- From Compton to Hammond to Harlem: Fight Racist Police Terror
- Obama’s Gates Flip-Flop Serves Racist Rulers’ War Needs
- Rulers and Harvard Boost Slicker, More Deadly Nazi-Style Policing
- White Cop, Black Prof Both Agents of Bosses
- France: Workers’ Threat to Blow Up Machinery Nets $42,000 Each
- D.C. PL’ers Lead Battle to Fire Criminal Transit Bosses
- PLP Summer Project Fights Racist Attack by Harlem KKKops
- PL’ers Lead Mass Protest Against Cal State’s Racist Budget Cuts
- Chicago ‘Mini-Project’ Backs Transit, Health, School Workers
- Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’: ‘1199’ Hacks Cut Wages, Pensions to Save Bosses
- Minimum Wages Produce Maximum Profits
From Compton to Hammond to Harlem:
Fight Racist Police Terror
COMPTON, CA, July 18 — “Avery Cody, Jr.’s murder means, We got to fight back!!!” Chants roared through the city of Compton today at a PLP-led protest against only the latest racist murder by the ruling-class KKKops. A multi-racial group participated: twenty-five PLP Summer Project volunteers and an equal number of workers and their families from the neighborhood, including the victim’s father. The neighborhood responded warmly to PLP’s revolutionary communist analysis that police murders are part of a capitalist system that must terrorize workers to guarantee maximum profits for the bosses.
On July 5, sixteen-year-old Avery Cody, Jr. was coming out of a nearby McDonalds with three friends when they were stopped without cause by sheriffs’ deputies. As Avery was being frisked, he ran and was chased and shot in the back, killing him in broad daylight. The cops claim he had a gun but a video of his murder does not show him holding a gun. Neighbors who witnessed the murder also said he didn’t have a gun. They were never questioned by police.
A friend of the Party told us of the murder, and members of the LA Summer Project responded immediately, visiting the neighborhood with leaflets and CHALLENGE. Neighbors insisted we visit the family, which was holding a family gathering to grieve Avery’s death. There we found scores of people hurt and angry. Their eyes lit up when they heard our calls for fight-back and revolution. In short order, people were calling out, “Bring one of those newspapers over here” and, “What you guys are doing is important.”
As we urged people to fight against this murder, we explained how racist police terror is intimately connected with capitalism as a system. “It’s more than the sheriffs,” we said in discussions and speeches. Black and Latin workers are the targets of police terror because the bosses need racism to squeeze extra profits from the working class. The U.S. ruling class figured out long ago that by paying some groups of workers less than others, they could bring down wages for the entire working class. Now, in the midst of their crisis, as they scramble to bail out their banks and fund their oil wars to compete against rival imperialists like Russia and China, they’re using racism to increase their attacks on all workers through layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, and deep cutbacks in services.
In industries like auto and aerospace, bosses have been eliminating thousands of unionized industrial jobs. At the same time, they’re hiring other, often immigrant workers at a lower, non-union wage. Unemployment for black and Latin workers is double that of white workers. They are also often the first to recognize and fight the bosses’ attacks. Whether LA County Sheriffs, in this case, or LAPD, the police’s job is to try to force workers to accept capitalism, through harassment and outright murder. In a word, it’s called fascism, and it’s up to us to fight back!
The bosses are counting on workers to blame each other for these attacks instead of capitalism. We must never fall for racism! We need one united, fighting working class: citizen and immigrant, union and non-union, black, Latin, Asian and white, women and men.
The ruling class wants us to think we can simply “fix” the police under capitalism. But the police are an arm of the bosses’ state to oppress the working class.
Capitalism produces two opposing classes of people: one tiny minority of bosses who feed off us like vampires, and the mighty working class — the overwhelming majority of the population — that produces everything and is fully capable of running society in its own interest when not divided by racism. Fighting like hell against Avery Cody’s racist murder is part of that struggle to build a movement to smash capitalism once and for all. We have already made plans to follow up with our new friends in the neighborhood as well as raise this issue on our jobs and in our mass organizations. This fight has just begun!
Obama’s Gates Flip-Flop Serves Racist Rulers’ War Needs
Obama’s flip-flop on the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Gates stems from the complicated needs of beleaguered U.S. rulers. On one hand, U.S. capitalists, seeking to make workers pay for their economic crisis, need racism to reap super-profits by attacking one sector of the working class especially hard. Black, Latino and Asian workers suffer layoffs, pay-cuts, foreclosures and evictions at disproportionally high rates, which helps depress conditions for all workers. And they need racist cops to enforce that racism.
But on the other hand, U.S. rulers, with two wars raging and more on the horizon, need a patriotic, loyal working class. U.S. bosses are in the awkward position of having to recruit troops in large measure from among the most exploited workers.
So when initially Obama let slip that the Cambridge, Mass. cops were “stupid” for jailing Gates, and remarked that “the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause casts suspicion of [government],” it partially played to winning this loyalty. But, of course, he and the bosses’ media played up his relationship to his friend Gates as “the main issue,” while Obama never touched on the most devastating effects of racist discrimination: black and Latino workers last hired and first fired, double unemployment and foreclosure rates, poverty wages, destructive education and 70% of the prison population.
However, since Obama’s original comments didn’t serve his bosses’ need for racist exploitation, he was forced to withdraw them and, in effect, praise Cambridge police for adding Gates to a nation-wide wave of unjustified, racist stop-and-frisks, arrests, jailings, beatings and killings by cops. The rulers are caught in this contradiction of needing racism for profits and for dividing the working class but also needing the victims for their wars.
Consequently, while trying to step up cop terror, they seek to cloak it in sheep’s clothing under the seemingly benign name of “community policing.” This anti-worker campaign enlists local support like neighborhood watches for police repression. Begun in earnest in the Clinton era, its chief evangelist, top cop Bill Bratton, has spread the program from Boston to New York, Los Angeles and Miami.
