- SEIZE THE MOMENT!
Millions See Racist Killer Nature of Capitalism - Victims of Katrina Treated Like Prisoners
- Black Cops and Officials Also Very Racist
- Bring Red Politics to Workers
Strike Hits Warmaker Boeing - Boeing and NWA Strikes: Red Politics Needed In Class Struggle
- Boeing Strikers Discuss New Orleans
- National Service: Volunteer For War Or Police State
- Newark: Racism, Elitism Hurt Northwest Strikers
- SEIU Janitors Support NWA Strikers in Spite of Hacks
- Struggle for Communism Is Long and Hard But Needed
- Liberals, Gutter Fascists:
Two Sides of the Same Coin - Stern's Job: Use Unions to Win Immigrants and All Workers to Fight in Bosses' Wars
- `Hustle and Flow' Hails Misogynist Hip Hop Culture
- Harry Potter: Nothing Magic About Exploitation and Slavery
- UNDER COMMUNISM
- Israeli Rulers Help Protect U.S. Oil Empire
- Sexism Benefits Only The Capitalists
- LETTERS
- RED EYE ON THE NEWS
SEIZE THE MOMENT!
Millions See Racist Killer Nature of Capitalism
Every so often a rare moment occurs that exposes the racist and brutal nature of the profit system. And in that moment, millions can see the nature of the beast and can be won to a more revolutionary communist outlook. This is such a moment. The rulers are losing a war in Iraq, about 20,000 industrial workers are on strike against Boeing and Northwest Airlines, and the ruling class has turned a hurricane into genocide of black and poor workers in New Orleans. Under different objective conditions, and with a mass PLP base among workers, soldiers and youth, such a moment could spark the armed struggle for the seizure of power.
Those objective conditions are not here yet, and we are a long way from having the mass base for PLP we require. Nevertheless, it is our job to seize this moment and advance the forces of revolution.
From Baghdad to New Orleans, capitalism stands exposed as a mass racist murderer for all to see. From Bush, to the head of FEMA, to the Governor of Louisiana, to the black Democratic Mayor of New Orleans, capitalism has failed. The number of dead -- mostly black workers, children and the elderly -- will dwarf the number of GI's killed in Iraq or civilians killed on 9/11.
The racist rulers, especially the liberals like the NY Times, are crying crocodile tears and will try to use this moment to fight for an even bigger army to wage more wars, so the National Guard can be used to protect the rulers' property and impose martial law at home, and for a larger, more efficient police-state Homeland Security Agency. They will use this disaster of their own making to try to put the White House back under the control of the biggest bosses and curb the neo-cons. We must expose their murderous deception and point out that the Democrats supported all the budget cuts and have said little to nothing in this crisis.
The industrial strikes have a special significance,particularly Boeing. When we say that billions are going to the war in Iraq and Homeland Security, much of it goes to Boeing, a major racist war-maker and strike breaker. The war, the strikes and the mass murder are all intimately tied together. What's more, PLP has built a base among Boeing workers over decades, and we can advance the revolutionary movement and recruit to the PLP out of this strike.
And not just at Boeing, but everywhere we have a base, we must seize the moment. PLP in Texas is actively taking part in the resettlement of victims from New Orleans, struggling with victims and care-givers alike to build a mass PLP. Postal workers in Chicago are holding a fund raiser in their union hall, while struggling to bring more workers into the Party. This moment can be one of increased revolutionary opportunities, but they will not happen spontaneously, we must work hard and seize them.
Every Party member and club should be involved in some kind of relief effort for the victims of New Orleans, while mapping out a plan to more aggressively build the Party. We should be fighting in the unions, on campus and in the communities and barracks, to march on Washington against the war and racist mass murder at home on September 24 in Washington D.C, L.A. and the Bay Area in California, to organize relief efforts for the flood victims, to support the Boeing and Northwest strikers, to sharpen the class struggle where we are and to build a mass international PLP. This moment will not last, but if we seize it, we can be stronger than we were when it arrived.
PL Volunteers Help Victims of Katrina and Racist Negligence by Rulers
Report from Texas
PLP members and friends are working on storm relief in Texas cities. In a major city near Louisiana, PLP has met many people fleeing New Orleans who blame the rich and government officials on all levels for the disaster that has killed their relatives and forced them into refugee camps across Texas. Multi-racial groups and families are fleeing on foot, pulling shopping carts and hitchhiking to get out after all so-called relief efforts failed or never even got started. Even the medical personnel from Louisiana hospitals are now fleeing on foot. People managing to get out on organized bus caravans move from checkpoint to checkpoint at evacuation centers in Texas which are barely operational.
Tens of thousands of working people are volunteering to help the refugees, inundating organizations like Salvation Army and Red Cross, which are barely able to organize anything, yet are doing a hundred times more than the government agencies like FEMA and Homeland Security. Many of the volunteers met by PL members are veterans of the two Iraq wars, often injured and disabled themselves. Most everyone agrees that the oil war in Iraq has sucked up all the funds that should have paid for relief.
The volunteer efforts are a lesson in the possibilities for communist revolution by the working class. Friends of PLP have called across the state to organize help at Red Cross sites and consider whether or not to go to Louisiana. The thousands of people working in food warehouses and shelters are almost entirely self-organized. The working people show up to volunteer and organize themselves, often fighting off the bureaucrats who do nothing but go to press conferences to announce relief efforts which don't even exist. Many volunteers, including PLP members, have taken matters into their own hands, picking up refugees stranded by the freeways, searching for victims whose medications have run out and getting them hospital care, and much more.
PLP school teachers in Texas will have (or will propose to have) refugee children in their classes and are discussing how to work with fellow teachers and PTAs to meet these families and build an understanding of how racism, imperialist war and the capitalist system itself, caused this disaster.
The ongoing Katrina crisis is showing the working class what capitalist "democracy" is worth. People are relying on themselves and the goodness of their class brothers and sisters for anything that is positive. A terrible problem is that PLP is so small. It is difficult to reach thousands with our message that communist revolution is the only long-run solution. People fleeing Louisiana and Mississippi, and the volunteers helping them, all can see the problems. They also sense that the only real help is to organize from below, for working people to help working people. But only a rapidly growing PLP can show people that the way to prevent U.S. rulers from continuing their system and its attacks on working people is to get rid of the rich altogether. Only PLP can explain the need to destroy the capitalists who try to stay on top of their European and Asian competitors by endless wars, financed by racist attacks against poor people at home.
Victims of Katrina Treated Like Prisoners
Hundreds of cots not even inches from each other are the living arrangements for New Orleans evacuees in this large Texas city. Although hurricane victims are now getting shelter, food and health care from thousands of volunteers in a show of mass multi-racial and class solidarity, many explain that the events in New Orleans were caused by the government officials who quit offering public services of any kind long ago. (PLP members doing volunteer work are carrying pencils and notebooks to exchange contact information with other volunteers and flood victims. This often requires asking for relatives' phone numbers from flood victims who have no phone and no homes left in Louisiana and Mississippi.)
Many of the people that fled New Orleans have told PL volunteers helping at evacuation centers that they are being treated like prisoners, endlessly passed from one police checkpoint to another. At a San Antonio relief center people had to get on and off buses several different times before reaching the main registration. In another city, lawyers reported that hundreds of police were awaiting the evacuees, planning to interrogate and search them in a facility without any outside observers.
It is starting to look like there will be up to 500,000 people sent to different closed military bases and other sites around the U.S. and will live in what will become refugee camps under martial law.
While the rulers' economic analysts focused first on the disruptions to the U.S. oil supply and its effect on U.S. competitiveness, these geniuses have now realized that the workers who ship, load and unload most of the U.S. agricultural crop that comes down the Mississippi to the Port of New Orleans, are gone. There are no houses, no transportation, no facilities at all left to support the workers that keep U.S. produce moving to make profits for giant corporate agriculture. The bosses are worried that this will cause a crisis as the harvest advances over the next several weeks.
Although this is not spontaneously producing conscious revolutionary communists, it is becoming easier to talk to people about the need for PL's politics and organization. The breakdown in federal and local government services, as money is siphoned off to imperialist war, shows that increasingly, only the police (who are deserting and committing suicide in New Orleans) and the military physically keep the bosses in power. If PLP can win workers to revolutionary ideology and commitment, the bosses' ideological hold on the workers will be in jeopardy. PLP-led volunteers can win our brother and sister storm victims to take matters into our own hands for the long run, while helping to provide immediate relief efforts. When workers see that the same enemy that invaded and occupies Iraqi has attacked the New Orleans black working class flood victims, great advances will become possible.
Black Cops and Officials Also Very Racist
One port/railroad worker, whose job ended when his tractor cab got stuck on a median he couldn't see in two feet of water, explained that the cops and jails in New Orleans are the most racist in the nation. This black worker explained that the black officials and cops treat black working people as bad, or worse, than the racist bosses who run New Orleans. To this worker, the rotten treatment of the working people in New Orleans, which led to their complete abandonment to the hurricane and flood, was completely based on the profit system and its need to suck profits from workers of all races. He explained that if you were a black worker in New Orleans who sounded like you knew what was going on, you were surely going to jail whether you were accosted by a black or white cop.
Several disabled vets from New Orleans explained to PLP that the government has "subcontracted" away government services for everything the past several years, that new pumps to drain the water had never been made operational, that the explanation on TV that water made the pumps quit was a lie, and that one levee might have been broken on purpose so that higher income neighborhoods would be spared.
The "subcontracting," which is a way government officials get out of their responsibilities, such as opening private jails, make the subcontractors rich. Meanwhile the services supposedly to be provided are not really given. This is happening in a big way today -- a city official in Texas announced that FEMA (part of Homeland Security) was "subcontracting" the management of the disaster relief effort for the entire city to private companies like Halliburton. This means that in this city people who don't know anything about disaster management and who haven't even worked on it for the past week will now be in charge.
Texas Comrade
Bring Red Politics to Workers
Strike Hits Warmaker Boeing
September 2 -- The strike is on. About 18,300 workers struck Boeing, the war-making, strike-breaking aerospace giant today, about 16,000 here in the Seattle area. Marches of hundreds through the plants followed weeks of rolling thunder -- banging metal on metal, amplified by machinist-made whistles and bull horns that reached decibels forcing all but the most protected, to flee the factories. Boeing workers were left in no mood to accept a contract that split young from old, plant from plant, and worker from worker. Faced with this anger and a ruling class determined to reorganize aerospace into a vast network of low-cost industrial "sweatshops," the union mis-leadership had no choice but to recommend a strike or lose the workers completely. Eighty-seven percent voted to hit the bricks!
"Why can't we stage a slow-down, instead of striking?" asked one machine operator. "What do you think we've been doing for the last week?" responded another.
It's Not Easy Selling Capitalism to Workers
The union hacks have been in a bind throughout these negotiations. They would love to maintain "labor peace," but the bosses' need to grind down the industrial working class to pay for "stunningly expensive" oil wars makes this problematic.
As with the Northwest Airlines mechanics, the hacks have been forced to strike, even as they promote capitalism's dog-eat-dog ideology that undermines that fightback. "Don't let them split us apart," they warn. "...withholding our labor is the only way to stop this attack on American workers. " Well, that leaves out most of the working class and builds nationalism -- a key tool the ruling class uses to promote their imperialist wars. And as for all "American" workers, the IAM leadership literally turned their backs on NWA strikers the week before [See Box page 3].
Union leaflets fault Boeing for not "partnering" with the union, for cutting off groups of workers at former Boeing factories in Wichita, KA, Spokane, WA, and Arnprior, Canada. The IAM leadership made these very same workers vote and vote again until they finally accepted contracts that cut wages, benefits and jobs. Boeing wants to end retiree medical benefits for future hires, and the union vowed, "not to forget them. " Meanwhile, the International sabotaged a Lockheed strike over this very issue, while the local leadership tried to shut down a union meeting rather than pass a resolution in support of the Lockheed strikers. As Challenge reported, the workers passed it anyway.
Red Politics Is What Angry Workers Need
The union hacks can't be too happy that our Party has exposed them to thousands of Boeing workers. Nearly 2,500 workers bought Challenges during these negotiations, 1,200 during our July summer project alone. Over 4,000 communist flyers answered the capitalist ideology pushed by the hacks. Hundreds have acted, in one small way or another, under our leadership--from signing petitions and union resolutions, to circulating our literature, to voting for real class unity at union meetings over the objections of the leadership.
Despite their blatant hypocrisy, nobody should have any illusions that these pro-capitalist hacks can easily be removed from power. In fact, on one level this strike is about shoring up their shaky position. But they have to be careful. Sometimes, for the bosses and their labor lieutenants, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.
During the summer project, our Party challenged Boeing workers to step up to bat -- to swing away and start a rally. "A rally that starts with rolling thunder and points to industry-wide demonstrations and strikes at a bare minimum. ...A rally that rejects the pro-capitalist ideology of the union mis-leadership and guides our fight with class-consciousness and anti-racist, internationalist solidarity. ...A rally that can teach us about the strength of the working class, so we can develop the wherewithal to end the bosses' profit-driven system." At least we're on base now.
Boeing and NWA Strikes: Red Politics Needed In Class Struggle
August 21 -- "If you can't give them bread, then give them circuses," would be a good description of this year's contract negotiations. The rallies, leaflets and even more information about the proposed contract early on--tactics that our Party and base have fought for, over 30 years--were all there. Unfortunately, none of this was aimed at building working-class solidarity and militancy.
The old social contract, where the bosses gave "the bread [crumbs]" as long as the union movement supported imperialism, has been thrown out the window. The union hacks are caught between Iraq and a hard place. They have to maintain our allegiance to be worth anything to the bosses, while US imperialism needs to attack us on all fronts to maintain its shaky empire. Revolutionary, working-class consciousness must replace trade union reformism or our class will be trapped as well.
The Truth Revealed
This became crystal clear during the August 21 "truth rally." Some 3,000 Boeing workers and their families rallied and marched outside the airport hotel where the negotiations took place. One block away, the main group of Northwest Airline strikers was picketing. One picketer visited our rally. Many in the crowd stopped to shake his hand and wish him well, but the leadership told him to "get lost." The hacks proceeded to march us away from the strikers, so we ended up literally turning our backs on the picketers. To add insult to injury, they sang "Solidarity Forever" at the final rally.
Furious workers circulated a resolution against crossing NWA picket lines. The IAM leadership directed members at Northwest to cross the mechanics picket lines and do some of their work. Dozens signed and a few went to visit the picket lines afterward. Since then, Teamsters, Teachers, Flight Attendants, Longshoreman, members of the IAM retirement club--defying their leadership--have all come to show support. At a BBQ hosted by a Boeing worker, strikers, their families and Boeing workers met to plan how to build solidarity.
"It's time to forget [union] politics and for workers to support each other," said one striker. To tell the truth, it's the capitalist politics of the union misleaders that gets in the way. PLP's revolutionary communist politics, which put the interests of the working class first and foremost, is the answer. The lengthy discussions on everything from the need for working-class consciousness, to fighting against racism and the Iraq oil war point to the desire workers, engaged in class struggle, have for political understanding. Nobody thought any of these topics were "outside" issues.
A Credibility Crisis
When we returned to the shop, we were flooded with one or two union leaflets a day. The most political was, "Divide and Conquer? You Might Be Next!" It referred to the company's attempt to pay the 800 Wichita military workers left under our corporate agreement lower wages than the rest of us. It blames the company for "cut[ting] out a group at every turn." It calls for unity.
"...And they wonder why people don't believe them anymore," commented an irate member. "The union leaders just cut out the NWA strikers themselves!" "That's why unions are losing," added another "In a time of crisis, you can't be neat and clean about everything. You just got to back workers."
Finally, one woman criticized a comrade for not seizing the microphone and leading the rally back to the picket line. It's good to hear that our fellow workers have faith in our communist ideas, but seizing the microphone was tactically impossible. We need a bigger organization to make that happen. She and others like her on the shop floor and at the BBQ can form the nucleus to make that happen. Combined with mass sales of Challenge, these workers can lead our class to seize more than just a microphone. As one retired Boeing worker we've known for 30 years said, "Don't ever forget about the government!"
Boeing Strikers Discuss New Orleans
Two of us started this strike with breakfast at a local diner. Naturally, we discussed strike issues and plans to build other big breakfast and lunch meetings throughout the duration. Then the discussion turned to New Orleans.
"There's something that really bothers me about New Orleans," my friend started. I was worried because of the racist, anti-working class attack in the press about "looting and mayhem" among the black survivors.
"Here they have all these poor people literally fighting for their lives, and all they can talk about is the looting. Let them have the damn stuff. Most of it is probably not any good anymore, anyway. Just help them!" He surprised me.
We could see a Safeway Supermarket out the window. It reminded me of a story by a teamster milk driver I know. The Safeway management pours chlorine on perfectly good leftovers so that no homeless could eat what the bosses can't sell. By now my friend was really pissed. "They can pour billion into two wars and they can't help these people!"
It's clear the main thing these bosses want to protect is their profits and their system. The attacks on the black workers in New Orleans and the Boeing workers comes from the same source, billions for imperialist war being paid for by the working class. And many of those billions go to Boeing in Pentagon contracts. If the ruling class is willing to shoot a poor, black worker for stealing a loaf of bread, imagine their reaction if they think they could lose their war production to an angry, communist-led working class. My friend has the right idea. Racism is paving the way for attacks on us all. This system has to go!
National Service: Volunteer For War Or Police State
The U.S. military is facing troop shortages in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. While the brass currently measures the shortfall in the hundreds of thousands, U.S. rulers must prepare for an eventual clash with a rising rival superpower requiring millions of willing soldiers. Defeating a military alliance of China and Europe or Europe and Russia (the Pentagon is studying both scenarios) would necessitate a greater mobilization than during World War II. Then, the Soviet Union bore most of the allies' burden. This time, the bulk of the fighting would fall to the U.S.
But U.S. rulers have a serious problem. Memories of rebellions against their murderous Vietnam debacle make restoring the draft a last resort. So the rulers' liberal agents are casting about for a "national service" scheme to begin the massive task of filling the ranks. The liberals are trying to take advantage of the many good people offering help to the victims of Katrina. The New York Times Labor Day editorial (9/5) said: "It may be time to recycle the idea of Labor Day. Instead of a day off, perhaps it should become a day on, a day devoted, across the nation, to helping out -- a day, in fact, of national service...what was lost with the sacrifice we were never asked to make after 9/11 was a sense of collective effort, the awareness that this was something we were all in together."
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI)-- the Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) think-tank -- just published "The AmeriCorps Experiment and the Future of National Service." The DLC, led by Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, marches in lockstep with the rulers' police state-and-war agenda. It embraced the Hart-Rudman reports and made regime change in Iraq a central plank of Gore's campaign in 2000.
After outlining proposals for promoting church and community-based service programs -- with a military option -- the PPI book concludes with the rulers' key debate: compulsory vs. volunteer service. William Galston, a domestic policy advisor in the Clinton White House, calls for "full-time 18-month service for all 18-year-olds," with a military/civilian choice. PPI head Will Marshall, noting that, "America may need to mobilize one day for full-scale war," proposes transforming Selective Service into a "recruiting device for voluntary national service, as well as a register of the nation's available manpower." Young men and women could choose the CIA-front Peace Corps, its domestic version AmeriCorps, or the military. Volunteers would then receive preference in college admission.
The volunteer service favored by the liberals cuts two ways. It reveals the weakness of U.S. rulers, afraid, in Marshall's words, to raise the "specter of conscription;" but it also has the dangerous potential to win large numbers of well-intentioned people to the rulers' imperialist agenda.
In a follow-up article in the DLC's "Blueprint" (7/23), Marshall invoked the supposed "selfless and patriotic ethos of the New Deal and the New Frontier, which linked our nation's security explicitly to economic and social reforms -- social insurance, civil rights, high-quality schools, help for the poor and vulnerable." He explicitly equates liberal calls to service with the rulers' genocidal wars: "Democrats...need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice...."
Sacrifice is the liberals' latest watchword. They understand that material incentives alone cannot motivate the military or the masses. Marshall says, "Democrats sometimes make the mistake of believing they can spend their way back into the military's affections. So they call for big increases in veterans' benefits, health care, housing...What matters most are intangibles -- being recognized and honored for the sacrifices they make to preserve our way of life."
Marshall says working-class families should take star-spangled pride in sacrificing their tax dollars and their children. "Democrats ought to insist on a major expansion of the military, by as many as 100,000 troops...and insist on paying for a larger force by rolling back the administration's unconscionable wartime tax cuts. This would neatly frame the real choice facing patriotic Americans: a stronger military versus tax cuts for the privileged."
What the rulers lack, however, is an effective ideology. Winning millions of workers to act against their class interest is a tall order. The Nazis used anti-Semitism. U.S. rulers employ anti-Arab, anti-Islamic racism to motivate troops to kill in the field. But their dependence on Saudi, Kuwaiti and other regimes prevents them from making "Kill the Arabs" a big media message. The liberals complain that Bush squandered the patriotic opportunity furnished by 9/11. They may be awaiting more such attacks. Whatever happens, our job is to mobilize workers in their class interest to destroy the profit system that thrives on workers' blood.
Newark: Racism, Elitism Hurt Northwest Strikers
Newark, NJ Sept. 1-- For the past two weeks, PLP has joined the Northwest Airlines mechanics on the picket line at Newark Airport. This strike is as significant as the PATCO (Air Traffic Controllers) strike that was busted by the Reagan-Papa Bush govt. in 1981. The mechanics' union, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), was forced into the strike due to the airlines' demand to fire half the union mechanics, cleaners, and custodians and slash wages by 25%. NWA's "new business model" is a plan to outsource heavy maintenance and use thousands of scabs to do union work, and was hatched a year and a half ago. They have been aided by the 130,000 layoffs of airline workers since 9/11, leaving a big pool of skilled unemployed workers.
Meanwhile, the mechanics have made it easier for the bosses to break their strike. About seven years ago they broke off from the much larger International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and formed a chapter of the AMFA. The reason for this, according to the workers we spoke to, was that they are "skilled" workers, compared to the "unskilled" baggage handlers in the IAM. Since they felt that they had more responsibilities than other workers, they should be paid more and represented better. Their union leaders had convinced them that their strength is in skill, not numbers and solidarity.
While PLP organized students and other workers to support the strikers, we also struggled with the mechanics to see the error of believing that "skilled" workers are more important than "unskilled" workers. We discussed the importance of class-consciousness and how crucial it is for workers to see that their common interests lie with their class, whether they are baggage handlers, mechanics, or pilots. As with PATCO, which was the first blow of 25 years of union-busting, mass wage and job cuts, etc., the vicious attacks on our brothers and sisters at NWA will affect all of us.
We distributed PLP leaflets and Challenge to the strikers, which showed how British Airways workers wildcatted in sympathy with fired food service workers, using class solidarity to shut down London's Heathrow Airport. Many striking mechanics began criticizing the way their union leadership had sold them out in the past. Another worker spoke about his father and grandfather who had been in the Longshoremen's Union and the battles that those workers fought against the bosses. By the end of the conversation, some of the workers began to question the union bosses' idea of "skilled" and "unskilled" workers.
It is important to point out that workers' unity is necessary to fight the bosses, but we must also point out that trade unionism will not stop these attacks. Even if the IAM or AMFA leaders were more militant, they would still have their hands tied because of patriotism and reformism. Workers need a leadership that connects the attacks suffered by mechanics to the the oil wars in Iraq-Afghanistan, that fights racism be it against baggage handlers (many baggage handlers are blacks and immigrants) or against the victims of racist neglect after Katrina swallowed New Orleans. We need a leadership that fights for international unity with the workers in London's Heathrow. This is the politics of PLP, which is based on the belief that workers are one class worldwide against an international system of exploitation and that every battle in the class war that is raging must be turned into a school for a society where workers rule and without bosses: communism.
SEIU Janitors Support NWA Strikers in Spite of Hacks
AIRPORT IN THE MIDWEST, August 20 -- Black, Latin, Asian, African and white airport janitors, citizens and immigrants, women and men, fought back against Northwest Airlines and their own union bosses with the onset of the NWA mechanics' strike. Northwest and its major subcontractors tried to force mostly immigrant workers to scab during the strike, cleaning NWA's major operations facilities and offices, replacing 800 janitors who are part of the striking AMFA mechanics' union. The racist union leadership has played into the bosses' hands by attacking immigrant workers in their strike literature rather than uniting with them.
At first the bosses concocted the racist lie that immigrant workers who have lived in the U.S. less than five years must work as scabs or jeopardize their immigration status. A small group of workers exposed this lie and struggled with their own sellout union leaders in SEIU. At a shop stewards' meeting the Saturday before the strike, the local SEIU leader and the head of the AMFA local made it clear they would not help.
On Monday, regular CHALLENGE readers who had formed a strike support committee distributed a PLP leaflet in Spanish and English throughout the airport. It was well received and caused a lot of intense political struggle over not scabbing and the need for international solidarity. The racist bosses tried to find out where this leadership was coming from, but failed.
That night the local president called an emergency meeting at the airport. He had no plan to stop the racist bosses from using us as scabs. One steward gave an anti-racist talk, supporting the striking mechanics and others were very vocal in supporting her. By Wednesday, a small but significant number of airport workers were refusing to scab for NWA. The bosses had not expected any resistance to their fascist plans and called an emergency meeting to try a new tactic. Exposed, they backed off trying to use low-seniority immigrant workers and switched, trying to use workers with high seniority as scabs. The bosses are having some success at this, but our struggle is continuing.
This struggle shows that even small resistance can disrupt the bosses' fascist plans, and the importance of the Party having an integrated and international base among the workers. We are learning how to organize under increasing surveillance and under the nose of the Department of Homeland Security. We are also learning the importance of building a mass base for PLP in the airline industry.
We cannot delay or hesitate in fighting fascism. If the strike support committee had delayed even one day, the small but significant number of airport workers would not have had the courage to defy our racist oppressors. We cannot delay in winning these workers to join, build and lead a mass revolutionary communist PLP.
Struggle for Communism Is Long and Hard But Needed
El Salvador,--"It's taken me a long time to realize that elections are good for nothing," said a former FMLN militant. "We've been telling you for years; PLP is not wrong in its analysis because it has an objective communist basis," answered a PLP comrade. "Since 1979, PLP predicted that the FMLN would never lead a revolution due to the bourgeois ideas on which it was founded. Now it has joined Christian-democratic groups and pseudo-revolutionaries who call themselves Trotskyist socialists."
Such discussions have been taking place in coffeehouses, universities, homes and workplaces here due to the FMLN's internal elections to choose candidates for deputy and mayoral elections all over the country. FMLN's Political Commission thinks that everything is under control. The uncertainty of their base does not reach the offices of the now corporate FMLN elite.
Throughout the internal elections, there have been rumors of fraud and coercion coming from the leadership. The goal of the misleaders is to run candidates who are loyal to capitalism. FMLN's leadership does not intend to shift its politics and ideology to the left. FMLN top hack Aquiles Montoya, declares, "FMLN's thesis rests on leading a bourgeois democratic `revolution' leading to socialism. Its position does not have any historical support and is very convenient for electoral political struggle. " The words of Shafick Handal, head of the FMLN, before the National Association of Private Enterprises stood out, "In reality our supposed socialism cannot be defined as being completely against capitalism. The program that we have developed does not, at its core, call for an immediate abolishment of capitalism in general or in the existence of capitalist relations of production, distribution, and exchange."
"Tit for tat" illustrates how factions of the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), and the Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS) have hogged political offices. "Sectarianism no longer exists in the front. Now we are one. No one ever speaks about the FPL or PCS," declared an angry young member of the electoral front. He also admitted, "it's true, in some municipalities the ballot boxes were stuffed; where there were 800 members, there would appear 1,200 voters." Facts are stubborn things. The new and old FMLN militants are only perpetuating the capitalist system. They mimic the strategy of the bosses' parties, which deceived and slaughtered tens of thousands of workers in the '70s and the '80s. "I saw an FMLN mayor with boxes stuffed with ballots in his own home. Is this the kind of representatives that the FMLN is offering us?" asked a worker. "We are right where the bosses want us, and more than 100,000 people had to die for this!" said a furious PLP comrade.
These discussions reflect the sharpening contradictions between bourgeois democracy and the need for the working class to take control through communist revolution. Communism will tear down flags and borders that enslave the international working class.
PLP in El Salvador will never drop our red international communist flag. In every issue of CHALLENGE/DESAFIO we distribute, we spread working-class ideas. They send out positive messages about international communist struggles. They are proof that workers can grasp communism all over the world.
The most glorious moments of communism have been written in blood, sweat and tears, in trenches and in workplaces. At this moment, the PLP in El Salvador is struggling to understand that there is no easy way to fight for communism. The electoral system is only an illusion. Communist revolution depends on consistency and discipline. Every letter, every Challenge article, every friend that we win, every reader and member of a club strengthens our struggle for international communist revolution led by PLP.
Liberals, Gutter Fascists:
Two Sides of the Same Coin
LOS ANGELES, August 20 -- Today PLP exposed a black liberal "community leader's" support of racism. Several weeks ago, the liberal Earl Ofari Hutchinson invited Joe Turner, the racist leader of Save Our State (SOS), an affiliate of the anti-immigrant Minutemen, to speak at his L.A. Urban Policy Roundtable. When Hutchinson was deluged by emails and calls condemning this racist and showing that anti-immigrant racism is an attack meant to divide workers, he changed the topic of the Roundtable to talk about how to stop gang violence, and uninvited the racist. But that did not stop racist Turner from coming, or Hutchinson from defending him.
We made sure to be at the Roundtable to oppose SOS, racism and the system that spawns them. Racist Turner came in before the discussion began and told someone he was "proud to be a racist." Some of us exposed him and chased him out of the room yelling that racists had no place in L.A. or anywhere. The leaders of this action were told not to come back into the building while liberal Hutchinson provided a bodyguard for the racist. Almost everyone who came in got a copy of our leaflet blaming capitalism, not immigrants, for low wages and unemployment.
Some of us saw Turner outside and chased him and his bodyguard, who ran into the parking lot and called the cops, who temporarily detained us.
Some of our friends who stayed inside denounced anti-immigrant racism. One teacher, who had been praised by a former student earlier in the meeting, pointed out that racist Turner was trying to create racism and hatred between black and Latin youth and workers. The audience applauded, as they had earlier when he explained that capitalism is to blame for gangs and sending youth to Iraq to kill and die for US imperialism. Earl Ofari Hutchinson interrupted him, saying the meeting was not a barnyard. Then how come this racist pig was allowed in?
As people left the meeting, they wanted to know about Turner and SOS. Some agreed with our condemnation of anti-immigrant racism saying, "The last thing we need is a race war between blacks and Latinos." We discussed with many people how allowing SOS to enter the meeting was like allowing the KKK to come. The liberal Hutchinson tried to legitimize the racist, and a few days later he sponsored another Rroundtable discussion featuring Police Chief Bratton to talk about community policing!
Our job is to strengthen our revolutionary communist movement to fight all forms of racism--whether the gutter type coming from Turner or more dangerous sugar-coated of liberals like Hutchinson and Bratton. Then, as our movement grows we can give all these racists their just desserts.
Stern's Job: Use Unions to Win Immigrants and All Workers to Fight in Bosses' Wars
Last month six big unions broke away from the corrupt AFL-CIO. SEIU chief Andrew Stern led the break-up, promising to reinvigorate the labor movement by signing up millions of new members. Unions, vowed Stern, would again battle greedy corporations and no longer act as mere fund-raisers for Democratic politicians.
Despite the militant-sounding rhetoric, the split is a deadly development for the working class, marking a significant step in U.S. rulers' efforts to organize society for a period of ever-expanding wars. Like the Sweeney crew he wants to replace, Stern serves the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalism. Of course, Sweeney & Co. are fully committed to the same vile mission, but currently the bosses need something more than the labor peace Sweeneyites have provided. Merely preventing workers from launching strikes or other militant struggles, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient to meet the imperialists' needs. They now require a union leadership capable of mobilizing workers to march enthusiastically and in large numbers to carry out imperialism's bloody agenda.
Stern hardly represents a "lesser" evil. His push to organize new union members aims at winning millions of workers, heavily black, Latin and immigrant, to patriotism and support for the rulers' military adventures.
STERN JOINS THE BOSSES' CAMP
Stern has sold himself completely to the imperialist camp. He sits as a trustee of the Aspen Institute think-tank, among planners and beneficiaries of every U.S. aggression during the past five decades. Aspen trustees include Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, who have the blood of 3 million Vietnamese workers and 58,000 GI's on their hands; Madeleine Albright, who advised Clinton to bomb Serbia back to the Stone Age in 1999; Warren Rudman, whose Hart-Rudman reports foresaw and welcomed the Sept. 11th attacks and provided a blueprint for transforming the U.S. into a militarized police state; and Saudi Prince Bandar, heir to the vast oil treasure that forms the economic cornerstone of the U.S. empire.
Stern doesn't just rub elbows with the warmakers; he helps shape and carry out their policies. Stern belongs to Aspen's Domestic Strategy Group (DSG), funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, which focuses on winning workers to fight for U.S. world dominance in the 21st Century. The DSG's 2002 report stated that future competiveness requires a larger workforce. Because of the declining U.S. birth rate, however, "any growth will simply have to come from older workers and immigrants." Social Security cuts and disappearing pensions are already forcing many workers to toil well beyond their rightful retirement dates. But the DSG worries that an influx of "unassimilated" immigrants will make a large sector of the population politically uncontrollable and thereby undermine military recruitment. "We will end up with folks who aren't quite as connected to this society and don't have as much incentive to invest in a nation as earlier immigrants did," warned DSG director David Ellwood of Harvard's Kennedy School. The DSG urged "dramatic efforts...to hasten assimilation."
USING UNIONS TO DRAFT IMMIGRANTS
Stern thinks his "Change to Win" breakaway coalition can assist the rulers here by boosting immigrant enrollment. Writing for another ruling-class think tank, the Brookings Institution, he noted, "Unions are often immigrants' entry point into civic life." Stern wants unions to become gateways to the barracks, as well. He proposed drafting undocumented workers, with unions functioning as draft boards. "Why not make a two-year commitment to national service one pathway to legalization? Union leaders and employers together could identify eligible current and future workers," said Stern in "United We Serve," a 2003 Brookings survey of ways to enlist the manpower the rulers will need in coming conflicts.
"United We Serve" is an important document. It provided much of the ideological basis for the national service plank in the Kerry campaign, which Stern eventually endorsed. Clinton and former Reagan defense secretary Weinberger contributed essays to "United We Serve." Throughout the book's various viewpoints runs a common theme: perverting people's desires to do good and belong to something larger than themselves. One contributor, Harvard professor Robert Putnam espoused the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing approach: "Wartime mobilization could also spark progress toward social justice and racial integration." Kerry lost, but the rulers' need for loyal soldiers and civilians has only intensified. The general in charge of Army recruitment just got the boot for his poor results.
Liberals like Stern wave the patriotic battle flag that others have dropped. In addition to offering unions as press gangs, Stern has jumped on board the rulers' domestic police-state agenda. One year after 9/11, Stern took part in yet another capitalist confab, the National Symposium on Competitiveness and Security, sponsored by Mellon Bank, Lockheed and the U.S. nuclear weapons labs, among others. Stern's panel concluded that workers "on the factory floor and in the office lobby" should serve as stool pigeons for the police and feds. In 2004, with Stern's blessing, a 60,000-member SEIU local in New York began a program in which the NYPD trains janitors and doormen to spot and report "suspicious activity."
(Next: How Stern would help the U.S. ruling class mobilize for world war)
`Hustle and Flow' Hails Misogynist Hip Hop Culture
An earnest speech where a pimp schools his "ho" on "the game" -- another capitalist way, comparing how men and dogs are different because men think about their futures whereas dogs, and implicitly women, don't -- opens this hateful neo-blaxploitation throwback. Hollywood is revamping this genre of celebrating the criminal life of "hustlers" (drug dealers and pimps) to manipulate mostly working-class youth into thinking "hustling" is the way to triumph within the capitalist system.
It's produced by John Singleton whose "Boys in the 'Hood" at least portrayed black working-class anger towards police and poverty, while pushing black nationalism and the black criminal. The film portrays Terrence Howard (DJay), as a pimp in the midst of a mid-life crisis, who rekindles his love of southern "Crunk" music and attempts to make it as a successful rapper. The movie is a sickening journey into sexism, racism and a glorification of the "hustler" lifestyle, the essence of modern hip-hop "culture." Howard was obviously picked for his resemblance to Ice-T, the real life "Hustler" who made his "dream" of a being a rapper come alive.
The vile songs, like "Whoop That Trick" and "It's Hard For A Pimp...," as well as their catchy hooks and bass beats, propel the message of "By any means necessary." Malcolm X's anti-passive statement is interpreted to mean that if you do whatever it takes to make money -- dealing drugs and abusing and exploiting women -- then you'll triumph over the odds, rise up and eventually "make it." What's not told is that under capitalism the odds are entirely against the working class as a whole. With this movie, the ruling class is trying to galvanize working-class youth into sexist and exploitative behavior by using the appearance of hip-hop culture and the rap game to glorify their selfish system.
Repeatedly the pimp's group of women try to rebel but he intimidates them into submitting to his control with threats of violence and abandonment from the house they live in. When one of them stands up for herself (a brash black "loudmouth" stripper), she's kicked out, along with her infant son, since she dared "disrespect her man." In these scenes, this repellant sexist is reinforcing his power and domination by putting his "bitches" in line.
This pimp doesn't care one bit about these women except for the money they give him. He's constantly pushing his individual needs above everyone else's, particularly in one degrading scene where the young girl has to fellate an old storeowner in order to acquire an expensive microphone. Outside he yells at her about how much he hates forcing her to do those things and he doesn't really want to live like this, but who is really being exploited? In several scenes she challenges the notion of selling herself and is reassured it's "all necessary" for them to get by. She's told she must trust her boss who knows what's best for her since "she doesn't have a plan." He at one point dubs her his primary investor, duping her into believing that he actual looks out for her.
