a href="#Elections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State">"lections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State
- Obama Lures Youth to Fight and Die in Wider Wars
- Clinton Team Drips With Serbian, Iraqi Blood
- Voting Never Solved Anything: Only Red Revolution Can
U.S. Imperialism: Killer By Suicide
Profs Fight for Right to Teach Anti-Capitalism in Classroom
a href="#Striking Miners Battle Mexico’s Bosses, Cops, Union-Busting Government">"triking Miners Battle Mexico’s Bosses, Cops, Union-Busting Government
Growing PLP Club in Spain Links Study and Action
Red Mechanics Needed: Detroit Totaled by U.S. Capitalism
a href="#Capitalism Won’t Fall On Its Own">"apitalism Won’t Fall On Its Own
a href="#Bhutto’s Party and Musharraf, Two Sides of Capitalist Coin">"hutto’s Party and Musharraf, Two Sides of Capitalist Coin
Unity With African, Arab Workers Critical to Union Fight vs. French Bosses, Hacks
Battle for Resources Behind Endless Wars in Africa
Transportation Workers Can Be Key Force for Revolution
LETTTERS
Confidence in Working Class Pays Off
Worker from the West Need to Fight Racist Deportation Raids
a href="#Phony Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’">Ph"ny Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’
Revoking Union Rights Is A Law of Capitalism
Higher-paid Jobs Corrupted USSR Leaders
- Lessons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future
- Steroids Helped Baseball Bosses Bulk Up Profits
Challenge Web Extra: Chile: Massacre of Miners a Century Ago Led to Building of Commmunist Party
a name="Elections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State">">"lections’ Primary Goal: Win Workers To War, Racism, Police State
The Obama-Clinton battle in the Democratic Party primaries has spread the illusion that positive change results from voting to reform the profit system rather than from militant, revolutionary struggle to smash the bosses’ dictatorship. High voter turnouts for Barack Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa and Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire comeback signal a dangerous development for the working class.
Liberals push the myth that Obama and Clinton mark a decline in racism and an advance in women’s rights in the U.S. Obama is "fashioning a positive change in the very character of the nation,’’ gushed NY Times’ black columnist Bob Herbert. (1/12/08) A Times article the next day said, "Whoever wins the nomination....the victory will be a benchmark moment for the American promise of equality." Nothing could be further from the truth.
Obama and Clinton, in fact, will intensify the oppression of workers — male and female, black, Latin, Asian, Arab and white. Illinois Senator Obama didn’t lift a finger when thousands of mostly black workers were laid off in Chicago’s Cook County hospitals, simultaneously slashing healthcare for a mostly black and Latino patient population. And Clinton voted for war in Iraq and for the military "option" against Iran.
Both Democratic front-runners represent a U.S. capitalist class seriously challenged by rivals from Iran to China. In the coming period, U.S. bosses will need millions of troops to kill and die in their expanding racist wars. They need to transform a debt-ridden, declining economy into a wartime one by slashing workers’ living standards and creating a police state. Obama and Clinton are vying, not to promote equality, but to become the chief executor of the rulers’ deadly plans.
Obama Lures Youth to Fight and Die in Wider Wars
Contrary to Obama’s capitalist-fed worshippers at the Times, racism, the rulers’ main tool for splitting and weakening the working class, remains rampant in the U.S. By every measure and in every area — income, unemployment, education, housing, health, arrests, imprisonment, deportation — black and Latin workers suffer the most, and this super-exploitation worsens conditions for all workers, under every Democratic and Republican presidency. Obama’s role is to mask that reality with the falsehood of "equal opportunity." He follows in the footsteps of ruling-class protégés Colin Powell and Condi Rice.
As Obama lures young people to the system, one job he can attempt for the rulers (win or lose) is to help reverse the 58% plunge in black military enlistment since 2000. "Man-of-the-people" Obama turns out to be a tool of the top U.S. imperialist financiers. He "has raised nearly $100 million in campaign contributions, nearly as much as the Hillary Clinton money machine. Three of his four largest groups of bankrollers are executives of Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase." (NY Daily News, 1/11/08)
Clinton Team Drips With Serbian, Iraqi Blood
"Pioneer" Clinton aims to be the first woman to lead U.S. imperialism in war. She has constantly lobbied in the Senate to increase the size of U.S. forces. Her campaign advisors include a host of war criminals from her husband’s administration — Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and General Wesley Clark, who all helped orchestrate Clinton’s terror bombing of Serbia and softening-up of Iraq with missiles and starvation-inducing sanctions.
Opportunistically seizing on people’s disgust with the Bush regime, Obama and Clinton babble about "change." But the change they have in mind is bad for workers. They want changes like those called for by the Clinton-appointed 1999 Hart-Rudman commission. It demanded a huge revamping of the state apparatus with vastly broadened police powers to put the nation on a war footing. It sought a government that could enforce the sacrifice of workers’ blood and bosses’ profits needed in global conflicts to preserve U.S. supremacy. Bush failed at this; Obama and Clinton hope to lead that effort.
Voting Never Solved Anything: Only Red Revolution Can
The best changes for workers in the last century — establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Russian and Chinese revolutions of 1917 and 1949 — did not occur in a voting booth. They grew from class-based armed struggle in the streets after years and decades of painstaking organizing in workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and the army and navy. Our Party’s long-term goal is to repeat those true working-class triumphs while correcting the political errors that led to their reversal.
a name="Black, Latino Youth Balk at Fighting Racist U.S. Bosses’ Wars">">"lack, Latino Youth Balk at Fighting Racist U.S. Bosses’ Wars
U.S. bosses have failed to win masses of working class youth — especially black and Latino — to kill and die for imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. On October 31, the Army announced that it had started the October 1st recruiting year with the lowest level of "delayed entry" recruits since the beginning of the all-volunteer forces in 1973. The Boston Globe reports that in the military overall, recruitment among blacks has dropped by 58% since 2000 ("Military Sees Big Decline in Black Enlistees." 10/7/07).
Racism within the U.S. — especially against lower enlisted black and Latin troops — undermines the bosses’ ability to win workers to fight their wars in the first place. Blacks make up more than 22% of the army and only 12.3% of the total U.S. population. But Michael O’Hanlon, a senior advisor to the military, says that the trend of serving in the military is "at risk in the black community."
The Globe reports that the racist response to hurricane Katrina, the legal lynching of the Jena 6, and the history of disproportionate black deaths in Vietnam has spurred black youth to decline military service in higher numbers. To win more blacks to serve, politicians and media are trying to mislead and fool workers, promising anti-racist reforms like revamped hate-crime legislation. They only want to direct anti-racist anger away from the capitalist system.
In 2006 an Army report recommended increasing the pool of black officers in the combat arms branch of the Army office corps in order to build "the capacity for a long-term, sustained level of conflict." And this past October, two months after two nooses were found at the U.S. Coast Guard academy, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, Elijah Cummings (Dem.-Maryland), and Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen, decried the incidents. What they feared was not more racist attacks on students and officers-in-training but rather the effects on "the strength of unity" within the officer corps that imperialism requires to keep U.S. workers killing Middle Eastern workers.
One way the bosses are trying to win black youth is by running Barack Obama as a serious contender for president. But Obama wants to expand the war on terror and shift the center of combat from Iraq to Afghanistan in order to free up troops for possible attacks on Iran, Pakistan or the Sudan. According to lower-enlisted black and Latin troops in contact with PLP, Afghanistan is more accepted than Iraq because troops are not as likely to die there, along with the perception within the military that the U.S. is winning. But Obama is looking out for U.S. imperialists’ interests, not for lower-enlisted troops.
According to a recent Army War College report entitled "U.S. Interests in Central Asia and Challenges to Them," U.S. imperialists need Afghanistan as a base to project military power and to fend off Russian and Chinese imperialists’ influence over oil/gas-rich states in the region, regardless of who becomes president. Already, the "good" war has killed thousands of Afghans and over 600 coalition troops.
No matter what the bosses do to win workers to fight, overall recruitment trends continue to fall short of the troops the military needs to relieve the strain of current deployments. In October, the Senate voted down the Dream Act, a Pentagon-backed bill that targeted hundreds of thousands of undocumented, mainly Latino, youth for recruitment. Lawrence J. Korb, a top strategist for U.S. imperialism, say the U.S. needs 100,000 more troops the next few years and warns, "If we cannot get sufficient numbers of the right people on a volunteer basis, as Lt. General Lute, President Bush’s war czar noted, returning to the draft will have to be considered."
PLP and friends must link the racism of the justice system and imperialist wars to local bosses and to the capitalist system. Within the military, we need to influence troops to do what they can to resist killing for imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the bosses building to expand support for the "war on terror," fighting racism, especially against Arabs and Muslims, becomes even more important.
Union mis-leaders have told PL unionists that raising the war distracts from bread-and-butter issues. Anti-war groups have told PL’ers that racism is a related but separate struggle. And soldiers won to bosses’ ideology say the main enemy is those who are planting IEDs (roadside bombs), not the bosses pitting workers against each other to fight their wars. It’s up to PLP to combat these lies and win our base to take action that exposes capitalism for what it is — a racist, sexist, imperialist system that must be destroyed.
U.S. Imperialism: Killer By Suicide
There are many ways in which U.S. imperialism kills people. One of the least know is GI suicide: one veteran soldeir commits suicide every 84 minutes — 24 hours per day, 365 days a year.
A CBS-TV report (11/13/07) on figures from 45 of the 50 states revealed that in 2005, 6,256 veterans committed suicide: 120 every week, 17 per day. If the other five states had reported, the final figure might approach 24 per day, or one every hour.
In the 20-24 age group, the suicide rate is up to four times the civilian average.
The onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder is often delayed for decades, but it has reached epidemic proportions, which the Pentagon denies and refuses to even count.
Most youth do not enlist because they want to kill civilians. But experiencing the carnage in Iraq and Vietnam, among other imperialist wars, leads to another type of murder by war: GI suicides.
Profs Fight for Right to Teach Anti-Capitalism in Classroom
CHICAGO — The situation in U.S. higher education mirrors the increasing crisis and growing ferocity of U.S. rulers against other parts of the working class. They raise the rate of exploitation, aided by the complete sellout by the trade union leadership. Huge cutbacks in state and federal money mean that even "public" colleges are so expensive that they are scarcely public any longer. Students take 5-6 years to graduate, and graduate students take almost a decade to get their doctoral degrees.
Almost three-fourths of college classes are taught by graduate students, part-time, and adjunct faculty who work for less than a living wage, normally with no benefits and no job security from year to year. A campaign funded by "conservative" ruling-class forces to intimidate teachers away from criticizing capitalism and its horrors has been so blatant that many of the more secure full-time and tenured faculty recognize that some form of opposition is needed.
PL members and friends carried the campaign against these abuses and for communism to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the largest convention of college teachers in the world. As in the past we worked with our friends in the Radical Caucus (RC) to recruit more faculty and graduate students to class struggle and ultimately to the Party.
The RC’s reform struggles focused on three resolutions to the MLA Delegates. The first, on the relation between super-exploitation of teachers, their lack of job security, and lack of freedom to teach anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, passed with some debate.
The second resolution, urging freedom to criticize Zionism in the classroom, was sidetracked by a backstage agreement between one delegate who is also head of the liberal American Association of University Professors (AAUP), supposedly an "academic freedom" group, and the MLA leadership. The explicit defense of those who teach anti-Zionism was replaced by a general statement that all teachers should be free to teach as they wish. This ignores the big attacks against those teachers who criticize Zionism — and that was the AAUP leader’s goal. A third resolution, against the politically-motivated firing of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, was watered down to be passed in a weaker form.
The "liberal" AAUP leader and the "liberal" MLA Executive Board were exposed as failing to stand up for those faculty who want to attack U.S. imperialism and Zionism. We need to stress this more, and prepare better for next year.
We met many new, good people who will help build our struggles. We had some good discussions about the Party and communism, and are following up. We should have organized to leaflet the convention itself, as in previous years. We were also weak in distributing CHALLENGE. That error is being corrected now in post-convention contacts.
We have renewed our determination to make explicit anti-capitalism, along with anti-racism, the "bottom line" of all our public statements in sessions and meetings. A modest beginning must be improved in future years.
Most of our friends believe that a "humane" capitalism without imperialism and war is possible. They think, and want to believe, that U.S. bosses can be won to making the U.S. like what they think Denmark or Switzerland are. This is impossible, but most of our colleagues "want it to be true." The Democratic candidates for President are feeding those illusions with promises of "Change!" and "Dump Bush!" Revisionists — phony "communists" and "socialists" — are building those illusions, leading our class down the path to world war. We have to win more and more teachers to seeing that there is no hope in capitalism, and that they need to join PLP, to smash capitalism with revolution for a communist world.
a name="Striking Miners Battle Mexico’s Bosses, Cops, Union-Busting Government">">"triking Miners Battle Mexico’s Bosses, Cops, Union-Busting Government
CANANEA, SONORA, MEXICO, January 14 — The miners of Cananea — whose struggle marked the beginning of the 1912 Mexican Revolution — are again fighting back against their bosses and the bosses’ state. This past week hundreds of state and federal cops attacked copper miners who have been striking for almost six months. Twenty miners were injured, some seriously, and many have been arrested.
The mine, owned by the Grupo Mexico (GM) capitalist group — which also owns two mines and a smelter group in Arizona — is raking in huge profits from high copper prices on the world market. Yet it refuses to grant workers a decent wage hike, reopen a hospital serving them and their families, and improve mine safety and working conditions. GM’s chief financial officer is a former executive of a Kimberley-Clark subsidiary in Mexico. That’s the paper company founded by the family of Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner, sponsor of the racist anti-immigrant bill that sparked mass mega protests in all major U.S. cities in 2006.
The bosses are trying to break the strike by declaring it "illegal." On January 12, the miners won an appeal against such a declaration.
The miners are also battling government and company plans to bust their union and bring in a company union. It has become the longest walkout in the history of the Union of Mine, Smelter and Allied Workers, surpassing the 2006 Lazaro Cárdenas, Michoacan, strike when workers beat back an attack by an army of cops and soldiers. Miners’ strikes have spread since February 19, 2005, when 65 miners died in a huge explosion in the GM-owned Pasta de Conchos coal mine in the northern state of Coahuila.
The 1912 Mexican revolution didn’t free Mexico’s rural and urban workers from the yoke of capitalism and imperialism. Today, all the contradictions in Mexico are sharpening. Now, a nationalist section of the local capitalist class, led by López Obrador, wants to use the anger of workers and youth to fight for a bigger share of the capitalist pie for their own interests. Obrador lost a fraudulent election in 2006 to the current President Calderón, a pro-U.S. lackey. The country is being militarized, with Pentagon help, under the guise of "the war against drugs." For workers, the only way out of this hell is to turn their struggles into schools for communism and join and build the internationalist communist PLP.
PLP calls on workers and students in the U.S. and Mexico to denounce this attack on the Cananea miners and unite in international workers’ solidarity.
Growing PLP Club in Spain Links Study and Action
SPAIN — "I didn’t know that an international party existed that was so concerned about the workers of the entire world," said a friend, a student from France, when I showed her CHALLENGE-DESAFIO at a meeting of a club formed in one of the largest cities here. Our club began with a Turkish worker and myself, an immigrant worker from El Salvador. Now we’re more than ten workers of different nationalities. We’ve joined marches organized by the transit unions and other mass reform groups fighting for better transit city-wide.
We met to review international events. It became complicated because two workers from Ireland didn’t understand much Spanish, but a youth from Venezuela translated our discussion on dialectical materialism. One was very excited because he hadn’t understood before why — if the communist line was correct — the old Soviet Union failed. Then he read a CHALLENGE explaining some of the errors committed then. We all concluded that in order to establish a system in which we’re all equal, instead of fighting for socialism as a stage between capitalism and communism, we must fight directly for communism.
Our French friend was quite taken with the recent workers’ and youth mass protests back home. Then when we read CHALLENGE, she saw the title headline saying when workers unite, we can stop the whole capitalist machinery. She took several copies to continue sharing communist ideas with her fellow students in France.
We met a week later in an area "occupied" by squatters to celebrate a member’s birthday, which led to turning a bad thing into a good thing. While discussing the racist police repression here against immigrants and social groups in general, the cops knocked at the door. Someone had called them to report a group of "disorderly" squatters in the neighborhood.
The good thing: we organized everything in a way that seemed natural. Two people left to talk to the cops. One stayed to guard the doors to bar their entrance, and another pair organized the rest to make a plan. The police said we couldn’t meet here, to go elsewhere. So one group left for the park and the others (immigrants without "proper" papers) stayed. Then we got the police to leave.
Afterwards, we all returned and initiated a sharper discussion. We said we need to print more leaflets and try to organize struggles with revolutionary, not reform goals.
These friends of the Party are now excited because they understand communist ideas more clearly, including the significance of union struggles for reforms and the real struggle that all workers must carry out worldwide, the fight for a communist system, organized by the only international communist party, PLP. We must fight to build more CHALLENGE readers’ clubs everywhere.
An internationalist communist worker
Red Mechanics Needed: Detroit Totaled by U.S. Capitalism
DETROIT, MI — "There are not enough park benches in the state to accommodate all the homeless people that are being created." That’s how one worker who faces losing her home described the sub-prime mortgage crisis that is affecting one out of every 21 homeowners here. Another said, "It doesn’t matter if you’re white or black. All working-class people are going through the same thing. We’re all just one step from being on the corner asking for food and money."
The home foreclosure rate here is the second highest in the country, and eight times the national average. Fifty years ago, when GM, Ford and Chrysler ruled the auto world, Detroit had the highest rate of home ownership of any major city in the U.S., and the highest median income. Today, with those same auto bosses fighting for their lives, and being increasingly challenged on their home turf, Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the U.S., with a median household income of only $35,500. Gambling casinos have replaced closed factories and there is hardly a supermarket or movie theater within the city limits. This is one of the clearest examples of the racism that is built into the profit system, as about 75% of Detroiters are black.
Since 2000, the metro area has lost 126,000 jobs. Many of those affected by layoffs and the recent wave of UAW-negotiated auto contracts are also facing foreclosure. In August, foreclosure notices were served on 260 homes per day. In the fall, the Wayne County treasurer’s office published a 121-page list of foreclosures. According to the Detroit News, more than 70,000 homes in the tri-county metro Detroit area entered some phase of foreclosure between January 2006 and September 2007. In some Detroit neighborhoods, the rate was 1 in 7 homes. This represents more than 250,000 active and retired workers and their children. Another wave of foreclosures will hit in March 2008, when many more adjustable mortgages will reset to a higher rate.
Help Wanted: In Iraq
On December 14, hundreds of workers lined up for the "Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles Job Fair." The Army was seeking more than 500 civilian welders, heavy mobile equipment mechanics, production controllers, administrative assistants, supply technicians and quality control specialists. The workers were hoping to earn between $138,000 and $212,000 for working 12-hours a day, seven days a week for 366 days in Iraq!
The deputy chief of staff for personnel at the Army’s TACOM Life Cycle Management Command said, "When an economy is down, we have more opportunities to get qualified applicants." The young black worker, who makes $50,000 a year working two full-time security guard jobs said, "…the neighborhood I live in, it’s no different than Iraq. I’m not scared."
This is a long way from the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, where Army brass was literally under fire, from Vietnam to Detroit, from Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers. It’s also a long way from the role played by young black Vietnam vets and auto workers who rebelled in solidarity with their Vietnamese brothers and sisters. But the collapse of the old communist movement gave the bosses a new lease on life. It opened the door to decades of massive racist attacks with little or no fight-back and very little class consciousness.
a name="Capitalism Won’t Fall On Its Own">">"apitalism Won’t Fall On Its Own
This past summer, the Detroit News examined economic conditions that sparked the Detroit Rebellion, and found:
•Detroit blacks had less buying power in 2000 than in 1967,
•In 2000, black median family income was down 6 percent from 1970, while white median income rose 18 percent,
•In 2005, blacks were 2.5 times more likely to be unemployed than whites – the same gap that existed in 1960.
Overall, there is more poverty in the U.S. now than 40 years ago and the poverty rate is about triple for black and Latin workers than for white workers. What’s more, the level of racist police terror and the rate of incarceration are far more oppressive than anyone could have imagined back then. The schools are much worse.
As with every crisis or "natural disaster," from sub-prime mortgages to Hurricane Katrina, black workers get hit first and hardest. Racism is at the very core of capitalism, created to justify slavery and the very cord that holds the whole profit system together. And while billions are lost on Wall St., and a few heads roll, millions of workers, children and the elderly are having their lives wrecked by the bosses and bankers. Building a mass PLP and increasing the base for CHALLENGE newspaper is the only way to answer the racist horrors of capitalism.
While this sub-prime crisis is very serious for the bankers and bosses, it is important to remember that the bosses can survive any crisis, even defeat in imperialist war. The only crisis they can’t survive is communist revolution. And the future of that movement is in our hands, not theirs.
Ford Strike In Russia Ends
The three-week strike at the Ford factory in Vsevolozhsk, located right outside St. Petersburg, ended on Dec. 14. Ford workers are among the lowest-paid factory workers in Europe, making between 16,000 and 25,000 rubles ($600-1,000) a month. This is comparable to auto factory wages paid in Latin America.
Ford used office workers to maintain one production shift, and toward the end of the strike managed to start a second. Nevertheless, the strike crippled production and exhausted the union’s strike fund. The police harassed the picketers and strike leaders were threatened with arrest.
Ford workers voted to go back to work after the bosses agreed to a wage increase. The union and the company agreed to settle all unresolved issues by Feb. 1. This was the longest strike in the post-Soviet era, the first under the new Labor Code and the first where strikers won a general amnesty against reprisals.
The workers failed to win their demands of a 30 percent wage increase, higher pensions and reducing the work day. But a strike leader, reflecting the fighting mood of the workers said, "I think [Ford] should agree to concessions. They would hardly want to see a new strike in the spring."
Lesson of Mack Ave. Wildcat: Scratch A Liberal, Find A Fascist
In December, Justin Ravitz died. He was the judge in 1974 who tried to jail the Chrysler workers who led the Mack Avenue Sit-Down strike. In August 1973, 350 workers seized the plant after a comrade was fired for his role in an anti-racist health and safety struggle, and reported to work the next day, refusing to leave.
Chrysler security was driven out of the plant, and the next day, the workers faced off against the Detroit police chanting, "FIGHT BACK! – FIGHT BACK!" It finally took 1,000 thugs organized by the UAW, just about everyone on the payroll and many KKK members, to violently retake the plant for the bosses. A white comrade and a black worker who gave crucial leadership to the action were arrested and each charged with two counts of felonious assault.
