic output in the early 1980's. Now they account for almost 50 percent of domestic steel output. In the fourth quarter of 1998, the 11 biggest integrated-steel companies sold twice as much steel as the 14-largest minimills--$5.9 billion in combined sales, compared with the minimills' $2.6 billion. Despite twice the sales, the big mills' profits were less than the minimills--$138 million to $199 million.
The woman was murdered at La Brea and 4th Streets, in front of the La Brea Towers Apartments building. The LAPD has a policy of harassing homeless people who leave filthy skid row. Commander David Kalish made the preposterous claim that Lorrigan had no option but to shoot the woman because it happened so fast! PLP is organizing a protest and going to one that others are organizing against these killers.
The capitalists have thrown many off welfare, out of mental hospitals and onto the streets, cutting costs to raise profits. Now they use their paid killers to terrorize and kill many of these workers. Then they justify it, as the DA did in the racist murder of Tyisha Miller and the Sheriffs did in the racist killing of Ricardo Close. The only way to end these racist murders is to destroy the racist profit system, which is based on exploitation and racist murder. That's why we need a mass PLP.
Many are saying that Volpe's admission of guilt shows that the justice system works for victims of police terror.
Challenge disagrees. Firstly, Volpe "confessed" only after the evidence was so blatantly obvious and overwhelming that other cops were forced to testify that he did it. What about the tens of thousands of other cases in which the cops have--literally--gotten away with murder? Secondly, Volpe may be punished (although we doubt the punishment will fit the crime) for torturing Louima, and maybe some of the other cops involved in the case will also be punished. But this won't change the fact that the role of the over 40,000 cops in the NYPD, and all police departments throughout the U.S., is to serve and protect the bosses' racist system.
The conviction of one or several cops won't change the nature of the police under capitalism. Bosses need racism to survive. The U.S. bosses steal over $250 billion in extra profits each year because they can super-exploit black, Latin and immigrant workers. This racist superexploitation lowers the wage scale of ALL workers. "Fighting crime" is not the cops' real job. Their main role (be they white, black, Latin, Asian, men or women) is to commit crimes--enforcing racism against workers.
It will be good to see Volpe pay for his crime (if he does), but there are still 40,000 racist cops to go.
"Mexico has finally beat the great nation of Japan for the position of #1importer of foods produced in California," said Gov. Davis.
Zedillo's visit came with speeches about immigration, prop. 187, the 395 workers known to have died trying to cross the border since Operation Gatekeeper began, Chiapas, and education. Zedillo met with groups like the Farm Workers' Union, immigrants' rights Groups, and latino politicians and business groups. He and Davis said that economic development in Mexico would help stop deaths at the border.
Zedillo talked to over 500 businessmen and community leaders about the great benefits of investing in Mexico, as well as creating more solid ties between Mexico and California. He announced that TELMEX would move its offices from Houston, Texas to San Diego, Calif. as a symbol of this plan. Gov. Davis ended the program by announcing that the Mattel Toy Company would invest $30 million to open a new plant in Monterrey, which, in a few years, would create 2,500 jobs. At the same time, Davis said that the US Dept. of Transportation would carry out a study of infrastructure needs for the border area between San Diego and Baja California, and the opening of 15 "Centers of Commercial Information" in Community Colleges to give information about the great opportunities to invest and trade with Mexico.
This visit and all the publicity it received has two aspects. One is trade, to open Mexico even more to the California industrial bosses, so they can further exploit workers on both sides of the border. The other is to create a supposedly "anti-racist" and patriotic atmosphere in the face of growing attacks on immigrants and all workers. "Long Live Mexico!" yelled L.A. Mayor Richard Riorden.
Thanks to the national campaigns by unions and politicians, thousands of new latino citizens have been brought into the election circus. The armed forces are recruiting more latino soldiers. The working class in California has a large percentage of latinos. The bosses need to win the workers, soldiers, and future soldiers to support their system, and any movement for war. Zedillo's visit fit into this plan. So have the parades, prizes and heroe's welcome given to Sgt. Andrew Ramirez, who was captured and recently freed in Yugoslavia.
Like everything capitalism does, this "progress and unity" means more exploitation of workers in Mexico and the US. But at the same time, the creation of more super-exploited workers, like those in the thousands of maquiladora factories at the border regions of Mexico, and soldiers ordered to fight a war against their interests, create more opportunities for communists to organize these future gravediggers of capitalism. The bosses won't resolve the problems of any worker or soldier. The only way to resolve them is to organize an international communist movement, as the PLP is doing, on both sides of the border. A mass international PLP is what will really bring progress to the workers by destroying capitalism and building a communist society where the workers will produce for the needs of our class.