The pimp is portrayed as a good man underneath, who had found his love of music in order to survive the streets of Memphis (coincidentally picked because it's the birthplace of Elvis and thus great music). The pimp, and hip-hop as a whole, is later musically validated by his white producer -- of whom he was initially suspicious due to his "race" -- who says that there's a tradition of rap coming from the South with blues music as the original "black music."
This movie is just a glamorization of a criminal who, through his individualistic, sexist, journey for fame, rises outside of the system to get his songs heard through his white prostitute after she's left "in charge" when a fellow southern rapper drops the pimp's demo in a urine-filled john. Meanwhile, in jail he meets two black cops who say they're also aspiring rappers, insinuating that we're all together as a people in the struggle to rise up and get heard.
The working class doesn't need to play into the bosses' hands through pimping, drug dealing and celebrating it through music, as this movie tries to demonstrate. Rather than accept this message of exploiting each other to get ahead "by any means necessary," we need to revolt against the capitalist system that uses these tools to advance the bosses' agenda. "Hustle and Flow" is not a revolutionary movie, regardless of how it's being lauded. The pimp may be using everyone around him to get money and riches, but really it's the ruling class who's using this movie and its contemptible theme to manipulate the working class. Our class needs to destroy the capitalist system and its ideals of fame and money, because in reality this was just a sick, hip-hop fairy tale.
Harry Potter: Nothing Magic About Exploitation and Slavery
Science fiction and fantasy writers nowadays don't use their imaginations very much. They use their talent inventing plots, gadgets and magic. But when it comes to imagining better human relationships, forget it. Most writers simply project capitalist social and class relationships into their imaginary worlds.
J.K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter series is a good example. Every time the hero, Harry Potter, leaves home for boarding school, he enters a parallel, magical world. But the realm of magic is just a souped-up version of Tony Blair's Britain. This would be great if Rowling used her books to criticize capitalism. Instead she does the exact opposite.
Rowling's strength is her anti-racism. Harry Potter and his friends are continually confronting evil wizards who believe in nazi theories about "racial purity." These evil magicians despise Harry's "mud-blood" and half-giant friends.
But this anti-racism has to be set against the social and class relationships that Rowling portrays. The latest volume, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, praises rags-to-riches entrepreneurship. The twin elder brothers of Harry Potter's best friend, Ron, go into business manufacturing and selling magical jokes and novelties.
Rowling describes in glowing terms the advantages of being a successful capitalist: power (they make their workers wear uniforms), respect (employees address them by their last name, whereas they call employees by their first names), and the ability to give their mother expensive Christmas gifts. Rowling even has a scene where the twins make Ron pay for things in their shop. Profits are thicker than blood -- and Rowling approves of this!
While praising capitalism, Rowling criticizes government bureaucracy from the right -- an echo of neo-con attacks on the laws that limit the exploitation of labor. In a word, Rowling loves Thatcherism, which Tony Blair and "New Labour" continue to apply in the U.K. today.
Rowling develops capitalist fantasies. She imagines house elves, a race of slave laborers whose only joy in life is working for their masters.
In the fourth book, Harry's friend Hermione set up a liberal do-good Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.) because "we are all colluding in the oppression of a hundred slaves!" Critics immediately praised Rowling for putting ideas of class struggle in a children's book, and wondered: "where will she go from here?" The answer is: nowhere.
She dropped S.P.E.W. like a hot potato. In the latest book, a teacher casually admits using a house elf to test his wine for poison. Harry's only reaction is to imagine "the expression on Hermione's face if she ever heard about this abuse of house elves, and [he] decided never to mention it to her."
Even worse, Harry himself is a slave- master, having inherited the house elf, Kreacher, from his godfather. Harry barks orders at his slave and makes him follow an evil student night and day for a week without sleeping. Admittedly, Kreacher is cast as an evil being, who colluded in the murder of his former master. Rowling contrasts him with Dobby, the good house elf that Harry liberated. Dobby scrupulously obeys all Harry's orders out of pure love. To understand the way J.K. Rowling has defined good and bad behavior, all you have to do is give Dobby and Kreacher appropriate new names: Uncle Tom and Nat Turner.
Rowling's latest book is rotten in its portrayal of class relationships. It is just as bad in its depiction of some social relationships. From the first book, Rowling has had a flippant attitude towards alcohol. In this book, the divination teacher becomes an alcoholic, but Rowling does not imagine any teacher or student trying to help her.
The Harry Potter books will continue to be wildly popular with young people because of Rowling's talent as a fantasy writer. We need to talk with them about the social and class relationships she portrays, and show how relationships will be transformed under a society without slavery or explotation: communism.
UNDER COMMUNISM
How would disasters from hurricanes like Katrina be avoided?
The short answer: Prevention. Under communism the working class would have the power to slow the global warming that causes more violent hurricanes. Global warming may be partly natural, but it is greatly worsened by industrial and transportation pollution that exists under capitalism, because corporate profits, rather than human needs, rule.
Second, since earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes happen, a working-class state could avoid building new cities in danger spots, and could relocate existing ones, like San Francisco and New Orleans. For example, during World War II the Soviet Union mobilized the working class to move entire cities and industrial plants east of the Ural Mountains, beyond the reach of the Nazi armies. And they succeeded, despite the devastating winters and numerous acts of sabotage by Nazi sympathizers.
New Orleans (NO) borders and lies below the level of Lake Pontchartrain. The PLP would mobilize and organize the NO working class to build a new city away from the danger spot and move the households. But before evacuating NO, the Party would have led the workers in shoring up levees, in case a hurricane struck during the building and relocation process.
Since hurricanes give several days' warning, if there was no time to shore up the levees the city would be evacuated immediately. In contrast to the rich black NO mayor's departure and call to evacuate -- meaningless for people without vehicles or money for food and lodging, particularly the poor black population -- the Party would provide adequate transportation to carry everyone out of the city safely and immediately. As during World War II, attempts at capitalist sabotage would be dealt with mercilessly.
The population outside NO would be called upon to take people into their homes on a short-term basis. Racism would be fought vigorously, not only to eliminate any hesitation in this effort but to unify the working class around this goal. Meanwhile longer-term housing would be constructed by as many workers as the job required, so that people could be housed during clean-up of the city, pending the much longer-term effort of permanent relocation.
Food, water, clothing, sanitary supplies and medicines would continually be imported in plentiful supply and distributed to the neediest first. Peoples' former occupations would necessarily be interrupted, but clean-up and relocation would require so much effort that no one would be idle.
No income would be lost, because there would be no income under communism. Guided by the communist principle -- from each according to commitment, to each according to need -- all necessities of life would be provided free, and money would be abolished. Unemployment would be history.
The Party and the workers would struggle with anyone refusing to participate, and the Party would guarantee prevention of interference, including possible imprisonment, and, in cases of deliberate sabotage, execution.
In these processes the Party would first mobilize workers by calling on them to participate and then would organize participants to carry out the necessary coordination of effort and division of labor. In contrast to the armed cops and Guardsmen currently in NO, whose first job is to protect the property of the rich, the Party and each of its hundreds of thousands of members would have a base among her/his fellow workers and neighbors and be known and trusted. If the Party had a large enough presence already in NO and the U.S., this kind of leadership could have organized rescue efforts from the flood and the gathering and distribution of food, water, diapers, medical care, as well as portable toilets and bathing facilities.
The key elements of communist leadership in times of disaster are mobilization, organization, coordination of the vast majority of workers and the disciplining of internal and external enemies of the working class. Over the long term, including the present, the key element of Party leadership has been and continues to be the struggle to arm the international working class with an understanding of communist theory and practice that will enable the workers to rule the world. The distribution of CHALLENGE plays a crucial role in that effort.
The task at hand for the working class of all nations is to organize, with Party leadership, its own hurricane to drown the capitalist ruling classes. Under the distant future of communism, with capitalists out of the picture, the working class will survive future hurricanes, tsunamis and volcanoes with minimal disruption in our lives.
In future issues we will discuss the way that workers in revolutionary China were mobilized by the Communist Party to eliminate public health scourges, like syphilis and parasitic infections.
Israeli Rulers Help Protect U.S. Oil Empire
Recently, much has been made of the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza strip. Gaza is a small area populated by 1.3 million Arabs and until their forced eviction, 9,000 racist Israeli settlers. The job of protecting them has become too costly, so U.S. and Israeli leaders agreed, as with Lebanon a few years ago, to a partial retreat. Israeli troops will continue to control Gaza's borders and the flow of people and goods into and out of the area. The Zionists will keep control of most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an ongoing base for the protection of U.S. oil interests in the Middle East.
Since the formation of Israel, U.S. imperialism has spent billions of dollars and enormous amounts of arms to establish Israel as their top cop in the Middle East. Israel's job is to use armed force and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to protect U.S. imperialism's oil interests. Mass opposition to the war in Iraq and other challenges to U.S. imperialism has made maintaining U.S. control of the Middle East more difficult militarily and politically.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, certain sections of the Jewish ruling class developed the ideology known as Zionism, -- a nationalist ideology as reactionary as the German, Italian, Japanese and other nationalist ideologies that destroyed 100 million workers during World War 2.
From 1900 to 1940 upper class Jewish Zionists tried to sell the lie that the "true" Jewish homeland was the areas described in the Old Testament as the "promised land," with little success. They used the racist slogan, "A land without people for a people without land," even though Arabs lived there for over 600 years. To the Zionists, Arabs weren't people. This "promised land," known as Palestine, was seized as a "protectorate" by Great Britain a result of World War I, in 1918.
Nazism was built around the racist hatred of Jews and extreme German nationalism. During World War 2, the Nazis killed over six million European Jews, and tens of millions of others. Many of the surviving Jews felt that they had no future in Europe. The racist rulers of the U.S., England and France, who either blocked entry or collaborated in the extermination of the Jews, adopted the Zionist plan of establishing a "Jewish state" in Palestine.
In 1947 the U.N voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas. The Jewish area became Israel. In a series of wars from 1948 to 1982, Israel seized control of the Arab areas of Palestine (the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem), forced hundreds of thousands of Arabs into exile in neighboring Arab states, and replaced them with over 400,000 Jewish settlers. Over the years, Arabs fought back against the Israeli occupation and, in the process a Palestinian nationalist ideology developed.
Nationalism is the most dangerous ideological enemy of workers everywhere. It is the tool that all ruling classes use to set workers against each other and advance the bosses' interests. All nationalism is reactionary and against the interests of workers. The Zionists and Arab nationalists and Muslim clerics, backed by the U.S. ruling class and its imperialist rivals, are all oppressors of Palestinian and Jewish workers. The Israeli occupation has killed tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, destroyed tens of thousands of homes, and stolen most of the water in the occupied territories. A mass communist movement of Arab and Jewish workers must emerge to end the oppression, all nationalism, oil wars and exploitation through worldwide communist revolution.
Sexism Benefits Only The Capitalists
Last issue discussed the effect of inter-imperialist rivalry on the industrial working-class, and how China's bosses' super-exploitation of its workers sets the pace for other imperialists, like the U.S., to intensify its own exploitation and compete through war. Since capitalism promotes sexism to profit from, and divide, the working class, it's important to examine the exploitation of working-class women in industry.
From the textile mills of the 18th century to today's factories, capitalism burdens female workers by encouraging sexist attitudes of male supremacy. This helps the bosses justify viewing women as inferior to men, and as sex objects, restricting them to low-paying positions, and paying them less for their labor power -- thereby keeping wages lower for all workers. The result: higher profits for the bosses and further decline in the working class's quality of life. (See "The Fight for Communism Is the Fight Against Sexism," in The Communist Magazine, Summer, 2003)
In my factory, at least 50% of the workers are female but only 5-10% are employed above the entry level. Many have been in the same "unskilled," low-paying positions for 10-20 years. Yet a month after being hired, I (a male worker) was already training for a "better" position. While these women are often among the best at what they do, and know the work better then the bosses' lackeys who are there to "supervise" us, their ability is continually overlooked because of gender.
Sexism permeates the factory. Women are treated as second-class workers -- given the most repetitive, menial jobs -- and are treated as sex objects by their supervisors. Even the most rebellious feel helpless to stop this abuse. They say, "I've told him already to please not touch me, but he keeps on rubbing up against me as if I never said anything." "I know that if I let him, he'll let me get what I want, but I don't come here to be fondled. I come here to work."
This persistent abuse convinces many female workers they will never advance beyond their current positions. I asked one co-worker with ten years experience, why she didn't apply for a higher-paying job. She replied, "I'm beginning to get old anyway; at least at this position they know I do my job well and they sort of leave me alone." Later, I asked her if it wouldn't make things easier for her financially if she got a higher-paying position. "Of course," she said, "but I won't kiss their asses or flirt with them, and that makes it difficult."
Because capitalism pervades every aspect of life, this is only a part of these women's struggle against sexism. Many arrive at work already exhausted from hours of domestic labor (cooking, cleaning, child rearing, etc.), often with little or no help from their spouses. This unpaid work is simply seen as "part of a woman's responsibilities," another way capitalism profits from sexism. Capitalists must pay enough wages for the working class to subsist and reproduce; otherwise they'd soon have no workers. So without unpaid domestic labor forced onto women, the capitalist would be forced to provide higher wages to meet the needs of every male worker. In other words, in order to survive and return to work, every male worker would have to be able to pay someone to do the cooking, cleaning and child rearing. So, for the working class to continue to exist, the capitalist must be forced to pay higher wages, lowering his profits. Sexism allows the capitalists to reap more profits through the unpaid domestic labor of working-class wives, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers.
Still further, this strategy divides men from women. The men run big expensive machines while women are relegated to secondary operations, encouraging a sense of superiority in men that keeps some of them from seeing women as political beings with equal abilities and the same stake in fighting and ultimately destroying capitalism. Men who embrace this false idea of someone "below" them in society prevents them from improving their objective situation. Men don't benefit from sexism. The special exploitation of women depresses the entire wage scale.
Ultimately, sexism keeps men and women from seeing the revolutionary potential of women workers, enabling the bosses to stop us from uniting in struggle against them.
Still, these boss-promoted divisions don't outweigh the common experience of exploitation, of "life" for workers under wage-slavery. This objective experience creates an army of women and men whose common interests are to destroy capitalism. Our goal must be to win them to fight for communism: a world free of sexism and capitalist exploitation.
(Next: temporary and immigrant factory workers.)
LETTERS
Teachers Angry at Racist Neglect of Katrina Victims
Last week as the horrors of capitalism in the aftermath of Katrina became more and more devastating, I took a PLP leaflet around to all the tables in the teachers' cafeteria at the school where I work. Everyone I talked to was as furious as I was that the working class people, mostly poor and black, had not been evacuated, that there was no help for the victims, that four days later there was still no food and water in the Superdome or at the Convention Center; and that resources needed to shore up the levy and the National Guardsmen needed to rescue the survivors had been directed to Iraq. I told everyone that this shows the nature of capitalism, and that this was why I am a communist. Everyone had their own comments about why they were as angry as I was, and were grateful for the leaflet. A new teacher took several leaflets to pass out to other teachers.
As the liberal media are now working overtime to channel the anger of the working class against the Republicans, it's more important than ever to point out that it's not just Bush, its capitalism! The mayor of New Orleans, who is furious with Bush, could have insisted that city buses be used to take the poor out of the city before Katrina hit, but did not.
Red Teacher
Hacks Help Brewery in Colombia Slash Jobs
Luis A Pedrazo, head of the union of Bavaria Brewery workers in Colombia said that the sale of Bavaria to the SAB-Miller corporation is worrisome because it threatens to lose more workers there because of the "lack of a strong union" to defend them.
But, as CHALLENGE has pointed out in the past, the union was busted by Bavaria because of the sellout policies of Pedrazá and other hacks. Bavaria got rid of 5,600 workers before it was sold to SAB-Miller, while the union was led by Pedrazá, who for several decades betrayed the interests of the workers he supposedly represented. It is obvious that Pedrazá and the rest of the hacks made a deal with Bavaria to get rid of most of the workers, to make it easier to sell.
Today, Pedrazá wants to do the same sellout by proposing to form a union representing the 1,600 workers still in Bavaria. Sixty percent of these workers have no job security and are hired with contracts of 3-6 months.
These hacks are as bad as the bosses, benefiting from the destruction of the livelihood of thousands of workers, destroying the lives of workers .
Workers in Bavaria don't need any more sellouts, they need a revolutionary communist leadership to fight the old and new Bavaria bosses and all the hacks.
A Red Worker
Our Vision of the Future
I agree with Old-Time Red's position that communist revolution historically comes in the midst of the devastation of world war and I think it is necessary to remind people of that fact. However the series "Life Under Communism" is about what we are fighting for in the future, how our system will affect workers' lives. Challenge is very good at the important task of criticizing capitalism and reporting on worker struggles, but we also need to try and lay out what we are fighting for. A vision of what we want to replace the misery of capitalism with, and confidence in the PLP to lead a revolution, is what inspires people to fight for communism.
Another old red
TV's Law and Order Helps Build Fascism
The mayor of San Francisco recently admired the cameras that Chicago is using to spy on the streets of the city. He wants to use them, amidst reports that street crime has dropped in the areas under surveillance. Cameras are everywhere now. They show us traffic jams around the city. They are in stores and banks. They didn't stop the transit bombings in London, but they may have made it possible to identify the bombers.
Increased surveillance of the working class is one of the signs of developing fascism. They don't have cameras in the executive offices of companies and governments who make decisions that ruin hundreds and thousands of people's lives (cuts in health care benefits and pensions, job cuts, and especially wars).
The bosses use several methods to win workers to accept and support this surveillance. One is to publicize the drop in crime in neighborhoods that are under surveillance. However, this may be suspect. When the police cleared SF's Golden Gate Park of homeless encampments, many people applauded. But then people living near the park complained about all the homeless people who were camping out in front of their homes. The city hadn't solved the homeless problem, they just moved it to another part of town. That may be the effect of all these cameras.
Another way to get us to sympathize with the police is through one of the most popular TV shows, Law and Order. The show portrays police detectives as nice people who are interested in justice, so we root for them to get the "bad" guys. The accused are always guilty (except when the plot twist puts someone else in the bad guy role). The show promotes the use of surveillance cameras for catching bad guys, lying to them and roughing them up once in awhile. It tells us that the forensics people are accurate and impartial. We are shown that every accused person has a good lawyer to defend them, but we get annoyed when these same lawyers use "technicalities" to obstruct justice. We get angry with the internal police investigators for going after the good cops that we root for.
The reality is that the police target minorities and the poor, cover up their own illegal activities, frame innocent people, violate people's rights, push drugs, plant evidence and beat people up and kill them. Even if they don't do those activities, they protect those that do by not reporting them to their superiors. The real role of the police is to protect the capitalists' property and their right to exploit workers and to attack workers who fight back against cutbacks, racism, and unemployment. Just look at how the New Orleans cops were unleashed against the victims of Katrina. Notice that the bosses can call the cops on you for passing out a leaflet on the job (It happened to me!), but just try calling the cops on them.
West Coast Comrade
No Cops Under Communism
On the July 15-16 weekend, 22 comrades from the NY-NJ area held a cadre school on fascism. After spending the first night collectively setting up camp, we met in workshops the next day.
The first one discussed the nature of fascism and its current prevalence worldwide. In the second workshop, "How to Fight Fascism," the youth shared their experiences with fascism in their schools and the methods for fighting it. An open mic concluded that day, with comrades reciting poems, songs and monologues.
Inclement weather cut the weekend short, but still much was accomplished. The youth developed a greater understanding of fascism, and learned a lot from older comrades about their struggles with fascism in school. I was inspired by the more experienced comrades' recounting of their own encounters with Nazis. I realized the importance of militant struggle. Fascism means we've got to fight back!
red youth
Summer Project Helps Build Worker/Student Alliance
The PLP Summer Project in Washington, D.C. in early June provided valuable insights on how to conduct a successful worker/student alliance (WSA), insights that have contributed to our work in the faculty/staff union of a major public university. Comrades and friends from across the U.S. participated, intending to strengthen the Party's work in the D.C. Metro transit union, where a long-time comrade was elected president. These workers, a majority of whom are black, are in a fierce contract struggle against racist wage differentials and benefit cuts. We wanted to help draw Metro workers closer to PLP, develop leadership among new comrades, and win some comrades to join Metro for the long-term.
Many participants were recently-recruited high school and college students. Given that students and workers historically have had common interests in fighting capitalism, we emphasized the need for a WSA. These wonderful communist students leafleted and sold CHALLENGES to bus drivers and passengers, helping them to organize a contract rally. They stressed that this was one struggle in a broader war between bosses and workers, one in which racism is often used to divide and super-exploit workers. They linked the fascist attack on workers to the bosses' drive for imperialist wars. They injected disciplined militancy into the contract rally. And, through their words and deeds, they demonstrated the power of a WSA.
During the two-week Project, students, public university faculty and D.C. Metro comrades discussed plans for broadening the WSA, including having a contingent of D.C. Metro workers, students and university faculty and staff at the September 24 D.C. anti-war rally. They also proposed an anti-imperialist forum, jointly sponsored by academic and industrial unions, partly modeled after a recent political education forum organized by the Metro union.
These experiences and ideas contributed to our organizing at our university. There the link between students and workers is obvious: our working conditions are their learning conditions. However, this doesn't guarantee students will support struggling faculty and staff; indeed, administrators often claim that union gains will be paid for by increased student tuition. Many faculty and staff are fearful of any action that might "harm" the students. Therefore, active student support for faculty-staff demands has a tremendous effect on the willingness of passive union members to fight. In strikes, organized students can expand the efforts of union members - both side-by-side, or by protesting on campus if strikers must stay outside.
Such a united student/union effort presents a terrific opportunity to struggle politically with students and union members, helping to forge a strong WSA through which both groups can win significant short-term reforms and wage more unified long-term political fights. By participating in such a WSA, students won to the Party who then become workers will participate in other struggles - like D.C. Metro - and build PLP there. Thus, the WSA turns both student work and union work into a school for communism.
Northeast Comrade
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Barbara says, Let them eat cake
...Barbara Bush yesterday walked past rows of poor and ailing refugees at the Houston Astrodome, then said, "So many of the people here you know were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.
"What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," gushed the white-haired mother of President Bush.
"Almost everyone I've talked to says, `We're going to move to Houston!'
The former First Lady's comments were part of a broadcast on National Public Radio.
Later, on CNN `Larry King Live,' Barbara Bush appeared upbeat about the stricken evacuees' prospects while sitting alongside her hubby, former President George H.W. Bush.
It's been only a week since Katrina cut a deadly swath through the South, she said, "And look what's happened; Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated and are in comfortable shelters." (NY Daily News, 9/6)
Profit system puts safety last
Crash investigators will study the diary of the co-pilot, Pambos Charalambous, who secretly chronicled his concerns about technical problems with the doomed Helios Airways Boeing 737, which plunged into a mountain last month, killing all 121 people on board.
His son Yiannis, a trainee pilot, had said before the flight that the discovery of the diary...contained enough revelations to close Helios down . "...he logged every one of that plane's and [the] airline's problems," he said... "He once told me that if any of it ever got out the company would close...Initial findings have revealed that the airliner cabin failed to pressurize on take-off, which probably rendered virtually everyone on board unconscious. (GW, 9/8)
Israel: 8,000 move, 400,000 will stay
Even before Ariel Sharon finished [forcing] 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank last week, the debate in Israel had turned to what happens next.
"Sharon will do nothing....Anyone who thinks that it is Gaza first is mistaken. It is Gaza only...
...Disengagement is a cover for Mr. Sharon to entrench more than 400,000 Jewish settlers living in the rest of the occupied territories while unilaterally imposing the borders of a rump Palestinian homeland. (GW, 9/8)
Workers' stress kills health, happiness
Richard Wilkinson is professor for social epidemiology, an expert in public health...surveying great sweeps of health statistics through sociological eyes. He has assembled a mountain of irrefutable evidence from all over the world showing the damage done by extreme inequality. However rich a country is, it will still be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and sad if the gap between social classes grows too wide. Poorer countries with fairer wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal nations.
...The people of Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh. When you take out the violence and drugs, two-thirds of the reason is heart disease. Is that bad diet? No, says Wilkinson, it is mainly stress, the stress of living at the bottom...
Low status and lack of control over one's life is a destroyer of human health and happiness. (GW, 8/25)
Why other countries might want nukes
In May 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his aides discussed the feasibility of using nuclear weapons in the event China attacked India for a second time, according to newly declassified audio recordings that were released Thursday by the John F. Kennedy President Library and Museum in Boston.
Analysts pointed out that the so-called nuclear option, even if it was considered in the spring of 1963, would have been dismissed the following year, when China first tested its own nuclear weapon. (NYT, 8/26)
Imperialist US will keep Air Force in Iraq
Gen. John P. Jumper, who is to step down this week as the Air Force chief of staff, predicted that American fighter and reconnaissance aircraft would continue flying missions over Iraq for a long time.
"We will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more or less indefinitely," he said. "We have interests in that part of the world... (NYT, 8/30)
G.I. Bill pushed black vets into bad jobs
Katznelson reserves his hardest criticism for the unfair application of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill....
...Thousands of black veterans in the South -- and the North as well were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. They were also excluded from job training programs for careers in promising new fields like radio and electrical work, commercial photography and mechanics. Instead, most African-Americans were channeled toward traditional, low-paying "black jobs" and small black colleges, which were pitifully underfinanced... (NYT, 8/28)
US nuked Japan to threaten USSR
They incinerated Japanese cities in 1945 because they could and they wanted to, not because they had to.
...Did the Americans simultaneously believe the Japanese were a nation of fanatics who would fight to the last man, woman and child rather than surrender, and would suddenly see reason if two medium-sized cities were wiped off the map?
Of course not. What happened was that the Americans wanted a chance to test their new weapons on live targets, not merely to shock and awe the already defeated Japanese into unconditional surrender, but to show the Soviets who was in charge. (GW, 8/25)
Modern day fascists
"I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting `Christian' fascists"
Harken to Dr. Adams' warning: "Fascists would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts...but would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance." (PYTHIAN Press)
(To our readers: this is a 3-weeks ssue of Challenge. We will return to our biweekly schedule with the issue going to press on Sept. 8)
Threats to U.S. Oil Control Mean Bloodier Wars
Back Northwest Airlines Workers
Why U.S. Rulers Will Spill Blood of Millions of Workers to Try to Save Their Empire
U.S. Atomic Genocide Launched the Cold War
- a href="#Dropping The Bomb Was ‘Militarily Unnecessary’">Dr"pping The Bomb Was ‘Militarily Unnecessary’
LA Summer Project Reaches Out to Industrial Workers
a href="#Workers in Puerto Rico Refuse to Pay for Bosses’ Crisis">"orkers in Puerto Rico Refuse to Pay for Bosses’ Crisis
a href="#Captalism Killed Cindy Sheehan’s Son; Bush Just the Trigger Man">"apitalism Killed Cindy Sheehan’s Son; Bush Just the Trigger Man
Screwing Subway Safety: Millions for Racist Profiling, Layoffs for Conductors
a href="#Inter-Imperialist Rivalry Bleeds Factory Workers — Part I">"nter-Imperialist Rivalry Bleeds Factory Workers — Part I
LAPD Admits Killing; Mayor Promises More Cops
Racist Bosses Force Immigrant Workers to Live in Tents
Chrysler Boss Deserts Union Roots; Profits Thicker Than Blood
a href="#UNDER COMMUNISM…How Will We Eliminate Racism?">"NDER COMMUNISM…How Will We Eliminate Racism?
Movie Review: Steal A Nation, Build A Military Base
a href="#Brooklyn Summer Project Views ‘Crash’">Br"oklyn Summer Project Views ‘Crash’
LETTERS
a href="#‘Borders’ Even on Nashville Buses">‘B"rders’ Even on Nashville Buses
a href="#Fox News’ Big Lies Apes Goebbels">"ox News’ Big Lies Apes Goebbels
a href="#‘Bubble’ Talk Ignores Lack of Housing">‘B"bble’ Talk Ignores Lack of Housing
a href="#NYPD Blue Message: Don’t Fight Back">"YPD Blue Message: Don’t Fight Back
a href="#Cautions on ‘Under Communism’ Column">Ca"tions on ‘Under Communism’ Column
- Case history of famine: It’s the profit system
- Wal-Mart creates poor, then sells to them
- US mining giant poisons Indonesians
- Darwin’s great insight not ‘merely a theory’
- Sharon, Bush make imperialist deal on Gaza
- Capitalist Russia: ‘The system is corrupt’
- Medicaid: As usual, pro-worker law is gutted
Threats to U.S. Oil Control Mean Bloodier Wars
Sharpening threats to U.S. rulers’ control of the world’s oil, from their foes and friends alike, bring the possibility of yet another oil war still closer. Having the upper hand on capitalism’s lifeblood allows U.S. rulers to dominate their rivals. But Iran’s increasing hostility and, more significantly, Saudi Arabia’s precarious internal politics could loosen the U.S. grip on the energy lever. The carnage in Iraq shows that U.S. rulers will resort to war without hesitation to hold on to the Middle East’s irreplaceable oil treasure.
Preventing any other state from achieving military supremacy over the Persian Gulf has been a cardinal point in U.S. strategy for decades. In 1979, liberal Democrat Carter declared that the U.S. would consider any challenge to its access to the region’s oil an act of war. In the 1980’s, Reagan backed Iraq’s fascist Saddam Hussein against Iran’s emboldened holy rollers. When Iraq, in turn, got too big for its britches, the U.S. invaded twice.
Today, with U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Teheran’s ayatollahs are again poking their thumb in Washington’s eye. Iran is threatening to restart its nuclear weapons program, sending arms to anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq, and planning to establish an oil exchange that would trade in euros instead of dollars and weaken U.S. dominance in world energy markets. On August 13, Bush warned Iran that "all options," including military action, were "on the table." Democrats in Congress were more specific. A report they issued in July spoke of "the possibility of repeated and unwarned strikes." (Boston Globe, 8/14)
But stepped-up terrorist activity in Saudi Arabia, which sits atop one-fourth of the world’s oil reserves, is giving U.S. rulers even greater reason to worry. Saudi oil serves as the economic cornerstone of U.S. imperialism in two ways. Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco and U.S. ally Britain’s Shell and BP have access to the lion’s share of Saudi production, an arrangement giving them tremendous leverage over the countries to which they sell it. And Saudi Arabia’s role as a "swing producer" until recently put the powerful price weapon in U.S. rulers’ hands. With vast excess production capacity, Saudi royals would pump more or less crude according to Washington’s desires and thus lower or raise the price of oil worldwide. In the mid-1980s, for example, Reagan and Bush Sr. got the Saudis to pump so much oil that the resulting five-dollar price severely reduced Soviet bosses’ oil export profits and undermined their regime.
But today China’s and India’s growing demand for energy is eating into Saudi spare capacity. Still worse for U.S. rulers, their plan to turn Iraq into a second swing producer hasn’t exactly panned out. Insurgent attacks on Iraq’s oil facilities are keeping daily production under two million barrels, far below U.S. oil bosses’ goal of six million.
While the Iraq quagmire makes Saudi oil all the more indispensable for U.S. rulers, bin Laden and his terrorists are hell-bent on seizing it. Saudi Special Emergency Forces have encountered more than 800 Al Qaeda attacks in the past two years, many against oil installations. Poverty and the royal family’s obscene corruption are driving more and more Saudi youth into the terrorists’ camp. A year ago former CIA chief James Woolsey feared "attacks…coordinated by terrorists who have infiltrated Aramco could cripple the Saudi system" and "take as much as 6m-7m bpd [millions of barrels per day] of Saudi output off the market." (Economist, 5/27/04). So U.S. rulers repeatedly warn the Saudi royals to eliminate Al Qaeda or face a U.S. invasion.
In 2002 a government-backed RAND Corporation report "recommended that U.S. officials give [Saudi Arabia] an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields." (Washington Post, 8/6/02) Although U.S. liberals disavowed the threat for diplomatic reasons at the time, they repeated it last month. A New York Times editorial (7/10), invoking the Carter Doctrine, urged the Army to add 100,000 soldiers immediately and prepare for "real wars." One involves reversing "a takeover by Al Qaeda of Saudi Arabia's government and oil reserves."
The Pentagon seems to be pondering air strikes against Iran. Taking Saudi Arabia, however, would mean a land campaign. We cannot predict how, where or when U.S. rulers will open the next front in their oil war. Their ground troops are now stretched thin [see box]. But one thing is sure: as long as capitalism exists, the rulers’ cutthroat competition for profit will cost workers their lives.
Back Northwest Airlines Workers
Fight Mass Layoffs, Wage-Cuts, Scabs And Pro-Boss Hacks
As we go to press, Northwest Airlines (NWA) and its mechanic’s union (AMFA) appear on a collision course for a strike or lockout. NWA wants $176 million in annual cost cuts by firing 2,800 mechanics and taking a 26% wage cut from the remaining 1,600. In addition, Northwest is demanding a freeze on workers’ pensions and wants deep cuts in retirement pay.
A 30-day cooling off period expires on August 20. At that time, NWA can impose its demands and the union can either accept it, reject it and strike, or reject it and get locked out.
When Northwest faced a mechanics strike in 2001, Bush broke it by creating a "Presidential Emergency Board." This time the White House says it doesn’t plan to get involved because they’re confident Northwest can continue flying with scab mechanics.
The opportunists who run the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association are looking for a concession contract they can sell, which means NWA giving in a bit on the number of job cuts. They can’t sell a contract that eliminates more than half of the jobs of the people who will vote on it.
NWA claims to have more than 4,000 strike-breakers lined up to use against the mechanics and flight attendants, should the Professional Flight Attendants Association (PFAA) refuse to cross mechanics’ picket lines. Northwest also plans to contract out more work to outside maintenance companies. On August 15, Detroit workers held a mass picket at the Hyatt hotel that’s housing many of the scabs.
At another one of its major hubs, NWA is having one of its sub-contractors assign immigrant workers with less than 5 years in the U.S. to clean its terminals. These workers are in Andrew Stern’s Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the leader of the "Change-to-Win Coalition" that left the AFL-CIO in July. There’s a struggle being waged in that local to refuse to let these very vulnerable immigrant workers be used as scabs.
The national AFL-CIO organizing director called AMFA a "renegade, raiding organization that is creating havoc in the airline industry," adding, "It’s not in the house of labor." The president of Local 141 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), who represents Northwest baggage handlers, skycaps and ticket agents at Detroit Metro Airport will tell his 2,700 members to cross the mechanics’ picket lines if they’re on strike or locked out. This is in stark contrast with the solidarity shown by British Airways ground workers who wildcatted in sympathy with striking food service workers and paralyzed Heathrow airport.
The struggle of Northwest mechanics and flight attendants shows again that narrow trade unionism just doesn’t work. All the various union hacks fight each other to see who can serve the bosses’ profits better.
PLP and all our friends must be on alert for a possible significant skirmish in the class war. We can turn this into a school for communism by bringing the full weight of our revolutionary communist politics into this fight, from many vantage points. We should organize Party clubs and friends in mass organizations to take regular picket duty with the strikers, and help them to face any fascist Homeland Security threats and to smash all scabs.
We should be bold in distributing CHALLENGE and our communist leaflets and in engaging the strikers in political discussions, linking the increased attacks on workers to the slaughter in Iraq, and exposing the pro-capitalist union leaders, whose loyalty to the bosses makes them unable to take them on. We can expand our base among airline workers and consolidate and recruit more workers to PLP from the factories, hospitals, schools and communities where we do our political organizing on a daily basis. If it happens, let’s jump on this from the opening bell.
Why U.S. Rulers Will Spill Blood of Millions of Workers to Try to Save Their Empire
"The goal of establishing an American colony in the Middle East has fallen on hard times, exposing the nation to the possibility of ruin in the process. For Washington powerbrokers and policy-makers even the thought of failure in Iraq is too grim to contemplate. The withdrawal of combat troops would put the second largest supply of oil in the world in the hands of an Islamic government which would quickly grow into a major player in the region and compete openly with rival Israel. Withdrawal would also hasten the expected switch in currencies from dollars to petro-euros; a change that would signal the end of America's economic dominance through control of the world's reserve currency.
"The US would be forced to face the $8 trillion debt that currently underwrites the "greenback" and deal with the economy-busting hyper-inflation that would quickly ensue. If creditor nations suddenly decided to dump their US currency and bonds and move to oil-backed assets, the US economy would go into freefall. It is impossible to calculate the magnitude of the catastrophe for the American people.
"This suggests that the Bush administration will carry on for as long as possible; trying to cobble together a strategy that will allow them to stay in Iraq controlling both the oil and the political process. But as the Iraqi resistance grows in strength and daring, and as public support continues to erode, there's little chance that the administration will be able to avoid the looming disaster.
"The American Century is now looking like it may be abbreviated to 10 or 15 years at the most…" Mike Whitney in CounterPunch, 8/15
CHALLENGE Comment
Whitney presents an emerging picture joined by many other analysts, that the problems facing the U.S. at home and abroad are so overwhelming, the Bush gang will be unable to "avoid a looming disaster." But the U.S. ruling class won't give up its world financial and military dominance without spilling the blood of millions of Middle Eastern and U.S. workers.
The Los Angeles Times (8/12) cited military experts who said the Pentagon is building the infrastructure to make possible a permanent U.S. military occupation of Iraq with bases for up to 50,000 soldiers, a force that can be used throughout the Middle East.The U.S. ruling class is united on the necessity to control the world's two largest sources of oil and gas, the Middle East and Central Asia, both to insure its own supplies and to have the upper hand against its major rivals.
The Democrats are even more adamant on this question than the Bushites. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joseph Biden are all calling for more troops in Iraq to squash the resistance.
To U.S. rulers, "giving up" in Iraq is unacceptable for their oil profits and class interests. They will move ferociously to try to maintain their control of this region, and will kill millions in pursuit of this objective. While anti-war demonstrations are good, they will not stop U.S. imperialism. History has shown that as long as there is capitalism and imperialism, there will be wars for profits. Workers and soldiers must have no illusion about peace under capitalism. Our task is to organize and prepare to turn imperialist war into a revolutionary struggle and build a society without bosses, religious holy rollers and fascist terror. That's PLP's goal.