Rulers and Harvard Boost Slicker, More Deadly Nazi-Style Policing
With Harvard’s help, Greater Boston’s local bosses now conduct the most advanced form of community policing. In 1992, a handful of Harvard-trained black pastors founded the Ten Point Coalition as a working alliance between churches and cops, supposedly to curb youth violence, which, they said “must be dealt with as crime, not simply as a symptom of poverty.” (Harvard Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2000) “Some kids need to go to jail, not only for the sake of the community, but for their own sake” (!) the Harvard-funded churchmen intoned, promising, “Ten-Point ministers will have a voice in who gets arrested and how they are sentenced....The ministers... are critical in pushing the police to follow a set of policies that the inner-city community is willing to support and sees as beneficial and helpful....That’s the whole idea of the ‘umbrella of legitimacy.’” (Harvard Magazine article)
Ten Point, which is thriving, blatantly copies the Nazis’ Judenrat scheme, which employed Jewish leaders as informers to draw up lists for their Nazi masters to use to send millions of Jews to the gas chambers. These traitors later became many of the leaders of the state of Israel.
Ten Point gets direct ideological support from Harvard’s sociology department, which has made it a major initiative. Ten Point’s chief funding comes from the ruling-class Boston Foundation; its financial boss, Jack Meyer, previously ran Harvard’s and the Rockefeller Foundation’s vast endowments.
The Gates’ hoopla and its aftermath form part of a larger — thus far unevenly successful — effort by the ruling class to impose fascism in the U.S. To compete with rising rivals in Europe, Russia and China, economically and militarily, the rulers must make the U.S. “leaner and meaner.” As jobs, wages, housing and every other aspect of workers’ security collapse with a crushing racist bias, Obama’s blessing of the police, the bosses’ main enforcement apparatus, helps the bosses crack down.
For their crimes, Gates, Crowley and Obama all belong in a working-class-run jail. This sentence can only be carried out through a PLP-led communist revolution that overthrows the hell of capitalism and establishes a workers’ society which abolishes wage slavery, including the wage system itself, along with destroying racism, the oppression of women and imperialist wars — all created by the profit system.
White Cop, Black Prof Both Agents of Bosses
The great irony in the Gates flap, untouched by the media, is that arresting officer Sgt. Crowley and Prof. Gates both play for the same ruling-class team. The Cambridge police department has impeccable anti-worker credentials. It helped break transit and rubber workers’ strikes from 1886 to 1956, reaching its fascist pinnacle in 1969-70. When our Party led mass, militant anti-Vietnam-war movements, including shut-downs, strikes, and sit-ins on and off Harvard’s campus, the Cambridge cops’ new Tactical Patrol Force came in to bust heads.
While PLP was leading college uprisings that called for the class unity of students and workers against U.S. imperialism’s Vietnam atrocities, Gates, then at Yale, also turned activist — for the ruling class. He became a disciple of Jay Rockefeller. Yale undergrad Gates wrote a book-length thesis extolling the arch-capitalist heir who was grabbing political control over Gates’s home state of West Virginia, strategic for its coal and steel industries. In 1972, Gates worked in Rockefeller’s campaign for governor.
Ever since, Gates has courted and served the big-money boys, garnering grants and fellowships from the Mellon, Carnegie, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations. His “scholarly” service to them lies in Gates’ constant focus on “identity” politics which masks the essence of capitalist society: class struggle between opposing classes, exploiters and the exploited, a contradiction that can only be resolved by the working class overthrowing the ruling capitalist class. The latter further rewarded Gates with a Harvard professor’s chair and pundit status as host of a series on their Exxon-Mobil funded PBS network.
France: Workers’ Threat to Blow Up Machinery Nets $42,000 Each
BORDEAUX, FRANCE, July 20 — Fifty-three workers at the JLG plant here slated for layoffs won over $2 million in severance pay after their co-workers occupying the plant threatened to blow up $352,000 worth of industrial equipment if the company ignored their demands. The JLG workers had been striking three plants for three weeks when they dragged four large platform cranes into the parking lot and surrounded them with gas cylinders and kindling.
Before that JLG bosses had refused to grant any compensation to the laid-off workers, but the blow-up threat forced the company to give 30,000 euros ($42,000) to each of the 53 workers, totaling $2,226,000. The cranes were then returned to the factory.
The JLG workers were following similar threats made by those at Nortel, the telecommunications equipment maker and New Fabris, an auto parts manufacturer. These tactics represent a new escalation by workers here in reacting to the bosses’ attempt to shift the burden of the capitalist crisis onto their backs. The government has reportedly “refrained from sending in the police to break up protests... [because they] want to avoid an escalation of violence.” (Reuters, 7/18)
Meanwhile, 366 New Fabris workers in Chatellerault facing layoffs have wired gas canisters to an electrical cable and threatened to detonate the gas and blow up the plant’s contents — worth up to 4 million euros ($5.6 million) — if they don’t receive 30,000 euros each by July 31. Renault and Peugeot-Citroen are Fabris’ main clients and were just given 6 billion euros ($8.4 billion) in state bailout funds after promising to preserve jobs.
One worker explained that, “The machinery and the stockpile of finished goods are our only bargaining chip.”
March Against Cops’ Cover-up:
Racists Set 10-year-old Black Child on Fire
Racists Set 10-year-old Black Child on Fire
HAMMOND, IN, July 24 — Sixty black, Latino and white workers and youth held a militant march today to support Joshua Judkins, his family and all children against racist violence and racist police complicity. This was the largest anti-racist demonstration here in decades!
On June 8, Judkins, a ten-year-old black child, was the victim of a brutal assault: three white boys (13, 14 and 15) doused his back with alcohol and set him on fire. Joshua was hospitalized for three weeks with second- and third-degree burns, had one major operation, and faces months of excruciating physical therapy.
The racist Hammond Police Department (HPD) “investigated” the incident and refused to charge the attackers with anything, saying it was just a prank!
A prank? If three black teenagers had set a ten-year-old white child on fire — for example, the child of the Mayor or police chief — would it be labeled a prank with no investigation? If a black child even accidentally started a fire that burned an old shed in a park, that child would be charged, but severely burning a black child is okay with the Hammond police and the mayor who keeps the chief on the job.
When Joshua came home critically burned, his father went to the woods, found the alcohol and matches and took them to the police, who refused at first to even accept them!
