TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO — Capitalism has murdered, through one of its criminal gangs, 72 immigrant workers. From the moment immigrant workers cross into Mexico they are harassed and extorted by the immigration authorities, criminal gangs, and the police. These criminals steal immigrant workers’ money or kidnap them to force their relatives in the U.S. to pay a ransom that can range from $1,500 to $5,000. Some are forced to work as slaves in clandestine factories, drug fields, prostitution, or as servants in criminals’ dens. Many who refuse are brutally murdered, as was the case here, or are killed while running away from immigration cops or gangs. It’s a true descent into hell.

The worldwide capitalist crisis has added seven million more to the number of the poor in Mexico alone. Modern capitalism concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The majority of the wealth of the world has become concentrated in a few countries, like the U.S., and that’s why many of our brothers and sisters, in spite of all the risks, are forced to migrate in search of jobs.

Only a communist revolution that smashes all borders and unites our class can put an end to this living hell for all workers. The death of our brothers and sisters motivates us to fight even harder against this criminal system.

Every year, close to 600,000 immigrant workers, mainly from Central and South America, cross the borders from Mexico into the U.S. Almost 20,000 are kidnapped. These workers are desparate to escape the misery, crime and unemployment of their home countries, harshly learning that under capitalism there is no escape. Many die; the rest find more exploitation and poverty. The essence of this system, in any corner of the world, is to extract the maximum profit from workers’ sweat. The only escape is revolution.

The reaction of the Mexican government to the murder of the 72 immigrants was hypocritical. They blamed narco-traffickers and approved an empty plan that pretends to protect immigrant workers. The drug trade is one of the most profitable businesses in Mexico which couldn’t be the case if there was truly an effort to combat narco-trafficking. The actual purpose of their “war on drugs” is to terrorize workers, build the military to counter workers’ rebellions and to support those criminal gangs allied with the government. When innocent people die in their confrontations, Calderón and his accomplices mockingly say that they were “collateral damage.” That’s what workers’ lives means to them.

The bosses’ media hyped the accounts of the massacre as part of their terrorizing propaganda. They pushed the nationalist idea of “unity of all Mexicans” as if workers and migrants have anything in common with their billionaire bosses. They shed crocodile tears for the slave-like conditions of immigrant workers, but hide or deny the wage slavery endured by millions of workers in this country and around the world.

In the U.S. the bosses and their media organize racist government and right-wing militia attacks that attempt to blame immigrants for the capitalists’ own financial crisis and runaway unemployment.

In some communities, mainly in the southern region of Mexico, people have organized to provide food and shelter to immigrant workers. This worker solidarity shows it is possible to defeat the racism and nationalism that divide us. This type of organization is the only thing that the government will try to destroy through its recently-approved agreements of protections for immigrants.

We must take the communist ideas of CHALLENGE to those communities and help transform that solidarity into a fight to destroy the cause of the problems: that the only way to escape this hell is through a communist revolution that would sweep away misery, all borders, and racism. That’s the best way to honor the death of our 72 brothers and sisters. J

This last year has witnessed the rise of the wide-spread racist “Net Far Right” (Net Kyoku) that has coordinated attacks on “foreigners” in Japan.  As reported in the New York Times (8/28/10), they organize mostly through the internet in order to conceal their identity, are “loudly anti-foreign” and direct their attack on Korean and Chinese residents, Christian organizations, and even those who dress in Halloween costumes. 

Much like the U.S. Tea Party’s racist attacks against immigrant labor from the Global South, the “Net” blame foreigners for the financial crisis that has lingered in Japan for over ten years, for the rise in crime and homelessness in Western Japan, and for the decline in pro-Japanese sentiment, particularly by young Japanese.  The similarity between the Tea Party and the “Net” is clear in another respect: they are both convenient devices used by the ruling class for creating dissonance among workers from various cultural backgrounds who should be united in fighting the real enemy, the capitalist bosses.

Apologists at the New York Times (NYT) suggest that the “Net” are distinct from other far-right groups, citing that the established right-wing (Uyoku) make themselves visible on a regular basis in Tokyo and other major cities around Japan. The “Net” racists, though, are equally sinister and cowardly in their attacks on Korean and Chinese immigrant groups, many of whom have been in Japan since they were brought as slave labor during World War II and have not been granted citizenship.

NYT apologists also fail to point out that ultranationalist groups hijacked the expanding working-class and peasant movements in the 1920’s and 30’s, leading to the rise of Japanese fascism which used racism and sexism to legitimize the rapes and slaughter of workers in most of East Asia, such as the genocides in Nanking and Korea.