U.S. Atomic Genocide Launched the Cold War
"In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city…, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly — people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague. Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence." Wilfred Burchett, reporting in the London Daily Express, Sept. 5, 1945)
August marks the 60th anniversary of U.S. imperialism’s act of atomic terror against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing some 250,000 civilians, and leaving 270,000 people in succeeding generations suffering genetic effects of radiation poisoning. This mass terror marked the beginning of a new era of imperialist wars waged by the U.S.: Korea, Vietnam Gulf War I, the Yugoslav air war, Afghanistan, Gulf War 2 in Iraq, and countless military interventions in between, from Dominican Republic to Angola to Nicaragua. Millions have been murdered by the U.S. bosses’ drive for world domination.
Today, the U.S. rulers continue to spread the lie that the Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-bombs were "necessary to save a million U.S. lives" which would have been lost in a land invasion of Japan; that the dropping of the bombs forced Japan’s surrender. However, the evidence is overwhelming that rather than being the last military act of World War II, the Bomb was a political act, dropped as a "warning" to the Soviet Union, the opening shot of the U.S. Cold War against the USSR.
a name="Dropping The Bomb Was ‘Militarily Unnecessary’"></">Dr"pping The Bomb Was ‘Militarily Unnecessary’
On March 9, 1945, "100,000 to 200,000 men, women and children died…when the U.S. Air Force doused Tokyo with jellied gasoline; all told, in the months before the Hiroshima, [conventional] bombs killed up to 500,000 in Japanese cities and left 13 million homeless." (US News & World Report, 7/13/95) This policy of mass terror bombings of civilians was pursued by the Nazis, the British and the Japanese fascists as well as the U.S. Only the Soviet Union did not target civilians.
By 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, its oil lifeline severed. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except "garbage can targets." On May 5, the U.S. intercepted and decoded a cable sent to Berlin by Germany’s ambassador to Japan stating: "Since the situation is…hopeless, large sections of Japan’s armed forces would [favor] an American request for capitulation even if the terms were harsh. (NY Times, 8/11/93)
Furthermore, at the May ’45 Yalta Conference, Stalin had pledged to Truman that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan no later than three months. This led Truman to write in his diary, "Fini Japs when that comes about." (Truman, "Off the Record") On August 8, millions of Red Army troops swept into Japanese-occupied Manchuria and were even preparing an invasion of homeland Japan. Truman wrote his wife that with the Soviet entrance into the war, "We’ll end the war a year sooner." ("The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman — 1910-1959"; edited by Robert Ferrell; 1983) As it turned out, by September the Red Army had routed the fascists (the subject of a future CHALLENGE article).
All the top U.S. brass were convinced that Japan was about to surrender and that using the A-Bomb was militarily unnecessary. It was General Dwight Eisenhower’s "belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives." (Eisenhower, "Mandate for Change"; 1963) Army Air Force commander General Henry Arnold wrote, "It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." ("Global Mission"; 1949) And the U.S. "Strategic Bombing Survey" concluded that, "certainly prior to December 31, 1945,…Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped." (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "Japan’s Struggle to End the War"; 1946)
The evidence is inescapable that the liberal Democratic Truman Administration’s decision to drop the Bomb was a political one. Once the Bomb was tested successfully on July 16 — with the Soviets ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8 — the U.S. rushed to employ it before the Japanese would surrender, to show to Moscow that the U.S. now had a "master card," as Truman’s War Secretary Henry Stimson referred to it: "Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have got to regain the lead …in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique." (Diary of Secy. of War Henry L. Stimson; emphasis added)
Finally, Truman’s Secy. of State James Byrnes told Truman that, "The atomic bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war." (Truman, "Year of Decisions") And when atomic scientist Leo Szilard met with Byrnes at the end of May, he recalls that, "Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war….Mr. Byrnes’s….view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe." (Leo Szilard, "A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb"; 1949)
So when it comes to mass murder, the U.S. ruling class is Number One.
Gen. Byrnes Takes Hit For Army Recruiting FailuresThe U.S. Army just fired its third highest-ranking general, Kevin Byrnes, who was in charge of recruitment and training, for having an extramarital affair. But the Army, which wantonly slaughters children and civilians and tacitly condones rape and prostitution, wasn’t upholding family values. Powers higher than the Pentagon made Byrnes a scapegoat for its inability to enlist soldiers in the numbers U.S. imperialism requires. At a time when U.S. rulers can’t even field enough troops to control Iraq or Afghanistan or face down Iran, the Army expects to miss its yearly recruiting target for the first time since 1999. So Byrnes takes the hit.
Byrnes’s policy differences with the main U.S. rulers contributed to his shortcomings and thus his downfall. Hoping to please Rumsfeld & Co.’s technocrats, Byrnes had favored high-tech weapons systems over boots on the ground.
But Byrnes’s replacement won’t be able to solve the rulers’ manpower problems, either. Their all-volunteer military has flopped. Signing bonuses and college tuition aid worked only until potential recruits began having to weigh them against the growing likelihood of getting killed or maimed. For their future conflicts, the rulers will need to win millions of young people, and society at large, to making sacrifices, including giving their lives, for U.S. imperialism.
Byrnes’s self-centered "Army of One" couldn’t fill the bill on either count, numbers or political commitment. His firing reflects the liberal bosses’ criticism of the Bush regime for failing to undertake the ideological shift, especially after 9/11 served up the opportunity on a silver platter. Although the rulers always have the option of restoring the draft, they would prefer willing warriors. Consequently, the liberals count on creating a voluntary national service scheme to fill the ranks.
(Next issue: the liberals’ various national service proposals.)
The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth:
Capitalism Has To Go!
SEATTLE-TACOMA, WA Aug. 13 — The Boeing IAM union will host a final rally here Sunday, August 21, before its contract expires in early September. So far, union leaders have presented an almost cheery demeanor, pledging a good contract if we "keep up the pressure" for the remaining days before the "final and best offer." All this "happy talk" flies in the face of reality. Their trade union reformism has hit a brick wall, as the bosses gut our wages, benefits and pensions to finance their strategic oil wars. Only red organization, energized with class consciousness, can answer these attacks.
Not an Honest Face on the Podium
Nowhere was the disarray of the labor "movement" more evident than at the August 9 "solidarity" rally at the Minnesota State Capitol rotunda in support of Northwest’s airline mechanics, who face a possible strike on the 20th.
The mechanics split from the IAM seven years ago, forming the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA). (CHALLENGE readers will remember that the AMFA, while hiding behind a militant façade, is a narrow, elitist craft union that, at least covertly, encourages racist divisions in the working class.)
No representatives from the IAM or the Air Line Pilots Association spoke at the rally, but a former IAM local leader vowed not to cross the AMFA picket lines. In fact, the pilots’ union has said the mechanics should take a pay cut, while the IAM claimed the mechanics union proposed their ground-workers take a cut. (The AMFA denies it said this.)
Leaders of the flight attendants’ union called for solidarity, but wouldn’t guarantee their members would honor the picket line, initiating a straw vote among its membership instead.
The state-wide AFL-CIO unions boycotted the rally, while the "change-to-win" crowd, including UNITE-HERE, SEIU and the carpenters — without so much as raising any criticism of this elitist, craft union —vowed unconditional support. So much for these hypocritical opportunists and their "change-to-win" strategy of "diversity" and big industrial-wide unions!
If you could get a nickel for every hypocrite on the podium at this rally, you’d be rich! The whole labor "movement" has been reduced to opportunist hucksterism.
Red Politics Will Defeat Class Traitors
"And they’ll get away with it," complained a retired Boeing worker, "because nobody will call them on it!"
Well, our Party won’t let them "get away with it." We’ll support the hundreds in the Boeing IAM who have gone on record for real solidarity and anti-racist, international class struggle — signing and circulating petitions, distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES to start. We’ll continue to patiently explain the limits of trade unionism, which can’t ultimately serve the needs of our class because it operates within the laws and boundaries of capitalism.
The August 21 rally is billed as a "Truth Rally." The most important truth we have to understand is that this system must go. Pleading with the bosses to "do the right thing" just doesn’t cut it.
LA Summer Project Reaches Out to Industrial Workers
LOS ANGELES, AUG. 15 — This past week young comrades here participated in a mini-project centered on local industry. We kicked off the Project with a BBQ, including good food, comrades and political discussion. Later on we arose early in the morning to sell CHALLENGE and distribute communist leaflets at a local aerospace factory. Everyone thought this was a great experience, receiving only positive reactions from the workers.
We also had a paper sale in the center of the city’s garment district, the largest sweatshop center in the Western hemisphere, and exhausted all our CHALLENGES and leaflets. (The leaflet was entitled, "De Indocumentados a Soldados y Super-explotados" — "From undocumented to soldiers and super-exploited workers" — calling on workers to unite against the imperialist exploiters and fight for communism.)
Earlier in the week we held a study group on the first law of dialectics: the unity and struggle of opposites. We read and discussed a short excerpt from the "Jailbreak" pamphlet, using such topics as basketball, magnetism and capitalism in examining the nature of a contradiction and why we intensify a struggle to resolve it. The week ended with some comrades attending a talk about the Mexican muralist Siqueiros, revolutionary politics and the Mexican muralists.
This week we’re continuing the Project with more industrial CHALLENGE sales, extending to transit workers, and more study groups, as well as a demonstration against anti-immigrant racism. We’ll expose capitalism as the cause of unemployment of immigrant and citizen workers alike. A group will also attend the preliminary hearing of three anti-racist fighters who were arrested in a demonstration against the racist Minutemen.
a name="Workers in Puerto Rico Refuse to Pay for Bosses’ Crisis">">"orkers in Puerto Rico Refuse to Pay for Bosses’ Crisis
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, Aug. 12 — In the latest of recent protests, thousands of public employees marched today to protest against Governor Anibal Acevedo Vilá’s plan to unilaterally nullify contracts for these workers, cut the work-week to four days and wages by 15%. The Acevedo administration insists it will defend employee benefits but is demanding that workers accept individual wage-and-hour cuts, rather than submit to mass layoffs. Initially, AFL-CIO union leaders accepted the Governor’s proposal, but when independent unions and rank-and-file workers rejected this attack, the AFL-CIO mis-leaders changed their minds.
The government is the biggest employer here, with some 200,000 workers. And these workers are very angry. Chants like, "Let the rich pay" for the budget crisis were commonly heard. Others included, "Where is the money, at the Banco Popular?" and "Don’t touch my work-hours; Wal-Mart pays no taxes." The workers are pushing the legislators to tax corporations and luxury items to solve the crisis.
The government is under pressure from Wall Street to reduce its fiscal debt. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have downgraded Puerto Rico’s bonds to speculative levels once this year. Early in August, Moody’s representatives met with Acevedo and pressed him to carry out severe budget cuts to stave off another reduction in bond ratings.
Now the Governor is trying to shift the blame to the legislature, especially the opposition right-wing PNP (New Progressive Party, linked to U.S. Republicans). Acevedo’s Democratic Popular Party is closely linked to U.S. Democrats. Several legislators spoke at the workers’ protest, but got the cold shoulder.
Workers here face the same kind of attacks as workers in the U.S. GI’s from Puerto Rico have one of the highest casualty rates in the entire Armed Forces. And now "war budgets" are destroying workers’ lives at home, too. And just as the AFL-CIO leaders have been on the wrong side of the fence in every fight-back in the U.S. (any protests they organize are basically to derail them), workers should understand these union mis-leaders will do the same here.
We live in an age of endless capitalist crises and wars, and the union leaders’ role is to make workers accept this reality, not to fight it. The best lesson these workers can learn from these struggles is to build a revolutionary communist leadership to fight all the bosses and their attacks.
a name="Captalism Killed Cindy Sheehan’s Son; Bush Just the Trigger Man">">"aptalism Killed Cindy Sheehan’s Son; Bush Just the Trigger Man
Cindy Sheehan, dubbed the "Rosa Parks" of the anti-war movement, has been camped outside of Bush’s Texas hideaway for weeks. (Parks was the black woman whose refusal to move to the back of the bus helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.) Sheehan has garnered widespread press as the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who is demanding explanations from Bush for the failed war.
She’s not the first mother of a dead soldier to confront Bush, but her stance comes at a time when it’s becoming clearer that the U.S. is not winning in Iraq; outside of a small minority of diehards, whatever support for the war existed has vanished.
She is compelling, and losing a child to imperialist war is beyond horrible. Certainly she, and the mothers of the many tens of thousands of Iraqis and those from the U.S. side killed in this war, deserve much more than answers. This war always was about control of oil, and all those democratic politicians and editorial pages now lining up behind her knew that from the beginning.
The media portrayed her as something she may or may not be, the almost perfect composite of a modern anti-war heroine: against the war, but for the troops; loving her country more than the right-wing; and demanding answers from the neo-cons.
For papers like the N.Y. Times, which cynically printed front-page stories about Hussein’s WMDs knowing the war was about oil, to now jump on this bandwagon because the war has failed is perverse.
Cindy Sheehan would be a voice in the wind as far as the media and politicians were concerned if Iraq were just another stunning victory for the U.S. war machine. But the war has been a failure, and while the think-tanks try to figure out the best way to avoid a complete disaster in Iraq, the Pentagon is already turning its sights to an increased role for Homeland Security and possible war with China down the road.
The liberals are using the widespread publicity of Cindy Sheehan’s protest to attack Bush. Thirty-eight Congressional Democrats have signed a letter to Bush demanding that he meet with her. TrueMajority, an organization founded by multi-millionaire Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) hired a Washington public relations firm for her to coordinate media coverage.
We hope Cindy Sheehan can see this, and that she doesn’t become a pawn in the ongoing machinations of U.S. imperialism as the war for oil moves to its next front.
Screwing Subway Safety: Millions for Racist Profiling, Layoffs for Conductors
NEW YORK CITY, Aug. 15 — While the fascist Homeland Security department and this city’s mayor have launched a "war on terror" in the subways and buses — ostensibly to "guarantee the safety of passengers" — their transit bosses have launched a war on the safety of subway riders and workers. After having eliminated conductors on midnight and short shuttle runs in 1966, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has announced the wiping out of 313 conductors in 2007 on four lines: the "7," the "N," the "J" and the "M."
Amid a massive police presence supposedly searching for "bombers" (and finding none) entering the stations — costing an estimated $1.3 to $1.9 million a week in overtime pay — the MTA refuses to use a dime of this year’s $833 million surplus to pay the $20 million "saved" from laying off these conductors. This exposes the bosses’ hypocrisy about "concern" for riders’ safety from "terrorism" while slashing jobs that runs directly counter to safeguarding riders and transit workers.
In terms of riders’ safety, conductors have the real responsibilities, not any cops engaged in racial profiling of innocent citizens. Operating from the middle of 10-car trains, conductors’ tasks include: opening and closing doors for passengers; observing platforms as the train moves out of the station to guarantee no passenger is stuck in a door; are the "first responders" (along with the train operators) for subway disasters; are trained to evacuate passengers over the electrified tracks in case of fire or smoke incidents or when trains are stuck underground; and are the first people passengers can turn to in dangerous situations.
Now only the train operators in the front cars on these lines will have these responsibilities, while operating the train as well. Many platforms are curved, making it impossible for a train operator to see more than half of a full-length train. The conductors are the most crucial "eyes and ears" on a train.
Of course, there may not be any hue and cry until a passenger is trapped in a closing door and is dragged to their death. But what do these bosses care about really saving lives? For them, profits come first.
Meanwhile, Roger Toussaint, who became president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union posing as a militant, has again shown he’s just another hack. He wants workers to act as cops enforcing racist "ethnic profiling" — he used union funds to hire the former head of security at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport to train workers in sniffing out "potential terrorists."
Some workers are circulating petitions asking Mayor Bloomberg to rescind the cuts. This might help to raise the issue, but it’s not enough. The mass power of the transit workers, organizing a strike against the layoffs and against the racist "war on terror," is what’s needed to protect the workers’ jobs and the riders from the real threat to their safety. The solidarity of the city’s entire working class can be drawn upon in such an effort. That’s the way to revive the labor movement, instead of relying on politicians or supporting the bosses’ racist "war on terror." And that requires a red leadership, very different from any of the splitting factions in the AFL-CIO or Change-to-Win "dissidents."
a name="Inter-Imperialist Rivalry Bleeds Factory Workers — Part I">">"nter-Imperialist Rivalry Bleeds Factory Workers — Part I
As imperialist rivalry intensifies worldwide, the contradiction between the ruling class and working class also sharpens, made inevitable because all capitalist gains come from the sweat of workers. For example, the super-exploitation of Chinese workers has been the key to the growth of China’s imperialist strength. The resulting "China Price" (cost of production in China) has become the standard for capitalist exploitation. All imperialist powers must compete with this rate of exploitation/profit, and therefore must intensify it to remain economically, politically and militarily competitive. General Motors knows this only too well. It has a minivan factory in Liuzhou, China, that pays its workers $60 a month!
Competition for maximum profit is inherent in the capitalist system. That’s why U.S. workers face longer hours, lower wages, fewer benefits and generally increased exploitation.
This analysis is a daily reality for millions of industrial workers. In factories, large and small, across the U.S. and indeed the world, imperialists are forcing workers to sacrifice their lives on the industrial front of imperialist war — no less true than for working-class soldiers sent home in body bags from the military front in Iraq. My experiences as an industrial worker under these conditions reveals that these workers are still crucial to the overthrow of capitalism, and that this material reality opens the door for communists to win industrial workers to PLP’s ideas and to join the fight against capitalism.
My factory illustrates what the "China Price" and imperialism mean for the industrial working class: between 60- and 70-hour work-weeks, not out of the ordinary for industrial workers; 12- hour shifts, but workers are also told to come in early or stay late; and sometimes working 15-16 hours.
Imagine the alienation spending this much time away from your home and family, for six days a week, a most common complaint. "I barely see my children any more," said one worker. "While I’m at work they’re sleeping. The only time I spend with them is while driving them to school." Another said she feels a lot of guilt and added stress because every weekend she must work her youngest daughter cries and begs her not to go. Workers often feel their children are growing up without them. As one worker noted, "We work these crazy hours to be able to provide for our children, yet we never see them."
This sacrifice of family, while not as drastic in the immediate sense as military deployment overseas, is just as harmful to working-class families. In fact, such deployment can last through an entire childhood. But beyond this sacrifice are the devastating long-term effects of this exploitation on industrial workers’ health. Almost all workers in my factory bare the scars of this labor war. Some injuries are visible while others are internal and only revealed by a brace of some kind, or a grimace on the face of a worker in pain.
Workers complain that their hands, arms and shoulders cramp while they try to sleep. They suffer headaches from inspecting products under magnifying lenses for endless hours. Chronic pain and loss of vision are common. Since I’ve been employed here, at least once a month a worker returns from medical leave. And when they do return, if a doctor restricts their work-load they’re treated like a burden on the company and given the most repetitive, tedious work day after day in hopes it will be so unbearable they may quit.
Even those workers who are not directly injured find that, over time, their bodies give out to stress. This is because every worker is pushed to the point of exhaustion; with virtually no time for exercise or recuperation their health deteriorates — and they can forget about recreation.
The bosses’ "answer" to workers’ suffering is a vending machine stocked with various pain relief medications so they can keep working by numbing the pain. The bosses treat workers the way they treat machines: run them until they break and then patch them up just enough to get them running again.
The capitalist system constantly proves it’s incapable of providing workers with a full and rewarding life. It also proves that no election or reform can change the fundamental contradiction between workers who produce and bosses who profit. Under capitalism workers labor so that they can live. This implies that life, for the wage-slave, is lived between shifts. For the industrial working class then, there’s not much life under imperialism. So the question my co-workers repeatedly ask is: "What else are we supposed to do?"
The answer for these and all workers is to change the social relations of production to a more collective, egalitarian process where we produce according to need and not profit. This is communism — Progressive Labor Party’s goal. Friends and comrades, the industrial working-class is awaiting PLP’s ideas.
(Next: the special exploitation of women workers in the industrial sector.)
LAPD Admits Killing; Mayor Promises More Cops
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 15 — LAPD Officer Steve Garcia was not in danger when he fired the ten shots that killed 13-year-old Devin Brown six months ago. But that’s not news.
The real news is that LAPD Chief Bratton is admitting it. Why is Bratton doing it now, when most LA workers figured it out six months ago?
After cop Padilla murdered Devin, Chief Bratton and his crew tried to suppress the autopsy report until they could "correct" it, to let cop Garcia (and the whole LAPD) off the hook. Now, after a special "reenactment" of the scene, he‘s changed his tune. It’s all "politics" — the bosses’ politics!
The "WHY" is "community policing" but a better name would be "trying to win black and Latin workers to fascism." The capitalist rulers are working hard to get us to trust their stinking racist system.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa claims to be the mayor of "One LA," and likes to pose for the cameras with a "rainbow" of political allies. Meanwhile, he campaigned — with the support of former police Chief Bernard Parks — on a platform of "putting 300 new officers on our streets now, followed by an additional 1,300 officers within five years." Villaraigosa emphasized that "we need to expand community policing." The Los Angeles Community Policing website shows they’re already expanding it.
Former mayor James Hahn tried the same thing, but workers weren’t buying it. For example, last March voters rejected a ballot proposition that would have raised the LA sales tax to fund the police. The rulers are hoping their phony "multi-racial unity" of politicians will do a better sales job. Villaraigosa’s ally Alex Padilla says, "Eventually, we’re going to have to revisit a sales tax increase for a permanent significant increase in the size of the police force."
But many workers know better than to trust the bosses’ system. When Devin was murdered, many teachers and parents at his school — black, Latin, and white — joined together to offer support to his mother. They chased the lying journalists who were looking for "dirt" to smear Devin’s reputation. Some marched in protest against the racist cops.
This is the real multi-racial unity that can lead to class-consciousness and a revolutionary outlook, when communists show that only revolution can end racist police terror and the profit system that needs it. This is the multi-racial unity we need to build "from the ground up" — in opposition to Villaraigosa, Bratton, Parks & Co. Their "rainbow" only serves those who already own the pot of gold at its end.
Racist Bosses Force Immigrant Workers to Live in Tents
FARMINGVILLE, LI, NY, Aug. 16 — The bosses and the police here have found new ways to harass and attack immigrant laborers, most of them from Mexico. Twenty of these workers are being forced to live in tents outdoors. Tenants in 11 of the 117 houses rented to laborers in the area have been evicted from overcrowded housing by Suffolk county executive Steve Levy.
The evicted workers and their supporters know well that the "overcrowded" rationale is based on racism. The local authorities should be providing decent affordable housing for these workers, instead of forcing them to sleep outdoors.
Several evicted laborers, camped in back of 196 Berkshire Drive, told El Diario-La Prensa (8/16) that the owner has allowed them to stay there, but they didn’t know for how long. Despite the recent unbearable heat wave blanketing the Northeast, endangering people’s lives if staying outdoors for too long, these workers must suffer since they have no place else to go.
While there’s a lot racism directed against these laborers, there’s also some support. People have brought blankets, water and money to the camped-out workers.
Farmingville is now considered a red zone of anti-immigrant racism, along with Arizona. PLP has been actively supporting the laborers. Several weeks ago, the cops arrested four PLP members when they confronted the local racists harassing the laborers. Our comrades are now facing court appearances for their anti-racist stand. We’re asking CHALLENGE readers to help cover the legal costs. Contributions can be made out to CHALLENGE Periodicals and mailed to PLP, GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202.
Chrysler Boss Deserts Union Roots; Profits Thicker Than Blood
The grandfather of Thomas LaSorda, incoming chief executive of Chrysler, must be turning over in his grave. LaSorda (no relation to the ex-Dodger manager) is pushing the exploitation of auto workers in the U.S. and Mexico to the hilt. Yet his grandfather, Harry Rooney, was a Canadian union leader whom Chrysler accused of trying to prevent scabs from crossing a strike picket line in the 1940’s. And LaSorda’s father Frank led a local union in Windsor, Ontario.
The Chrysler boss has obviously cut himself off from his working-class roots. Using his 20 years experience overseeing General Motors’ manufacturing operations in the U.S. and Europe, LaSorda is out to suck the blood out of Chrysler workers. Speaking of streamlining the company’s assembly lines, he told the New York Times (8/13), "We’ve got to…add a lot of new products with the same number of people and make more money."
At the Chrysler truck assembly plant in Saltillo, Mexico, LaSorda told the 2,100 workers there that, "We’re depending on all of you…to stay focused….Don’t let up." This to workers who are paid $5 and hour, including benefits, less than one-tenth of U.S. Chrysler workers’ wages and benefits. No wonder Chrysler — the U.S. division of the German automaker DaimlerChrysler — has more than doubled its vehicle production in Mexico, to "stay competitive."
While grandfather Harry was doubtless striking against speed-up, by 2007 grandson Thomas plans to have a system in most Chrysler plants allowing it to build multiple vehicles on one production line. His face lights up as he explains how robots with an interchangeable tool on their robot arm will allow it to build different parts of a vehicle, rather than requiring different robots. He’s even speeding up the robots! But, of course, they don’t strike.
The LaSorda family values sure have changed. But of course, under capitalism, profits are thicker than blood.
a name="UNDER COMMUNISM…How Will We Eliminate Racism?">">"NDER COMMUNISM…How Will We Eliminate Racism?
The 250 years of slavery in the U.S. gave birth to modern racism. The deliberate intent of racist discrimination, oppression and ideas was to create separations among European-Americans, Africans, African-Americans, and Native Americans (Indians), all of whom were initially used for slave labor. When the Southern aristocracy found that multi-racial unity among slaves was fostering slave revolts and escapes that were very expensive to them, they decided to focus slavery on Africans and African-Americans alone because they could be bought more cheaply.
When chattel slavery formally ended with the Civil War over 140 years ago, the bosses discovered that racism would still serve their continuing need to divide and conquer the working class, who now were all wage slaves rather than chattel slaves.
Under communism, when the working class, led by PLP, seizes power from the bosses through armed revolution, there’ll no longer be any bosses who profit from racism. Only then will it be possible to eliminate it. However, because of the grip these ideas have worldwide, the struggle to eliminate them will lag behind, and depend on, the elimination of the practice of discrimination and oppression. Under communist leadership, there will be ongoing sharp struggle to win all workers around the world to reject and fight against racism, just as PLP does today and has done for the 43 years of its existence.
The elimination of discrimination and oppression will be possible immediately upon the seizure of power, through laws making racist speech and actions illegal and, if persistent, punishable. The same will be true for other forms of division, such as sexism and nationalism, which the bosses use now to make maximum profits.
A glimpse of how this will work comes from the experiences of Paul Robeson in the Soviet Union. Robeson was a black communist in the U.S. in the early to middle part of the 20th century. He excelled as an athlete, actor and singer. One of his greatest contributions to the working class was his courage in defying the U.S. government and traveling to the then communist Soviet Union.
In a conversation with the great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, Robeson said that in the Soviet Union he had felt "like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be….Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity." (Martin Duberman, "Paul Robeson, A Biography"; 1989; p. 190)
Despite the laws against racism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the communist leadership failed to win workers to take the anti-racist struggle upon themselves. As a result, when these communist governments openly reverted to capitalism, racism — as well as nationalism — increased rapidly. With the participation of millions of the world’s workers, PLP plans not to repeat that error.
Movie Review:
Steal A Nation, Build A Military Base
Many may have heard of Diego Garcia, a U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean, from where B-1 and B-52 bombers took off to launch the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. This base cost $1 billion, has room for 30 warships, and contains two bomber runways, a satellite spy station, and facilities for 4,000 troops. But what’s little known is that this base was built only after thousands of indigenous islanders were forced from their homes.
Diego Garcia is the largest of the Chagos Islands, a chain of 64 coral islands that up until the 1960’s was home to 2,000 Creole-speaking people of African and Indian descent, whose ancestors had lived on the islands since the 18th century. In 1965, Britain’s Labor Government leased Diego Garcia to the U.S., which was looking for a base in the Indian Ocean from which to spy on the Soviet Union and China, and to use for attacks in the region "if necessary." Before the U.S. began construction in 1971, it insisted British officials first remove local residents from the Chagos Islands.
John Pilger’s extraordinary film, Stealing A Nation, is the heartbreaking story of how a peaceful people were forcibly removed from islands they had lived on for generations. Pilger, who’s made a number of valuable films about Iraq, Palestine and East Timor, uses recently declassified British and U.S. government documents to describe the vicious tactics used to remove the islanders. First, the British government simply declared — against all evidence — that the Chagosians (also called the Ilois) were "not indigenous people" but were rather "temporary contract workers." Britain then began a campaign of intimidation and removal, including barring people who had gone to Mauritius for medical treatment from returning home.
Finally, the remaining residents were loaded on a boat and brought to Mauritius, where they were dumped in an impoverished housing project without water, sanitation or electricity. There they’ve remained, hoping some day to return to their homeland.
The documentary includes shocking interviews with British and U.S. officials attempting to justify their racist treatment of the native population, contemptuously described as "Tarzans" and "Men Fridays."
This racist attack shows that both the U.S. and British imperialists have always done whatever’s required to protect and expand their business empire, no matter how many people are harmed. Diego Garcia provided U.S. imperialists with a strategically-located base from which to control the oil-rich Middle East and to block any expansionist efforts by its Soviet rival. If 2,000 people lose their homes, it’s no big deal for the imperialists. After all, a million Iraqis died in the 1990’s from U.S. economic sanctions, and 100,000 Iraqis perished in the U.S. invasion and occupation of a country that has the world’s second largest oil reserves. As a U.S. Defense Secretary recalls, the displacement of the Chagosians was a "minor detail."
However, the film promotes the liberal hope that the Chagos Islanders can obtain justice through the courts. In 2000, a British court ruled that their "evacuation" had been illegal. Four years later, Tony Blair’s government quietly obtained a royal decree which simply forbid the islanders from ever returning home, possibly based on a rigged environmental "study" concluding that the island was unsuitable for human habitation. Nonsense, of course, since these people had lived there for centuries and thousands of U.S. military personnel currently "inhabit" the island.
Just as Native Americans couldn’t stop their dispossession through court suits, the Chagosians won’t win by relying on a legal strategy. The right of return for the Chagos Islands indigenous people is an anti-racist demand that should be raised by the anti-war movement, particularly in Britain and the U.S.
Despite this weakness, "Stealing A Nation" is a wonderful film to show in classrooms, churches and union halls. It’s available from Bullfrog Films:
(http://www.bullfrogfilms.com).
a name="Brooklyn Summer Project Views ‘Crash’"></">Br"oklyn Summer Project Views ‘Crash’
After weeks of spirited organizing and a successful attack on racism in Bridgewater, N.J. and Farmingville, Long Island, our youth summer project chose the movie "Crash" to watch and discuss. As reviewed in CHALLENGE (July 6), the film deals with racism in Los Angeles. We have additional comments.
On the one hand, we thought "Crash" tried to expose the racism of the police, especially liberal cops. They turn out to be the worst, since it’s the liberal, well-meaning cop who can’t believe the black hitchhiker he’s picked up likes hockey and country music. This cop eventually shoots the man and tries to destroy the evidence. The main cop (played by Matt Dillon) is believable as he humiliates a black couple on their way home and tells his liberal partner, "You have no idea." In fact, the police department and the District Attorney’s office are exposed as both racist and corrupt.
While we disagreed on whether the characters change or are able to redeem themselves, we did agree that the movie’s main message was cynicism and hopelessness — that we workers are trapped in a web of racism and hate and there’s no way out. The movie begins and ends with a crash scene where the drivers are screaming racist epitaphs at one another. We thought the characters were often exaggerated or even cartoonish and most were clueless about what was happening to them. The movie made racist and insulting stereotypes seem as if they’re perfectly acceptable to everyone. Only the character played by Ludacris as the conscious car thief questions and analyzes his situation. Everyone else seems to be passive victims.
The movie portrays racism as a personal thing, infecting everyone. Most of the characters blame and hate other workers and show a disturbing lack of humanity towards others. Whether it’s the selling of workers from Thailand that Ludacris meets up with or the District Attorney’s wife who bosses around her Latino housekeeper, we wondered why the director chose to portray almost all his characters in this manner. We felt this was a dangerous movie because, while focusing on what some people are really like, it sent the message that most people are like this.
Our group feels Hollywood won’t make a movie exposing racism as the class enemy nor present a story showing multi-racial unity, like the recent Los Angeles janitors’ strike or the recent protests by black and Latino youth in South Central LA against the LAPD killing of a Salvadoran immigrant and his little daughter. The film begins with the line, "We crash into each other so we can feel something." But the movie is certain to make one feel hopeless and cynical.
LETTERS
a name="‘Borders’ Even on Nashville Buses"></">‘B"rders’ Even on Nashville Buses
I spent a one-week immersion in the Spanish language at Lake Tahoe’s Community College Intensive Spanish Summer Institute. Besides grammar classes they offer sessions on culture and contemporary issues like immigration.
I attended the latter and the subject of "legal" and "illegal" immigration came up. A classmate asked why we shouldn’t punish people who break the law. Immediately I went into my favorite story about borderlines.
I was raised in the South during the 1950’s and on every damn city bus in Nashville there was a borderline. This border would move according to the needs of the racist bosses: if the bus had more white people the border moved farther to the back of the bus. Those who "broke the law" by crossing this line were subject to arrest, beatings, fines and/or expulsion from the bus.
When I said this, three different people said the problem of borders is the problem of capitalism.Que viva el comunismo!
Anti-racist reader
Cops Under Communism?
I recently joined PLP. I’m very happy with this decision, to have joined a productive struggle for a better world, a communist world. All my friends really like the "Under Communism" articles in recent issues of CHALLENGE. In fact, in my efforts to increase class consciousness among my peers, the majority of questions I’m confronted with are about the details of life under communism. I suppose this is better than being asked about whether or not there’s anything wrong with capitalism.
The reason I’m writing is that I would like to see an article about what law enforcement would be like under communism. I know the cops are class traitors and serve only ruling-class interests. Yet there’s still a certain degree of concern about the protection of people, particularly women and children regarding sexual assault. I think it would be naive to think things like pedophilia would simply disappear after a revolution. Since under communism there would be no private property and therefore no concern about things like property theft, my friends and I are still curious about how the Party would deal with people’s safety, and how we would react to attempts at exploitation, racism and sexism that would be left over from the capitalist world.
Red Student
Differs on Lynne Stewart Case
The letter from "Red Lawyer" on the Lynne Stewart case (CHALLENGE, 7/20)) was very useful, but neither the letter nor the CHALLENGE response really addressed how the ruling class is using this case. Red Lawyer was absolutely correct in pointing out that Stewart’s client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, is a "vicious, racist, religious fanatic and murderous fascist." Stewart made two wrong-headed decisions: (1) to defend such a working-class enemy, and (2) to smuggle out messages for him (regardless of whether it was covered by attorney/client privilege). CHALLENGE was correct to state that Stewart isn’t a fascist like Rahman, but actually neither Rahman nor Stewart is the issue.
The main point is that the ruling class is using this case to increase fascism and repression, and it’s precisely because both Rahman and Stewart were so unappealing in their actions that the bosses are getting away with it, playing up both fear of terrorism and racism against Muslims. The rulers’ actions in this case will make it easier for them to attack immigrants, working people, activists and revolutionaries, and more difficult for working people to obtain defense in court against attacks by the bosses and their agents.
Red Lawyer was right that not every exercise of capitalist state power is a step towards fascism, and CHALLENGE’S assertion that Red Lawyer "seems to disagree with PLP’s position that fascism is growing in the U.S." was not at all supported by the letter. But the fact that the bosses are marshalling such efforts around this case, and that the convictions were so disproportionate to all previous precedents, shows that the bosses are using this case to their own ends.
Even so, with the bosses perpetrating so many attacks on undocumented immigrants, especially with the renewed rise in profiling, it’s not at all clear or convincing that this is the best case around to organize to fight the rise of legal fascism. If we’re going to devote time to the struggle around this case, we need to always be up front about Rahman’s fascism and Stewart’s severe political weaknesses, and make primary how the ruling class is using the case.
Many cases communists have organized around in the past — the execution of Joe Hill in 1915, Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, the Scottsboro defendants in the 1930’s, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 — were persecutions of dedicated organizers or innocent workers. (And the ruling class never backed off in any of these cases, despite worldwide opposition.) It would be much easier for us to organize here if this case had similar sympathetic defendants. But it doesn’t. What it does have is the ruling class’s attempt to increase fascism, and that is what we have to point out.
Agrees with Red Lawyer
a name="Fox News’ Big Lies Apes Goebbels">">"ox News’ Big Lies Apes Goebbels
I’m never surprised by the fascist nature of capitalism and its media, police and armed forces. This view was reinforced when I caught a commentary on Fox News endorsing the terrorist, racist Minutemen, portraying them as "social justice peace officers." The news report linked the spread of Latino gang activity with the "dangers" of "illegal" Mexicans entering the U.S. The Minutemen were portrayed as patriots doing their civic duty, protecting the nation from the "threat" of "illegal aliens," with the complete cooperation of local law enforcement.
This shifts the attention from the capitalist conditions that cause crime and poverty to poor immigrant workers trying to survive. It also demonstrates that the cops and government do not oppose racism or any discrimination, and never have. In fact, this allows them to divide the working class here and worldwide.
Unified, militant actions against these terrorists, like those carried out by comrades and supporters in Los Angeles, Long Island, NY, New Jersey and Chicago, is the only way people will see that we won’t stand for capitalist-sanctioned hatred.
Scarlett
a name="‘Bubble’ Talk Ignores Lack of Housing"></">‘B"bble’ Talk Ignores Lack of Housing
Recently numerous articles about the housing bubble (Paul Krugman in the NY Times, Business Week, etc.) are eerily reminiscent of the stock market crashes and junk bond episodes — hard to follow all the details, but ultimately it’s all based on building mounds of paper that must collapse, with many small investors, and some big ones, imploding and being gobbled up by the bigger fish.
But none of these articles ever refer to the availability of housing for the working class or even the middle class. They don’t examine the number of housing starts or the increasing number of foreclosures and they ignore the abysmal tightness of the rental market. It’s almost like the railroad wars at the end of the 19th century, when the biggest robber barons fought over the rising value of railroad stocks when the railroads themselves were deteriorating.