Members of a local campus anti-racist group heard about this and contacted the family. After distributing leaflets and setting up a page on Facebook, a rally was set. Word-of-mouth brought activists from several Illinois cities, including PLP members from Chicago. The overwhelming majority were black workers and youth from the area.
The rally started in Martin Luther King Park behind Hammond City Hall. We held signs, handed out flyers and spoke on the bullhorn, indicting the HPD for racism. We then marched and chanted through the park to Hammond City Hall and rallied there demanding mayoral action. Many members of the community, including Joshua’s father, also spoke. It was pointed out that if the white boys get away with this without punishment, it will only encourage more racist attacks. Furthermore, it will even damage the white boys who will go through life believing that if they set fires on, or otherwise abuse innocent people, there are no consequences! Chants included demands to fire the Police Chief as well as to bring the attackers to justice.
Some Party members gave our militant communist analysis on the bullhorn, which the crowd enthusiastically accepted. PLP members declared that until we end the racist system of capitalism, there will always be a fascist police force to terrorize our youth. CHALLENGE was also distributed at the rally.
While we don’t want to put anyone into the hands of the bosses’ watchdogs, the kkkops, still we must smash racism at all costs. When the HPD refused to file charges against the white boys, they were saying, “This black boy’s life is not important.”
PLP opposes police repression. We’re exposing the reality that the cops are the enemy. Even if the white youth are eventually charged, it will only be because of community pressure. This is all part of the process of building the movement. PLP will work with these serious, dedicated community anti-racists and keep the focus on building communist consciousness and commitment as the only way to destroy racism forever. Join PLP and help destroy capitalism, the system that reaps super-profits from racism.
D.C. PL’ers Lead Battle to Fire Criminal Transit Bosses
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 22 — PLP members rallied today outside a busy Virginia subway station against Metro transit bosses and in solidarity with Boeing workers. We distributed over 550 communist leaflets and dozens of CHALLENGES to workers during rush hour. We then took our protest to the local office of Boeing to demonstrate the link between the struggle at Metro and that of our brothers and sisters in Seattle against the no-strike clause and threats to move their jobs to North Carolina.
Meanwhile, the struggle for the Washington, D.C. transit union to go on the offensive against management is intensifying. Management negligence led to a horrible rail accident that killed nine people (including our sister operator Jeanice McMillan) and injured over 100 more. But at the last union meeting, President Jackie Jeter dodged the issue, postponing discussion until the tail end of the meeting. Then she declared that top Metro boss, General Manager John Catoe, could not be held responsible for the tragedy because he was not here when the problems began!
A PLP member at the meeting sharply attacked that position and her leadership as too timid, declaring that the union must demand that Catoe (who has run Metro for two years) and other managers be fired for their crimes. They knew about the longstanding safety problem and had deliberately decided not to do anything to address it because they decided fixing the problem was too costly!
Management always blames the operators for any problem. Since the accident, Metro bosses and their media have attempted to divert the discussion away from management negligence of safety by announcing a zero tolerance policy for cell-phone use on the bus and trains by operators. Huh? Since when was this a safety issue?
Metro bosses are using an event which rarely happens to portray it as an everyday occurrence and to get the riding public to believe that the accident was really the fault of the heroic Jeanice McMillan, who did everything in her power to stop the train in time but could not because of the equipment failure. Investigators even noted that her cell phone was off and in her bag, but that hasn’t stopped Metro’s smear campaign against its workers. Metro’s cynical lie reminds us of George Bush’s deliberate lying effort to get us to think that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, when he knew full well that there was not!
At the upcoming August union meeting, PLP’ers will mobilize the membership to fight against these attacks on us, to demand Catoe and his crew be fired, and to get us a contract, and continue to show how these problems all have their origin in the racist, capitalist system. One union member recently told our Metro collective that President Jeter’s concept of fighting management is meeting with politicians and begging them to fight for us, whereas the PLP approach is to fight for ourselves. By following the PLP line, we can steel ourselves in today’s struggles for the larger battle to smash the entire system of capitalism and seize power for the world’s working class!
PLP Summer Project Fights Racist Attack by Harlem KKKops
A protest march was organized in Harlem, where the kkkops from the 26th precinct, beat the hell out of a young black man returning home from work because he couldn’t hear the order for him to stop due to his headphones. Such actions are commonplace with the police, whose purpose is to serve and protect a system that allows for the bosses to close hospitals and schools to fund oil wars. The capitalists never lose a chance to remind the working class that they and their state are the real terrorists.
The 26th precinct is infamous for brutalizing the workers that live in the Manhattanville projects. Students, teachers, and workers under PLP’s leadership leafleted throughout the housing projects, marched back through the projects, and picketed across from the precinct. Afterwards, a speech was made condemning the police and linking their role in protecting the bosses’ scabs in Stella d’Oro and in Harlem.
PL’ers Lead Mass Protest Against Cal State’s Racist Budget Cuts
LONG BEACH, CA, July 21 — Fifteen PLP members and friends joined with over 200 Cal State students and faculty at the Cal State Chancellor’s office in demonstrating against massive budget cuts. The protest coincided with a meeting between the chancellor and the Board of Trustees as they voted to slash the already skeleton budget of the Cal State system. When we arrived we distributed our leaflets and CHALLENGE. Then the demonstration began and PLP’ers encouraged the protesters to push forward into the building.
PLP members organized students to link arms in order to keep from getting kicked out by the cops and ushered in a student with a bullhorn from outside the building. We shifted the chants from “Shame on you, Chancellor Reed” to “Strike, Strike, Strike!’ and “Asian, Latin, black and white, workers and students must unite,” and the overall demonstration picked up momentum and
militancy. Some of the students and faculty easily transitioned from chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, this whole system must go” to “Hey-hey, ho-ho, capitalism has got to go.”
militancy. Some of the students and faculty easily transitioned from chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, this whole system must go” to “Hey-hey, ho-ho, capitalism has got to go.”