Ravitz had a reputation as an anti-racist lawyer and criminal court judge. He was involved in the legal dismantling of STRESS, a police undercover unit that murdered 20 people, 17 of them black, and fought to have more black people on juries. He called himself the only Marxist judge in the U.S., banned the American flag from his courtroom in protest of the Vietnam War, and refused to stand for the pledge when he was sworn in. But when it came to prosecuting PLP and communist-led workers, Ravitz was on the side of Chrysler, the UAW leadership and the Detroit police.
At the time, the bosses were still trying to retake control of the major cities, after the armed rebellions of the late 1960’s. Henry Ford and the New Detroit alliance of bosses, bankers and politicians were calling the shots in Detroit, pulling the strings of Coleman Young, a former Communist Party auto organizer and Detroit’s first black mayor, and a City Council of preachers and fake radicals.
PLP relied on auto workers and youth to wage a political defense around the city, exposing Ravitz and the bosses he served. Every notice posted inside the plant soliciting prosecution witnesses was torn down in minutes. Literature saturated numerous plants, Wayne State University, and unemployment and welfare offices, calling on workers and students to defend PLP, the Mack Sit-Down and exposing Ravitz, the UAW leaders, and the rest. Many supporters attended the trial, and many more gave money. The black worker who was arrested, a Vietnam vet, joined the Party on the very day he was called to testify.
Ultimately, the case was tossed out. There was a provision in the law at the time that the prosecution had to produce witnesses from a cross section of the population that witnessed the alleged crime. The Chrysler bosses, UAW and the Detroit police could not produce one Chrysler production worker to testify against the defendants. Not one. Case dismissed. Ravitz was beside himself, and scolded the cops and Chrysler bosses for failing to make their case.
A lot has happened since then, and today Detroit is a shell of what it was. Every anti-racist "reform" has given way to more and deeper racist oppression, from mass unemployment and poverty to crumbling schools and over-crowded jails. The infant mortality rate here is comparable to that of the poor countries in the Caribbean. This is the legacy of the reformers like Ravitz, who above all else were loyal to the profit system until the end. And we are better off for having fought them.
Mack Ave. Defender
a name="Bhutto’s Party and Musharraf, Two Sides of Capitalist Coin">">"hutto’s Party and Musharraf, Two Sides of Capitalist Coin
The recent murder of Benazir Bhutto released the pent-up fury of workers and youth in Pakistan against the repressive and exploitative military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf. Workers and youth clashed with the police and army in cities nation-wide. Fifty-eight were killed, 89 injured, 800 shops, 185 banks, 27 railway stations and 13 polling stations burned.
Benazir Bhutto, was a former prime minister and chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). She had recently returned from exile to take part in elections after a deal with Musharraf worked out with the U.S. and Britain. Her assassination blew up that deal. (See Jan. 16 CHALLENGE on how that was a big blow to the U.S.-U.K. "war on terror," and on the inter-imperialist rivalry behind events in Pakistan.)
But even though Bhutto’s murder sparked the masses’ fury, it was really fueled by a smoldering discontent with the country’s rigid class system, poverty, oppression and a widening gap between the rich and poor. Despite a rapidly-expanding economy, conditions for the working class have worsened as the cost of basic necessities rise and wages fall.
New anti-labor laws strip away previously-won rights to organize. Among 20 million industrial workers only two million have contracts, leaving 18 million who can be fired at any time and paid as bosses see fit. Workers have no social security, health care or pensions. In a population of 168 million, (the 6th most populous country on Earth) 70% are agricultural workers, many of them "housewives" who work without pay, and landless peasants dependent on wealthy landlords for survival. Forced labor and child labor are common.
Privatization is making bosses even richer. The government is handing over the country’s state-owned utilities and major industries to individuals, often army officials. As the new bosses "downsize," workers lose jobs. Privatization of colleges, which previously received government funding, means that working-class youth cannot afford an education.
Benazir Bhutto was part of the same capitalist class, as corrupt as the generals who run the country and dominate its businesses and banking sectors. In her two terms as prime minister she acquired immeasurable wealth. Her husband, known as "Mr. Ten Percent," served eight years in jail for extortion. Before the assassination, Benazir was facing corruption charges.
The Bhutto family, among the biggest landowners in the southwest province of Sindh, has feudal-like control over the lives of thousands of landless peasants and sharecroppers and sees the PPP as its personal domain. The PPP’s first chairperson was Benazir’s father; her will names her 19-year-old son as heir to the party’s leadership.
The PPP was founded in 1967 during a fierce revolutionary-type fight-back. In 1968-69, under the influence of a worldwide anti-Vietnam War movement and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, workers occupied factories, peasants surrounded landed estates and youth took to the streets. This anti-capitalist movement cut across ethnic and national lines, uniting around one slogan: "Revolution! Socialist Revolution!" It nearly overthrew the government but failed because the movement had no party with the strategy of taking state power. In addition, many workers joined the PPP, attracted by its stated aim of a classless society, only to be misled into the dead-end struggle of reforming capitalism through electoral politics.
The PPP leadership, acting in its own class interest, deflected the revolutionary aspirations of the masses and never delivered on its promise of ending exploitation. Her government also helped prop up the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan and led to the Taliban. Yet some workers still look to the PPP as the way forward.
But revolutionary ideas can be embedded in workers’ consciousness. They surfaced in the mass movement of the 1980s and are present again today as Pakistan falls into political turmoil. Revolutionaries of the 1960s missed the historical opportunity to take power. Now the working class is organizing again and learning from its past mistakes, as well as from the experiences of revolutionaries worldwide, that the fight for a classless society is not for socialism but for communism.
(This is the first part of a series on current struggles in Pakistan.)
Unity With African, Arab Workers Critical to Union Fight vs. French Bosses, Hacks
PARIS, January 9 — Workers are searching for effective ways to fight the government’s continuing attacks on them. The next test of strength will be a public workers’ strike on January 24.
Yesterday President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted he wants to abolish the 35-hour work-week and impose racist immigration quotas. On January 6, Budget and Civil Service Minister Eric Woerth repeated his refusal to uniformly raise public workers’ wages, which fell 6% between 2000 and 2006 due to inflation. Wage negotiations for public workers will begin January 14.
On November 20, some two million public and private workers struck for higher wages. (See CHALLENGE, 11/28/07 and 12/12/07) When Woerth refused to consider an across-the-board wage hike on Dec. 19, six union federations representing public workers called for demonstrations and a strike on January 24. Five teachers’ unions joined the strike call, demanding higher wages and protesting the government’s decision to eliminate 11,200 jobs.
Education Minister Xavier Darcos then announced he will test strike-breaking "minimum service" in public schools in at least four cities that have signed strike-breaking contracts with the national government. Scabs will baby-sit pupils to keep them in school and not disrupt parents’ work schedules, minimizing the strike’s impact.
Scabs will be paid with money docked from the strikers’ wages. The unions denounced "minimum service" as an assault on the right to strike.
These attacks stem from the inter-imperialist rivalry that is pressing the bosses in each country to drive for maximum profits by taking them out of the pockets of the working class, smashing the social contract that has existed since World War II. Only international working-class unity can begin to meet these attacks.
Increasingly, workers here realize that they must meet escalating government attacks with greater working-class unity across public sector-private sector divisions. Responding to this rank-and-file pressure, the FO union confederation called for private-sector workers to join the January 24 demonstrations, but stopped short of calling on them to strike.
The SUD-Education union in northern Brittany issued a sarcastic statement denouncing "an isolated, one-day strike by only public workers," asking why the major trade unions insist on: (1) pursuing the losing 24-hour-strike strategy, (2) negotiating crumbs while abandoning fundamental demands, and (3) allying with the government’s effort to smash the welfare state. SUD-Education 22 nevertheless backed the strike call.
Several recent developments underlined workers’ and students’ combative mood. The public television union is calling for a strike to oppose plans to merge the five public TV companies and lay off workers.
The CFE-CGC nurses’ union is calling for a strike to protest unpaid overtime hours. Each nurse is owed an average of 70 hours overtime pay from 2007.
Tolbiac University students here voted to strike and occupy university buildings to protest Sarkozy’s "reforms." Classes were disrupted and cancelled, and access to elevators was blocked. The students condemned "the privatization of the universities, and the axing of some academic departments," and also raised the anti-racist demand of "papers for all undocumented immigrants."
This is an important step in making the fight against racism central to workers’ and students’ overall demands. The rank and file must link their struggle to that of African and Arab workers and youth against racist unemployment and police terror. Otherwise, the rulers will have accomplished their goal of dividing and weakening the entire working class.
Nevertheless, as of today, the CFDT union confederation — whose leader was denounced as a sellout and expelled by angry workers from the November 20 Paris march — still wanted to look at government proposals before considering joining the strike.
These pro-capitalist union misleaders will push workers to the bottom. Communist leadership is needed to turn workers’ and students’ growing frustration with the union hacks’ betrayals into an understanding that only communist revolution can abolish the whole capitalist system, with its bosses, reactionary governments and labor fakers.
Battle for Resources Behind Endless Wars in Africa
The bosses’ mass media reports about Africa only when Madonna or Angelina Jolie adopts another baby or when another massacre or tragedy occurs. But they rarely explain what’s really happening there. This series will present a communist analysis of events on that continent.
Kenya is the latest victim of a combination of imperialist super-exploitation of Africa’s workers and its resources and how crooked capitalist politicians use tribal politics to pursue their own interests. For many years, there was little tribal conflict in modern Kenya; people basically got along. U.S. and British imperialists used Kenya as a base to invest, super-exploit and wage their "war on terror" in the region. But amid growing inter-imperialist rivalry and capitalist economic turmoil, the imperialist-created "stability" of Kenya was bound to fail.
The power struggle between President Kibaki and opposition leader Odinga sparked an explosion. Kibaki stole the December election and now refuses to give Odinga a piece of the action despite calls by Koffin Annan, Barack Obama (whose father is Kenyan), Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) and Condi Rice. Hundreds have died in clashes between supporters of both politicians, and 500,000 now need immediate relief because of this politicians’ dogfight.
4 Million Killed in Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has again erupted into a bloody civil war, particularly in its Eastern region. It’s being labeled a re-play of the fight between Tutsis and Hutus that led to the murder of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda and Burundi over a decade ago.
A front-page NY Times article (1/10) reported: "The recent clashes in eastern Congo…have exacted a grievous toll on a region ravaged by a decade of war. Around 400,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, thousands of women have been raped and hundreds of children have been press-ganged into militias, the United Nations says….But the fighting is also rekindling the kind of ethnic hatred that previously dragged this region into the most deadly conflict since World War II."
The rebels fighting the Congo army are Tutsis, who many see representing the Rwandan rulers who aim to control this part of the Congo. But while this conflict is defined as involving ethnic and tribal politics, economic and political factors are really behind this endless war in that country. (Since the 1990s, this war has killed over four million people, beginning with the fall of long-time strongman Mobutu, a rabid anti-communist first installed by the CIA and then propped up in his last few years by French imperialism).
The real fight is over the region’s mineral wealth — gold, diamonds and coltan (used in ballistic missiles and cell phones) are among the many lucrative minerals mined there. Usually, local bosses and generals work as subcontractors for multi-national corporations from Europe, the U.S. and South Africa which buy and trade these minerals.
(Future articles will explore the role of inter-imperialist rivalry in the misery of Africa; Chinese and Russian energy giants’ involvement in the imperialist power game, from Darfur to Nigeria; Pentagon creation of a new command to protect U.S. imperialist interests in the region; and how the powerful working class of South Africa and Nigeria can play an important role — if given red leadership — in helping liberate all of Africa from imperialism and their local capitalist lackeys.)
Transportation Workers Can Be Key Force for Revolution
For several weeks last fall, French transit workers engaged in a series of strikes to defend their pensions and jobs. Other workers and students also struck. Meanwhile, the cops murdered two youths, sparking an anti-racist rebellion of African and Arab youth. It is inter-imperialist rivalry that is spawning increased racist attacks on our living standards worldwide, attacks which impel these strikes and rebellions.
French bosses are using president Sarkozy to attack industrial workers and youth, shredding the old social contract. The pro-capitalist union leaders refuse to counter these attacks. The bosses have their strategy for the future; what is ours?
The major imperialist powers are freely investing capital globally. New transportation and communications systems are creating rapid, mass migration of workers. The industrial working class is expanding, especially in India and China, where migration is mainly internal, from rural areas to the cities. In Europe and the U.S., migration is primarily from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In Latin America, workers migrate from poorer countries to those somewhat less poor — from Haiti to Dominican Republic, from Nicaragua and Honduras to El Salvador, from neighboring countries to Brazil and Argentina. The bosses use this mobility to force large pools of unemployed workers to compete for jobs. We can use this greater connection to build an international movement against capitalism.
Transportation systems that move people and commodities are becoming increasingly critical to capitalist profit. The transportation industries can be the Achilles heel of capitalism if we can organize breakthroughs here. This adds importance to the recent transport strikes in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, and the struggle in mass transit worldwide.
Our strategy is to unite the unemployed, immigrant and industrial workers in a movement for communist revolution, bringing workers to power and crushing the racist bosses. With communist leadership, transportation workers can take the lead.
French transit workers were able to draw students and other workers into the struggle, but lacked the leadership to unite with the unemployed and immigrant youth. Communist leadership is necessary to develop the anti-racist class consciousness required to advance at this time.
Among transit workers in NYC, Washington D.C., Chicago and the West Coast, we’re fighting racist attacks and cutbacks that target a mostly black work-force that serves an even larger black, Latino and immigrant population. We struggle to keep the fight against racism in the forefront of contract fights and union elections. We organized support for those left to die in New Orleans during Katrina, and more recently for the Jena 6. We have tried to pass union resolutions and collected money from co-workers.
Mainly, we’re fighting to spread CHALLENGE and PLP literature in our garages, bus barns and workplaces. We’re trying to develop personal and group discussions among co-workers, inviting them to study-action groups and PLP club meetings. Self-critically, we can do much better on this. The better we do, the better we can do. We must fight against getting buried in the daily demands of "union work."
The transportation unions are shadows of their former selves. Strikes, like the 2005 NYC transit walkout, are seldom used and often broken. This year the rulers will spend over a billion of our dollars in a sucker’s bet on the 2008 presidential elections. Clinton, Obama and Edwards are the bosses’ shell game. Whoever we choose, we lose! No matter who’s elected president, more and deadlier imperialist wars will still rage, racist terror will be used to attack and divide us, and transportation workers will face more cutbacks and attacks. These are the laws of capitalism.
Transit workers, airline workers, railroad workers and truck drivers are the lifeline of modern industrial society. We can be a key force for communist revolution. The current inter-imperialist rivalry is leading to wars that will make Iraq look like a tea party. Slowly but surely, a new generation of black, Latino and women transportation workers will be building a mass international PLP to end the profit system once and for all.
LETTTERS
Confidence in Working Class Pays Off
Recently, industrial workers in the Party got together to discuss the present and future state of industrial work. At this meeting the idea that we have been too timid in talking to our co-workers came up. We decided to be bolder and work harder to expand our CHALLENGE networks. This emphasis on boldness lies in having confidence that the working class can understand local, national, and international issues and how they are all connected. Most importantly, our practice must be based on the knowledge that workers can and will understand and identify with our Party line.
This new emphasis has paid immediate dividends for the workers who attended the meeting. Shortly after I returned to work my conversations with my co-workers became more political and the content of the conversations was pushed to the left, not just by me but also by my co-workers.
The quantity of conversations increased as well. While having lunch last week one of my co-workers, out of the blue, asked me what I thought about the new UAW contract. Seizing the opportunity, I put forward the Party’s analysis regarding the ruling class’s push to "re-industrialize" and how this push was a reaction to growing inter-imperialist rivalry. One co-worker brought up the Navistar strike and how the presence of UAW scabs is a sign of this intensifying struggle. The conversation then took on a life of its own as we discussed the Russian and Chinese push to build a massive industrial base in preparation for war and how the sub-prime loan crisis has exposed U.S. weakness in the face of its adversaries. The conversation expanded my potential base from just one person on the job to five.
All our lives the ruling class tries to tell us that the working class is stupid and incapable of understanding the world around them. But when you have confidence in the working class and you boldly put communist politics forward you realize that myth of the stupid and complacent worker is a capitalist lie. It is important that when we talk to workers sympathetic with our politics that we trust their ability to understand them.
Worker from the West Need to Fight Racist Deportation Raids
When we heard about a fascist ICE (immigration police) raid that rounded up many of our undocumented working-class brothers and sisters at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, we figured if it happened there it could happen at our airport. My co-workers — CHALLENGE readers — were glad to help distribute flyers calling a meeting to discuss anti-immigrant racism.
The week before there was much political discussion among immigrants and citizens who helped build for this meeting. Led by our anti-racist shop steward, it was multi-racial and included Latino and black workers from El Salvador, Mexico and the U.S. However, one weakness was that no African immigrants came, influenced by nationalist thinking that says, "Well, this raid only affects Latino workers." This only aids the racist U.S. bosses and must be addressed. When one group of workers is singled out, none are safe.
In reviewing the O’Hare incident, we realized our airport hasn’t had such a raid since 9/11. We need a plan to warn our fellow workers on all shifts in case the ICE police show up. Soon afterwards, when the union mis-leader visited the airport, the shop steward asked, in front of the airport workers, what would the union do if there’s an ICE raid. This question disturbed the misleader who had no concrete answer or plan.
Later a black woman worker remarked, "You could tell the union leader really didn’t want to talk about that." It exposed the racism and incompetence of our union leadership. Since half our membership is Latino, we need a plan to fight anti-immigrant racism, a part of capitalism which the bosses use to super-exploit immigrant workers and then discard them after they’ve made millions off their labor.
In fighting racist deportations, PLP is following the anti-racist traditions of abolitionists like John Brown and Harriet Tubman and the Dutch communists in World War II who led workers to protect Jews from Nazi attempts to deport them to concentration camps.
The racist U.S. bosses use anti-immigrant racism to scapegoat immigrants just as the Nazis did with Jewish workers. PLP is building a movement of communist-led workers to smash such U.S. fascism with communist revolution that would benefit all workers.
Airport Red
a name="Phony Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’"></">Ph"ny Wrestlers Hype Phony ‘War on Terror’
I wrote a letter to a local paper based on a CHALLENGE editorial exposing the split in the ruling class over war with Iran.
If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard some yahoo state that U.S. troops are stationed around the world to protect "our" freedom, I could purchase a BMW.
On Christmas Eve, I was forced to watch the World Wrestling Entertainment tribute to the troops in Iraq. Imagine that spectacle: a bunch of phony wrestlers entertaining "our" troops fighting a phony "war on terror." How appropriate!
Of course, nobody mentioned that the war was based on the lie that Iraq had WMDs. Instead we’re told that the mission is to ensure a "bright future" for the Iraqis and an end to persecution there. The viewer is also told that the Saddam Hussein regime executed the entire Iraqi soccer team in a stadium and therefore the U.S. invasion was correct.
This reminded me that 3,000 Chilean workers were murdered in a stadium following the U.S.-backed coup there in 1973. So U.S. imperialism should know a lot about soccer stadiums.
One thing I like about CHALLENGE is it always points out the need for communist revolution. If it was possible to reform capitalism to meet workers’ needs, there’d be no real need for communist revolution. Some "left" groups (like the "Communist" Party) don’t seem to grasp that fact.
Reform of any sort will not be on the agenda in capitalist-imperialist Amerikkka. The head honchos in the labor movement won’t even launch serious unionization drives.
CHALLENGE is not afraid to tell it like it is.
Red Coal
Revoking Union Rights Is A Law of Capitalism
Recently all of Mexico’s capitalist parties (PAN, PRI, PRD) approved the elimination of the labor rights of hundreds of thousands of office workers in state-run companies and as well as "mixed" ones (combined state-run and private) — PEMEX (oil), IMSS (health care) and CFE (electricity).
The legal protection of the current contracts was eliminated. Now the bosses can freely establish contract conditions through individual work agreements (CIT), dividing and weakening the workers.
In PEMEX, 32,000 office workers are forced to sign CIT work contracts. One clause bars a worker from appealing unjust company decisions, including being fired.
The bosses have spread the lie that these workers are an "elite," loyal to the company, and sworn enemies of rank-and-file unionized workers. Many of the latter believe this bosses’ tale. But in reality working conditions for the office workers and the unionized workers are similar.
The majority of these office workers receive only a few crumbs more than the rest of the workers, and are often forced to work long hours without overtime and without any recourse against the bosses’ abuses. Only the higher directors and very specialized professionals receive bigger salaries. The majority carry out functions very similar to those of unionized workers.
This division is the cutting edge in eliminating workers’ rights since these attacks will later be extended to unionized workers.
The office workers are starting to organize in associations to defend themselves. However, although they recognize the importance of uniting, they consider the legal road as the main way to fight the bosses. This limits their power and effectiveness.
We’re active in these organizations where we’ve distributed DESAFIO-CHALLENGE and leaflets. We’re struggling to overcome passivity and to be bolder in presenting the Party’s ideas. We want to show these workers that defending ourselves from the bosses’ attacks legally will fail in the long run and leave us frustrated.
All workers must see clearly that the laws of the capitalist system function to guarantee the bosses’ profits. Working-class victory can only be guaranteed through uniting the workers and organizing a revolutionary communist party which fights for a society that workers control. This is the struggle of the communist PLP. Join us!
A Red Worker, Mexico
Higher-paid Jobs Corrupted USSR Leaders
CHALLENGE’s recent back-page historical article on the Russian revolution urged readers to study and learn what the Communist Party did right and what it did wrong.
Good idea.
But in your suggestions about where to look for errors, there is an important blank space. That is the fact that in the 1930s Communist Party members who moved up as leaders –– even very minor or local leaders –– moved up to a standard of living much higher than the average worker. Yes, putting forth "socialism" as the immediate goal opened the door to wage differentials. But, keeping communism as the long-range goal would not be believable unless party members set an example by not taking excess income.
When Anna Louise Strong, a sympathetic reporter, visited the USSR for some time in the 1930s, she was shocked to be offered a country home. "We’re all getting them," she was told by party members. She did not report on this at the time, fearing it would feed anti-communism.
Whatever mistakes Stalin may have made, I consider this the greatest harm he did to communism. Leaders who have a financial stake in keeping their jobs cannot honestly listen to and represent the workers. In fact, the leaders split-interests paved the way for the growth of a Party central leadership that ended up condemning Stalin and enriching themselves and their cohorts as they reverted to capitalism.