The bottom line in all this is capitalism’s total inability to provide basic human needs, like shelter, even in the "affluent" West. And the entire ruling class is on board with this — Clinton’s housing "plan" was to increase the percentage of home-ownership, not the stock of affordable housing. And the words "housing" or "homelessness" were never uttered by John Kerry the last time around. (Then again, when shuttling between five of your wife’s mansions, it’s hard to keep track of little things like overcrowding at the shelters.)
The pundits are counting on the i-crossing details and percentages of the housing bubble to blind us from the fact that housing is just one more commodity under capitalism. If you can’t afford it, you can always exercise squatter’s rights in the big cardboard box from a new plasma TV discarded by some yuppie living in a condo they’ll be flipping in a year. Or so they hope.
A Reader
a name="NYPD Blue Message: Don’t Fight Back">">"YPD Blue Message: Don’t Fight Back
Recently I saw a rerun of NYPD Blue that addressed the post-9/11 social climate in New York City. A store owned by a Muslim family had been burned down by a racist with a history of harassing this family. The son of the store owner went to the police station to proclaim his family’s status as U.S. citizens and ask what they should do to protect themselves. The lead cop, played by Dennis Franz, told him, "Hang in there." His advice was that Jews, Italians and blacks didn’t have an easy time in this country (implying that their hard times have passed), and if he can just tough it out, things will eventually get better. The young Muslim man smiled and thanked the cops for all their hard work, even after being verbally abused by some of them earlier in the show.
This kind of thinking fuels the apathy that allows racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and anti-working class ideas to flourish. It exemplifies the complacency that the rulers encourage and enforce with brutal police terror and fascist laws. The idea that people shouldn’t actively fight to smash hatred of any kind is disgusting. Class-consciousness needs to be developed among all those hurt by the tools of capitalism so we can destroy it and erect a communist society where hatred isn’t fostered or protected.
Red Robyn
a name="Cautions on ‘Under Communism’ Column"></">Ca"tions on ‘Under Communism’ Column
I find the new column "Under Communism" thought-provoking with the ideas on what a communist society would do for the masses of people. And I certainly would not want to discourage readers from addressing this subject and trying to answer the questions that many of our friends have about what communism could do for the working class.
However, in trying to demonstrate how the elimination of the profit system would create many wonderful conditions, we must remember that the road to communism involves destroying capitalism. We won't just "jump" from capitalism to communism. Not only will the old ruling class not go quietly, but a revolution will probably grow out of world war (as did the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949). So in building communist relations in factories, in health care, in culture and so on, we must recognize that this building must take into account that tens of thousands of current factories, health care facilities, farm land and other features of society will be physically destroyed, along with millions of the workers who run them, who would be fighting for the revolution and who would run all institutions under communism.
Proceeding from capitalism to communism will be no "tea party." And rising from this destruction to build communism may very well entail tremendous sacrifices upon the part of the international working class as it attempts to establish all the aspects described in some of the columns in CHALLENGE.
Of course, this road in creating the new will hopefully be following communist ideas and principles, not the baggage of capitalism unfortunately carried into previous aspiring communist societies, which led to their downfall. The many ideas being presented of what communism will bring to the working class will be affected by the suffering and sacrifices of world war, and by a capitalist class fighting tooth and nail to preserve its system.
So obviously we will go through a period of constructing the new society while fighting off the remnants and ideas of the old. How this will affect what we create remains to be seen.
Old-time red
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Case history of famine: It’s the profit system
"I cannot afford to buy millet in the market, so I have no food and there is no milk to give my baby," says Fatou, a mother cradling her son Alhassan. Though he is 12 months old he weighs just 3.3kg [7lbs].
This is a strange reality of Niger’s hunger crisis. There is plenty of food in Niger, but children are dying because their parents cannot afford to buy it. The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of the world’s second-poorest country. The price of grain has skyrocketed but…the last harvest was only 11% below the five-yearly average….traders have been exporting grain to wealthier countries like Nigeria and Ghana.
Niger relies heavily on donors such as the EU and France, which favour free-market solutions to African poverty. So the Niger government declined to hand out free food to the starving….
The World Food Programme, which supplies emergency rations to other hunger-stricken parts of Africa, also declined to distribute free food. The reason given? Interfering with the free market could disrupt Niger’s development. (GW, 8/11)
Wal-Mart creates poor, then sells to them
By offering rock-bottom wages to its more than one million workers (and by depressing the wages offered at other competing businesses in the area), Wal-Mart leaves its workers and other consumers little choice other than to shop its aisles, stocked as they are with merchandise that is dirt cheap in large part because of those low wages….
Lower prices are supposed to allow poor households to save more money to better their lives. Wal-Mart’s policies, however, seem to create more poor people, who then need even lower prices to survive. (NYT, 8/7)
US mining giant poisons Indonesians
In a rare case against an American business giant operating in the developing world, the Newmont Mining Corporation and its chief executive in Indonesia go on trial here Friday on criminal charges of pollution….with mine waste containing arsenic and mercury….
Local people…moved from Buyat Bay in June after complaining of illnesses….
Even so, the Indonesian government, which depends heavily on foreign investment, has pushed the case ambivalently. On the one hand, its anemic regulatory agencies would like to put teeth into their still-evolving environmental laws; on the other, high-ranking and local officials alike fear driving off the corporate money that is their biggest source of tax revenue. (NYT, 8/5)
Darwin’s great insight not ‘merely a theory’
Charles Darwin’s great insight is based on a simple syllogism: (a) like begets like, with variations; (b) all creatures produce more offspring than can survive to reproduce in turn; (c) those most fit — adapted — to the environment are more likely to survive; and therefore (d) favourable variations will be preserved and species will evolve — change over time. This is natural selection, and its logic is irrefutable….This is why "Darwinism" is not merely a "theory" to be confronted with mumbo-jumbo such as "intelligent design" , but, like gravity, an inevitable feature of the universe we inhabit. (GW, 8/8)
Sharon, Bush make imperialist deal on Gaza
…On the eve of the Gaza withdrawal, in an interview with the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Mr. Sharon gave a strikingly succinct explanation of his diplomacy. "I’ve reached a deal with the Americans," he said. "I prefer a deal with the Americans to a deal with the Arabs…."
Mr. Bush…asked for — and got — Mr. Sharon’s agreement to do what he could do. Evacuating Gaza was one of those things.
But the deal Mr.Sharon cut with President Bush…comes with an escape clause. Further Israeli concessions are predicated on the Palestinian Authority — led by President Mahmoud Abbas — taking control and disarming the Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas gunmen.
…If Mr. Abbas and his colleagues won’t (or can’t)…George W. Bush has made it clear that the process stops. (NYT, 8/16)
Capitalist Russia: ‘The system is corrupt’
…Vast amounts of Russia’s wealth flow in a shadowy netherworld of corrupted officials — unreported as income, untaxed by the government and unavailable for social or economic investements.
"The weakness, inefficiency and corruption of all branches of government are the most important obstacles to further progress….
…Transparency International, the worldwide corruption watchdog, said in its latest report that Russia was now following the path of countries like Nigeria, Azerbaijan and Libya — rich in oil but soaked by graft….
"Corruption is not a virus infecting the system…."It is the system itself that is corrupt." (NYT, 8/13)
Medicaid: As usual, pro-worker law is gutted
In a series of rulings, federal judges are limiting the ability of poor people to turn to the courts to fight for Medicaid benefits….
Medicaid provides health insurance to more than 50 million low-income people. The court decisions are raising questions about what it means to have health insurance, if the terms of such coverage cannot be enforced.
The rulings, in more than a dozen cases, affect millions of people and involve a wide range of services like nursing home care, home health visits and preventive care for children. (NYT, 8/15)
a href="#Bush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans">"iberal Democrats Are Also Warmongers: Bush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans
Workers Need Red Politics, Not AFL-CIO Pro-Boss Hacks
Anti-war? Not These AFL-CIO Traitors
The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Immigrants
From U.S. To England, Racist Attacks Continue
Immigrant Workers Fight Racist Attacks
a href="#Coal Country Coalition in Solidarity with Nurses Aide’s Picket Line">"oal Country Coalition in Solidarity with Nurses Aide’s Picket Line
a href="#‘We need a revolution...’">Un"ted Airline Picket Agrees: ‘We need a revolution...’
a href="#‘Change-to-win’ SEIU Hypocrites Turn Backs on Home Health Care Workers">‘C"ange-to-win’ SEIU Hypocrites Turn Backs on Home Health Care Workers
a href="#PLP’S Songs On CD">"LP’S Songs On CD
Bible Group Moves Against War, Fascism
PLP Forum Makes Plans to Step Up Fight Against Racism
Small Schools: A Losing Lesson For The Working Class
Homeless Dying In Oppressive Heat Is Capitalist Murder
a href="#Killing Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’">Kill"ng Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’
a href="#Workers’ Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’">Workers’"Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’
a href="#‘Communist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting back...’">‘Com"unist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting back...’
a href="#Mexico’s Drug Cartel War Nets Huge Profits For U.S. Banks">"exico’s Drug Cartel War Nets Huge Profits For U.S. Banks
a href="#Movie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’">Mo"ie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’
BBC Polls: Marx Tops All Philosophers
Under Communism: Can You Have Both Wealth and Health?
LETTERS
Red Vet Says, What You Do Counts
Rockers Raise $ For Anti-Racists
Communist Art Celebrates Workers
Attack on Lynne Stewart A Fascist Step
Pakistani Comrades Teach Their Youth
Fighting Racism Builds Internationalism
- Oil-hungry US won’t give up bases in Iraq
- US leads new ‘race to the bottom’ for labor
- Youth suicide high in capitalist China
- Bribery is zooming in Russia’s ‘democracy’
- Is Harry Potter worse than myths of Bible?
- Point a finger at all religion not just Islam
Liberal Democrats Are Also Warmongers
a name="Bush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans">">"ush Carrying Out Rulers’ Iraq War Plans
Spokesmen for the liberal wing of U.S. rulers are talking out of both sides of their mouths about the bloody quagmire their masters created in Iraq. At times, they openly preach the liberals’ imperialist agenda and call for putting more boots on Iraqi soil now and mobilizing for greater conflicts later. At others, they seek to shift the blame onto bloodthirsty neo-cons, while portraying liberals as peaceniks.
Liberal mouthpieces in government, think-tanks, and the media have been pushing two related big lies lately. First, an energy policy directed by liberals rather than the Bush gang would shrink U.S. dependence on imported oil and thereby eliminate the need for military action in the Middle East. The second lie: invading Iraq was all the neo-cons’ idea; what liberals really want is an exit strategy.
The liberal Brookings Institution claims it knows how to end oil wars: "If all new cars, pick-up trucks and SUVs had roughly one-third higher fuel economy, it would take less than 10 years…to displace petroleum consumption equal to the amount the United States currently imports from Persian Gulf dictatorships. This would be fabulous for U.S. national security." (7/28/05)
But supplying the U.S. with oil is not the main goal of U.S. Mid-East military action; imperialism is. The U.S. wields its control of Persian Gulf oil as a weapon against its rivals. Relying largely on Saudi production, Exxon Mobil makes 70% of its sales outside the U.S. The firm has over 100 countries dependent to some degree on its tankers. Typical is Exxon Mobil’s recent deal to ship Saudi crude, under the U.S. Navy’s watchful eye, to a new $3.5-billion refinery in China’s Fujian province. U.S. rulers hope to use this leverage, which depends on the U.S. war machine’s continuing Mid-East slaughter, to check China’s industrial and military growth. Iraq is but one of the oil wars in the liberals’ deadly game plan. The N.Y. Times editorial (7/10) warning of a possible "takeover by Al Qaeda of Saudi Arabia’s government and oil reserves," said "the active-duty Army should be increased by about 100,000."
Employing oil and armed force to maintain the U.S.’s top-dog status is the chief aim of the dominant liberal faction of U.S. policy-makers. But the liberal media hypocritically hold the neo-cons solely responsible. By demonizing them, Bob Herbert, in his New York Times column (7/28/05), shielded the real enemy, "The obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks…Iran was also in the neoconservatives’ sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness."
Time for a reality check. Recall that the "weapons of mass destruction" lie, the pretext for invading Iraq, originated with the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the New York Times. In 2000, while Clinton was stepping up his missile attacks on Iraq, the CFR’s "ambassador in residence" Richard Butler, a former UN weapons inspector, published "The Greatest Threat," a book charging Saddam Hussein with developing a full range of nuclear, chemical and biological arms. In editorials and news reports, the Times constantly repeated the WMD lie. Early in 2003, a CFR task force declared "full-scale military operations will be necessary…[unless] Hussein disarms Iraq’s WMD program." The invasion came within months.
The Times’ Herbert wrote that Bush should "declare victory" in Iraq "and bring the troops home as quickly as possible." But the liberal rulers have other ideas. A CFR task force headed by Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, and Brent Scowcroft, who allies with Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, issued a report in late July drawing lessons from the Iraq quagmire. Called "In the Wake of Iraq: Improving U.S. Post-conflict Capabilities," it urged expanding the Army so that it can perform more "constabulary" duties in conquered nations undergoing "reconstruction and stabilization" by the U.S. It also said that, in addition to setting up police forces and law courts overseas, the U.S. should "establish coordinators for reconstruction-related programs in other agencies, including the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, and Health and Human Services."
In other words, the U.S. should take a page from the heydays of the British and French empires and establish full-fledged colonial armies of occupation and complete colonial civil administrations.
The liberals won’t bring the troops home. Their doubletalk is meant to steer us away from attacking the real cause of their wars: imperialist rivalry inseparable from the profit system,
In a future article we will analyze the love-hate relationship between the U.S. and the Iranian mullahs. How Iranian agents like Chalabi and Allawi are now ruling Iraq.
Workers Need Red Politics, Not AFL-CIO Pro-Boss Hacks
CHICAGO, July 30 — PLP conducted a week-long Summer Project here, starting with AFL-CIO pre-convention events the previous weekend. During the week we sold over 300 CHALLENGES — the majority at Cook County Hospital and the Ford plant — distributed 2,300 leaflets and made 12 contacts.
At the pre-convention session, to which rank and filers were allowed in, a contingent of youth and adults went to raise our ideas. Unfortunately, for the most part, we were forced to listen to hacks talking to hacks, as union bosses like President John Sweeney dished out their liberal pro-capitalist pro-war lies.
Many streaming in and out of the hall agreed with us that both this session and the convention itself would be shell games devoid of any real political content. The bosses’ media gave the big play to the so-called split between "opposing" sets of misleaders, two sides of the same sellout coin. (See CHALLENGE, 8/3.)
There was much talk about needing "diversity" in union leadership. But this was actually an empty call for token "representation" and "legitimacy" that completely ignored the real need to fight racist divisions and super-exploitation amongst workers.
Those fights occurred when communists led the unions in the 1930’s. Unfortunately those same communists were sucked into fighting only for reform, not for revolution, and, without a political base to support them, eventually were ousted in the Cold War anti-communist drive of the late 1940’s.
At the pre-convention session, the only real fighting spirit came from the floor. In response to the AFL-CIO’s nationalism, a union steward boldly stated that "working people have no nation." Later a young comrade spoke up to reveal the true history of how workers won the rights the bosses have taken away and continue to take away today.
The AFL-CIO did nothing when 140,000 United Airline workers were faced with losing their pensions, while further attacks loom for 20,000 mostly black and Latin baggage handlers, supposedly union represented.
The pessimistic reformism of many at the pre-convention events sharply contrasted with the atmosphere at the rank-and-file-organized SEIU picnic later on Saturday — at which many militant ideas were discussed with workers from Cook County and Michael Reese hospitals — as well as at our dinner- forum on Tuesday. At the latter, a worker from the local Ford plant related an impassioned story about his struggle to revive militant opposition among assembly-line workers, where there is mass skepticism and fear that the union won’t back them if they speak out against such lousy conditions as the lack of fans in an overheated workplace.
Other dinner participants jumped in about how their contracts (or lack of them) only help the bosses. One young friend of ours angrily reported how his post office job would last only 89 days — one day short of admittance to the union. An industrial worker quickly seconded this story with a similar one.
We concluded our project on Friday night with an open mic. Many spoke about the need for revolution. There were lively arguments about what this would mean and about the potential to really change society. We also held a group discussion with many young workers (all non-union) focusing on the decline of the labor movement. The collectivity and inspiration of the night did much to show the potential of our movement and goal of a communist society.
Anti-war? Not These AFL-CIO Traitors
When the AFL-CIO convention passed a resolution that supposedly opposed the war in Iraq, many anti-war "leftists" went wild applauding the union bureaucrats’ "historic" change from backing U.S. imperialism. Who’s kidding who?
The resolution says the Iraqi elections expressed the aspirations of the people "to control their own destiny." That’s exactly the Bush administration’s position. The U.S. military presence made sure that any new "government" didn’t conflict with the U.S. ruling class’s stake in controlling Iraq’s oil. The union resolution agrees that troop "withdrawal" should occur "as soon as security is established," again the administration’s position. It never mentions U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib, mass round-ups, huge destruction of cities like Fallujah and the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
But the real kicker exposing these fakers is the reference to the AFL-CIO’s "proud history of solidarity with worker movements around the world in their opposition to tyranny." In reality, these pro-capitalist sellouts worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to set up anti-communist "unions" in scores of countries to suppress militant workers’ movements opposed to U.S. bosses’ interests. They supported every war launched by U.S. imperialism, from Vietnam to Grenada to Panama to the Dominican Republic to Nicaragua to the Middle East. And now they hypocritically proclaim their allegiance to the Iraqi people "controlling their own destiny."
Their "solidarity" still lies with the capitalists who they serve all the time.
The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Immigrants
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 1 — Some anti-immigrant racists are turning their sights on this city’s black community. The racist "Save Our State" (SOS) group brags they’ve been invited to a "roundtable" discussion on Pacifica radio to be aired in a studio in South Central LA on August 20. Last week the LA Times reported some attendees at a meeting blamed immigrants for unemployment and racist conditions faced by black workers. Ex-police chief Bernard Parks weakly advocated the need for "coalitions," saying "we all have to get along."
Clearly the racist SOS and their financial backers, like billionaire Scaffe, want to drive a wedge between black and Latino workers with the lie that immigrants "cause" unemployment and low wages. Two weeks ago, black and Latin neighbors united in protest against the racist cop murder of 19-month-old Susie Lopez and her father. The rulers’ biggest fear is that workers of all backgrounds will unite against their system. When politicians like Parks call for multi-culturalism without placing the blame for low wages where it belongs, they want us to have confidence that this system will protect us.
Facts are stubborn things. GM Southgate and Van Nuys, Bethlehem Steel, Chrysler, Firestone and many other large manufacturers closed plants in the LA area in the 1980’s, laying off tens of thousands of workers, many black, from the few relatively good-paying non-government jobs available to them. Then the rulers helped flood many neighborhoods with crack cocaine, destroying families and leading to the "war on drugs," actually a war on black and Latin youth. This created the world’s largest prison population, over two million, 70% black and Latin. To prevent rebellions, the racist U.S. rulers and their Democrat and Republican politicians imprisoned black workers in record numbers after closing factory after factory in cities like Los Angeles.
Since the 1980’s many more unionized manufacturing jobs are gone. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Boston’s Northeastern University reports that 2.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the last recession. Simultaneously, about 320,000 new jobs went to immigrants in the manufacturing sector, concentrated in Texas and Southern California. Further, the Labor Department reports that 7 of 10 jobs outsourced go to U.S. contractors, rather than overseas (although some jobs have also gone abroad). In order to compete with other capitalists, U.S. bosses have been sharply cutting wages and working conditions. Most industrial workers have been forced to work for suppliers or mini-mills. Millions of these workers are Latin or other immigrants. Most are non-union. The hours are long, the work is dangerous. (The Communist magazine, Spring 2005, p. 44).
Blaming immigrants for this situation is akin to the KKK blaming black workers for working for lower wages than whites when they moved to the north from the south to find work. It’s the bosses — their racism and their constant competition for maximum profits — who force black and Latin workers to work for lower wages, slash better-paying jobs and produce more goods with fewer workers.
The solution is the opposite of the one proposed by the anti-immigrant racists (many of whom are open members of Nazi and racist skinhead groups who also hate and attack black workers). It’s working-class unity against racist low wages and conditions, racist unemployment and most importantly, against the capitalist system that profits by dividing and weakening the working class. Immigrant and black and white workers all have the same class interest. On-the-job segregation and apartheid help the bosses lower all workers’ wages.
We need to build unity and a fighting movement against the racist profit system which is based on the exploitation of labor. We call on black, white, Latino, citizens and immigrants, to stand up to the racist thugs who spread lies and division. The unity we forge is needed against the major racists: the top U.S. bosses who preach "multi-culturalism" (like Parks) while instituting and enforcing racist wage differences, low wages, terrorizing us with their killer cops, and sending our youth to war for oil profits in Iraq. The multi-racial unity we need is not to support U.S. imperialism but to build a movement to destroy it with communist revolution.
From U.S. To England, Racist Attacks Continue
The terror attacks in England have spawned a wave of racist attacks against immigrants and blacks in England. According to the BBC, since those attacks there have been 269 racist crimes reported compared to only 40 in the previous year in the same time period. Immediately after the July 21st bombing attempts the London police murdered an immigrant, Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes (memorial service above right). An 18-year-old black man, Anthony Walker(above left) was killed last Friday by a group of white men with an axe. The attacks have escalated so much that a leading Muslim cleric has advised Muslim women not to wear their traditional head scarves, the hajib.
Seattle Project Sparks Growth of Communist OrganizersSEATTLE, WA., July 31 — We’ve just completed another Summer Project here, and as always, it’s been a great experience. The difference this year was that younger student and worker leaders of our Party led, organized and carried it out. This challenged us with limited experience leading a SP, but we responded, selling 1,800 CHALLENGES (1,000 to industrial workers, 200 to the community and 600 to GI’s) and distributing 4,100 leaflets (3,500 to workers and 600 to soldiers).
We focused on industrial workers and soldiers. Surprisingly, rising at 4:30 A.M. to sell CHALLENGE to workers in the plants was not as difficult as dealing with the union’s stark anti-communism and misleadership. The latter was very antagonizing, especially for some of the younger volunteers who’ve had no trade union involvement. As the last CHALLENGE reported (8/5), the union "leaders" spent all their time trying to tear our leaflets from our hands, rather than organizing workers against the bosses’ recent 30,000 layoffs.
One night, we watched the movie "Matewan." We discussed the differences between the unions that were led by militant class-conscious workers in the early 1920’s, filled with anti-racist solidarity. Today the union "leaders" spend their time and our money making deals and selling us out. Class consciousness and union membership are at an all-time low.
But unions and reformist movements can only do so much under a system based on the exploitation of the working class. As history has shown, without the necessary ideology, strikes and sit-ins will only win limited victories, if any. Now we’re considered lucky if we can retain our health care or pensions.
One SP cadre school reviewed the history of workers’ movements. (Others were held on dialectical materialism, democratic centralism, immigration and the history of rebellions in the military.) One workers’ struggle was the 1934 West Coast longshore strike — which shut all shipping on the coast for three weeks — and the simultaneous San Francisco general strike, where over 125,000 workers walked off the job and ran the city for four days when the cops killed four dock strikers. But because the bosses still held state power, eventually they were able to turn around any victories (converting the 30-hour week into 45 hours) and slashing jobs with containerization. Any gains are on the verge of being destroyed for the next generation of industrial workers.
Because unions operate within, and currently defend, the capitalist system, they inevitably sell out the workers, not even maintaining any gains. This is why our goal must be to smash the rulers’ state power and erect a communist-led workers’ state.
With all this in mind, our other SP focus was soldiers. Right now the bosses are using all military personnel to defend and maintain their imperialist goals. However, those soldiers will eventually have a choice: fight for the bosses or fight for your class. Therefore, twice a week we talked with soldiers and their families, having many great experiences (see CHALLENGE, 8/3). Everyone was inspired to continue this with soldiers and their families back home.
Our final forum of volunteers, Boeing workers and other young workers from the area emphasized the importance of what we had accomplished the past two weeks. As the out-of-town speaker on political economy explained, the sharpening economic, political and military conflicts among rival imperialists means building a base in these strategic areas — among industrial workers and soldiers —is crucial, not to mention the need for large numbers of student comrades who will be the future soldiers and workers.
All in all, we grew as communist organizers this summer. The real victory will be to continue the struggle throughout the coming year. Adelante! Forward!
Immigrant Workers Fight Racist Attacks
FARMINGVILLE, NY, July 28 — Two weeks after our militant confrontation with anti-immigrant racists á la Minutemen here (see CHALLENGE, 8/3), we were invited back to a vigil/march supporting the workers viciously evicted from their overcrowded homes deemed "fire hazards." As our multi-racial group of young people entered the rally area, many workers thanked us for returning. While our conversations were limited because not all of us spoke Spanish, the workers didn’t seem to mind since the DESAFIO/CHALLENGE front-page told the stories of our Party fighting against racism and imperialism.
Marching, chanting and singing in Spanish with over 300 workers and supporters in the early evening hours inspired us with the feeling of workers’ power. Although much of the chanting and singing were nationalist in character, they told of workers uniting to struggle against the bosses and/or system that oppresses them. We interjected class-conscious chants which were quite popular, like "Workers, United, will Never be Defeated" and "The Workers’ Struggle has no Borders."
As we rallied at the end of the march, we spotted several anti-immigrant racists from two weeks ago videotaping and holding up anti-immigrant signs. While this was not the right time to confront them, as the anger of the laborers grows, along with our building ties among them, the gutter racists will get what they deserve.
Most of the speeches called for legality and equality to gain justice for workers under this system. We told workers standing nearby that even if the politicians build the centers for laborers they want, the only future capitalism has for immigrants and all workers is low wages, racist terror and endless imperialist wars (see page 2). The next day at a NYC meeting, Mayor Bloomberg’s Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, Guillermo Linares, promised more centers, without making any concrete plans to build them.
The best speeches came from a militant woman who condemned racism against immigrants from California to Arizona to Florida to New York, and another from a man who blamed U.S imperialism for having created the poverty of these workers in the first place.
These workers shouldering the brunt of the system’s racism are realizing how capitalism and racism go hand in hand. But liberal politicians and their agents are working very hard to build illusions that the system can help them. We must both support workers and bring them our communist politics, to turn their anger and struggles into fighting for their real emancipation from the horrors of capitalism and its racism.
a name="Coal Country Coalition in Solidarity with Nurses Aide’s Picket Line">">"oal Country Coalition in Solidarity with Nurses Aide’s Picket Line
EBENSBURG, PA., July 25 — "We work to live, not live to work!" "I was hired to work eight hours, not 16!"
These were the sentiments of more than 50 nurses’ aides, mostly women, demonstrating at the Cambria County Courthouse here against forced overtime at Laurel Crest, the county’s nursing home. Many of the aides not only work an extra four hours a day — getting called in early or staying beyond their shift — but end up working double shifts.
Members of the Coal Country Coalition, originally formed to battle the Klan in the Western Pennsylvania coal fields, joined this spirited workers’ protest, firstly to show our solidarity with the workers’ righteous cause, and secondly to talk with them about capitalism, workers’ power and the war in Iraq, hoping to raise the consciousness of some. We carried signs reading, "It’s not just Bush, It’s capitalism"; "Now’s the hour for workers’ power"; and, "Iraq War: Rich man’s greed, workers and poor bleed."
The workers, members of Local 1305, Laborers District Council of Western Pennsylvania, told us that forced overtime is causing them stress and leading to burnout. One worker’s sign stated: "Overwork seriously undermines workers’ health and safety." Another said, "I’m burned out. I work 32 to 40 hours in overtime alone in a two-week period. I could do 60 hours (overtime) in one week if mandated. It’s too much."
Still another woman, walking the picket line with her three children, stated, "I’m here because I want them to see we have a life outside Laurel Crest."
Many workers asked us about our signs. We talked with more than a few, saying it was capitalism, the entire profit system, that was waging war on workers nationwide. Many agreed. We also pointed out that the war in Iraq was a rich man’s war and that young workers and the poor were dying and being seriously wounded.
This protest reflected the fact that workers are fighting the ruling class’s attacks on their working conditions, as the bosses attempt to take out the cost of the war on their backs. We must support these workers while presenting the communist solutions to their oppression in order to win them to PLP.
Red Coal
United Airline Picket Agrees:
a name="‘We need a revolution...’"></">‘W" need a revolution...’
CHICAGO, July 30 — "Save our pensions, smash the system!" is just one of the chants PLP led on the system-wide United Airlines flight attendants informational picket line today. We were invited by a flight attendant who got our leaflet and CHALLENGE at an AFL-CIO rally. "I do agree and I’ve been saying this for a while. We need a revolution!"
Arriving at the picket line with signs reading, "An attack on some is an attack on all. When workers unite, the bosses will fail." "When bosses and unions are united (United logo), workers lose." Many workers enthusiastically took CHALLENGE and talked about communism, capitalism and whether reform led by the union can work.
One attendant took the paper and declared, "That’s why people become communists because…people are just not valued, only money is."
a name="‘Change-to-win’ SEIU Hypocrites Turn Backs on Home Health Care Workers"></">‘C"ange-to-win’ SEIU Hypocrites Turn Backs on Home Health Care Workers
NEW YORK CITY, July 29 — "I don’t know anything about the split. No one consulted us," said one 1199-SEIU delegate in the Nursing Home division. "What does that have to do with us?" asked another delegate in the Homecare Division. While the "Change to Win Coalition" has bombarded the media with its goals to supposedly "revitalize" the labor movement, its leader Andrew Stern and 1199-SEIU have turned their backs on their members.
Nursing home workers face an immediate increase of 21.5% in payments to maintain their Benefit Fund. The union says "no give-backs," but has submitted to arbitration, which will result in "some pain on both sides." Homecare workers earn between $7 and $9 an hour and work 24-hour shifts for 12 hours pay and a $16 night differential. The government and homecare agencies have jointly robbed most workers of time-and-a-half for overtime for 20 years.
1199-SEIU courts politicians crow about how they "understand" the "pain and sacrifice" of the mostly women, immigrant workers. While claiming to lead the charge against racist and sexist practices and poverty, they’ve done nothing. Meanwhile most of the 200+ "unionized" agencies have cut workers’ hours to no more than 40 to avoid overtime pay, dropping thousands of household heads below the poverty line. The union says back overtime pay isn’t its "priority." But the misleaders all want the sons and daughters of these workers to join the military to fight for U.S. imperialism.
There’s no end to the shameless hypocrisy of the bosses and their agents in government, unions, institutions and the media. Capitalism, a system of profits for the ruling class and exploitation and misery for the working class, must be overthrown. We need a communist society based on production and distribution for workers’ needs under working-class rule.
About a year ago a group of home attendants at the Personal Touch agency in Brooklyn filed a case with New York State Attorney General Elliott Spitzer’s office for back overtime pay. Recently they won a settlement for between $1 and $3 million, going back to 1998. According to a 5/26/05 memo from Family Home Care Services of Brooklyn and Queens, Inc., the court ruling in Coke v. Long Island Care at Home "removes the overtime payment waiver that home care providers such as us had."
A worker and her 1199 ESL teacher contacted the Attorney General’s office asking about back overtime pay for the rest of the 100,000 homecare workers at over 200 union agencies here. A labor division lawyer pretended to be surprised at the numbers. He told us the workers must report their cases individually or agency by agency, not for the whole industry. A small group of homecare workers is organizing workers to file cases, to protest at public appearances of the mayoral and gubernatorial candidates this fall and to get student support. We expect a long, difficult struggle.
To proceed PLP’ers know we must build mass class-consciousness and overcome passivity, fear and isolation of the homecare workers. Workers need to develop their own rank-and-file leadership and give up the illusion that union leaders and liberal politicians will save them. To create a core group of communist leaders among the workers we’ve formed two club/study groups, which include four home attendants. One has joined PLP. We have a readership and network distribution of 36 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS. These small steps can lead to future advances. We must stay the course.
a name="PLP’S Songs On CD">">"LP’S Songs On CD
The 1970’s PLP LP’s "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers — in English and Spanish — such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.
Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202
Bible Group Moves Against War, Fascism
Recently our political Bible study group had an excellent discussion about the London/Egypt bombings. First we noted how the Roman rulers and their class collaborators in 1st century Israel created a climate of fear and repression for egalitarian radicals like Jesus. Then we compared that time of imperial oppression to the present.
The priest expressed sadness at the deaths and the vindication Bush and Blair would claim for their invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many felt frustrated that, besides the daily stress of surviving as black and Latino working people, we had to cope with the fear of terrorist atrocity. Support for the NYC detention/searches was implied. I admitted to sadness, and anger at the ruling class, but also a stunned sense of, "Well, they’ll get away with this higher level of oppression without a fight." One more hour’s thought brought decades of communist training into play, and I began thinking (with the help of an excellent recent Party forum) of how we could take the offensive against fascism.
Our priest made an excellent analysis of how the cops’ new stop-and-search program could in NO WAY prevent terrorism because a well-prepared bomber could simply avoid one of the search points and move to an unguarded station. Several workers, along with myself and the priest, explained the thoroughly racist foundation of what is inevitably racial profiling, and the mass intimidation and docility it fosters. (A N.Y. Times editorial insisted the cops had to assure that "the appearance" of racial profiling must be avoided. But all the Times’ photos of searches were of darker-skinned or Asian people.)
We then criticized and rewrote a leaflet: "Go On the Offense: Against the U.S. Occupation of Iraq; Against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine; and Against Tightening Fascist Repression." Probably half of the ten involved wouldn’t be ready to take even agitational action against the subway searches yet. But everyone participated actively in drafting the statement below. I trust that, with struggle, more will begin to test in practice what they’re beginning to understand of the Party’s line. Excerpts follow:
The…corporations and their servants who actually run the United States are facing growing crises in their bid to continue to dominate the world…. The Iraqi occupation — far from guaranteeing control of oil and a secure military foothold in Asia— is more quickly…degenerating into uncontrollable civil war. And the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is a cynical public relations move to cover expanded control of the West Bank. Thus, continuing terrorist attacks on the U.S. and its lackeys are inevitable.
Within the U.S. support for the war…is slipping, and fewer young people…are willing to fill the ranks…. The ruling class is becoming more desperate in its need to intimidate and repress any and all opposition. The "random," inevitably racist, searches in New York area transportation centers are the next stage in a strategic campaign to develop fascist controls.
It is essential to expand the debate about these developments and to…resist the searches in mass actions. We must also continue to mobilize support for Lynne Stewart, the courageous defense attorney who will be sentenced in September after a Patriot Act conviction designed to intimidate all activists.
Red Churchmouse
PLP Forum Makes Plans to Step Up Fight Against Racism
NEW YORK CITY, July 23 — Fifty people attended a Progressive Labor Party forum tonight and heard reports and communist analyses of the protest against the fascistic Minutemen in Bridgewater, N.J., the split in the AFL-CIO and the continuing struggle of home care workers for overtime pay. Each report referred to the main issues shaping today’s world, imperialist war and the growth of fascism. The forum’s value was measured by the fact that many people gained a better understanding of some current events, and secondly, this encouraged two people to join PLP.
In the first report, two young people who had participated in the Bridgewater demonstration examined the nature of the Minutemen movement and our efforts to disrupt their recruitment meeting. Clearly the police have a zero tolerance policy of our efforts to confront these racists. The audience made generous contributions towards legal expenses for those protesters who were arrested.
Then a veteran red unionist compared the current split in the AFL-CIO to the one in the 1930’s. He contrasted the world view of communist-inspired union activists then to the pro-capitalist business unionists of both camps in the current AFL/CIO "split." He noted that today’s low percentage of unionization (12% of the work-force, compared to 35% 40 years ago) makes the unions less useful to the main, liberal wing of the ruling class and the Democratic Party. He also exposed the AFL-CIO’s role as an arm of U.S. imperialism worldwide, citing examples from Latin America and Poland.
A young comrade then outlined our Party’s strategic goal of building a base among industrial workers as a key force for revolution. She urged those present to consider devoting their working lives to achieving this goal.
In the last presentation, a veteran comrade and a home care worker teamed up to outline the racist super-exploitation of these mainly immigrant women. Listeners were horrified at their working conditions, involving long hours with no overtime pay, 24-hour shifts with flat rates of $16 for the overnight hours, and the low hourly wages chaining them to poverty.
During the discussion period, many questions and suggestions were directed to the home care worker in an effort to help that struggle. We also drew up a collective plan to fight the "random" searches in the NY/NJ mass transit systems.
Small Schools: A Losing Lesson For The Working Class
NEW YORK CITY — Many large public high schools here are being phased out for new "small" schools, comprising 125 students per grade. They will gradually become full four-year, 9-through-12 grade high schools of 500 students. These schools are housed in the same building as the large schools being phased out. Some of those buildings may contain three or four separate schools. As the process proceeds, the new small schools will take over the space the old large school has vacated.
As we will show, this change represents a further ruling-class attempt to increase their fascistic assault on the working class. As communists, with PLP leading the way, we must fight them on this critical battlefield for the minds of working-class youth.
Firstly, the rulers try to convince teachers that these new schools provide the mostly black and Latin inner-city children their only chance to learn. The racist nature of this move is revealed in the fact that schools in predominately white neighborhoods are not being forced into such reorganization.
Many teachers buy into the idea that they can design "their own school" the way they think it should be run. However, the realities of the education budget bring the teachers down to earth very quickly. Teachers work on curriculum, administration, etc., to design a school with a certain "theme." The bosses even have teachers disciplining other teachers to "improve student performance." The teachers can then remove a colleague who doesn’t conform to the "theme" of the school's designers. Some of the teachers in the new schools say they’re told not to talk to teachers in the phase-out school because "they don’t know what they’re doing." Supposedly their school is closing because their students flunked the state regents exams.
Secondly, the rulers are increasing their absolute control of the small schools. The latter have very small staffs — maybe 15 to 20 teachers and support staff, secretaries, etc. Most are either first- or second-year teachers without tenure. They’re asked to perform many different tasks, violating the union contract, tasks that a veteran teacher who knows the rules could refuse to do. The administration is everywhere. I observed one small-school principal go from room to room overseeing each teacher's lesson. The teachers must follow the pre-designed lesson plans issued from the central office or face disciplinary action. Capitalism in crisis uses fascistic methods to completely control what’s being taught to future workers. Many of these small-school teachers have told me they don’t protest their being overworked for fear of losing their jobs. The teachers’ union is doing little, if anything, to stop this abuse.