The cuts are a vicious racist attack on black and Latino working-class students who make up the largest segment of the Cal State system, as well as against all students, faculty and campus workers. This week’s L A Times reported the massive cuts, including $6 billion to K-12 and community colleges and $3 billion to the Cal State and
University of California systems. One Latino student traveling as much as three hours each way would no longer be able to afford school. Another Latina student said she had used her already evaporating savings and would no longer have enough to pay for next semester’s classes. A faculty member who also spoke out reported her classes had gone from four a semester to two, with many of her students having to withdraw from her classes because they could no longer afford them due to financial and family responsibilities. This is the reality capitalism forces upon the working class. Only communism can create an educational system that meets our needs.
University of California systems. One Latino student traveling as much as three hours each way would no longer be able to afford school. Another Latina student said she had used her already evaporating savings and would no longer have enough to pay for next semester’s classes. A faculty member who also spoke out reported her classes had gone from four a semester to two, with many of her students having to withdraw from her classes because they could no longer afford them due to financial and family responsibilities. This is the reality capitalism forces upon the working class. Only communism can create an educational system that meets our needs.
One professor who spoke angrily declared that the Board of Trustees, which continues to get paid throughout this crisis and these attacks, does not “live on the same planet” as the students and teachers who live these struggles day in and day out. The reality, however, is that the Board of Trustees and the Chancellors of all of these schools — not only for Cal State, but also nationally and worldwide — do live on the same planet as the rest of us; we the students, workers and soldiers, who sacrifice our homes, our educations, our wages, our social security and our lives to fill the pockets and war budgets of these thieves are united in our struggle against them.
One Cal State Long Beach student spoke of the need for militancy on the campuses. He referred to the depression during the 1930’s and how we have the militancy of the left of that era to thank for our 5-day week. PLP’s role in this rally shows that many students and workers are prepared to harness their anger and step up the fight, and we all need to go back to our campuses and our workplaces and organize unified struggles against these attacks. But until we can tie these attacks and this crisis and these wars to the essential crisis of capitalism, we will be fighting for the same crumbs generation after generation.
The working-class students and teachers that are participating in the Summer Project have protested against budget cuts in their own cities, and this protest really illustrated the chant, “Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite.” Nationally and internationally we are all struggling against the same attacks from the same capitalist system in crisis preparing for wider wars.
Chicago ‘Mini-Project’ Backs Transit, Health, School Workers
CHICAGO, July 23 — “Workers were interested in what we were telling them, so they were interested in the paper,” Chicago youth reported after their first CHALLENGE sale at Stroger Hospital. This was part of a Chicago mini-project to develop youth around PLP, introduce them to revolutionary work and raise interest for other Summer Projects. The mini-project greatly influenced those close to us and inspired the day-to-day Party work. The youths said they “were surprised to see us out there” — not just workers, PLP’ers too.
The project started when high school students joined a Chicago Transit rally about health insurance cuts. There many workers said they were excited to see students selling CHALLENGE and standing up to fight back with transit workers. One worker who met PLP that day came to our mini-project BBQ and told everyone about transit-worker struggles and encouraged PLP to keep reaching out to them. Chicago public school students and Cook County healthcare workers also addressed the group to prepare project participants for the next-day’s activities.
Most participants had never sold CHALLENGE before. One student said he liked doing it because it increased his confidence in discussing politics with people. Another was surprised by the response from workers and patients at Stroger hospital, saying, “Everyone took some of everything” (the paper and fliers), asking ‘Can I have that?’” All participants dedicated themselves to future CHALLENGE sales.
Afterwards, the mini-project went to two anti-privatization rallies, one opposing Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s education policies and one against the expansion and increased cost of parking meters, part of Chicago’s gentrification. The discussion induced by the rallies helped the group distill the political ideas from our activities that day, including those about the role of communists in reform struggles.
Participants were also excited to see the protests develop from small gatherings to militant struggles. The education protest — after rallying with speeches from displaced teachers — decided to demand to see Duncan. Two volunteers snuck in to hear him describe the profit-driven education “business,” but the rest of the protesters were forced out, showing everyone how the rulers protect their politicians. The second protest became a loud, crowded demonstration that project participants appreciated for its disciplined militancy.
We ended the mini-project with a dinner and study group on education under capitalism. The study group involved mostly college and high school students, which led students to say that they liked, “to learn that adults and kids have the same problems.” One of the new youths close to PLP led a political analysis of the day’s events.
Overall, the event was a success. Seven mini-project participants are attending the LA Summer Project and those who couldn’t plan to work with PLP in future sales and events. Mini-Project volunteers are talking about PLP with their friends and families and want to invite them to upcoming events. We’re organizing an August mini-project to continue to involve new friends in spreading communist ideas and develop new leaders among students.
Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’:
‘1199’ Hacks Cut Wages, Pensions to Save Bosses
NEW YORK CITY, July 19 — Local 1199, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Workers East, has reached a tentative agreement on a contract reopener that steals previously agreed-upon wage increases and decreases future pensions, all to fill a huge hole in the healthcare workers’ pension plan.
Previously, CHALLENGE reported former 1199 President Dennis Rivera as gleefully saying, “We’re all capitalists,” referring to the union’s multi-billion dollar Wall Street investments. But as finance capital’s house of cards fell apart, with “real estate investment trusts” and “credit default swaps” losing most of their value, 1199’s pension plan lost 40% of its worth since October 2007.
That’s how capitalism works: striking workers win pensions, Rivera and his union cronies invest them in the bosses’ profit system, which then looks to “solve” its crisis by taking them away, along with hard-won wage hikes.
Many 1199 rank-and-filers must be bewildered at the reopening of the contract and the loss of their raises. PL’ers were among — and helped lead — thousands of 1199’ers who participated in militant walk-ins, confrontations with local hospital bosses and human resources managers where workers packed the bosses’ offices calling for the hospitals to meet various union demands.
The appearance was of militant union action to make the bosses pay for their crisis. But the reality was that the 1199 leadership — following SEIU policy of viewing the bosses as partners rather than as enemies — was preparing the members for the Obama line of “shared sacrifice.” The members, however, were the only ones sacrificing.
Involvement in the afore-mentioned actions and attending negotiating and delegate meetings, we’ve met militant workers who want to fight back. We’ve struggled with our friends, new and old, to turn this fight over dollars and cents into a broader fight that unites with patients against racist health cuts and for better healthcare services. Part of this fight is to increase staffing by demanding rehiring of laid-off workers as well as hiring new ones. In our hospitals we’ve been increasing our CHALLENGE sales and involving co-workers in animated discussions about PLP’s goal of communist revolution.
