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CHALLENGE, October 14, 2009

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14 October 2009 59 hits

Challenge October 14 2009

Stella D’Oro Struggle: One Battle in Long War vs. Capitalism

NEW YORK CITY, September 25 — “Whose jobs? Our jobs! Whose factories? Our factories!” rang out today in front of the world’s largest investment bank, Goldman Sachs, in the heart of Wall Street. Over 400 supporters of the Stella D’Oro workers came from workplaces citywide — post offices, train depots, hospitals, offices, high schools and colleges. They marched from the Goldman Sachs billionaires (who back the new owner, Lance, Inc., (see below) to City Hall where billionaire Mayor Bloomberg watches Stella close while campaigning on “promises” of more jobs.
Thousands of office and other workers saw the marchers — many organized by PLP — fill several blocks on Broadway at rush hour, shouting their anger at bosses who dump workers in the street. Stella supporters in two statewide unions, NYSUT (teachers) and NYSNA (nurses), won support resolutions phoned into the rally. Another rally is set for Friday, October 2, at 3 PM, at the plant.
But the struggle at Stella D’Oro is coming to a head and needs more than another rally. Lance plans to move production to Ashland, Ohio, where it will pay much lower wages and benefits. The Stella layoffs are slated to begin around October 9. The bakers’ union is negotiating with the old boss Brynwood, who is taking a hard line on severance pay and other serious issues. Little time remains. A union meeting is set for October 3.
The workers refused Saturday overtime last week, protesting the firing of one of their leaders on trumped-up charges. They have written a letter to the Ashland Lance workers (see p. 5) explaining what happened to them and asking for support. Last week in New York the teachers’ delegate assemblies of the UFT (K-12) and the PSC (college) greeted Stella workers with a standing ovation. They can count on growing support as they step up the fight.
The chant, “Whose factories? Our factories!” reflects an understanding of both the present and the future. In the present, we know that all value — including the Stella D’Oro factory and its machinery — has been created by the labor of workers and is rightfully ours. In the communist future, workers will run the factories and all of society ourselves, for the benefit of our class. PLP fights for the day when, as communist workers, we will treat ourselves with dignity and respect, not like we’re treated today — exploited and abused and dumped on the streets when the owners can make more money elsewhere.
The unity of black, Latino and immigrant which made the strike strong represents a model of anti-racism for our class to follow.
Other pseudo-leftists in the support committee tell the workers that we’re only fighting for their jobs. PLP disagrees. Of course we’re fighting for these jobs. But as communists we tell workers that we are fighting a war, not just a battle, a war with capitalism, not just a battle with Brynwood and Lance.
Of course you don’t win a war by losing battles. WE FIGHT TO WIN! ALWAYS! PLP will fight alongside the Stella workers 100% if they make a last stand for their jobs. But we also hear many workers asking for answers to bigger questions, many who understand they must prepare and organize now to fight the next battle and the one after that.
A Stella D’Oro worker at a workers’ meeting said, “We’ve all been infected now. Who knows where we’re all going to end up. But wherever we go, we’re going to spread PLP.” Many say they’ve learned they must fight for the whole working class, as their letter to the Ashland workers shows. Some see they need to join and build PLP in order to do that. They are supporting other workers like the cafeteria workers at Hunter College and the CUNY Research Foundation workers, both having staged walkouts last week.
Together we can raise the stakes for all workers, from fighting for crumbs from the bosses’ table to fighting for communist power to build a new egalitarian workers’ society, free of racism and imperialist war. Join us!

Rulers ‘Debate’ War: Afghanistan or Pakistan? Both Are Killers

The Obama administration’s internal debate about U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan reflects one inter-imperialist conflict within another still graver one. The first involves the struggle between U.S. and Russia over neighboring Turkmenistan’s vast energy reserves. The other is nothing less than the global dogfight for capitalist supremacy among the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China, with emerging nuclear powers Pakistan, India, and Iran in supporting roles.
Meanwhile, nuclear-armed Pakistan, with bin Laden hiding out and the potential to destabilize India, is possibly a greater threat to U.S. supremacy than exists in Afghanistan.
As CHALLENGE’s last issue pointed out, the original U.S. Afghan invasion and every surge since have aimed at securing the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route. But questions about the project’s near-term feasibility amid fears of an Islamic fundamentalist takeover in unstable Pakistan have caused a tactical split inside the dominant imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists.
One faction bets that the influx of up to 45,000 more U.S. troops that General Stanley McChrystal calls for can guarantee TAPI. Energy strategist Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a top level think-tank. Its heavy-hitting advisors include assorted former admirals and generals and warmonger Ken Pollack. In 2002, Pollack — working for the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations — wrote a book titled, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” Luft recently urged that:
“The Obama administration should actively promote...the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline....[W]hile providing the impoverished Afghan government with a steady revenue stream in the form of transit fees... TAPI would allow Turkmenistan to sell its gas to India, enriching two U.S. allies (Afghanistan and Pakistan) rather than selling the same gas to Europe, enriching a U.S. enemy (Iran).” (International Analyst Network, 9/25/09)
Begun in the late 1990s by the Clinton administration and Unocal (now Chevron), TAPI is financed from the U.S. government-dominated Asian Development Bank.

Obama’s First Afghan Surge:
Mistaken Gamble On Supposed
Russian Weakness

But one daunting task facing U.S. rulers is prying TAPI’s sole supplier, former Soviet republic Turkmenistan, from the grip of a growing Moscow-led anti-U.S. alliance. Until recently, two-thirds of Turkmen gas exports have gone to Russia. China and Iran take most of the rest. Gas-rich Russia and Iran don’t need Turkmen supplies for their own domestic needs but use them to augment their power as regional and global energy brokers. They’re trying to copy the racket the U.S. ran throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when, more than self-sufficient in oil, it used military might to wield Saudi, Iranian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti energy sources as a worldwide imperialist weapon (with junior partner Britain’s help).
In April 2009, with gas prices falling, Russia demonstrated its physical control over Turkmen energy by closing a valve on the country’s main export pipeline, causing it to explode. Obama & Co. mistakenly interpreted this act as a lasting rift between Turkmenistan and Russia and sought to exploit it with a 21,000-troop surge to buttress the TAPI pipeline. But Russia still has the upper hand.
Knuckling under completely, Turkmen president Berdymukhamedov slavishly said, “Negotiations... [with] Russia have allowed us to resolve some technical issues related to the functioning of Central Asia-Centre pipeline.” (Industry newsletter Upstream Online (9/22/09) The latter added, “Turkmenistan needs to agree with Russia soon to avoid pressure from export revenue shortages.”