As in all working-class attacks in the schools, the students are the most exploited. Students and parents have been deceived into thinking that these small schools are somehow better for them. The school "themes" never really have anything to do with education. For example, the curriculum of the Stevie Wonder School of Music and Art, the All-City Leadership Academy or the Harbor School, don’t resemble Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science high schools. The new small schools take students on field trips at least once a week, or give them lots of lessons using videos instead of books. I’ve seen many students rebelling by walking out of the classrooms, arguing with the staff and, unfortunately, fighting with each other. The structure of these schools is very loose, where many young working-class students need structured guidance in their formative years.
Communists believe all workers must be educated to help lead and run society. They must be able to read, write and think critically. The bosses' plans for working-class children are either war or slave labor jobs, negating any education beyond those bosses’ needs. It is on this critical battleground that we must wage many fights to win the hearts and minds of the working class to communism.
Homeless Dying In Oppressive Heat Is Capitalist Murder
PHOENIX, July 24 — "I’m dying out here," declared a homeless man seeking shade while waiting for a handout meal and bottle of water. "The police are making us move all over the place. Where do they expect us to go?" (NY Times, 7/23)
So spoke one of the up to 20,000 homeless on the streets of this city during a month that saw 14 days of 110-degree temperatures and a week in which 21 people died due to the blistering heat. "When the temperature is 115 degrees," said a Phoenix Rescue Mission worker, "the pavement is 130 degrees and people’s feet are burned even through their shoes."
The actual death total "is probably much higher …because heat is either not listed on the death certificate or listed only as a contributing factor." (Arizona Republic, 7/24) The bodies of the homeless are discovered in dirt lots and between buildings. Volunteers distributing water found some were too weak to move.
Why these needless deaths? Because Phoenix has barely 1,000 shelter beds and hundreds of them are available only in winter. And these shelters lie in the shadow of real estate valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This utter disregard for the homeless who the profit system has thrown out on the street exists alongside a corporation/city government joint plan renovating downtown Phoenix to create a "business friendly" environment. The homeless are seen as a "nuisance" to be ignored or driven out entirely, their presence conflicting with the long-term business plan.
Of course, there’s no profit to be gained in providing shelter for the homeless to protect them from the ferocious heat, so naturally a system based on profit will never build the shelters needed to prevent death. And since most of the homeless are workers who capitalism’s mass poverty has dumped on the scrapheap in the first place, the bosses’ attitude is, "if they can’t produce profits, let ’em die."
Workers need to heat up the class struggle to put an end to this hellish system.
a name="Killing Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’"></a>"illing Immigrants — A Capitalist ‘Sport’
Additional victims of this relentless heat are job-seeking immigrant workers trying to enter the U.S. because capitalism has created even more mass unemployment in Mexico. During this lethal 3rd week of July, 13 immigrants died near the Arizona-Mexico border because of the 116-degree temperatures. Many more died crossing the border in other areas.
While the police protect the racist Minutemen bent on attacking immigrant workers, the U.S. Border Patrol is arresting volunteers from the group "No More Deaths" who station themselves along the border to transport immigrants to receive medical attention. These Border Patrol agents claimed that the immigrants — one of whom was vomiting blood and a 13-year-old boy who had severe blisters on his feet — "did not seem sick." No wonder many consider the Border Patrol just like the Nazi Gestapo.
a name="Workers’ Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’"></a>Work"rs’ Power Won’t Come Via Chavez’s ‘Socialism’
On July 22, DaimlerChrysler in Carabobo, Venezuela topped off six recent firings with two more, for trying to organize independently of the plant’s sellout union. Some workers wrote to Aporrea, a Venezuela news service:
"DaimlerChrysler, faithful to fascist and counterrevolutionary principles, once again attacks the working class…This company gets foreign currencies from the national government for its operations and financed the failed coup attempt and bosses’ strike of 2002. It has been plotting against a group of workers who decided to break with the pro-COPEI (the Christian Democratic Party) which for 25 years has not allowed a free and democratic union election."
The fired workers were trying to organize into the UNT, a union federation which has broken with the sellout union (part of the old corrupt union movement which was and is still supported by the AFL-CIO and was active in the 2002 coup and other attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez). The UNT has demanded rehiring the fired workers.
Venezuela’s workers, as in the rest of Latin America, are fed up with the old pro-boss and pro-imperialist union hacks. But, as in this case, they believe Chavez’s Bolivarian movement is the answer. Chavez recently called for "a socialism of the 21st century." This follows social-democracy á la Zapatero (Spain’s Prime Minister, head of his Socialist Workers Party). In essence, Chavez’s socialism is state capitalism with some free-market capitalism. Workers will get some crumbs, but they’ll still be exploited since capitalism in any form is based on extracting surplus value (profits) from labor.
But many workers understand socialism as being workers’ power, a real revolutionary anti-capitalist society where production serves the needs of all workers. History has shown us that the old socialist societies (of the Soviet bloc and China) led back to capitalism, so we need to fight for workers’ power under communism (no concessions to any form of capitalism). Following Chavez or a new set of reformist union leaders won’t produce that. These revolutionary workers in Venezuela need to turn their struggles into schools for communism.
a name="‘Communist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting back...’"></a>"Communist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting back...’
El Salvador —"We must be convinced that we have to fight racist ideas." "How can I explain that among us poor farm workers, the one who owns a cow thinks he’s more important than another farm worker?" "Racist attacks are a direct result of capitalist economics." These statements were part of a heated political discussion about capitalism and communism.
With light from a gas lamp on a beautiful star-filled night on a mountain, a new group of friends of PLP was meeting, including workers, youth, teachers and farm workers. The discussion centered on racism.
"Communist ideas are alive and well as long as we’re fighting Back," said the comrade leading the meeting. First we discussed the world situation, showing that racism wasn’t a question of "races," but rather that capitalism needs it to divide workers. "Our own internal conditions are primary," said a young worker.
We reviewed PLP’s fight to expose capitalism’s puppets like Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Nelson Mandela and Koffey Anan. No matter what color their skin, if they serve the capitalists, they’re racists.
We also talked about the LAPD’s murder of a Salvadoran immigrant and his daughter, two more in the long list of racist police murders. The Mayor of LA, Antonio Villaraigosa forgave the police. Then he invited San Salvador mayor, Carlos Rivas Zamora, and an FMLN group to his inauguration. They congratulated this social fascist mayor. "The devil created them and they join together," is a wise saying.
"I would have thought the laws of Dialectical Materialism would be very difficult to understand, but now that we’ve been discussing the law of contradiction, how the internal one is primary to advance the struggle for communist ideas, it makes me really enthusiastic," said one worker.
There was much sharp self-criticism about our weaknesses and how we can collectively overcome them. The comrades made valuable contributions about their own lives and how racism has affected them. We plan for every meeting to be a true political school to strengthen PLP.
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Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, across the border from Texas, has become the center of a war between drug cartels, employing local cops. Recently after one police chief was assassinated,his replacement was killed the very next day. It’s basically a war zone.
According to a Southern U.S. Joint Task Force of police agencies, Mexican cartels have now replaced the Colombian drug lords as the main distributors of cocaine, marijuana and methaphetamines in the U.S. (El Universal, Mexico, 7/31). The drugs flow from Colombia and elsewhere through Mexico and into the U.S.
The latest development finds the Mexican Sinaloa and Gulf cartels using heavy weapons, not just Uzis and guns. How do these drug gangs obtain their weapons?
"Reports by Mexican authorities say that in their fight for control of the drug routes in the Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean side of Mexico, the criminal organizations have increased their purchase of weapons in the U.S. The same way they transport the drugs to the U.S. they bring back heavy caliber weapons to Mexican soil." (La Tornado, 7/31).
Mexico’s authorities blame this on the U.S. government’s lack of control over the weapons sales. The Gulf cartel is the main group with a paramilitary wing armed with heavy weapons, but their enemy, run by drug capo Chap Guzman, now also has heavy weapons. Both use them to kill each other and anyone else who gets in their way. Now a 50 millimeter Barret machine gun was also found on one of the Pacific drug trafficking routes.
According to Mexico’s Justice Dept., the arrests and jailings of some drug capos and their lieutenants have led to a war among many of the drug cartels in Tamaulipas, Sinaloa and Baja California.
Drugs are big business. Methaphetamines are now becoming one of the most lucrative for the cartels, which have established labs on both sides of the border. The bosses — especially in the U.S. — have always been very hypocritical about the drug business. U.S. banks make billions laundering the drug-money. Only about a decade ago, Citibank had a special unit just to manage the money of the brother of Salinas de Gortari, then Mexico’s President, before he was jailed for drug trafficking and murder. Corruption is rampant among the politicians and cops on both sides of the border. Afghanistan again has become the biggest producer of heroin following the U.S. invasion and restoration of the warlords back into power. Now the weapons manufacturers are making big bucks from the drug trade.
So basically, as long as capitalism is in power, drugs will be around.
a name="Movie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’"></">Mo"ie Review: ‘The Fourth World War’
Must Smash Capitalism, Not Just ‘Big Mac’The documentary, "The Fourth World War," produced by Big Noise Films, uses footage of street demonstrations and interviews with activists, a poetic narration, and vibrant music, to present a vivid picture of the class wars that are taking place in Argentina, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and many other countries. In these wars, workers are resisting — with tremendous energy, solidarity and commitment — capitalism’s attempts to drive down their living standards in order to boost bosses’ profits. Some powerful segments include:
• Huge demonstrations in 2001 in Argentina demanding the resignation of the government viewed as responsible for the severe economic crisis producing a steep increase in unemployment and sharp decline in the standard of living. An older woman tells a mass rally they must develop a new, collective way of thinking about society: "I am ‘the Other.’ I am the unemployed worker. I am the revolutionary. I am those who take over their factories. I am those who do not eat. I am all of us."
• A general strike of South Korean workers, who shut the factories and march militantly through the streets protesting the "crushing poverty of the working poor," hidden by glitzy skyscrapers.
• Massive street demonstrations of black South Africans protesting the ANC government’s privatization of water, electricity and housing, leaving many workers without these basic life requirements. One South African activist bitterly recounts how in 1994 the South African owners of the mines and factories shrewdly replaced white politicians with black ones, who now manage the same exploitative system.
While there’s much to recommend in this film, there’s also much to criticize. Its politics are that of anarchism. Anarchists may hate capitalism and racism, and many youth influenced by anarchists have participated in many demonstrations. But anarchism opposes building a revolutionary communist party, which is the only way the capitalism they hate can be defeated.
Because of this basic contradiction, the film is often confusing:
• It never names the system of exploitation producing the poverty and misery that workers are shown fighting against. It refers to "corporate globalization," "neoliberalism," and "empire" but never once identifies the system as capitalism. This only leads people in the anti-globalization movement to think capitalism can be improved and saved, thereby promoting a liberal rather than an anti-capitalist outlook.
• Although the documentary shows the governments’ armed forces (police, army) repeatedly breaking up demonstrations, arresting and shooting protestors, while protecting the meetings of the corporate and political elites, the narration never states the obvious — that capitalist governments must be forcibly overthrown before capitalism can be replaced with a system of, by and for workers and their allies.
Street demonstrations, no matter how militant, will not topple the capitalist state. Yet the film suggests they can.
One segment shows unarmed peasants in Chiapas, Mexico — led by the Zapatistas — marching into a small, temporary military base and demanding the soldiers leave. The stunned soldiers, seeing themselves being filmed, don’t fire their rifles and leave the base. The film presents this as a big victory. But this is politically deceptive. Actually the army has been able to establish military bases in Chiapas, and unarmed peasants haven’t, and won’t, be able to prevent this. Only when the workers and peasants establish a red army — with units in both rural and urban areas, as well as in the military — will they win real victories.
The first criticism — that anarchists don’t identify capitalism as the enemy — is related to the second criticism, that anarchists don’t say capitalist governments must be overthrown. If anarchists tell people that it’s not enough just to demonstrate, or smash McDonalds’ windows, that the system needs to be overthrown, people will rightfully ask, "How can we accomplish this?" Then anarchists are in trouble, because it’s only by building a mass revolutionary communist organization that we can succeed. Without a revolutionary solution, anarchists often fall back into reformism, betraying their own desires for meaningful change.
BBC Polls: Marx Tops All Philosophers
Karl Marx was voted the most important philosopher in history in a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) radio poll of 30,000 people in the UK, leading with 28% of the total. An October 1999 BBC Online poll chose Marx as the "greatest thinker of the millennium," followed by Einstein, Kant, Descartes, Hawkings, etc.
Marx won the latest poll despite a massive campaign to stop him by The Economist magazine, representing Britain’s big bosses. The Economist pushed David Hume, who came in a distant second. Marx beat Aristotles, Schopenhauer. Confucius, Kant, Descartes, Locke, etc.
Now that Marx has won, the bosses are trying to "justify" it by separating his revolutionary philosophy from real revolution. Historian Eric Hobsbawn, a renegade from Marxism, used the already timeworn argument of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union supposedly marked the death of revolutionary Marxism, whining that "the fall of communism has liberated Marx of the deformations it suffered in the countries where real socialism ruled."
Hobsbawn uses the term "real socialism" to mean the attempts to build revolutionary workers’ societies from the 1920’s to the decade after World War II, not the state capitalism that ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1950’s until 1989.
But Marx was not just an "armchair philosopher." He himself said philosophy’s real job was not simply to explain the world, but rather to transform it. His discovery of the "dirty secret of capitalism" (surplus value extracted from labor); his helping to found — along with his comrade Frederick Engels — the first international revolutionary workers’ movement; their writing of "The Communist Manifesto"; and his development of Dialectical Materialism (the universality of change, that capitalism is not eternal) — all this still gives workers worldwide the roadmap to emancipate themselves from the endless wars, racist terror, mass unemployment, famines and super-exploitation that is capitalism.
Aspiring to be a good Marxist
UNDER COMMUNISM:
Can You Have Both Wealth and Health?
The first column in this space (6/8) discussed health care in communist China in the 1950’s, based on the inspiring "Away With All Pests" by British surgeon Joshua Horn.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the workers and farmers of China made tremendous strides after the 1949 revolution. That column described the struggle to improve relations among health care workers and patients, especially efforts to overcome the elitism of doctors and learn from the experiences of the worker-patients. (Future columns will give other examples, such as the amazing mass campaign to wipe out schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by snails.)
In the decades following the revolution, the CCP made health care widely available to the working class in poor and war-ravaged China.. (The "barefoot doctors" movement merits another column.) Starvation was eliminated and once the population had enough to eat, the Chinese diet became one of the healthiest ever: modest portion sizes, not that much meat and fat, lots of whole grains and some vegetables. Obesity was no problem and the physical labor carried out by much of the population probably meant fairly healthy cardiovascular systems and bones.
Sounds like a great start for a society aiming for communism. But what has happened to health and medical care in today’s capitalist China? Millions cannot afford health care. Drugs and prostitution have become serious problems. It’s unclear whether Chinese officials are able (or willing) to control potentially dangerous diseases like AIDS, SARS, or avian flu. Industrial accidents, especially in mines, are epidemic and pollution is a major health problem in many areas, even sparking anti-government protests.
Fast-food companies like McDonald’s and KFC are rampant and the consumption of animal fat has risen substantially. An increasing percentage of the population has adopted a sedentary lifestyle, sitting for hours at a time in factories and riding scooters or cars rather than walking or bicycling. Obesity, high blood pressure, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes are afflicting ever larger numbers, and western drug companies are salivating at the prospects of cashing in on these chronic conditions. Capitalism has undermined people’s health and made medical care unavailable to tens of millions.
Under communism, health care will be free and distributed based on need. Collective exercise time can be built into factories and offices. We will build and use mass transportation systems that include lots of opportunities for walking. Agricultural production and distribution will be organized to make fresh, healthy foods available to all. There will be mass campaigns to end smoking. Prostitution, drugs and pollution will be wiped out by a society that consciously and vigorously adopts a communist way of living and thinking.
When it comes to health and medical care, we need to learn both the positive and negative lessons of communist and capitalist China. Readers will undoubtedly have many other ideas about how a communist society should develop in order to guarantee the health of its people.
LETTERS
Red Vet Says, What You Do Counts
During our Summer Project, many comrades and friends questioned how you can know if you’ve made "progress" with friends at work, in school or in the barracks. At least in my case, I’ve consistently underestimated how much our work and politics affects those around us. Here are three examples, beginning when I was a soldier during the Vietnam War.
About 20 years after I left the Army, my wife was selling CHALLENGE at a local shopping center. One shopper stopped in mid-stride, stared at the paper and exclaimed, "I haven’t seen that paper in twenty years since Sam Smith sold it to me when I was stationed at the Fort."
"Sam Smith! That’s my husband." answered my wife. Needless to say she made that sale!
A few years later, I was running for union office on a slate organized by the "outs." I went to the first campaign meeting thinking I didn’t know these people too well as they were working in different plants, in different cities. After the formal meeting, one candidate pulled me aside with a couple of his friends and proceeded to recommend me highly. "You should listen to Sam and his paper," he told his friends, "These guys in the Progressive Labor Party are the real deal!" You see, during my court martial — for fighting against racism and imperialist war while in the Army — I had stayed at his apartment. I remembered him, but he really knew me and our Party!
Around this same time, I recognized another of my "rebellion" buddies from the Army as I was walking into work. He asked me what I was doing after all these years. "Oh, the same old thing," I answered, non-commitedly.
"Good!" he said, "because this is the most racist place I seen in years." We started some fight-back and he invited me to his house. When I arrived, there were maybe eight of his relatives sitting around the living room.
They immediately started to chat with me as if they had known me for years, complete with details of my history. There was only one problem; I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever meeting them. After about 15 minutes of this, seeing the perplexed look on my face, they broke out laughing. In truth, they had never met me before, but my "rebellion" buddy had been telling them stories about our years of class struggles in the Army, so they just "felt" like they knew me.
You just never know how much our political work and base-building affects those around us.
Red Veteran
Collectivity Conquers Fear
On July 25th I went to my first PLP demonstration. On my way to a comrade’s house, I was more nervous than I was willing to admit. My mother’s old joke of "don’t get arrested" struck me in an odd way, possibly because I knew this wouldn’t be like the other activities my mother jokingly issues this warning for. The minute I saw my comrade’s face all my fear diminished. He looked so ready for today’s event that I knew I had no reason to be nervous. Another comrade arrived and also helped quell my fears. We left for the meeting place, getting really excited. I had waited for this kind of event for a long time.
The environment at the assembly point was like every other PLP event — comfortable but charged with energy. After discussing the importance of fighting these fascists, we drove to Bridgewater, N.J., where I saw police cars. Suddenly my mother’s warning filled my head. I contemplated turning back but my comrade put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and I realized I was surrounded by friends who would look out for me.
Everyone marched in front of the sports arena, many with copies of CHALLENGE. Then the cops, deciding we were a "threat" to their fascists inside, told us to move back, away from the entrance. Fellow comrades urged me to stay away from the cops — I wasn’t there to get ‘arrested. One searing image was seeing a fellow comrade being handcuffed and taken away. I was angry, but kept myself in check, realizing this was not the time nor place to confront a cop. I could care less about getting arrested; it’s more the wrath I, and the comrade my mother trusted to watch out for me, would endure if I did.
Soon I got into the spirit of the chants. Slowly our numbers grew. It was hot. At times I wanted to stop, feeling faint (as has happened before) but the voices kept me going. I was amazed to be part of it all. My heart jumped as I saw the cops in riot gear arrive. We then stormed up the hill where comrades were holding up banners and cheering. I was ready to join them but realized we were supposed to go to the car and leave.
We returned to a friend’s house to talk about it all. A few thought it could have been organized a little better and that there should have been a little more discipline, but overall we felt it was a very good demonstration. Our four friends shouldn’t have gotten arrested, but that’s the way the system works against us.
I was sad to see it end. I never feel so right as when I am doing something with the Party. So thank you to all my comrades, you’ve become a second family to me.
First-time demonstrator
Rockers Raise $ For Anti-Racists
On July 29, a benefit concert raised funds for the legal expenses of anti-racist protestors, including one PL’er, arrested at a demonstration against the fascist Minutemen on May 25th in Garden Grove, CA. A diverse crowd of youth, students and workers came to listen to several alternative rock music bands and speakers. The latter reviewed the May 25th demonstration, the need to understand the nature of fascism as a necessary outgrowth of capitalism and to be aware of the danger of liberal politician misleaders. The last speaker concluded that the only way to fight racism is to build a multi-racial, revolutionary communist movement that rejects racism, patriotism and nationalism.
Many youth who helped organize and participated in the event because of its anti-racist character were glad to hear a broader analysis of the relationship between racism, war and fascism. Many also took CHALLENGE and asked to be contacted for future events. It was one more step in building an anti-racist, anti-fascist political campaign defending the anti-racist protestors under attack by the fascist Orange County cops, sheriffs, and courts.
Red Youth
Communist Art Celebrates Workers
What would the role of entertainment be under communism? In William Hinton’s historical work "Fanshen," documenting his experiences during the Chinese Communist Revolution, he recounts an opera he saw in the countryside. It clearly depicted the landlords’ savage brutality against the peasants, fleecing them for maximum profit. The opera’s music, acting, and beauty came from a realistic portrayal of the working class’ oppression.
Communist art will seek to challenge, motivate and educate as well as entertain. It will not be escapist, but will seek to illuminate working-class struggles.
About 10 years ago I saw the Chinese state ballet put on a beautiful show depicting a young woman being chased through dark woods. She eventually joined the communists and red flags and beautiful colors celebrated her new communist commitment. Her arrival at a communist consciousness was the greatest beauty; the ballet reflected this. This opera portrayed a glimpse of what art is capable of creating and inspiring.
Communist art will seek to create such consciousness. Soviet art celebrated the beauty of the working class and depicted factory workers building and struggling to create a socialist state.
Our art will celebrate the values communists hold dear — the family, love, struggle, and communist politics. Our villains will be the real enemies of the working class — the CEOs, kkkops, politicians, kkkourts and the bosses. Our creative ambitions will facilitate destroying rotten capitalist consciousness by building, reinforcing, and creating a morally communist conscience.
Red Reader
Attack on Lynne Stewart A Fascist Step
PLP’s role in the Stewart case is about exposing U.S. imperialism and the development of fascism via the legal system which is increasingly being used to discipline the working class. We must fight the fascists as they seek to expand their control of the world’s wealth for their own profits.
The followers of Lynne Stewart’s client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, have committed acts of terror in Egypt and plotted to do so in the U.S. He has called for Jihad against "Jews." Abdel-Rahman is a vicious, racist, religious fanatic and a murderous fascist but Red Lawyer is wrong to say that PL’ers shouldn’t be active in her defense.
Though Stewart has ideological differences with PLP, she certainly stands against imperialism and racism. Comparing her to Mathew Hale and Abdel-Rahman confuses the issue, which is that the ruling class is changing its laws to usher in growing fascism.
Red Lawyer’s letter (CHALLENGE, 7/20) was inaccurate. Ramsey Clark, who also represented Abdel-Rahman, testified at Stewart’s trial that he also broke the Special Administrative Measures (SAMS), both in the U.S. and in Europe. The reason the Bush administration chose to go after Stewart and not Clark or the third lawyer, Abdeen Jabara, was probably a political not a legal choice.
The fact remains that Lynne Stewart has been convicted of five federal counts. She faces 40 years in jail for acts which previously would have resulted in nothing more that a fine and/or professional disciplinary action.
Who was the target here? Not just Stewart but the entire working class. Changes in the legal procedures, as in Stewart’s case, show that anyone who speaks out can face "zero tolerance" and be viewed as a "terrorist," intimidating activists as well as lawyers.
Despite differences with Stewart, we must seize the political opportunity in this case to broaden our base, raising the issue in our unions, community organizations and churches. We need to understand and explain why this struggle involves developing fascism and affects us all.
A Worker
Pakistani Comrades Teach Their Youth
As a Party we emphasize winning the masses to communist ideas, a struggle that begins with our own families, many of whom are won to bourgeois ideology. We must struggle to build a political life which abandons bourgeois customs and creates our own communist habits.
Here in Pakistan we held a communist cadre school in July with a good number of school children (sons and daughters of PLP’s comrades and their friends). We believe these children are our future so they must prepare themselves for communist struggle.
Capitalism produces poverty, slavery, terrorism, religious and sectarian violence, exploitation, illiteracy, injustice and fundamentalism. The education system here is based on capitalists protecting their interests. It teaches that class division is made by God, so workers must thank God for their poverty. But we communists know it’s the capitalist system that makes us poor by exploiting our labor and resources. We preach each according to his/her need. Communist society will have none of the divisions rampant under capitalism. This is the only way to get rid of poverty, illiteracy, exploitation and alienation.
We also met with some trade unionists and professionals who’ve become fed up with the ideas of fake "leftists." Pakistan’s revisionist parties have quarreled over "social democracy" and "national democracy"; they viewed socialist revolution as a first stage for communist revolution. But these ideas failed to influence the masses so their rank and file became frustrated, leading to splits in their parties.
Then these fake leftists formed NGO’s and enriched themselves. We in PLP know that because past communist movements didn’t break with social and national democracy they ended up forming united fronts with the bosses’ organizations instead of relying on the working class. They limited themselves to trade unionism. Such errors led to a betrayal of the working class worldwide.
After a long discussion about the Party and its ideas, we struggle internationally under a single revolutionary communist party, the PLP. We analyzed the current situation in the world and especially in Pakistan, concluding that PLP is the only party truly struggling for communist revolution. We must work hard to win the working class to our Party. Long live communist revolution and PLP.
Comrade from Pakistan
Strikes Spread in Italy
Strikes are erupting throughout Italy. For the third time in four months, the Transport Workers’ union has shut down bus and subway service nation-wide. They’re protesting the government’s decision to allow the transportation companies to stop paying workers for the first three days of sick leave. Workers feel if they let this attack go unanswered, it will set a precedent for future attacks. Participation in all three strikes has been very high.
In addition, Alitalia flight conductors struck on July 18. And railway workers were scheduling a one-day strike on July 25 against staffing cuts that lead to longer shift hours and threaten safety conditions for themselves and train riders.
A friend in Italy
Fighting Racism Builds Internationalism
I was impressed once again by the importance of PLP’s international work while participating in the NYC Summer Project. On July 16, we were determined to confront the racists in Farmingville on Long Island in solidarity with the Latino day laborers who gather at 7 A.M. daily at a local 7-11 store seeking work in landscaping or construction. (See CHALLENGE, 8/3.)
It was great to see these workers encouraging each other to join the picket line and participate in the chants. As they picketed they would signal others to do the same. These hardworking immigrant workers put a lot on the line by joining us; had any been arrested they would have faced deportation, not just a misdemeanor court date. Despite this, the workers were ready for action. Seeing the especially vulnerable and oppressed group come forward makes revolutionary ideas come alive. They showed that "the man" can’t keep us down because we’re willing to fight! With students and workers joining in solidarity against the racist oppression infecting Farmingville, the racists and their cops took notice.
Our comrades’ arrests were not in vain because the workers saw our Party in action and our commitment to all workers. Visiting these workers, bringing them closer to the Party, will strengthen all involved. These connections can help advance our movement globally. Suppose these workers who join here get others to join PLP in Mexico, some of whom may return to the U.S. for work. Such results within this group can have powerful impacts internationally.
The imperialist nature of capitalism forces workers to emigrate, chasing after the jobs bosses create through their global investments. Many corporations have left Mexico for China and other still cheaper labor countries to make maximum profits from workers’ labor. Mass unemployment in Mexico drives workers to the U.S. They’re often separated from families until scraping together enough money for brief reunions. They then travel to wherever the imperialists have taken the jobs. This dangerous trek is repeated over and over, showing the workers’ strong and admirable commitment to their families as well as their desperation.
As the ruling class continues its drive to increase pro-USA, nationalist sentiment, we must continue to promote international working-class solidarity. Capitalist bosses use borders and "race" to divide and oppress workers worldwide. We are one working class and must unite to smash racism and the profit system through communist revolution. Only then can we live, not just survive.
I was happy to join my NY comrades both for the protest and the discussions. This has been an unforgettable, red-hot summer! Keep the fight!
Militant Anti-Racist
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Oil-hungry US won’t give up bases in Iraq
It’s the oil, stupid.
…The whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the middle East and its precious oil reserves… "the greatest single prize in all history."
…The invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond.
…Dreams of empire die hard. American G.I’s are dug into Iraq and the bases have been built for a long stay. (NYT, 7/28)
US leads new ‘race to the bottom’ for labor
…As labor costs in the United States continue to decline, employers in other advanced nations will feel pressured to lower their costs to meet the competition….
…The United States is leading this race to the bottom in wages, benefits, working conditions and social protections. Many companies that once considered investing in Western Europe or Japan are now investing in the United States as the new low-wage center of the developed world….
The average annual employer contribution for Social Security in the United States is $2, 196, compared with $8,274 in Germany…and $5,183 in Japan. (Labor Research Association)
Youth suicide high in capitalist China
Suicide is the main cause of death among young adults in China, the state media reported. Loneliness and a lack of medical support for depression are thought to have contributed to a suicide toll that is estimated at 250,000 people a year. (GW, 8/4)
Hope of Communism built Vietnamese morale
…In South Vietnam, he [Westmoreland] was made commander in April 1964, in part because of his ostensible knowledge of guerrilla warfare.
Westmoreland’s main flaw was that he thought that if he confronted the communist forces directly, either on the ground or with his massive airpower, he could simply win by attrition. The communists’ death toll was very heavy, and this encouraged the delusion that the war was being won, as Westmoreland could not imagine how relatively small countries like North or South Vietnam could sustain such massive casualties.
As Stanley Karnow, the Vietnam reporter and historian noted: "Westmoreland did not understand — nor did anyone else understand — that there was not a breaking point. Instead of breaking their morale, they were breaking ours." (GW, 8/4)
Bribery is zooming in Russia’s ‘democracy’
More than $300bn will be paid in bribes in Russia this year, almost 10 times as much as in 2001, according to a survey. The average bribe paid to corrupt bureaucrats is 13 times what it was four years ago, research by the Indem thinktank shows….
Bribes are most commonly paid to avoid army conscription, secure a place in a school or university, buy up a judge or get better medical treatment. President Vladimir Putin admitted the scale of the problem in a recent speech… (GW, 8/4)
Is Harry Potter worse than myths of Bible?
…[An] anonymous clergyman…got a primary school to cancel a Harry Potter-themed fancy dress party on the grounds that children who dressed as witches and wizards were being led into "areas of evil". You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of such a pronouncement, coming from a man who peddles what some regard as superstition. (GW, 7/28)
Point a finger at all religion not just Islam
…Yet before we embark on a round of religious finger-pointing we should note that all major faiths are the same….
Think of the muscular Christianity of imperialist, Victorian Britain (or indeed, of contemporary America) or Hinduism’s lunatic fringe. In Sri Lanka even smiley, happy Buddhism has exacerbated one of the most vicious civil conflicts of our time.
In the Lebanese war of the early 1980s, more than 70% of the suicide bombers came from Christian secular groups. And, before being outraged by the more belligerent quotes from the Qur’an, we should examine the words of many hymns…considerable portions of the old Testament or the religious references made by extreme Israeli settlers. (GW, 7/28)
- Soldiers Agree:
`IT's A RICH MAN's WAR . . .' - Protesters Arrested for Confronting Anti-Immigrant Racists
- U.S. vs. China:
Profits Now, Nukes Later? - Rove `Scandal': Liberals Want More Troops to Control Iraqi Oil
- LAPD -- Enforcers of Racist Exploitation
- Push Janitor-Aerospace Worker Solidarity in LA Strike
- Boeing Workers Defy Union Hacks, Greet PLP Summer Project
- PLP Links War, Racist Cuts To Capitalism At NEA Convention
- AFL-CIO `Insurgents' Another Gang of Pro-Boss Strike-Breakers
- PLP'S Songs On One CD
- Imperialist Rivalry For Oil Behind Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism
- Liberal Bosses, Politicians, Minutemen -- All Enemies of the Working Class (Part II)
- CIA Puppet Regime in Ethiopia Massacres Anti-Gov't Protestors
- Video Games Used to Recruit for War
- UNDER COMMUNISM
Auto Workers Will Have A Better Idea - According to Anti-Communists,
Hitler Defeated Stalin!! - LETTERS
- RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Soldiers Agree:
`IT's A RICH MAN's WAR . . .'
"All you had to do was mention oil profits and Iraq in the same sentence, and soldiers would grab the leaflets!" said one of the Summer Project volunteers, including PLP members, who distributed over 700 leaflets and 400 CHALLENGES at a local Army base and door-to-door throughout nearby apartments where soldiers and their families live. The leaflet was entitled "Oil profits or soldiers' and civilians' lives -- it's one or the other."
They were explaining the real reasons why U.S. soldiers are being sent to kill and die in Iraq -- oil profits and the rulers' need to ward off imperialist competitors. Suddenly, the wife of a soldier deployed in Iraq blurted out, "I know what you're talking about. My husband called me yesterday and told me he was being sent on a `suicide mission,' and that he wouldn't be able to call me until he got back to the States." She agreed the war was only benefiting rich multi-nationals like Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton. After taking CHALLENGE, the woman agreed it was important to build a higher level of political consciousness among soldiers. Others discussed with soldiers and their families the growing tensions and fundamentally contradictory interests between rank-and-file enlisted GI's and officers.
The sister of a GI who's back from Iraq but is being redeployed believed the war was not worth the death of a single soldier or civilian. She understood it was a "rich man's war," with workers paying the ultimate price for the bosses' profits.
In a show of class anger, the mother of a soldier in Iraq exclaimed, almost yelling, "I'd like to see Bush send his children to Iraq!"
Another GI, a member of the Special Forces, openly confessed: "We know this war is about oil profits for Exxon-Mobil, and we know it's not for us. Thank you very much for this."
"I was in Iraq, but I don't have an opinion about this war," said another soldier. "You can think, so you do have an opinion!" we responded. Although he wouldn't share his opinion, he agreed he had one, and took the leaflet and a copy of CHALLENGE.
After hearing us say Exxon-Mobil's profits and the bosses' oil wars are not worth the life of one GI or the death of one Iraqi civilian, a number of soldiers thanked us for coming to the town near the base and distributing the paper.
While many believe soldiers are won completely to capitalist ideology, most GIs were open to anti-imperialism and to PLP's red politics. In fact, the overwhelmingly positive reaction soldiers had to CHALLENGE surprised many in the group at first. The experience among many who had never spoken about politics with soldiers helped them to combat and demystify the negative stereotypes and opinions spread by the majority of liberal and phony "left" organizations. "While there were some negative responses," one said, "mostly it was a good experience, and I would definitely enjoy talking with soldiers again."
A Vietnam veteran felt soldiers were facing many of the same problems and difficulties today that he and others had to deal with during the 1960's. Suggesting that the war wasn't worth fighting, he felt soldiers needed to put their collective interests first, even if it means disobeying orders. There was some discussion of soldiers' tactics during the Vietnam War, including wildcat strikes on bases and "search-and-avoid" practices (where platoons would ignore orders and purposely avoid combat). Political solidarity is needed among soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. If these soldiers' and their families' reception of us is any indication, solidarity seems to be growing with every passing day.
Soldiers play a key role in the basic workings of capitalist society. The U.S. ruling class can continue to wage its bloody profit wars only by winning working-class soldiers to nationalism and racism. Yet, armed with communist ideas and leadership, soldiers and workers also can end the permanent cycle of wars, exploitation and racism endemic to capitalism. Winning soldiers to this fight will prove crucial to PLP's long-term struggle for communist revolution.
Protesters Arrested for Confronting Anti-Immigrant Racists
FARMINGVILLE, NY, July 16 -- Around 9:00 A.M., PLP'ers -- alongside angry day laborers waiting for jobs -- confronted the leader of an entrenched group of anti-immigrant racists here. As the bosses cut wages and workers' social services to pay for their endless wars, these gutter racists are attacking immigrant workers across the country, trying to divide workers and youth from seeing the real cause of these attacks -- capitalism.
On a previous visit we learned that every day these racists harass workers and those who come to hire them. On that earlier visit six workers took CHALLENGE and gave us all the information needed to plan a confrontation. (Farmingville gained international notoriety four years ago when two men linked to white supremacist groups attempted to murder two young Latino workers.) Recently, the town police raided and evicted these workers from their overcrowded housing on the pretext that it was a fire hazard, to hide its racist character. Some of those evicted are now living in the nearby woods. Today a local racist had thrown a bottle at a worker.
As we arrived, a group of four racists were leaving, with signs reading, "INS, do your job!" and "Deport illegal aliens!" We quickly set up a picket line. The workers we had met previously eagerly took stacks of CHALLENGE. They collected $11.00 for 30 papers they distributed.
Then the workers spotted the leader of the racist scumbags who was filming our demonstration from across the street -- big mistake on his part. We immediately surrounded him, blasting our chants in his ear through our bullhorn while the workers cheered us on from across the road. As our fists pumped and we shouted, "Working people have no nation!" the workers were grinning from ear to ear in appreciation that the local racists were getting what they deserved.
Then the cops arrived. At first, the coward chuckled arrogantly, but ended up whimpering to the cops to rescue him. The entire time, we marched around his car, continuing to chant slogans like, "We are not illegal, we are workers," and "The workers, united, will never be defeated," in both Spanish and English.
In minutes, at least 15 police cars arrived. Initially, the cops told the scumbag that since he was "free to leave," the actions of the demonstrators were not their responsibility. But in five minutes, they changed their tune and ordered us to the sidewalk.
At this point, one comrade made a short, impassioned speech in Spanish: "Now we can see that the police defend the racists, that the racists and the state are one and the same, but we're not afraid! We will continue marching!" When the on-looking workers heard that, they immediately joined our picket line.