The Obama administration, while finding trillions for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for bailouts of the biggest Wall Street financial houses, banks and capitalist companies, offered nothing to save workers’ pensions. Despite Rivera’s claim, we’re workers, not capitalists. Their system means war, oppression, racism and misery for the working class. We need a system that ends these injustices and represent the interests of all workers. That’s what PLP fights for — communism.
Minimum Wages Produce Maximum Profits
A big hoopla appeared in the bosses’ media about an increase in the federal minimum hourly wage, from $6.55 to $7.25. Yet not only did a NY Times editorial (7/24) admit that this figure — in terms of purchasing power — is no higher than it was in the early 1980s but it’s actually BELOW what it was in 1968!
Is it any wonder the Times could conclude that “no matter how hard they work, many low-wage workers keep falling behind”? “Low-wage jobs are a fact of working life in America,” says the Times, “they’re not going away” and “are going to be most plentiful for years to come.” Now there’s an “American dream” to look forward to.
The Times fails to mention that a goodly percentage of the labor force is specifically excluded from even this paltry minimum wage — farm workers, restaurant and other workers who depend on tips to make ends meet, etc.
Because of racist discrimination, this super-exploitation falls most heavily on black, Latino, Asian and immigrant workers who comprise a disproportionately large section of the low-wage work-force (not to mention double the unemployment rate). In fact, the reason for government raids on undocumented immigrant workers — most of whom are paid below the minimum wage — is to threaten them with deportation and jail precisely to keep them from protesting and organizing against their low-wage status.
As tens of millions of workers fall victim to joblessness in the bosses’ current Depression, they’ll be competing for these low-wage jobs, which will only give the bosses the opening to lower wages still more, and act as a brake on wages for all workers.
So why are these low-wage jobs so “plentiful,” are “not going away” but are “a fact of life” in the U.S.? Because of the one word that never appears in the Times’ editorial’s crocodile tears: PROFITS. The lower the wage, the higher the profit reaped by the bosses.
Low wages are built into capitalism. Under its wage system, a worker who labors for eight hours will create value in perhaps two hours that will equal his or her wage. The boss pockets the value created in the other six hours, from which he reaps his profit and uses to pay other sections of the ruling class their profit: rent to the landlord; interest to the banks for loaning the boss the money he uses to invest in machinery; payments to utilities that supply the power to run the factory; and so on.
This value the bosses steal from the workers is what Karl Marx called “surplus value” — the source of the collective profit that all these sections of the ruling class make off the labor of the working class. So the lower the bosses can force wages down, the more profit to be stolen. Of course, the Times omits any relationship between slave wages and profits.
On top of all this, when unemployment rears its head periodically because of the system’s recessions/depressions, the workers lose even more as the bosses lay off masses of workers to try to maintain their profits, making the workers pay for the crisis. And only 40% of the workforce is even eligible for the unemployment insurance that millions of workers fought for in the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, as tens of millions of workers suffer this wage exploitation, the Obama administration serves its masters by doling out hundreds of billions to the bankers and for the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan.
There’s only one way to eliminate this exploitation: eliminate capitalism, its profit system and abolish the wage system altogether. With communism, the working class rules society and portions out the collective value it creates according to the needs of the workers who produce all that value.
How We Organized an Anti-Racist Rally
This summer, my second Summer Project, had many similarities to last years’ project. The CHALLENGE sales were easier for me this year. My conversations with MTA and Boeing workers were politically sharper. I was able to talk to the workers and use the articles in CHALLENGE to tie it to their own exploitation. After helping lead a study session last summer I was more confident and ready to help and lead study groups at home. This year also had some new experiences that have helped me further develop, sharpen my understanding of PLP’s line, and push me to accomplish more for the Party.
Last year’s shooting of a Latino teen by the Lennox cops was repeated again this summer in Compton. Avery Cody, Jr. a 16-year-old black youth was shot by LA County sheriffs. A comrade’s friend told her of the shooting. I, along with three other comrades, spent time leafleting the neighborhood where Avery lived and was killed. There we met Avery’s dad and family. I spent time talking with Mr. Cody while my other comrades were talking to other members of the family. Along with my comrades I worked on plans to have a rally in their neighborhood. Continually talking with area residents and Mr. Cody helped us to begin building a base there. We knew that this work earlier in the week paid off when the bullhorn for our rally broke. Instead of just standing around, one of the workers of Compton ran inside his house and got us a megaphone to use.
He even held it for me while I finished giving my speech. I was able to politically say what I really wanted to say: that only through a communist revolution will we be able to overthrow the capitalist bosses, smash capitalism, end racism and sexism!
Summer Project Red
U.S., Local Bosses Use Crisis to Militarize Mexico
MEXICO CITY, July 28 — Capitalist speculation and its endless drive for profits, built into the system’s very nature, was the straw that broke the camel’s back in this bosses’ financial crisis. In the U.S., millions are unemployed and have lost their homes, unable to cover mortgage payments.
This has a cascading effect in Mexico. Due to reduced purchasing power of U.S. workers, Mexico’s industries have had to lower production, leading to massive unemployment here. Money Mexican immigrants in the U.S. send back home — an amount only surpassed by oil revenues and tourism — has been severely reduced, creating even more poverty. Capitalism has never met workers’ basic needs.
In recent months, more than 700,000 jobs have been lost here. This drastically increases informal work like selling popsicles, flowers, music CD’s, etc. The youth, even university graduates, see no future. Many turn to crime. Those still working face poverty wages, increased hours and slashed medical benefits.
Police repression is the bosses’ answer to workers’ reform demands, attempting to maintain their profits and prevent destruction by their competitors. They want us to sacrifice to save them; they spare nothing to fight to the last drop of our blood to sustain their allies and their imperialist wars.