Pakistan Better Near-Range Target For Long-Term U.S. War-Makers

To oppose the “subdue-Afghanistan-now” camp, another section of U.S. imperialists has anointed a “voice of reason” spokesman — Rory Stewart, new head of the Carr Center at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. Stewart was governor of a U.S.-U.K.-occupied Iraqi province in 2004. With these credentials, he testified to Congress on September 16.
Trying to sound a phony anti-war note, Stewart said Afghan tribalism essentially made the country unwinnable but strategically worth the presence of special forces assassins: “The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000.”
But then Stewart revealed his, and his ruling-class masters’ real target: “Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations.”
In a later interview Stewart presented his now famous feline analogy, “It’s like you’re going into a room with an angry cat and a big tiger....The angry cat is Afghanistan and the big tiger is Pakistan. Pakistan has nuclear bombs. Pakistan has Bin Laden. Pakistan can destabilize India.”
Whatever course Obama and his ruling-class masters takes, it will be a disaster for our class. A drive for pipeline terrain in Afghanistan will kill tens of thousand of Afghan workers and working-class GIs. Expanding the U.S.’s semi-secret war in far more populous Pakistan will murder many more and help set the stage for World War III.
The working class has no interests in this debate among the rulers — but must organize against its consequences. We can’t stop the rulers’ wars just yet. But by building a working-class party with a revolutionary communist outlook, we shall eventually be able to crush the billionaires’ profit system and its ceaseless mass slaughter.

U. of Cal.: Need Strike vs.
War-Inspired Racist Cuts

CALIFORNIA, September 24 — Thousands of students, campus workers, staff and faculty walked out and rallied across the ten campuses of the University of California (UC) system today, in a huge worker-student alliance protesting fee hikes, worker layoffs and wage-cuts. The UC system has a budget shortfall of $813 million and is furloughing faculty, raising student fees, and firing workers, staff and part-time lecturers. Student fees rose 9.3% this quarter, and a UC Regents proposal would raise fees from 30% to 50% by the next academic year. This comes after tripling of fees in the last ten years.
Many campus workers have lost their jobs and been forced onto furloughs — a cut that further slashes their poverty wages. At these rallies PLP called for a strike against a racist capitalist system that cuts education to wage expanding imperialist wars and bail out banks.

UCLA

Around 1,000 UCLA students, faculty and university workers walked out in support of the UC-wide walkout against the system’s budget cuts.
The UC regents and state politicians claim the state’s budget crisis has forced these cuts. But in fact, they reflect the priorities of a capitalist system in crisis. Federal aid, an important source of funding for the UC system, has been slashed, like in all states. The single most important reason for this reduction is the billions upon billions U.S. rulers are spending on imperialist wars for oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For instance, while UCLA has closed its undergraduate writing/tutoring center because of a lack of funding, the Department of Energy has exempted military research labs like UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore from cuts. In addition to war spending, California in particular has increased spending on its state prison system at a higher rate than on public education. California erected 23 new prisons while building one new UC campus.
During the rally here, most speakers representing various unions criticized the cuts but blamed the UC regents and argued for equal distribution of the cuts among students, workers and administrators. A PL student, one of just three students the union officials allowed to speak, explained the relationship between the cuts and spending on war and fascism. He concluded that politicians are part of the problem, not the solution, seeking to shift responsibility for the crisis onto workers.
The most important gain that can emerge from this struggle is showing that students and workers have power when they unite to fight back, and that a system that cannot meet their needs must be destroyed.
When the rally moved to Murphy Hall, site of the Chancellor’s office, about 60 students broke away from the main group, eluded the cops and sat in the hallway just outside the Chancellor’s office. Several led chants, such as “UC regents, we see racists!”; and, “No cuts, No war, the cuts are for the war!”
Union reps joining the students tried to quiet them, arguing a delegation was inside negotiating with administrators. Several students refused to listen and eventually the union reps broke solidarity with the students, stating they were leaving the building, and demanding that all union workers do the same. The union had agreed not to engage in civil disobedience. After about an hour, administrators agreed to organize a meeting between the Chancellor and students and workers within a week.
Student organizers met after the events to plan another meeting to continue organizing actions against the budget cuts. There is disagreement about the type of actions and objectives. Some think the struggle should focus on pointing out that the UC system has money but has simply “mismanaged” the budget. Others argue for organizing actions that empower students and workers, understanding that the long-term objective must be communist revolution. J

More Action

On another California campus, over 700 students, workers and professors mounted a noon-time rally and speak-out backing the walkout and a one-day strike called by the University Professional and Technical Employees union. “Make the Bosses Take the Losses!” and “Same Enemy, Same Fight, Workers and Students Must Unite!” were two of the chants led by a large picket line that blocked the main campus plaza. Several speakers pointed to the need to defend public education and other social services, while others explained the ways the cutbacks affected them.
Speakers declared that “anti-war” Obama and the Democratic Congress, much like Bush and the Republicans, were still funding wars for oil profits and Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan and giving trillion-dollar bailouts to predatory banks and corporations. Meanwhile workers lose their jobs and homes and social programs are gutted.
The crowd cheered when another speaker exposed Obama’s supposed “shared sacrifice” as a lie and questioned the existence of a system that wages war and bails out banks while attacking education and health care for workers and students. Still another speaker received huge applause when showing that the cuts are both racist and attack all working-class students, and that now it’s clearly rich vs. poor, with the rulers reserving the universities for the elite only.
At a later afternoon rally of about 200 students, speakers outlined the racist nature of the cutbacks, pointing out that California spends more on prisons than any other state and that by 2012 prisons will outspend education. Since the 1990s, fewer and fewer black and Latina/o youths attend the UCs, but in California the incarceration rate for young Latinas/os is twice that of white youths and six times for young African-Americans.
Students responded emotionally to workers who described the hardships they face from the cutbacks, layoffs, subcontracting and poverty wages from one of country’s richest public universities.
The workers’ picket-line militancy sparked students’ and other staff members’ anger. They loudly yelled, “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated”; and, “Workers’ Struggles Have No Borders.” Workers led in revealing the class nature of the fight on the campuses.
CHALLENGE was recognized and warmly received by many. PLP was the only group that distributed a Spanish-language leaflet to these overwhelmingly Latina/o immigrant workers. The bilingual leaflet called for a revolutionary communist movement to end imperialist wars and the fascist attacks against workers and students. Many were happy to see PLP participating and distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES at the protests on several campuses.
The day’s events’ preparations did not lack struggle and disagreements over the nature of the cutbacks and the crisis. In prior planning meetings, arguments erupted around the day’s message. Some argued for a narrower, more specific message: “save public education, a public good.” Worried about alienating themselves from others, some feared raising the issue of the economic crisis and capitalism.
Other organizers, including several PLP members and long-time CHALLENGE readers, advocated bringing the larger capitalist crisis into the day’s actions and speeches. People were open to critiques of capitalism and the crisis, but disagreements persisted over connections to the state budget crisis, the crisis in the UCs and the larger financial crisis. The discussions were heated at times, but ultimately productive.
The speeches moved a little more to the Left than initially expected by some organizers, due to the political discussions in the planning meetings and while working on different tasks for the day’s protests.
We need to fight the cuts and widening war with the growing understanding that a racist profit system which puts the needs of the oil profiteers and capitalist bankers over the health, safety and education of the working class must be destroyed. While the faculty union leaders say we should fight for the “sanctity” of public education, this is capitalist public education, with its racism, patriotism, war research, and anti-worker ideas. Education will only serve the working class when workers take power through revolution, in a communist society dedicated to meeting the needs of the international working class.