When we didn't move quickly enough for the cops, they arrested four of us. The police targeted those they thought were the leaders, today's most visible fighters. But as communists in Progressive Labor Party, we're all leaders. We raised bail money to get our comrades released from prison, but in any event we would keep fighting.
As mainly a group of students and teachers, we have much to learn from these workers who, by joining this demonstration, put more on the line than any of us did. In defiance of the state, its laws, and its vigilantes, we will visit Farmingville regularly to water the seeds of revolution planted there today.
U.S. vs. China:
Profits Now, Nukes Later?
The rampant growth of capitalism in China puts U.S. rulers in a bind. On one hand, they can't do without China's cheap labor and its propping up of the U.S. Treasury through purchase of T-bills. On the other, they fear China's industrial expansion will provide the means to challenge the U.S. militarily. China National Offshore Oil Company's (CNOOC) impending $18.5-billion bid for Unocal has some in Congress demanding that the U.S. treat China as a strategic enemy openly and immediately. The dominant, liberal faction of U.S. capital, however, thinks it has time to make trillions more off China before things get too hot. But if China should move against Taiwan or gain a nuclear-armed ally in Iran, the liberals now pledging "engagement" and "partnership" will quickly change their tune.
Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with China three decades ago, realizing that the latter's embrace of the profit system would, for a time, prove a boon for U.S. rulers. It largely has done so. With workers averaging 40cents-an-hour wages, U.S. companies have raked in super-profits by erecting factories in China. Imports of low-cost Chinese goods have limited U.S. inflation. They've also provided a kind of bribe to U.S. workers, who can increasingly afford a broad array of consumer products despite stagnating wages. Prices of TV sets, for example, drop 9% a year mainly because of Chinese production. Wal-Mart imports $18 billion worth of goods from China annually. While the U.S. trade deficit with China reached $162 billion last year, Chinese rulers' holdings of $230 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds more than offset the gap. China's bosses are stealing more from workers than they can invest in the booming but not fully-developed Chinese economy. So they park a big chunk of the profits in U.S. government securities, which helps finance U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The liberal U.S. rulers' wing doesn't want to upset that apple cart just now, even as it plans for a future large-scale conflict. The San Francisco Chronicle (7/17/05) warns of repercussions if lawmakers block the China-Unocal deal: "Boeing could lose billions in contracts for commercial jetliners....The business climate for U.S. companies heavily invested in China's fast-growing market could turn chillier." Rockefeller protégé Kissinger is advising CNOOC on Unocal, as is JP Morgan Chase.
The main opposition to the takeover comes from the "Iron Triangle" of weapons makers, Pentagon arms buyers and compliant Congressmen. But Kissinger foresees a decade or more of breathing room: "Certainly, China's growing industrial capacity will improve its military capacity, and surely in a war with us, China could do us more damage in ten years than it can do now....China will not be in a position for a generation to threaten vital American interests militarily." (Council on Foreign Relations website, 7/14/05)
But the Nobel "peace" prize winner vows the nuclear murder of hundreds of millions when and if China does challenge U.S. profits through armed force: "It would suffer total devastation in such a war....[W]ar between major countries in the nuclear age is not the same as it was before World War I."
The clash could come sooner than Kissinger thinks. China's thirst for energy puts it squarely at odds with U.S. imperialism's need to control the world's oil and gas supplies. Taiwan, which commands the oil route between the Middle East and China, has become a flashpoint. A top Chinese general, Zhu Chenghu, said at an official briefing recently, "We will have to respond with nuclear weapons," if the U.S. military intervenes in a conflict over Taiwan. (New York Times, 7/15/05) [The general's statement reveals the Chinese "Communist" Party's utter abandonment of communist principles. During and after World War II, China's communists defeated their imperialist enemies not with capitalist "biggest-bang-for-the-buck" weaponry but by mobilizing the entire working class.] And, at the Persian Gulf heart of hydrocarbons, China has launched an "Arms for Energy" program with Iran.
"Beijing has reportedly threatened to veto any U.S. attempt to impose sanctions on Iran for pursuing uranium enrichment technology in what Washington alleges is a nuclear arms program. China has also sold Iran weapons, including long-range missile technology, that could threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40% of the world's oil exports flow. In October, Beijing used its friendship with Tehran to seal a $70-billion agreement giving Chinese companies a 51% stake in the huge Yadavaran oil field, Iran's largest onshore field, along with a promise to help develop the largely untapped area." (Los Angeles Times, 7/17/05)
To prepare for potential "real wars" -- such as a "mainland Chinese attack on Taiwan" -- in the near future, a New York Times editorial (7/10/05) urged that "the active-duty Army should be increased by about 100,000." (Hillary Clinton is sponsoring legislation to add 80,000 more troops to the Army.) And Kissinger holds the door wide open for U.S. military action against Iran. "I'm not recommending it but, on the other hand, it is a grave step to tolerate a world of multiple nuclear-weapons centers without restraint. I'm not recommending military action, but I'm recommending not excluding it."
We cannot predict when or how hostilities between the U.S. and China will erupt. But we understand that cooperation among capitalists is limited by an overriding need for each capitalist to eliminate his rivals. When Kissinger and General Chenghu speak openly of nuclear slaughter, it's time for the working class to go on our own wartime footing.
Rove `Scandal': Liberals Want More Troops to Control Iraqi Oil
The scandal over White House adviser Karl Rove is heating up. Workers shouldn't mistake the forest for the trees. This isn't about protecting the "freedom of the press," exposing "treason" or disciplining a Bush operative for playing dirty pool. It's about sharpening tactical differences within the ruling class over an imperialist war in Iraq that is going badly for the bosses, as well as over how best to mobilize society, the economy and the capitalist state apparatus for future wars.
Of course Rove is a sleaze ball, who will stoop at nothing to slander Bush's critics. Sure, he "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband, Joseph Wilson, for blowing the whistle on Bush's Big Lie about Saddam Hussein's non-existent purchase of uranium from Niger. But that's not exactly news; repeating it won't get us very far in understanding why the rulers are making such a ruckus about this scandal. Our class has nothing to gain from glorifying a married couple with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which has directly or indirectly murdered millions of workers worldwide since its founding 60 years ago. Nor should we fall into the trap of celebrating the supposed "courage" of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, now serving a short jail sentence for refusing to divulge her sources for leaks in the Plame-Wilson caper.
Miller is hardly a hero. In fact she, and by extension her Times' bosses, are war criminals. As Bush & Co. were preparing to invade Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, the Times' editors published a series of front-page counterfeit stories by Miller about Saddam Hussein's "nuclear program." They played a key role in mobilizing public opinion to believe Bush's B.S. about going to war over Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD).
Facts, as the great communist revolutionary Lenin once wrote, are stubborn things. Here are a few: (1) The legend about WMD was a crude pretext for a war Bush & Co. were going to launch anyhow. (2) Congressional liberals who now criticize the war -- including 2004 Democrat presidential candidate Kerry and 2008 front-runner Hillary Clinton -- gave Bush the green light in 2003 to launch it. (3) The liberal press, which now condemns Bush and Rove for their lies about WMD, could have exposed the fiction well before the war started.
The liberals who voted for the war did so with misgivings. But these were purely tactical. The Liberal Establishment and its media ideologues never questioned U.S. imperialism's need to control Iraqi oil as an indispensable weapon in the struggle to maintain U.S. world dominance. They did worry, however, about the wisdom of conquering and occupying Iraq with fewer than 150,000 ground troops and few allies. But they put aside their doubts for the sake of class unity.
Now, however, the war is going badly. There seems to be no end in sight. Even the top guns in the U.S. military brass have to acknowledge that the anti-U.S. resistance is gaining strength. The U.S. occupation has increased rather than diminished the number of suicide bombers. Exxon Mobil and cohorts are a long way from enjoying the stable investment climate they covet to begin reaping a profit bonanza from pumping, refining and exporting Iraqi oil and gas. Perhaps most ominous for the rulers is growing cynicism among soldiers, workers and youth about the war and U.S. society in general. The military is stretched thin and demoralized. It needs twice the number of boots on the ground that it now has in Iraq. Hardly a week goes by without news about the army's failure to meet its recruitment quota. None of this bodes well for U.S. imperialism's future plans.
These, and not Rove's "dirty tricks," are the real reasons the liberal politicians and media are going after the Bush White House. While it's entertaining to see Bush -- the born-again man of "faith" and "character" -- having to duck questions about a top advisor who's a character assassin, the Times and others aren't attacking Rove and Bush for our benefit.
At stake here are an empire to defend, trillions of dollars in present and future profits and a world to rule -- and Bush simply isn't up to the job. That's the real scandal from the rulers' point of view. Rove may well prove to be the fall guy, because they always need one, but the center of the storm is a presidency that has failed to meet the needs of U.S. imperialism.
Bush might get impeached. After all, a lie about a sordid sexual scandal served as an excuse to impeach his predecessor, Clinton. Bush's failure and transgressions are much greater. Unlike Bill Clinton, an opportunist from a modest background who successfully hitched his star to one ruling-class faction, Bush actually comes from that class. His family represents the unstable marriage of convenience between Wall Street and a number of U.S. business interests. They include the domestic Oil Patch and oil services industry (Halliburton, etc.), which don't always share the agenda of liberal Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans. Whether or not Bush is impeached is of little concern to workers.
From a working-class viewpoint, the real "scandal" here is the profit system itself. When the bosses go to war, they always concoct a lie to cloak their mass murder in the fabric of righteousness. Lyndon Johnson's genocidal escalation of the Vietnam War began in the summer of 1964 after a fabricated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Clinton bombed the former Yugoslavia to smithereens in 1999 in the name of "human rights." Throughout his eight-year presidency his policy of sanctions and bombing in Iraq slaughtered hundreds of thousands, especially children.
The real scandal is that war and imperialism are inseparable. The rulers are trying to punish Bush for his ineptitude. But since 2003 this ineptitude has already killed over 100,000 Iraqis and maimed many more, and has caused the death of nearly 2,000 U.S. troops, plus tens of thousands injured. The liberal bosses' idea of competence is a presidency that can impose a police state at home and enlist millions in a military capable of far more violence and destruction than the Bush White House has managed to produce. There's no "lesser evil" here.
The Rove scandal and the liberals' hypocrisy around it reflect a sick, rancid system that has managed to hold on for so long only because the old communist movement fell under the weight of its own fatal errors. However, cynicism about the rulers won't get us very far. Yes, Bush, Rove, Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Kennedy, and their media mouthpieces are all rotten. But shaking our heads in dismay or disgust isn't the answer. Communist revolution remains the only road away from the profit system's dung heap of endless war, racism and terror. It's a long, hard road, but it nonetheless represents the interests of future generations of our class.
LAPD -- Enforcers of Racist Exploitation
WATTS, LOS ANGELES, July 10 -- "I don't want an apology. I want justice," declared Lorena Lopez, mother of Susie Marie Lopez. The LAPD killed Susie, her 19-month-old daughter, bullets piercing her left knee, her outer calf and finally her head, killing her instantly. The police also killed Susie's father, Raul Peña.
After a 911 call, the South East Division cops showed up at Raul Peña's small dealership in Watts. They claim Mr. Peña started shooting at them, while holding his little daughter in his arms. The family said Mr. Peña was upset and needed counseling, that he would never hurt his baby. They charge that he didn't shoot first.
Mrs. Lopez was on her knees, begging the cops not to shoot, but instead to call in a psychologist to talk to the distraught man. But a police SWAT team brought in nearly 100 cops who fired more than 60 bullets into the small office, killing father and baby.
Police Chief William Bratton and his lieutenants are working overtime to convince the public that Susie's father is the "sole responsible person" for his daughter's death. The racist LAPD keeps attacking the father's character.
Black and Latino residents of this neighborhood held several demonstrations against the murderous cops, demanding they be fired. Hundreds attended the wake at Mrs. Lopez's home. Several comrades distributed leaflets condemning the cops and connecting racist police terror to the capitalist system. Many asked for extra flyers and CHALLENGE. They expressed both anger at the police and the need for unity between black and Latino neighbors against the killer cops. Some agreed the problem is the system itself. People questioned why the police didn't look for alternatives to halt the standoff. An onlooker said the cops saw little Susie as "collateral damage."
Comrades also went to the mass for Susie, where once again leaflets and CHALLENGES were distributed outside the church. Many commented approvingly and asked for extras. The media was there to spread their racist filth. The priest had to recognize that multi-racial unity had resulted in the aftermath of Susie's death but couldn't quite blame the cops. Instead his sermon was about making the "right choices," clearly directed at the father.
Liberal politicians like Maxine Waters (who attended the wake), Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and AL Sharpton (who came to the mass) are telling everyone to rely on the results of the "investigation" and/or the "Community Civilian Police Review Boards." The Police Department's Force Investigation Division and the Inspector General's Office are "investigating" the cops' actions. The district attorney's office will "monitor" the investigation. That's like saying that after the wolf eats the chicken, a wolf's council will investigate the incident. No report will ever justify racist murder.
The Civilian Police Review Board would have us believe the cops can be "reformed." But that can never happen because their job is to enforce poverty wages, exploitation, terror and scabs, while protecting the rich and their capitalist system.
These two murders come a month before the 40th anniversary of the Watts Rebellion, which erupted not far from this site at 116th St. and Avalon, during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. Today, amid another imperialist war, racism continues and intensifies. Rebellions and protests are good but in the course of these struggles we must win groups of youth and workers in the factories, schools, churches and the military to build a mass red-led movement to fight the real cause of racist terror and endless wars: capitalism. That's the goal of the communist PLP. Join us!
Push Janitor-Aerospace Worker Solidarity in LA Strike
LOS ANGELES, July 17 -- Seven hundred janitors who clean the huge aerospace giants Boeing, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon in El Segundo, Redondo Beach and Long Beach began striking July 6 after contract talks stalled. The workers -- members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- struck over low wages and unfair labor practices by the three cleaning services subcontractors: Servicon Systems, Somers Building Maintenance and Aramark. They take home about $230 a week, without health care. Boeing refused to admit any responsibility for these slave-labor wages, saying it was an "issue between the janitors and the cleaning services."
PLP'ers joined the picket line with CHALLENGE and leaflets about the struggles of Boeing workers in Seattle, literature which the strikers gladly took. We told them, "We're here to support you and to say the workers at Boeing are in a similar struggle." Before finishing, one striker interrupted to say, "Wait. I want you to make this announcement to all the strikers."
While the workers picketed Raytheon and Boeing they chanted (in Spanish), "What do we want? Justice!" When we chanted, "The workers, united, will never be defeated!" the strikers became more enthusiastic and chanted that slogan.
They gave one of us their bullhorn. We emphasized the need to build the unity of all workers against all bosses' attacks. We added that the reason for these attacks was capitalist greed and the war in Iraq. We mentioned that whatever lessons they draw from their strike will benefit all workers.
The strikers applauded. Some gave their names. Then a striker told us, "It's true [as we had said] that workers' struggles have no borders. For example, in El Salvador a few families control all the wealth and the rest of us work for them." He gave us his name and requested our communist paper.
The janitors' union has over 9,000 members but some workers pointed out that the leadership is doing nothing to mobilize them to support the strike, nor to organize support from the machinists either. They emphasized the need to build a labor movement in which solidarity is the key principle.
Such a movement must be built on the communist principle that all workers have the same class interests and need to act as a class against the bosses' class dictatorship. Ultimately, the lasting victory in this or any other strike is the growth of the revolutionary movement, of Progressive Labor Party, whose goal is to destroy exploitation with workers' power, communism. We urge workers and students to go to the picket lines and support these workers.
Boeing Workers Defy Union Hacks, Greet PLP Summer Project
SEATTLE, July 17 -- Summarizing the first week of PLP's Summer Project here, a veteran Boeing worker and comrade concluded that "this may be a long-term struggle, but we can do this!" She helped us see it as a concrete step in the development towards Progressive Labor Party's goal of communist revolution. So far the numbers support this: 2,000 Strike Sanction flyers and 1,000 leaflets distributed and 1,200 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS sold -- 700 to Boeing workers, 100 to the black community and 400 to soldiers (see pages 1 and 6).
"Let them try to take this from me..." one worker warned when, true to form, IAM union hacks snatched our leaflets from workers' hands. Workers know if the hacks are trying to keep it from them, it must be in their interest.
Many evening visits and contacts were made with workers and soldiers. We focused on working-class solidarity, particularly among industrial workers concentrated at Boeing aerospace. The machinists' contract expires soon and last week saw the ritual strike-sanction vote. While the union sells out the workers every contract, this year there's an oil war and massive cutbacks, as well as the Boeing sale of their Wichita plant (see CHALLENGE, 7/6 and 7/20). PLP is exposing the union hacks' sellout, while winning workers to see that only PLP and revolution can truly end exploitation and war.
Project volunteers spoke with workers streaming in and out of the strike-sanction vote. We cited the need for a militant labor movement, but concluded that the only long-term solution to cutbacks and sellouts is a revolutionary movement destroying the profit system. A concerted effort on our part and a marked increase in class solidarity, led by communists, can fight the worsening attacks on workers.
We were inspired to see that a group of "concerned workers" had circulated a petition at the strike sanction vote calling for a new labor movement based on anti-racism and working-class solidarity. We heard one worker declare, "Everyone sign this petition! Workers Solidarity!" One petitioner said over 240 workers signed. We applaud these workers and fight for them to hear our revolutionary line. After all, the only choice in the present crisis -- with attacks from all sides on workers' livelihoods -- is to stand together as a class and use the power we have to halt production and halt the flow of profits into the pockets of the ruling class.
In the plants (average age is 52), a 60-year-old Boeing worker exclaimed, "I never thought I would be reading a communist leaflet...and agreeing with it!" He said his only hang-up was the word "communism" at the end. After a discussion with a friend, he read the Seattle General Strike article from PL magazine and wants to see PLP's documents, Road to Revolution III and IV. He planned to pay for and distribute a leaflet on the company's and the union's lies.
At the end of the first week, Boeing workers and Project youth attended a forum to learn from the experiences of a seasoned veteran of the class struggle. He described a railroad strike in the sixties in which the workers, through mass agitation and years of concentrated development of class consciousness, led by communists, were able to halt all freight transport throughout New York City in defense of 660 railroad tugboat strikers. Truck drivers, freight handlers and electricians banded together to respect the strikers' picket lines and stop all scabbing -- not one worker crossed the lines.
We also heard from a young worker from a local Boeing subcontractor (with thousands of workers) describe how work was being sent from Boeing union shops to hundreds of non-union subcontractors. In contrast to older Boeing workers, these subcontractors hire mainly young black and Latin immigrants, half of them women. The worker explained the necessity of -- and our ability to -- organize for revolution in such shops.
Both speakers inspired us to see the need and possibility of influencing industrial workers, especially in the non-union shops that capitalism is forcing onto the working class.
In the remaining week, we'll be out at the plants mornings and afternoons distributing CHALLENGES and leaflets with our communist analysis and talking to workers eager for a new direction in the class struggle. The latter may be a long one but we can and must win it, and we've done a good job moving it forward this week!
PLP Links War, Racist Cuts To Capitalism At NEA Convention
LOS ANGELES, July 18 -- A young black teacher, standing on her chair, shouting "Aye!" and waving her card in a vote to put the National Education Association (NEA) on record against the U.S. occupation in Iraq is my most vivid memory of the July 3-6 convention here. The motion called upon Bush and Congress to "support our troops by creating an exit strategy to end the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and bring our troops home." Of course, this wording echoes the Congressional Democrats' disagreement with Bush's war tactics, and opens the door to send still more troops and kill even more Iraqis, which is not really the intention of anti-war teachers. But it also expresses the anger of the majority of teachers at the death and destruction of Iraqis and U.S. troops and creates the potential for winning teachers to revolutionary politics.
Daily outside the convention hall, comrades and friends distributed PLP flyers, totaling over 5,500, and 800 CHALLENGES. Teachers were very receptive. They began asking, "What's today's flyer about?" Four different flyers covered the war in Iraq, prison construction, "Let Us All March Against Racist Budget Cuts" and "It's Not Just Bush and Arnold, It's War and Capitalism."
They opposed the NEA leadership's line of blaming Republican politicians for capitalism's problems and challenged them to lead all 9,000 delegates to Governor Schwarzenegger's office on July 5 to protest $2 billion in state education budget cuts. Although they planned a hand-picked delegation of 300, 3,000 eventually joined the march.
Later we erected a banner inside the convention center where exiting delegates could read: "Capitalism leaves every child behind." This stood for 20 minutes, receiving favorable comments from several delegates before security intervened. We also organized a well-attended PLP Forum, which included members, friends and delegates new to our ideas.
REFORM AND REVOLUTION
We advanced PLP's revolutionary principles with our friends and other NEA members, pointing out that even if the war ended, education wouldn't be fully funded (see "Permanent War Rules Out `Peace Dividend'"CHALLENGE, 5/11); that constant war is integral to imperialism; and that capitalism is a system of exploitation which can never satisfy workers' needs. We want teachers to understand that revolution is a war on the bosses to end the profit system; that communism is a system based on workers' needs; and that they should join PLP.
Shortly after returning from the convention, a study group examined how reform and revolution are both united and contradictory. As communists we participate in both processes, but reform builds capitalism and revolution destroys it. Actually we had been applying these concepts daily, as we tried to move delegates to the left in caucus and floor discussions.
For example, asking 50 delegates to sign a petition enabled us to introduce New Business Item (NBI) 39, which asked the NEA to "encourage its state and local affiliates to organize job actions in alliance with public employee unions and organizations....in response to massive cutbacks in funding for schools, healthcare, housing, and other social services caused by the war budget." The maker of the motion and our delegates speaking for it attacked the imperialist nature of the war in Iraq, described its burden on the working class and called for working-class unity in fighting these attacks on our class. While NBI 39 was defeated, it led to sharper discussion with many friends about the nature of the system.
Our speeches on the floor and in caucus meetings sparked a higher level of political response from delegates. However, we should have exposed the bosses' plans to recruit green-card soldiers for their imperialist war when a resolution about the DREAM Act demanded that "legalization [must] not be used as an incentive for or be dependent on military service." We also could have better explained that 70% of the prison population is non-white because the ruling class is intent on jailing the unemployed and young working-class men who are potential rebels against capitalism's racist attacks. As we return home to our study groups, the collective struggle with PLP's members and friends will help us all take advantage of the openness of our friends to the Party's ideas.
Education Not Incarceration
On June 30, we attended a pre-convention conference sponsored by two groups within the NEA: Education Not Incarceration (ENI) and the NEA Peace and Justice Caucus. ENI wants to shift funding from prisons to education. In workshops, conference participants were quite open to our revolutionary ideas. We explained that the imperialist war in Iraq was the primary factor affecting education and other social services, and that the massive 25-year increase in prison construction (during declining crime rates) is the racist cutting edge of an over-all fascist attack on the working class. Young people in one workshop responded enthusiastically when we said the bosses are trying to use the same youth the cops target on the streets as cannon fodder in Iraq, noting the revolutionary potential of working-class soldiers with guns in their hands. We also met teachers who want to work with PLP members in their areas to continue the struggle.
AFL-CIO `Insurgents' Another Gang of Pro-Boss Strike-Breakers
The AFL-CIO convention in Chicago is shaping up as a battle between the old guard (Sweeney & Co.) versus the "new insurgency," as phony a group of labor "leaders" that have ever sold out their membership. PLP -- understanding the pro-boss nature of all hacks -- was the only one who attacked the Sweeney coronation with a mass picket line ten years ago when he represented the "new guard."
The heads of five "insurgent" unions, with about one-third of the Federation's members, have two main demands they agree on: more power for themselves in an Executive Committee of select larger unions; and a 50% rebate on the dues they pay to the central Federation. Now consider who these "leaders" are:
* Joe Hansen, president of the UFCW (United Food & Commercial Workers) with 1.4 million members, has a resumé that includes destroying the strike and the union of meatpackers in Local P-9 who fought Hormel in the mid-1980's. Hansen plotted with the strike-breakers against a militant rank and file, becoming trustee of the local and then expelling the workers' elected leaders, offering unconditional surrender to the company and seeing to it that none of the strikers ever returned to work. Hansen screwed up the Southern California grocery strike and today pushes 2-tier contracts while gaining new members by making sweetheart deals.
* Andrew Stern heads the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the biggest in the AFL-CIO with 1.8 million members. Recently he spent $65 million of his poor members' money to try to elect John Kerry. One of his right-hand men, Steve Lerner, headed up the failed campaigns to organize the strawberry pickers and the Las Vegas building trades. Stern distinguished himself by promising corporations help in lobbying state regulators in exchange for union recognition. He is most aggressive at applying trusteeships, stripping power from a huge number of locals, a la Hansen at Hormel. He "organized" 70,000 Illinois health care workers by getting exclusive AFL jurisdiction and making a deal with Democratic Governor Rod Blagoievich in exchange for helping him get elected in 2002.
* James Hoffa, son of the infamous "Jimmy," whose Teamsters has 1.4 million members is close to the most reactionary and corrupt elements in that union. He stands out as pusher for oil drilling in the Artic and attacking reform-minded rank-and-filers. He collaborated earlier this year with the bosses at Tyson Foods to decertify his own union's Local 556 in Pasco, Washington. Its 1,500 members were bombarded with Hoffa's attacks on the local leadership, threatened with plant closure and forced workers to vote twice on a sellout before they capitulated.
* Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, president and hospitality division chief respectively, of the merged UNITE-HERE (apparel, laundry and hotel and restaurant workers), with 450,000 members. Raynor never fought the shakedown artists in UNITE's garment locals and essentially abandoned the country's sweatshops as a "lost cause," giving free rein to some of the most exploitative bosses in the U.S. Raynor's number two man, at UNITE, Edgar Romney, has run the union sweatshops in New York where contracts were never upheld, labor standards were violated and members lost wages and overtime pay. Wilhelm has never purged Mob influence from HERE.
* Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers with 800,000 members, has never worked in the trades, owes his position to his father who was union Secy.-Treasurer and ran it like a fiefdom jointly with the Mob, who the younger O'Sullivan has never cleaned out.
So these are the "insurgents" challenging the Old Guard. With "friends" like these, the rank and file doesn't need enemies.
PLP'S Songs On One CD
The 1970's PLP LP's "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers -- in English and Spanish -- such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.
Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202
Imperialist Rivalry For Oil Behind Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism
The terrorist attack that hit London's underground (subway) and blew up one bus has already claimed over 50 lives, many of them black, Asian and white workers. Several of the terrorists were identified by surveillance cameras, who turned out to be young British men won to the reactionary idea of political Islam (fundamentalism).
The terrorist attack (7-7) occurred a day after London won the 2012 Olympics and in the middle of the imperialist G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. Tony Blair returned to London from the meeting while Bush condemned terrorism. All the world's big bosses have condemned this attack. How hypocritical! These same bosses are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of workers and their families worldwide due to wars, poverty, starvation, lack of decent health care, mass unemployment, racist police brutality, and more -- all created by a capitalist system driven by the need for maximum profits. This is mass terror.
There are already many rumors about who was really responsible for this terrorist attack. The London Times (7/17) reported that MI5 (British domestic spy agency) had one of the terrorists, Mohammed Sidique, under investigation. Previously, the cops had said they didn't know any of the terrorists. But apparently, they knew Sidique and let him go because they considered him non-dangerous despite his connections with reactionary Islamic groups. So, conspiracy theories abound about who is really behind these terrorists. A French intelligence leak reported that MI5 had said that, contrary to other terrorist acts, military explosives were used on 7-7.
What is not a conspiracy theory is that all these groups are fighting for the control of the oil profits of the Middle East and Central Asia. They include Al Qaeda that represents Saudi bosses who want to break with Exxon-Mobil; MI5 representing BP-Amoco and Shell; Mossad representing Israeli bosses; and Pakistan's drug-dealing Inter-Service Intelligence service.
We live in a world full of danger for the international working class. Imperialist war for control of oil and other resources has put millions at risk, from New York to Madrid to Baghdad to Kabul to London. We in PLP condemn all forms of anti-working class terrorism, whether by individual terrorists or the terror hi-tech bombing by B-52s and cruise missiles, or the racist-fascist backlash against Moslem workers and youth.
While the G-8 bosses have condemned the London attack, don't hold your breath if you think the imperialist rivals of the U.S.-UK war in Iraq will help Bush-Blair in their troubles there. The rivalry among the imperialist blocs is sharpening. These bosses have inflicted war and tremendous terrorism on the world's workers and their families. The only way to smash all forms of capitalist terrorism is to fight for a world without any bosses, a world run by and for workers: communism!
Liberal Bosses, Politicians, Minutemen -- All Enemies of the Working Class (Part II)
(Our last issue reviewed bi-partisan immigration reform enabling U.S. rulers to use immigrants as cheap labor, cannon fodder and to "tighten the fascist noose around the neck of all U.S. citizens and documented residents.)
With this reform, U.S. rulers are also aiming to further stem the flow of immigrants by eliminating one of the main reasons they've been forced to stay here and bring their families: inability to travel abroad. The H-5B bill will allow workers in the program, and their families, to travel freely back and forth. But most important, they hope this bill would win many immigrants and their children to join the military. If this fails, when a draft is reinstituted, millions of these workers will be forced to enlist or face deportation.
This policy follows the mandate of United We Serve in which U.S. rulers' strategic thinkers advocated the need to integrate millions of undocumented workers and their children into the system, to foster their patriotism and consequent willingness to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. As U.S. rulers' need for more "boots on the ground" in Iraq grows, so grows their desperation. Articles in both the N.Y. and LA Times have promoted allowing undocumented workers to serve in the military in exchange for U.S. citizenship.
Behind their "humanitarian" facade of "caring" for the immigrants' plight and "safeguarding" wages and jobs for U.S. workers, U.S. bosses are creating slave-like conditions for millions of immigrant workers. This includes legislation like the Real ID Act, which establishes uniform standards for state driver's licenses. It effectively creates a national ID card (resembling South Africa under Apartheid) to better control the population, supposedly aimed at possible immigrant "terrorists." It intensifies the fascist conditions U.S. rulers will use to try to stifle the struggles of all workers against racist cutbacks, unemployment and imperialist wars.
Both the open and the liberal racists are the enemies of the whole working class. Relying on "lesser-evil" liberal politicians who back expanded wars and low-wage war production is a deadly trap. Racism will be ended when a united working class revolts and eliminates its source: capitalism. The rulers' biggest fear is the growth of a massive alliance of exploited industrial workers, students and soldiers to fight for power for the whole working class. That is the road to victory.
Bosses Want Immigrants for Cheap Labor, War Recruits
The bosses' media is "discovering" that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are good for the economy. A Business Week cover story (7/18) entitled "Embracing illegals" cited increasing profits from selling goods, opening bank accounts and issuing home loans to undocumented immigrants. It said with these money-makers, the Corporate Establishment is legitimizing the over 11 million undocumented immigrants, 84% of whom are between 18 and 44.
The same week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story "Banks Open Doors to New Customers: Illegal Immigrants." It also detailed the trend to grant mortgages to undocumented workers, saying they're good risks because they make payments on time.
The LA Times ran a story (7/3) on the benefits immigrants supply to the economy, saying, "Immigration is part of the DNA of America, and its as necessary as ever." It favored the "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005," sponsored by Senators McCain, Kennedy and others.
The bosses' media haven't just "discovered" that undocumented immigrants make huge profits for the bosses. But the liberal rulers now argue for a combination of "amnesty," winning immigrants to feel part of the U.S., to be patriotic, and have them and their children work for slave-labor wages in the arms and other industries, this is especially important since many industrial workers among the tens of millions of baby boomers are about to retire.
The bosses have always known they could make super-profits from immigrants' labor. Now they need them also for war. We shouldn't be fooled. The liberal imperialists are even more dangerous than the openly fascist Minutemen but slicker. All these racist bosses are the enemy of all workers. Our allies are workers and soldiers of all backgrounds, whose class interests sharply contrast with those of the imperialist exploiters.
CIA Puppet Regime in Ethiopia Massacres Anti-Gov't Protestors
The news from TransAfrica Forum describes how, in early June, Ethiopian government forces opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in Addis Ababa, killing 36 and wounding over 100. They were protesting the May 15 elections.
Supporters of the opposition parties -- the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF) -- organized the action. The so-called opposition party CUD is a pseudo-left and nationalist assortment. The UEDF is composed of feudal remnants and their cronies who fled to England and the U.S. in 1972 when Haile Selassie was deposed by the Dergue (military Junta led by Mengistu, who sided with Moscow against the U.S. in the rivalry among the superpowers back then). Both of these reactionary bourgeois parties claim the election was fraudulent, as if they have different agendas for the working class. There's no difference between the current rulers and these so-called opposition parties.
Jane Gaffney, U.S. State Department director for East Africa, said the election was "fair and free and non-violent," but after the government murdered 36 people, she "condemned" the violence because their puppet embarrassed them. The European Union, which monitored the elections, declared there were significant irregularities, while Gaffney called the balloting "very impressive."
The Ethiopian publication Nation online (6/11/05) reported, "Ethiopia's position is global geo-politics [which] could mean it escapes international scrutiny (it is a key U.S. ally in the anti-terrorism campaign)." This enables the government to crack down on any opposition by calling it "terrorism." So now we know what "anti-terrorism" means. Britain is also freezing its so-called aid to the Ethiopian government ($36 million). So rival imperialists are in the act.
The CIA helped the current government come to power in 1991, after deposing the military junta (a Russian client) that had ruled from 1973 to 1990. Originally called the Tigrai Liberation Front, after it took power it changed its name to the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front), an umbrella disguise to cover its fascistic character.
For the working class and the oppressed masses there's no difference who's elected. The working class's only alternative to this murder, starvation, poverty, oppression and exploitation is to fight against capitalism by establishing the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Only communists represent the interests of the workers in the fight to emancipate our class from exploitation.
Video Games Used to Recruit for War
In their struggle to normalize fascism and force working-class youth into the military, the rulers' culture makers use every form of media, including video games. While such games have existed for over 20 years, in the last decade game marketers have especially targeted youth between 16 and 24. The types of games they sell indicate some of the values the ruling class hopes to instill in this vital segment of the population.
The extremely popular "Command & Conquer" series of strategy games allows gamers to "experience" leading an imperialist power as they build giant armies to conquer other nations. One of the most popular installments, "Red Alert," puts the gamer into the middle of World War II. Only this is an imagined version where the allied forces utilize time travel to kidnap a young Hitler so the German military can ally with Britain and France to fight Stalin and the Soviet Union in the 1940's. By doing this, the game makers switch the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in the gamer's mind. As the game progresses, Stalin is revealed to be a mere puppet controlled by "Kane" who represents pure evil and turns the USSR into the "Land of Nod" (the mythical area outside of the Garden of Eden where wickedness dwelled).
The games' premise reflects the anti-Soviet trend in U.S. universities that accuses the USSR of being "worse than the Nazis" and labels Stalin as history's most evil man. These lies are pounded into workers' heads so they'll forget that it was the Soviet Union which wiped out the scourge of Nazism during WWII.
To the current ruling-class academic, the USSR and all it represented (workers' power, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism) are the real evils. It's important to remember that in the 1930's, other imperialist states supported German fascism in the hope it would fight the USSR. Not until the Nazis invaded France (a fellow imperialist) did other imperialist powers make any effort (small as it was) to stop the Nazis.
By implying that without Hitler, Germany would not have fallen to fascism, the games' creators are also saying that "great men," not masses of people, make history. Fascism, like imperialism, is a natural outgrowth of capitalism, not the actions of one man. When dealing with the Soviet Union, the game not only spreads lies about Stalin, but erases the role of Russian workers and peasants in defeating the Nazi armies. The game implies that working people are too weak, too dumb, or both to resist such "great" leaders. This same belief in individualism and the fear that workers couldn't be won to communism undermined many working-class movements in the past.
"Command & Conquer's" latest effort, "Generals," continues with more of the same. This game pits the Chinese, the U.S. and the GLA, (an imagined terrorist organization of Middle Eastern origins) against one another. It sees the three sides as imperialist powers that fight one another in order to expand their empires.
This game intensifies the level of violence. The intro to the game assures us that "in the modern world leaders use words to solve their disputes...words like `scud launcher' and `carpet bombing.'" It portrays B-52's carpet bombing houses while people run in terror; a scud missile smashes into a crowded market. Your tanks roll through towns, running over people who happen to get in the way, and civilians run away screaming as artillery barrages destroy city blocks. Such acts of violence against civilians were not available in previous games. These images are both a sign of people's willingness to accept this kind of violence and a tool for U.S. culture makers to prepare people for the slaughter that accompanies real imperialist conflicts.
One sign of the power of these games is that the Army now uses a combat simulation game similar to these commercial games to recruit youth, showing them that the army is "cool." Perhaps these kids think that if they join the "Army of One" they can be a "great man" too, just like in the game.
To combat such indoctrination, we must constantly remind workers of our true history and the great accomplishments of workers' power in the last century. We must expose the anti-working class nature of individualism and the "Great Man" theory by showing that it is the masses of people working together for a common goal who make history, not individuals.
What appeal do these games have for workers? Is it the feeling of power they give the gamer after a hard day of being exploited and feeling powerless on the job? Is it that the mind-numbing effects of video games help one forget -- for a night -- the situation facing the working class? Is it that we have internalized enough ruling-class ideology that we are "amused" by imperialism and fascism and the violence they create? Or do we simply want to permanently escape reality and feel like we can be one of the rulers?
We must answer these questions if we are to provide an effective defense against these opiates of the masses.
UNDER COMMUNISM
Auto Workers Will Have A Better Idea
Many years ago I worked at the River Rouge Ford engine plant. Signs everywhere offered trips to the Caribbean for any idea that would improve the production process. Plenty of ideas floated around among the plant's workers, but the suggestion box remained empty. Why? Every worker knew that, in the eyes of the bosses, improvements meant more production with fewer workers, and therefore layoffs of yourself and co-workers.
The bosses understand that almost all good ideas are held by those who actually engage in the practice of production -- the workers. Makes you wonder which worker(s) actually came up with the idea for the movable assembly line that made Henry Ford famous as an inventor.