Ancient Red
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Clear case of insurer-murderer
The 17-year-old had been in a coma after complications following a bone marrow transplant to counter leukaemia. Her liver failed and doctors referred her for an emergency transplant. She was fully insured and had a donor but Cigna refused to pay….The family… could not afford the down payment of $75,000.
The family mounted a protest of 150 people outside Cigna’s Glendale offices. The demo was amplified by an internet campaign…. Cigna decided to reverse its decision….
The news drew cheers but the crowd grew sombre when they heard her condition had deteriorated. A few hours later her life support was switched off. "She passed away, and the insurance [company] is responsible," her mother, Hilda Sarkisyan, said.
The case points to growing disenchantment with healthcare in America. "This is what’s wrong with our health system – insurers decide treatment, not doctors…" (GW, 1/4)
Neocons trace to anti-Stalin cult
…Neo-conservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of… young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky… Along with Irving Howe… the veterans eventually drifted away from Trotskyism, becoming stalwarts of the anti-Communist left, where they were joined by Norman Podhoretz… few if any of them expressed concern when they discovered that Encounter, a magazine that Irving Kristol co-founded in 1952, was secretly underwritten by the Central Intelligence Agency. (NYT, 1/13)
Black workers lost more homes
… Wells Fargo made high-cost loans, with an interest rate at least three percentage points above a federal benchmark, to 65 percent of its black customers in Baltimore and to only 15 percent of its white customers in the area…
Wells Fargo allowed mortgage brokers to charge higher commissions when they put borrowers in loans with higher interest rates than the customers qualified for…
Now, Baltimore is a city in a foreclosure crisis…
Half of Wells Fargo foreclosures occurred in census tracts with populations that were more than 80 percent black. (NYT, 1/8)
Capitalist system: big trouble ahead
The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world… Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies –– for example, institute honest government and a free market economy –– they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax.
[But] we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels… Whether we get there willingly or not… our present [is] unsustainable. (Jared Diamond, NYT 1/2)
Capitalism doubles mental ills
… studies in the United States, Britain and Australia reveal that [mental illness] almost doubled between the early ‘80s and the turn of the century.
Capitalism has massively increased the wealth of the wealthy, robbing the average earner to give to the rich.
In itself, this economic inequality does not cause mental illness.
But Selfish Capitalism stokes up relative materialism: unrealistic aspirations… Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people…can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.
…Most damaging of all [is] the ideology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough. If you don’t succeed, there is only one person to blame –– never mind that it couldn’t be clearer that it’s the system’s fault, not yours. (GW, 1/11)
Iraq: US bombings multiply by 5
The Iraq air war may be the longest in history. In one way or another it has been undermining Iraq’s sovereignty, destroying its infrastructure, and killing and maiming its people for over 16 years. And there’s no end in sight.
Despite global pressure to withdraw, President Bush –– and indeed the broader U.S. power structure –– has no intention of giving up Iraq. The potential oil bonanza is too huge. And Iran –– with its oil bonanza –– is next door.
That air war is intensifying. The U.S. dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first half of 2007 as it did in the first half of 2006. As U.S. troops withdraw, the air attacks will multiply.
From the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to Korea and South East Asia, to the first Gulf War and now to Iraq –– air war is the signature of U.S. war making. (MinutemanMedia.org, 12/27)
a name="Lessons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future"></a>"essons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future
The four months between May Day 1975 in Boston and the first day of school there in early September remains one of the sharpest sustained periods of struggle our Party has yet experienced. The anti-racist summer project BOSTON 75 remains rich in lessons and examples.
The most important is that gutter fascists like ROAR can be beaten even when they are protected to the hilt by the bosses’ state apparatus and made to appear invincible by the bosses’ media. The battle of May Day 1975 had already exposed ROAR as a paper tiger. In the ensuing months, the tiger lost its fangs and claws.
The BOSTON 75 volunteers were relatively few in number. Most had little experience in politics or class struggle. They were young, the majority in their twenties. They had to live on a shoestring. They confronted the daily fury of the ruling class’s dictatorship. Between June and September, the volunteers saw the inside of Boston’s jails more than 200 times. Some were arrested twice or even three and four times. A few eventually received prison sentences.
Yet, despite these attacks, they won a clear strategic victory. They proved that a small force of bold, determined anti-racists under communist leadership could at least temporarily thwart a ruling class bent on building a mass-based fascist movement. The numbers tell the story.
The day before the Boston schools opened in September 1975, ROAR led a demonstration of 3,000 people at City Hall, down from the 15,000 in a similar racist mobilization in 1974. Sporadic racist violence characterized the 1975-76 school year, but it never reached the proportions of 1974-75. ROAR’s public activities dwindled to a series of poorly-attended anti-integration "mothers’ prayer marches." Fascist Louise Day Hicks soon abandoned politics altogether and in time fell into disgrace after her son was exposed as a dealer of illegal drugs. Shortly after BOSTON 75, the ROAR organization was dead in the water. PLP and the Committee Against Racism (CAR) deserve the lion’s share of credit for killing it.
BOSTON 75 therefore belongs to the living history of the PLP and the working class. For four months, against great odds, communists and anti-racists inflicted important political and tactical defeats on the ruling class of a great city and its plans to turn a large portion of the working class into Nazi thugs.
The project nonetheless had serious weaknesses; their lessons remain valid today. The most important was political, which grew out of the Party’s basic line at that time. By 1975, PLP had rejected nationalism — the idea that there were "progressive" bosses, even though they all believed in capitalism and would try to stop the working class from taking the road to revolution. This tied into also rejecting the theory of making revolution by stages, the idea that we could get to communism while still retaining some of the elements of capitalism (such as the wage system) — socialism — because workers "weren’t ready for communism." But we still believed in socialism. We didn’t come to understand this error until seven years after the adoption of Road to Revolution IV in 1982. (For the full text of this document, see the PL website, PLP.org)
In practical terms, we continued to initiate reform organizations through which we would function, such as CAR — later InCAR. We had founded it in 1973. It achieved much: organized BOSTON 75 and the fight against ROAR; launched militant mass struggle against leading academic racist theoreticians like Richard Herrnstein and E.O. Wilson; and led many battles against attempts to revive the Ku Klux Klan.
But ultimately, with all their militancy, CAR and InCAR were still reform organizations. In creating them, we had committed two serious mistakes. Firstly, we were substituting them for existing mass organizations in which we should have been deeply active and struggling directly for communist ideas and the Party, both during the BOSTON 75 project and elsewhere over the long run. Secondly, related to the first, was the implicit belief that the workers and students we expected to move to communism needed a "half-way house" — a PLP-led militant reform organization — on the way to joining the Party. This was an opportunist error, allowing us to win people to militant reform, something less than the communism we stood for. We thought we had licked this aspect of opportunism, at least in theory. We were wrong.
In the ensuing three decades, we’ve been trying to absorb these lessons, as the pages of CHALLENGE show. In the face of rising imperialist war and the bosses’ advance towards police-state fascism, this task has become increasingly urgent today. We defeated ROAR, a specific manifestation of U.S. fascism, despite working with one hand tied behind our back. It would be sheer folly to think that the experience could be repeated in the present period with an identical political approach and tactics.
We fight to preserve the spirit of boldness, militancy, anti-racism, and class hatred that characterized PLP’s work during the campaign against ROAR. We reject the opportunism of "two-stage" approaches to communist organizing. The victory against ROAR was an important battle, but it was temporary. The war against the profit system continues. The lessons learned in Boston more than 30 years ago should help the Party improve its leadership in the battles and trials ahead.
Steroids Helped Baseball Bosses Bulk Up Profits
Under capitalism, money ultimately ruins everything, even the games that are designed to divert workers from the wars and fascism rising around us. On December 13, Major League Baseball released the Mitchell Report, which told us what we already knew: that baseball — like the Olympics, the Tour de France, and every other big-money sport — is hopelessly infected with performance-enhancing drugs.
After naming more than 80 players, from superstars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to average players like Paul LoDuca, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell declared that "everyone" in baseball was to blame for the spread of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone (HGH), from club management to the players’ union. But when it gets down to cases, the report essentially convicts individual players and low-level pushers like Kirk Radomski, the one-time Mets’ bat boy, while giving a pass to Commissioner Bud Selig and the owners and executives who have seen no evil as long as their profits and bonuses kept rolling in.
As Dave Zirin notes in his online column, Edge of Sports, the report was stacked from the beginning. Mitchell was appointed by Selig, whose family owned the Milwaukee Brewers until 2005. The ex-senator sits on the boards of the Boston Red Sox and the Walt Disney Company (which owns ESPN), and his law firm has earned tens of millions of dollars by lobbying for Big Tobacco and General Electric. Mitchell is a high-priced mouthpiece for his corporate bosses, first and last. His report gives baseball executives some needed damage control on the steroid front, along with leverage to re-open contracts with the Players Association in the owners’ ongoing struggle to grab a bigger slice of the money pie.
For communists, there is no "good" side in this controversy. In their desperation to gain an edge in the brutally competitive major leagues, the players — from the surly Barry Bonds to the God-fearing Andy Pettite — have been corrupted into liars, cheaters, and hypocrites. They bear responsibility for the countless high school athletes and insecure adolescents who ape their drug-enhanced heroes on the path to torn tendons, liver and kidney damage, diabetes, heart attacks, depression, and suicide.
But as in every enterprise in this society, the owners paint the landscape. As Howard Bryant points out in Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005), baseball’s steroid era was born in 1994, when a player strike led to a cancelled World Series, depressed attendance, and a sharp drop in network television revenues. The owners’ response was to lure back the fans and sponsors with artificially inflated home run totals. They built smaller ballparks, shrank the strike zone — and looked the other way at rampant steroid use. In 1998, when an AP reporter spotted a vial of androstenedione (a "legal" steroid developed in East Germany) in Mark McGwire’s locker as McGwire was en route to his record 70 home runs, "the entire baseball establishment," Bryant wrote, "crushed…the story." (In contrast to the media’s racist focus on Bonds, McGwire remained an all-American hero until 2005, when he humiliated himself by dodging questions at a Congressional hearing.) In 2001, the owners renewed their five-year TV contract with Fox for $2 billion, nearly four times higher than the previous contract.
To date, only two middling major leaguers have received 15-day suspensions in the aftermath of the Mitchell report, but no matter how the sport changes as a result of the report, history tells us that baseball will remain business as usual — an enterprise run by capitalists for capitalists, with the next season’s profits the only record that matters.
Challenge Web Extra
Chile: Massacre of Miners a Century Ago Led to Building of Commmunist Party
A century ago, on Dec. 21, 1907, Chile’s army and police massacred over 2,000 miners and their families in the town of Iquique. It was one of the worst individual atrocities in the history of Chile and Latin America.
Earlier that month, thousands of dockhands in the town’s northern port — mainly handling saltpeter — struck to demand better working conditions. During the next few days, thousands of workers from the saltpeter companies in the Atacama Desert flats, controlled by Chilean and foreign (mainly British) capital, entered Iquique to join the strike. The workers tried to negotiate some economic demands, but the bosses insisted the laborers return to work as a precondition for negotiations.
Chile’s President Pedro Montt initially acted as a mediator in the conflict. But as the workers’ strike grew, the authorities decided that the 5,000 workers occupying the Santa María school and the 2,000 who had taken over the Manuel Montt plaza posed a threat to the system. When the workers refused to move elsewhere, Interior Minister Rafael Sotomayor urged the town’s mayor Carlos Eastman to remove the workers by any means necessary.
At 3:45 PM on Dec. 21, Gen. Roberto Silva Renard gave the order to open fire with machine guns on the Chilean, Bolivian, Peruvian and Argentine strikers occupying the Santa María school, many of them of indigenous origin. Many workers and their relatives were shot and even cut through by bayonets and horse cavalry carrying lancers. Many were killed when they were forced back to their jobs, returned in the same trains carrying saltpeter.
The massacre was basically hidden from Chile’s history until 1969 when the late Luis Advis composed the Cantata of Santa María de Iquique and the internationally known Chilean folk music group Quilapayún recorded it in 1970.
But the massacre, and many more that followed, made the workers and the trade unions politically conscious. They turned away from their previous "mutual aid" role and broke from the control of the Catholic Church.
Working-class leaders who survived the massacre, like Luis Recabarren, called it a "crime of capitalism" and formed the Socialist Workers Party. The imperialist World War I led to the first workers’ state headed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. The 3rd Communist International, led by the Bolsheviks, influenced revolutionary workers in Chile and worldwide. Under the leadership of Recarraben the Communist Party of Chile (CPC) was formed.
The bloody repression did not stop the workers’ mass struggles. In 1909, some 200,000 workers struck nation-wide. From 1916 to 1921 there were 13 general strikes throughout Chile. The country’s CPC was born from these mass struggles.
Unfortunately, decades later what the bosses’ repression couldn’t accomplish, the internal opportunism that rotted the old world communist movement did, turning Chile’s CP, the largest in Latin America, into its opposite. It helped bring Salvador Allende to power, creating illusions among workers about capitalist democracy. But these illusions were soon shattered by the heirs of the 1907 murderers of Iquique’s miners. General Pinochet’s fascist coup, organized by the new imperialist masters (Kissinger, the CIA and ITT), killed and jailed tens of thousands of workers and others.
Today, Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s first woman President, is a member of Allende’s same Socialist Party. She has continued the capitalist class’s attacks on workers’ struggles, including the copper miners’ strike several months ago. Chile’s workers need to learn from their history and rebuild the communist movement, based this time on fighting for communism, rejecting any faith in all bosses and their capitalist "democracy."
An Internationalist Reader
- RULERS' NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: FOR MORE LETHAL WARS
BHUTTO MURDER UNDERMINES U.S. EMPIRE - Bhutto Was Workers' Deadly Enemy
- Letter From the Iraq War
- 2007: Rival Imperiaists Challenged U.S. - Workers Fought Back Worldwide
- South Asian Worker Joins the International PLP
- PLP Youth Lead Anti-Racist Campaign At Brooklyn H.S.
- Student Anti-Racist Assembly Sparks Fight-back
- Opportunities to Build PLP After Navistar Union Hacks Sold Out
- Red Transit Workers Mean
`Doomsday' For the Bosses - Hacks' Phony `Human Rights' Unit Kills Jena 6 Resolution
- Fresh Direct's Anti-Immigrant Attack Is Rotten to the Core
- Paraguay's Electoral Circus Offers No Solution for Workers
- KENYA: Imperialist-Sponsored `Democracy' Blows Up
- LETTERS
- Asian Youth Wants to _Serve Working Class
- Airport Workers Rap on Ideas in CHALLENGE
- Union Struggle Sparks Ex-Member to Nix `Ex'
- Deportation Terror Hits ALL Workers
- Backs Proletarian Dictatorship All the Way
- High School Program Supports the Jena 6
- A Friend's Memory of Carson Beach: Boston Summer Project, 1975
- AIDS Day Hears Revolutionary Message on Epidemic
- PL History:
Anti-Racists' Multi-Racial Unity Defies Rulers' Attacks - NY Bosses Engineer Another Train Robbery: Hike Fares
RULERS' NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: FOR MORE LETHAL WARS
BHUTTO MURDER UNDERMINES U.S. EMPIRE
Benazir Bhutto's assassination and subsequent chaos in nuclear-armed Pakistan seriously set back U.S. plans for continuing control of the strategic region, especially of oil's grand prize, Saudi Arabia. U.S. rulers had hoped that Harvard-educated Bhutto could heal the ruling-class split between her land-holding family's faction and that of Musharraf's military and initiate more vigorous attacks on Pakistan-based al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Those who murdered Bhutto -- and simultaneously scores of workers -- dashed that dream and strengthened the forces of Osama bin Laden, who's almost certainly hiding in Pakistan. Bin Laden represents the non-royal sector of Saudi capitalists who are using unconventional violence to seize the oil bonanza the princes deny them.
Bhutto's killers' uncertain identity further underscores U.S. shakiness in its "ally" Pakistan. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are prime suspects but many blame Pakistan's pro-Islamist Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and fault Musharraf himself for not adequately protecting Bhutto. In any event, the killing reflects U.S. imperialism's tendency to create one crisis by trying to solve another.
All the possible culprits sport a "Made-in-the-U.S.A." label. Al Qaeda and the Taliban grew out of the U.S-led campaign to arm Islamists against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The ISI became powerful by helping run this operation. And the U.S. has built up Musharraf's military with gifts totaling $10 billion meant to "combat terror" but diverted to the power-hungry generals' own purposes.
Fight For Oil Sharpens
The grim Pakistan situation represents but one of the many major challenges U.S. rulers will face in the new year. Iraq remains an unprofitable hellhole, despite claims of the surge's "success." With the oil majors still afraid to risk capital and personnel there, Iraqi crude production hovers around 2.4 million barrels a day (mbd), far short of U.S. bosses' goals. Actually, just before the 2003 invasion, the Establishment's Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and James A. Baker Institute had issued a report foreseeing a six mbd windfall for Exxon Mobil and the rest.
Now Turkey's bosses, pursuing their own security needs, are making things even worse for their U.S. "allies": "Crude futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange soared past $96 per barrel...after Turkish warplanes hit alleged Kurdish rebel sites in northern Iraq....[T]raders fear that the rebels may respond by attacking oil pipelines in northern Iraq. (Energy Intelligence, 12/27/07) U.S. troops won't leave Iraq anytime soon, as Congressional Democrats keep writing the Pentagon blank checks.
Meanwhile, U.S. rivals are stepping up their military influence in the region. Iran almost simultaneously announced delivery of nuclear fuel from Russia and its purchase of a Russian air defense system. Furthermore, "Iran and Russia are in negotiations to expand military cooperation beyond air defenses, including attack helicopters and jet engines for a fleet of indigenous Iranian fighters. There have also been reports that Iran intends to purchase Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighters." (Washington Post, 12/27/07)
China, whose thirst for oil puts it on a collision course with the U.S., is building a naval port for its new oil tanker-shepherding "blue water" navy at Gwadar, Pakistan. Gwadar commands the crucial Strait of Hormuz chokepoint through which virtually all seaborne crude from the Persian Gulf to East Asia must pass.
NEXT PRESIDENT'S MAIN JOB: MOBILIZE FOR ALL-OUT OIL WAR
Both before and after 9/11, CHALLENGE constantly said that the U.S. would launch a war for control of the greater Middle East and its oil. Before 9/11, reporting on the Hart-Rudman commission that foresaw a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, we specifically said such an attack would precede a U.S. invasion of the Mid-East beginning in Iraq. Now U.S. rulers themselves admit as much. Richard Haass, president of the rulers' CFR -- when asked about the next U.S. president's main task -- said, "The greater Middle East represents the greatest collection of challenges that continue to face the U.S." (Nikkei News, 12/13/07) Haass charged the next president with militarizing the nation for deadlier wars. "[W]e have to expand the size of the U.S. military....[I]t is quite possible that a lot of uses of military will be manpower-intensive....And it now looks more [like] the current Iraq war is going to be the model of future wars."
Making Bhutto a martyr for wider conflict, White House hopeful Barack Obama called her "a respected...advocate for the democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people." Hillary Clinton also glorified Bhutto, "The world is once again reminded of the dangers facing those who pursue democracy."
But Bhutto was, in fact, no angel. She, like her U.S. backers, stood for nothing more than capitalism's utterly unprincipled, relentless pursuit of profit (See box below). In the ranks of departed foreign standard-bearers for U.S. imperialism, she joins Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran and countless Latin American dictators, from Pinochet to Somoza to Trujillo to Battista.
Obama, Clinton, and the rest of the liberals praising Bhutto are selling political poison. Far better than following them down the road to imperialist world war would be to join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. We have the ultimate goal of eradicating the profit system and its endless wars and establishing workers' rule in their place.
Bhutto Was Workers' Deadly Enemy
Benazir Bhutto was no friend of the working class. She belonged to the aristocracy of the Pakistani ruling class in particular and to the worldwide capitalist ruling class in general. Under her premiership the Pakistani state apparatus, one of the world's most repressive, continued its brutal practices of torturing, killing and "disappearing" workers and those who opposed her rule.
Even her younger brother Murtaza was mowed down by the police, which many (including her niece Fatima) believe Bhutto either engineered or tacitly approved. A member of parliament, he was a vocal critic of his sister's politics and her corrupt government.
She, her husband, mother and other family members became obscenely rich from laundering money, getting kickbacks, customs inspection fees and outright stealing funds from social programs. Her husband and she accumulated a $1.5 billion fortune while over 80 million Pakistani workers and peasants live on less than $2 a day.
Letter From the Iraq War
I'm doing fine, been very busy since last time I wrote. There's so much to write about. I'll start with the current condition of my sector. The army has allied with the local insurgent group. This is the same group that was blowing us up and shooting at us. It was formerly allied with Al Qaeda, but since the U.S. pays them more and gives them arms, they now supposedly fight Al Qaeda.
We've been walking around the villages and the city trying to find them, then put them in the "hide system," a machine that electronically reads fingerprints and retina scans, takes a picture and sends it to the Pentagon.
The Army pays them $250/month each and $350 to the leader of each house. They also have us passing out rice, flour, oil, books and backpacks.
Right now we're using the velvet glove, but the iron fist isn't far off. This has led to intense discussions about why we're here; why the U.S. is allying with the insurgency and now supporting the Sunni faction and fueling the civil war between Sunni and Shia. Would U.S. rulers support al Qaeda if it was in their best interest to do so? [After all, in the 1980s the CIA financed bin Laden and AQ to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan]
We've been involved in a lot of fighting -- many attacks against us and our unit has attacked many people. There is some death-squad mentality in my unit. A vocal group is swayed by the racist attitudes of Special Forces around our platoon.
I "came out of the closet," so to speak, so now everyone in my platoon knows about my politics. This has led to some heated debate and has been a good experience for me. I've taken on some of the racist ideas about the Iraqis with the other people in my unit. Being here and interacting with the local people has also made me challenge some of my own ideas about ethnic stereotypes. There is a lot of hostility towards my politics.
I'm arguing with the people in my platoon that the U.S. is the cause of much of the misery here. That we blew up the hospitals, power station and sewer systems so that people lie sick and shit runs in the streets. That we allow most of the food brought in as aid to be given out to pay off U.S. allies or to be sold on the black market. I've reminded them that we've blown up two schools since we've been here, and that there is no running water because we don't allow people to lay pipe. That our snipers are killing innocent people, and U.S. missiles are blowing up families.