PLP Unites Workers, Wins CHALLENGE Readers, Rebuts Union Hacks

PHILADELPHIA, September 20 — At our hospital the nurses recently attempted to organize a union. This organizing drive was part of a national campaign associated with the California Nurses Association (CNA). The CNA was the moving force in winning the law improving nurse-to-patient ratios in California. This reform victory has given the CNA a great deal of prestige among nurses and they are using this prestige to organize nurses around the United States.
The drive to organize PASNAP, the local CNA union, was part of an agreement between CNA and our Tenet Healthcare bosses who promised that they would do nothing to oppose the union campaign. The Tenet bosses’ promises proved worthless.

Bosses Attack

The capitalists followed the same dirty tactics at our hospital as they did at every other hospital where the union campaigned under the agreement. First they hired several hundred young nurses just out of school and assigned anti-union nurses to orient them to the job. Then they found a reactionary nurse educator who was technically not in management to contact the American Right to Work Committee. Through this committee she brought in a union-busting consultant to run a full-fledged anti-union campaign.
Despite all of this boss treachery, after a six month campaign the union had won a significant majority of the nurses to sign pledge cards and filed with the federal government’s National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) for an election. But on the night before and during the two days of the election the bosses called the young nurses into the head nurse’s offices on all the floors and told them that they would lose their jobs if they did not vote against the union. These threats were a violation not only of the agreement with the union but also of the National Labor Relations Act. Because of this boss treachery the union lost the election by a vote of 309 to 267. The union has filed suit with the NLRB in an attempt to overturn the results and start a new organizing campaign.

Communist Response

At the beginning of the PASNAP campaign, several black workers from 1199 SEIU — the largest healthcare union in the U.S. — asked us in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to run a competing union campaign for 1199. The argument of these black workers was that all the workers at our hospital should be in the same union because we need unity to be able to fight the hospital bosses.
PLP has a long history with our hospital’s workers and some have joined PLP and distribute CHALLENGE. Keeping in mind that all unions defend capitalism, which serves the bosses, our PLP collective recognized that the primary goals were expanding our CHALLENGE networks and bringing our base closer to joining the Party.
But in response to our base, we now had to decide whether to join the campaign on the side of PASNAP or 1199. The question was raised whether communists had an obligation to remain loyal to 1199 since this is the union that the so-called “non-skilled” and most of the black workers are in. PASNAP is modeled after racist craft unions that openly advertise themselves as “professionals” that exclude so-called “non-skilled” jobs held by many black, Latino and immigrant workers. This racist elitism is offensive to the 1199 workers.
Considering the sentiments of our base and friends, we contacted 1199. We also surveyed the nurses and found a mixed reaction to 1199. But the 1199 leadership never responded with any serious organizing efforts. All 1199 did was distribute literature portraying themselves as committed servants of the people and PASNAP as a flunky union that had entered into a sweetheart deal with the Tenet bosses. PLP has a long history of struggle against the 1199 leadership and we know both CNA and 1199 are enemy organizations. When our friends in 1199 saw the pathetic response of the union leaders, they advised us to continue with PASNAP.

Anti-Racist Victory in Long-Term Struggle

PLP is now building a unity committee — composed of both nurse union organizers and-rank-and-file 1199 workers opposed to the do-nothing 1199 leaders — that would struggle against hospital bosses and any divisive tactics initiated by the capitalist labor leaders on either side. Workers in both groups read CHALLENGE. This is a victory in itself.
PLP hopes to bring these CHALLENGE readers together into PLP to fight the racist and craft divisions that the bosses and their labor lieutenants try to force on us. We must eventually win a great number of workers skilled and unskilled to a multiracial mass movement that will overthrow capitalism and replace it with an egalitarian anti-racist communist society.