Indeed, major business consulting firms are now teaching bosses how to reap the benefits of workers' knowledge. They preach that since the bosses own the workers' hands for eight or more hours a day, tapping their brains comes at no extra charge. They preach that only a small percent of ideas are held at the top of the corporate structure. The further down the structure you go the more knowledgeable and smarter people get. No kidding. I've actually attended such corporate consultant meetings.
In any case, in a communist society there'd be no obstacles to putting innovative ideas into practice. No worker would be laid off and there'd be no boss to profit. Only the workers would benefit, both those in the plant as well as those throughout society.
We can see how this worked in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China when communists were in the leadership. For one example out of thousands, Chinese workers at a steel plant invented the process of cold rolling, now used all over the world. They met regularly during work-hours to discuss everything from political issues and relationships among the workers to the production process and how to improve it. Of course, improvement to them did not mean increasing profits, since there were no profits to be made for a boss (only steel). Rather, improvement meant increasing the amount of steel they could make in a particular amount of time and making the job easier to accomplish with fewer workers so that others could be freed to do other jobs.
Under communism, once the bosses and their murderous imperialist profit system are eliminated, no capitalists will be around to steal the fruits of workers' labor and ideas. No capitalists will be around to prevent the workers from taking time out to meet, discuss and think, let alone go to the bathroom, rest or eat lunch. Under communism the sky will be the limit in what the world's working class can accomplish. After all, as even business consultants understand, the workers are the ones who possess almost all the knowledge about production.
According to Anti-Communists,
Hitler Defeated Stalin!!
It's well known that certain anti-communist writers make their living from condemning Stalin. But a review of three recent anti-Stalin books appearing in the New York Times Book Review (6/12) tops them all. The reviewer, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, heaps praise on the theme of all three authors: because Stalin allegedly did not prepare for a German invasion, he cost the Soviet Union millions of lives, resulting in "the greatest military defeat in Russian history," [!] Of course, the fact that Hitler sent probably the largest invasion force in world history into the USSR had nothing to do with those deaths -- "Stalin killed them," according to these red-baiters.
In the course of a review covering two-thirds of two full pages, nowhere is it ever mentioned who won this war! If someone from outer space came to the Earth and read this opus to find out what happened in World War II, they would have to conclude that Hitler beat the Soviets. The review never states what actually happened.
Ferguson, therefore, never quite explains how Stalin and the Soviet leadership was able to convert this "greatest military defeat in Russian history" into a war that not only stopped the Nazis cold at the gates of Moscow; not only produced what is accepted even by Western historians as the turning point of World War II when the Red Army smashed the German 6th Army at Stalingrad; but somehow was able to drive one of the most committed armies the world has ever seen all the way back to Berlin. This is never mentioned in the book review, and presumably in the three books themselves.
Ferguson doesn't explain this because, seemingly, it never happened. He also fails to contrast the Red Army's achievements with the six-week collapse of France's military and government, not to mention the rest of Western Europe.
Somehow he sees a "demented" Stalin as "assum[ing] that the capitalist powers...were more interested in the destruction of the Soviet Union than in the destruction of Nazi Germany." The anti-communism of this reviewer knows no bounds. For that is precisely what Britain, France and the U.S. were aiming for: Hitler to destroy the world's first workers' state. U.S. President Truman even said he hoped the Nazis and the Soviets "would bleed each other to death."
Ferguson "concludes" that it is hard "to conceive how World War II might have turned out if Stalin had not trusted Hitler." [!] But Ferguson never says how it did turn out -- the smashing of the Nazis along a 2000-mile-long front, occupying 80% of the German army, and saving the West.
No wonder Ferguson can't figure out that -- despite 50 years of an anti-Stalin orgy, from Khrushchev to Gorbichev to Yeltsin to Putin -- "53 percent of Russians still regard him [Stalin] as a `great' leader," according to a 2003 poll by the Russian Center for Public Opinion (which Ferguson appears to accept). Truly, no matter how huge their lies and distortions, the apologists of capitalism can always top themselves.
LETTERS
Cops Murdered My Son
On June 28, the police shot and killed my son Jeremy in his home near Lansing, Michigan. The police said he "committed suicide." The Medical Examiner later told us that he "didn't bother" to perform an autopsy because the police had told him my son was a suicide. Later we found that Jeremy had been shot once in the head and twice in the back. There were a number of irregularities leading to suspicions the cops had murdered him, and more seems to be coming out to confirm that.
My son will never receive justice under capitalism. Even if the police were caught on tape killing him, the chances are high that they'd escape punishment. I live on the other side of the country and have no base of support to mount any movement to avenge my son's murder in the area where the police killed him.
The Michigan police are the same as the police everywhere. They exist to serve the interests of the ruling classes. Part of that "service" consists of terrorizing the working class. What we all can do is organize to destroy the ruling class and their police forces. Get a job in basic industry or join the military. These are the places where the bosses are most vulnerable and where we can organize to finish off capitalism.
I dream about killing the police who ended my son's life and hope some day I'll be able to do it. But I know what's most important for victims of capitalism worldwide -- those that have been killed and we workers who are still alive and fighting -- is organizing to fight them collectively as a working class. Build and fight for communism!
Angry Fighting Parent
GI's Like CHALLENGE
When I sold CHALLENGE in a town near a military base, overall the reaction was positive. I was surprised the paper sold so quickly. After telling soldiers and their families I had a paper with an article about GI's resisting the war for oil in Iraq, most soldiers would take the paper. I then told them about the paper's analysis of racism in the U.S. and the rise of racist anti-immigrant groups. When I linked the racist war in Iraq and the growing racism at home, I noticed a special interest among the black, Asian and Latina/o soldiers. Several voiced agreement with the paper on the issue. They understood that racism is still a huge problem in the U.S.
A Summer Projecteer
Punk Anti-Racist Benefit Concert
Recently we had a successful backyard hardcore punk benefit in Los Angeles to raise money for those arrested at the anti-Minutemen demonstration (see CHALLENGE, 7/20). It exceeded expectations -- between 100-150 attended and contributed over $800. Some people hesitated about the suggested donation, but as soon as they heard how one of our comrades was unjustly arrested, beaten and is facing jail time, they were furious and full of support. There was an intense energy the whole night, and it was put into words during our friends' version of the song "Police Bastard" by Doom.
During the evening there were several political discussions. Some asked to be informed of future events and protests; a few new people decided to join upcoming study/discussion groups.
The event's outcome further reveals that these punk youth, with all their frustration, are incredibly full of potential. All they need is some attention and direction. Instead of shoving them to the sidelines because they may be "cynical" or "just trying to be different or rebellious," we should talk to them as we do to any other potentially fighting youth.
Benefit Organizer
Racism, Sexism:
No Laughing Matter
Humor is a powerful tool, and the ruling class uses its comedians to press stereotypes into our consciousness. Dave Chappelle, a leading black comic who didn't return for a second season on Comedy Central, was replaced by Carlos Mencia, a Latino doing a similar show: short skits, stand-up and sexist, classist, racist jokes.
Self-critically, I laughed at Chappelle when I first saw him, but then I analyzed what he was really saying, and it's not O.K., since he reinforces racist stereotypes, dividing people. Is it funny to say that it's now the "Arab's" turn to suffer racism since other groups have suffered such for centuries? NO! Racism should not be tolerated in any form, nor is it anyone's "turn." Are crack addicts a joke? NO! It's a serious disease caused by capitalism's corruption and inequality. Classism is not funny, nor is sexism (every other word out of Chappelle's mouth is the B-word). Just because he and Mencia are people of color doesn't make it O.K. for them to use racial slurs or poke fun at African Americans, Muslims or Latinos.
Some friends have said that these shows are a good way to start talking about race and gender with those we're trying to influence. I disagree. A better way is to bring someone to protest a Minuteman or Nazi rally! These demonstrate exactly what racism is (ugly and sick!) and how we do something positive about it and oppose it with our class analysis. Showing someone the reality of this hatred and racist slander is the best way to open discussion, not by making jokes. Emmett Till's mother wasn't laughing, Matthew Shepard's family didn't make jokes, and the countless other families of victims of police brutality, police murders, hate crimes and lynching were not smiling.
These shows get air time to promote divisive stereotypes. Just as the kkkourts protect the kkkops who protect the Nazis, the ruling class protects and promotes this kind of hate and racist thought through its propaganda and TV "programming." As long as we're divided, we'll always be defeated. The actions in Yorktown and New Jersey (see CHALLENGE, 7/20) are great ways to fight racism as well as organize to destroy the murderous capitalist system that fosters it. I applaud all those who participated in those actions and showed the fascists and racists what they're up against. Racism, sexism, fascism -- capitalism is the disease. Multi-racial, unified, militant workers and students, women and men, young and old, PLP --- communism is the cure! Not a step back!
A Comrade
Don't Name PL Union Prez?
The articles about the Party's activity at Metro in Washington, D.C. have been great. However, I think the repeated use of Mike Golash's name in these articles promotes individualism, which will ultimately be detrimental to the Party's work. It's important to recognize the strengths of our comrades; however, no one individual personifies the Party's work alone.
There is uneven development among comrades; we all have our strengths and weaknesses which are to be discussed with our clubs in criticism and self-criticism -- including Mike! If CHALLENGE continues to use Mike's name in articles, we risk making him a Party icon and elevating him above other members. All of us contribute to the Party in different ways; all of our work is important.
In combating individualistic ideology, let us look up to Mike's strengths and accomplishments rather than to Mike himself. Remember, in our history of struggling against cults of personality (such as those that were created around Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, often against the desires of these leaders), we decided to never sign our articles or letters, since all such items are social products, not individual ones. It's the same with "individual" accomplishments; they're really accomplishments of all of the people, activities and organizations that influenced, strengthened and taught that one "individual."
A Comrade
The Science of Cooking and Revolution
Recently my wife and I were watching a cooking show on TV. "Why do you like to watch this show?" she asked. "You don't even like to cook!"
"It interests me," I replied, "that if you combine the right ingredients in the correct proportions, your cooking turns out fine. That's science." And so it is with the science of making communist revolution.
A good friend who helped win me to PLP 30 years ago told me, "Do something every day that helps lead to communist revolution, even it it's only distributing one CHALLENGE." I've always remembered those words, because -- as in science -- quantity leads to quality. Every bit we do counts!
What does scientific analysis mean? Objectivity and collectivity are paramount in assessing the situation in the world, in the community and on the job. We must figure out the contradictions. It's important to assess the quantity and quality of our friendships: How many are political? How many took CHALLENGE? How many are involved in struggles? Can these reform struggles help bring out the contradictions which will lead to revolutionary consciousness?
Many of us were recruited to PLP during the mass reform struggles around civil rights and against U.S. imperialism's invasion of Vietnam. But the ruling class maintained state power and stole almost all these reforms from the workers. It's up to our class to scientifically analyze which are the correct ingredients which will lead to communist revolution.
From the Paris Commune to the Russian and Chinese revolutions, workers have moved the struggle forward. We have a world to scientifically analyze, and a better world for all workers to win!
Keep up the good work in CHALLENGE.
West Coast reader
It's More than Money
The letter "Money Under Communism?" (7/20) says many good things but misses the target by trying to equate the failure of socialism with economic policies like retaining money and Capital instead of concentrating on the real root of capitalism -- a class system based on bourgeois ideology that believes most people exist for the services they can provide for a relatively smaller group of "better people."
Socialism is basically a class system utilizing state capitalism. It could have even eliminated currency and cash and the state capitalists would still have been able to appropriate labor power to further their interests, privileges and power because they, their class system and ideology had become dominant in the communist parties. If we don't learn that lesson and struggle now to make sure bourgeois and revisionist ideas and values have no place in the Party and among the working class, we could defeat ourselves and negate any opportunity for revolution. Under communism workers will still create surplus value in their work but it will, as the reader says, be used for the collective needs of the working class.
A Comrade
What About Rural Areas Under Communism
I'm proud to be a young member of PLP in El Salvador. Repression is very strong here against youth, even traumatic for those who see no way out of this capitalist, fascist hell.
I like the new "Under Communism" column since it helps answer many of our doubts of how communism will work. Many friends have asked me, "If communism is so good, why doesn't it exist anywhere?" -- that it's like a dinosaur which we will never see again. When I can't respond, this column is very helpful.
I hope the column will deal with my main interest, rural areas under communism, since in countries like El Salvador they contain the majority of the exploited population -- many of whom have emigrated to the U.S. searching for jobs.
Fight for communism!
Red Youth
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Londoners: Iraqi cities see worse killing
We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately....
The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London...with more that 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they should be compared. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan....
Invading Iraq clearly made Britain a target. (GW, 7/21)
Immigrant high school whiz can't go to college
A recent front page story told the dramatic story of a Massachusetts high school valedictorian, who is an undocumented immigrant. The student, Juliano Foleiss, is returning to Brazil because he cannot afford college in the United States. As a noncitizen, he does not qualify for in-state college tuition rates, and without a valid Social Security number, he is ineligible for scholarships or loans. (Boston Globe)
John Brown sanely rebelled against slavery
...My concern is with John Brown and his meaning for America. In "John Brown, Abolitionist" I argue that Brown who fought for freedom and social equality for millions of enslaved blacks, was right, and America, whose laws and customs endorsed slavery and racism, was wrong. Most people in that era supported the American government's view that Brown was insane and criminal....A debate has raged for generations, with some...like the historian Allan Nevins, calling him insane. I'm delighted that [reviewer] Ehrenreich says my biography provides conclusive evidence of Brown's sanity.
I trust that my evidence is now on the historical record and that John Brown will be granted a special place in the pantheon of enlightened Americans who demanded justice for people of all ethnicities.
David S. Reynolds (NYT, 7/10)
African-aid celebration hides greedy reality
...The primary instrument of US policy towards Africa [is] the African growth and Opportunity Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy and raw self-interest....
Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is investment. But investment by many multinationals has not enriched its people but impoverished them. The history of corporate involvement in Africa is one of forced labor, evictions, murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and collusion with dictators. Nothing in ... the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes mandatory constraints on corporations....
From now on, the G8 would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa's best friends....
At the Make Poverty History march the speakers insisted that we were dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming toward our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs. (GW, 7/21)
Shaky US earners are in the red
For every $100 earned by individuals in the US, they are spending $108 -- not exactly a recipe for long-term sustainability. (GW, 7/14)
US crop-spray ruins Colombian Farmers
...In northern Colombia.... For 25 years the Vargas family survived by subsistence farming. Until the crop-duster lanes arrived. "Four years ago planes spewed potent herbicide over our neighbor's coca fields," said Mr. Vargas's daughter, Angela. "Our crops, cows and chickens died too...."
"It's unfair. We had nothing to do with growing coca."
The fate of the Vargas family is shared by thousands of farmers living under the flight paths of US-sponsored aerial fumigation programmes....
Aerial fumigation also raises health concerns...Medical records from a local hospital show a significant increase in skin and eye irritations, fever, abdominal pains and respiratory problems among patients living in fumigated areas....The US government disagrees.
In addition to the health and environmental effects of glyphosate, crop spraying is useless ....A US embassy spokesperson said...the amount of coca in Colombia was virtually unchanged....But aerial fumigations will continue... (GW, 7/14)
China general says US may face Nukes
Beijing, Friday, July 15 -- China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the Americans military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday....
General Zhu said he believed that the Chinese government was under internal pressure to change its "no first use" policy....
"We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese." (NYT, 7/15)
London Bombing: Imperialist Rivalry For Oil the Cause of Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism
- a href="#RACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool">"ACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool
PLP Leads Shutdown of Fascist Anti-Immigrant Meeting
Bosses Create Borders to Divide Workers
a href="#Liberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers">"iberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers
a href="#Spread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally">"pread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally
CHALLENGE A Big Hit At Immigrant Anti-Minutemen March of 10,000
Protestors Link Minutemen and Liberal Racists At Anti-Immigrant Rally
a href="#PLP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight">"LP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight
Ford, VW, GM, Mercedes Workers Block Highway, Shut Plants in Argentina
Boeing Contract Battle Should Teach Us How to Think As a Class
AFL-CIO Dogfight: Only Red Leadership Can Put U.S. Workers on the Offensive
Disrupt Army Flag Day Recruiting Spectacle
a href="#Boston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting">"oston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting
a href="#PLP’S Songs On One CD">"LP’S Songs On One CD
a href="#War’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s">Wa"’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s
Threat of Class Struggle Hangs Over EU Rulers
UNDER COMMUNISM: How Would Health Care Be Better?
LETTERS
Learning About Communism At Chicago March
N. Africans Suffer A Lot More Racism Than Oprah
Fight Nationalism, Privatization in Pakistan
Disagrees About Stewart Prosecution
D.C. Project Showed Power of Red Ideas
Youth Write About the NJ Anti-Minutemen Protest
Group Relations Influence Health
- US, China will clash as oil runs out
- ‘Missile Defense’ is plan to control globe
- Recruiting: 4 times harder than year ago
- ‘Made in USA’ can still mean slavery
- White ex-prisoners: More job offers than never-arrested black men
- CAFTA: blood-sucking drug lobby plan
- US loves terrorists if they’re anti-left
- With 9/11 excuse, FBI gets your secrets
Imperialist Rivalry For Oil the Cause of Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism
A coordinated terrorist attack has hit several London Underground (subway) stations and a bus. Many have been killed and injured, presumably mostly workers. Supposedly, an Al Qaeda European cell has taken responsibility for this attack.
It occurred during the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. Tony Blair returned to London from the meeting while Bush condemned terrorism. All the world’s big bosses have condemned this attack. How hypocritical! These same bosses are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of workers and their families worldwide due to wars, poverty, starvation, lack of decent health care, mass unemployment, racist police brutality, and more - all created by a capitalist system driven by the need for maximum profits. This is mass terror.
Whoever is responsible for the July 7 London attack (either Al Qaeda—which represents a section of the Saudi bosses which want to control the oil wealth without sharing with Exxon-Mobil, etc.—or some rogue operators from one of the various imperialists’ spy agencies), one thing is clear: we live in a world full of danger for the international working class. Imperialist war for control of oil and other resources has put millions at risk, from Baghdad to Kabul to London. We in PLP condemn all forms of anti-working class terrorism, whether coming from reactionary groups like Al Qaeda or from the world’s big imperialists..
While the G-8 bosses have condemned the London attack, don’t hold your breath if you think the imperialist rivals of the U.S.-UK war in Iraq will help Bush-Blair in their troubles there. The rivalry among the imperialist blocs is sharpening. These bosses have inflicted war and tremendous terrorism on the world’s workers and their families. The only way to smash all forms of capitalist terrorism is to fight for a world without any bosses, a world run by and for workers: communism!
a name="RACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool">">"ACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool
With disgusting hypocrisy, U.S. rulers are portraying themselves as anti-racists, even as they build a racist police state at home and wage racist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. NYC Mayor Bloomberg vows "zero tolerance" for the recent baseball-bat assault on three black men in New York City. Mississippi finally convicts Klansman Edgar Killen in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. After 50 years, the FBI has resumed "searching" for the surviving killers of Emmett Till. The U.S. Senate has "apologized" for failing to outlaw lynching.
But believing that the rulers oppose racism would be a serious political error. Capitalists will never end racism, because they cannot do without the profits that racism produces. By oppressing one group of workers with particular viciousness, the rulers drive down the wages and living standards of the entire working class. Racist divisiveness undermines workers’ struggles on the job and in the community. And in their endless wars against rival capitalists overseas, U.S. rulers use racism to motivate working-class soldiers to kill.
Bloomberg rehashed the lie that "we have come a long way" in overcoming racism. In reality the rulers have integrated the power structure, which helps them control workers more effectively. There are now black and Latino cabinet members, politicians, cops, judges, military officers, principals and business executives. But for the working class, the systematic racism created by U.S. capitalism is as bad as, or worse than, the days of Jim Crow, by every measure imaginable. As they have for decades, black workers continue to earn one-third less than whites. Unemployment for black workers is more than double the rate among white workers. Schools have become even more segregated in many places. Black people can expect to live five years less than whites. Black infant mortality stands at 245% of the rate for whites. Amid a tripling of "persons under correctional supervision" from 1980 to 2003, one young black man in three languishes behind bars, compared with 10% of whites. Similar percentages victimize Latinos as well. And, just as the rulers brand black and Latino youths "criminals," they have jailed without trial hundreds of Arab-Americans as "terrorists."
While they preach equality and democracy, U.S. rulers actively promote racism to serve their imperialist needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pacifying those countries for the likes of Exxon Mobil requires soldiers willing to kill Arabs and Muslims in large numbers. As a "condition for success," the Army War College demands of the troops "a primordial hatred" resulting in an "impulse to destroy the enemy." (Parameters, Summer 2005) Aiden Delgado, an Army reservist, recalled receiving a thorough racist indoctrination, orchestrated from the top down, before shipping out to Iraq: "I remember Army chants. We sang in cadences. And the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads, killing the Taliban. Our drill sergeants would give us motivational talks to pump up our fighting spirit. The theme was the need to get revenge, to go to the Middle East to fight Arabs…. My own commander was infamous for anti-Arab speeches." (Online Journal, 4/1/05)
With larger conflicts looming, the rulers are seeking more widespread loyalty to the government. By harking back to the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, they hope to repeat the political coup they pulled off then when they duped millions into viewing the state as a "protector" against racism. The harsh reality remains, however, that the state employs racism to enforce the rulers’ tyranny over the working class. The troops that "integrated" Southern schools were soon carrying out the rulers’ genocide in Vietnam — although many GI’s there rebelled against these racist orders — and brutally suppressing workers’ anti-racist rebellions in Detroit and elsewhere.
Following the lead of any capitalist politician on racism is suicidal for workers. Racism is inseparable from capitalism. Racism will never be wiped out until the working class, through communist revolution, eliminates the profit system and takes power for itself. That is the eventual goal towards which our Party is continually building.
PLP Leads Shutdown of Fascist Anti-Immigrant Meeting
BRIDGEWATER, NJ, June 25 — The Progressive Labor Party organized 70 militant protesters to shut down the recruitment meeting of the United Patriots of America (UPA), a racist, fascist organization that — under the guise of "Homeland Security" — blames immigrants for U.S. economic woes and equates undocumented immigrants with "terrorists."
While anti-racists chanted and marched with banners outside, ten people including PLP’ers, infiltrated inside and completely disrupted the meeting, stunning the fascists.
The UPA — affiliated with the infamous "Minutemen Project" that places armed vigilantes at the Arizona border — advocates closing all U.S. borders to "illegal aliens," enforcing English as the only language spoken, supporting fascist educational policies of "traditionally American curriculum" and monitoring the activities of "liberal" or "left" teachers.
Outside the arena, the police, working as tools of the ruling class to protect the racist UPA, descended on the group of approximately 60 chanting protestors to force them from the Sports Arena property. Defying police commands, two PLP members were arrested while the rest of the group was aggressively pushed and prodded to the road below. But the cops’ intimidation only motivated us more to continue demonstrating.
Meanwhile, inside the 10 anti-racists, including PLP members, raised hell. Initially posing as "supportive and interested" persons, they responded to a leadership signal during Minutemen Ed Whitbred’s speech to about 35 listeners, standing up and unfurling two huge banners while chanting, "SMASH RACIST DEPORTATIONS! WORKING PEOPLE HAVE NO NATION!" As they militantly marched to the front, the cops and attendees were frozen in shock while Whitbred dashed from the podium. Action proceeded quickly: the microphone cord was ripped from its socket, a comrade moved to the front to belt out a speech, and local police and the County SWAT team quickly filled the room. The PL speaker was arrested as the rest of the group was pushed out the door and down the stairs. A brutal attack on the staircase by the Somerset County SWAT team — armed to the teeth in full riot gear — left one member with a broken shoulder. He was subsequently arrested on false allegations of simple "assault."
The remaining eight infiltrators emerged from the building chanting just as the 60 protestors were marching back up the grassy hill. They joined forces in the Sports Arena lot.
The youth led the day, both outside and inside, showing great determination, courage, discipline and commitment. This leadership bodes well for the future of our Party.
The effective disruption of the UPA meeting was only made possible by the unending leadership and organizing efforts of every PLP member present — just as it will take the unending leadership and organization of the entire working class to successfully fight for the end of racism, of artificial borders, of fascist police control and of capitalism itself. This event marks one more step forward for PLP and the international working class.
We will fight these charges and the fascist police attacks on our comrades, in the courts, in our mass organizations and on the streets. We will raise money from our friends and will recruit more members to PLP, to bring closer the day when the bosses, their homeland security police state and their gutter racist supporters will be a forgotten chapter in history.
Bosses Create Borders to Divide Workers
Borders are a bosses’ creation to mark their nation-states. They use nationalism and patriotism to portray workers who live outside these borders as "foreigners" or "aliens." However, when it suits them, the rulers ignore these borders, always searching for the cheapest labor, no matter its origin. Imperialism requires that capital be exported outside the "home country." And bosses’ wars send one side’s armed forces to invade the "territory" of the other side.
The working class is one class, worldwide, with one class interest — to seize the world away from the profiteers who run it now and to make communist revolution all over.
UPA publicly calls for "border control" and mass deportations. They want to spread the "Minuteman Project," enlisting vigilante "volunteers." They falsely portray themselves as the voice of "middle America" and "the forgotten little guy." But behind the UPA is an openly fascist anti-immigrant ideology, decrying "the loss of American culture and values" resulting from a "foreign invasion." Their platform dovetails with the rulers’ current push to win a mass base for a Homeland Security police state. UPA and others like them are potential foot soldiers for U.S. fascism.
a name="Liberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers">">"iberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers
Borders are a bosses’ creation to mark their nation-states. They use nationalism and patriotism to portray workers who live outside these borders as "foreigners" or "aliens." However, when it suits them, the rulers ignore these borders, always searching for the cheapest labor, no matter its origin. Imperialism requires that capital be exported outside the "home country." And bosses’ wars send one side’s armed forces to invade the "territory" of the other side.
The working class is one class, worldwide, with one class interest — to seize the world away from the profiteers who run it now and to make communist revolution all over.
UPA publicly calls for "border control" and mass deportations. They want to spread the "Minuteman Project," enlisting vigilante "volunteers." They falsely portray themselves as the voice of "middle America" and "the forgotten little guy." But behind the UPA is an openly fascist anti-immigrant ideology, decrying "the loss of American culture and values" resulting from a "foreign invasion." Their platform dovetails with the rulers’ current push to win a mass base for a Homeland Security police state. UPA and others like them are potential foot soldiers for U.S. fascism.
a name="Spread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally">">"pread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally
YORKTOWN, VA., June 25 — With militant chants, powerful signs and the only speeches with political content, a group of PLP’ers gave communist leadership today to protesters demonstrating against a rally of a new Nazi-KKK coalition. The racists chose the historic battlefield where the U.S. War for Independance ended to promote their goal of ridding the U.S. of Jews. "Just as Washington kicked out the British, so shall we kick out the Jews" was their Hitlerian motto. The Nazis and their supporters, numbering less than 90, were protected by police barricades keeping protesters — Progressive Labor Party militants, anti-racist anarchists and supporters of U.S.-Israeli nationalism — more than a football-field-distance away.
PLP comrades, young and old, truly challenged these fascists with our political speeches, offering our bullhorn to fellow anti-racists who were dissatisfied with the religious pacifists and partisan nationalists. We chanted "I don’t know but I’ve been told, These Nazis getting way too bold, Time to put them in their place, Kick a Nazi in the face!" and "Death, death, death to the Nazis, Power, power, power to the workers!" We held signs like, "The Progressive Labor Party, kicking Nazi ass since 1962" and "Which pig is which?" with a pig dressed in a combination Klan/police uniform.
Amnesty International members from Norfolk attended the rally, and discussed our chants and speeches with us. All bought CHALLENGE. PL also had a contingent at the rally exit, distributing the paper to all who passed, while chatting about revolutionary politics.
The cops searched everyone with metal-detectors, filming and photographing only the protesters, for future attacks on anti-racist radicals. One cop being told, "You got your gun and your nightstick, but where’s your noose?" responded, "In my car." One young comrade explained how cops never break down big corporations’ doors to fight for workers’ interests, but are always there to protect the bosses and break strikes. We also linked police brutality to the courts’ compliance with racist cops.
Almost 30 media people sat in the front row for 90 minutes listening to the racist group’s fascist ranting, before recording five minutes of token footage of the anti-racists’ action. Thus, the police and the media provided direct auxiliary support for these racist terrorists. Our chant, "The cops, the courts, the nazis and the Klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan," pointed out these ruling-class connections.
PL youth and supporters had a sign-making party preparing for the rally, discussing how PLP militantly disrupted past rallies. The most disturbing moment was dissecting the Nazis’ National Socialist Movement ideology, explaining how advocating the mythical superiority of some workers over others can be twisted into a barbaric capitalist war machine.
Communists show that all workers deserve sustenance and should use their abilities in the interests of the working class as a whole. In response to the pacifists and other-worldly mystics, communist revolutionary love of human-kind will prevail over the fear of oppression and over the capitalist oppressors themselves.
CHALLENGE A Big Hit At Immigrant Anti-Minutemen March of 10,000
CHICAGO, July 2 — Today more than 10,000 workers, students and youth marched for immigrant rights on the Southwest Side. PLP distributed 1,100 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS and 1,000 leaflets in under an hour. Many responded enthusiastically to our anti-racist line, helping us distribute literature and listening eagerly to what we had to say. Many joined our chanting, "Este puño si se ve, los obreros al poder" ("This fist you see means the workers are coming to power"). Workers selflessly donated hundreds of dollars for PLP comrades arrested in New Jersey (see front page) while protesting the racist Minutemen.
Several Spanish radio hosts organized the march, responding to a local Latin woman who invited the Minutemen to speak here. The March leadership was incredibly nationalist and opportunist. Many workers and youth waved Mexican and U.S. flags, chanting, "Viva Mexico!" We struggled against these classless ideas, pointing out that the bosses manufacture national borders to divide us. We chanted, "Stop Racist Deportations, Working People Have No Nation!" and "La Lucha Obrera, No Tienen Frontera!" ("The Workers’ Fight Has No Borders!"). Workers enthusiastically joined us, taking up our internationalist line. A young woman comrade made a speech in Spanish explaining the role of groups like the Minutemen, how nationalism divides the working class and how all workers are exploited under capitalism.
A close friend of the Party said, "I couldn’t believe the response of the workers to the Party. People just came up to me and took CHALLENGES right out of my hands." She saw how welcoming the working class could be to the Party in action. She got out 50 CHALLENGES "accidentally." When asked, she said that all the people who got the paper came up and asked her for it
Newer comrades took most of the leadership throughout the march, leading chants, making speeches and other decisions. Self-critically, we collectively felt that we could have given more effective political leadership with more people, especially Spanish speakers, with more literature, and with better political preparation. This event brought more of our friends closer to the Party and inspired one young woman to want to become more of a leader as a communist and a Party member.
The politicians and clergy, who attacked us for spreading communist ideas, cannot and will not lead workers to smash racism. All these tricksters will lead us down the dead-end road of reformism. Our experience today shows that we should have confidence the workers will see through their lies. Communist leadership will lead the struggles against racism towards communist revolution and a world without borders.
Protestors Link Minutemen and Liberal Racists At Anti-Immigrant Rally
BALDWIN PARK, CA., June 25 — About 800 workers and students protested a rally by anti-immigrant racists called "Save Our State" and the Minutemen. These racists were demonstrating at a monument that says, "These were Indian lands, then they were Mexican…and they will be again." The racists alleged this would bring an "invasion of immigrants."
Hundreds of the anti-racist protesters and Baldwin Park residents enthusiastically received PLP leaflets and CHALLENGES, contrasting with the liberal and nationalist politics of other groups there. We exposed the Minutemen as being part of a long history of attacks on immigrants to divide the working class. We also showed how the liberal Dream Act and the McCain-Kennedy Bill are ploys to induce immigrant youth to fight and die in the bosses’ war in Iraq.
The PLP helped organize a neighborhood march of over 100 people, trying to get to the racists, who were protected by over 200 cops armed to the teeth. At one corner the police formed a line to stop the marchers. As they called in reinforcements, several youth gave speeches attacking racism, the war in Iraq, and bosses’ borders and calling for communism.
After demonstrating in front of the cops, they joined the main group of protesters at a cultural event to try to get to the racists via another route. On the busy street, their chants rang out: "La clase obrera no tine frontera" ("The working class has no borders"); "The workers, united, will never be defeated"; "The cops, the courts, the Minuteman, all are part of the bosses’ plan." Many drivers honked in support while others joined the march.
Many protesters re-grouped with others closer to the racists, but hundreds of cops protected them. Still, the crowd took up chants like, "SOS, Policia — la misma porqueria" ("SOS, Police — the same crap"), contrasting with those only saying "SOS — go home." When the cops tried to clear demonstrators from the street to let the racists through, the anti-racists refused to leave.
While this was very positive, the main gain was the political struggle waged in schools and factories to bring friends to this action. The anti-racist fight is part of the long-range struggle for working-class unity and the building of a revolutionary movement for communism, which will bury all the racists and the system that created them.
a name="PLP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight">">"LP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight
The intensive drive to organize a strike of 1,100 workers at our large hospital defied the management’s demands to wreck our health plan — the major dispute — and led to a contract settlement that hugely increased the bosses’ payments to the union benefit fund, needed to maintain the present level of our health benefits. We also won annual 3% wage hikes for the next three years in a 5-year contract, with wage and benefit-re-openers in the last two years that will possibly necessitate a strike then. We also prevented the bosses from carrying through a doubling of worker payments to the health plan, resulting in a lesser amount spread over the next three years. The workers approved the settlement 500 to 50.
Ultimately, what can turn out to be the biggest victory for the workers is formation of two PLP study groups. One began functioning during the contract fight. They include several union activists who’ve become CHALLENGE readers. The paper’s circulation rose slightly; one new reader and study-group member said, "The way I’m feeling now, I’m agreeing more and more with that paper!"
Smaller contract victories included vacation, sick and holiday time for hundreds of part-timers, many of whom work almost full-time hours. Without vacation or sick time, they were a valuable cheap-labor source. Until recently, none were active because they had few benefits. But now a group has come forward and will be developed to lead their fellow part-timers. Also, now those retiring will take unused sick time with them.
Without the union members’ militant strike-preparation response to the bosses’ attacks — the best in the union’s history here —the final settlement would have been a disaster for the workers. Strike teams were organized. Every other week hundreds of workers attended solidarity meetings. An early June rally drew over 400 workers, the largest turnout ever. Union delegates were constantly being pulled into conversations or secret meetings. The hospital buzzed about a possible strike. Security was on alert. The workers voted for a strike 700 to 100.
Organizing for a strike meant uniting a diverse group of workers — largely black but also white, Latin and Asian, young and old, full-time and part-time. But the more we politicized and developed men and women rank-and-file activists of all ages and colors, the better we overcame any potential divisions. An anti-scab campaign appealed to thousands of non-union workers.
The union delegate group leading the strike preparation was the largest and most militant ever at this hospital. Black workers from the inner city, white tattooed ex-bikers from the surrounding states, Vietnam vets, ex-Marine Corps Sergeants, middle-aged church-goers, workers from other countries — this was the diverse group whose unity and differences were sharpened as we organk zed. We also had to deal with weekly BS from our union hall — personal rivalries among the full-time organizers, confused and contradictory decrees from the union leaders, and downright sabotage of the rank-and-file organizing.
Amid this whirlwind of activity, PLP had a crucial role, and responsibility to grow and expand our political base. The workers’ main internal weakness reflected capitalist ideas: racism, sexism, passivity, obedience to the pro-capitalist union leaders, nationalism, patriotism and anti-communism. The main external problems involved the capitalist state: anti-working class laws, courts and cops, and pro-boss media, with possible deployment of the Army and National Guard waiting in the wings.
While daily organizing was truly intoxicating, the most important victory required resolute concentration on advancing the Party. PLP’ers were involved in the strategic and tactical leadership of the struggle, while trying to turn the fight into a school for communism.
Initially, PL’ers struggled with workers to broaden the contract issues into strike demands against capitalism. The 30-member delegate group endorsed a demand of "No cuts due to the Iraq Oil War" but the union leadership omitted it from the official demand list. We championed a fight against the attacks on patient care, advocating improving it by hiring more full-time workers. We said the demand for more jobs would also fight the epidemic of unemployment-fueled violence killing our youth. But the fight to preserve health benefits overwhelmed this demand.
We tried to link various questions to the need for communist revolution. For example, after the successful march of 400 workers to the city-wide strike authorization meeting, some union delegates wanted to organize a larger rally at the hospital. The union leaders derailed this plan by citing possible conflict in the law’s 10-day notice requirement for the June 27 rally vs. the 10-day notice required for a June 30 strike. The rally was cancelled. One delegate commented, however, that if our recent march had drawn 800 workers, we could have forced the rally no matter what the legalities, "and burned down the union hall!" PL’ers then explained how the bosses’ laws and their government are weapons against our class which is why we need to seize power with communist revolution. THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES.
Ford, VW, GM, Mercedes Workers Block Highway, Shut Plants in Argentina
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, June 30 — A powerful march in early June of thousands of workers from Ford, VW and Mercedes-Benz that blocked Pan American Highway traffic for six miles was symptomatic of the anger and militancy gripping this country’s workers as they pressed for strikes to recover part of their wages stolen by bosses here, especially since the December 2001 economic collapse. The workers must fight the companies and the government as well as their own union hacks.
Autoworkers are leading the fight-back. The auto industry has recovered, and production is double of what it was in 2001, but wages are the same as 20 years ago.
Just before May Day, delegates from Ford, GM, VW and Mercedes Benz met to demand higher wage hikes than the bosses offered. At mass meetings, workers from different companies united against the bosses’ threats of firings and discussed work stoppages leading to an industry-wide walkout. When GM announced the firing of 320 contract workers, a strike was planned.
Then the union hacks began their sabotage. Stoppages were carried out for only two hours and only in certain sections of plants. Despite this, Ford and VW workers shut down two plants. When workers began organizing an all-out strike, José Rodriguez, national leader of SMATA (the autoworkers’ union) called for a 10-day cooling-off period, with no concessions from the bosses, succumbing to pressure from President Kichner’s Labor Minister. (The bosses, the government and the union hacks are all part of the ruling Justicialista [Peronist] Party).