These are some of the racist ideas I struggle over with them on a daily basis. On top of that, I've had discussions about the nature of capitalism and communism with some people, but that's been a touchy subject with many in the platoon.
It's been hairy, but I'm doing OK. I can't wait to see you guys, I will be home soon. Thanks for everything.
Bella Ciao, In Struggle
2007: Rival Imperiaists Challenged U.S. - Workers Fought Back Worldwide
World domination by U.S. rulers is being challenged by the bosses of Russia, Iran and China. This sharpening rivalry is displayed in many ways. Pick up a mainstream U.S. newspaper any time and the message you most likely receive is that China is evil. News sources reported all year about the dangerous or poisonous products of China: from pet chow to toothpaste, from toys to sea food. The mouthpieces of the ruling class were determined to paint China as the devil, even though U.S.-owned companies produced the goods in question.
A communist analysis tells us that the bosses' reason for this is not concern for our safety. They fear China's growing ability to compete with the U.S. as an imperialist power, and they need to build up anti-China sentiment in workers in anticipation of future armed conflict.
The U.S. rivalry with China and other growing powers drove many of the events of the year, either directly or indirectly. The Save Darfur movement is being built among students and workers in order to oppose China's interests in Africa. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is able to call George Bush names without much fear, partly because of his ties to imperialists in China, Russia and elsewhere. Over a million people have been killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan waged by U.S. bosses to prevent rivals from gaining access to Mid-East oil.
The year 2007 saw the outbreak of rebellions by Arab and Muslim youth in France and mass strikes in France, South Africa, Peru, Italy and the Dominican Republic and a general strike in Greece. Workers in the United States have fought back with strikes in war plants at Northrop-Grumman in Pascagoula, Mississippi and at Navistar. Although those workers struck for economic reasons, striking war plants shows that they did not fall for the boss's patriotism. PLP supported these strikers and helped expose the pro-boss union hacks still holding back our class. PLP'ers have also been organizing in the military and in subcontracting plants serving the war industry.
The lead-up to the next presidential election was big news as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton jockeyed for the Democratic Party nomination, each hoping to convince workers of their anti-war stance while assuring Big Oil that they would do a better job than Bush at securing control of the Middle East. Both Obama and Clinton have openly supported pre-emptive strikes against al Qaeda in Pakistan and the Iranian rulers respectively.
In mass events, PLP'ers -- through chants, speeches and sales of CHALLENGE -- have consistently exposed the liberal politicians as more dangerous as they try to win worker support with their lies while deepening the wars their "conservative" counterparts started.
Meanwhile, the current government used the "war on terror" to excuse increasingly fascist tactics in oppressing the workers. We saw a rise in the use of video cameras everywhere, from schools to buses. Police murdered black and Latin young people in every major city like Kiel Coppin in NYC, Francisco Mondragon in LA and Aaron Harrison in Chicago. Brutal crackdowns on immigrants, like the raid at a plant in New Bedford, Mass., separated families through deportation at the same time that immigration "reforms" like the DREAM Act promise citizenship to those who would join the military to fight in the Middle East. The bosses have worked hard this year to build fear and passivity in the workers, but they face a major contradiction: they are attacking the same people they need to be patriotic and fight their imperialist wars.
PL was there to lead militant, multi-racial protests against gutter racists like the Minutemen. We stood up against racist right-wingers like David Horowitz with his Islamo-Fascism week and against military and CIA recruiters on our campuses.
The local courts in Jena, LA, viciously punished young black students who fought back against racists who hung nooses at their school. Since then the media has reported that racist attacks are on the rise. As the NY Times reported (11/25), "...this country has seen a rash of as many as 50 to 60 noose incidents. The level of hate crimes in the U.S. is astoundingly high -- more than 190,000 incidents per year." Masses of black workers and students converged on Jena, LA, to protest the racist events there. PL members brought communist politics to these anti-racist events.
The rulers left workers to suffer in many ways while they struggled to keep control over their imperialist interests. The sub-prime mortgage crisis meant many workers, disproportionately black and Latino ones, lost homes and financial security. Bridges collapsed, miners died in cave-ins, homes and lives were lost to fires and floods, earthquakes from San Diego to Tabasco, Mexico, to Peru, the Caribbean and Bangladesh. The wreckage left in the wake of hurricane Katrina is in even worse shape after two years of the bosses' "recovery effort." The bosses have decided to demolish the public housing which were totally livable.
No matter how much the bosses abandon all responsibility for our safety, workers take care of each other. Students, teachers and workers are still traveling to the New Orleans area to lend support to their class brothers and sisters there. PLP contingents made the trip several times during the year, organizing our friends to help in schools, churches, community groups and workplaces.
High school students spoke to the Delegate Assembly of the New York teachers' union for the first time, demanding that their voices be heard against imperialist war. On the West Coast, high school and college students spent their summer building unity with industrial workers.
Even as the bosses try to beat us down and win us to their nationalist ideas, the workers' anger is still there. It's the job of communists to give this anger at the system a revolutionary direction. We don't want to rebel fruitlessly, but to build a movement that will be able to challenge and destroy capitalism. Then workers will be able to run the world according to our class interests. PLP is leading the way towards that communist future.
South Asian Worker Joins the International PLP
Recently on a trip to a South Asian country I had an experience that brought home so strongly to me that communist ideas are deeply embedded in the working class worldwide, over-riding apparent barriers of geographic origin, gender and language.
I, a jean-clad Western woman, was sitting with a traditionally-dressed Muslim male neither speaking each other's language. After a few minutes of awkwardness and pantomime trying to communicate, the comrade who had brought us together joined us and interpreted for us.
First the comrade told me that he and his friends had not been in touch for two years and that the man had previously been close to PLP and was now ready to join.
The friend began talking about the situation in the area, where the working class is caught up in conflict based on ethnic and regional differences. He went straight to the point, saying, "Our aim is a classless society, but to get rid of the bosses we need to overcome these barriers and unite the working class in one struggle. We can do this. The opportunity is there but the difficulty is our lack of resources and funds. Every member [and CHALLENGE reader] has to give money to support this work."
He continued, "We also need an international party, that if a worker suffers in one country it is felt in the heart of a worker in another country."
So, comrades, we do have an international party and this comrade inspired me to work harder to build it. J
A Comrade
PLP Youth Lead Anti-Racist Campaign At Brooklyn H.S.
BROOKLYN, NY -- Students, mainly black and Latino, and teachers at a local high school here -- located in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood -- have been battling racist attacks inside and outside the school. Every day after school the racist NYPD quickly herds students out of the neighborhood.
Before Thanksgiving, when an underage female student and her friends tried to leave a subway car because they feared a fight was about to erupt, a cop in that car yanked her back in. Her friends defended her, saying she'd done nothing wrong, that the cop's action was illegal. They wrote down his name and badge number. Seeing students stand up for each other angered this racist cop. When the train pulled into the next station, he ordered the young student out of the subway car.
Her friends, and passengers on the train, told her she didn't have to go because she'd done nothing wrong. But she went, fearing arrest and further abuse. About a dozen of her friends followed her, which angered the cop even more. He called for back-up; almost immediately a dozen racist cops came running down the stairs. They maced and beat the students, arresting six.
Four were underage and taken to the precinct and then to a juvenile detention center for the night, where they were further harassed and verbally brutalized with racist remarks. Three are CHALLENGE readers, which partially influenced their will to fight back.
When PLP members at the school, heard this story, we responded immediately, first calling the parents of those arrested. Consequently, we were able to accompany the students and their parents to a court hearing. The students, never offered legal aid, were instead offered a "deal": community service and a sealed conviction! Such is capitalist justice: get harassed, maced, beaten and locked up by racist cops -- the "crime" being black or Latino.
PLP members encouraged and supported the parents to fight the case and demand a lawyer. Despite the DA's scare tactics, and because the parents had a prior relationship with the teacher/debate coach of their children, the parents resisted the "deal" and await a trial date.
Back at school, a PLP youth club took an anti-racist petition to the Student Government Association. It linked the racist attacks on the Jena 6, the NYPD's brutal murder of Kiel Coppin, the cops' racist attacks on students to the racist pizzeria owner across the street. Hundreds of signatures were collected the first day!
During the petition campaign, a debate on metal detectors in the school occurred before the entire student body. One side argued safety required having such detectors. The other side exposed the racist nature of these detectors. They eloquently explained that besides metal detectors being ineffective at catching many metal objects, the main reason to eliminate them was their use to teach control and obedience to authority.
One debater argued, "Although we all won't get 95's in all our classes or pass all the Regents exams needed for graduation, we will all leave this school knowing how to "assume the position." This shows that the main reason school exists is to train us to follow orders, like prisoners." (This fits in with the bosses' need for obedient cannon fodder in imperialist wars and for cheap labor.) Another debater used statistics from the NYC Lawyers' Union website revealing that 82% of students attending high schools containing metal detectors are black and Latino. Hundreds of students and many teachers wore stickers distributed at the debate, stating: "Students not Suspects! Fight Racism!"
This modest increase of class struggle has helped expand our CHALLENGE distribution, though inconsistent, to 75 per issue. Two new students have joined a study group. Since one student's arrest and our response, she began meeting with a PLP study group again. She will attend the next PLP club meeting and has her mother's full support. Four PL student members have led the campaign.
Still, we must strengthen our organizing. The anti-racism campaign must include the Apartheid pizzeria owner across the street from the school; he refuses to allow our students to eat there. We're planning to more vigorously approach the building's other two schools; the petition is being passed around in one. We've also taken the petitions to mass organizations, provoking political discussion that's changed some of their thinking, increasing our experience in doing this.
The anti-racist campaign has not yet blossomed, but 2008 promises more opportunity to win these youths to the Party while advancing the class struggle within their schools.
Student Anti-Racist Assembly Sparks Fight-back
BROOKLYN, NY, December 19 -- "Asian, Latin, black and white; to fight racism, we must unite!" was a chant among 800 high school students attending our second annual anti-racist assembly. It centered on the theme of the "Jena 6" and students fighting back. Members of Progressive Labor Party -- understanding that racism is a crucial weapon in the capitalist arsenal against the working class -- see one way of building the anti-racist fight is organizing mass assemblies in the school to spread our ideas.
The assembly was exciting from start to finish, with original poetry, a skit about battling racism, some great speeches linking past struggles to today and lively routines by cheerleaders and steppers. It called on students not only to wear the Jena 6 button (see insert) but to become active in the fight against racism. The high point was a slam poet's poem opposing the criminalization of students in the schools. It really hit home as students are increasingly treated like suspects and criminals.
The main lesson: always rely on the students and staff, especially the students. Everyone came through in a big way. Students had been meeting daily for over a month to plan every aspect of the assembly, from the program, the lighting, the music and the ushers to, most importantly, the message. We had lively discussions about the nature of racism, its history and what to do every day to challenge it.
A few teachers lent their support and attended all the discussions and planning meetings. Others were very enthusiastic about the program, thanking us for doing it.
But clearly, the students led this activity, armed with much determination and understanding. It was followed a week later by a debate in the cafeteria based on the Lerone Bennett article, "The Road Not Taken."
We've taken some important steps, especially to make racism a mass issue. Our sharp assembly was even better received than last year's program. Nationalism was minimal in organizing the assembly, but the administration's fear was evident. One weakness was the failure to link racism here to the U.S. rulers' imperialist wars which use racism to win GI's to kill their class brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan
Those who run the school are afraid of our students and of PLP's communist ideas. They understand their power and know that we can be a spark to lead rebellions. Our job is to continue this fight, explain the class nature of racism and our solution -- and always rely on the working class!
Opportunities to Build PLP After Navistar Union Hacks Sold Out
LOS ANGELES, December 30 -- The UAW ended a seven-week strike against International Truck and Engine Corp. (ITEC), betraying the company's 3,700 workers. ITEC, a unit of Navistar International, based in Warrenville, Illinois, imposed increases in workers' out-of-pocket healthcare costs, as well as a new-hire package lowering wages and benefits.
When the Navistar contract expired October 1, the union refused to call a strike, even though workers were ready to go. The UAW leaders postponed the walkout until October 23, enabling the company to send the work to non-union plants in Mississippi, Texas and Mexico. This helped the company and its imperialist masters build the armored vehicles they needed to send immediately to the war in Iraq. In delaying the strike, the union leaders continued their role as junior partners of the bosses and their contempt for the workers' conditions. Their failure to reach out to workers in the non-union plants in the U.S. and Mexico exposes their pro-boss outlook as well.
However, PLP built strike support from Chicago to Southern California. We walked the picket lines. We passed out thousands of leaflets to workers calling for support for the strikers and for unity between workers in the U.S., Mexico and Iraq, between union and non-union, citizen and immigrant, black, Latin and white. Our leaflets explained that a revolutionary party is needed to answer the bosses' growing attacks on workers, which are part of widening imperialist war and deepening attacks on war-production workers. Workers need one international revolutionary communist party fighting to destroy the rule of profit and to establish the rule of workers.
Hundreds of workers showed their support by buying CHALLENGE and revealing the similarity of their own conditions with the Navistar workers. These discussions included some sharp struggle about racism. A few citizen workers wanted to blame immigrants for worsening conditions in the war-production plants, but PL'ers made it clear that it's capitalism's need to force workers to shoulder the bosses' drive for super-profits and for war, not immigrant workers, that is to blame.
Red Transit Workers Mean
`Doomsday' For the Bosses
CHICAGO, IL, December 27 -- For the third time in five months, transit workers and riders are facing a "Doomsday"(see CHALLENGE, 11/14/07) deadline. The bosses are threatening to slash thousands of jobs, dozens of bus routes and other service cutbacks if a new 5-year concession contract and state funding are not in place by January 20. These are especially racist cutbacks as they target a mostly black work force that serves an even larger black and Latin population.
Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) boss Huberman admits that mass transit creates $2 billion in value added wealth to the local economy by bringing millions of riders to work, shopping and events. But that $2 billion goes into the vaults of the biggest bosses and bankers. We create the wealth and they keep it. That is the secret to capitalism. The attacks on transit workers, the riding public and para-transit users are taking place as the economy slides into a recession and federal funding is cut to pay for the $12 billion-a-month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!
City and state politicians are fighting over how to fund mass transit. Mayor Daley, the CTA and the ATU locals want the matter settled with a 5-year concession contract that creates a permanent two-tier system, a fare hike to $3.00 and service cuts. The CTA and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) sent the contract to arbitration to keep it from being voted on by transit workers. The contract will go into effect as soon as the state politicians vote on funding, but they are fighting to tie funding to casino gambling. As with the Cook County health care cuts a year ago that closed half of the public health clinics, closed wards and slashed hundreds of jobs, the city and state politicians are Democrats, black and white, elected with union money.
Daley and the CTA had the union leaders (ATU locals 308 - rail, and 241 - bus), call for a one-day "job action" on December 17. They wanted us to demand funding that would saddle us with the 5-year concession contract, force new hires to work 15 years longer before they can retire, and use our "raises" to fund the shaky pension plan.
Most transit workers smelled a rat and wanted no part of it. Others were frustrated and wanted to take some action, like the three-day strike of 500 para-transit drivers in November and the one-day strike of PACE drivers in early December.
Had this been the start of a real strike to stop fare hikes and service cuts, and win a decent contract, the media and the bosses would have threatened us with jail and fines. But we didn't hear a thing from them because they were behind it. Some workers notified the ATU International leadership and they threatened to put the ATU locals into trusteeship. The action was called off.
During this period, a group of transit workers took matters into their own hands, distributing a flier in several garages exposing the Daley-CTA-ATU charade. They called on workers to unite with riders to fight racist cutbacks. They got a very good response. As this struggle unfolds we have an opportunity to introduce more workers and transit activists to CHALLENGE newspaper and PLP. Communist revolution will be "doomsday" for the racist rulers, as we build a society that serves the needs of the international working class, not the bankers and casino operators.
Hacks' Phony `Human Rights' Unit Kills Jena 6 Resolution
Seattle, WA -- After nearly two months of struggle at various International Association of Machinists (IAM) union meetings and conferences, our rank-and-file Jena 6 support resolution was finally kicked upstairs to the District Human Rights committee. Last week, the Business Representative chairman informed us the committee decided to kill it. "If we supported this then anybody could come forward with his or her issues," he warned.
"That would be horrible" was the sarcastic reaction of many members on the shop floor. Then more serious discussions began. What is the purpose of these human rights committees anyway?
The network of Human Rights committees was started in the mid-'70s. At the time, the union was flooded with new younger members just back from the Vietnam War, with experience in anti-racist rebellions and familiarity with left-wing politics. These new members expected action against racism both on the job and in society at large. The leadership answered with a human rights committee in every local. Carefully controlled by the reactionary leadership, these committees served as the hacks' lightning rods. They diverted the efforts of honest anti-racists from militant class struggle into dead-end bureaucracy.
In our district, the activity of this committee is also driven by rank-and-file anti-racist struggle. But, once again, the misleadership used this committee to give an appearance of "diversity" while short-circuiting class struggle. The leadership even decided to cover their ass with diversity training for all union officers. Unfortunately, the International runs these classes. As explained by an International officer, diversity training is important to organizing. Their organizing slogan is "Defending Our Freedom; Defending Our Jobs." Their logo features a U.S. flag and an armed soldier.
The picture is complete. The International's version of Human Rights is multi-racial support for racist U.S. imperialism.
Communism: The Only Answer To Bosses' Racism
Under communism the PLP would bring workers into the street to battle racists. Racism hurts all workers; communism requires anti-racist working-class consciousness and unity. In order to ensure the victory of the revolution, we must muster our class's fighting might.
Today, with pro-capitalist unions, we have to expose the misleaders' phony Human Rights committees. In that sense, being attacked by the hacks in this struggle has not been such a bad thing. Our CHALLENGE sales have increased a bit as we have worked hard to bring communist ideas to our fellow workers who have lost faith in pro-capitalist unions. We now have to turn those sales into bigger CHALLENGE networks and new Party members.
Where possible, we should encourage honest workers to join these misleaders' committees. They should have no illusions about how far the hacks will let these committees mobilize rank-and-file class struggle. On the other hand, by pushing just such action, we can more profoundly expose the pro-boss union leadership.
As these struggles ensue, the revolutionary alternative will become more meaningful when we find ways to emphasize our communist politics.
Fresh Direct's Anti-Immigrant Attack Is Rotten to the Core
NEW YORK CITY, December 23 -- Two recent stories show how the racist noose, Jena-style, is tightening around the necks of undocumented immigrants, thereby sharpening exploitation of all workers and intensifying fascist control in the U.S.
On December 20, two days before a vote to have the United Food and Commercial Workers Union represent warehouse workers at Fresh Direct here, a multi-racial group of unionists and community and church groups rallied to support them. The bosses at Fresh Direct, a rapidly-expanding company that raked in a $240 million profit in 2007, fired hundreds of undocumented workers. They had threatened the workers with deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which the company had invited to the warehouse. Fresh Direct bosses are deliberately using ICE to divide and defeat the union drive.
A black worker, responding to an ad for a job there, encountered a comrade and later joined the rally. "I'm against deporting workers who've been working in the U.S. and dividing their families," he declared.
Our ability to fight exploitation and criminalization of undocumented workers depends on such an internationalist working-class outlook and an increasing willingness of all workers to fight back for our class, not on uniting with the politicians for so-called immigration reform. In fact, a key element of such "reform" will be a guest-worker program that will allow bosses like those at Fresh Direct to "legally" super-exploit and divide workers.
On December 13 about 80 people held a candlelight vigil sponsored by the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) at Manhattan's ICE Center, where immigrants awaiting deportation are processed before being sent to detention centers. Nearly two million people have been deported in the last decade; ICE detains more than 280,000 a year.
The NSM flyer exposed the fact that "New York City collaborates with ICE in many ways: In 2006 the City's Dept. of Corrections received over $18 million from the federal government in exchange for targeting non-citizens, more that any other city in the country....Without revealing their identities, ICE officers routinely question and then detain suspected non-citizens caught up in the criminal justice system, many of whom have yet to be convicted or even charged with a crime."
The New Sanctuary stance to protest in the streets against raids and racist terror is a welcome development. But the struggle must sharpen. Immediately after the vigil participants arrived, a handful of gutter racists from Morristown, NJ appeared with whistles, American flags and signs saying, "Deport them all." A comrade chanted in their faces. "We are workers, we're not illegals," trying to win the protestors to stand up to the racists. A few protesters joined her, but most chose to ignore them, saying, "Don't worry. Our message is stronger than theirs."
The comrade pointed out that allowing such racists to go unchallenged permits the growth of violent racism that historically results in fascist genocide. She explained how Morristown racists throw rocks and bottles at day laborers in New Jersey and work with politicians like Morristown Mayor Crisitelli and Colorado Senator Tancredo. But while Tancredo proclaims he's made "immigration a front-burner issue," it's the liberal ruling class that's primarily behind the legalization of fascist treatment of immigrants.
They don't want to deport most of the undocumented immigrants, just enough to terrorize them and all workers in order to super-exploit them even more. These liberals want to use the so-called Dream Act to force undocumented youth to serve as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and militarize the U.S./Mexico border, all in the name of "national security." A couple of the comrade's good friends later told her they agreed with her and that we need to discuss the issue in the Sanctuary group.
History teaches us that capitalism is built on racist exploitation and that defeating fascist terror requires a revolutionary communist party. PLP'ers join mass organizations like the Sanctuary Movement to bring these ideas to workers and their allies.
Paraguay's Electoral Circus Offers No Solution for Workers
Fairly soon Paraguayan workers will be asked to choose a new oppressor. The candidates, serving different capitalist interests, essentially all favor the exploitation of the working class and its allies. Instead of choosing a "lesser evil," it's time to organize a revolutionary communist movement to free workers from all forms of capitalist and imperialist oppression.
Paraguay is a key piece in the larger chessboard of imperialist domination and cheap labor in South America. Its ruling class has kept the population, many of them indigenous, super-exploited and very poor. Paraguay has one of the hemisphere's largest aquifers [underground water supply] and is strategically located, bordering Brazil and Argentina, the two giants of the "Southern Cone," as well as Bolivia and Uruguay. So the elections must be seen in the context of the growing imperialist rivalry in Latin America.
The Pentagon is trying to activate the Mariscal Estigarribia airport in the Chaco region, a very short distance by air from Bolivia. The latter is now on the brink of a civil war between very racist pro-U.S. forces in the rich gas and oil region of Santa Cruz against pro-Chávez President Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president. Energy companies from Brazil, Spain, China, Venezuela, India, France, Great Britain and the U.S. are all interested in controlling the region's oil and gas wealth.