B’klyn Students Defy School Bosses, Stick It to the Fascists

BROOKLYN, NY, Sept. 24 — “These kids are amazing,” a black worker repeatedly told passers-by in his neighborhood. He was referring to a militant, multi-racial group of several hundred students who gathered outside their high school to oppose a racist, anti-gay rally by right-wing nut-jobs from the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, KS. While the Westboro crazies have only managed to recruit fifty members in over thirty years and their “rallies” rarely include more than a handful of their tiny membership, they are part of a growing trend of right-wing extremism in U.S. politics and society today.
As dangerous as their message is, however, the main danger these and other openly fascist groups pose is the way they push broader masses of workers and youth into the arms of the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class. Westboro, for instance, protests the funerals of U.S. soldiers slain in Iraq, claiming the deaths are divine punishment for supposed tolerance of homosexuality in the military. This position is so extreme that many workers, wanting to oppose the right-wing sentiments, end up taking a stance that supports the war.
The racists of the “tea party” movement aren’t mainly a threat in and of themselves, as bad as they are, because they don’t have a mass base. The worst aspect of their growth is that they move masses to rally around president Obama and the ongoing project of imperialist war and growing fascism he inherited and is expanding.
At the Brooklyn high school the administration worked hard to get students to “respond” to the WBC by ignoring their impending visit. Yet students, some who are beginning to work more with the PLP, led a campaign through their school club to reject this dangerously mistaken position by mass-producing anti-racist stickers for their peers to wear the day of the protest. When the WBC showed up after school over three hundred students, many of whom knew CHALLENGE, showed up to outnumber, outlast and drown out the handful of fascists who showed up.
The slogans the students mobilized around ranged from the plainly liberal “love don’t hate” to the sharper “reject racism” and “no free speech for racists.” The students’ defiance of the advice to ignore growing fascism represents a sure step in the right political direction and a solid basis on which to further the growth of the PLP.
The day before the racist crazies came, five students from the school went with some teachers and four Stella D’Oro workers to the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Delegate Assembly (DA).
The emergency DA was scheduled to “discuss” contract demands put forward by the union’s negotiating committee. However, at the Labor Day parade the Saturday before, two PL’ers challenged the UFT president to put Stella D’Oro on the agenda, and to welcome Stella workers to the DA.
At the Assembly students distributed a PLP leaflet — and several UFT’ers distributed CHALLENGE. We won the struggle to bring the Stella workers to the stage after we had to wait for a parade of politicians to waste our time. The president of the union, Mulgrew, chairing his first DA, presented himself as a working-class guy who welcomed our class brothers to the DA. He announced that everyone should go to a Wall Street area rally later that week to demand that Stella stay in the Bronx.
On the other hand, the members of the DA know who really brought the Stella workers to the DA. We know union leaders like Mulgrew are loyal to the rulers, and the lack of any pro-student demands in the UFT contract proposal only highlights which side Mulgrew is on.

Tool Workers’ Strike Solid, But Union Relies on Bosses’ NLRB

CHICAGO, Sept. 25 — Over 70 workers at SK Hand Tools in Chicago and McCook, IL went out on strike August 25, after the company cancelled their health benefits, with no notification to the workers or the union, Teamsters Local 743. This strike has captured the attention of many workers and the media, with health care “reform” being in the national spotlight. The company also proposed to cut their wages by $4.00/hour, another 20% pay cut, and cut their vacations in half. The workers voted overwhelmingly to strike, and have maintained a 24-hour picket line ever since.
These workers, many of them on the job for 20 and 30 years, produce quality tools such as Craftsman. While the company sells them at a premium price, most of the workers make only $14 to $19 an hour. The company cuts would actually put some of them BELOW the minimum wage! All of the workers we have spoken to felt they had no choice but to strike. This struggle just proves the point that capitalism does not meet the needs of the working class as even those who have skilled jobs have no real security.The ruling class can destroy our standard of living whenever they decide it’s necessary to increase their profits.
The leaders of the union have not organized the workers to completely shut down or seize the plant, as the Republic Door and Windows strikers did last winter here. A small group of managers is coming in and out daily, trying to keep up some production. Instead the union is relying on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to decide in their favor that the company’s actions amount to “unfair labor practices.”
As we pointed out in the Stella D’oro strike, relying on the bosses’ NLRB is not the way to fight the bosses. As soon as the NLRB decided in favor of the Stella workers, the Stella bosses announced they would close the plant and move it elsewhere. Only by relying on the working class, and fighting for state power can we defeat these bosses and move toward a communist society of equality.
The SK strikers have shown tremendous resolve and fight. Many of them marched in the Immigration March in Chicago on Labor Day, and then joined the AFL-CIO Labor Day Festival in Pullman. Workers of many different nationalities, colors and unions welcomed them to both events as the heroes of the day. PLP members and friends have made some visits to the picket line, bringing food, water and our communist politics to the strikers. We need to do much more of that, both to learn from the struggle of the SK workers, and to spread our ideas through CHALLENGE newspaper of communism, anti-racism and equality.

Fascist Terror: Racist LA Cops Murder 4 Black and Latino Workers in 6 Days

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 14 — LA County Sheriffs murdered Darrick Collins, 36-year-old black father of two, in the Athens section of South LA. They were supposedly looking for two robbery suspects, but shot unarmed Darrick Collins three times in the back in his own backyard at night through a wooden gate. The fatal shot hit him in the back of the neck, the other two in the back. They later said Collins and his friend were not the suspects they sought.
There have been demands for a full investigation. Collins has a very large family and larger group of friends who are all demanding justice. Students in PLP who live near the Collins family went to the home to offer support. They were invited to the funeral, where speakers told what a good father, son and friend Darrick was. Afterwards the youth took PLP leaflets to the neighbors and some of the family members. Many expressed agreement and want more action against the killer cops.
After the racist murder got a lot of publicity Sheriff Baca announced that such “officer-involved” shootings would be investigated more rapidly. This was meant to calm the angry family and friends. A pastor at the funeral who was a skillful speaker said that black people have been lynched by the Sheriffs for generations. He said they had blood on their hands. Then he called on the mourners not to be angry at the police, but to turn to religion. But clearly hundreds of mourners at Darrick Collins’ funeral are angry and want something done.
Just six days after killing Darrick Collins, the LA County Sheriffs had killed three other men in separate incidents, bringing the total number of murders by racist cops in Los Angeles this year to 13. The cops and press claim the three men were armed. Only one of them, 17-year-old Travion Richard of Long Beach, has been named.
Only a few days later, a combination of local, state and Federal police agencies brought 1,200 cops to carry out a gang sweep in northwest LA, arresting 88 people. This show of force by the LAPD, DEA and other agencies, along with the brutal murders of Darrick Collins, Travion Richard, and the other two men are part of the racist terror that goes hand in hand with cuts in services, skyrocketing racist unemployment, cuts in education and health care, and widening imperialist war.
Fascism doesn’t start full-blown but develops one small step at a time. In Los Angeles this year we’ve seen a whole series of steps that add up to a big jump in fascist conditions. PLP has been organizing against the budget cuts in the UC system and the fascist reorganization of the schools. We will continue organizing students and workers to protest these racist murders and the capitalist system that must rely more and more on racist terror and fascism both at work and in the streets. Fascism is a double-edged sword. With revolutionary leadership, anger, deep hatred of the capitalist system, and the need to get rid of it will overcome both fear and cynicism and build the movement that will lead to a communist revolution where workers’ power will put an end to the murdering fascist bosses once and for all.

