CHICAGO, August 5—A strike of 1,700 auto mechanics from 130 car dealerships is now in its second week. Workers are demanding that the Chicago Automobile Trade Association (CATA) give workers what they deserve after the last two contracts have given concessions to the bosses.
The workers represented by Automobile Mechanics’ Local 701 are fighting for a guaranteed 40-hour work week, better schedules, higher apprentice wages, and a reinstated 4-year apprentice program in place of an 8-year one. They have said that mechanics have not been paid for all the hours they work, and that bosses are making it more difficult for apprentices to find their way into the industry.
PL’ers went to the picket lines to support the striking mechanics, and to bring a long-term, communist alternative to the crumbs thrown to us by the bosses. We brought the workers water and held up their strike signs with them with pride. We led chants such as, “shut it down, shut it tight—the bosses can’t profit when the workers unite!” The workers thanked us and welcomed our presence and support. We distributed CHALLENGES and got into many discussions.
One worker we spoke to came from Vietnam and was a neighbor of a PL member, and it turned out he went to the same ESL school that another comrade taught in. He thought that revolution was going a little too far because he did not like war and his dad suffered a lot in Vietnam and died in a camp. It is important to win the working class to see that the ruling class will never, and has never, handed over power willingly. For the international working class to win a world run by and for workers, revolution is a must—communist revolution.
Another young worker was an immigrant from Mexico, who came here when he was eight. The racist system has held him back in many ways—first, he couldn’t start mechanic school until he was a permanent resident, so he had to wait until years after high school. Now, the bosses are holding him back in an 8-year apprentice program.
Worker Solidarity vs. Individualism
In an important show of solidarity, experienced workers are standing strong in this strike, though key aspects of the struggle are for better conditions and better pay for newer, less experienced mechanics. One striker was quoted saying, “It took me two years to become a journeyman back when I started in this business, and they’re asking these guys basically to give up eight years of their lives to learn the trade” (CBS Chicago, 9/1). Capitalist ideology and media are used to convince workers to look out for themselves only, and not get involved in others’ battles. That ideology is losing here!
When we visited workers on the fifth day of the strike, their spirits seemed high. We in PLP must continue to build support for these workers, as they should be setting the mood for all workers. At the same time, we must bring forward the understanding that unions and contracts will never end the wage exploitation that this capitalist system is based in. Union leadership misleads workers into thinking the system can be reformed to work for us—but only a worker-run communist world will truly benefit the working class. Support striking mechanics and spread the fight back! Long live the international working class.

MISSISSIPPI,  August 4—“It’s the beginning of a war!” That’s how one Nissan worker responded to his co-workers voting 2,244 to 1,307 to reject union representation. The United Auto Workers union (UAW) has led a 14-year campaign at the Nissan plants here to unionize the workers. Nissan has 48 auto plants around the world and all are unionized except for those in the U.S. This most recent vote is another disappointing defeat for union organizing across the southern U.S., following similar setbacks at Volkswagen in Tennessee and Boeing in South Carolina.
Unlike the other campaigns, this one was particularly antiracist. Of the 6,000 workers in the Canton plant, over 75 percent are Black. The pay rate averages about $3/hour below that of the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee that is majority white workers. Almost half of the Canton workers are temp workers employed through Kelly Services, working across the line from the permanent workers for about half the pay. This represents the racist exploitation that is standard under capitalism. All workers are exploited, creating profit for the bosses. Racism is a dangerous tool used by the bosses to keep workers divided and to try to convince white workers to not fight back, to protect their “better” wages.
The UAW organized the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan (MAFN), a coalition of student groups, clergy, community, and civil rights groups. They used civil disobedience to win back the job of a worker who was fired for pro-union activity, and organized the more than 5,000-strong March on Mississippi last spring.
Despite all of this, the union still had only a slim majority of workers signed up when they filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Nissan bosses worked hard to make sure of that. Once the vote was scheduled, the bosses forced thousands of workers to sit through one-on-one hour-long meetings that were used to bribe and threaten them while Nissan ran anti-union videos in the plant as well as TV ads. Some were told they would lose their special employee rates on new cars while others received long overdue raises and new car deals.
Nissan had plenty of ammunition by pointing to the UAW’s inability to defend its members and asking, “Do you want Canton to become another Detroit or Flint?” They also used the unfolding scandal of a former UAW-VP in charge of Chrysler and the Chrysler VP for Labor Relations allegedly stealing millions from a training fund for Chrysler hourly workers while they negotiated UAW-Chrysler contracts.
Most workers realized they might lose this round, but saw it as the beginning of the next phase of what has become a long-term struggle. The NLRB has charged Nissan with Unfair Labor Practices, including threatening to close the plant, cut wages and benefits, and interrogating workers. If these charges are upheld, the NLRB could order a new unionization vote within six months.