Militarization and Drug Trafficking Attacks All Workers
The struggle against the drug traffic is the perfect pretext for U.S. bosses and Mexico’s ruling class to militarize the country. Recently, the U.S. gave the first $400 million of the $1.4 billion approved by the U.S. Congress to buy helicopters and weapons, as well as supply military “advisors.” In the last two years, 13,000 people have died in this war, among them drug dealers, civilians, police and soldiers. However, drug trafficking has not diminished.
In the face of eventual world war, U.S. imperialists must try to guarantee — under any and all circumstances — various sources of wealth from Mexico. This country’s strategic role includes: all the oil that’s exported going to the U.S. as well as the majority of its auto, aerospace and agricultural production. Resources in dispute involve biodiversity, uranium, metals, food and low-paid workers.
To try to terrorize and pacify masses of workers as well as the anti-U.S. bosses, they use fascist strategies like population control through the swine flu, to kick off a whole system of social control. They’ve passed laws to search homes without warrants, for mandatory registry of the personal details of all cell-phone users (supposedly to fight kidnappings), to tap telephones, put chips in cars (supposedly to avoid robberies), all to intimidate and firmly control workers and submit us to police terror. Backed by the federal government, sellout union leaders, churches, schools and bosses’ media, they’ve stopped one of the working class’s most important mass demonstrations, the May Day March.
While things are more critical for the working class, it also gives us a greater opportunity to fight to make communist ideas the property of masses of workers in struggle, in our work-places, schools and universities, among farm workers and soldiers. The working class needs communist
ideas to break the chains of the capitalist system.
ideas to break the chains of the capitalist system.
The sooner we advance, the less the suffering for our class. That’s why we need to build PLP, organizing study groups with communist literature, extending CHALLENGE networks, participating in mass struggles, recruiting new members and sharpening the ideological struggle with our friends, family members and co-workers. We need to make the fight for communism primary.
We are one class, with one goal and one party, from Afghanistan to Honduras, from Mexico to China, from Los Angeles to Pakistan, we need to strengthen the bonds of struggle. Only an internationalist struggle can smash capitalism once and for all.
LETTERS
Summer Projects Unite Workers and Students
‘Learned what communism really means...’
I concluded from the LA Summer Project that, in a certain way, workers and students are going through the same thing. I’m a student from Chicago. Schools there are experiencing something called a “turnaround,” because they’re not getting enough funding. In a “turnaround” the school closes, and all the teachers are fired, replaced with new teachers who are paid less because they lack the amount of education needed to become certified.
Others who aren’t teachers are also hired, and the same students who attended before return to the school. The rest go to neighborhood schools, crowded with other students from other areas.
During the Summer Project, we visited the workers who are getting fired and laid off because the companies are not meeting their expected money-making goals. Living under this capitalist system, my teacher brought me out here because I wanted to learn a better definition of communism. At first I thought it was just a word. I never really knew it was something the working class really needs so they can get what they worked for. From my understanding now, communism is a system where all workers will be equal, with no bosses or banks.
Summer Project Volunteer
No More Doubts: ‘I’m joining PLP...’
As a youth in Los Angeles, being involved in the PLP Seattle Summer Project was a little intimidating, but it was very much worth it. I was interested in what the Party was doing to fight racism and sexism but I had some doubts. My parents are struggling to make ends meet because of the attacks on the working class but they disapprove of my involvement with the Party.
My friends told me I was fooling myself by participating with PLP. But by the end of the Project, my doubts completely disappeared. I met great people who’ve been involved with the Party for a long time. I heard about all their struggles and could relate them to my parents’ struggles and to the problems at my school.
For example, Boeing workers were fighting to stop pay cuts and layoffs. Seeing how serious they were, whether in reformist or revolutionary ways, was really inspiring. All the hands-on experience — visiting workers and in the early-morning distribution of CHALLENGE at factory gates — was really amazing.
One activity that really stood out for me was the visit to the military base, Fort Lewis. It was really interesting speaking to soldiers and realizing how they are both a major factor for the well-being of capitalism, but simultaneously a key element for a communist revolution.
The PLP Summer Project was an eye-opener for me. I went to the Seattle Project with doubts but I left wanting to join PLP, with no doubt in my mind. We’re now in the middle of the Los Angeles Project and I’m happy to be in it. I’m now proud to say I’m a part of the struggle and ready for a lifetime fight to end capitalism with a communist revolution.
A doubter no more
‘What we do really counts...’
During this Summer Project, I saw that, with struggle, the Party is capable of progress and growth.
We went to a high school where the PLP has teachers and students. When I was in high school, it was cool to see the presence of other PLP members outside of the teacher at my school. It helped me understand that PLP is a movement and that my teacher was not the sole proponent, individually printing CHALLENGE in his basement. I hope our agitation will make a qualitative difference in our comrade’s base-building and class struggle.
A friend that I had introduced to the Party a few years ago pleasantly surprised me. Several comrades over the years in our mass organization built political and social ties with her. This Summer Project she informed us that her mother saw a cop kill Avery Cody, Jr. a 16-year-old black youth as his back was turned. PLP immediately contacted the family and helped plan a protest against racist cops. I could never have imagined that knowing her would lead to a mass movement against racism. What we do really does count.
Project Participant
‘Along the pathway to communism...’
Having now spent three days with the Los Angeles Summer Project, I can happily say that it has been a productive week. As a neophyte in the Party, I had few expectations for the Project, save that it would be a collection of communists actively working towards a classless society. My favorite event thus far has been an evening forum on dialectical materialism, in which Party members clarified the definition of the term, and actively challenged one another regarding processes and conflicts that exist along the pathways towards communism.
In addition to great discussion, we have conducted some paper sales in the garment district and at a local high school in Los Angeles. Though we have distributed countless papers and flyers, I question how effective our efforts have been without constant reinforcement at these locales. With greater organization and communication between Party members, we may be able to capitalize upon existing strongholds with more structured events like rallies, forums, and debates.
Hoping to Consolidate
Party-led Group in Spain Vows Anti-Imperialist Struggle
This is a letter from an internationalist comrade who met with a Party group in Spain before leaving for the U.S.
At our study group we invited the new comrades with whom we were talking to join, and to understand that if you are conscious and are not ignorant, nor alien to problems, you must deepen your political work with the PLP. We need to go out to the streets, but we need to have the arguments of why we have to fight.