El Salvador FMLN’s Capitalist ‘Reform’:
Mass Unemployment, Daily Killings, $1-a-Day ‘Wages’

El SALVADOR — “To us, the right-wing position of Funes and his FMLN government hasn’t been a surprise. CHALLENGE wrote about this possibility” said a comrade in a meeting. Another affirmed, “we should cut out all the articles from CHALLENGE about Mauricio Funes, the FMLN and it’s capitalist program of reforms applied by the Arena government (“solidarity network,” the credit card law, etc) to show workers who had illusions in change that we were right when we criticized Funes and the FMLN.”
Ramon Diaz Bach, member of the Central Civic Movement, has said that the Funes capitalist model has failed. “Continuing to insist on a failed model is dangerous for the country.” Bach lamented that despite the failure of the capitalist model, Funes is not showing signs of change. (Diario CoLatino, 08/08). Diaz Bach is a social Christian liberal, ex-director of the Chamber of Commerce and Industries of El Salvador and ex-Vice Minister of Economy (1984) during the administration of the Christian Democratic Party. Today he is a prominent member of the leadership of the FMLN, which wants liberal changes and small reforms, amidst world-wide capitalism in a severe economic crisis, because he’s afraid that the worker-peasant-student masses will seek a real communist change.
In the Funes government and the FMLN, in spite of the promises of change, criminality continues. There are daily killings all over the country. An average of 12-14 people killed every day shows the failure of the capitalist system to give the working class a secure life. The farm workers continue surviving on $1 a day. Unemployment from layoffs this year alone number 55,000 workers thrown out into the street, who join the army of hundreds of thousands who are looking for jobs that don’t exist. Additionally, family remittances from the U.S. have decreased by 10% compared to a year ago.
The illusion that things have improved is confronted with the harsh reality of more of the same. Many of our friends still say that this isn’t the Funes that they knew, who confronted power, who put government functionaries on the spot. But we shouldn’t forget that Funes was never, nor will ever be a communist. His critique and bravery were liberal-reformist. He was always a defender of capitalism, supposedly “democratic”. That was his limit.
The ferocious right wing Arenas Party, brutal in its repression, now shows itself to be so understanding that the government investigator Mitofsky says Funes has the support of more than 80% of the population. He says they are full of hope for the new government “of the left.” Now, the capitalist media even praises Funes. “If the bosses’ press, like Prensa Grafica, TCS, and others accept him, something’s wrong,” stated a worker.
The bosses’ system will not be destroyed though the voting booths. Elections maintain the capitalist system and we must fight against them. The electoral parties and opportunists want to trap the working class in elections. Our mission is to get our class out of this trap, and our most powerful weapons are to fight back against the bosses’ murderous attacks and build more groups of CHALLENGE readers and sellers.
Hundreds of workers demand their CHALLENGE newspaper. Study groups are spreading around the country and Central America. Some comrades who for years have distributed our literature are asking for more CHALLENGES. The cadre schools are being organized and prepared by experienced PLP comrades. The topic of contradiction between the bosses’ system and the workers’ system (communism) is discussed in these meetings with the seriousness that the working class demands. Our uphill battle continues its march.

Stella Strikers’ Open Letter to Ohio Workers

The Stella D’oro strikers have asked CHALLENGE to print excerpts from an open letter from Stella D’oro Workers in the Bronx to Lance Workers in Ashland, Ohio:
Dear Workers at Lance:
We work at the Stella D’Oro bakery in the Bronx in NYC. Many of us have worked for the company for as many as 30 years.
In 2006, a private equity firm, Brynwood Partners, bought Stella D’Oro to squeeze out a higher rate of profit for its investors. In 2008, Brynwood’s demanded that the assembly line workers accept a 25% wage-cut, as well as a reduction in health benefits, sick days and vacation time. Our union offered to negotiate but Brynwood said, “Take it or leave it,” and imposed the new terms.
Lance managers will tell you that we were greedy. But how could we accept a 25% wage-cut? Our rents and mortgages weren’t going to be reduced, nor were food prices, or college tuition payments for our children! It was the greed of the multi-millionaires who run Brynwood Partners that forced us to strike.
For eleven months we existed on unemployment insurance, but not a single person crossed the picket line. Then word of our struggle began reaching people throughout the city. Transit workers, teachers and professors, postal workers, students and others came to our picket line. Thousands came to plant rallies, union members throughout the state donated money to support us, and thousands of customers refused to buy Stella D’Oro products during the strike.
At the end of June, the NLRB ruled that the company had to take us back and bargain in good faith. We thought we had won. But only a few days later, Brynwood announced that it planned to close the plant in October, in a city with 10% unemployment.
You know what happened: Brynwood sold the Stella D’Oro name and plant machinery to Lance, which plans to make some of its products in Ashland. We know that unemployment is high in Ohio, as companies have moved better-paying jobs to low-wage areas. That’s what Lance is doing here! It has no intention of giving you the same wages and benefits we had won through years of struggle. It will pay you a fraction of our hourly wage, give you an inferior health plan, and provide fewer sick days and vacation time. And we bet it won’t bring all 135 jobs to Ashland, just as it didn’t rehire all the unemployed Archway workers when it took over your bakery.
We want you to know that we don’t blame you for what’s happening. We also want you to know that we’re not going down without a fight. We can’t afford to lose our jobs. There will be rallies throughout NYC demanding that Stella D’Oro stay in the Bronx.
The owners want to keep us separate, pit the Ashland and Bronx workers against each other. But every gain for labor has come when working people united and fought together for things they needed: a shorter work-week, pensions, health care, social security. In these rough times, our unity is more important than ever. We ask you to understand our position and offer whatever solidarity you can.

