BOSTON, MA., October 29 — About 50 students and faculty from Roxbury Community College (RCC) marched to the police station today to protest the vicious October 22 police beating of a sixteen-year-old-youth in the Administration Building. The youth had run away from a Department of Youth Services facility in order to be present at the birth of his child.

A student recorded the incident with her cell-phone camera and posted it on Youtube while a cop attempted to intimidate her. If not for her, the incident would have been swept under the rug.  No one except those who had witnessed it knew it had happened. The RCC administration kept it silent for almost a week, helping the police cover up their crime. They didn’t address it on the campus until the Youtube video made it an issue in Boston.

At that point, the RCC President Gomes and VP Mercomes tried to distance the college from the ”bad press” since “the boy was not an RCC student.” They showed their true colors as lackeys of the local ruling class, who will do anything to protect the interests of capitalism. 

Students immediately organized a response, posted signs around the school announcing a march to the police station. Once there, students expressed their outrage at the police and college administration while demanding the firing of the cops guilty of the beating. One student spoke about the police “serving and protecting” the rich and not the working class, giving a political analysis to the class anger being expressed.

Now it remains the task of these student leaders along with PL’ers and other anti-racists to organize the whole RCC community to take a stand against racist police terror. 

The workers of the world are struggling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Jobs are disappearing, wages are falling, and millions of people are being thrown out of their homes and into the streets. In the U.S., over half of the federal budget is going to fight imperialist wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and the rest is being funneled into the hands of the capitalist class through bank bailouts and other giveaways.
Naturally, the ruthless greed and relentless attacks provoke anger in workers. This mass anger represents an opportunity for communists, who must strive to transform this unorganized and often misdirected anger into a mass communist movement. To do this, we must expose one of the bosses’ primary ideological weapons: elections.

Elections are a Ruling-Class Charade

The controlling forces in society — government (including elections), cops, military, schools, culture, etc. — comprise what we refer to as “the state” and are funded, organized and led by the ruling class. They function solely to reinforce the existing, racist structure: bosses exploiting, workers exploited. Elections, no matter who is elected, can NEVER change this.
 The 2008 election provides a recent glaring example of this general statement: Millions of workers turned out to cast their vote for Barack Obama, the highest voter turnout in decades. Perhaps more than in any recent election, many who turned out were expressing their anger at imperialist war, racism, environmental degradation, bank bailouts and foreclosures.
Yet, immediately after being elected, Obama proved that he serves the bosses: He intensified the war in Afghanistan, he refused to fight racist police attacks while always defending the racist cops, he intensified the racist attacks against workers by militarizing the southern U.S. border and he continued the economic policies of the Bush Administration.

It’s Only a Fair Election if U.S. Bosses Approve

Elections are primarily an ideological weapon to disarm the working class, and do not represent a high ideal of  “freedom” or “democracy.” When the “free expression of the people” doesn’t conform to the interests of U.S. imperialists, they freely ignore their own words.
• Patrice Lumumba, the first “democratically elected” Prime Minister of Congo, was assassinated under orders from the U.S. and Belgian governments.
• Salvador Allende, a socialist elected as president of Chile, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the C.I.A.
• In Guatemala, the C.I.A. organized, funded and equipped the 1954 coup against the elected government of Jacobo Guzmán. The ensuing civil war resulted in more than 200,000 dead.
•uMohammed Mossadegh was the elected Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953. When he challenged the interests of U.S. and British oil bosses, he was deposed after a C.I.A.-backed coup.
These examples and others make it clear that “democracy” means nothing to the bosses when their imperialist goals are threatened. But when masses of workers view elections as the only route to societal change, the bosses’ power is secure.
Only Workers Fighting Back Can Change Things
Just as the hollowness of the bosses’ “democratic” ideology is plain when we look at the historical record, so is it equally apparent that only when workers have abandoned the electoral circus and collectively struggled against the bosses have they been able to win any real reforms.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 where over 200,000 workers went on strike; the 1886 May 1st strike that included over 350,000 workers, and tens of thousands of other strikes led to the eight-hour workday. The police and the army brutalized and murdered the strikers throughout this entire period.
The Civil Rights Movement and the push to end segregation was the fruit of the multi-racial struggle against racism. Before the 1960s, they were often led by communists. They organized unions in the South, they held rallies against lynchings and attacked the Klan. For leading the fight against racism they were attacked by the FBI, murdered by police and Klan vigilantes.

