WASHINGTON, D.C., October 3 — This past weekend the liberal wing of the ruling class tried their best to motivate its base to elect Democrats on November 2. The PLP joined thousands of other workers at the Lincoln Memorial to expose the dead-end politics of voting and to spread the revolutionary communist ideas crucial to fighting the endless attacks workers have been facing. On the buses going to and from the rally and at the rally itself, PL members distributed over 7000 issues of CHALLENGE while making many new friends.

The event, entitled, “One Nation Working Together,” was an attempt by the liberal rulers to rally their base. Through various unions — the UAW, CWA, AFSCME and SEIU 1199 — they had hoped, for a number of different reasons, to bring hundreds of thousands to Washington.

In the long term, the bosses are working to convince millions of workers to fight and die in their imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. As their situation deteriorates, the capitalists here know they’ll need a much more disciplined work-force than they’ve got now.

In the short term, this liberal ruling-class wing hopes to win workers to support the Democrats in the November 2 elections. With the recent Republican primary victories of Tea Party candidates in Delaware, New York and Kentucky as well as the “Restoring Honor Rally” led by right-wing commentator Glenn Beck, the liberals are worried that the energy from the 2008 Presidential election has temporarily run out of steam.

In a NY Times article (9/17) titled “Unions Find Members Slow to Rally Behind Democrats,” labor columnist Steve Greenhouse warns about the Democrats’ inability to energize rank-and-file workers to support their local politicians: “Union leaders themselves say that their efforts may not be enough because union members, like other important parts of the Democratic base, are not feeling particularly enthusiastic about the party.”

Who can really blame them? Unemployment and underemployment has passed 30 million; 21% are either jobless or can’t find full-time jobs. The rates are double for black workers and 40% to 50% for youth, depending on the region. Meanwhile, wages, pensions and benefits are being slashed, causing many workers to feel betrayed by the same politicians they campaigned for door-to-door just two years ago.

This was evident in the weeks leading up to the October 2 rally. Unions, in trying to win rank-and-file members to go to D.C., were literally bribing them with free bus rides, clothing and lunch. PLP members on those buses were working to seize an opportunity to win workers towards a communist revolutionary line.

On the bus rides heading to the rally, many PL’ers detailed the attacks workers are experiencing. Contrary to the “alternatives” advocated by the rally’s organizers, PL speakers advanced international working-class unity, fighting back militantly against the bosses and the importance of revolutionary communist ideas. They inspired many riders, who also bought copies of CHALLENGE.

At the Lincoln Memorial, PL’ers led marches and chants through the crowd, with many high school students leading the way, receiving a warm reception from those in attendance. One worker, a CWA member, said, “You know, I’m not a communist. I always voted for the Democrats. But as I see more and more taken from me and the Democrats not doing much about it….Hell, the union isn’t even doing much about it, [so] your idea doesn’t seem that crazy.” He then gave $5 for a copy of CHALLENGE.

Ultimately, the event revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal section of the ruling class. While there are still signs that the Democrats are unable to energize the workers to support them, they definitely control the organizations that can mobilize many workers and students.

There might not be a lot of workers organizing for them, but there is still only a small section of the working class ready to fight back against the bosses. The bosses’ lieutenants in the unions and community groups have done their job in keeping the working class passive in times of incredible attacks.

But if this rally revealed anything, it’s that workers with pro-worker leadership, are willing to fight back and are upset with their current conditions. It’s PLP’s responsibility to give leadership to these workers, not only through the distribution of CHALLENGE, but also by fighting side-by-side with them. Over time, many workers will see that communist revolution is the only solution.

However, as we’ve always said about the class struggle, “You gotta be in it to win it.” 

INDIANAPOLIS, IN October 3 — While UAW President Bob King was addressing the mass “rally for jobs and justice” in Washington, D.C. yesterday, he forgot to mention the ongoing struggle here by GM workers in UAW Local 23, who refuse to knuckle under to King and the UAW leadership, GM and JD Norman Industries, or the Governor of Indiana.  On September 27 they rejected a tentative agreement between the UAW and GM by a more than 10-1 margin that would have cut their wages so that GM could sell the plant.

Under the Obama bailout and restructuring of GM, this plant will close. JD Norman Industries wants to buy it and turn it into a low-wage GM parts supplier. After workers voted by a similar margin to reject any wage concessions last May, GM and the UAW continued to bargain and tried to pass an agreement in August. But International reps were met by hundreds of workers and literally run out of the union hall. The UAW then scheduled a mail ballot to try to pass the deal. GM allowed International reps into the plant to sell it, and the Governor said if the plant closed because the workers rejected the wage cuts, they would not be allowed to collect unemployment benefits!

The workers responded with a rally against concessions at UAW Region 3 headquarters on September 25, and a “Solidarity Vote,” where 412 members came to the hall and voted “NO” in front of a video camera. Then they videoed taking the ballots to the post office and the mail clerk counting them to record the rejection of the contract.

PLP members visited the plant and distributed hundreds of fliers and CHALLENGES before being chased off by GM security. We talked with some workers at length who expressed tremendous anger at the UAW leadership and thanked us for coming.  In a sense, this fight reflects why King & Co. organized the Washington rally in the first place.

