SANTA MONICA, CA, June 18– Nearly 100 hotel workers, community members, and clergy marched through the hotel district in Santa Monica, rallying in front of two hotels and City Hall. The focus of the struggle is to combat sexism in the workplace and improve conditions for the overworked, mostly female housekeeping staff. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members work in a church that is part of a coalition called Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, which is currently supporting the efforts of local hotel workers to unionize and improve working conditions.
Their most recent struggle has been focused on combating sexist conditions in the workplace, especially the sexual harassment and assault perpertrated by management and hotel guests. The workers and the union are pushing the City Council to pass an ordinance that would mandate that panic buttons be placed in all guest rooms; provide for humane workloads and job retention rights when hotel ownership changes; and begin necessary training for supervisors and staff on preventing human trafficking, domestic and sexual violence, and labor abuse.
At the rallies, there were the usual talks from Council members, but the most inspiring speeches were from the workers themselves. The women talked about their experiences with sexism on the job and how they have stayed strong and kept fighting because of the support they’ve received from fellow workers and the community.Their campaign started last fall with informational forums, where workers shared their stories. As nearby jurisdictions started passing panic button ordinances, the workers and the union began to craft their own housekeeper’s bill of rights. Then they circulated a petition to gather community support. At our church, we’ve been gathering signatures after services and making announcements from the pulpit.
Santa Monica hotels are not alone in the sexist and racist mistreatment of their workers. In Los Angeles, workers are organizing a union at the trendy Freehand Hotel, owned by multi-millionaire real estate developer Andrew Zobler. Workers have faced “speed-up” — the number of beds and bathrooms they must clean has doubled. As a result, they have no time for breaks or even quick water breaks.When they began to organize a union, management threatened to report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and made antigay remarks comments to some union delegates.
Since the owners of hotels and every other business want to maximize profits, they seek to cut labor costs whenever possible. How this affects the workers—damaging their health, and their family lives—is of no concern to the owners. We support the collective action of workers to improve their conditions and defeat racist and sexist treatment. We also bring to the struggle the understanding that capitalism will always use racism and sexism to oppress the working class and extract maximum profits, but that workers have the power to overthrow that system with a communist revolution that allows the international working class to run society for the benefit of all.
SPAIN, June 24—A small fascist party called Vox is taking hold here. The Vox party panders to the domestic-oriented bosses, along with the disaffected racist and sexist working-class people who make Vox’s base. These little fascists are secondary to the main danger—liberal fascism.
The current division we see worldwide is between the main finance capital wing of the ruling class who are committed to imperialist interests and more domestically focused capitalists who don’t want to pay the bill in higher taxes that it will take for a global war to maintain that control. Immigration is one of the fault lines of these divisions.
Gutter fascists grow out of crisis and splits
The crisis of capitalism has fostered the rise of fascist parties across the globe, as we’re seeing from Spain to India. In Europe, many fascist parties have been gaining ground, playing on the disappointments and suffering of workers who have been subjected to unemployment and government cutbacks in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis that continues to widen. From Italy to Hungary to the UK and beyond, parties have used anti-immigrant racism, “anti-corruption” promises and anti-communist rhetoric. Their Klan-type racism fueled violence against immigrants fleeing inter-imperialist war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The use of nationalism and racism against immigrants and Muslims, and antigay and antisexist ideas are consistent features of fascism across the globe.
In Spain, the fascist virus has reared its ugly head in the form of Vox (Latin for “voice”). Emerging in 2013 as a split from the traditional right-wing Partitdo Popular (People’s Party). Vox openly supports Israeli fascism and advocates war against Iran. Vox’s current boss, Santiago Abascal, launched the 2019 campaign in Covadonga, the site of the first victory of Christian Spain against Muslims who governed the Spanish peninsula for over 780 years. He is calling for “making Spain great again” via mass deportation of Muslim workers. Abascal also wants to build a long wall on Spain’s southern border to stop migrants from Morocco and other parts of Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa who are fleeing war and environmental catastrophe. Vox unabashedly evokes the legacy of Franco, the Spanish dictator who ruled for over 40 years, and longs for a return to authoritarian rule under the banner of Spanish ultra-nationalism.