The resolution, passed by the Latin American Society of Cal State LA (LAS), stated that the current war is a struggle between the U.S. (and Western European) oil capitalists and Russian capitalists over the land, sea routes, and pipelines which connect central Europe to the trillions of dollars in oil in the Caspian Sea area. The resolution brought out facts about the brutal history of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, Iraq and Latin America. It declared that "imperialist war and ethnic cleansing are racist and fascist attacks on all workers and students and we as workers and students cannot sit passively by and allow the mass murder of our working class brothers and sisters to continue."
The idea to pass the resolution was to both raise PLP's line concerning the war as well as to use the resolution at a conference that took place on campus this past weekend. The conference focused on the effects of globalization and neo-liberalism's influences in the Americas. Passing out the resolution against the war at the conference was helpful for many in LAS because people accepted it with enthusiasm.
PLP members raised our line during the opening plenary session. A comrade said, "Given the severity of the current capitalist economic crisis that is waging a war against workers all over the world and the spread of global fascism, it seems that there are two paths before us. Either we take the path towards fascism and war or the long and hard path towards revolution and a society that is communist. Let's come out of this conference not trying to reform capitalism, but let's organize to get rid of it and build a society based on meeting the needs of the workers of the world." The moderator quickly went to the next question, but several hundred people heard our call for communist revolution.
Over the next two days, we distributed 20 Jailbreak pamphlets, 35 copies of Road to Revolution and 75 copies of Challenge. We sold one subscription to Challenge.
We spoke at different workshops. During a workshop on union organizing, a Party member asked the representative from the AFL-CIO why they represented the interests of management and not workers. He talked about the role the union leaders are playing in the current "Stand up for Steel" campaign in trying to tie steel workers to the interests of the bosses and build U.S. nationalism. He also talked about how Boeing uses prison labor, and that workers should fight for workers' power and students should support this fight against capitalist exploitation and oppression. The AFL-CIO representative at the conference asked the PLP member what he thought was needed. He answered, "I'm a communist and what workers need is to fight for a communist society. That's the only way to end capitalism, exploitation, and all the attacks on the working class." The moderator quickly interrupted and changed the subject, but did end by saying that "any communist is welcome to my picket lines. It was the communists and socialists who built the union movement when it meant something in this country."
PLP is raising the struggle with friends in the LAS between reform and revolution. We are going to continue our Challenge sales. We are planning a rally against the war to build revolutionary class politics on campus. We also plan to invite the students in LAS to participate in the campaign against sweatshops and against racist police terror.
Strategically, the NATO air war has been a miserable failure. Having struck out against the Serbian military, its main target has clearly become the Yugoslav civilian population as a whole. Large sections of Serbia have been reduced to "caveman" status (New York Times, 5/25). High explosive bombs have cut off water for 70 percent of Belgrade's population. The civilian electrical supply is now a prime target of NATO's charitable mission. Workers in Belgrade are building makeshift fireplaces out of bricks because they can no longer cook otherwise. Clinton is doing for Yugoslavia what Bush did for Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Serbian army has solidified its ground position in Kosovo. The NATO alliance is crumbling by the minute. Italian bosses want a bombing pause. Germany rejected all talk of ground war. Greece is refusing to let their air space be used for bombing flights from Turkey.
The best Clinton can still hope for is a Russian-brokered deal that will enhance the status of the U.S.'s strategic rivals in Moscow and postpone the inevitable. A far wider and bloodier war on the ground for Caspian and Middle Eastern oil wealth and world domination is only a matter of time. Imperialism will keep launching its periodic mass slaughters for profit until our class destroys it with communist revolution.
Clinton's bloody Balkan fiasco has also deepened divisions within the U.S. ruling class. These splits reached a boiling point over the Clinton impeachment circus. The defeat in Yugoslavia is highlighting them once again. It's now possible to identify some of the forces involved a little more clearly than before.
The use of ground troops in Kosovo appears to be the key political issue now pitting these murderers against each other. The main advocate of "ground war now" is Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain has close ties to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The CSIS wants to use existing troops and the military arsenal at hand to safeguard U.S. bosses' Balkan interests. The CSIS think-tank is linked to the Halliburton Co., which is building the U.S.-backed Bulgaria-Macedonia-Albania pipeline, in competition with a Russian-Bulgarian-Greek combine. Anne Armstrong, the CSIS chairman, is a Halliburton director. Halliburton chairman and former Bush Defense Secretary Dick Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a "conservative" Republican think-tank with positions similar to the CSIS's. CSIS "counselors" include former Vietnam hawk and Carter National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has been ranting lately in the Wall Street Journal for immediate ground war (5/24). All these forces are immediately and tactically opposed to Rockefeller's strategy (see below).