Workers have sacrificed billions without a fight, but they have not been won to doing whatever it takes to save U.S. imperialism. So the union leaders are trying to get us focused on the Tea Party and getting out the vote for the Democrats while they slash our wages and destroy 200,000 jobs.  Ultimately they have to win us to embrace a future of poverty wages, high racist unemployment, and world war to save their asses.  But we are building a revolutionary communist movement that will smash them and their billionaire masters. And we need to win these GM rebels to join us. J



Who wins — and who votes — in November’s elections are crucial questions for the imperialist, Rockefeller-led faction of U.S. capitalists served by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. The segment of the latter’s base — trade unions, environmentalists, civil libertarians, advocates of government regulation, etc., who might stay home out of disenchantment with Obama’s broken promises — have the latter worried over Tea Party candidates. They threaten the liberals’ agenda of widening war, war taxes, and wartime regulatory powers consolidated in the White House.

Rulers’ Push for Two-Party Voting a Dead End for Workers’ Anger

Electoral politics are the capitalist class’s ace-in-the-hole as their most effective weapon for stifling working-class rebellion against the imperialists’ genocidal warfare abroad and racist attacks at home. It clouds the need for workers’ revolution. “You can vote the good guys in and the bad guys out” runs the bosses’ deadly lie to workers.

But, in fact, all politicians front for one group or another of capitalist enemies of our class. The anti-tax, small-government Tea Partiers represent a variety of capitalists whose profits don’t directly depend on U.S. military operations overseas.

Poverty, unemployment, and cuts in education, housing and health care are soaring because of trillion-dollar war layouts. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who suffer double the jobless rates, the worst housing, health care and schools. On September 16, the Census Bureau revealed that while overall, one family in seven lives in poverty, for black workers it’s one in four.

Two days later, Obama urged black members of Congress “to go back to your neighborhoods,…your workplaces,… [your] churches” to get their constituents to the polls.

So the liberal imperialists are striving mightily to defeat potential obstructionists like Tea Party Senate hopefuls Rand Paul and Sharron Angle. And just as urgent for war-bent, globally-focused U.S. rulers is luring workers to view voting, rather than militant action, as the solution to their worsening misery.

Tea Partiers Won’t Go Away, So Liberals Try to Co-opt Them

Voting proves so powerful in misleading the working class that liberal capitalists see a silver lining even in the Tea Party movement: it draws angry workers to the harmless polling booth rather than to either the strike picket line or to right-wing fringe movements and gun-toting terrorist groups.

The NY Times, the liberal imperialists’ top mouthpiece, has anointed its scribe Kate Zernike as official Tea-Party watcher and just published her new book, “Boiling Mad — Inside Tea Party America.” Zernike hopes the Republican Party’s dwindling imperialist establishment wing can somehow co-opt the Tea Party’s voter-boosting energy. These are the descendents of the old, arch-imperialist Nelson Rockefeller wing of the G.O.P. which at one time was its backbone when President Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Vice-President in the wake of Nixon’s ouster. It includes the likes of Maine’s two Republican Senators, Rhode Island’s Chafee, and others who have sometime cooperated with the Kennedy liberals.

Assuming the role of all-knowing, pro-imperialist advisor to such establishment Republicans, Zernike wrote (NYT, 9/18/10): “[T]he Tea Party has brought a swell of new participants to the political process, and historical and economic trends are working in favor of the party out of power — that would be you, G.O.P. The trick is to take advantage of the Tea Party passion and stay away from its extremes.”

Split Congress Makes U.S. Strike on Iran More Likely

But, however effective the voting system may be in misdirecting workers’ rage, it poses real problems for the bigger bosses. In Congress, differences among capitalists can cause deadlock, especially over domestic issues, such as the current, growing tax battle. The 220-year-old U.S. Constitution, itself the product of deadly competition between camps of U.S. capitalists, in fact enshrines legislative stalemates of the kind that Tea Partiers foment. The Brookings Institution, a top liberal imperialist think-tank, calls Congress the “broken branch” of ruling-class state power.

Consequently, legislatively-embattled presidents like Obama, resort more to foreign policy, where commander-in-chief status allows them freer rein to create lasting benefits for their masters. One leading strategy-analyzing firm, Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor, 9/14/10), betraying the rulers’ utter disregard for human life, can’t decide whether Obama’s next big move will be to attack Iran or make a peace deal with it:

“Obama will come out of the November election having to turn over his cards on the only area where he can have traction — Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.…One option is to solve the Iraq problem by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.…That leaves another option….: ‘pulling a Nixon.’ In 1971, Richard Nixon reached out to [then enemy] China” because it was in the rulers’ interest to overlook China’s backing of Vietnamese fighters in order to take advantage of the potential for U.S. entry into that vast market.

But Stratfor’s crystal-ball gazers aren’t banking on such a “peace” move. “What the settlement with Iran might look like is murky at best. Whether Iran has any interest in such a settlement is murkier still.” Stratfor says that for Obama, “far safer is a generalized air campaign against both Iran’s nuclear and conventional capability” — which his Republican rivals would be hard-pressed to oppose (especially its pro-Israel wing).