This struggle must be massive and militant; we must be millions, convinced that a revolution is necessary to overthrow the imperialist governments; we must not wait any longer while the bosses put out their strategies which keep the working class always on the margin, or that allow the bosses to control mass revolutionary movements.
Every inhabitant of this planet is witness to each injustice that is committed, second by second, worldwide. Let’s not fall again into this vicious cycle. Let’s truly struggle for the working class.
This is what I have been struggling for, for several years, and which continues to be essential: continuing to prepare myself to consolidate even more the political basis for being objective on this road.
A comrade
Rally to Unite Boeing Workers vs. No-Strike Deal
LA Summer Project calls for unity of Boeing workers in Long Beach and Puget Sound against the “no strike deal”, and unity between Boeing workers and subcontractor workers. Black, Latin and white youth summer project volunteers made impassioned speeches attacking the capitalist system for laying off workers, outsourcing jobs, racist super exploitation of subcontractor workers and trying to enforce a “no strike deal” on Boeing workers. They exposed the bosses’ moves to deepen fascism to prepare for wider imperialist war. We called for unity of the whole working class against capitalism and for communist revolution. As we were chanting “Fight Back”; “Same enemy same fight, Boeing and Auto workers, unite!”, “Workers of the World, Unite!”, “The only solution is a communist revolution”, hundreds of Boeing workers took CHALLENGES, leaflets and the Summer Project industrial EXTRA. This response by the majority (though not all) of the workers showed us that industrial workers are very open to communist politics. That’s important for the future, since industrial workers, in subcontractor and heritage plants, are the key to revolution. This demonstration was entirely organized by the youth volunteers from all over.
Attacking Racist Devastation of Industrial Workers Head-on
• A young Latin machinist described the contradiction he faced expanding his CHALLENGE sales at an important aerospace subcontractor. “I live with five family members in a small apartment. Everybody has been laid off or had their hours cut, including me. Frankly, I ask myself how much can I risk what’s left of my job in order to do what I know has to be done to end the cause of this misery, capitalism.”
• Another comrade in a union Boeing plant has a running bet with a co-worker, who believes the struggle will continue along the lines of the last 30 years: contract fights and legal strikes. For the first time in three decades, this CHALLENGE reader now thinks the government, company and union will discard all these legal niceties as every bosses’ paper and TV station demand a “no-strike regime.” “It’s the ‘rhetoric of fascism,’” he admits.
• Detroit has been turned into Katrina without the water, while the small nest-egg generations of black autoworkers fought for growing out of the black rebellions of the 1960s, has been largely wiped out.
• LA bus drivers and mechanics are working without a contract while the drivers’ union tells rank-and-filers, in effect, they’re “lucky to have a job.” The union strategy is to wait a year “until the economy is better.”
In the face of rapid changes like these, this year’s Summer Project tackled the racist decimation of the industrial working class head-on.
The worldwide economic crisis has accelerated U.S. bosses’ economic, political and military decline, giving U.S. imperialists less maneuverability, bringing the prospect of wider war and world war closer. The bosses here are preparing for a confrontation with their imperialist competitors, like Russia and China, by attacking the whole working class.
Central to the U.S. bosses’ strategy is saving their industrial military capacity. This includes civilian auto and aircraft production, which, as a purely military industry, is too expensive to maintain over the long haul. The “bottom line” is trying to maximize profits while also saving the empire.
What’s Good For GM Is Racist
Devastation For Us
But saving basic industry does not mean saving the industrial working class. Quite the contrary, the bosses are using their government to ensure the racist decimation of the industrial workforce. The “new GM” or a “new strike-free culture” in the unionized Boeing plants means unprecedented cuts in wages, pensions and health care.
Racist super-exploitation in the subcontractor factories over the last decade has set the stage for this latest onslaught. “Either Boeing is going to move to the low-wage South or the low-wage South is going to moving to Washington State,” one Seattle area comrade explained to the Summer Project volunteers.
Developments in basic industry signal the direction society is heading. The might of the capitalist empire is centered here. The racist lie of the Obama “shared sacrifice” administration stands naked before the destruction in Detroit. The nationalization of auto and the devastation of auto workers signals the further consolidation of fascism. The “no-strike regime” at Boeing mirrors Mussolini’s fascist corporate state.
Traditional trade unions are helpless faced with this assault. The vast majority of industrial workers are now non-union. The International Association of Machinists, United Auto Workers and the Amalgamated Transit Union are rapidly becoming agencies of the very government that’s coordinating the building of fascism. “Shared sacrifice” replaces striking.
Only Communist Revolution Can Smash Fascism
The trade union officials must hide these changes to maintain their positions in the new fascist
hierarchy. We workers, on the other hand, must not build our movement based on illusions.
hierarchy. We workers, on the other hand, must not build our movement based on illusions.
Winning economic concessions from the bosses becomes more difficult as the imperialists’ maneuverability declines. We must fight tooth and nail against the fascist attacks on our class, understanding that we fight a system hell-bent on our destruction.
PLP at LA Metro and our friends correctly called on transit workers to strike against a system that attacks workers in this latest contract in order to prepare for their wars and to save the bosses’ banks. The more we can build class struggle highlighting the present-day political situation the better.
Communists have long known that strikes can be schools of class war, but not the war itself. Political struggle with transit workers — for example, about breaking the law and confronting the bosses’ state apparatus to build for such an illegal strike — are keys to our victory. Our ability to mobilize our fifty CHALLENGE readers in this struggle — and expand our networks — measures our ability to act without relying on the social-fascist union leaders. The very political and ideological obstacles we face winning our fellow workers to engage in class struggle within capitalism offer us an opportunity to win these workers to the kind of revolutionary communist politics that will lead to capitalism’s destruction.
Fascism is a fact of life; the racist devastation of the industrial working class is the carnage in its wake. The Summer Project volunteers faced this fact head-on, building for the only solution possible — communist revolution. The transit workers who sat in their break-rooms reading CHALLENGE, the CHALENGE EXTRA and our PLP leaflets, asking for more, and giving their names are becoming more aware of this battle. So are workers in aerospace subcontractor factories throughout Southern California.