At first glance, Halliburton and Rockefeller interests would seem like two peas in a pod. Halliburton wants to build the pipelines; Rockefeller wants to control the oil. So how come Halliburton and Rockefeller are fighting? Halliburton mouthpieces are raking Clinton over the coals because he won't invade Kosovo on the ground now. Rockefeller flunkey Jesse Jackson flies to Belgrade to pray with Milosevic for a deal. Rockefeller's Brookings Institution calls for "compromise on what...we are prepared to accept on the ground" (Richard Haass, 4/29) and a Russian-brokered settlement, even if it must be recognized as a defeat. The Boston Globe, owned by the Rockefeller-friendly New York Times, demands (5/9) that Clinton back off--for now.
Winning contracts for pipeline construction isn't quite the same as the need to gain a stranglehold on oil at the source and the market. The Halliburton gang have a much more short-range, deal-oriented approach to capitalism than the Rockefellers. Their interests coincide in that they can agree on the need for Caspian oil and gas to be shipped through U.S.-built pipelines. Once the lines have been built, Halliburton, like any sleazy real estate broker, will chase after the next deal. And the next deal may well mean trading with the enemy. For example, Halliburton has major contracts throughout Russia and China, Rockefeller's two main long-range strategic threats.
But the Halliburton and Rockefeller interests also diverge exactly where they unite. Sending tens of thousands of troops to protect a few pipeline bonanzas isn't a strategy that can mobilize the U.S. working class for eventual wars involving millions against far more powerful enemies than Milosevic. Halliburton has billions in construction profits at stake. Rockefeller has trillions and a world empire to lose. The Rockefeller interests know that they will ultimately have to confront both the Russians and the Chinese, and that the U.S. military will most probably enter the next World War without allies.
The bottom line is that Halliburton & Co. wants limited ground war for the next quarter's profits. Rockefeller & Co. are willing (reluctantly) to take their lumps in the Balkans now in order to regroup and launch far more devastating war, for far higher oil stakes, later.
At the moment, the Clinton White House appears to be stumbling toward a humiliating deal in the Balkans. U.S. and Russian ground troops will probably be involved. Clinton the mad bomber will ironically portray the deal, if he gets it, as a "humanitarian" victory, because it avoided ground war. Meanwhile, McCain will whine about "stabs in the back," and the Rockefeller forces will develop their plans for liberal fascism and major oil war. Ultimately, the Rockefeller gang will have to co-opt or silence their domestic rivals. The stakes are far too big for the U.S. ruling class to tolerate more than one strategic line. The Clinton impeachment brawl settled nothing. Far sharper internal struggle among the rulers, possibly violent, is in the cards.
Thus, it's imperative we be clear in our goal and what it takes to get there. The road to power must be paved with practice and still more practice. Confidence in ourselves, our Party and in the working class can grow only from applying our line to events large and small. So you might say we are involved in a "confidence game." Only practice--which will enable us to enhance our theory--gives us the eventual tools to take power.
We should be clear that modest, limited efforts will produce little or limited results. There is no get-rich-quick scheme to taking power. Efforts which are too small will produce only smaller results, leading to cynicism. Nor can we rely only on agitation to produce results. Distribution of Challenge is important to Party building, but it must be accompanied by base-building. In the final analysis, it's only the person-to-person political relations based on being in struggle together and having mutual aspirations that will yield new recruits. New recruits will create more communist power which can ultimately lead to important breakthroughs.
The collapse of the communist movement doesn't change the fundamental laws of capitalism. Capitalism is still bedeviled by its internal contradictions. There are serious conflicts between capitalist powers and important cleavages within each capitalist class. Economic development in the capitalist world is wildly uneven. It ranges from the brutal poverty of Africa and most of Asia and Latin America to the considerably better-off industrial world. But even within the latter, vast numbers of workers and others are pauperized and are living impoverished lives. It is clear that capitalism cannot serve the interests of the world's workers.
With the increased maneuverability of capitalism, these contradictions unfold at a slower pace. Many serious crises exist just below the surface. Many smaller crises are seen by all. Many smaller wars are raging and larger wars are on the distant horizon. History has shown us that despite the slowness of the revolutionary process, things can sometimes change quickly. But we can only take advantage of unforeseen developments if we are constantly building the Party. Party building combined with class struggle can keep the Party constantly ready to take advantage of any situation.