Unions are really not the long-term answer for the working class, though. Unionization on the job is a means to unite workers and secure some reforms under the system, but won’t smash racism or end capitalist exploitation. The Nissan campaign underlines how the UAW’s strategy of relying on politicians and the bosses’ laws and courts has brought the union to the brink of irrelevance. It is crucial to win workers to see beyond those reform struggles to fight for an end to this deadly system.
The main challenge for PLP is to be more involved in struggles like this. As one worker said, “I don’t take this as a loss because I have learned so much…during this process.” By being in these battles we can learn from the workers and help them to see past the misleaders who seem to offer so much, but won’t deliver.

Venezuela has become a flashpoint for the global crisis of capitalism and the escalating fight between big-power imperialists to control the world’s oil. The division between the Chinese-backed Nicolas Maduro regime and the U.S-backed opposition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), reflects the shifting tectonic plates of inter-imperialist rivalry. Once the unchallenged power in Latin America, U.S. rulers are under challenge by rising Chinese imperialism. China is Venezuela’s second-largest trading partner, just behind the U.S. By 2025, the Chinese capitalist bosses have pledged to increase trade with the region by $500 billion and foreign investment to $250 billion (foreignpolicy.com, 3/6).
Meanwhile, falling oil prices have triggered widespread shortages of food, medicine, and basic services. In public hospitals, the maternal death rate has increased five-fold; the infant mortality rate is up more than one hundred-fold (New York Times, 5/15/16). After more than three months of widespread societal unrest, involving millions of Venezuelans, the Maduro regime has killed more than 100 protestors as it moves to rewrite the constitution and consolidate power. In response, U.S. bosses are threatening economic sanctions against the state-owned oil company, “which could be disastrous for the average Venezuelan citizen, as the already decrepit Venezuelan economy would sink deeper into depression” (oilprice.com, 7/23). It’s clear that both sides represent dead ends for workers. The deepening crisis in Caracas is yet more proof that the brutal and volatile profit system can never serve the needs of the international working class.
Venezuela is crucial to the global competition for control over oil. Venezuela is the third-largest oil exporter to the U.S., behind only Saudi Arabia and Canada (mysanantonio.com, 7/18). It possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at 302 billion barrels, surpassing Saudi Arabia’s estimated 266 billion (opec.org). In a period of permanent war in the Middle East and the growing inevitability of global world war, oil is the lifeblood of modern-day capitalism, from factories to imperialist militaries. Neither U.S. nor Chinese rulers will give up Venezuela without a fight—a conflict guaranteed to drag workers there further into misery.
Chinese Imperialism: False Hope for Workers
In 1999, former President Hugo Chavez was elected on a platform that attacked U.S. imperialism and promised “21st Century Socialism” in Venezuela. Under Chavez and his successor Maduro, Venezuela exercised increasing autonomy from the U.S. and began tilting toward Beijing. In 2001, Venezuela became the first Latin American country to enter a “strategic development partnership” with China (NYT, 2/15).
Between 2007 and 2014, leveraging the power of its finance capital, China loaned $118 billion to Latin America, with 53 percent of loans going to Venezuela (Brookings, 5/8). These investments primarily targeted development of energy, mining, and infrastructure (thediplomat.com 4/15). For China, Venezuela is both economically and geopolitically important: “The Venezuelan alliance offered a crucial beachhead for engaging in a region where it lacked cultural and historical ties, nestled in the backyard of the United States — its principal geopolitical rival” (NYT, 2/15). Given Venezuela’s influence in Central America and the Caribbean through its subsidized oil program, China has quickly become a major player throughout the region.
Trading One Imperialist for Another
While a China alliance may have offered a temporary refuge from the grip of U.S. imperialism, it has also exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis. To guarantee its tens of billions in loans, Beijing insists on being repaid in oil. Due to a slowdown in China’s economic growth, along with overproduction of oil and natural gas from fracking in the U.S., oil prices plunged in 2014 and again in 2016. As a result, with an outstanding debt of $62 billion, Venezuela has been forced to double the amount of oil it ships to China. Even so, it is behind in its repayments (Bloomberg, 6/18).
In an attempt to hedge their bets, Venezuela’s bosses are also seeking significant ties with Russia. Before oil prices fell in 2014, Venezuela was set to become the largest importer of Russian military equipment by 2025. In February 2017, the Russian foreign minister reaffirmed Moscow’s support for the Maduro government, declaring that bilateral relations “are on the rise” (Council on Foreign Relations, 7/18).