Vox is part of a broader fascist movement that has been building in Europe and worldwide. Steve Bannon, ex-strategist of the Donald Trump administration, founded an organization called “The Movement” to promote nationalist groups in Europe. Parties under this banner include the Belgian People’s Party, Italy’s Northern League, France’s National Front, Alternative for Germany, the Danish People’s Party and The Freedom Party of Austria.
What goes unmentioned in liberal analyses of Vox is that it’s the conditions caused by capitalism that provide the fertile ground upon which fascist parties can grow. These groups are a political response of one section of the capitalist class to the circumstances and obstacles of capitalism in crisis. This section of the ruling class is unwilling to make sacrifices for global imperialism. They are in conflict with the finance wing, which has been on the defensive from Europe to Asia to Latin America. The volatility of the capitalist world order is rapidly increasing.
Who will lead the fight?
We would be misleading ourselves if we think a movement absent of communist politics can steer a fight against fascism. Since December of 2018, the southern region of Andalucía has seen militant protests opposing attacks on immigrants and Vox. In cities like Granada, Sevilla, and Málaga, these groups have shut down streets and occupied central areas of the city with shouts of “We are not afraid” and “It’s fascism, not democracy,” and “Refugees welcome.” The main liberal wings of the bosses seek to control and steer this movement. What we need to keep in mind is that all liberal politicians are loyal servants of the main wing of their ruling class. Their job is to mislead and pacify angry workers, and to keep them on the dead-end road of capitalist electoral politics.
Just as it was in the period before World War II, the answer to a fascist international is a communist international, which makes the struggle against anti-immigrant racism, nationalism, and other oppressive and divisive ideas the key to building the unity necessary to defeat rising fascism. However, the old movement made a grave mistake in forming a united front against fascism—essentially failing to separate itself from the liberal bosses. PLP is trying to build a communist international movement that is independent from all bosses’ camps.
The capitalist bosses will always demonstrate significant tactical and strategic differences. However, they are united in the fundamental principle of attacking the working class at all costs and will achieve that through increased exploitation as well as racist and sexist attacks. However, it is our duty to continue to expose the liberals as the main threat to the international working class for their role in ensuring the survival of the profit system.
BRAZIL—In 206 cities, hundreds of thousands of students and teachers took to the streets in protests, outraged by President Jair Bolsonaro’s announcement to cut 30 percent of funding to public universities and high schools. Racist and sexist Bolsonaro is now under attack and rightly so. But voting so-called leftists back into power is not the answer. It’s not just Bolsonaro. It’s the whole damn capitalist system. Various socialists or “leftists” today – from Bernie Sanders in the U.S. to Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva- just want to fix capitalism. That’s not possible.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of workers are striking, demonstrating and fighting the cops, demanding no cuts to their pensions and other safety net programs. This is working class power. It should not be wasted on an effort to replace Bolsonaro with some socialist hack. Let this be a school for communist revolution. We need workers and students in Brazil to join the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and organize for an egalitarian society totally run by the working class. Bolsonaro won big because the fake leftist governments - led by the Worker’s Party (PT) which was in power for twenty years - dished out a few crumbs to the working class and then screwed them royally.
By the time of his October 2018 election victory, Brazil was in the deepest recession in its history, corruption was rampant among politicians, and homicides were at record levels (nytimes.com, Oct 28, 2018). It was Lula and his fake “leftist” Workers Party– in power for almost 20 years– that put Brazil in this crisis.
The current cuts come on top of years of budget cuts by the previous governments led by the Workers Party. They are part of a policy of austerity measures aimed at shrinking government spending and privatizing the country’s resources. They target the humanities and social sciences as part of Bolsonaro’s far-right nationalist party’s ideological attack on the “left”, which he claims has turned the universities into “hotbeds of Marxist indoctrination” (Aljazeera).
Bolsonaro also aims to privatize 100 state-run companies in areas such as energy, ports, highways, and airports, a process that began over 20 years ago when the government began privatizing Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, and South America’s largest. Now, under Bolsonaro, that plan is being intensified with a vengeance. Some capitalists aligned with Bolsonaro will control businesses that were previously controlled by capitalists aligned with Lula.