LETTERS

Salvador ‘Left’ Pro-Capitalist

What irony that the contingent of the fighters from El Salvador’s FMLN, which is today a political electoral party, can’t use the word “revolution” in their meetings and street actions. They are left with the populist “change,” an infamous ruse to fool and mislead the working-class masses from El Salvador to China. I was a member of the FMLN. Thanks to PLP, I’ve been rescued from the claws of capitalism.
Today I can see a party which claims to be leftist accommodate and adapt itself to a profit system where the bosses don’t care how much blood has been spilled or struggle waged, and to fall into state capitalism. During the 1980’s the Salvadoran Communist Party joined the FMLN. This organization still exists and is very well known for worshiping and praising capitalism. What real communist ideas could this party present to us? If they currently quarrel among themselves, it’s a fight over positions inside the FMLN. We shouldn’t be fooled by these sellouts.
We are internationalists. We hear Latin American leftists talk and I ask myself, “What left?” There isn’t one, and that’s why indigenous slavery continues, as well as wage slavery. These nationalist “leftist” groups have made us accommodate for centuries to the bourgeoisie when they are our enemy, those who we have to destroy. That’s why in El Salvador’s PLP we’re fighting for communism, so that the working class sees the light of a new world.
Recently, ex-fighters, refugees of the FMLN, met in Sweden with the goal of founding the Communist Party of Sweden. We communists of PLP don’t go around founding parties based on nations, because we want one world, one class without borders, without the disgrace of money, without racism or races. We don’t want a different party in each country. The nationalist parties divide the working class and that’s why there’s not enough working-class unity. We fight for the slogan “One class, one international party, one fight for communism.” PLPers continue to organize the red army.
A Red Comrade

Need More Info on LA Fight

In the last CHALLENGE (9/30), the page 3 article “Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform,” is a scathing attack on L.A. school reform, but not much of what we are doing about it. PLP has been active there for some time, with some of our most committed cadre. But this reads more like a leaflet that might have been distributed at the meeting. We, as readers, need more information about what actions they are organizing.
For example, it says that some teachers called for a strike at an area union meeting. How? Did they make a resolution? Did they give out a flier? Did it get discussed and/or voted on? What was the response of the union leaders? How did they take them on in the meeting? What was the response of other teachers? How are they working in the union to spread these ideas? How are they answering questions teachers have? How much support is there? How are they building a base for PLP?
The article closes by saying that “a trade union response is totally inadequate,” and “PLP calls...[for a] strike...based on expanding CHALLENGE networks...” Are they expanding? If so, tell us how so we can follow that example. If not, what are the obstacles? The formulation makes it sound like PLP is trying to organize a strike led by us and our base, outside the unions and other mass organizations. If so, that would be a big mistake.
Unions and other mass organizations are reform groups, even if we lead them. The same is true for strikes at Stella D’Oro and Boeing, or job actions against transit workers getting killed in Washington, DC. But if we are not in the thick of these struggles, fighting for our communist outlook and trying to lead workers in sharper more militant actions, we will just be spinning our wheels.
The fake-left Trotskyite groups are always “calling” for a General Strike, or demanding the union leaders do something. But they are not the least bit interested in making anything happen. They attack PLP for “working with the liberals” because we are active in our unions. We shouldn’t make their same mistake.
The revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin said that by fighting for the political leadership of the workers and leading class struggle, unions could become “schools for communism.” The founder of scientific communism, Karl Marx, said that workers would have to wage 50 years of class struggle in order to be fit to rule. By fighting shoulder to shoulder with workers within mass organizations, we can expand the circulation of CHALLENGE and the size and influence of PLP.
A Chicago Comrade

Criticizes Slavery Graphic

In the Sept. 30, 2009 issue of CHALLENGE, the article on the upcoming commemoration of the Harper’s Ferry raid is illustrated with a 19th-century engraving of a slave rebellion. This picture is pro-slavery propaganda. It portrays the slaves as half-naked “savages,” whereas the “civilized” slave-owners are all fully-clothed. The slaves are shown barbarically exterminating an entire family: the mother lies dying in the foreground; on the right, a slave is about to saber a girl, while on the left another is about to club a little boy to death. Both children have their hands raised in an appeal for mercy. This sort of propaganda was used to persuade white people in the South and North that they had to support the slave-owners because slavery was the only way to prevent black people from massacring everyone. I think it was a mistake to use this pro-slavery propaganda to illustrate an anti-slavery article.
A friend

Workers Unite to Battle Racist School Closings

Hundreds of black, Latino and white workers rose in unison, fists pumping, to chant “RESIGN NOW” and “NO SCHOOL CLOSINGS” at the entirely black and Latino school board of a southern city during a mass community meeting. Roused by speeches of anti-racist community activists and friends of PL, more than a thousand people, led by black workers, forced the school bosses and their hand-picked “community” advisory committee to cower in their seats.
This was the sixth in a series of meetings to let the community blow off steam regarding the proposed closings of a third of the city’s public schools, including the only high school in the historically black East Side. But school bosses underestimated the intelligence and anger of the working class. Over the course of earlier meetings, workers exposed and challenged the school board’s effort to pit neighborhood against neighborhood, Latinos against blacks, by letting the “community” pick among alternate plans, each one cutting someone else’s schools.
At an earlier meeting, a speaker exposed the fascist war machine’s goal to turn schools into jails. At every meeting, a Latina woman who had led struggles against school closings two years earlier, challenged the district’s history of divide and conquer. She pointed out that even neighborhoods not under direct attack would be harmed by overcrowding and the threat of future school closures. At the third meeting a school teacher finally labeled the board’s actions for what they were: RACISM! A gasp was heard from the hundreds at that meeting.
Activists from groups including PTAs and opponents of earlier school closings, returned repeatedly to community meetings to fight back and reject the call that working-class parents and students pick their own poison. Organizers circulated petitions, went door-to-door and spoke in churches to bring workers to protest school closings. Parents repeatedly defied commands to limit comments and to choose one of the proposals for school closings.
Following these meetings, the superintendent suggested he would delay closing high schools in the areas of the greatest protest, though many other schools will be shuttered. But there is a contradiction embedded in thinking this a victory and even in the chant “Resign Now!” Hundreds of the most militant anti-closing fighters believe that the hiring of a new superintendent or the election of “better” school board members will allow power to be shared and bring long-lasting improvement. In fact, some honest community activists served on the task force that created the school closing plans out of a desire to create a fairer district. As they worked under the direction of hired experts to frame school closings and to meet funding cuts that economic crisis and war brought, they were used to provide cover for the ruler’s exercise of state power.
Despite hating the superintendent and his plan, many do not realize that the real rulers, the capitalist class, are using the layers of elected and appointed community members of all “races” to create the illusion that real, permanent reform and improvement is possible. A new superintendent will not change the ruling class’s need to cut school funding in the face of economic crisis and war. The rulers never share power. Right now, their needs to bail out the banks and to continue oil war in the Middle East mean the rulers have to reduce education, lay people off and foreclose houses.
In numerous discussions since then, the points raised by communists and their friends hope to move the discussion from the specific reform plans proposed by the bosses to the context of system-wide crisis that spawned these reforms. These discussions are urgent because capitalism cannot be reformed — it must be destroyed and replaced with a system run for and by the working class of the entire world. As we deepen our understanding and win more friends, we can also develop plans for even more militant actions, like walk-outs in schools or occupations of school board offices, which would help us learn even more and become better fighters for revolution.
The rulers’ plans depend on racist and fascist attacks on working-class people. But the rulers sometimes underestimate the power of the working class to learn from experience and from communist leadership — even in a short reform battle that likely cannot be won. This power of the working class is also very weakly understood by the workers themselves nowadays. But participating in these battles and making friends for the lifetime battle for communist revolution strengthens our class’ understanding of its power and the ability of PL to grow and guide the working class to revolution.