Reforms Won’t Liberate the Working Class

The reforms that workers fought and died for were granted by the capitalist class as temporary measures designed to pacify the masses so that power ultimately remained with the capitalist class. The decrease in working-class consciousness and militancy has allowed the bosses to roll back these reforms: The unchallenged devastation of the Detroit auto-industry illustrates the corruption of union leadership. The U.S. ruling class is unleashing racist attacks on the border, on the job, in schools and overseas that the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movement fought valiantly against.
If the working class wants true liberation we must recognize the class nature of the state and give up on phony elections and half-hearted reforms.
Workers have to seize state power through violent revolution and establish the dictatorship of the working class. We can’t let our fellow workers be pulled in by the elections charade because no matter who gets elected it will be the capitalist class which is in power. If you are sick of the daily exploitation and degradation, don’t vote, organize the working class; don’t vote, fight racism and sexism; don’t vote, build Progressive Labor Party. Don’t vote, BUILD REVOLUTION!

Billions of people cheered the recent rescue of 33 heroic Chilean miners. This outpouring of admiration and sympathy for the workers and their families encourages our revolutionary communist Party. It shows that worldwide class-based solidarity is indeed possible.
But the cheers and tears that filled the world’s media for the miners rescued from the San Esteban Primera Company’s San Jose copper and gold mine occurred amid an orgy of Chilean patriotic nationalism led by billionaire President Sebastián Piñera. It should not obscure the collaboration of profit-hungry mining bosses with Chile’s capitalist government which caused this disaster and many others.
José Rojo, a 20-year veteran miner, charged that the bosses had “turned a blind eye to the San José mine. They told us it was coming down; every so often there were cave-ins. They knew it was going to happen. At times when I was there with the Jumbo drill, I had to stop because I saw that the roof was coming down on me.” (Argentine daily, “Pagina 12”) On the day of the cave-in, he was lucky — the machinery he operated was broken, so he was not at work!
Philippe Sanchez, 51, who worked at the mine between 1987 and 1999 and whose nephew was among those trapped, told a reporter, “It is one of the worst mines in the area. It has always been dangerous. There are accidents all the time and when you are hurt, you had better not complain or you will be sacked — there is a culture of silence.”
Two factors saved the miners: their own courageous working-class egalitarianism and the capitalists’ opportunistic grab at a rare chance to appear benevolent. In the crucial first 17 days, the miners, left for dead by the pit’s owners, selflessly rationed scant food supplies. “They had two little spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours,” said Dr Sergio Aguila, who was part of the rescue team. (London Telegraph, 8/24/10)  They took turns at finding water and trying to get messages to the outside. That’s when the capitalists decided to cash in and launched their nationalistic orgy.
Just like West Virginia’s Massey Coal Company whose illegal unsafe conditions killed almost 30 miners this year and the deaths in the Chinese Wangjialing coal mine earlier this year (an average of seven miners die in China every day; 24 miners die every year in Chile), the capitalists are happy to pay fines rather than paying for more expensive safe working conditions for miners. Less than a week after the drama in Chile, at least 25 miners perished in preventable incidents in China and Ecuador. The yearly worldwide mine death toll numbers in the thousands and doubles with deaths from lung disease.
Under capitalism, we, the working class and its allies, are locked in a death struggle with the bosses that profit-driven mine disasters lay bare. In every case, it’s cost-cutting shortcuts on safety procedures that keep killing workers. With capitalism rampant, concern for the bottom line continues to trump workers’ well-being.
For safety on the job, workers need the power to make it safe. That can only come with communism, when workers rule society and the capitalists and their profit drive at any cost no longer exist.