Desperate U.S. Imperialists Fund Capitalist Opposition
In the face of China’s rise, Venezuela is one of many countries that the U.S. can no longer unilaterally control. But despite their relative decline, the U.S. bosses retain a significant ability to influence and destabilize. As of 2015, the U.S. remained Venezuela’s largest trading partner at close to $24 billion, mostly from oil exports to the U.S. (state.gov). To protect its imperialist interests, the U.S. ruling class helped train and support organizations that staged a failed coup against the newly elected Chavez in 2002 (oig.state.gov). Since then, the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fund opposition groups (Guardian, 2/18/14).
MUD, the main organization mobilizing the resistance to Maduro’s rule, is a right-wing coalition representing pro-U.S. sections of the Venezuelan ruling class. Among other things, it calls for privatizing the country’s oil industry, an open invitation to even more theft and profiteering (coha.org 8/13/15).But U.S. imperialism’s grip on Venezuela continues to slip. In April, Venezuelan authorities seized a local General Motors assembly plant, forcing the company to halt production. Several other U.S. companies, including Coca Cola, Ford, Clorox, and General Mills, have either left Venezuela or scaled back production significantly (NYT, 4/20).
‘21st Century Socialism’: Workers’ Nightmare
As Venezuela descends further into chaos, the dangers of Chavez’s “21st Century Socialism” can be seen more clearly than ever. Social reforms promised under both Chavez and Maduro—for literacy, redistribution of wealth, healthcare, and land reform—drew mass support from the working class. But because they relied on high oil profits and imperialist China, they could not possibly be sustained.
As socialism in the Soviet Union and China eventually decayed into state capitalism, socialism in Venezuela allowed local capitalist bosses to keep their profits—stolen from workers’ labor—while making a few temporary reforms. As history shows, socialism can never lead to a true communist society rid of money and exploitation. Images of Venezuelan workers in long lines for food and medicine, holding inflated bolivars (Venezuelan currency) that drop in value as they wait, reveal the destructive inequalities of capitalism in full bloom.  
The U.S. bosses are using the crisis to build anti-communist ideas, arguing that Venezuela represents the failures of Marxism. But what is happening in Venezuela has little to do with the failures of workers’ power and everything to do with the horrors of capitalism and imperialism. Many workers fell prey to Chavez’s cult of personality and nationalist politics, which called for siding with “lesser evil” imperialist China over the U.S. By putting their faith in fake leftists like Chavez and Maduro, Venezuelan workers have been left disarmed, with no organized, revolutionary mass movement to lead the fightback needed today.
For far too long, these frauds have misled the working class throughout Latin America. From the revolutionary-turned-liberal FMLN in El Salvador to the anarchistic, phony leftists of the FARC in Columbia, a lack of class consciousness has made the working class vulnerable to misleaders’ poisonous nationalism and reformism. Despite the revolutionary appearance of millions of protesters demonstrating against Maduro’s regime and burning police motorcycles in the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s opposition movement is far from revolutionary. Driven by anti-working-class, dead-end electoral politics under MUD, it is steering toward a lethal alliance with U.S. imperialism. Today’s Venezuela is reminiscent of 2014 Ukraine, where a  “revolution” was essentially a right-wing coup, funded by the U.S., to bring prominent Ukrainian neo-Nazis into power.
The only hope for workers in Venezuela and throughout Latin America is an international revolutionary communist party that rejects nationalism, capitalism, and alliances with “lesser evil” imperialists. A party that organizes to smash imperialism, racism, and sexism, and that fights for a world rid of money and profit. A party that rejects the cult of personality seen in Cuba and Venezuela and organizes around the collective leadership of the working class through democratic centralism. Progressive Labor Party is that international, revolutionary communist party. Join us in the fight for a better world!

CHICAGO, July 13—A feature of the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) recent Chicago Summer Project was a “Labor History Bus Tour” around the city. The tour showcased locations of historical working-class battles dating to the nineteenth century, and locations of current struggles involving PLP.
Union Stockyards: Hotbed of Class Struggle
We started at the former location of the giant Union Stockyards, once a world famous animal slaughterhouse known as the “hog butcher of the world.” Formerly sprawling over a square mile, thousands of Black, white, and women workers waged intense class struggle against the capitalist meatpackers who treated the workers horribly while stealing millions of dollars in profits. The Union Stockyards were named after the Union side of the U.S. Civil War. Basing the stockyards entirely on war production needs, the northern industrial capitalists settled on the site to pack meat for soldiers in the war. We reviewed stories from The Jungle written by radical journalist Upton Sinclair in 1906, and the memoirs of a leader in the old communist movement, William Z. Foster, who organized labor unions in the slaughter houses in 1917 during World War I.
Despite filthy and deadly working conditions inside the plants, most workers were not organized into labor unions. Those who were had craft unions based on their job titles. They were also divided by race—in 1917, of 60,000 packinghouse workers, 12,000 were Black. However, only the Butcher Workmen’s Union allowed Black workers to join. We found their old union hall and we stopped by the old main gate to the stockyards, which held pictures and information of what life was like in those meat factories.