This is also a defeat for Chinese imperialists who have made huge investments in Brazil – and especially in Petrobas - while the Workers Party was in power. Bolsonaro’s fascist program is a full-fledged attack on the working class. Since taking office, he has lowered the minimum wage, eliminated labor legislation protections, announced the dismantling of social security and the slashing of pension benefits, and attacked public education. He is promoting racism to divide and weaken the working class. He campaigned on the promise of seizing resource-rich indigenous lands that “are an obstacle to agri-business” (Campo Grande News, 4/22/15).
Bolsonaro promotes vicious racism against the indigenous tribes to divide the working class and justify this land grab.The massive demonstrations show students and workers acting in their own class interests. Now, they need to reject the socialism of the Workers Party, which has produced little for the working class. Join the PLP and transform this anti-government movement into an armed revolution for a classless society-- communism.
Workers and students in Brazil have seen first-hand, over the last 20 years, how socialist reforms within a capitalist economy fail the working class. Join the Progressive Labor Party and help us build a new international communist movement for real workers’ power.
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The $4.6 trillion Social Security swindle to pay for imperialist wars
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- 30 June 2019 81 hits
The bosses’ media is filled with cries of a “Social Security (SS) crisis,” screaming that SS will “run out of funds” unless taxes are increased and the retirement age is raised. But this is not a crisis of SS. It’s a crisis of U.S. capitalism.
Until 1968, the bosses’ law mandated that all payments into the SS Trust Fund be used only for retirees’ pensions. But that year the Johnson administration broke that law by “folding” the surplus revenue in the S.S Trust Fund into what the bosses called the “Unified Federal Budget”(UFB). Why? Because the cost of their imperialist war in Vietnam was creating a huge deficit. But now, by including those billions and trillions of surpluses from the S.S Trust Fund into the UFB, they could steal those surpluses and use them to reduce the Federal deficit and pay for the cost of that war and all the imperialist wars to follow: Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Gulf War I, Iraq and the longest one of all: Afghanistan — 18 years and counting.
Workers pay a SS tax rate at 7.65 percent (including Medicare) and the employer pays an equal amount. But the employers’ amount comes from the workers’ labor so, in effect, 15.30 percent is being paid by workers to build the SS Trust Fund, ostensibly to cover workers’ retirement and Medicare.
The Federal government is obligated to pay back the SS surpluses robbed from the SS Fund — in the form of Treasury bonds — a robbery which by 2015 left the SS Fund $4.6 trillion short. This leads to their lie that “Social Security is endangered.” But in actuality — as noted in the NY Times (1/21/90) — the government is using the $4.6 trillion of SS surpluses it robbed “to pay for everything from jet fighters to thumb tacks.”
For instance, this addition of the SS surpluses to the UFB made the 1998 “budget surplus…a mirage….about which both the President [Clinton] and the Republicans crowed incessantly.” It “was due to a big surplus in Social Security….The rest of the budget showed a deficit of almost $30 billion. Most of the Social Security surplus, which supposedly goes into the Social Security Trust Fund, was spent on other programs” (NY Times, 11/9/1990). Thus, with a $100 billion addition from a SS surplus, this sleight-of-hand turns an actual $30 billion federal deficit into a $70 billion federal budget “surplus.”
The rulers’ crocodile tears about “saving Social Security” is utter bullshit. The Carter, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama Democrats along with the Reagan, Bushes, and Trump Republicans have all, been using the working class’s pension money to prop up U.S. capitalism, cutting taxes on the rich while paying for the rulers’ imperialist wars.
The deficit crisis is part of the general crisis of capitalism. It will always try to solve that crisis on the backs of the workers who produce all the value in society. Such “solutions” will continue until the working class, led by its revolutionary party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rises up to destroy the bosses’ state power and establishes a society in which retired workers will be provided for by the social value produced by our entire class. Profits, bosses, and imperialist wars will not be part of that picture.
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The bosses shift the tax burden
In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration, with the help of the Democrats, cut income tax rates for the rich from 70 percent down to 28 percent. Corporate income taxes fell by 23 percent. Meanwhile, it raised the Social Security tax on workers’ wages. Thus, the New York Times reported (1/21/90) that, “The burden of taxation was shifted from the income tax to the Social Security tax….[75 percent] of all Americans now pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes.” Thus, “the expenses of government are financed more by a tax on the poor and the ‘middle’ class and less by a tax on the wealthy.”