This San José mine has had 80 “accidents” since 2004 when a miner died after a cave-in. In 2006, a truck driver was also killed in an “accident.” That same year 182 workers were injured, 56 of them seriously. The mine was closed in 2007 after a geologist died in a rock explosion. The owners were charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was dropped after they agreed to pay the family $170,000.
To re-open the mine, the government required that San Esteban construct an emergency ladder that would lead to the surface from the very shelter where the 33 trapped miners huddled together. The miners got only one-third of the way up before discovering that the mine owners had never bothered to finish the ladder to the top! Moreover, one of the trapped miners said that when they reached the shelter itself, “The energy was cut off and there was no ventilation,” forcing them to sleep in the shafts.
Continuing their arrogance, the mine bosses did not pay the miners’ families while their breadwinners were trapped, forcing their families to rely on charity. When a court ruled that the company freeze $1.8 million for future compensation to the miners, the bosses threatened to declare bankruptcy.  Meanwhile, San Esteban is poised to open another mine in the Atacama Desert! The union leadership has proven ineffective in rallying workers to fight these bosses because they’re defenders of the capitalist system and therefore did virtually nothing to fight for the workers during the previous 80 “accidents.”
Chile’s politicians are partners in these capitalist crimes. President Piñera, who has milked this rescue mission for every ounce of patriotic fervor he could mount, ran for president on a platform of privatizing Chile’s copper mines, provoking miners’ strikes against his proposal.
Piñera, a billionaire businessman, is a political descendant of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime his brother Jose served as minister of labor and of mining. Under Pinochet, Jose Pinera pushed through a Constitutional Mining Law in 1981 that privatized much of Chilean mining, leading to more severe declines in safety conditions.
The right-wing president has tried to claim ownership of the rescue effort, appearing at the mine site and attempting to turn the entire operation into an exercise in patriotism. He furthered capitalism’s classless myth that “we’re all in this together” as a nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even more shamefully, Socialist Party Senator María Isabel Allende Bussi, the daughter of former president Salvador Allende (who Pinochet had assassinated with CIA help), embraced Piñera at the mine, responding to Piñera’s call for “national unity.” The revolutionary left of the 1970s that fought the fascists, conservatives and liberals, virtually disappeared during Pinochet’s murderous regime. Now it’s necessary to build the Progressive Labor Party in Chile to take on the Piñera-phony leftist gang-up.
Chile is sharply divided between rich and poor. Chile’s bosses subject the indigenous Mapuche people to vicious racist attacks, driving them off their ancestral land. Currently, 34 Mapuche fighters, jailed under the Pinochet era’s “anti-terror” laws, are continuing a two-month hunger strike, demanding an end to those laws. There has been no media circus around the efforts of these anti-racists.
Chile’s modest 4.1% annual per-capita growth rate over the past two decades has been accompanied by widening social and economic inequality. Fourteen percent of Chile’s population — 2.3 million people — live in poverty, with millions more barely making it above the poverty line.
Lucrative book and movie deals with U.S. media giants, absolving the guilty pit operators, await the traumatized miners. That’s their next form of exploitation under capitalism in this age of weak class consciousness. Not so long ago, however, mine cave-ins helped spur communist organizing. It is our Party’s task today to rekindle that revolutionary working-class spirit.
Communist revolution is the path towards freeing the working class from racism and exploitation, and establishing workers’ power.

Box 1

‘SAVIOR’ CHILE CHIEF PINERA IS U.S. BOSSES’ LACKEY
Harvard-educated Pinera’s close ties to the U.S. ruling class shaped his self-serving, U.S.-boosting crisis management. He immediately put mining minister Laurence Golborne — a former boss at Exxon Mobil’s Chilean subsidiary — in charge. Pinera owes a good part of his fortune to his recent sale of Chilevision TV to Time Warner. Two years ago, Pinera was a keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. (Rockefeller and his daughter serve as its advisors.) Pre-presidential Pinera touted “New Horizons for Opportunities” to potential U.S. imperialist investors.