Deep-rooted ultra-nationalism and racism has continued to govern the censorship of history books, which discount the genocides committed by Japan in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The grossest example of this is the recent film ‘The Truth about Nanking,’ directed by the ultranationalist and fascist Satoru Mizushima and backed by the outspoken fascist and racist Mayor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, which alleges that the Nanking Massacre was created as propaganda that intended to demean the image of Japan in the world.

Racist ultranationalists are closely linked to ruling-class parties, such as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) which ruled Japan almost continuously from its founding in 1955 to 2009. Figures like the wartime profiteer Yoshio Kodama, who helped found the LDP, and the right-wing Nihimura Shingo; who has ties to the current ruling Democratic Party of Japan; and fascists like Mayor Ishihara, who has openly called for violence against foreigners in the past, are examples of how the ultra-right and ruling-class parties are linked.

 The inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China for the control of the world’s recourses, including the struggle to dominate the East China Sea, is part of the larger framework for how the “Net” and other racist groups can be utilized by ruling elites to increase nationalist sentiment, particularly as Japan is right in the middle of the U.S.-China dogfight.  As the New York Times has been reporting since the spring of this year, China has expanded its naval power “from as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca” in order to “secure Chinese interests” which include oil from the Middle East.

The resource-rich South and East China Seas, in which Chinese engineers discovered natural gas reserves off the coast of the disputed Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, has also sparked recent political trouble between Japan and China. The U.S. is expanding its influence in the region through the continued colonization of Okinawa, which is host to one of the largest U.S. military instillations in the world. 

The struggle against ultra-nationalism by students and teachers in recent years over the censoring of textbooks and the inclusion of the fascist national anthem (Kimigayo) needs to be extended to oppose racist groups like the “Net” and other Uyoku who terrorize immigrant and foreign populations and who are manipulated by capitalist bosses.  The time has come to forget reformists like the Japanese Communist Party and other movements who offer false promises of a “peaceful transition to socialism,” and build an internationalist communist movement led by the PLP in Japan and East Asia to smash racism and nationalism and create a world built on human need, not profit! J



The economic “recovery” from the greatest crisis since the Great Depression has left over 30 million U.S. workers and youth unemployed and underemployed and wages plummeting. “Recovery” means the bosses’ profits are rising, as there there are fewer workers who must work harder to increase the bosses’ productivity.

Billions have been handed over to the bankers and auto bosses while millions of families continue to lose their homes. And that’s as “good” as it’s going to get.

Now the bosses are squealing that the recovery is weakening and yet another major economic crisis looms. At best, they say, mass racist unemployment, as high as 50% among black males and higher among black youth, will continue for years. While Congress haggles over extending unemployment benefits, increased funding for the $3 trillion oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sails through uncontested.

The racist rulers need a working class that is ready to sacrifice and fight for U.S. imperialism. They’re losing in Iraq and Afghanistan and have Yemen, Pakistan and Iran waiting in the wings. So far, they’ve had some success in getting workers to sacrifice. They’ve yet to win workers ideologically to fight for them.

Nowhere are these sacrifices more evident than in the U.S. auto industry. This month Obama visited a Michigan GM plant and a Chicago Ford plant. This  is after Ford announced $4 billion in second quarter profits and GM announced profits for two consecutive quarters for the first time in years.

And why not? Obama and the UAW leadership teamed up to close dozens of plants, cut wages by as much as $30,000/year, and destroy more than 200,000 jobs. And that’s just since the meltdown of 2008-2009. Billions of dollars and maybe a million jobs were sacrificed long before that. The starting pay for a GM, Ford or Chrysler worker has been cut by more than half, and they’ll have no pension if and when they retire.

These massive sacrifices took place with a minimum of resistance, highlighted by the three-month strike at American Axel in 2007 and Ford workers rejecting a final round of concessions in 2008.  The UAW, now led by religious, “social activist” president Bob King, has reached a new low by claiming the bosses’ profits as a “victory” for the workers. “We saved the auto industry, and U.S. jobs.” It’s no accident that King, the former UAW-VP at Ford, which made the greatest profits, is now the UAW president!

Open Union-Corporate Alliance
Signals Impending Fascism & War

While having a passive working class helps the rulers cut wages and steal jobs, it’s a double-edged sword. They need a politically-motivated working class to mobilize for a future of poverty and expanding war. In order to win them, they have to put workers in the streets to give vent to their frustrations. That’s a very risky proposition for the racist rulers and their union front men.