We also learned how the bosses are always relentless in their efforts to maximize profits off their workforce. In the winter of 1917-1918, Foster described how the meatpacking bosses were afraid of a strike inside the plants during a mass union campaign that was uniting the various craft unions to fight the oppressive conditions. A major union at the time, and still today, was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which represented skilled, white workers. In this struggle the AFL misleaders prevented the workers from striking and agreed to a government mediation process for the workers’ grievances. Many workers came forward to expose the treatment they suffered under. Armour, one of the biggest meat bosses, testified that he had made 40 million dollars in profits in 1917 alone. So to avoid a shortage of food stuffs during war, the packing house bosses raised wages, gave workers 10 hours pay for 8 hours work, and a lunch break.
It was apparently a victory. But as soon as the imperialist war was over, the stockyards were flooded with spies, goons, and “organizers” who moved to return to the craft union style in the plants.  Foster, who was an organizer and leader in the old Communist Party, made no mention of study groups or leadership training programs. Progressive Labor Party has learned that we have to be involved in reform struggles with the working class while also educating workers on the evils of the capitalist system.
Haymarket: The Birth of May Day
We also made stops connected to the famous Haymarket events in 1886 that led to the creation of the international communist holiday, May Day. These events did not fall from the sky.  In the 1870s, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world. Fortunes were being made off the backs of immigrant workers. Families lived in deplorable conditions. At the time, one of the biggest capitalists in Chicago was Marshall Field, founder of a department store chain today known as Macy’s. After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, workers all around the world sent money to the Relief Fund. Workers later discovered that Field and his cronies controlled the Relief Fund money, and were using it for themselves.
Working class outrage, alongside the struggle for an eight-hour workday, grew. In April of 1886, angry workers marched around the new Board of Trade’s opening banquet with a beautiful red flag, led by Lucy and Albert Parsons, a Black and white couple. By then, the struggle for the eight-hour day had struck a chord with masses of workers and thousands were demanding it. Revolutionary socialists like the Parsons and August Spies joined these struggles and tirelessly organized and educated workers around revolutionary ideas inside the workers’ unions and community organizations.
On Saturday May 1, 1886, thousands marched down Michigan Avenue singing labor and revolutionary songs. Factories all over Chicago closed down. The city was tense. Then, at a gathering on May 3, the police fired at a group of workers supporting the McCormick Reapers strikers, killing two with no remorse. The city bosses were looking to retaliate!
Overnight the workers called for a demonstration in Haymarket Square, at that time a busy intersection and commercial area, to protest these murders the very next night, May 4.  The rally was small and breaking up, when the police charged up the street and opened fire. Someone, possibly a police agent looking to provoke chaos, threw a bomb, and seven cops died in the chaos. The Chicago bosses used this incident to suspend the legal rights of anyone suspected of radical politics and to harass working-class leaders. They used their newspapers to build disapproval of the workers.
Seven of the workers’ leaders, including Albert Parsons and August Spies, were charged with murder and convicted. Before being executed, they were allowed to address the court, which they did for three days. Their speeches have gone down in history, especially Spies’ final warning to the bosses: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” All seven denounced the bosses’ court and capitalist wage slavery. All were defiant to the end.
At the birthplace of May Day, we sang the Internationale, the anthem the international working class, with fists in the air and the admiration for working-class fightback in our hearts.
Humboldt Park: Fightback Against Police Terror
Next we stopped by Humboldt Park where, in June 1977, Progressive Labor Party held a march the morning after a Puerto Rican community had rebelled in response to the police murders of two Puerto Rican youth. A comrade told us of how PL’ers marched to the police station where the killer cops worked, holding signs and red flags, and distributing CHALLENGEs. The cops were unsettled by the group’s boldness and by the great respect of the youth who came up to them and cheered them on!
La Casita Vive!
Lastly was a stop at “La Casita,” the site of a struggle by parents of elementary schoolers fighting to have a library built at their school. For years, the local bosses denied this school a library, which mainly serves the children of workers from Mexico. Many parents pushed to renovate an old park building alongside the school into library. For years, nothing. Then, when these same bosses announced the old park building would be demolished in order to build a soccer field for a nearby mostly-white, upper-income private school, the parents rebelled! For 43 days straight, parents, fellow workers, and PL’ers occupied the old park building, which they called “La Casita” (the little house), to physically prevent the demolition. The students’ parents, mainly from Mexico, while worried about deportations, were determined to fight for their children to have a library and had had enough of the way the politicians and school bosses treated them. La Casita was eventually torn down, but the morale of some parents was strengthened through their contact with the Party.
This concluded the tour. The Summer Project participants were a wonderful group of young and old, committed, multiracial and multigender PLP members and friends. The struggle continues, and we must continue fighting for as long as we live!