Box 2

U.S. COVERAGE REFLECTS GROWING SPLIT AMONG BOSSES

Back in the U.S., capitalist rivals for state power in the mid-term elections seek to turn the San Jose “miracle” to their own purposes. Tea-Party booster Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal trumpeted (10/14/10), “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.” That’s because, the Journal says, the drill used in it came from a small, unregulated company in Pennsylvania.
On the other hand, the liberal, Obama-loving Brookings Institution brays, “An Act of People, Leaders and Good Governance.” Brookings just as fancifully insists that the workers survived mainly because of extensive Chilean government regulation. The liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalism that Obama serves needs tighter control of the economy by Washington for its current and future wars. Financing current U.S. military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia and looming conflict with Iran, China, and Russia requires enforced fiscal focus.

NEWARK, NJ, October 15 — So what do you get when you put Oprah Winfrey, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a stage to talk about how to reform the Newark public schools? Another attempt by the U.S. ruling class to make schools more efficient warehouses, producing capitalist ideas and maintaining class inequality and racist divisions of the working class. Especially in a place like Newark, where the “official” unemployment rate is well over 14%, and over 70% of students can’t pass state tests, the bosses need to cover up their racism with a U.S. nationalist “We are all in this together” mentality. This is where Zuckerberg comes in.
On September 24, Zuckerberg announced that he is setting up a foundation, like fellow billionaire Bill Gates, to focus on the improvement of education in the U.S., and particularly Newark.
Along with his $100 million “matching grant,” Zuckerberg also gave suggestions on how to reform schools: “So we should close schools down that are failing, get a lot of good charter schools and figure out new contracts for teachers so that better teachers can get paid more money,” he said during an interview on the techcrunch website1. After the Oprah show, that comment was deleted from the site.
All the hoopla on Oprah couldn’t cover up the backroom deal between Christie, Booker and Zuckerberg that would leave Newark parents out in the cold. Although it seems dishonest, this is how education under capitalism has been operating since the founding of this country. Public education has always been controlled by the ruling class: from early factory owners, who built the movement for mass public education as a means to control immigrant workers, to today’s corporations giving  millions to school systems to run things their way.  Only a communist revolution could put workers in command of the policy and practice of education.
One example of capitalist control of the schools is in Washington, D.C., where private groups like the Walton Family (owners of  Wal Mart) Foundation have the right to take back $64.5 million if the D.C. political leadership changes2. Zuckerberg’s latest “donation” with strings attached comes at a time when the Newark public schools face devastating cutbacks from Christie totaling $56 million and eliminating around 200 positions. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends over $1.5 billion per month to secure gas pipelines and key minerals in Afghanistan and gives the bankers billions in interest on government debt.
While it seems that the billionaires are in a much stronger position than the workers, things are changing, even if not as fast as we would like. Last week around 100 students from Barringer High School, one of the most neglected schools in Newark, staged a walkout to protest the terrible conditions there. In the first month of school, there were many students still without a schedule, one young girl was sexually assaulted in a classroom and there were fights every day. This symbolizes what many black and Latino students go through — the worst of the worst from the bosses’ racist system.
In the teachers’ union, a study group has formed where teachers and parents from all over the city will read about the history of the union (including the past role of communists), study the role that racism has played in keeping parents, teachers, and students from uniting and analyze the results of the cutbacks and corporate-backed “turn-around schools.”
On October 13, over 200 Newark parents, teachers and students held a community forum to talk about how we can build an alliance to ensure that our students benefit from any increase in funds. While many parents still believe that public schools can solve students’ problems, PLP was there to get to know more of these fighting parents and spread our ideas: that even if these schools had all the technology and good teachers around, they would still be controlled by the ideology of the ruling class. Even the “best” schools reproduce unequal class relations and win young people to patriotic ideas. Some of the parents agreed and took CHALLENGE, but many believe that “community control” of the schools is still the answer.
We in PLP both have a lot to learn and a lot to give to this movement. Only through our consistent base-building and involvement in the struggle will we win thousands of workers in the city to our revolutionary communist ideas. The bosses are giving us plenty of opportunities; let’s run with them.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/tech              crunch-interview-with-mark-zuckerberg-on-          mn     100-million-education-donation/
2. Turque, Bill Washington Post, April 28, 2010