Recently, several U.S. Senators and Congressmen made a five-country tour of Latin America, starting in Paraguay. Meanwhile, Brazil's bosses -- who exploit Paraguay's natural resources and cheap labor -- are supporting former general and presidential candidate Lino Oviedo.
Contrary to all the capitalist parties, PLP and our friends here, even though small in number, offer the only alternative: organizing workers across all borders -- including the large number of Paraguayan immigrants in Brazil, Argentina, the U.S. and Spain -- to fight all bosses and imperialists, for a world without capitalism: communism.
The Electoral Players -- All Capitalist Stooges
The ruling Colorado Party, in power for over 60 years, is now split between two candidates. Blanca Ovelar recently resigned as Minister of Education to escape striking teachers, and hit the campaign trail. Current Coloradan Vice-President Castiglioni is also running. Former bishop Fernando Lugo of the Christian Democratic Party, allied with the reformist pro-Chávez PMAS party, has formed a coalition with the Liberal Party, the main opposition to the Coloradoans, choosing a liberal as his V-P running mate. Pedro Fadul left the "Anything-but-Colorado" Lugo camp to run for President as the Dear Fatherland Party candidate.
President Frutos of the Colorado Party freed the jailed General Oviedo, after dropping treason charges against him (for murdering a former Vice-president), enabling him to run and split the opposition. Oviedo graduated from the U.S. School of the Americas which trains Latin America death squads.
Lugo -- As Bad As the Rest
Lugo, who leads the polls, has much support from workers and peasants because he has backed the poor farmers' movement. But he's turning out to be a "socialist" á la Chile's President Bachelet, a close U.S. ally and darling of Chilean bosses. Lugo has already visited the U.S. trying to win Washington's support, pledging not to interfere with Wal-Mart's recent opening here. Even if elected, Lugo is already entangled in a web of deals with very reactionary parties. Little will change for urban and rural workers if Lugo wins.
We in PLP must use DESAFIO-CHALLENGE to build our movement here, as the only true liberation for workers and their allies.
KENYA: Imperialist-Sponsored `Democracy' Blows Up
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 2 -- Kenya was considered the most stable capitalist democracy in this part of Africa and a gold mine for imperialist exploitation, but the violence following the rigged presidential election last week has blown all that. Kenya is too important for world imperialism not to try to squash a power struggle between two politicians that could turn into another Rwanda. The two candidates are using tribal politics in their fight but in reality their thirst for a bigger piece of the capitalist pie is behind this conflict. The two men became enemies after Kibaki (the current ruler) reneged on a 2002 deal that would have given Odinga (the opposition candidate claiming fraud) the premiership in return for his support in the election.
Kenya's importance to the imperialists is as a regional base for multi-national corporations like Barclays Bank, British American Tobacco and Unilever, among others who viciously exploit African workers. Its port of Mombassa is crucial to transport manufactured goods, fuel and military equipment for Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and southern Sudan. Financial Times columnist Michael Holman, wrote (1/1/08)): "For the outside world, Kenya has been the acceptable face of Africa: a safe destination for a million tourists a year from Europe, Asia and North America to the country of surf and safari; a reliable base, in a tough neighbourhood, for a burgeoning aid industry; regional headquarters for the United Nations; and -- less well-known -- a country whose military pacts with the U.S. and Britain have made it a crucial ally in the `war against terror.' Kenyan politics, however, has never been healthy. It has been dominated by ethnic allegiances, stained by assassination, distorted by one-party rule until 1991 and, above all, oiled by endemic corruption." These are central features of worldwide capitalism.
The U.S. government wanted the situation to remain stable enough to have congratulated Kibaki for his "victory," even though it's common knowledge it was fraudulent. Then, on Dec. 31, Washington effectively retracted that initial position with a fresh statement expressing concern about "serious problems experienced during the vote-counting process."
The instability of world capitalism, with its imperialist wars, economic crises, corruption and fascist terror, is deadly for workers and their allies in Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq and more "hot spots" that will surely arise in the future. This instability sharpens the divisions among workers and their allies along tribal, religious and national lines. These contradictions cannot be solved under capitalism. The world's workers are in dire need of rebuilding an international revolutionary communist movement that unites our class and allies based on our common interests to fight our common enemy: capitalism, imperialism and their crooked politicians.
LETTERS
Asian Youth Wants to _Serve Working Class
(This is a letter from a young working-class comrade whose family was made homeless in one of the many natural disasters turned into mass tragedies by capitalism in Asia in recent years. He is a first-year college student and sent us these comments on the situation for working-class youth like him.)
The rich people put drugs into our communities. They want to keep us down. They deprive us of an education and jobs. It's our duty to get an education because we need it for the future of the working class. All students have to get involved in the struggle of the working class so that we can get rid of the rich people's system. We can do this if we unite the ranks of the working class here and all over the world.
A Young Comrade in Asia
Airport Workers Rap on Ideas in CHALLENGE
At the airport where I work, I ran into my friend, a black flight attendant for a major airline. I gave her the latest issue of CHALLENGE. She's fairly new to reading it and knowing about its communist politics.
She asked me: "Do you get paid for doing this? Do they pay you for making sure people read it?"
"No," I replied, "I'm not paid for getting CHALLENGE to airport workers. My incentive is political rather than monetary or material. I do this (as do other Party members) because I want to see a better world and future, especially for our children. That's my `reward.' Some day, millions of workers will organize a communist revolution worldwide. In a communist society it will be, `To each according to need' instead of capitalism's hellish system, ruled by the almighty dollar."
My friend noted, "This communist revolution may be far off in the future; you may not be around to see it."
I answered, "Hopefully communist revolution will begin in our lifetime, but if I'm not personally around to see it, the international working class still needs it, regardless of my personal physical presence. It would solve many of the working class's problems -- racism, sexism, super-exploitation and imperialist war.
"We can and will have a communist society where workers' needs will be primary and where money doesn't exist. For 95% of our existence humankind has lived without money (primitive communism). Money or classes have been around for only a relatively short time. With all this advanced technology, the Party can envision communist society without money. All it takes is the political will to organize it!
"And just because something has not historically happened yet, it does not mean it can't."
My friend commented, "You know, maybe you have a good point about everything we talked about! I'll read CHALLENGE to learn more."
What comrade Marx said a long time ago was as true today as it was then -- "When enough of the masses believe in an idea, then that idea will become a material force in the world." And so it will be with communism some day.
Airport Red
P.S. The following are excerpts of a draft resolution I circulated among workers at my airport for presentation in our union:
(1) Be it resolved we support the immigrant airport workers (undocumented and documented) at O'Hare International in Chicago who have been the victims of racist harassment by ICE (immigrant police). Immigrant or citizen workers should not respect our racist oppressors' national borders which only exist to divide us.
(2) Be it resolved we support our working-class African and Arab brothers and sisters in France who are fighting President Sarkozy's racist riot police and support the strikes of French workers fighting to not lose their union gains.
(3) Be it resolved we continue to offer our support to the "Jena 6" students of Louisiana, victims of the racist U.S. criminal (in)justice system.
Union Struggle Sparks Ex-Member to Nix `Ex'
I work in a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, where I have been a union delegate for many years. I used to be a PLP member, but since leaving, I was lulled into complacency for a number of years. The war in Iraq and events with Hurricane Katrina woke me up.
CHALLENGE has been reporting in great detail about the step-up of racist killings by police nationwide and how racism is used in the rulers' plans for war and fascism. Recently, a PLP leader asked me to work on a resolution to condemn these racist murders and call for action to mobilize hospital workers and others around this issue.
When the issue was raised on my job, most of my co-workers were enthusiastic about it. A discussion at our hospital's delegates meeting was very positive. Another delegate and I were asked to write a resolution to be introduced to our union. In the process, I was able to introduce my fellow delegate to CHALLENGE and use the article regarding the recent shooting of Kheil Coppin as the basis of our resolution. The process of fighting around this reform issue has opened many doors for the introduction of the communist ideas of PLP.
Our resolution was brought to the December delegates' assembly after being approved unanimously by our hospital's delegates. A lot of diplomatic maneuvering was engaged in so that the resolution would make it to the floor for a vote. (The leadership of our local, 1199, is fearful of any proposal that they don't control or initiate.) The resolution was adopted unanimously. The fight now goes to put rank-and-file pressure on the leadership to act on the resolution.
As long as 1199's leadership leads this struggle together with politicians it will go nowhere. However, we can show the contradiction of reform versus communist revolution to our CHALLENGE readers and larger base of co-workers. It is the daily work of struggle one-to-one that will result in recruitment and building a mass party on the road to communist revolution. This is the area in which I need the most improvement.
Thank you for the opportunity to serve the working class in this all-important struggle.
Thinking of rejoining
Deportation Terror Hits ALL Workers
I am an Ironworker working on a bridge spanning the Mississippi River, when the fascist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided our worksite. At the time I was working near a generator so I heard nothing. But I saw a group of guys running for the only way out. At first I thought a crane fell over or an accident happened, but it didn't take long to figure out La Migra had showed up. Even though they were on the opposite shore, it was enough to send immigrant workers running.
The purpose of these immigration raids is to terrorize all workers, and today they did a good job at accomplishing this. Those of us who stayed were jittery, nervous, and very angry. Black workers, the majority, were just as upset as white workers. Most of the immigrant workers who left were deck carpenters, and without them we couldn't proceed so after lunch the rest of us were sent home.
One layout carpenter told me that after the last ICE raid, about 6 months ago, the result was more speed-up for the remaining workers. This will probably be the result again after this latest attack.
There is only one-way to fight this terrorism and that is by patiently organizing to smash racism and the bosses, and organizing the entire working class to fight for communism. Conditions are becoming worse with each passing day. The need to organize is becoming more urgent. I hope that many more will join PLP and actively fight for communism until we see it through. No half steps. Every day I become a little more committed. Things won't get better on their own.
Red Ironworker
Backs Proletarian Dictatorship All the Way
I was studying the recent history of some organizations on the left and was quite dismayed. Lutte Ouvrier (LO) of France renounced the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in favor of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat" in 2003. Years ago, I was a supporter of Spark in the U.S., which is in solidarity with LO.
Unfortunately, I was NOT surprised when they threw in the sponge. Decades of parliamentary cretinism finally took its toll.
When I discussed this with a representative of WSWS.org (Socialist Equality Party of the U.S.) he said they don't have the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as part of their program either. No kidding! He said that it caused "misunderstandings" or some such garbage.
I was taken aback by this because I found their website interesting. But they are not alone. Other "leftist" organizations have also renounced the dictatorship of the proletariat. The important thing is that there is no compelling reason for this!
Just consider. The bosses have created a situation of enormous concentration of wealth for themselves, at the direct expense of the rest of the society, the likes of which has not been seen in 80 years. They're running non-stop and never-ending wars based on obvious lies. There's been an unprecedented attack on civil rights. Medical care is terrible. Wages are stagnant. The list goes on and on. But at exactly this juncture, these guys are giving it up! That's very revealing.
However, there's one organization that would never consider such a thing -- none other than the PLP! That's why I'm going to send the PLP a well-deserved contribution. Fight for communism!
RJ
High School Program Supports the Jena 6
A day of support for the Jena 6 was held at our high school in December. Many came with black arm bands in support of anti-racism and went to a teach-in, three students sang their own original song, another student performed a powerful spoken-word poem and a teacher did a rap. A parent of a former student gave the keynote speech about her visit to Jena to participate in the large, angry protest there in September, and she offered a first-hand account, along with a broad criticism of the unacceptable racial inequalities throughout the U.S.
The day's activities were sponsored by two organizations: the teachers' union chapter at our school, and a club for students who write hip hop lyrics and poetry. These two did good work in the fight against racism: making over 200 armbands, selling them in many locations around our school, raising money for legal defense of the Jena 6, and providing MC's, poetry, singing, and hip hop for the teach-in.
Much of the organizing and leadership for the event was provided by student and teacher participants in a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) study group. These study group members worked hard to make the event a success, and they also planned to personally speak up at the teach-in, explaining the idea that racism is caused by capitalism, that all students and workers are badly hurt by it, and that all of us - including white workers - need to fight hard against racism. In addition, a member of PLP planned to explain that to completely defeat racism, revolution and communism are needed.
Red teacher
A Friend's Memory of Carson Beach: Boston Summer Project, 1975
I recently read the December 12th issue of Challenge, "Battle of Carson Beach: Anti-Racists Send ROAR Thugs Running."
A friend of mine was at Carson Beach. He said, "I have a different memory of Carson Beach. That was a great day for demonstrating the power of multi-racial unity. INCAR had been following a strategy of multi-racial community organizing and anti-racist militance the entire summer, and the popularity of these ideas was growing. When we called for the "swim-in" to re-integrate Carson Beach, thousands came. However, most were under the direction of groups like the NAACP, which had initially opposed the swim-in. Recognizing the popularity of the swim-in idea, the big reform groups ultimately organized for it and, somewhat successfully, took away our leadership. And when the reform leaders and their police protection, which was massive, abruptly and unexpectedly abandoned the beach shortly after arriving, our very multi-racial INCAR group of approximately 200 was left to fight off overwhelming and simultaneous attacks from thousands of ROAR-organized thugs on one side and 50-100 black nationalists on the other. We fought courageously, but ultimately we retreated. The group I was with narrowly escaped. I cannot remember the exact outcome that day for everyone else, but my recollection is that there was absolutely no sense of INCAR having routed anyone, in regard to the headline in the December 12 Challenge story about Carson Beach, "Anti-Racists Send ROAR Thugs Running."
Stockton Challenge Reader
CHALLENGE comment: The writer has a good point. A sentence in the body of the article may have created the impression that the combined forces of INCAR and PLP "routed" the ROAR fascists. This was a mistake. The headline contributed to it. The account given in the comments made by the writer's friend seems fair and accurate.
The Carson Beach events showed the power of multi-racial unity, in the face of heavily unfavorable odds. Arrayed against the INCAR and PLP demonstrators were several police forces (the state apparatus), the organized racist movement they protected (ROAR), and a group of equally well- protected nationalist thugs. Despite these odds, the bravery and resourcefulness of the outnumbered PLP'ers and INCAR members defeated the trap. The article was correct in making that point. We thank the writer for pointing out the error of the exaggeration.
AIDS Day Hears Revolutionary Message on Epidemic
WASHINGTON, D.C., December 1 - Several PLPers joined over 200 activists who rallied at the White House on Friday, November 30th for World AIDS Day, an annual rally to demand aggressive action against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Our message to demonstrators -- it will take revolution to defeat the racist neglect of AIDS! At the rally, we distributed Challenges and flyers that urged our friends to join a PLP study-action group. Four of them attended the first meeting two weeks later. Activists need to stop trying to elect politicians or just promoting new HIV testing and educational programs. We need to figure out how to unite black, white, and immigrant workers for communism and the PLP so the working class can take power and reorganize society to meet the needs of our class.
The World AIDS rally demanded that the D.C. Board of Education approve comprehensive sex education for all students including safe sex, abstinence, and respect for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. Since the rally, the Board has agreed in principle to require this. Demonstrators also demanded that the U.S. government end ridiculous restrictions on the $15 billion it provides to countries struggling with HIV that force them to use 1/3 of the prevention funds for abstinence-only programs and to limit outreach to women forced into prostitution.
Forty people carried out civil disobedience around these demands, refusing to move from the White House sidewalk. Others maintained a steady stream of chants.
More activists are taking to the streets in D.C. to improve the health of all residents. Students from George Washington University continue to fight for drug treatment on demand and are helping the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association organize a spring conference on substance use, HIV, and mental health. Another student group militantly picketed a CVS drug store in a black neighborhood demanding it unlock its condoms, chanting, "1 in 20 with HIV -- CVS, Set the Condoms FREE!", and distributed free condoms to scores of people who stopped to talk to us.
The latest report from the D.C. Department of Health confirmed that 1 in 20 D.C. residents lives with HIV and 80 percent of people newly diagnosed are African American. HIV remains the leading cause of death for young black women and men nationwide. We urge other CHALLENGE readers to join the fight against HIV/AIDS and the capitalist system with its poverty, racism, homophobia and imperialist war that has made this disease into a global epidemic.J
DC Red
PL History:
Anti-Racists' Multi-Racial Unity Defies Rulers' Attacks
(Last issue's article about the 1975 summer of struggle against racism in Boston recounted the rulers' unsuccessful red-baiting campaign against the Committee Against Racism and the PLP, and the cops' attempt to ban CAR -- later known as INCAR, the International Committee Against Racism -- from marching on City Hall with an anti-racist petition containing 35,000 signatures.)
Early in the morning of August 18 -- the planned march date -- INCAR members and their lawyers went to court to enjoin the ban. The judge bent over backwards to help the cops' lawyers present their own case. But they had no case, even by the lopsided standards of capitalist "justice."
The cops' attorney was reduced to arguing that since the commissioner had already canceled the march, it was too late to assign enough police to manage it. This he argued despite the hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes cops stationed along the march's route at that very moment, waiting to prevent it.
In a public courtroom, the judge faced the alternative between flagrantly denying the right to free speech and assembly, supposedly "guaranteed" by the U.S. Constitution, and restoring the permit for the sake of protecting the system's democratic façade. This time, the mayor and cops had gone too far, even by their own standards. The judge regretfully revoked the ban, and 300 people marched. It was one of the summer's highlights. Thousands of workers watched from the street and shouted friendly encouragement to the demonstrators.
One speaker, INCAR's chairperson at the time, aroused a collective shout of militant anti-racist anger when he said: "We will turn ROAR into a mee-ow!" and then, pointing to Hicks, O'Neill, & Co., who were watching from their City Hall offices, led the demonstrators in collectively giving these fascists the finger.
After that march, most of the volunteers returned home to prepare for school openings. Some decided to remain in Boston to consolidate the gains made over the summer and to build both PLP and the anti-racist movement there. The project's final action came on September 8, the opening day of the 1975-76 school year. A year earlier, at the start of the busing program, ROAR thugs had thrown rocks at busses carrying young black schoolchildren into South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, etc., and had otherwise conducted a racist rampage throughout the city, under the benevolent gaze of Boston's police. Having proven that the ROAR goons didn't reflect the views of most Bostonian workers, INCAR and PLP were now intent on organizing a demonstration for multi-racial unity outside South Boston High School on opening day.
Two busloads carrying anti-racist black, white and Latino students and workers set out for "Southie" on the morning of the 8th. As the busses were crossing the bridge leading into South Boston, the cops pulled them over. A lieutenant named Bradley boarded and informed the anti-racists that they were all under arrest. "What for?" asked one of them, a final-year law student. "Well," answered Bradley, "you're not exactly creating a disturbance, but your presence could tend to create one." The law student retorted: "There's no such thing as `tending to create a disturbance.' Your arrest is completely illegal." "Don't worry," chuckled Bradley, "we'll think of something."
Before depositing the demonstrators in a South Boston jail, the cops made a point of handcuffing them so tightly that many lost circulation in their wrists. On the way to the jailhouse, the demonstrators were treated to a volley of racist vulgarities from the cops in the front of the vans transporting them. Once the demonstrators were behind bars, a cop at the jailhouse greeted them by saying, "Comes the revolution, we'll kill every f------ one of you." No one was intimidated, and spirits remained high.
After spending the day locked up, the demonstrators were transported in police vans back to the Park Street subway station in downtown Boston. The cops' original plan had been to release them at dusk onto the South Boston streets, where they might have been easy prey for a cop-ROAR trap. At the request of a PLP member, who had spent a good part of the day befriending a public defender from behind bars, the lawyer agreed to accompany several shifts of demonstrators on the ride to Park Street. The thought was that with a public defender in the van as a witness, the cops wouldn't dare try their usual brutalities. This estimate proved correct. The demonstrators held a short, defiant rally at Park Street.
The public defender's courageous action had taught a valuable political lesson: sharp situations provide important opportunities to do the "right thing," and given the proper encouragement, many people can be won to rise to the occasion.
BOSTON 75 proved that under determined communist leadership, a relatively small number of militant anti-racists can put the rulers, their state apparatus and their gutter racist henchmen on the defensive. This was one of the project's important lessons. In the final installment, we will discuss others, including the crucial ones to learn from its weaknesses.
NY Bosses Engineer Another Train Robbery: Hike Fares
NEW YORK CITY, December 21 -- Another chapter in this city's Great Train Robbery is being written by the bosses' Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) upon their decision to raise subway and bus fares through the "back door."
Amid some big public relations hoopla by Gov. Eliot Spitzer about "freezing" the $2 fare -- implying that there would be no fare hike -- the MTA is increasing the unlimited monthly Metro pass by 6.6% to over $80. This despite their admission that it will have more than a half-billion dollar surplus at the end of 2007. Use of the straight $2 fare accounts for only 14% of transit revenues while the monthly pass brings in over 30%.
This fare hike will hit low-income families particularly hard, the greater proportion of which are black and Latino. It will become more difficult to buy the unlimited monthly Metro cards (with its discounts) since one must lay out a larger sum initially.
The racist nature of the increase is exposed in the MTA's raising commuter fares -- used by an overwhelmingly higher-income white population -- only half as much: 3.76%.
The MTA bosses' excuse for the fare raise is "to prepare financially for large deficits...in 2009....expected because of increased debt service." Debt service is the nice way of saying billions of dollars in interests to the banks. These, of course, are the same banks who have robbed homeowners of billions in the subprime mortgage scam and will try to recoup any bankers' losses by squeezing whatever they can out of the working class. Interest on transit "debt service" is the first expense the MTA must pay out, before operating costs, maintenance, workers' wages or anything else.
This is the way the capitalist system works: profits first, workers last. Mayor Bloomberg himself has a $6 billion fortune, stolen from the working class. No wonder we call it the dictatorship of the bosses. Only a workers' dictatorship through a communist revolution can end such robbery.
Transit fare hikes, mortgage foreclosures, mass layoffs and tax cuts for the rich suck money out of our class while the rulers spend $12 billion a month of our tax money on imperialist wars for control of oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The transit union leaders and other hacks utter hardly a whimper about these fare increases, much less organizing a mass campaign to oppose them. Instead they tell us to vote for a "lesser evil" politician to "save us" from such robbery. In many other countries like France, Italy and Brazil, despite the union sellouts, workers fight such hi-jacking of their pockets by taking to the streets, battling the cops and even burning buses and trains. U.S. bosses will get away with such robbery as long as we, the workers, let them. It's time we united our class in organized mass opposition to these attacks, one big step on the road to revolution to destroy this oppressive system.