Since World War II, the U.S. has escaped a full-blown crisis of an economic, political and military nature. The U.S. was involved in two major wars--Korea and Vietnam. The U.S. economy has suffered several recessions (some quite severe) but no full-scale 1930's-type depression. U.S. rulers have been able to use their new-found maneuverability to smooth over their bumps in politics and the economy. In other words, it's a great help to operate without a mortal enemy. The self-inflicted defeat of the Soviet Union and China in the Cold War was a big dividend for imperialism.
Understanding the situation facing us, alongside improving our practice, will help us achieve the necessary protracted commitment we need in order to carry out a long-range perspective. Increasing the readership of Challenge is crucial to this process. At the same time we must be careful not to encourage "Great Expectations" or unreasonable results. Articles and headlines that foster this help undermine commitment. If you believe something is about to happen and it doesn't, it creates, at best, doubts. Occasional pieces which imply that revolutionary uprisings, economic collapse and World War III are right around the corner are not helpful. Some articles imply that capitalism will die by itself. But the fact is, it can only be defeated by a communist revolution.
The current economic period of capitalism is probably drawing to a close. This doesn't mean tomorrow. But it does mean, as Challenge usually indicates, that many capitalist contradictions are deepening.
However, even if the present period is more of the same, there are still enormous opportunities for our Party. The oppressed workers welcome leadership. With protracted, patient efforts, many more will respond to our leadership. The growth of our Party will cut into the maneuverability of the rulers. An enlarged Party can itself change objective conditions. That is our goal.
Despite our many shortcomings, we have done a decent job under the circumstances. Communism is far from dead. We have kept the red flag flying. Many more emblems of communism will fly because of our efforts.
The thing I will remember most about May Day 1999 is the unity that was so clear among all of the marchers. We were as one. Many people fighting for one cause, communism and a better world.
This was my first May Day, and I enjoyed it very much. On our bus we had many different age groups and personalities, but the one thing we all knew, was that the system we're living in now isn't working. And the only way to make life better for the working class is communist revolution.
During the march I worked with other dedicated young people. We were all on security. Never in my life have I felt so safe than when we were all watching out for each others' safety and making sure the other marchers were safe.
I wasn't a member of the PLP when I stepped on the bus, but when I stepped off, I was. I think that's because when I began the march I knew the system of government wasn't working to insure a happy life for the people, but when I finished the march, I knew the answer to what would make the world better, communist revolution.
Young Brooklyn May Day Marcher
I am enclosing a small donation for Challenge collected among farmworkers here in California. Challenge keeps us informed about the different political developments around the world and give us ammunition to have political discussions with other workers.
A few days before the May Day March in San Francisco, I was invited by a group of 18 farmworkers in a town in the San Joaquín valley. They wanted to know more about the meaning of May Day as the international working class day, and why it is an official holiday worldwide except here in the U.S.
I explained to these men and women farmworkers how May Day was born out of the struggles of workers in Chicago in 1886. But the bosses along with union hacks decided to change that day to Labor Day at the beginning of September to take away the more class conscious May Day. But PLP, as a revolutionary working class Party, couldn't let the bosses and hacks get away with this, and organize mass communist May Day marches each year.
At the end of the meeting, the workers were very grateful. I hope to continue meeting with them. All the information I gave them about May Day I got from Challenge and other PLP literature.
A Farmworker Member of PLP
Why do the US bosses care so much about Kosovo? Sometimes the simplest explanations are the best. Consider this description of Kosovo from pages 4 and 5 of the definitive book about the region (Kosovo: A Short History, NYU Press 1998, by Noel Malcolm, foreign editor of the British Spectator, and a history professor at Cambridge University).
"Geology supplies one essential reason for the enduring historical importance of Kosovo--particularly its eastern half. It contains the greatest concentration of mineral wealth in the whole of south-eastern Europe. The Trepca mine...became in the post-war period one of Europe's largest suppliers of lead and zinc...It also supplied half of [Yugoslavia's] production of magnesite (of which Yugoslavia was the third largest supplier in the world). Important too are the deposits of bauxite and chrome in Western Kosovo; there are large coal mines in both halves of the territory...Kosovo's mineral riches have made the territory a special target for conquest by many armies, from the Romans to the Nazis." Malcolm points out that Kosovo's silver made it "one of the richest places in southern Europe" for centuries during medieval times.
