BALTIMORE, September 23—The Northeast District police station is home to the racist animals who beat unarmed Black man Tyrone West to death in July 2013. This evening, a toilet was symbolically placed in front of the station’s sign. We chanted, “Killer cops in cell blocks!” This marked the 113th West Wednesday rally, led by Tyrone’s inspiring family every week without fail.
Over the last two years, much has been learned in the struggle to indict and jail the state terrorist gang of cops—as many as 15 of them—who assaulted Tyrone after a traffic stop. They repeatedly called him the “n” word, pulled him from his car by his dreads, and proceeded to mace, Taser, beat, and club him to death!
At today’s rally, a member of Progressive Labor Party explained that there are two classes of
people in the world: the big business owners and the working class. When the business owners hold state power, that’s capitalism. When the working class holds power, that’s communism — a society of sisterhood and brotherhood where we take care of one another. As the PLer explained, only a revolution can move us from today’s rotten world to a communist world. All things change. Racist, murderous cops — and the system they serve — will one day be eliminated!
The West Wednesday mobilizations offer a taste of the bright future we’re fighting for. Members of the West family appreciatively hug everyone who attends. And this week, as usual, nearly everyone took a copy of CHALLENGE.
Cops’ Job: Guarding Capital
Through this struggle, protesters have witnessed how the mayor, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, the police, the medical examiner’s office, the state legislature, and the media have lined up behind racism. None of these officials have done anything about Tyrone’s murder.
Although eyewitnesses described in detail the horrific violence of the kkkops as they beat Tyrone to death, the cops were given immunity even before they completed their testimony. They remain free to brutalize and kill again.
The job of the police, a profession descended from the slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries, is to uphold the bosses’ laws and protect private property. The entire legal system is designed to serve the ruling class and oppress the working class. About 75 percent of U.S. law deals with property relations, including businesses, machinery, money, and stocks—everything of monetary value. One half of one percent of the population owns most of that property. The legal system is their system.
After more than two years of struggle and learning from experience about the true nature of the capitalists’ government and police, it’s become common to hear speeches at West Wednesday that lay the blame for Tyrone’s death squarely on the system.
Ignite Rebellion,Build Revolution
In April, the outrageous police murder of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray ignited a righteous rebellion against police terror. The protests against the murders of Freddie and Tyrone are part of the same struggle. The persistence of the fight for justice for Tyrone West has advanced antiracism in Baltimore. At the first pre-trial hearings for the six cops who killed Freddie Gray, as these racist thugs tried to get their charges dropped, we held a West Wednesday rally outside the courthouse.
Ending police terror and changing the world is a long process. Let’s not forget that the struggle to defeat slavery in the U.S. took more than two hundreds years. Like chattel slavery, the wage slavery of capitalism will also be abolished. To achieve that goal, Progressive Labor Party is organizing for a communist revolution. Never give up! Dare to struggle! Dare to win!
BROOKLYN, September 21 — Forty workers and students demonstrated today in the continuing struggle for justice for Kyam Livingston, murdered in 2013 by the kkkops’ medical negligence in Brooklyn’s Central Booking Jail.
Kyam’s family and the Justice For Kyam Committee, with strong support from the Progressive Labor Party, have guaranteed monthly actions to remember July 21, the date of her murder. The racism of Kyam’s indifferent cop jailers caused her death, the speakers explained to scores of neighbors who stopped on their way home from work. Members of PLP explained that the capitalist rulers use their police forces to terrorize workers and discourage fightback. Many residents of this mainly immigrant working-class neighborhood listened, donated money, and took leaflets and over 300 copies of CHALLENGE. The overwhelmingly positive response to our monthly actions prove that the bosses, their lackeys and their brutal profit system can’t stop the struggle of the working class.
Kyam’s mother spoke movingly of her daughter’s final hours, the conditions faced by those held in central booking, the callousness of those responsible for her daughter’s death and her own commitment to seeing those responsible punished. She vowed to shut down the Central Booking Jail and the crowd responded, “Shut it down, shut it down, shut this racist system down!”
A speaker related the struggle in Palestine/Israel to the struggle in the U.S. against racist police violence.
Among the several members of PLP speaking at the rally, one young teacher, holding her toddler in her arms, moved the crowd when she said no mother should have to bury her child. There is something wrong with a system, she went on, where the mainly Black and Latin students in her school are forced to start their day by passing through scanners like criminals.