BROOKLYN, June 6 – “Pay back the money you owe!” “Whose streets? Our streets!” Chants in Spanish and English filled the air as more than 30 workers from a community immigrant organization confronted a wage-stealing boss this week: a small-time capitalist who makes his fortune ripping other workers off by exploiting their unscientific belief in Tarot Cards. It was a militant protest that reflects years of Progressive Labor Party efforts to organize fightback among immigrant workers!
The workers carefully planned this protest in the days before, bringing signs made by young workers drawn with Tarot hands and crystal balls, with messages like “Thief Tarot Reading”, and “Your Future: Jail”, both in English and Spanish. This petty boss, filled with rage, screamed and called the cops on the workers! While the protestors entered the store with chants demanding the stolen wage money, the petty boss yelled and tried intimidating the workers to leave his store. After kicking them out of the store he also demanded they leave the sidewalk, because according to him, it was private property.
There was a great feedback from the passersby of the neighborhood, who not only took our leaflets describing why we were there, but also had discussions with us asking what was going on and even stayed at the rally to simply watch the action with surprise and admiration.
A petty boss and a gutter racist
Towards the end of the rally, the petty boss was just so furious at the bravery and actions of the workers that he began to say even more disgusting racist insults and at one point he even said how he was so happy what Trump has been doing to Latin workers with mass deportations.
At that point a young comrade of the party, who was one of the leaders of this action, lost his control and began to curse out the petty boss and even reminded the petty racist boss that he was also an immigrant. A few other protestors also joined in the match of insults, but eventually we had to retreat when the cops came.
The petty boss even lied to the police that the protestors had wrecked his store, but there was no evidence of that, and our lawyer told the police that not only was that a lie, but that the community organization is a peaceful entity and that we were within our rights and were not breaking the law in any way. After the rally, all of the protestors went to have pizza and soda for dinner to cool off after this intense event.
Building for struggle and revolution
Planning for this demonstration began at a weekly meeting of a liberal community organization two days before, where members of the communist Progressive Labor Party have been working for many years. Over the past year, workers and PL members have demanded side by side to the leaders of this community organization to support direct actions and confront wage-stealing bosses, as it was done in the past for workers who came to the organization asking for help against wage theft.
The community organization has recently transitioned to younger leadership, who have re-started this campaign of direct action and have even allowed one of our young comrade leaders of PLP to take more charge of this campaign, while under the liberal community organization’s direction. This week, the workers scored a victory: the organization’s leadership would support direct action to confront the thieving bosses!
Following the meeting, a dedicated workshop took place where the members of the organization brainstormed on how to proceed, including making signs. The petty boss had already been disrespectful to the lawyers of the organization when requests were made on the phone. At the end of the workshop, it was decided that the lawyers of the community organization, along with 30 members, would go to the work site with a letter of demands followed by the protest.
Criticism, self-criticism, and the science of struggle
At the next weekly meeting of the community organization, the protest was evaluated and analyzed by the workers. While the workers supported the action, some of the leaders of the organization weren’t too happy about the screaming insults that had been exchanged with the petty boss. According to their reasoning, they fear the possible arrests of our mainly undocumented members.
Then the young comrade of the party took the stand and spoke at the meeting and made a self-criticism. He indicated to the workers that he was not going to just stand there while the petty boss made these horrible racist remarks and wasn’t going to tolerate the bosses attempt to intimidate the workers. Even though the young comrade apologized about possibly putting our undocumented sisters and brothers in danger, he also took full responsibility if he got arrested, since he himself is documented and fully aware of his rights. He felt he was within his right to yell at the boss as long as he didn’t touch him.
The young comrade also took this opportunity to compare and criticize the liberal mass organization’s many previous staged arrests that are planned ahead of time, as opposed to unplanned spontaneous arrests, which are considered real fight backs. We must continue to lift the class consciousness of the workers in the fight back against the bosses, including making direct actions and confrontations against the exploiters. When the time comes, the working class will be ready to take control of the means of production with communist revolution!