- Information
Liberal Rulers On Iran War: Right Now, No Later Yes
- Information
- 03 January 2008 681 hits
The recent revelation that Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program for the last four years marks a step towards, not away from, wider war in the Middle East. Policy-makers representing the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. rulers dropped the Iran bombshell in order to hamstring the remaining neocons in the lame-duck Bush administration. The liberals want to prevent Cheney & Co., whom they view as inept war makers, from launching an undermanned, unilateral military strike on Iran in their administration’s last year.
With the U.S. war machine bogged down in Iraq, the liberal rulers are buying time. They hope a Democratic president can mobilize the vast forces — both U.S. troops and allies — needed for inevitable clashes not just with Iran but with rivals China and Russia. Toning down the U.S.’s image as a racist torturer (while in no way eliminating actual torture) is crucial to this process. That’s why a "new and improved" liberal-led CIA revealed that the corrupt, incompetent old neocon CIA had, back in 2005, destroyed videotapes of torture at Guantanamo.
Liberals Try To Remake Discredited CIA For War Effort
The "December Surprise" on Iran comes not from the White House but from a spy apparatus, once discredited for its Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco but newly rehabilitated by imperialist liberals. Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Rockefeller-led imperialists’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), boasted, "The intelligence community surprised everyone, including the Bush administration" (CFR website, 12/04/07). The liberal NY Times joined the chorus of praise: "The new national intelligence directorate is analyzing information more rigorously" (12/09/07).
Key to this pro-imperialist transformation has been Gen. Michael Hayden, CIA chief since 2006. Hayden serves the liberal wing. Bill Clinton chose him to direct the National Security Agency in 1999. His mentor in the Air Force was Gen. Charles Boyd, formerly executive director of the Hart-Rudman commission, which outlined U.S. capitalism’s plans for world domination for the next 25 years.
Boyd penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, "A Symphony for Hayden" at the time of his prot�g�’s CIA appointment last year. It was Hayden who blabbed about the Guantanamo torture tapes to pin the blame on Bush die-hards and cast his own crew as "reforming" white knights. Liberal Sen. Jay Rockefeller, while condoning torture, backs Hayden’s whistle-blowing because waterboarding "however well-intentioned, plays into the hands of our enemies" (NYT, 12/08/07). However, the Democrats were briefed about waterboarding back in 2002 and said nothing.
Liberals Want To Buy Time For Iran War...
Mobilizing the U.S. militarily and building popular support for its wars are the chief tasks the liberal rulers lay upon the next President. CFR chairman Richard Haass told National Public Radio (12/08/07), "The new president will inherit a tremendously complex world and a U.S. less well-positioned to deal with it because our military is stretched and worn down and because of anti-Americanism."
The liberals understand that Iran won’t be a quick "hit-and-run" job. Robert Blackwill, counselor at the CFR writes, "If diplomacy fails and the U.S. attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, the result would likely be a long war, as Tehran isn’t likely to surrender. Such use of force would also further destabilize the Middle East, inflame the Islamic world, strengthen terrorist forces everywhere and would probably produce attacks on the American homeland" (Wall Street Journal 12/6/07). So, to give the rulers time to militarize the U.S., the new intelligence estimate sets the timetable for action beyond the Bush gang’s term, declaring, "Iran will achieve nuclear weapons capabilities somewhere between 2009 and 2015."
...But May Strike Soon
Robert Gates, the liberals’ replacement for Rumsfeld (Gates has worked for the Baker-Hamilton commission and the CFR), said there was no telling when the pretext for a U.S. invasion would arise. "Iran could restart those efforts at any time." At a recent conference in Bahrain, Gates urged U.S. Mid-East allies to "develop regional air and missile defense systems" and maritime security to prepare for war against Iran. He promised that the U.S. was hell-bent on expanding its war for control of the region’s oil. "The United States remains committed to defending its vital interests and those of its allies in Iraq and in the wider Middle East" (NY Times, 12/09/07). "Vital interests" has been code for Mid-East oil ever since Jimmy Carter used the term in his Carter Doctrine and began the military build-up to secure it after the 1979 Iranian ayatollahs’ ouster of the Shah, a U.S. puppet.
All the Democratic candidates seek to meet their capitalist masters’ needs in ways that will shed even more workers’ blood. Supporting any of them would be a grave error. The course for our class must be to join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, which has the long-term outlook of destroying the profit system and its ever-deadlier wars.
Hi-Tech Weapons of Mass Control
Every holiday season the bosses push their new line of technology commodities onto the working class. iPhones, Blackberries, Wii and X-Box bring in big bucks. At the same time social networking programs like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and blogs have been praised as the "democratization" of the Web, giving voice to anyone with access to a computer, the bosses use this ability to more tightly control workers as they face increasing rivalry from growing imperialist powers and engage in wars for oil.
New Technologies And Fascism
The Bush Administration used the 9/11 attacks to institute fascism under the guise of the PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security. The government controls the Internet in the U.S. with measures that can trace what information people are seeking and who they are speaking to. Programs have been created to track certain words and phrases so that they can be filed for future use. In airports, records retrieved by privacy advocates and reported in WIRED magazine (09/20/07) reveal that Homeland Security tracks information and stores it in databases about people, from their "race" to their reading material.
Locally in the schools, we saw police brought in as security guards; and metal detectors and now cameras are becoming the norm in every school. The City of New York now wants to install a closed-circuit camera system similar to London, so they can do facial scans for particular people. New York City hopes to install 3000 cameras by 2010 (Christian Science Monitor, 07/11/07).
Last month New York City cab drivers struck, in part because they did not want Global Positioning System (GPS) mechanisms placed in the car. They knew that the bosses would use this technology to track the cab drivers and push to exploit them more.
More workers need to follow this example and stand up to the bosses’ tactics. In Nazi Germany, workers did not wake up one morning to full-blown fascism, but they had not fought the gradual addition of more racist laws until too late. U.S. bosses are counting on keeping us passive as they add more and more oppressive technologies and laws.
The ruling class needs to continue to win workers to their fascism. They are using rhetoric (their campaign "See Something, Say Something" for instance) about terrorism, immigrants "stealing jobs," and crime prevention to convince workers that all these cameras, metal detectors and phone tapping is for our own good. They want us to accept that workers in other countries or of other "races" are our enemy.
The working class wants technology to make our lives easier. The bosses use technology to make profits, control markets for imperialism and oppress the workers. New technology can speed up production for increased profits and create layoffs, it can improve the bosses’ ability to wage war abroad and it can make life hell for workers. The bosses can use technology to track our every move and they want us to know this, to be afraid and to accept it as a normal part of our lives. Technology is one of the ideological tools they use to win workers into racist movements at home and into the military to wage imperialist wars.
New technologies can be used to the working class’ advantage to distribute information about class struggle, communist politics and Marxist-Leninist ideology more broadly around the world through the Internet. We must not have any romantic liberal notions about it either. It will be shut down when the bosses feel it necessary. The bosses do not want information that can harm them to get out. A perfect example of this was in the current struggle in Myanmar when the rebelling monks were relaying information to journalists and the world at large through the Internet, the generals in the end shut it down (NYTimes, 10/04/07).
For communism and working-class revolution we still need "boots on the ground," to use the military term. A revolutionary movement can’t exist in a "virtual" environment because we need to organize workers at our jobs, in our schools and in the streets. We need active communists sharpening the class struggle, distributing CHALLENGE through many networks and recruiting new members. Only by fighting racism and fascism can we show the working class that the Progressive Labor Party can lead a revolution and a communist society. Then and only then can we use and make technology for the good of all workers and not just to make a profit.
This is a 3-week issue of CHALLENGE. We will return to our biweekly schedule on the first week of January 2008. We wish our readers a new year of many struggles against capitalism, its racism, sexism, wars and oppression. Fight for communism!
Liberal Rulers On Iran War: Right Now, No Later Yes
Hi-Tech Weapons of Mass Control
Fighting Fascism And Building A Base Still Key
a href="#Mortgage Scam Fuels Bosses’ Crisis, Puts Workers in Hock">"ortgage Scam Fuels Bosses’ Crisis, Puts Workers in Hock
How Bosses Profit Off Our Labor
a href="#CHALLENGE Networks Unite Workers vs. Bosses’/Hacks’ Attacks">CH"LLENGE Networks Unite Workers vs. Bosses’/Hacks’ Attacks
Students Unite Against Anti-Muslim Racist
Harlem March Fights Columbia U. Expansion, Demands Clinic Re-opening
a href="#Rulers’ Rivalries A Killer for Workers">"ulers’ Rivalries A Killer for Workers
Navistar: Warmaker/Strike-breaker
$10/hr = 800 Vehicles X $40,000
Bosses Keep Their Profits Safe, Not Workers
a href="#S. Africa Miners’ Strike Exposes Nationalist/Capitalist Rulers">". Africa Miners’ Strike Exposes Nationalist/Capitalist Rulers
Italy Strike Shows Workers Can Shut Down Any Capitalist Country
a href="#Revolutionary Struggle, Not Chavez’s ‘Business Socialism,’ Will Win Workers’ Power">Revolu"ionary Struggle, Not Chavez’s ‘Business Socialism,’ Will Win Workers’ Power
a href="#Spitzer’s Licensing ‘Gift’ Really Nazi ‘Yellow Star’">Spitzer’" Licensing ‘Gift’ Really Nazi ‘Yellow Star’
a href="#PL History: Red-baiting, ROAR’s Rampage Can’t Stop Boston’s Anti-Racists">PL H"story: Red-baiting, ROAR’s Rampage Can’t Stop Boston’s Anti-Racists
a href="#USSR, The First Workers’ State — How It Was Won, and Lost">US"R, The First Workers’ State — How It Was Won, and Lost
LETTERS
Capitalism Is Not Organized For Workers
a href="#Johnstown Workers Expose Fascist ‘ID’">Jo"nstown Workers Expose Fascist ‘ID’
Industrial Workers Key to Revolution
- Why free pass on Israel nukes?
- L.A. forced to cancel Muslim map
- Pope sees why oppressed turn red
- Gov’t anti-foreclosure plan is a big lie
- US will back Pakistani military
Liberal Rulers On Iran War: Right Now, No Later Yes
The recent revelation that Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program for the last four years marks a step towards, not away from, wider war in the Middle East. Policy-makers representing the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. rulers dropped the Iran bombshell in order to hamstring the remaining neocons in the lame-duck Bush administration. The liberals want to prevent Cheney & Co., whom they view as inept war makers, from launching an undermanned, unilateral military strike on Iran in their administration’s last year.
With the U.S. war machine bogged down in Iraq, the liberal rulers are buying time. They hope a Democratic president can mobilize the vast forces — both U.S. troops and allies — needed for inevitable clashes not just with Iran but with rivals China and Russia. Toning down the U.S.’s image as a racist torturer (while in no way eliminating actual torture) is crucial to this process. That’s why a "new and improved" liberal-led CIA revealed that the corrupt, incompetent old neocon CIA had, back in 2005, destroyed videotapes of torture at Guantanamo.
Liberals Try To Remake Discredited CIA For War Effort
The "December Surprise" on Iran comes not from the White House but from a spy apparatus, once discredited for its Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco but newly rehabilitated by imperialist liberals. Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Rockefeller-led imperialists’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), boasted, "The intelligence community surprised everyone, including the Bush administration" (CFR website, 12/04/07). The liberal NY Times joined the chorus of praise: "The new national intelligence directorate is analyzing information more rigorously" (12/09/07).
Key to this pro-imperialist transformation has been Gen. Michael Hayden, CIA chief since 2006. Hayden serves the liberal wing. Bill Clinton chose him to direct the National Security Agency in 1999. His mentor in the Air Force was Gen. Charles Boyd, formerly executive director of the Hart-Rudman commission, which outlined U.S. capitalism’s plans for world domination for the next 25 years.
Boyd penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, "A Symphony for Hayden" at the time of his protégé’s CIA appointment last year. It was Hayden who blabbed about the Guantanamo torture tapes to pin the blame on Bush die-hards and cast his own crew as "reforming" white knights. Liberal Sen. Jay Rockefeller, while condoning torture, backs Hayden’s whistle-blowing because waterboarding "however well-intentioned, plays into the hands of our enemies" (NYT, 12/08/07). However, the Democrats were briefed about waterboarding back in 2002 and said nothing.
Liberals Want To Buy Time For Iran War...
Mobilizing the U.S. militarily and building popular support for its wars are the chief tasks the liberal rulers lay upon the next President. CFR chairman Richard Haass told National Public Radio (12/08/07), "The new president will inherit a tremendously complex world and a U.S. less well-positioned to deal with it because our military is stretched and worn down and because of anti-Americanism."
The liberals understand that Iran won’t be a quick "hit-and-run" job. Robert Blackwill, counselor at the CFR writes, "If diplomacy fails and the U.S. attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, the result would likely be a long war, as Tehran isn’t likely to surrender. Such use of force would also further destabilize the Middle East, inflame the Islamic world, strengthen terrorist forces everywhere and would probably produce attacks on the American homeland" (Wall Street Journal 12/6/07). So, to give the rulers time to militarize the U.S., the new intelligence estimate sets the timetable for action beyond the Bush gang’s term, declaring, "Iran will achieve nuclear weapons capabilities somewhere between 2009 and 2015."
...But May Strike Soon
Robert Gates, the liberals’ replacement for Rumsfeld (Gates has worked for the Baker-Hamilton commission and the CFR), said there was no telling when the pretext for a U.S. invasion would arise. "Iran could restart those efforts at any time." At a recent conference in Bahrain, Gates urged U.S. Mid-East allies to "develop regional air and missile defense systems" and maritime security to prepare for war against Iran. He promised that the U.S. was hell-bent on expanding its war for control of the region’s oil. "The United States remains committed to defending its vital interests and those of its allies in Iraq and in the wider Middle East" (NY Times, 12/09/07). "Vital interests" has been code for Mid-East oil ever since Jimmy Carter used the term in his Carter Doctrine and began the military build-up to secure it after the 1979 Iranian ayatollahs’ ouster of the Shah, a U.S. puppet.
All the Democratic candidates seek to meet their capitalist masters’ needs in ways that will shed even more workers’ blood. Supporting any of them would be a grave error. The course for our class must be to join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, which has the long-term outlook of destroying the profit system and its ever-deadlier wars.
Hi-Tech Weapons of Mass Control
Every holiday season the bosses push their new line of technology commodities onto the working class. iPhones, Blackberries, Wii and X-Box bring in big bucks. At the same time social networking programs like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and blogs have been praised as the "democratization" of the Web, giving voice to anyone with access to a computer, the bosses use this ability to more tightly control workers as they face increasing rivalry from growing imperialist powers and engage in wars for oil.
New Technologies And Fascism
The Bush Administration used the 9/11 attacks to institute fascism under the guise of the PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security. The government controls the Internet in the U.S. with measures that can trace what information people are seeking and who they are speaking to. Programs have been created to track certain words and phrases so that they can be filed for future use. In airports, records retrieved by privacy advocates and reported in WIRED magazine (09/20/07) reveal that Homeland Security tracks information and stores it in databases about people, from their "race" to their reading material.
Locally in the schools, we saw police brought in as security guards; and metal detectors and now cameras are becoming the norm in every school. The City of New York now wants to install a closed-circuit camera system similar to London, so they can do facial scans for particular people. New York City hopes to install 3000 cameras by 2010 (Christian Science Monitor, 07/11/07).
Fighting Fascism And Building A Base Still Key
Last month New York City cab drivers struck, in part because they did not want Global Positioning System (GPS) mechanisms placed in the car. They knew that the bosses would use this technology to track the cab drivers and push to exploit them more.
More workers need to follow this example and stand up to the bosses’ tactics. In Nazi Germany, workers did not wake up one morning to full-blown fascism, but they had not fought the gradual addition of more racist laws until too late. U.S. bosses are counting on keeping us passive as they add more and more oppressive technologies and laws.
The ruling class needs to continue to win workers to their fascism. They are using rhetoric (their campaign "See Something, Say Something" for instance) about terrorism, immigrants "stealing jobs," and crime prevention to convince workers that all these cameras, metal detectors and phone tapping is for our own good. They want us to accept that workers in other countries or of other "races" are our enemy.
The working class wants technology to make our lives easier. The bosses use technology to make profits, control markets for imperialism and oppress the workers. New technology can speed up production for increased profits and create layoffs, it can improve the bosses’ ability to wage war abroad and it can make life hell for workers. The bosses can use technology to track our every move and they want us to know this, to be afraid and to accept it as a normal part of our lives. Technology is one of the ideological tools they use to win workers into racist movements at home and into the military to wage imperialist wars.
New technologies can be used to the working class’ advantage to distribute information about class struggle, communist politics and Marxist-Leninist ideology more broadly around the world through the Internet. We must not have any romantic liberal notions about it either. It will be shut down when the bosses feel it necessary. The bosses do not want information that can harm them to get out. A perfect example of this was in the current struggle in Myanmar when the rebelling monks were relaying information to journalists and the world at large through the Internet, the generals in the end shut it down (NYTimes, 10/04/07).
For communism and working-class revolution we still need "boots on the ground," to use the military term. A revolutionary movement can’t exist in a "virtual" environment because we need to organize workers at our jobs, in our schools and in the streets. We need active communists sharpening the class struggle, distributing CHALLENGE through many networks and recruiting new members. Only by fighting racism and fascism can we show the working class that the Progressive Labor Party can lead a revolution and a communist society. Then and only then can we use and make technology for the good of all workers and not just to make a profit.
a name="Mortgage Scam Fuels Bosses’ Crisis, Puts Workers in Hock">">"ortgage Scam Fuels Bosses’ Crisis, Puts Workers in Hock
"Sub-prime mortgage" defaults. A "credit crunch." Wild stock market swings. Swiftly changing economic forecasts. CEOs falling faster than U.S. bridges. All this occurring amid U.S. bosses’ imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (see editorial on front page) costing trillions of dollars — alongside intensifying competition with imperialist rivals — putting even greater pressure on their developing economic crisis and driving them to squeeze workers’ living standards even more.
What’s behind it all? What does it mean for the working class, students and soldiers? And how does it affect the outlook for communist revolution?
The capitalist economic system requires the extraction of surplus value from the working class (see box), particularly in basic industries — steel, auto, oil refining, aerospace, chemicals, machine tools, etc. U.S. bosses have stolen literally trillions of dollars from the labor power of the working class over the last 150 years, especially through the use of racism and sexism to extract super-profits by even further lowering wages and working conditions for black, Latino and Asian workers.
But capitalism has limitations and laws. Competition forces more and more capitalists to invest greater amounts of their capital in machinery and technology, needing fewer workers, the very source of their surplus value.
As profits shrink, bosses cut costs, through laying off workers and moving operations from higher-wage areas (the U.S., Europe, Japan) to successively lower-wage areas (first Mexico, then China, then Vietnam). But no matter where they move, two obstacles confront them – working-class struggle for better conditions, and continued competition from other bosses. The former puts upward pressure on wages; the latter forces more consolidation, automation and layoffs.
Consequently, the capitalist class, including rich investors (who front money for company stock and bonds) and the banks (which make huge loans to businesses), has no productive place to invest. Because capitalists are always competing against similar groups of thieves, they’re never satisfied with less than the maximum return on investment. Cut-throat competition is the only way to remain in the game. As Karl Marx said, "One capitalist kills many."
So these rich thugs turn to unproductive, speculative, increasingly bizarre investments. The latest is "collateralized debt obligations" (CDOs). These are groups of mortgages, sold as a package by a mortgage broker or company, usually first to a commercial bank, and from there to pension funds, hedge funds, or insurance companies.
The Federal Reserve was part of this game. To get out of the 1999-2000 recession, borrowing rates were cut to historic lows. Former Fed. Chief Alan Greenspan encouraged the development of new and "unconventional" ways of financing home purchases. So the market was flooded with low-rate, "sub-prime" mortgages, with wildly adjustable rates and other gimmicks. Unsuspecting home buyers were caught in a trap: "High-interest loans [were] foisted on borrowers who qualified for lower rates…. The Wall Street Journal found 55% of subprimes ‘went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.’" (NY Times, 12/10)
CDO advocates used mathematical models to "prove" they were "risk-free." Then security-rating firms gave them high ratings ("safe investments"). They were further guaranteed by credit guarantee insurance companies. A buyer stampede led to huge numbers of CDOs.
For banks this scheme did not tie up their capital. Instead of waiting 30 years to reap full profits from a long-term mortgage, bankers got immediate returns from selling packages of mortgages to CDO buyers. They then re-lent the money to reap even more interest/profit (including back to these same CDO buyers!). As CDOs became touted as great investments, real estate prices skyrocketed. This, in turn, led to further loans, made by the banks based on the inflated property values. At the height of the CDO mania, a single dollar of "real" capital was supporting $20 to $30 of loans (see http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/SuperModels?AreWeHeadedForAnEpicBearMarket).
Now the capitalist media is "protesting" — "What were they smoking?" asks Fortune Magazine. Speculative investment is an attempt to escape the fundamental laws of capitalism. But such con games only increase the economic instability inherent in the profit system.
We have no crystal ball. But several things are clear. The bosses are now desperately trying to fix things on the backs of the working class. Currently, 2.5 million mortgages are delinquent; 800,000 of those are in foreclosure. This has hit black and Latino home-buyers especially hard as the racist bankers enticed them into loans with even more exorbitant interest rates.
The rulers’ legislative scheme to "help" distressed home buyers is still one more scam: "Only a small fraction of subprime borrowers will qualify for relief and many…will eventually face foreclosure anyway. [Treasury Secretary] Paulson’s plan entirely focuses on reducing investor losses….It does nothing for the victims of predatory lending." (NY Times, 12/10)
The Fed. Chairman and Paulson are now admitting the economy isn’t quite so rosy. In reality, none of the bosses’ pundits know fully the extent of the corporate losses — how long it will take for the effects of this reckoning to ripple through the economy, and how big the waves will be.
Capitalists will attack workers as long as we let them. That’s why revolutionaries must expose these swindlers and mobilize workers to fight these capitalist attacks. As the rulers move toward wider wars, we can better show the connection between imperialism and this war on workers at home.
We must destroy a system that’s always looking for some new way to screw us for their profits. A capitalist future requires ever more workers thrown on the street; war-weary soldiers returning home to more insecurity and cuts in veterans’ benefits; and students seeing education costs soar.
In a communist world wage slavery will be abolished, workers will be free of these periodic capitalist crises. Cooperation, not competition, will be a hallmark of our culture. We will socially "invest" our productive labor into meeting the collective needs of the international working class. Our "rate of return" will be measured only by how much better we are doing at satisfying those needs.