Another teacher spoke about students being forced to learn how to “assume the position” by the NYPD. Both related the murders by police from Brooklyn to Texas to Ferguson to Baltimore, as well as the everyday oppression faced by the working class, to the need to destroy capitalism with communist revolution.
NEW YORK, September 25 — A community group recently protested in front of a building near Central Park owned by gutter racist, sexist presidential candidate Donald Trump. We protested racist statements made by Trump against Latin immigrants—in particular, statements referring to Mexicans as rapists, drug dealers and murderers. These slurs, along with a number of Nazi-style proposals, are a central part of Trump’s campaign.
The demonstration was well attended, and many from our local PL club participated. Even though the organizations behind the action push the pro-capitalist agenda of the Democratic Party, the demonstrators militantly responded to our chants of: “Workers’ Struggles Have No Borders”; “We Are Workers, Not ‘Illegals’”; and “Amnesty Now, No More Deportations.”
One comrade connected Trump’s racism to the problems faced by immigrants worldwide. He spoke about Syrians fleeing the violence of war and crossing into Europe, only to be mistreated and humiliated. He mentioned the African migrants who die by the thousands as they flee poverty, war, and disease, as well as those from the Middle East and Asia. All of these crises are caused by capitalism; the situation for the working class is getting worse and worse.
The demonstration’s reformist leaders sidelined two individuals who began yelling insults at Trump. These two had the courage to challenge the police, even standing in the middle of the street. By contrast, when a Trump sympathizer started yelling insults at us, the misleaders failed to respond.
Whenever possible, PL members should try to give leadership to the working class. With militant chants and ideas, we should always lay the blame for the deteriorating world condition at its root cause: capitalism and imperialism. As we unite and fight back to change this horrific profit system, workers will join us to work toward a communist revolution—the only solution to racism and war.
NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — As old and new taxi bosses divide workers to lower their wages, three hundred taxi drivers rallied outside Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Manhattan office today as part of the Global Day of Action Against Ubernomics. They were protesting Cuomo’s plan to give Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Uber & Lyft approval to dispatch fares to an unlimited number of drivers using personal cars across New York State. This move increases competition and attacks driver’s income. In June, taxi drivers in Paris went on strike and blocked major highways to stop the Uber advance there.
TNCs are destroying full-time jobs and incomes for tens of thousands of taxi drivers and their families. In San Francisco, the home of Uber, 3,000 regulated taxis compete against 30,000 private cars. Driver income is down 20 to 30 percent. In Boston, 3,000 taxis are pitted against 10,000 private cars. Driver income is down 25 percent.
At the same time, the traditional taxi companies attack their workforce by classifying drivers as private contractors, even though 85 percent lease their cabs every day and are responsible for gas as well. The 16,000-member Taxi Workers Alliance is trying to re-establish a union in an industry that provides no collective bargaining, unemployment compensation, or healthcare benefits. The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission presides over the racist super-exploitation of these mainly immigrant South Asian and Black workers, similar to the bosses’ attack on workers in construction, home healthcare, domestic workers, and freelance writers. By 2020, contract workers are expected to make up 40 percent of the U.S. workforce.
All drivers—whether unionized or on contract, whether they’re oppressed by Uber or exploited by the traditional taxi bosses—must unite to build a world where our labour is fully valued. We must fight for a society run by collectivity, not profit, to meet our needs of health, food, housing, and education.
PLP is working among contract workers — from Israel-Palestine to New York City — as they fight for
financial and social security, with the outlook of uniting across lines of work. We will sharpen the class struggle and show that the only security we have as workers comes from building an international movement for communist revolution.
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Immigrant Workers Fight Racism
On Sept 15, a driver/organizer for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) was passing out fliers for the Ubernomics rally to his co-workers at a taxi lot at LaGuardia Airport. He was physically assaulted by a dispatcher, who then called the cops on the driver. All of the drivers got out of their cabs and refused to move. The racist New York Police Department used vans and police dogs to surround the lot full of mostly immigrant drivers from South Asia and the Caribbean. The drivers still refused to get back in their cars. After a tense stand-off, the organizer was released and the dispatcher arrested. Only then did the cab drivers resume work. The organizer spent the night in the hospital, but attended the next day’s rally with his son.
DETROIT, September 28 — “This is bullshit! It will take me another eight years to reach top pay!” That’s what one worker at Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant said of the tentative sellout agreement between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US (FCA) and 40,000 workers in the United Auto Workers (UAW). If what he says is true, top pay will be $25 an hour, a 15 percent cut from the current rate. The UAW leadership’s nationalist “Buy American” dogma and their strategy of partnering with the capitalist auto bosses has been a racist disaster for the mainly Black workers of Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Chicago and other cities. Thousands of Black families in Detroit are facing another wave of water shutoffs and foreclosures.