Fearing workers’ anger, Rodriguez made a deal with GM, while the other plants were on strike. Workers are irate at the sellout which was less than their 2,000-peso monthly base-pay demand (about $900).
The angry workers continued their fight-back, forcing the union to agree to a 2-hour stoppage. Then SMATA reached another separate deal with VW-Cordoba for 1,500 pesos base pay. The workers booed Omar Dragun, union head in Cordoba. They accused the hacks of joining the bosses’ fear mongering of threatened firings if the strike continued. The hacks managed to jam through ratification by a 55% to 45% margin.
Workers throughout the country then demanded union buses to take them to a mass protest in Buenos Aires, while the top union leaders were meeting with the government and the bosses’ association. National union head Rodriguez tried to divide the rest of the autoworkers from the militants from VW-Cordoba.
But in early June, workers at VW-Pacheco, angered because they weren’t paid for the previous two weeks, refused to enter the plant and stopped any supervisor or manager from going in our out. Many workers from the neighboring Ford-Pacheco plant supported the VW struggle. Both groups, along with Mercedes workers, voted to carry out the mass march that blocked the Pan-American Highway. It was the most militant and powerful autoworkers’ march in 15 years. Young and old workers united to flex their muscles. Some workers wanted to seize the plants, but the hacks prevented it.
The government, fearing these angry workers could ignite more working-class struggles, told the bosses to give a little more than originally offered. It wasn’t quite what the workers wanted, but the struggle continues.
Fittingly, this month is the 20th anniversary of the historic Ford-Pacheco sit-down strike. In June-July 1985, 4,500 workers took over the plant for 18 days, causing country-wide tremors. At a mass assembly, only 17 workers decided to leave the plant. Mass support guaranteed the feeding of all sit-downers. Rank-and-file delegates played a leading role in organizing workers in all departments. Workers were opposing the Plan Austral, economic attacks carried out by President Alfonsin. And aping the fascist military dictatorship of the mid-1970’s, the "democratic" Alfonsin government attacked the workers, sending 3,000 cops to evict them.
Then, during the economic collapse of 2001, after the bosses abandoned hundreds of plants, the workers decided to continue production without any bosses, foreshadowing the hundreds of plants occupied by other workers today.
We in PLP believe industrial workers are the key to fighting the bosses’ attacks against our entire class. Just last month saw general strikes in Greece and South Africa (where autoworkers played an important role). When those workers grasp revolutionary communist politics and turn their struggles into schools for communism, then the bosses and their hacks will have plenty to fear.
Boeing Contract Battle Should Teach Us How to Think As a Class
SEATTLE, WA — International Association of Machinists (IAM) District 751 will hold its strike sanction vote on July 13. The result is a forgone conclusion. Almost all these Boeing workers will authorize a strike, as all the union misleaders will brag how "tough" they’ll be during negotiations. The actual strike vote will be Sept. 1 when the old contract expires.
Most of us know it will take more than wearing a T-Shirt that says "Do the Right Thing" or "supporting your negotiators" to ward off disaster. Big cuts in wages, health care, pensions and work-rules marked all recent IAM aerospace negotiations. Lockheed workers lost medical benefits for new hires when they retire. United Airlines defaulted on their pensions, then cut wages and benefits for the third time. Just last month, the Boeing Wichita plant was sold to Onex; then a new contract cut wages and benefits, gutted work-rules and eliminated the Boeing pension plan. In each case, the IAM local leadership, backed by the International, railroaded these contracts through despite initial rejections and even a short strike at Lockheed.
When rank-and-filers moved to build solidarity with each of these groups, they were stonewalled by the local and national IAM leadership. Isolated, each group eventually gave in.
In fact, Jerry Calhoun, Boeing’s chief negotiator, reported to Auburn, Wash. managers that he was "impressed" by the way things were handled during the IAM/Onex negotiations. When you get praise from sources like this, you know you’re in trouble!
But the collaboration between the union leadership and the bosses goes beyond praise from the company mouthpiece. The country’s biggest bosses plan to reorganize basic industry to pay for their "stunningly expensive" wars to secure Mideast oil, which they intend to use as leverage against any up-and-coming imperialist challenger. They are hell bent on eliminating defined pensions, rationalizing medical care and reducing wages to a bare minimum to finance this reorganization in preparation for "small" wars now and bigger wars later. The chairman of the Council of Foreign Affairs, the bosses’ main foreign policy think-tank, warns we have to choose between "retirement security and national security." "[It’s] weapons or walkers," he says. Goose-steeping right in line, the AFL-CIO industrial conference focused not on the unprecedented attacks on our brothers and sisters, but on China’s military potential.
Let’s have no illusions! This contract battle is part and parcel of an overall attack against our economic survival so the bosses can prepare for more deadly imperialist wars. That’s all this system has to offer us. Trying to negotiate our way out of these attacks has been an abject failure. Building class solidarity and rank-and-file militancy that inspires our fellow workers is the only way out of this death spiral. Using PLP’s ideas can teach us, even in this difficult period, how to employ our strength to put an end to this bosses’ nightmare with communist revolution.
AFL-CIO Dogfight:
Only Red Leadership Can Put U.S. Workers on the Offensive
With the upcoming AFL-CIO Chicago convention about to witness a possible split-off of unions comprising 40% of the federation’s membership, various "pro-labor" pundits are lamenting the sad state of affairs in the labor movement and remembering those days when workers were on the move. One such advocate, sociologist Ruth Milkman of UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations, wrote an op-ed piece in the N. Y. Times (6/30) in which she recalled a previous "time of trial for organized labor," in the early 1930s during the Great Depression when "Employers impos[ed] wage cuts and speed-up on their workers while the AFofL [stood] by helplessly."
She then points out that "a few years later" the CIO, "an insurgent group within organized labor…set off America’s greatest surge of unionism." She says that the present move by four of the largest unions — the SEIU, the Teamsters, Unite Here and the UFCW — to triple the funds for organizing the unorganized and combine competing unions could "restore labor" as the force "it once was in an era" of "remarkable gains…for all Americans."
Ms. Milkman conveniently forgets the central feature of the 1930’s surge: communist leadership.
It was communists who put over a million workers on the streets on March 6, 1932 in the battle that eventually produced unemployment insurance and welfare relief for 17 million jobless workers, one-third of the work-force.
It was the communists who were the major force in building the CIO, who championed industrial unionism to organize millions of workers in the basic industries — auto, steel, electrical, rubber, mass transit, chemical, longshore and the rest.
It was the communists who led the fight against racism and for unity of black and white workers in the multi-racial CIO, in contrast to the lily-white craft unions of the old AFL.
It was the communists who organized and led the sit-down strikes in auto that swept the country and forced the giant corporations — GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, US Steel, Republic Steel among many — to agree to unionization and the 8-hour day.
In the key strike — the sit-down at GM in Flint, Michigan — that sparked the organization of four million industrial workers in four years into the CIO, six of the seven members of the Committee that ran that strike and mobilized 40,000 workers from four states to surround the struck plants were members of the old Communist Party.
Compare that record to the likes of the Teamsters’ James Hoffa, the SEIU’s Andrew Stern, and their ilk. This latest crop of labor "leaders" see as their main role "rescuing" the unions to be able to serve the bosses’ capitalist system — which they defend — a lot more effectively than John Sweeney & Co.
It is ironic that the achievements of that communist-led industrial union movement should produce the components of what the ruling class now "proudly" refers to as "the American Dream": the 8-hour day, regular wage increases, health insurance, home ownership, etc. Unfortunately the old Communist Party fell victim to reformism. It did not turn its gigantic organizing efforts into "schools for communism." It did not build for revolution, but rather ended up supporting the liberal, Roosevelt wing of the ruling class that was out to save capitalism from a communist revolution that would eliminate the profit system.
But with the rulers’ massive attack on the working class’s wages, hours, health benefits and the rest, with the drive for imperialist wars in which the rulers use young workers as cannon fodder to keep control of Middle East oil and fend off their imperialist rivals, the "Dream" is becoming a nightmare, especially for the super-exploited black, Latin and immigrant workers who produce super-profits for the racist bosses. It will take a new communist movement, led by a mass PLP, to produce a workers’ society that will be a nightmare for — and destroy — the ruling class.
Disrupt Army Flag Day Recruiting Spectacle
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., June 14 — A crowd of anti-war protesters, including a PLP contingent, disrupted an orgy of patriotism today as the U.S. Army combined with the city government in attempting to turn a Flag Day celebration into a recruitment drive from the local high schools. The extravaganza included police SWAT teams cordoning off the area, Blackhawk helicopters circling the Common, National Guard groups displaying military vehicles — all trying to wow the spectators, mostly grade school children and their teachers.
The black-suited SWAT teams herded protesters into a "Free Speech Pen," but the PLP’ers outmaneuvered them, taking their banner and bullhorn outside the security perimeter and concentrating on selling CHALLENGE and injecting sharp political chants into the demonstration. When some black-suits confronted a PL leader demanding the bullhorn, she steadfastly refused to surrender it and carried it off to a safe place.
The protesters greeted the main speaker, an Army Undersecretary, with angry chants denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Iraq war, disrupting the program. When six flag-bearing parachutists jumped from the Blackhawks and floated to the ground, the protesters’ booing dominated the scene, lasting through the singing of the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance. One person snuck into the audience of mostly schoolchildren and soon had 50 of them chanting anti-war slogans! Then the black-suits arrested seven demonstrators who tried to break into the podium area.
When the ceremony ended, its purpose became clear: the Mayor and Deputy Secretary signed an agreement bringing Cambridge into the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success (PaYS) to improve its recruitment at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High Schools. The nationwide PaYS program dupes youth into joining the military with promises of training and jobs in participating corporations — how the bosses directly combine with the Army to get cannon fodder for their oil wars.
We learned that rank-and-file demonstrators are eager to hear our ideas on imperialism, racism and fascism and are ready to follow our leadership. But we must try to move these actions beyond simple protest and booing to a higher level — which in this case could have been leading them to break out of the infamous "Free Speech Pen." This could inspire all those school kids to join with us in the struggle when they come of age.
a name="Boston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting">">"oston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting
Recently the striking NSTAR gas and electric workers were voting on a proposed contract. A few PLP’ers distributed a flier entitled, "Vote No on the Contract!" It broadened the perspective on the decision facing the workers, stating that company attacks on pensions and benefits are part of the "life-and-death war between ...the capitalist class...in crisis...and the working class...[that] must fight not just for its livelihood, but for its life."
The flyer called on workers "who are ready to up the ante and fight the class war against capitalism...[to] see the proposed contract for what it is — a trick to keep the workers’ struggles confined to a narrow legal process that the bosses control — and vote it down.... But however they vote, the important thing is that they begin to fight as members of the working class."
The workers gladly took the leaflets, eager for any analysis about their struggle. Soon the Utility Union hacks threatened us, ordering us off the property, and calling the cops. They baited us McCarthyite-style, telling the workers to "Rip that up! That’s the communists! It has nothing to do with the union!" This, however, inspired more workers to take the leaflets. Not one worker was seen throwing it away or ripping it up. They carefully began reading them setting them aside in their cars, defying the hacks.
This experience showed again that strikes are important opportunities to politicize workers. The union hacks, desperate to get the sellout agreement passed, were freaking out mostly because the flier called for a "no vote." They’re running scared and must lie to prevent workers from thinking things through. But many NSTAR workers are starting to see that the attacks on them are part of a broader attack on their entire class. They couldn’t have missed the fact that it was communists who had enough respect for them to present a real analysis and long-range program for victory.
Comrades, strike support and boldness will go a long way!
Boston Reader
a name="PLP’S Songs On One CD">">"LP’S Songs On One CD
The 1970’s PLP LP’s "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers — in English and Spanish — such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.
Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202
a name="War’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s"></">Wa"’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez has been charged with killing two superiors, Lieutenant Louis Allen, his operations officer, and Captain Philip Esposito, his company commander. On June 7, the two officers were in their quarters when four explosions rocked their room in Forward Operating Base Danger, near Tikrit Iraq. Initially the Army thought the two deaths were caused by enemy mortar fire, but army munitions and explosives specialists later determined that the bomb patterns were more consistent with fragmentation grenades and claymore mines.
Some reported that Capt. Esposito and Lt. Allen had previously disciplined Staff Sgt. Martinez. The exact motives for the killings are unclear but some general political implications are apparent. The occupation of Iraq is beginning to strain the military.
Since the war started, over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, the vast majority by the U.S. military. Over 40,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded or mentally disabled enough to be removed from Iraq. Over 1,700 U.S. soldiers have been killed.
The enormity of the destruction of human life has moved well beyond the "small" wars to which the U.S. has limited itself since Vietnam. While this is nowhere near the number of casualties suffered in WWII or even in Vietnam, it has caused many people to question the motives for the war.
When young soldiers are ordered to kill children, smash down doors of families and drag them into the streets and shoot wounded men lying on the ground, it induces some of them to ask why and others to crack under the pressure. We don't know if Staff Sgt. Martinez killed those two officers, but we do know that murder has become a way of life in Iraq.
U.S. imperialists are having difficulties in building all-class unity within the armed forces. In October 2004, an entire platoon of the 343rd Quartermaster Company refused to go on a mission in defiance of their commander who felt delivering contaminated fuel over a dangerous road with slow, poorly-running vehicles was worth risking their lives.
The military has been trying to reduce the tension between working-class troops and their chain of command by using civilians for everything from mercenaries to cleaning porta-potties in order to ease discomforts of earlier wars. Racism against blacks and Latinos, once practically an open policy, is now more subtle as U.S. rulers depend on blacks for nearly half of their non-commissioned officers and half of female officers. Latinos, facing racist unemployment and super-exploitation, are expected to fill the military's shrinking enlisted ranks.
But no matter what the bosses do, they can't hide class antagonisms, nor will they be able to cover up racism too much longer. Imperialism asks the poor to fight the rich man's war. Every soldier, marine, airman and sailor who lost their lives died because some commanding officer found the risks acceptable to U.S. interests. Every operation that brings praise is another medal for career-climbing, resume-building officers and another day of danger in the desert for lower enlisted personnel. Pentagon officials, the general of Abu Grahib prison and the commanders of the MP units caught torturing Iraqis supposedly "had no idea of what was going on" while the enlisted soldiers collect years in jail.
The bosses need workers to commit murder, torture and occupation on their behalf but it's the bosses who reap billions while our families reap the casualties.
Threat of Class Struggle Hangs Over EU Rulers
(Part I discussed the snag suffered by the bosses of the European Union when the French and the Dutch rejected the proposed EU Constitution, and the fact that workers have no interest in either bosses’ side. It revealed two contradictions: one involving the high-tech countries like Germany vs. export-industry countries like Italy who must compete with low-wage China; and the second pits European rulers against their U.S. rivals — both of which are difficult to solve. The final one follows.)
The third contradiction reflects the 800-pound gorilla in the room: class struggle, the fight pitting workers against bosses. This was the real shadow hanging over the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution. Leaving aside the openly racist forces, led, for example, by the fascist Le Pen and his National Front in France — who predictably mobilized against unity with Turkey and against immigrant workers — this vote reflected more than anything the workers’ disapproval of a U.S.-style "free market" economy with few social concessions. The European bosses would love to reach this stage. They envy U.S. bosses’ ability to slash health care, education, etc. They took due note when Clinton, a liberal Democrat, ended welfare and replaced it with a slave-labor scheme known as "Workfare."
For many years workers in France and Germany have been able to count on a social security system with affordable medical care, unemployment insurance, retirement benefits and lengthy paid vacations. But these reforms didn’t fall from the sky. The massive class struggles in France during the "Popular Front" period of the 1930s brought them about. French rulers at the time were split. Some felt that granting significant reforms was the only alternative to communist revolution. Remember, the Soviet Union was in its heyday 70 years ago. Other French bosses took the hard line and preferred junior partnership with Hitler to the Popular Front. The second group won out in the short term; the first won in the longer term. After World War II, newly resurgent German bosses decided that throwing some crumbs to the working class was the best way to stifle class struggle and co-opt the threat of communist organizing. Again, this was at the height of the Cold War.
Well, the Cold War is over. The old communist movement has died of its own opportunist political weaknesses. The former Soviet Union is now a capitalist Russia hell-bent on becoming a major imperialist. So the rulers of France and Germany would love to move more quickly to grind down workers’ living standards and keep the profits for themselves.
But the French referendum sounds a warning signal. Voting is one thing. Militant class struggle is another. In 1968, a rebellion by French university students spread like wildfire throughout the working class and shut down the entire country for three weeks. French and German bosses haven’t forgotten it. Neither should we.
The memory of this rebellion provides the second lesson our class must draw from the European bosses’ disarray. The specter of communism continues to haunt the rulers. It made them grant the reforms they now want to take away. It gave rise to the 1968 revolt which occurred in the international context of anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Rebuilding a new communist movement in Europe must now become the rallying cry of workers throughout the European Union.
Despite the claims of the European fake-left, the "No" vote is not in and of itself a victory for workers. Our class can never win anything in capitalist elections. Rather, it is a sign that workers are thirsting for an alternative to this system.
Working with its European friends, our Party accepts the challenge and responsibility of helping provide this alternative. The specter of communism can and will eventually become flesh and blood. Even in the direst of periods, like the present, it will continue to haunt the rulers. Over time, it will destroy them. We should take advantage of the rulers’ momentary disunity to increase the boldness and vigor with which we build international working-class unity for communism.
UNDER COMMUNISM
How Would Health Care Be Better?
(This column continues a new CHALLENGE series on how life under communism would differ from life under capitalism; how it will represent the interests of the international working class and our allies. We invite all readers to contribute both questions and answers to this column for discussion, relying on either history, examples from our own lives, or hope and imagination.)
The June 8 issue described some of British surgeon Joshua Horn’s experiences in China from 1954 to 1969. In his book "Away With All Pests," Horn describes the progress made then in burn treatment.
In 1958 a Shanghai steel worker, Chiu Tsai Kang, was splashed with molten steel causing severe burns over 89% of his body. British and U.S. medical experience at the time would have given Chiu no chance of survival. But despite being technically backward, the Chinese refused to accept such a diagnosis. They were able and willing to provide better treatment to workers than other countries gave to monarchs and billionaires.
A constant stream of workers gave blood to save Chiu’s life. The hospital workers built him a room with air under positive pressure to prevent infection to his open wounds. His nurses cut off their braids to lessen the spread of germs. Anyone entering his room bathed and changed into sterile clothes.
Meetings of doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners and maintenance workers developed treatment plans. They provided Chiu round-the-clock care. When Chiu became discouraged and refused to eat, Shanghai chefs sent him tempting food, while his comrades urged him to eat. Daily bulletins kept the whole country informed.
To keep his wounds draining, and to keep him as comfortable as possible, Chiu needed an air mattress that could be inflated in sections. In the middle of the night Horn and a colleague went to a nearby plastic raincoat factory. The workers met, designed such a mattress and, based on everyone’s suggestions, modified the drawings. By dawn they had produced a 12-section inflatable mattress.
Chiu recovered. The experiences gained from his treatment greatly improved burn care, not only across China, but worldwide. In 1961 a U.S. expert, Dr. T. G. Blocker, wrote in the Journal of Traumatology that the Chinese mortality rate from severe burns was 30% lower than in the U.S.
Thus, in a communist system, the tremendous attention and care given by thousands of working people to one injured steelworker saved the lives of countless people throughout the world. Still today in the U.S. some 50 million people have no health insurance, while companies massively slash employee health coverage. Why? It doesn’t make profits for the big capitalists. You tell us, which is the better system for workers?
LETTERS
Learning About Communism At Chicago March
I want to publicly thank the young comrades who organized our Party’s participation in the anti-Minutemen protest today (see p. 3 ). It was so energizing to be amongst people who literally took leaflets out of my hand, asked for Desafio and generously donated money. To think I almost didn’t go because I was "too busy"! Congratulations also to the comrades on the principled way they handled one group of marchers’ anti-communism. They advanced our line forcefully but politely, trying to "win the person, not just the argument." PLP turned what could have been just a nationalist, anti-Minutemen march into an exciting, provocative invitation to learn about communism and join us. We, and everyone who heard us or inter-acted with us, were able to glimpse a future society without bosses or nations.
Older comrade
N. Africans Suffer A Lot More Racism Than Oprah
When Oprah Winfrey was denied entrance to a Paris department store, she received only the slightest taste of the racism that hits North Africans here. The Canard enchaîné reports (6/22) that when 18-year-old Haroun jay-walked in Sucy-en-Brie on June 4, the cops started beating him up with their flashlights and Billy clubs. Three neighborhood youths and Haroun’s brother got mixed up in it and were beaten up as well. Haroun’s mother arrived to get smashed in the face with a flashlight. Haroun’s father was maced.
In all, eight people were arrested, suffered cuts requiring stitches, slight concussion and bruises and spent three days in jail. Seven of the eight have been charged with "insulting a policeman" and "rebellion." They go to court September 6.
This is what Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s top cop, means when he says he’s going to "clean up the poor neighborhoods."
Comrade in France
Fight Nationalism, Privatization in Pakistan
(In our last issue, the initial part of this letter reviewed the exploitation of workers in Pakistan, especially the brutal oppression of women, how the bosses use the fundamentalists, and the role of PLP.)
The bosses use "nationalist" slogans in Baluchistan, Sind, NWFP (Northwest Frontier Provinces) and the Saraikee territories to divide the working class and to protect their rotten system. Meanwhile, the rulers exploit the masses’ emotions to divide them by nationality, territory, "race," religion and sect to prevent a united fight of the working class against wage slavery, inequality, illiteracy and fundamentalism. This is a worldwide tactic of capitalism, especially in this less industrialized region. China’s bosses are investing a lot of money in Baluchistan’s industries. This is a threat to U.S. rulers who want to create chaos there to ward off the Chinese. Autonomy for these provinces does nothing for these workers. It only diverts them from their real problems: poverty, exploitation, unemployment and injustice.
The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service between India and Pakistan is another attempt by these bosses to strengthen their capitalist economies. They need markets to sell their commodities. But their colliding interests won’t allow peace in this region, Actually, if Kashmir’s workers had no bosses’ fight to contend with, they might direct their struggle against their exploitation, which would be a real threat to the bosses’ economy. We communists are the real force fighting for internationalism. We stand for opening all borders in a communist world; these borders just protect capitalist interests.
Pakistan’s rulers are privatizing all industries, making workers’ lives even more miserable. While workers do fight this greed, their union leadership plays the role of puppets of the bosses. The telecommunications workers are resisting the privatization of the state-owned PTCL, making it difficult for the government to sell it to the bosses. Our comrades are playing a revolutionary role in this strike and are standing firm against bosses’ privatization moves. We believe they will fight back if we provide them real communist leadership.
Our Party is struggling for communist internationalism, serving the working class. We ask the working class all over the world to join us.
Comrades from Pakistan
Disagrees About Stewart Prosecution
Lynne Stewart's client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, is a vicious, racist, religious fanatic and a murderous fascist. He is not merely an "anti-government" client. The charges against the lawyer Stewart were not an "attack on anyone who seriously challenges capitalism." Neither he nor Stewart is militantly opposing imperialism, racism, or other attacks on the working class, as suggested in the Challenge article of March 19. Abdel-Rahman was in prison under a tight lockdown and prohibited from communicating with his fanatic followers, much the same as Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale who tried to have a federal judge killed.
The fact that both Abdel-Rahman and Hale promoted racist holy war on the working class was not enough under capitalism to land either of them in jail. Like with Osama Bin-Laden, the FBI & CIA ignored Abdel-Rahman when he was "only" promoting fascist slaughter in the Mid-East. Hale was not seen as a threat as long as he "only" organized for racist attacks on African-Americans. The ruling class does not consider being an active fascist a crime. The prosecutions came only after Abdel-Rahman was involved in bombing the World Trade Center and Hale tried to have a Federal Judge killed. Attacking the ruling class itself is considered a crime by their state apparatus.
The charge against Stewart is not a frame-up. To act as Abdel-Rahman’s civil (not criminal) lawyer, she had to sign agreements to abide by the prison rules and to not smuggle messages out for him. His other lawyers refused to smuggle messages, just as Matt Hale’s lawyer refused to carry coded messages out of prison for him.Stewart foolishly smuggled out of prison and released to the press a call by Abdel-Rahman to his followers in Egypt to withdraw from a ceasefire and return to military attacks which in the past had focused on slaughtering unarmed "infidel" tourists to further the goal of an Islamic theocracy. By then, Egypt had become a more important ally of the U.S. in its war planning. If we held state power, we would not treat either Abdel-Rahman or Stewart less harshly. Stewart took an active part in Abdel-Rahman’s fascist plans. She was not prosecuted for being an activist lawyer.
None of Abdel-Rahman’s other lawyers were prosecuted, as they refused to get sucked into his fanatic scheming.
Stewart did not just commit an ethical violation, or break prison administrative rules. She did not merely improperly smuggle personal or fund-raising messages out to her client’s family or friends, or violate the rules in seeking to rally public support for his legal position. She smuggled out his call to his supporters to return to a fascist armed conflict.At some stage in her legal career, Stewart may have believed herself to be fighting against an oppressive government by legally defending her clients. She crossed a major line when she sided with her client by providing direct tactical support to his pursuit of a religious war. We could conclude that Stewart was once well-intentioned, but Stewart does not deserve our political support. We should waste no energy on Stewart, not because of who her legal client was, but because of her own later choice to give active support to religious-based fascism. Stewart may have deluded herself into believing that she was aiding a liberation struggle. We do not have to join in that delusion. Capitalism is at best oppressive; in bad times it is vicious.
When cornered, it turns to fascism. But to call every exercise of capitalist state power a step toward fascism minimizes the inherent every-day brutal nature of the capitalist state. Worse, it trivializes the qualitatively different and pervasive use of state terror that defines fascism.
Red Lawyer
CHALLENGE Comment: We thank Red Lawyer for his letter. He seems to disagree with PLP’s position that fascism is growing in the U.S. Presently, under the guise of "fighting terrorism," it is taking the form of a legal structure which allows the ruling class to do away with, or circumvent, rights that are supposedly "guaranteed" by U.S. law. The rulers would like to build a mass movement to support this Homeland Security police state. It is in this context that the Stewart case must be viewed.
Stewart is not a fascist, as Red Lawyer implies, although we have many sharp disagreements with her politics. Nevertheless, we believe the Stewart case is one more step, among many others, toward a full-blown fascist U.S. We think it would be a serious error not to make that point to all our friends and readers, and not to organize workers and others to fight this type of legal fascism.
D.C. Project Showed Power of Red Ideas
My experience in the Washington, D.C. Summer Project, especially the rally against police brutality and in meeting the Metro workers, was eye-opening and a big boost for the Party, the Metro workers and the anti-racist Coalition for Police Accountability.
Organizing a multi-racial mass of young and old supporters at the rally energized the Coalition. For the first time, we appeared in force with a truly militant attack on the capitalist system which uses the police and racism to oppress youth and the working class. When a cop threatened us with a police dog if we did not move, maybe it was because this time we were a force to be reckoned with. I think the mother of the murdered Archie Elliott III was impressed by the youth turnout, the energy and support at the rally.
The Metro work was also effective. Riding the buses, talking to the drivers and passengers, helped us learn how to share our ideas with the masses, and was of huge significance for Metro workers themselves. To see so many people, especially youth, come out and support them, to take the time to ride the bus and talk to them about their day, their families, their daily struggles, the grind and ups and downs of driving a bus — all this showed the workers we do care and that we’re united in solidarity with them, in fighting the bosses but also in fighting the capitalist system that chains all workers in the shackles of wage slavery.
Our actions during the Summer project brought more workers closer to the red-led union, closer to the Party and has raised class consciousness to a level not seen since the 1978 strike. It highlighted the crucial role played by industrial workers.
Project Participant
Youth Write About the NJ Anti-Minutemen Protest
Traveling to this protest, we really didn’t think we’d have this much of an impact on the police. Those protesting for the first time felt excited and happy to be part of a coalition of the working class.
Preparing for the protest we were told we could get arrested. Running through our minds were thoughts of lawyers, parents and that we were way too young to be jailed. After realizing the rally’s importance, we quickly got over it and were ready for the challenge. Workers of the world united as the fascist Bridgewater police came to support the racist "Minutemen."
As we approached the arena, police quickly identified our New York plates and our multi-racial passengers and followed us all the way to the parking lot. They were expecting trouble from us, and they were right!
Exiting the car approaching the entrance, we chanted, "Obreros unidos, jamas seran vencidos!" (Workers united will never be defeated). The cops immediately demanded we move off the property. We stood firm at the entrance. Then two of us were arrested. The police expected this would intimidate us and we’d run home but little did they know we came to send a message and weren’t going to be pushed around like their little puppets.
We rallied on the road down below, excitedly chanting many great slogans. Then people from local anti-racist and immigrant groups arrived and began chanting with us. Our protest grew, it was HOT but we were dedicated and determined to be heard. Racism and fascism are growing. As communists we believe capitalism’s chains must be broken.
While outside chanting, more police cars showed up, calling for more and more back-up. Now look who was scared! When the cops appeared with tear gas and guns, it just made us chant harder. We were dedicated, willing to put ourselves on the line. We must fight back against the "Minutemen" and their fascist propaganda. The people of the world will one day stand up and dismantle the capitalists’ poison.
******************
Today was a truly inspiring day, workers united against fascism and racism. These racists are the modern-day equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.
Our first goal was to oppose the injustice directed against immigrants. It was over 90 degrees, but that didn’t deter us. As soon as we began protesting, the Bridgewater cops tried to disperse us. Two members were arrested and subjected to police brutality. These fascist cops slammed one of our elder members onto a car. We only protested harder.
It was truly inspiring to see people randomly joining the demonstration. We were truly united. Police SWAT teams and an excessive amount of cops showed up, but we would not be moved, not be pushed down or away. We stood strong and continued to fight for the cause.
******************
Before the protest, I must admit I was a little nervous. But the possibility of being arrested only showed me that participating was essential.
When I actually arrived at the protest, the experience was surreal. We, especially the students, showed that we would express ourselves no matter what the police tried to do.
The truly beautiful thing was that so many people — Asian, Latin, black, white — protested and got our message across. We united around the idea that workers of the world have the power to unite to change society. It starts with one person taking a stand one day, one moment to make a difference and we all can work together to do our part.
Group Relations Influence Health
I was very pleased to see a series on life under communism, but I think the first article (6/8/05) was written more for health professionals than for the rest of us. It would have been stronger if it had drawn the conclusion that we should all be part of collective groups wherever we work so that everyone would help each other take responsibility for the work of society. These groups would be a safe place where we would struggle with each other to improve our relationships and our work.
Research has shown that the interpersonal relationships we have with people have a big effect on our health. (For more information, see a book which summarizes many studies, written by Dean Ornisch, a well-known doctor who has reversed heart disease through diet.)
I think the bigger picture related to health is sanitation, clean water, availability of medical care and how it will be paid for.
I want to contribute to this discussion, as well as life under communism, in more detail in future letters.
A regular reader
Inspired to Defy Fascist Cops
When I arrived at the anti-Minutemen protest in NJ, I saw three of the racist nationalists cradling rolled-up U.S. flags and carrying anti-immigrant signs. I started to open up my car door to attack them. The only difference between me, as an Hispanic male, and the undocumented workers is that I have U.S. citizenship. These patriots were trying to organize against workers like my grandmother who slaved in a sweatshop so that my father and uncle could eat.
As I was about to jump from the car and pound these patriots with my red rage, I was told to wait and follow the agreed-upon plan. With the communist understanding of the importance of discipline and following the collectively decided-upon plan, I refrained from attacking them.
No sooner had we assembled in the parking lot and moved to protest in front of the center, the cops surrounded us, told us to move and then arrested one comrade. As she pounded on the squad car with her free hand and shouted to fight the fascists, she inspired all of us to continue protesting. A cop then told me to leave or I would be next. I saw what the rest of my comrades were doing, still shouting and protesting, so I shouted the same slogan at the cop. I was quickly arrested.
While I was being hand-cuffed, I heard three racists saying I was probably one of those "illegals" who came here to steal jobs and cause trouble. I recognized one as a guy I saw from the car, and told him he's lucky I didn't get at him. He quickly shut up with a look of shock and surprise when he heard my English.
At the police station I was asked a series of questions that led me to believe a special database is being kept on left-wingers.
This was my first arrest, but it was a small price to pay in the long struggle for communism. Our Party will continue to fight the fascists, the bosses and any patriots who dare to organize against the international working class.
Defiant Red
Money Under Communism?
"What would the role of money be under communism?" is a question I've heard many times. The answer is simple: there won't be any. No currency, no cash, zero, zilch.
To understand why money must be abolished, we must consider why money exists in the first place. Cash is a medium of trade that simply represents a portion of wealth created by labor. What a nation's currency is based upon varies. The U.S. dollar is the de-facto currency for oil. The Euro is based upon gold. But mainly, money is used to steal working-class labor. This labor is the real value of anything.
Under communism, the only goods produced would be that which the working class needs. A major failing of socialism was that it required cash to operate. The only way to get currency is by extracting the surplus value the working class creates. Commodity production for trade eventually overrides the agricultural, medical, educational and residential needs of the working class. The socialized capitalism that earlier parties fought for can never lead to communism because it didn't remove the root of capitalism — Capital!
By destroying the base of the bosses' power and reorganizing society based on producing for need, we can construct a world of "from each according to ability, and to each according to need." We will build a society to share and meet needs, not create surplus value. For communism to exist, all forms of currency must be destroyed. We don't seek to redistribute wealth; we seek to destroy it.
A Reader
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
US, China will clash as oil runs out
…In 30 years oil production could be down by 75%....
This is a staggering figure . . . A world without oil is bound to represent a massive economic, social and political shock.…There will be a power struggle over dwindling oil stocks. Already, there are signs of a new cold war emerging as the US and China seek to curry favour with poor African countries that are seen to have potential as oil suppliers. It could get a lot worse than that. The oil junkies of the West will be like heroin addicts suffering from cold turkey. (GW, 7/7)
‘Missile Defense’ is plan to control globe
In order to sell this space warfare program to the American people, the Pentagon has labeled it "missile defense." But in reality the program is all about offense. It was first spelled out in the 1997 Space Command plan, "Vision for 2020," that called for U.S "control and domination" of space.
The Pentagon and its aerospace corporation allies understand that they cannot come to the American people and ask for hundreds of billions of dollars for offensive weapons in space. Thus the claim of "missile defense"….
…Federal expenditures on missile defense [are] about $ 10 billion per year—enough to provide health insurance for every uninsured kid in America. (Distributed by MinuteMan.Org)
Recruiting: 4 times harder than year ago
…Marine recruiters are spending an average of 12 hours per recruit they enlist, up from about 3 hours a year or so ago, Marine officials say. (NYT, 6/30)
Pol: US prisons worse than Guantánamo
…As a response to increasing calls to shut down the…facility, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the panel’s ranking Democrat, said that Guantánamo was in many ways better than state and federal penitentiaries… (NYT )
‘Made in USA’ can still mean slavery
…The Northern Marianas, DeLay said, was no haven for cruelty but a "perfect Petri dish of capitalism."
…Garment industry sweatshop workers and sex slaves in the Northern Mariana Islands — a U.S. territory — were exploited in a system that resembled indentured servitude.
Brokers — traffickers, really, in human beings — brought thousands to work in sweatshops for as many as 70 hours per week. They lived in crowded barracks; some were locked behind guarded fences. And because the territory is a U.S. possession, garments bore this seal of approval: "Made in the U.S.A."
Some who failed to get work were forced into the sex trade, though they may not even have been paid for prostitution since they still owed the brokers. (Wash. Post)
White ex-prisoners: More job offers than never-arrested black men
White men with prison records receive far more offers for entry-level jobs in New York City than black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often — if not more so — than black men who have never been arrested, according to a new study by two Princeton professors.
The study, the first to assess the effect of race on job searches by ex-convicts, also found that black men who had never been in trouble with the law were about half as likely as whites with similar backgrounds to get a job offer or a callback. (NYT, 6/17)
CAFTA: blood-sucking drug lobby plan
…Washington’s biggest and wealthiest lobby, appears to have succeeded in the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement would extend the monopolies of drug makers and, critics say, lead to higher drug prices for the mostly impoverished people of the six Latin American countries it covers….
…In Guatemala,...poor AIDS patients have marched in the streets to protest. (NYT, 7/2)
US loves terrorists if they’re anti-left
Colombia has just passed a law to demobilize paramilitary fighters that the government calls the "Justice and Peace Law." It should be called the "Impunity for Mass Murderers, Terrorists and Major Cocaine Traffickers Law."
Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary armies, one party in a 40-year civil war, have massacred thousands of people. They control 40 percent of Colombia’s cocaine exports….
The new law, which reflects the paramilitaries’ considerable political power, will block the extradition of paramilitary leaders wanted for trafficking to the United States and allow them to continue their drug dealing, extortion, land theft and other criminals activities undisturbed. Even those responsible for the most heinous crimes against humanity may go free because of strict time limits for prosecutions. The few who are convicted will likely serve sentenced of only 22 months….
The Bush administration could have pushed President Alvaro Uribe to pass a good bill. Instead, Ambassador William Wood enthusiastically backed the new law, giving Washington’s endorsement to…a terrorist mafia. (NYT, 7/4)
With 9/11 excuse, FBI gets your secrets
The Social Security Administration has relaxed its privacy restrictions and searched thousands of its files at the request of the F.B.I. as part of terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, newly disclosed records and interviews show….
…The Social Security agency agreed to an "ad hoc" policy that authorized the release of information to the bureau for investigations related to Sept. 11 because officials saw a "life–threatening" emergency, internal memorandums say.
The Internal Revenue Service also worked with the bureau and the Social Security agency to provide income and taxpayer information in terror inquiries, law enforcement officials said.
" But an ad hoc policy like this is so broad that it allows law enforcement to obtain really sensitive information by merely claiming that the information is relevant to the 9/11 investigation….There appears to be very little oversight." (NYT, 6/22)
