From campus picket to transit strike: workers bring solidarity
Fresh from picketing the City University of New York Central Office to denounce the Chancellor for sending a phalanx of NYPD cops to brutally attack and arrest students at Brooklyn College who were calling for CUNY to divest from Israeli securities, several members of my faculty union walked downtown to join striking New Jersey Transit engineers.
Hundreds of motor engineers had shut down the third-largest commuter rail network in the U.S. The striking workers, members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, had been working without a contract since 2019 and were demanding wage increases that would provide them the same pay as engineers who work for nearby railroads: Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North. Currently, NJ Transit engineers earn $10 less an hour than the other engineers.
The workers were grateful for our solidarity and words of encouragement. They explained how NJ Transit tried to recruit strikebreakers from the other railroads, but workers refused to be scabs. They were also furious with Governor Philip Murphy, who called the strike “a slap in the face of every commuter and worker who relies on NJ Transit,” trying to divide working class commuters from the striking workers.
This is typical of Democratic Party officials, who are no friends of the working class. Governor Murphy worked for the investment firm Goldman Sachs for 23 years, where he held a variety of executive positions and came away with $60 million in personal wealth. One of Murphy’s positions was President of Goldman Sachs (Asia), headquartered in Hong Kong, which profited from an investment in Yue Yuen Industrial, a Taiwan-based shoemaker notorious for abusing its Chinese factory workers, with wage theft and unsafe working conditions.
The day began with workers in my union walking a picket line in support of students arrested for demonstrating solidarity with victims of a U.S./Israel-imposed genocide, which Biden and the Democrats in Congress enabled. It ended with showing solidarity with striking workers up against a Democratic Party ruling class governor.
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Govt cuts services—only workers’ power can save us
As part of the federal government cuts and Trump’s desire to eliminate community organizations, many of them have been affected and find themselves in a very difficult situation. They have had to make staff cuts due to budgetary constraints, ending programs such as English classes, closing committees and legal services, among others. The community organization where our club does Progressive Labor Party (PLP) work has a multi-million dollar deficit, and a few days ago they sent layoff letters to a large group of workers, while others had their hours reduced. So, a few days ago, these unionized workers held two protests in front of the offices. The situation for these laid-off workers is very difficult; many of them are currently on the unemployment line, and others will join in the coming days. The first action wasn’t very large, but I had the opportunity to participate in it to support them, shouting slogans alongside them. The second one was larger and demanded no to layoffs and that the organization seek other alternatives, among other demands.
I had the opportunity to distribute CHALLENGE, and at that moment, I reaffirmed my conviction that if the working class were in power, living in a communist society, these things wouldn’t happen. I made this comment to a friend who was at the protest and who reads our newspaper, and he agreed with me.
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Border ads Outrage over racist border patrol recruitment ads
Riding WMATA (metro) to work in the Washington, D.C. area, I’ve been horrified to see ICE / Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) recruitment posters posted at multiple locations in the stations and trains!! Progressive Labor Party has now taken up the struggle to have WMATA remove these ads by leafleting at protests and raising the issue in our local organizations. We have reached out to the transit union, ATU 689, to demand management remove these ads. This will be an ongoing campaign through the end of June. WMATA has chosen this time to run these ads because many tourists will be in town and so workers from all over the U.S. will be exposed to them.
ICE / CBP has arrested over a thousand of our neighbors around the country in the past several months, mostly with a complete lack of due process, often using plain clothes agents in unmarked vehicles, and including violently abducting ,kidnapping, and disappearing people, engaging in all kinds of deceptions, bashing in car windshields and dragging people out through the broken glass, etc.
ICE / CBP’s actions are flagrant violations of every type of law. And WMATA, in posting these recruitment posters, is an accomplice to the abductions, disappearances, and gross violations of human and legal rights. The rulers and their friends at WMATA promote immigrants as scapegoats for crime, drugs, and unemployment as they do with Black workers. Most importantly, they divide and distract U.S.-born workers from fighting the bosses. Capitalists make large profits from paying immigrants less; this practice also drives down wages for everyone. Now, Florida, incredibly, wants to bring back child labor!
To join the protest, call WMATA at 202-637-1328, write
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Capitalism, a house of horrors
Capitalism is in crisis the world over, and the most powerful ruling classes – mainly from the U.S. and China - are galloping into another world war. Capitalism has an increasingly insatiable need for growing larger profits to remain competitive. In the U.S., the bosses’ falling profits require them to fix this with increasing levels of attacks and exploitation of the workers. I find this reminiscent of the musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” written in the 1960s as a metaphor for capitalism and imperialism. There, the demands of the cannibalistic plant Audrey II to “feed me” more and more human flesh to continue to live, leave behind the byproduct of capitalism…Human carnage.
To continue, the bosses must fan the flames of racism, nationalism and sexism to divide the working class. We learn these deadly ideas from childhood. But by reading CHALLENGE we learn why these divisive ideas NEVER benefit the working class. No matter what OUR origins are, workers of the world have a proud history of fighting back under the banner that “WE have nothing to lose but our physical and ideological chains.” FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM. If you didn’t march with us on May Day this year, come next year. Meanwhile, join Progressive Labor Party to eventually smash this vicious system.
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Chinese capitalism and overproduction
Recently, the U.S. and China decided to put a 90-day freeze on the high tariffs each had imposed on each other’s exports. The Trump administration was worried that its tariffs would cause a recession, and was also concerned when China threatened to cut off the U.S. from exports of rare earth minerals (used to make computers, smartphones, cars and by the military — for precision-guided missiles, tanks, aircraft, fighter jets, satellites). China — heavily reliant on exports —was nervous it would lose the U.S. market, which accounts for 15 percent of China’s exports.
This deal does not solve the problem of overproduction faced by Chinese capitalism.
China’s economy rests largely on the export of commodities produced by 211 million workers in 6 million factories, both large and small. Domestic consumption is stunted for a variety of reasons:
1. China has a meager social safety net. Pensions and unemployment insurance are low, so Chinese workers feel compelled to save a large fraction of their pay for retirement or if they’re laid off. This depresses consumer spending.
2. Because banks pay low interest on savings accounts and the stock market is risky, workers in recent decades have been buying apartments as an investment, an investment they were sure would appreciate in value. Construction boomed and cities raised money by selling land to developers. This created a housing bubble, which a few years ago burst and apartment prices plummeted, erasing much of the savings of workers, who now spend even less on domestic consumption.
With fewer buildings being built, the construction industry has been hit hard and construction workers have lost jobs. Cities have less tax money and have had to cut services.
The Chinese government has responded to the crisis of housing overproduction by spending more than a trillion dollars to build more factories and equip them with the latest in robots and automation. But that creates more commodities that need to be sold and with diminished domestic demand, those goods need to be exported. In 2024, exports grew by 5.9 percent while imports grew by only 1.1 percent.
Despite China’s claim to be socialist, it’s actually a capitalist system with heavy state intervention. But capitalism — even with government intervention — cannot prevent capitalist crises of overproduction and stagnating growth.
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