The local bosses’ plans to build new sports arenas for their own profit and entertainment wouldn’t be possible without the total collaboration of the UAW misleadership. Once upon a time, the UAW was a militant union organized by communists during the class wars of the 1930s. The great Flint sit-down strike of 1936-7 inspired workers throughout the world. Coinciding with the successes of the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, Flint gave bosses worldwide good reason to tremble at the prospect of revolution. But over the decades, the old movement’s strategy of allying with lesser-evil bosses has turned unions like the UAW into powerful enemies of the working class.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is picking up the red flag where the heroic workers of Detroit once raised it. We are fighting for what bosses fear most: communist revolution.
With “Friends” Like These…
Having given away the store, UAW President Dennis Williams was promising hourly pay raises for longtime workers who haven’t seen one in a decade. He also said the union would “bridge the gap” for second-tier workers hired after 2007, who now start at about half the pay of first-tier workers. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne had another idea for how to end the two-tier system: by lowering wages for top-tier workers!
Today, 45 percent of FCA-UAW members make entry-level wages of about $17 per hour. Over the last two labor contracts negotiated by the UAW, FCA workers have seen their wages drop as much as $30 per hour. These givebacks by workers’ false friends in the UAW and the Democratic Party have lowered their pay to the level of non-union workers at Toyota and Honda in the U.S. South. Now, in the name of moving production back to the U.S. from Mexico, these class traitors are pushing more wage-cutting contracts.
After decades of being battered by its international competition, culminating in the 2007 bankruptcies of GM and what was then Chrysler, the U.S. auto industry has undergone drastic changes. So has the UAW, which has chosen to ally with U.S. auto bosses instead of the international working class.
Counting the foreign-owned “transplants” and the massive parts supplier industry (which used to be mostly in-house at the Big Three auto makers), there could be more than 700,000 auto workers in the U.S. But the vast majority of the industry, including temporary and part-time workers, is non-union, and wages outside the core assembly plants have collapsed. The parts supplier industry has workers making as little as $9 per hour, even as they toil for luxury auto makers from Cadillac to Mercedes.
Thousands of workers may be voting this contract down. Workers have rejected it at Jefferson North, Sterling Stamping, Trenton Engine, Kokomo Casting, and Toledo Machining. No matter what the final count, this antiracist rebellion by the rank-and-file against the UAW leadership is a welcome development.
Same Enemy, Same Fight!
The attack on autoworkers is worldwide. On September 10, 4,300 Ford workers in Sao Bernardo de Campo, the industrial region around Sao Paulo, Brazil, went on strike against mass layoffs and pay cuts. The strike concluded with a deal to cut workers’ hours by 20 percent! Workers in Brazil at Fiat, Volvo, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen and truck manufacturer Iveco have faced thousands of layoffs and forced time off without pay.
The ruling Workers’ Party, Brazil’s version of the U.S. Democratic Party, has been busy slashing workers’ wages and pay in response to what they call the “economic crisis.” Meanwhile, these bosses are rolling out a red carpet of tax breaks and blank checks to builders of giant stadiums and luxury hotels for the 2016 Olympic Games. The workers of Brazil gave $15 billion to the capitalists to pay for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, sponsored by Ford and Fiat—a disaster for the working class. Now the workers in Detroit, like their sisters and brothers in Brazil, are shouldering the costs of new professional sports stadiums there.
Unlike the UAW or Brazil’s anti-Workers’ Party leaders, the Progressive Labor Party isn’t trying to bail out the bosses; we’re fighting to destroy them with communist revolution. We’re not pushing two-tier wage contracts; we’re fighting to abolish wage slavery.
PLP salutes the militancy of industrial workers fighting back in São Paulo and Detroit! Over the past three years, tens of thousands of autoworkers in Brazil, Mexico, China, South Africa, and Turkey have staged bitter strikes. Their unions cut deals to keep the assembly lines churning out profits for the capitalists. As the 1937 Flint strike showed, industrial workers are at the center of capitalism’s profit engine. They will play a key role in communist revolution. United with the international revolutionary communist PLP, we can build a world run by the working class. PL’ers and friends should call on their local unions to organize actions of solidarity with auto workers from Detroit to Brazil. Our aim is to build an international PLP that can smash this racist, imperialist system once and for all.