How Bosses Profit Off Our Labor
In the article on the current issue where an industrial worker reports, "We get paid under $10 an hour and each day we produce 800 vehicles that sell for $40,000 each." Therein lies the secret of capitalist exploitation, discovered by Karl Marx.
For example, during an 8-hour shift, a worker produces a certain amount of value, but out of that value comes the bosses’ profits, the cost of buying the machinery, the interest paid to the banks for the bosses’ loans, the bosses’ other costs for utilities, transportation, as well as the worker’s wages.
So, while the worker might produce $80 value in an hour, he or she is paid $10 an hour, or one-eighth of the value that worker produces. The difference between the value that wage represents and the total value produced is what Marx called the "surplus value," out of which comes the bosses’ profits.
The less the boss can spend on the cost of labor, the greater the bosses’ profits. And the bosses use racism to cut wages still further, reaping super-profits. The workers noted above, paid less than $10 an hour, are producing $32 million worth of vehicles per day!
Only when workers produce solely for the collective needs of our class — not for the bosses’ or bankers’ profits — will workers reap the full value of what we create. That’s communism.
a name="CHALLENGE Networks Unite Workers vs. Bosses’/Hacks’ Attacks"></">CH"LLENGE Networks Unite Workers vs. Bosses’/Hacks’ Attacks
Recently PLP organizers in our city were able to bring together rank-and-file workers from two of the city’s major hospitals to discuss building a movement to fight the bosses and their labor lieutenants in Local 1199-SEIU. This meeting was an important step forward in the Party’s work here. We discussed the recent attacks on the pension fund, firings for refusal to work mandatory overtime and unfair hiring practices.
The hospital workers’ pension fund is in trouble because of the crisis of capitalism. The strategy of the union leaders at this point is to convince the hospital bosses to allow some of the funds allocated to the benefit fund to go to the pension fund. Of course we shouldn’t be surprised if the union leaders again bring up getting the members to agree to giving up one percent of their scheduled pay raise to help bail out the pension fund.
These misleaders are always asking the workers to give something up rather than leading them to fight for more. This is because their true role is not to fight against capitalism but to control the workers for the capitalists. We communists hope to win rank-and-file workers to fighting for a strong pension fund while we also struggle with them to realize that in fact there is no real security for workers under the capitalist system.
We discussed the union leadership’s refusal to fight effectively against firings. Several women at one of the two hospitals have been suspended and fired for refusing to accept mandatory overtime when they needed to get home to their children. Union delegates have repeatedly filed grievances against these firings but the union leaders have blocked these grievances in their arbitration committee. In a recent PLP newsletter we condemned this as an attack on women workers.
Some workers raised that the bosses have been unfairly hiring immigrant workers from Eastern Europe and bypassing black workers who had applied for jobs. We saw that there was resentment of these immigrant workers because of this. This gave us an opportunity to struggle around the Party’s line that the working class has no borders. We must fight against the unfair hiring but never attack immigrant workers since this would lead us into a bosses’ trap of dividing workers — particularly blacks and immigrants — who are victims of the bosses’ racism.
The basis for bringing together these two groups of workers is our CHALLENGE distribution and networks at both hospitals. All the workers involved read the paper and some have networks of their own. We plan to involve these workers in future writing for CHALLENGE.
While this is a significant step forward for us, we do understand that the ideological struggles with our friends must intensify. Many questions face our growing base and us: How do communists and our friends work within the union? How do we communists keep PLP’s politics primary while we are in the midst of reform fights — sometimes several at the same time? Should we rely upon the capitalist legal system? How do we work with workers and union delegates who have differences with us? How do we handle the struggle with friends who want us to focus on reform battles and "leave that communist agenda alone?"
One thing that moved these workers toward us is their anger at the union leaders’ refusal to organize fights against the bosses’ attacks. We have been involved in organizing and leading many of these reform fights and we will continue to do so. But we can never lose sight that the main victory in all this activity is the development of more communists in PLP.
Students Unite Against Anti-Muslim Racist
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, Nov. 28 — Right-wing groups invited the infamous racist and anti-Muslim demagogue Daniel Pipes to our campus. Pipes and these conservative and Zionist student groups are promoting a fascist agenda and distorting Middle East history, painting it as a "backward," "fanatical" and terrorist-producing region because it doesn’t support U.S. imperialism’s plans there.
Pipes is a mouthpiece for U.S. and Israeli imperialism. Funded by conservative sections of the ruling class, Pipes tries to convince workers and students that "radical Muslims" are inherently violent, irrational "enemies of freedom." For Pipes, the Middle East needs U.S. leadership to "modernize," meaning intensive bombing campaigns, racist occupation, massive slaughter, mass detentions and torture in the interests of "U.S. national security." Pipes wants U.S. workers to join the military and defend the U.S. empire by killing their Middle-Eastern and Muslim working-class brothers and sisters.
A united multi-racial coalition of Muslim, black, Latina/o, white and Arab students protested Pipes, his racist ideas and support for U.S. and Israeli fascism. The students interrupted Pipes’ talk, staging a silent walkout of about 60 protestors. They held signs reading, "Israeli and Palestinian Workers Unite!" and "From Gaza to Jena: Fight Racism with Multi-racial Solidarity." Afterwards, students held a teach-in outside about class solidarity, anti-racism and imperialist war.
One speaker described Jewish and Arab working-class solidarity and the many labor strikes (1917-1948) against their common enemies, the local capitalists and British colonialism to fight the racist bosses and misleaders who sought to divide them. They would chant slogans like, "Long Live Unity Between Jewish and Arab Workers!" The Israel-Palestine conflict was discussed in class terms, one over resources, land, cheap labor and profits. Workers have struck in Basra, Iraq and Tel Aviv, Israel against the effects of U.S. imperialism. The student speaker declared that all workers share common interests as members of the working class and must unite to smash racism, exploitation and imperialist profit wars.
Students’ flyers exposed Pipes’ racism and ties to the Middle East Forum, a conservative, pro-imperialist think-tank. The flyers also revealed the liberal politicians’ support for U.S. imperialism and our university’s connection to the war machine through military funding, research and hosting of racist speakers. Liberals like Obama and Clinton are more dangerous than the Pipes’ conservatives, covering up their imperialist goals by deceiving workers into believing that the equally racist DREAM Act and Comprehensive Immigration Reform are "solutions" to capitalism’s racism.
Communists must expose the racism and nationalism of all these bosses, explaining how the ruling class uses both to divide workers and prevent the international working class from recognizing our common interests in overthrowing capitalism, exploitation and racism. Later students discussed the day’s events. Many said the actions
were a success and thought that multiracial unity is a powerful weapon against racism. Others agreed but also said that being "silent" in the face of racism is not the best strategy. They argued that our solidarity showed the potential power we have on campus as students and workers, saying that more could have been done against Pipes and that more should be done when racist speakers are invited to campus.
Many of the students read CHALLENGE and are in a study group on communism and revolution. Although there was disagreement about how to deal with racist speakers, the discussion and struggle exposed the role of academics and the university in promoting racism, fascism and imperialism, while creating a strong foundation to build antiracism and communist politics among our friends next semester.
Harlem March Fights Columbia U. Expansion, Demands Clinic Re-opening
NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 1 — Today, about 30 people held a militant march in Harlem demanding that the Manhattanville Clinic, once a NYC Dept of Health Child Health Clinic, be re-opened. The city closed it in 1999, supposedly for renovations, and then spent $5 million redoing the façade while leaving the inside untouched. Meanwhile, the health and access to health care of the black and Latino residents of Harlem remain dismal.
The demonstration was an important breakthrough. It was initiated by parishioners at a nearby church, who began the effort under CHALLENGE readers’ leadership, and was led by Sunday School youth carrying a banner linking the issue to expanding war and racism. It was co-sponsored by the Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC), the group which has been fighting Columbia University’s expansion into Harlem.
Also present were Columbia students, who had just completed a 9-day hunger strike against racism in the curriculum and the expansion, and other students from the City University of New York. These combined forces, involving workers and students of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and occupations, have great potential to build a militant anti-racist movement in Harlem.
The demonstration’s size was limited because the same groups had been busy all week protesting at City Planning Board hearings, where the Columbia plan was being voted on. Although the hearing room had only about 75 seats, mostly filled by Columbia, dozens of opponents were standing around the edges.
As soon as the cops tried to evict the standees, they began chanting and making continuous speeches. One pointed out the conflict of interest on the Board, with one member being an ex-Columbia dean and another having University construction contracts. Many of the others, especially the chairwoman, are the super-rich, which one protester illustrated by displaying a picture of her in a gown in her gilded apartment. The cops gave up trying to evict the protesters.
Of course, the Board voted almost unanimously to support Columbia, as the whole plan was agreed to long ago by the mayor and City Council President. In this age of endless imperialist wars and huge racist cutbacks, only a massive militant student and community opposition could really have a chance of blocking the expansion and begin to fight for the jobs, health care and housing needed in Harlem.
But this movement cannot rely on any politicians and must understand the nature of the present period. While we in PLP fight for larger-scale actions involving rank-and-file workers and students in Harlem, this is why we also build CHALLENGE networks that fight for our communist politics.
Already we have expanded CHALLENGE circulation in the community around the church, but we must involve this base in more actions like this demonstration. In the anti-Columbia expansion movement, we will continue to build ties with members of all groups while we discuss the need to dump this whole rotten society and build a communist world.
a name="Rulers’ Rivalries A Killer for Workers">">"ulers’ Rivalries A Killer for Workers
While working for a building subcontractor operating on site for a major aerospace company, we were again reminded that workers are expendable in the name of speed-up and profit. Last week, a young laborer was seriously shocked while removing a water heater from a bathroom wall, requiring hospital treatment.
The foreman told the young laborer to remove the box rather than follow the proper safety procedure and wait for an electrician. In order to reap maximum profits the bosses cut corners.
The laborer had only worked in construction three weeks. When he asked how to remove the box, the foreman simply said "Take the screws out and pull it off the wall." He didn’t mention the possible electrical hazard a twenty-year old water heater posed. The 220-volt circuit that fed the water heater had been stripped bare over time. The stripped wiring made contact with the metal casing when the laborer pulled on the box. Since the laborer had both hands on the casing, his body made a circuit. The current held him onto the casing for five seconds before kicking him off.
When the laborer told the foreman what happened and that he didn’t feel good, the foreman laughed. "So you are telling me that you’re a dumbass and that you shocked yourself," he said. He refused to let the laborer seek medical treatment. Finally, an hour later, a carpenter demanded the laborer be sent to the factory medical center. Factory medical sent him to the local hospital. The project superintendent ran down to the hospital, assuring the injured worker that it was a "freak accident" and "nobody’s fault."
After the incident, we were forced to attend mandatory safety meetings. The general contractor and representatives from the aerospace company assured us they were going to get to the bottom of this. At first they acted as if people were going to be fired. As it became clear that the foreman was at fault, they decided to be lenient this time and not fire anyone. It came out later that the foreman had suggested a meeting involving only management and that the laborer should be fired for "incompetence." In the end, the contractor and the aerospace company set up a safety liaison. The person chosen to fill that position was none other than the foreman who had almost gotten the laborer killed.
This was not the first problem we have had with this foreman. He was involved in the racist firing of a black worker just one month prior.
I’ve had a lot of great conversations with my fellow workers about the nature of management and how workplace safety is a joke. When a product can be potentially damaged safety is important, but when a lowly worker is at risk safety is ignored.
Aerospace is important if the bosses want to get serious about competing with the Chinese and Russian war machines. As the push for the "re-industrialization" of America grows stronger, increased fascism at work and in working-class neighborhoods once again reminds us that the bosses need us a lot more than we need them. Hopefully, this incident will help me turn my present-day CHALLENGE sales into a bigger network.
Navistar: Warmaker/Strike-breaker
CHICAGO, IL, December 11 — As we go to press, 4,000 Navistar workers are in the 7th week of their strike. Formerly International Harvester, Navistar is the world’s fourth largest truck builder, and the biggest supplier to the Pentagon of the MaxxPro engines for the blast-resistant trucks used in Iraq. In past years, it has closed unionized plants and moved to non-union plants in the South and Mexico. Navistar also entered a joint venture with India’s Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. to build medium- and heavy-duty diesel engines, further driving down wages for all workers.
Not only has the UAW leadership failed to defend its members, it’s also failed to make organizing these non-union plants a strike demand. As is now true in auto, aerospace, steel and coal mining, most of Navistar’s plants are non-union.
The 500 workers at the Melrose Park engine plant, just outside Chicago, build MaxxPro engines. The MaxxPro chassis is built in Garland, Texas, and the trucks are assembled in West Point, Mississippi, both non-union plants. The union and the company are guaranteeing that Melrose Park continues to operate with scabbing supervisors and engineers, ensuring that the racist rulers can continue their imperialist bloodbath in Iraq. A big solidarity rally planned for December 5 was hastily cancelled the night before, partly because the UAW leadership feared it would make it possible for PLP and others to expose Navistar as a war-maker and strike-breaker, and show that U.S. and Iraqi workers face the same enemy and the same fight.
PLP is slowly but surely organizing support for the strike and attempting to build ties with some Navistar workers. Over the past week, groups of workers and students have walked the picket lines, talked to the strikers and distributed dozens of CHALLENGES. While it’s not a strike against the war, it’s still significant that workers have struck a war profiteer amidst a war. (Last March, 7,000 shipbuilders in Pascagula, MS struck Northrop Grumman for one month.) Workers have given us a very warm welcome. We’ve learned a lot from them, but are just scratching the surface. We’ll do better at raising the strike at our workplaces, schools, unions and churches, not just to build support for striking workers, but to show how the working class has the power to end this war, and all wars, by uniting across all borders and fighting for communist revolution.J
(Send statements of solidarity to: UAW Local 6, 3520 W. North Ave., Stone Park, IL 60165-1042)
$10/hr = 800 Vehicles X $40,000
I am an industrial worker in a sub-contracting company. We get paid under $10 per hour, and each day we produce 800 vehicles that sell for $40,000 each. In my factory and in all other industrial factories there is a huge contradiction between the safety of workers and the drive for profits.
For example a friend reported a safety issue to the company’s "safety officer." The problem concerned a large bolt sticking out of the shop floor. The bolt gets in the way of workers doing repetitious sub-assembly work. My friend pointed out, "A worker is probably going to trip over the bolt and hit their face on one of the surrounding metal racks." The "safety officer" replied, "If you don’t like the conditions here then you can go find another job."
Two days later that same friend tripped over the bolt he had complained about. He hit his face on a metal rack, splitting his lip open and knocking out his four front teeth. His lip needed ten stitches and he will also need four tooth implants. The company is paying for all of his medical bills, which have cost thousands so far.
The bosses will attempt to care for workers only when it benefits their profits — in this case it’s cheaper to pay for these bills than to reconfigure the shop or slow down production. This compensation will not bring back knocked out teeth, lost appendages or family members that have died all in the name of profit.
As a result my friends and I have written a flyer, which we plan to circulate at an upcoming barbeque. This injury is a terrible thing, but it’s helping us expose the contradictions between the bosses and the workers in our factory. Great conversations have arisen from this incident. Many workers that I have spoken to hate the way they are treated but feel there is nothing that they can do. I told them, "As workers we have the power to change the world because we create and run everything in society. But we must be organized."
The only way to resolve the contradiction between worker’s needs and the bosses drive for profits is to eliminate profits and wages –– capitalism. As workers we must unite and organize for our class interests, for a communist society, where production is based on the needs of workers not profits.
Bosses Keep Their Profits Safe, Not Workers
"Hey did you see Gustavo’s finger?" a worker asked me.
"Yeah that thing looked sick; the health and safety rules are a joke around here." I replied.
"I know, I think they (the Environmental Health and Safety people) are just here so they can keep OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) off the bosses’ backs."
We were talking about our co-worker who almost lost his finger because the safety guards on our machines had been disabled and the machine turned causing two hydraulic jaws to close on his hand while he was trying to clear a jam. Of course, the bosses tried to blame our co-worker for having his hand in the machine but as machinists we have to do that sometimes. The bosses knew in advance that the guards had been disabled but did nothing to prevent this injury.
The correct solution would have been to turn the machine off and call maintenance to fix the problem but because the competition in the aerospace industry is so fierce, the bosses are cutting costs everywhere while pushing for more production. The result is workers working long hours and not getting adequate rest. This combined with the bosses not keeping an adequate maintenance department creates dangerous conditions for us as workers; conditions that we must confront together.
The bottom line is that the bosses don’t care how many people get hurt or sick because of their long hours and dangerous machines. Their main objective is to out-produce their rivals at the cheapest cost possible. Almost anyone I talk to on the floor understands this but they don’t see that there is a way to change this rotten profit system. The key will be to win these workers to communist politics and help them understand that the U.S. bosses are competing with other imperialists around the world to maintain their system. The Iraq war is further putting U.S. capitalism in crisis and more wars are on the horizon. The imperialists know this and are pushing more racism and nationalism so workers will pay for these wars with their labor and lives.
CHALLENGE will play an essential role in developing workers’ understanding of capitalism and inter-imperialist rivalry. Within a relatively short period of time I have been able to start a network of CHALLENGE readers who are interested in learning more about how they and the Party can build a movement to end capitalism and build a world based on workers’ interests. One of these friends said that at first he was a bit nervous because he had never seen a group like PLP with so many different "races" having a discussion but that after he saw how we are all equal regardless of color he felt much more comfortable and encouraged to come again.
We understand that it is a long road ahead of us but with the help of students, teachers soldiers and workers inside the factories working towards the same goal, these small networks can grow to be large networks and study-action groups. They can lead struggles against the bosses and recruit more workers committed to ending capitalism, and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat led by our Party.
Worker from the Southwest United States
a name="S. Africa Miners’ Strike Exposes Nationalist/Capitalist Rulers">">". Africa Miners’ Strike Exposes Nationalist/Capitalist Rulers
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, Dec. 4 — Over 40,000 striking South African miners marched here today against hazardous working conditions, adding to pressures on the industry in a country where a miner dies nearly every day. The world’s leading producers of gold and platinum are among mines hit by the one-day walkout called by the 270,000-member National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The workers marched on the Chamber of Mines, the industry employers’ organization that includes the leading companies — AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Harmony Gold, Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin.
In October, around 3,000 miners at Elandsrand were trapped almost a mile underground for more than 24 hours when the lift cage’s power cable was damaged. They were eventually rescued unharmed. Agence France-Presse quoted Thembisile Marrent, a miner at the Kloof goldmine in Mpumalnga province, saying, "We’re dying in mines but get nothing. We want change, we want to work safe. When you get accidents the boss [says] it was ‘bad luck.’ If the mistake is yours, they charge you [with disciplinary offenses] even though you’re in the hospital." The miners carried placards with slogans including, "Mine safety is a human right," and "Blood-dripped profit is the bosses’ luxury."
South Africa’s mines are among the world’s deepest and most labor-intensive. But since the end of the apartheid regime working conditions still haven’t improved too much under African National Congress (ANC) rule. Mining produces 7% of the country’s gross domestic product and is the highest foreign exchange source here. The high price of precious metals has seen mine company profits soar through the roof, but the workers see little of it. As a matter of fact, the mine bosses are demanding even more productivity from the miners.
Unfortunately, the NUM leadership won’t challenge the ANC government. In fact, the NUM is a leading union in the COSATU union federation, which is part of the ANC coalition government currently led by President Mbeki. The South African "Communist" Party is also a key member of the government and a leading force in the trade union movement. But these sellouts have joined the side of the class enemy. Instead of breaking with all these capitalists, the "C"P and union hacks helped millionaire boss Jacob Zumia — then the country’s deputy president — survive a 2005 corruption scandal. Zumia is now in a dogfight with President Mbeki for control of the ANC and of the government.
In the 1990’s, when the imperialists and big capitalists (like the Anglo-American Mining Corp.) felt they needed to derail the growing revolutionary anti-apartheid anger of workers and youth, they decided to dump the old apartheid racist rulers and allow Nelson Mandela and the ANC to take power while continuing the oppression of capitalism and maintaining their profits.
South Africa’s militant working class, the continent’s most powerful proletariat, needs new leadership, one based on revolutionary communist politics and no alliance with any capitalist or nationalist politician. That’s the only real road to liberation from the yoke of capitalism and racism.
Italy Strike Shows Workers Can Shut Down Any Capitalist Country
ROME, ITALY — The massive transportation strike that shut down most of this country on Nov. 30 again shows the power of the working class. It was the first strike in 25 years uniting all transportation workers. Ninety percent of public transport was closed in Rome, Turin, Bologna and other cities. Flights were cancelled in the main airports. No trains were running anywhere. Even funeral hearses were halted. Sea transport between Sicily, Sardinia and the rest of Italy was blocked. These actions occurred amid mass strikes by railroad machinists in Germany and rail workers throughout France, including Paris bus and Metro workers. Unfortunately, the nationalism and reformism of the union leaderships in all three countries prevented a united internationalist strike.
Conservative rulers like Sarkozy (France), Merkel (Germany) and "center-left" Prodi in Italy are enacting massive cutbacks in workers’ wages and pension benefits and privatizing the transport systems.
In Italy itself, the law bars transport strikes during rush hours and limits these walkouts to eight hours, and they can’t strike for weeks after any previous 8-hour strike.
But the hacks of the leading transport unions are too tied to capitalism to break that ban. These mis-leaders fear workers might wildcat, as rank-and-filers did in the winter of 2003-04. The union hacks in all industries here are trying to divert the anger of the workers with these limited walkouts, while simultaneously signing on to the government’s social reform and budget law instituting major cutbacks in services and jobs.
Workers must break with the union leadership and link their struggles to other actions, like the massive Dec. 15 protest scheduled for Vicencia. It will oppose the plan to enlarge the U.S. military base there, used for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Workers must also join the fight against racism suffered by immigrant workers through the Security Law, which is being used to deport 5,000 immigrants for "crimes" like begging and washing car windows. The 150,000-strong Nov. 24 march in Rome saying no to violence against women rejected this racist law. It is being justified by the recent murder of an Italian woman by a Rumanian immigrant, but as the marchers pointed out, Italian men influenced by capitalist ideas perpetrate most of the violence against women.