LA School Compact ‘Racist attack on students...’

LOS ANGELES, September 22 — An emergency informational teachers’ union meeting here discussed a proposed “Compact” between the union, the LA Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor, the Universities and the Schools Board. If this “Compact” passes, the union leadership will be enforcing the education reform agenda of the main section of the ruling class to reorganize schools on the cheap for the bosses.
The Compact would expand so-called peer review, determine No Child Left Behind intervention, expand charter and “iDesign” schools (where the teachers partner with a corporation to compete with charters and end up unwittingly helping do the bosses’ job for them). The goal is to make the school system cheaper and more adept at teaching minimum levels of math and English with lots of patriotism so students join the military and/or work in war plants for low wages.
When a comrade roundly condemned the Compact, he was heartily applauded by the teachers. He declared: “I’m a communist, not a democrat or a socialist. Socialists can’t make up their minds. This LA Compact that our leadership has brought us is a racist attack on our students. The fact that this union’s leadership would work with the Mayor, the School Board and the Chamber of Commerce on this should tell us it’s not in our interests.
“This Compact comes in the context of capitalist crisis and widening war. It represents a fascist reorganization of public education to meet the needs of the rulers, not our students. Fascism comes through dividing the working class and attacking one section more fiercely, and through racism. Our students are mainly black and Latino. The bosses are cutting education and health budgets but not the war budget. We must fight these attacks, including those on substitute teachers, with a united strike.”
PLP showed that the whole “compact” is a fascist assault on students and teachers. Others opposed the compact for each individual attack but concluded that it could be okay if it didn’t take away from “community organizing.” Our comrade argued that during an era-defining economic crisis and two wars, collaboration between the union leadership and the bosses would attack the students, on the road to fascism. He called on teachers to oppose the social-democrat/social-fascist union leadership and build for mass actions towards a political strike against the Compact, the cuts and the war.

Reformism A Trap to Maintain Bosses’ Power

MEXICO — In recent years, many very militant movements have arisen, producing problems for the ruling class. These include the mass struggle of APPO and teachers in Oaxaca; the miners in Pasta de Conchos in the state of Coahuila; the peasants in San Salvador Atenco in the State of Mexico; as well as the very militant movements of the Ford workers, and the recent struggle among the taxi drivers who put the transportation bosses in check (including the local government).
All this demonstrates the immense potential of the working class. However, it also shows a lack of sufficient organization and above all the understanding that to truly liberate ourselves from the bosses’ yoke, we will have to struggle for a real communist revolution.
In these struggles we’ve fought for crumbs, even though workers made the whole cake. No sooner do we win small wage increases (reforms), they take them away by raising prices on basic products, speed-up, layoffs and even jailings and death. We need to take the means of production away from the bosses. We don’t need them because we’re the ones who produce everything. Yet the bosses live like kings without working.
If we fight under the bosses’ laws, we’ve already lost, since capitalism’s laws are designed to protect the interests of capital. When someone goes against the bosses’ interests, we’re repressed by the bosses’ police and sentenced in the bosses’ courts, accused of “terrorism,” drug trafficking or whatever other crime they can invent.
Government branches that supposedly “defend” workers’ interests — the Department of Labor, the Congress of Labor, human rights groups, etc. — are regulated by the capitalists’ government. We workers will always lose under the bosses’ laws; all our efforts get turned around.
Given the treadmill of reform, the working class needs to build a long-term struggle — participating in reform struggles but understanding that workers need to be politicized and consciously see the nature of the reform struggle, to understand how capitalism functions. We must primarily recognize that racism, nationalism, sexism and religion are ideological tools manufactured and used by the ruling class to keep dividing our class and subject us to the bosses’ interests.
Even if momentarily we win some crumbs from the bosses, as the taxi drivers here who formed a cooperative, sooner or later the bosses and their government will end up controlling the movement through their laws, or corrupting the leadership as has been the case in other movements.
It’s not that we distrust these workers, but it’s our obligation as a Party to warn about how
capitalism functions. Such analyses can prevent the capitalist system from co-opting us, from allying ourselves with one or another branch of the ruling class, which doesn’t help our class in any way.
As we participate in these class struggles, we workers must make our main priority building the Progressive Labor Party, with mass CHALLENGE networks, so that we can continue giving leadership to the international working class. Our goal is building a communist society that liberates us forever from all the misery of capitalism.

Red Eye on the News

Back Afghan pipeline, US backs you

Pythian Press, 8/29 — Through the years power in [Afghanistan and Pakistan]... has switched back and forth with our being on whichever side suited us at the moment. At different times we have supported groups including Osama bin Laden, a Saudi and our current sworn enemy....
It is suspected that our allegiance is largely to whoever is supporting an oil line from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan to a Pakistan port.

Moore: Voting will cure capitalism

NYT, 9/23 — In the end, what is to be done? After watching “Capitalism,” it beats me. Mr. Moore doesn’t have any real answers.... This isn’t the story of capitalism as conceived by Karl Marx... and it certainly isn’t the story of contemporary American capitalism, which extends across the globe and far beyond Mr. Moore’s sightlines.
Neither is it an effective call to action: Mr. Moore would like us to vote, which suggests a startling faith in the possibilities of social change in the current political system.

Cuba honors black rebel’s demise

NYT, 9/13 — A bricklayer who began working at age 11, Mr. Almeida was the only black commander among rebel leaders. He was one of the most important and decisive voices in the battle to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista....
Mr. Almeida, the Castro brothers and Ernesto Guevara, and Argentine known as Che, were among only 16 who survived the landing, in which most of the rebels were killed by government troops.
“No one here gives up!” Mr. Almeida shouted to Guevara at the time, giving the Cuban revolution one of its most lasting slogans and ensuring his place in Cuban Communist history....
He was a member of the Communist Party of Cuba’s Central Committee since its creation in 1965.