Youth Take Lead in L.A. Summer Project
“I came to the LA Summer Project to find out what communism really means to all the workers and why we should fight for what we need in life — and why we don’t need capitalism. As a youth, I’m trying hard to fight for those who don’t know what capitalism is doing to them. It is not right for people to work so hard and then lose pay and jobs. I want and need to be out here helping in any way I can.”
Students and workers came from throughout the United States and Latin America to participate in this year’s PLP Summer Project in Los Angeles. The main objective was to put forward PLP’s communist analysis of the economic crisis, war and fascism while organizing Southern California’s industrial base to join the fight for communism.
Every morning Summer Project volunteers woke up as early as 3 am to sell CHALLENGE and distribute leaflets at aerospace subcontractors, Metro divisions, garment factories, and schools. The leaflets called on workers and students to organize fight-backs against layoffs, cutbacks, wage reductions, and other fascist attacks, with the long-term goal of fighting for communist revolution. Many workers and students were excited to take CHALLENGE, and were open to the call for communist revolution.
Transit workers took literature and gave it to friends in the bus barns. During a sale at a garment factory, a bus driver recognized our literature and asked for some to hand out to riders. And at aerospace subcontractor plants, workers openly defied their bosses to get our literature. At one factory, the police were called to intimidate us and forced us to stay on sidewalks, away from the traffic of workers coming in. But the workers pulled to the side of the street to take CHALLENGE and talk to us.
Youth, especially high school students, played an especially important role in the Summer Project. Students led study groups on dialectical materialism, the study of change, and on political economy. They helped everyone to continue developing their understanding of these important ideas, crucial to fighting for communist revolution.
Forums were held to present the important questions of the relationship between reforming capitalism and fighting for revolution, the nature of the economic crisis, and U.S. imperialist activities and wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. At one, comrades from Latin America reported on the work of organizing PLP in other countries. At these forums young comrades and friends raised important discussions about how the Party fights for communism, and what communism means.
Summer Project participants organized a rally outside a Boeing plant that produces C-17 military transport planes. The UAW and IAM union mis-leadership are pitting these Boeing workers in Long Beach against Seattle Boeing workers, while Boeing bosses attack both groups of workers. We led chants that pointed to the bankruptcy of union leadership and called on workers to assert their power by organizing against the company’s and union’s attacks. Many workers were very receptive to our message. One woman bought CHALLENGE and told the seller, “You are absolutely right, believe me!”
Following a forum discussing the strategic importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan for the U.S. imperialists, we visited a local military base. Summer Project volunteers overcame their initial trepidation about approaching marines and engaged marines in discussions about the nature of the war they are being asked to fight. The responses were mixed. Many marines said the war was about fighting terrorism but many others also expressed disagreement with the war and revealed that marines are willing to talk about communist politics if we are persistent.
One Summer Project volunteer noted that despite our conversations being short it was clear that we had an impact on how many of these marines view the nature of the war and their role in it. She said, “it saddened me to see how these young marines were trying to make sense of our analysis and how it related to them because for them these are life-and-death questions. But this is also why I joined the Party because this work is so important. I know that when these marines are overseas in the middle of war, they will be thinking about our conversation and our communist ideas.”
PLP has a long history of holding Summer Projects, during which PLP members and their base fight the products of capitalism, including racism, sexism, and nationalism. We also fight to run the Projects in a collective way by sharing responsibilities of the daily tasks, such as cooking and cleaning. It is difficult in this capitalist society to enjoy culture and socializing with one another, but we struggle to make it possible. Each Summer Project is a small taste of what an actual communist society will look like.
This Summer Project showed the tremendous opportunity for winning workers, students, and soldiers to a revolutionary communist outlook. It strengthened the fight to build a communist base among Southern California’s industrial workers. Additionally, the Project won seven high school students to join PLP. The Party will try to build a new collective of students when the school year starts.
There were some areas where we can improve, particularly in how to better balance promoting youth leadership while relying on the knowledge of more experienced comrades. Overall, PLP in Los Angeles — and everywhere else — has learned and grown from the experiences of this year’s Summer Project. J
Protest Bankers’ Threat to Dump Stella D’Oro Workers
NEW YORK CITY, July 22 — Fifty workers and students picketed the Wall Street headquarters of Goldman Sachs (GS), one of the world’s richest investment banks, an important section of the U.S. ruling class. GS owns a big share of Lance, Inc., a southern-based non-union outfit that may buy the Stella D’Oro Bronx bakery from its Brynwood owners. This scheme would shut the plant and dump the workers, on strike for 11 months to save their jobs and fighting wage-cuts.
GS executives gave almost a million bucks to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They then received over $10 billion in federal bailout money, helping GS reap the highest profits in its 140-year history.
The Stella D’Oro Solidarity Committee — unionists who supported the anti-racist group of 135 bakery workers, uniting black, Latino, white and immigrant workers, men and women — organized the demonstration. A highlight was the participation of 20 IBEW Local 3 electrician apprentices, brought by a professor at a nearby labor college. These young workers — black, Latino and white — added their loud and enthusiastic chanting of “No Runaway Plants, Keep Stella D’Oro in the Bronx!” Joining them were faculty from the Professional Staff Congress and the United Federation of Teachers, other unionists and CUNY students, including PLP members recently returned from the LA Summer Project.
We warned GS that if Lance does steal these jobs from the Stella workers, we will hold GS responsible. Party members involved in the struggle have stressed that while capitalist law allows companies to move plants wherever they like, workers don’t have to respect those laws. Stella D’Oro workers’ labor built the company and have every right to protect their jobs.
Workers everywhere should fight runaway plants, a battle to protect our class’s livelihood. PLP workers and students are organizing co-workers and friends to come to the plant to join the Stella workers when they stand up to any plant closing.
This is part of fighting a capitalist system that exploits millions to benefit a tiny group of profit-hungry bosses. The system’s crisis has the capitalists scrambling to protect these profits by cutting wages and benefits of millions of workers, and laying off millions more.
Stella workers are producing fighters for our class and must join PLP to lead class struggle and build a communist movement that will have workers running society, without bosses, bankers and profits. J