The massive transport strikes throughout Europe belie the post-modernist dream that "there is no more working class." Workers are demonstrating that they still have the power to shut down any capitalist country. They now need to turn those struggles into schools for communism, to forge a red leadership that can unite all workers against their common enemy: capitalism.
a name="Revolutionary Struggle, Not Chavez’s ‘Business Socialism,’ Will Win Workers’ Power"></a>Re"olutionary Struggle, Not Chavez’s ‘Business Socialism,’ Will Win Workers’ Power
"Without a revolutionary Party, there can be no revolution." - V.I. Lenin
The narrow December 2 loss for the Constitutional Reform referendum in Venezuela is a clear example of the above idea. The Chávez government’s plan to impose its "21st Century Bolivarian Socialism" in a bureaucratic top-to-bottom manner suffered a major political setback even though it lost by only 50.3% to 49.7%. The right-wing anti-Chávez forces only gained some 200,000 votes over the 2006 presidential election total. In 2006, 7.3 million voted to re-elect Chávez; this time approximately 4.3 million voted for his constitutional reform.
The Empire Strikes Back
There are many reasons for this decreased support for Chávez’s program. The right-wing waged a very aggressive campaign, financed by big money from both local anti-Chávez bosses as well as from the U.S. The Washington Post (12/3) reported that the anti-Reform movement was funded in no small part by the U.S. government. The Post cited U.S. documents obtained by National Security Archive researcher Jeremy Bigwood that revealed at least $216,000 was funneled through the Office of Transition Initiatives, a secret branch of the U.S. Agency for International Development, erected in Caracas in the wake of the failed April 2002 anti-Chávez coup.
As CHALLENGE has stated many times, Chávez represents a nationalist populist trend in Latin America which, under the guise of anti-imperialism, seeks a better deal from U.S. imperialism’s rivals, like China, Russia and even India. The U.S. bosses and their local allies have been fighting for their interests, using blatant anti-communism (they claim the constitutional reform would turn Chávez into a "red dictator" who would take babies away from their parents, and other lies). Coincidentally, Chávez proved to be a better "bourgeois democrat" than the right-wing opposition in accepting the December 2 loss. If the right-wing had lost, they would have raised hell. Of course, U.S. apologists never mention the many U.S.-backed overthrows of elected leaders in Chile, Guatemala and elsewhere.
But the biggest cause of the loss was the Chavista movement’s internal weaknesses. Firstly, it isn’t really a revolutionary movement. The Chávez government attacked workers who actually fought their bosses like at Maracay (bathroom appliances) who tried to stop the closing of their plant. Chávez’s "land reform" has been limited to some unused land, without really touching big landowners. In the last few years, some 200 farmworkers have been killed fighting these landlords.
Chávez’s "anti-imperialism" has exploited Venezuela’s new oil supplies via "mixed enterprises" incorporating big foreign oil companies. While talking about "revolution" and "socialism," his government limited itself to a few small reforms for poor workers, including medical services using some 20,000 Cuban doctors. But meanwhile poverty overall has risen. Chavista bureaucrats and bosses have enriched themselves and big companies have increased prices, squeezing any wage hikes for workers. The government did little to counter the lack of milk and other basic staples caused by hoarding bosses.
Former guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo, a left-wing critic of Chávez, exclaimed: "How can you pretend to build a 21st century socialism enriching a bourgeoisie that came about with this government through oil income…or not taking into consideration workers, poor people in the countryside, indigenous people and giving power to agro-business and rich Chavistas?" (El Mundo, Caracas, 12/3)
That’s why so many workers and their allies abstained from voting December 2. Meanwhile, the pro-U.S. right-wing forces will try to take advantage of their victory in continuing to try to topple the Chávez government through a military coup. (General Baduel, who until recently was Chávez’s Minister of Defense, and who joined the anti-Chávez forces just before the referendum, is their man for this.)
But the right-wing is not united. It represents many different bourgeois forces, included disenchanted former Chavistas. The Chávez camp will also try to regroup, building its bureaucratic Unified Socialist Party to push for its "businessmen’s socialism," using workers and their allies as cannon fodder.
The real missing ingredient here is a revolutionary communist (not "businessmen’s socialist") leadership to fight for the real liberation of workers from capitalism and imperialism. This liberation won’t come through electoral referendum, but through revolutionary class struggle. This is a crucial task since the dogfight between the pro-Chávez and pro-U.S. forces will sharpen and workers will wind up losing unless they break with all forms of capitalism, whether the Chavista type or the pro-U.S. type.
a name="Spitzer’s Licensing ‘Gift’ Really Nazi ‘Yellow Star’"></a>Spit"er’s Licensing ‘Gift’ Really Nazi ‘Yellow Star’
In October, New York’s liberal democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, proposed allowing undocumented immigrants to get drivers’ licenses. The "immigrant rights" movement pushed the idea that Spitzer was taking a bold, pro-immigrant stance.
Spitzer’s plan was developed not out of concern that undocumented workers need to be able to drive to and from work legally, and to get car insurance, but rather "as a way of bringing a hidden population into the open." This fits with "homeland security" concerns consistently pushed by the Democrats. Some right-wing flunkies of the ruling class favor licensing undocumented workers. Colonel Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney and West Point professor, figures this plan would address the problem of "hundreds of thousands of people run[ning] around the country without any oversight when there’s a war going on." (NYT, 10/9/07)
But even that sham was too much for the openly anti-immigrant racists. Many upstate New York county clerks indicated that if the plan was enacted, they would simply disobey it. Within weeks, Spitzer held a meeting and then a joint press conference with Michael Chertoff, the head of the fascist Office of Homeland Security, and announced that New York would agree to a three-tiered driver’s license program. That plan would have given undocumented immigrants a license which could not be used to travel across borders or to fly, and would have left them open targets, easily identifiable by cops and immigration agents.
Spitzer’s apartheid licensing system would have led undocumented workers into the eagerly waiting arms of immigration agents (ICE) just as surely as the yellow stars on their clothes led Jews to the waiting arms of the Nazis. However, Lou Dobbs, CNN’s ranting racist, and his fellow media apologists for the ruling class, continued their vitriolic campaign, viewing even this plan as a "gift" to these workers. Within days, Spitzer announced that he was withdrawing the entire proposal.
Unfortunately, many workers still believe that liberal Democrats will look after their interests and protect them from the ravages of the gutter racists. Each of Spitzer’s proposals, however, shows the error of that belief. The liberals simply have a different way of building fascism. They know that the wider wars of the future require winning immigrants to patriotism, while maintaining a level of terror to keep workers in line. That is why they keep Dobbs & the Minuteman racists around, and allow them to build their movement.
Liberal Democrats are no more the friends of the working class than are the gutter racists. Today, we fight against all forms of racism and fascism, and for the international unity of the working class. Once our struggle is won, members of the working class will not have to carry an identification card to prove our entitlement to the fruits of our labor.
a name="PL History: Red-baiting, ROAR’s Rampage Can’t Stop Boston’s Anti-Racists"></a>"L History: Red-baiting, ROAR’s Rampage Can’t Stop Boston’s Anti-Racists
(Last issue’s article about the anti-racist struggle in Boston during the summer of 1975 recounted the battle of Carson Beach. PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (INCAR) once again successfully battled the segregationist thugs in ROAR and defeated a trap set by Boston’s cops, liberal politicians, the NAACP and an unholy alliance of nationalists and Trotskyists.)
The day after Carson Beach, rebellions erupted in several sections of Boston. Black workers and working-class youth, who had had their fill of racism and police terror, fought the cops with every weapon at their disposal. The cops responded by running amok in ghetto projects, breaking indiscriminately into homes and unleashing trained killer dogs on elderly people and children.
The rebellions were somewhat tainted with nationalism. A few black youths stoned cars carrying white passengers or otherwise attacked white people. Given the racist atrocities that had occurred every day in Boston for years, the absence until recently of a mass campaign against them and the rulers’ encouragement of nationalism, this mistake was not surprising. The bosses’ media portrayed the rebellion as "black mobs out to kill whitey."
Meanwhile, ROAR escalated its fascist violence, conducting ferocious gang assaults against black workers several nights in a row. As usual, no ROAR members were arrested.
Some of the most serious physical and political attacks against BOSTON 75 took place during the week after the Carson Beach fight. The day after the beach incident, a small group of INCAR members were leaving a television studio interview, when about 40 ROAR thugs attacked with clubs and other weapons, including a machete. The thugs were led by Warren Zaniboni, a "South Boston Marshal," whom Ted Kennedy would later dignify with an invitation to discuss busing. The anti-racists fought back valiantly. They made good their escape onto a city bus with the help of the white driver, who slammed the door in the fascists’ face and drove away. The INCAR members went to Boston City Hospital for treatment. While they were in the emergency room, the cops showed up with the ROAR goons and arrested the anti-racists for "assault with a dangerous weapon."
Seeing that the combination of ROAR’s terror tactics and their own state power had still not succeeded in crushing the anti-racists, Boston’s rulers launched a political red-baiting campaign. Suffolk County District Attorney Byrne claimed that the violence at Carson Beach had been caused by "outside agitators," who had come to Boston to start "racial disorders." He named INCAR and PLP and said that 18 "special prosecutors" would work 24 hours a day to produce indictments in the case. Deputy Police Supt. John Doyle told the newspapers that INCAR members had thrown the first rocks at Carson Beach. The lies went on and on.
However, the red-baiting proved a complete fiasco. The task force of "special prosecutors" vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, without producing a single prosecution. Boston’s workers didn’t fall for the red-baiting. The organized fascist forces failed to grow during the weeks after Carson Beach. Meanwhile, thousands of people throughout greater Boston continued to sign the INCAR petition.
BOSTON 75’s last major action was a demonstration planned for August 18th, when the volunteers intended to present INCAR’s petition, signed by 35,000 people, to a regularly-scheduled City Council meeting. CHALLENGE readers will remember that several Boston City Councilors proudly flaunted their ROAR membership.
Weeks earlier, INCAR had obtained a permit to march to City Hall. However, Mayor White and the cops had one more trick up their sleeves. Late on Friday afternoon, August 15th, three cops came to the INCAR office with a letter from the Traffic Commissioner revoking the permit for the Monday march. He offered no reason. The rulers obviously thought that this timing would prevent INCAR from organizing against the ban. The press announced that the march would not take place.
As usual, the bosses and their media mouthpieces had underestimated the resourcefulness and commitment of INCAR and PLP.
(Next: The August 18 march; INCAR and PLP prepare to demonstrate in South Boston on the first day of school.)
a name="USSR, The First Workers’ State — How It Was Won, and Lost"></">US"R, The First Workers’ State — How It Was Won, and Lost
When the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War that followed it, ended in 1921, the new workers’ state was in a state of exhaustion: largely destroyed, several million of its citizens killed, with a raging famine. Millions of homeless people wandered the land, and starvation was rampant. The worldwide typhus epidemic of 1919 had killed tens of thousands.
Seven years of war and invasion by Imperial Germany, then Poland, and all the Allied countries, including the U,S., Britain, France, and Japan, had created a culture of violence. Crime — robbery, murder, gangs — was everywhere. Armed bands from Poland raided border areas, robbed, raped, and killed, then fled back across the border. Industry and agriculture were almost at a standstill.
The Bolsheviks’ task was to build socialism/communism with the traumatized people in this devastated country. They had no blueprint, for it had never been done. No communist theorist — neither Marx and Engels, nor Lenin, nor any other — had ever thought the first workers’ state would look anything like this.
In the 192s, the Bolsheviks debated the best course of action to build the new society. All socialists/communists believed that communism could only come in as an industrialized country. The party leadership knew that the advanced capitalist countries would attack the USSR as soon as possible. Their position — that the USSR could and must quickly industrialize by itself — won over the vast majority of rank-and-file Bolsheviks.1
Led by Stalin the mainly working-class Bolshevik Party took the country on to a great "leap into the unknown." By the mid-30s, collectivization was almost complete, and the USSR was becoming a major industrial power. Nothing like this had ever been accomplished before in world history!
During the 1930s Oppositionist leaders conspired to overthrow Stalin and the Party leadership. Some also conspired with German and Japanese fascists. The leadership found out about these plots and tried and executed the guilty. But two successive heads of the political police were involved in these plots too. The second, Nikolai Ezhov, had his men arrest, torture, and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet citizens and Party members to cover up his own plot, and to sow dissatisfaction. This too was eventually uncovered, but not until huge damage had been done.2
Workers’ power was thought guaranteed as long as the communist party was in charge. In fact, capitalist ideas and practices turned the Bolshevik Party into its opposite. At Stalin’s death in March 1953 the communist movement appeared stronger than ever. Yet within three years the new head of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, had pushed the country towards capitalism, while attacking Stalin as a monstrous murderer and egomaniac. How could this happen?
All other socialists and communists along with the Soviet leadership believed there had to be an intermediate stage called "socialism" between capitalism and real communism. It would preserve many capitalist features: wage inequalities, inequalities between countryside and city; between workers and managers, the uneducated and the educated, nationalisms of various kinds, and so on. In industry, science, technology, art and literature, it meant preserving many capitalist ways of doing things, though with pro-worker reforms.
No human undertaking can ever be free of error, and the Bolsheviks made lots of mistakes. The basic reason is: They were the first! Never before had a communist movement seized and held power, then tried to build socialism/communism in any country, much less one that was unindustrialized to begin with and, moreover, hugely destroyed by World War, a Civil War, foreign invasion, epidemic and famine.
The Bolsheviks then led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II. After losing over 20 million lives and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure in the war, the USSR rebuilt in record time. The socialist USSR built nuclear weapons through the political commitment of its scientists.
The history of the USSR is an invaluable "textbook" for all workers! We must study the Soviet experience (and that of the other great 20th century communist revolution, the Chinese) to learn essential lessons about what Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks did right, and what they did wrong, so we can do it right next time and win a communist world!
Footnotes:
1 The plan was:
• Collectivize agriculture, so the collective farms could give up all their surplus to fund the industrialization drive;
• Build whole cities of industry over night, making the huge investments of industrializing a gigantic country within a few years instead of the decades it had taken the capitalist countries;
• Mechanize the new collective farms with tractors and farm equipment, making them even more productive;
• Build a large modern army with advanced weapons, able to defeat the armies of the capitalist countries that he knew would attack, probably soon;
• delay the attack as long as possible through diplomacy, trying to play off the capitalist countries against one another.
2 For one version of these events see Grover Furr, "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform (two parts) at http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/2005.html
Stalin and the cult
A related error was the "cult of the great man," usually called "cult of personality." As the 1930s progressed both supporters and secret opponents of the Soviet government took every chance to praise Stalin to the skies as basically infallible. Supporters did this because of the undeniable and immense successes of collectivization and industrialization. Opponents did it to cloak their own conspiracies.
Privately as well as publicly Stalin always disapproved of this "cult." But he did not succeed in stopping it. The "cult" made it possible for those who had been won over to the essentially capitalist line evolving within Soviet "socialism" to hide their real disagreements with the goal of communism -— a goal Stalin himself never stopped aiming for.
The "cult" also created an atmosphere of blind obedience within devoted communists and working people. If the "great man" has all the answers, why think for yourself? PLP has firmly rejected any "cults" of leaders or anybody else.
LETTERS
Capitalism Is Not Organized For Workers
At a November UFT meeting for Teachers in Reserve, teachers spoke about their long years of service and oppression by the administration. A Teacher in Reserve (ATR) is usually someone whose school or department has been closed. If they cannot secure a job during the summer, they are sent to their district headquarters which is supposed to operate like a hiring hall. Sometimes they are assigned to a school basically as a substitute teacher. About 400 people came to this meeting to find out what the United Federation of Teachers plans to do about their status.
I said that the system is in such a terrible state because capitalism is not organized for workers. The meeting leader, a Vice President of the union, told me "Don’t discuss capitalism." Since I still had the floor and the microphone, I replied that I had the patience and fortitude to listen to the chair’s remarks, so he could now listen to me. The chair became flustered, but apologized and I continued to blame capitalism for the educational crisis and pointed out the U.S. had plenty of money for the war while the children are getting less and less.
I pointed out how many teachers are removed from classrooms simply for being older or fighting back. ATRs are often considered "troublemakers" who know too much and explain to new teachers how the system works.
I went on to ask why this union did not pursue the leaders of the Dept. of Education to their homes. Why should Bloomberg and Klein have a good night’s sleep while our union members cannot? There had been applause for many points, but this point got the most applause. I suggested that the union get the rank-and-file involved in a real way with sit-ins, walk-outs and informational picket lines.
The following day at my ATR job assignment, I bumped into a teacher who said, "That was a great communist speech you made." I hadn’t realized this person was an ATR or that he’d been to the meeting and asked the man if he liked it. He said that he did and so did everyone else. There was a lot of applause. Now it’s my job to get to know this teacher better and to raise these ideas in the new school.
A Red ATR, NYC
a name="Johnstown Workers Expose Fascist ‘ID’"></">Jo"nstown Workers Expose Fascist ‘ID’
On Nov. 29, a large number of people attended a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pa., to protest the National ID. The meeting was sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the panel consisted of ACLU members, including Dr. Jim Scofield, the group’s local leader. Following the panelists’ presentation, the floor was open for discussion.
One young man said he was put through hell and high water when he renewed his commercial driver’s license recently. "I felt like a criminal going to get it renewed," he said. "I was fingerprinted. They checked my tattoos." The government wanted to know all about him and he wondered why.
Dr. Scofield responded that the government of the wealthy wanted to criminalize not only black workers but ALL workers in an attempt to gain control.
The head of the Coal Country Coalition took the mic and explained that "the phony war on terror was really an attempt to regiment and control all workers, for the imperialist oil wars and to save the capitalist imperialist system." "This is all about fascism," he said.
One young woman from Somerset, Pa., asked the panel why immigrant workers were applying for driver’s licenses while U.S. citizens were being forced to carry ID cards. A worker pointed out to her that immigrant workers were not the problem, and that, in fact, the government was rounding up these workers.
CHALLENGES were distributed at this interesting meeting.
Red Coal
CHALLENGE comment: It’s good to see many workers questioning this ruling-class move for social control. The "REAL ID" law would bar anyone from using their driver’s license as identification if their home state does not meet Federal standards. And the bosses will make sure that a driver’s license is required for everything. Every cop in the country would, in effect, become a Border Patrol agent, ostensibly to "hunt down" undocumented workers.
Such a system would enable the government to gather information about everyone’s life, especially if one opposed the rulers’ policies, such as opposition to their endless imperialist wars. It is nothing less than fascist control. (For a detailed explanation of REAL ID, see CHALLENGE, Dec. 12, page 8.)
Industrial Workers Key to Revolution
Recently a flight attendant for a major airline who has been reading CHALLENGE asked me, "These articles you have written for CHALLENGE are good! So why are you not teaching at a university instead of working at the airport?" (I’m a janitor.)
A fair question. I explained that organizing for a successful revolution to defeat the racist oppressors means the Party must reach and recruit workers in key areas — auto, steel, mass transit, airports, hospitals, agriculture, etc.
Equally important, we need comrades in the bosses’ armed forces to politically win soldiers and other service personnel to side with their working-class brothers and sisters, not to protect the oppressors.
I referred to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1920’s movie "Potemkin" and explained how, in 1905, the battleship Potemkin’s sailors were influenced by Bolshevik sailors to fight against horrific conditions, their officers and Czarist oppression.
My friend, who likes to read about history and politics, said this all seemed strange and different to her. I wanted her to understand it was crucial for millions of industrial workers, not just university workers, to see the need for a communist revolution and for PLP and the working class to destroy racist, sexist capitalism.
I said, "There’s absolutely no shame in being an industrial worker or working with one’s hands. Intelligent workers come from all different backgrounds." Of course, capitalism teaches us that if you work with your hands for a living, "there’s something wrong with you," as well as the racist, sexist elitist view that only particular types of workers are "intelligent."
After the victory of communist revolution, the workplace will be the center of education, with schools and libraries right there; workers will work with brains and hands. Universities, as elitist institutions, will no longer exist. (During the Chinese Cultural Revolution workers in places like hospitals encouraged doctors to not only work with their brains but also their hands. For a good first-hand account, read "Away with All Pests" by the English Marxist surgeon Joshua Horn.)
I look forward to more conversations with my friend. All workers, black, white, Latino, non-immigrant and immigrant, must struggle to make communist revolution and society possible. Marx and Engels said it best: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
Airport Red
REDEYE ON THE NEWS
Why free pass on Israel nukes?
As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was developing a nuclear device. The contrast to the efforts being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker….
On November 27, 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s administration accepted Israel’s assurance that "it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons."
As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made….
[Later] the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir… and Nixon appear to have agreed that the Israeli programme could go ahead, as long as it was kept secret….
While the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors crawl round Iran’s factories… they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in Israel. So when the Israeli government complains, as it did recently, that the head of the IAEA is "sticking his head in the sand over Iran’s nuclear programme," you can only gape at its chutzpah….
Israel under Olmert is also a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago it bombed a site in Syria. Last year, it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon…. Nuclear weapons in Israel’s hands are surely just as dangerous as nucear weapons in Iran’s.
So when will the US…. admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? (GW, 11/30)
L.A. forced to cancel Muslim map
The Los Angeles Police Department is scrapping its contoversial plan to create a map detailing the Muslim communities in the sprawling metropolitan area, bowing to the outcry among Muslims and others that the project was a thinly disguised form of racial profiling.
"We put it out there, it was rejected, it’s dead on arrival," the police chief, William J. Bratton, said at a news conference after a meeting with Muslim residents and civil rights organizations… (NYT, 11/16)
Pope sees why oppressed turn red
VATICAN CITY, Nov. 30 – Atheism may be "understandable" when mankind is confronted with evil and suffering, Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his second encyclical, issued on Friday….
He also said that attraction to Marxism was understandable given the terrible conditions of workers and that atheism could be read as a "type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history." (NYT, 12/1)
Gov’t anti-foreclosure plan is a big lie
…the mortgage relief plan unveiled last week…. isn’t mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble….
As Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert, puts it, "The administration’s subprime mortgage plan is the bank lobby’s dream…."
Hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of American families will lose their homes…. But [Treasury Secretary] Paulson’s plan – or, to use its official name, the Hope Now Alliance plan – is entirely focused on reducing investor losses….
But won’t the borrowers gain, too? Not if the planners can help it…. in many, perhaps most, cases those who get debt relief will be borrowers who owe more than their house is worth. These people would be nearly as well off in financial terms if they simply walked away. (NYT, 12/10)
US will back Pakistani military
A small group of US military and intelligence experts met in Washington for a classified war game last year, exploring strategies for securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if the country’s political institutions and military safeguards began to fall apart….
The conclusion of last year’s game, said one participant, was that there were no palatable ways to forcibly ensure the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons….
"Our best bet to secure Pakistan’s nuclear forces would be in a cooperative mode with the Pakistani military, not an adversarial one…" (GW, 12/7)