It is a stretch to say that the U.S. ruling class cares about Kosovo because of Caspian oil. In fact, the Clinton administration has sent four cabinet secretaries on more than a dozen trips, and Clinton has met with the presidents of four countries, to promote its favorite plan for the Caspian, called the East-West Transportation Corridor. The aim is to bypass Russia and Iran, as Challenge explains. And for that reason, the U.S. rulers do not want the oil to ever go into the Black Sea, where Russia has too much influence. Instead, the plan--which has a special high-level ambassador pushing it, offering billions in U.S.-backed financing--is for a pipeline across Turkey to the Mediterranean. The pipeline is called Baku-Ceyhan, because it would go from Baku on the Caspian, to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Ceyhan is less than 50 miles from the huge U.S. military base at Incirlik, Turkey.
Reader In The Energy Business
I'm a junior in high school student. I recently participated in a march on May Day, which is held annually. It was my first experience in a march that dealt with today's working people and their power to fight for communism in order to have a world economic system based on the ownership of all property by the community as a whole.
I had a great time participating in the march that took place in San Francisco and I was well-received by people I didn't even know. These people are part of the PLP. We marched for a couple of hours on the streets of San Francisco letting our voices be heard.
After marching we gathered at a park where speeches were made by many participants. They talked about issues that the people are going through and how the cause of these issues should be crushed with communism.
From the park we were taken on a little tour of San Francisco, were given lunch and rode the subway. It was a great time just being together as one whole group.
LA Student
I'm a college teacher who has been a friend of the Party for many years. I use as much of the information in Challenge in my classes as possible. The following are excerpts from a letter to me from one of the students who just completed my course:
"Well, it certainly has been a very different class, to say the least. I went into your class with, what I think, is much more pre-belief in what you say about the government, the media, and capitalism than most others. I am not saying that I have agreed with every single statement you have made, but I would go with about 80-90%.
"I recall that on the first day of class, you said that if we put in our share, you would put in 110%, and you did. You helped me with a speech report, and I was informed of many issues that I was not aware of. I did not know of the killings that were shown in the "Panama Deception." I would sit in that class for three hours and never be bored or restless. In terms of what I would have you add to the course would be a further explanation of Marxism. Maybe make the class read The Communist Manifesto....
"Your heart comes out in your lectures and that is rare these days in school, or at least at this school. It was a great semester and I am already spreading the word of what you tell us to friends and family. In fact, my cousin had to do an essay on human liberation in Kosovo and how tragic the killing is. I let him use the handouts you gave us and told him to revolve the essay around the bull the media is giving us and how it is all a ploy for imperialism and oil control. Well he took my advice and used many of the sources that you had given us. His essay won first place in an essay contest! How's that for spreading the word?... Lets get together for a drink and talk politics!"
My experience so far is that many students like this one are open to an anti-imperialist perspective. Among the faculty, its harder. The newer faculty are open, but many of the tenured faculty put forward the "humanitarian" line and say that anti-imperialism is naïve. When I was in college during the Vietnam War, I was a pacifist. One of my teachers told me, "the trouble with you is that you read too much pacifist literature. I'm going to introduce you to a paper that shows how to fight and defeat imperialism." He gave me a subscription to Challenge. I've subscribed ever since. Now I'm going to give this student and four others subscriptions to Challenge.
A Friend of PLP
The War in Kosovo seems to be an attempt by the Gang of Eight Industrialized Nations to solve the crisis of overcapacity and overproduction. The capitalists are solving the crisis by destroying their overcapacity of weapons (which will have to be replaced) and destroying the production of the Yugoslav economy (reducing competition and opening up Eastern Europe to American and British imperialists).
The bombing campaign has from the beginning been aimed at the industrial and transportational infrastructure of Serbia. Few took seriously the Gang of Eight's lie that the bombing was about human rights. The Gang of Eight's military arm, NATO, has systematically destroyed bridges disrupting trade on the Danube (opening up new markets to some of the Gang of Eight) and factories which all of the Gang of Eight will fight for among themselves to rebuild.
The disruption on the Danube hurts the German capitalists the most and they are now seeking a way to stop the war quickly. The British have the most to gain and they are the most aggressive in Kosovo
The crisis of overproduction will only be temporarily solved by the destruction of the Yugoslav economy. The Gang of Eight have caused tremendous misery and suffering for both Serb and Albanian working people by bombing and by aiding the fascism of the Serb government. After Kosovo the Gang of Eight will start another war (maybe in Korea) in order to profit from their capitalist system of misery and death. It is clearly time that communism put an end to the Gang of Eight.