So it is with that in mind that the NAACP, UAW, Teamsters, SEIU, TWU, ATU and hundreds of unions and “progressive” community and religious organizations are planning the “One Nation” march on Washington, D.C. on October 2. In the short-term, it’s a counter-attack on the Tea Party and a mass “Get-Out-The-Vote” effort (for Democrats) in the mid-term Congressional elections just a month later. “One Nation” is a reference to Obama’s campaign pledge of “no blue states, no red states.”

This is all part of the rulers’ and Obama’s attempt to lump workers and bosses under one nationalist flag. They want to win workers away from viewing themselves as a working class exploited by the bosses’ class.

But beyond the elections is the more sinister effort to begin to win the working class in earnest to a future of war and fascism. U.S. imperialism needs more than our wages and health benefits. They need our commitment and our very lives. After 9/11, Bush told everyone to “go shopping.” That was a serious error for which the rulers never forgave him. Workers and youth can’t be won to war and fascism in the mall. They have to be in the streets.

PLP accepts this challenge. As the rulers try to put a million workers in Washington, D.C., we will be there fighting for the political leadership of the working class, fighting to have anti-racism, internationalism and communist revolution make an impact on the mass movement. This can’t be done with a few lone wolves handing out leaflets with the “right idea.”

This can only be accomplished by mobilizing our base in the mass movement to weigh in in a big way. On our jobs and in our unions we will organize not just against the racist Tea Party, but to oppose Obama and our union “leaders” as well. It wasn’t the Tea Party that cut 200,000 auto jobs and slashed our wages in half!

In the schools and campuses, we can organize busloads of youth to oppose the plans the rulers have for us to kill and die for U.S. imperialism. And we should organize contingents of unemployed workers to march, whether they are recently laid-off transit workers, former Stella D’Oro strikers or those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits.

A racist system that can’t provide jobs should be destroyed. Communist revolution will smash racist unemployment. We can win the masses to break away from their misleaders and fight for communism. In the build-up to October 2, the ball is very much in our court.

INDIANAPOLIS, IN, August 31 — “Get Out! This is our hall!” “Traitor!” “Go Home!” That’s how hundreds of GM workers greeted UAW International reps on August 15. The standing-room only crowd of hundreds of stamping plant workers, members of UAW Local 23, had no intentions of cutting their wages in half to save their jobs. As the International reps headed for the doors, the workers jumped to their feet and started chanting, “Take [UAW Local President] Ray [Kennedy] With You, Take Ray With You!”

As part of the GM bailout restructuring by Obama, this plant is to be closed. JD Norman Industries made an offer to buy the plant, but made 50% pay cuts a condition of the deal. Last May, the workers voted 384-22 against reopening their contract. Despite this, Kennedy and the UAW International continued to negotiate with GM and JD Norman, reaching a deal they planned on ratifying at the August meeting. This is what new UAW President Bob King calls the 21st Century UAW, where the bosses and the union partner up to screw the workers.

They gave workers one day’s notice and provided them with “highlights” of the proposed contract before trying to bum-rush them into cutting their wages in half. Instead, the workers told newly-annointed UAW Region 3 Director Mo Davidson to take a 50 percent pay cut. One worker said, “They’re not representing us, they’re representing their 17 percent stake in GM,” referring to the UAW’s stake in GM as a result of the federal restructuring and bailout.

The majority of workers here have high seniority and many are GM “migrants,” having moved from plant to plant as factories shut down. They are not afraid of one more closing. They have learned the hard way, from years of exposure to GM’s and the UAW’s “whipsawing” of one GM local against another, that concessions don’t save jobs.

By casting their fortunes with those of the auto bosses, the UAW has gone from 1.5 million members to under 350,000. 150,000 of those are in casinos, legal aid offices, college campuses, state and city workers and more. The domestic auto industry is over 50% non-union and the restructuring of the past few years has cost yet another 200,000 jobs and seen wages cut in half. The devastating racist nature of these attacks is evident in the streets of Detroit, Flint, St. Louis, Lansing and a host of other GM towns.

The current crisis of 30 million unemployed and underemployed will be with us for years. The UAW hopes to increase its numbers by partnering with the bosses and enforcing a low-wage economy. UAW President King hides behind the banner of “social justice,” but will put thousands in the streets to march for the same Democratic Party politicians who have failed workers so miserably while expanding the endless “oil war on terror.” GM workers are exposing the real nature of the UAW leadership. Building a mass PLP in basic industry will ultimately crush these maggots and lead the working class to power.