Afghan women see little liberation

LAT, 8/23 — “Liberating the women of Afghanistan” was often cited as one of the reasons to seek “regime change.” More than seven years later, however, the situation for Afghan women remains dire....
Educational gains plummet when girls hit secondary school, with just 4 percent of female students reaching 10th grade. Violence against women is endemic; women in public life are regularly threatened, and several have been assassinated.
Things got much worse recently when President Hamid Karzai officially promulgated legislation that would make the Taliban proud. Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern....
The Kabul government and its backers are supposed to be different from the people they are fighting. Yet with regard to women’s rights, Afghans might conclude that there isn’t as much difference between the two as they had hoped.

What Afghan ‘win’ really means

Tribune Media Svc., 9/5 — ...Geocorporate interests control international relations....
[US] leaders... assume the mindset and agenda of those anonymous interests. In Afghanistan, this agenda includes [US] regional dominance [and] the flow of oil (the pipeline).... This is what “winning” in Afghanistan really means...

System ranks profits over health

NYT, 9/10 — ...Reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system....
There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry....
It’s more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Russian energy clout breeds conflict

GW, 9/18 — Russia’s stranglehold over dwindling global energy resources was dramatically confirmed last week when figures showed that the country has become the world’s biggest exporter of oil, producing almost 10m barrels a day in August, according to the International Energy Agency.
Russian production toppled Saudi Arabia from the number one spot. It is already the world’s largest exporter of gas, and supplies around a third of the European Union’s consumption.
The news is likely to heighten unease... over the Kremlin’s tightening grip on energy reserves....
“The question is will Russia want to exploit its feeling of superiority and demand a seat not just at the table but at the head of the table.”

Pfizer drug sales ‘endangered lives’

GW, 9/11 — Pfizer had been charged with mispromoting medicines and paying kickbacks to doctors.
Pfizer pleaded guilty to... promoting a drug for uses that were not approved by medical regulators....
A Pfizer sales representative in Florida... blew the whistle....
“At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that...”

Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid
Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution

In mobilizing the October 17 Harper’s Ferry march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid and to finish the job, two keys to revolutionary change stand out: revolutionary violence and multi-racial unity.
Revolutionary Violence
The government of a capitalist society enforces the exploitative and racist oppression of the working class by any means necessary, including violence by the cops at home and the military abroad. The capitalist state asserts a monopoly on the right to use violence, and uses it whenever workers and rebels threaten the bosses’ rule — on picket lines, in community rebellions against racism or in insurrections threatening bosses’ investments worldwide. The working class has no choice but to meet this capitalist violence with organized mass violence of its own. Failure to do so guarantees defeat.
Consider the Garrisonian abolitionists in the 1830s and ‘40s. They felt that with “moral suasion” slave-owners would eventually surrender their slaves. But “morality” will never trump the economic advantage of exploitation by elite classes, be they slaveholders or capitalists. The battle in Kansas (see CHALLENGE, 9/30) and the raid on Harper’s Ferry brought home that truth, and the ensuing Civil War demonstrated most certainly that only great violence could end the exploitation of chattel slavery.
Slavery was violence. The capture in Africa, the leg irons and imprisonment of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic on slave ships, the whip of the overseers to enforce interminable backbreaking work, and the master’s branding iron, jail cell and noose maintained slavery. The federal government guaranteed the legitimacy of this daily violence in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution and supporting laws, and used its armed might against both Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and the 1859 Harper’s Ferry Raid.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 restated the Constitution’s provision making it illegal to aid escaped slaves but now required citizens of Northern states to actively assist their recapture whenever asked by private slave-catchers and/or federal marshals. Refusing to help could mean six months in prison or a $1,000 fine, even if the person seized had never been a slave at all! No trial by jury was allowed in such cases, since Northern juries would not generally convict someone who opposed slavery. No supposedly escaped slave could ever testify.
The 1857 Dred Scott Decision deepened this tyranny. The Supreme Court ruled that no black person, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen and had no right to bring a case to court. This essentially legalized slavery nation-wide and officially endorsed racist doctrine.

Racist Laws Still Exist

Similar practices continue today! The U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staffs checkpoints on roads leading north from Mexico (sometimes hundreds of miles above the border), randomly stopping and searching vehicles, particularly those containing people who “look Latino.” Those who cannot prove their citizenship or produce documents showing they’re legally in the country are jailed and deported. ICE has employed similar tactics in raids on factories, movie theaters and wherever Latino workers are concentrated.
Similarly, the police beat and kill African American and Latino workers with impunity across the country. No jury trial for them, just cops acting as judge, jury and executioner! Killer cops are rarely indicted and virtually never convicted. Such state terrorism is designed to keep workers docile, divided and intimidated, echoing chattel slavery.
And so our class faces a violent, mighty foe. We must not shrink from what must be done today, organizing in factories, in the military and on campuses, not merely to resist but to turn the guns around on the world’s most violent ruling class. But such violence must be based in the masses.
Consider John Brown’s trip east after the January 1859 battle in Kansas. During this journey, his band of 15 helped 11 slaves escape and confronted and defeated 60 government soldiers trying to capture them. He fought and moved about with confidence since thousands of anti-slavery activists backed him wherever he went. In fact, when the Kansas governor demanded, via telegraph, that the U.S. Marshal at Springdale “capture John Brown, dead or alive,” the marshal responded with great irony, “If I try to capture John Brown, it’ll be dead, and I’ll be the one...dead!”
Similarly, Brown boldly declared that since President Buchanan had offered $250 for his capture, Brown would give $2.50 for the safe delivery of James Buchanan’s body.
A massive, militant anti-slavery movement existed, powerful enough to markedly limit federal government action. It had grown from the thousands who escaped from slavery and from their supporters. John Brown did not march on Harper’s Ferry to create a movement, but to put that movement on the offensive, just as he’d done in Kansas.
The Progressive Labor Party has mobilized against hundreds of demonstrations and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and Minutemen. Only the presence of hundreds of cops prevented the fascists from being torn apart by anti-racist fighters led by PLP. Similarly, it was only the power of the federal government to enforce laws that protected the slave-owners from being crushed by enslaved workers and their allies.
As the communist movement grows once again, we must prepare to defeat ruling-class violence with mass, working-class violence that sweeps away all capitalist institutions and bosses. Nothing short of this will enable us to rebuild a society based on equality, collectivity and sensible management of the planet’s resources for the needs of the working class, now and in the future.
(Next issue: The Importance of Multi-Racial Unity)
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