Non-stop news coverage, from both the liberals’ newspapers and networks and Rupert Murdoch’s pro-Tea Party media empire, underscores the importance of elections to the bosses. This campaign circus should have the opposite effect on our class, steering us away from the dead-end voting booth and towards militant fight-back against all capitalists.

For workers, organizing strikes, demonstrations and anti-imperialist, anti-racist forums, in the very areas Obama targets, would prove a far better strategy than tailing the liberal-controlled unions, churches and other mass organizations. A good place to start would be to challenge them at their mobilization of thousands of workers in Washington, D.C. on October 2, which the Democrats plan to use to bring the working class to the polls, not into militant action.

PLP’ers and friends must organize now to expose and combat the openly-racist Tea Party and the deadlier genocidal liberals and use October 2 to build the Party as indispensable steps on the road to a capitalist-crushing communist revolution. 



INDIANAPOLIS, IN, September 18 — After being run out of the Local 23 union hall by hundreds of angry GM stamping plant workers last month (see CHALLENGE, 8/22), the International UAW is trying to ram through a new contract that would cut wages in half. Rather than directly confront the workers again, they’re imposing a mail ballot, something never done in a factory where votes occur either in the hall or in the shop. The ballots, going out this week, will be counted on September 27.

As part of Obama’s GM bailout and restructuring, this plant is to be closed. JD Norman Industries made an offer to buy the plant, and sign a UAW contract, if the union agreed to a 50% wage-cut. Last May, the workers voted 384-22 against reopening the contract, but the International UAW and Local 23 President Ray Kennedy continued negotiations, reaching a deal not one of the “negotiators” will have to live with.

‘Traitor Go Home!’

They had scheduled a ratification meeting for August 15, but hundreds of angry workers drowned them out with shouts of “Traitor,” and “Go Home,” forcing them to slip out the back door.

Since the union hall isn’t safe for the sellouts, their senior partners at GM are allowing them into the plant to speak to the workers either one on one or in small groups, where workers are subject to GM disciplinary actions if they “act up.” This is what UAW President Bob King calls the “21st Century UAW,”
a boss-union partnership. (See Box)

The majority of workers here have high seniority and many are GM “migrants,” having moved from plant to plant as factories shut down. They don’t fear one more closing since they are eligible for transfer to another GM plant. They don’t want massive wage-cuts following them for the rest of their lives, although that die has already been cast.

Indiana Governor Threatens Workers

GM wants to sell this plant and turn it into a low-wage parts supplier. The UAW wants to hold onto more than 600 members, and they’re ready to sacrifice workers’ wages and health care to do so. Meanwhile, the scab Governor of Indiana has threatened to deny these long-term GM workers unemployment benefits if the plant closes because they reject the wage-cuts.

Decades of “concessions to save jobs” and partnering with U.S. auto bosses has reduced UAW membership from 1.5 million to under 350,000, with the domestic auto industry now more than 50% non-union. The recent bailout and restructuring has cost yet another 200,000 jobs and cut wages in half.

The racist nature of these attacks is evident in the streets of Detroit, Flint, Lansing and many other GM towns. Today it’s wages and jobs. Tomorrow it will be the lives of our sons and daughters in an endless war for control of Mid-East oil and pipelines that has already costs millions of workers’ lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will use the October 2 March on Washington to build the revolutionary communist PLP in the auto industry and in the UAW. J

‘A UAW for the 21st Century’:Boss-Union ‘Partnership’

On August 2, fresh from his coronation as head of the UAW, President Bob King delivered a talk to the Center for Automotive Research Conference, an industry group, where he laid out his vision for the union’s future:

• “We are deeply grateful to the Obama administration…for saving the American auto industry. Enabling our companies to survive and turn around has saved hundreds of thousands of good jobs that would have been gone forever.…UAW members took wage-cuts of $7,000 to $30,000 a year. Benefits were also reduced significantly. Restructuring resulted in the loss of nearly 200,000 jobs.”

• “The UAW of the 21st Century must be fundamentally and radically different from the UAW of the 20th Century. This is a new world, and we must reinvent our union….”

• “The 20th Century UAW fell into a pattern with our employers where we saw each other as adversaries rather than partners.…The 21st Century UAW no longer views…management as our adversaries or enemies, but as partners.…Our new relationships…are built upon a foundation of respect, shared goals and a common mission.”

• “So the keywords of the 21st Century UAW are flexibility, innovation, quality, teamwork, productivity, continuous cost savings and respect. The rigid demarcation between management and labor that was so entrenched in the old model is discarded.”

That’s it, from the horses’ mouth, proof positive of what PLP has always warned. The greatest threat to the workers and the revolutionary communist movement is not the gutter racists and open fascists, as bad as they are, but the liberals! The Tea Party or Sarah Palin didn’t wipe out 200,000 auto jobs and cut wages in half, although they certainly support it. It was Obama and the union leaders.

In a period of growing war and deepening economic crisis, “Shared goals and common mission” means doing whatever is necessary to maintain U.S. imperialism at the top of the heap. It means war and fascism, with a “thank” you from UAW President Bob King.