TEXAS, April 20 — In December 2014, the racist Obama government opened a new prison in Dilley, a small southern town in Texas to hold up to 2,400 immigrant women and youth who have been crossing into the U.S. since last summer. The new prison space was justified by Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers because, they claimed, that the women and youth pose a “threat to U.S. national security” by their mass migration. Therefore all are held without bail even if they have a potential claim for asylum for fleeing persecution in their native countries.
The U.S. government has a profound racist fear of Latin and Black workers, who have the potential to lead a new wave of struggle. Almost all of these women and youth are fleeing violence, especially sexist attacks and killings, in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
U.S. Bosses Fear Rebellion
The U.S. rulers know that the inmates of Dilley prison and their family members across the U.S. and in their home countries represent a threat of rebellion against capitalism. The act of crossing the border itself is an act of rebellion. Because these families are part of the most exploited sections of the world’s population, they are the most likely to fight back hardest throughout their lives. The situation is the same for Black working-class families in the U.S., who are increasingly subject to police murder in the streets and who face the very highest rates of arrest and incarceration.
Racism is a divide-and-conquer strategy that only benefits the bosses, because super-exploitation of different sections of the working class guarantees that wages and conditions of all workers will remain low and be forced lower. Each group is brainwashed to accept the worsening conditions of the other. By keeping wages and conditions horrible for Black, Latin and Asian women workers, the system keeps millions of workers below a poverty level. Racism hurts the entire working class. It allows white and citizen workers’ wages and conditions to be driven down further. That is why the standard of living for workers in the U.S. worsens every year, except for the very rich. Racism is the key to capitalism’s profits!
Increased Rivalry Leads to Imperialist War
The U.S. capitalist class backs Central and South American governments to secure continuing U.S. imperialist domination there, where these countries are sources of profit and resources. In these countries, as in the Middle East, the U.S. imperialists must counter European, Chinese and Russian bosses’ investment and expanding influence. The U.S. recently assisted the present government of Honduras in suppressing a movement to align Honduras with Venezuela, which is in the Russian imperialist orbit.
Currently, the rulers of the U.S., Europe, Russia and China are intensifying their imperialist competition with each other for the world’s wealth. As the U.S. prepares for wider war with their imperialist rivals, it needs to build racist fear of immigrants along the southern border. Thus Dilley is part of an effort to build nationalism, as well as to convince citizens that “foreign” workers seek to steal jobs. This was a foundation of Hitler’s brand of fascist ideology in the 1930s, which taught that Jews were stealing jobs and property from non-Jews. It went from rhetoric to concentration camps, to mass exterminations.
Dilley, and the intensification of racism at the U.S. Mexican border today, is at the cutting edge of 21st century U.S. fascism. Since 2000, the number of Border Patrol agents has doubled to 18,000 and fencing multiplied nine times to 700 miles. Predator drones now patrol a stretch of 900 miles along the border, with over 10,000 flights in the past two years. This, along with government-backed attacks on immigrants by border vigilantes such as the Minutemen, demonstrates the ability of capitalism to use fascist tools of the state to perpetuate racist terror on a mass scale.
“Deporter-in-Chief” Obama has deported more people than any other president — 2.4 million immigrants since taking office — and separated even more. Now he is imprisoning thousands at Dilley. Today, as in Germany in the 1930s, the liberals are paving the road to fascism.
March on May Day!
The bosses are looking to the 2016 presidential election in order to pacify workers’ anger over unemployment and racism. All the clowns in the electoral circus are enemies of the working class whether they are socialist, liberal, or conservative. The mass deportations and mass incarceration of Black and Latin workers is not the byproduct of a “ broken” immigration system. It is the product of a racist capitalist system, a system that depends on racist super-exploitation to survive. Capitalism cannot be fixed. The U.S. bosses want these immigrant workers to be cannon fodder for larger and deadlier imperialist wars looming on the horizon through programs like the Dream Act.
Many churches and activist groups are calling for marches to release the inmates, and the Progressive Labor Party will be there to march with them! However, PLP fights for something more. In the past, Russian and Chinese workers and peasants, led by communists, defeated capitalism and ran society, and defeated German and Japanese fascism. Today, learning from past victories and failures of the old communist movement, and with the communist leadership of PLP, we can build a mass Red Army of the working class that will not only smash Dilley prison, but the entire capitalist system with communist revolution. MARCH ON DILLEY PRISON ON MAY 2, 2015!
BOGOTA, April 22 — Teachers of a rural town in Bogota, Colombia, went on strike in response to the Ministry of Education’s racist policies against working-class students.
The school administration maintained overcrowded classrooms by assigning 50 students to a room which can hold a maximum of 30, creating a health hazard, and harassing the students. This abuse, when added to the lack of a budget to respond to students’ needs, motivated the strike.
The ministry called on the teachers’ representative to stop the strike and begin negotiations. It also wanted to accept a parents’ representative. The union refused and demanded the presence of 17 parents, one for each rural district. The union demanded a negotiating committee be set up.
After several days of negotiations, it was agreed to use the budget to improve the school under parents’ supervision. This budget was already allocated but the dean had refused to spend it, a move that highlighted his sinister motives. The students will be placed in other schools.
This agreement was the product of working-class unity and forcefulness. It showed that the initial fear of several teachers — who argued nothing could be done and that they would get hurt — could be transformed by the struggle.
The teachers, as well as the other unions, have been suffering the consequences of the capitalist crisis. Year after year, they lose what they’ve won in previous struggles. The union bosses are a bunch of collaborationist misleaders who are in bed with the government.
Participation in reform struggles is part of the training for communist leaders. We must be part of those struggles to influence and guide the revolutionary struggle. Exploiting and attacking the working class is part and parcel of capitalism. It takes away crumbs workers gained through years of struggle.
A united working class under the leadership of the PLP is truly indestructible and in the long run the just revolutionary struggle for communism will succeed. Everything you do, and neglect to do, matters. Join PLP.
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Israel/Palestine: One State or Two, Capitalism Rules
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- 23 April 2015 337 hits
Dallas, TX, March 29 — Several PL’ers attended a small conference here of members of the One Democratic State (in Palestine) group.
This group oppose the two-state proposal because of two basic reasons: 1) Given the use of the right-wing settlements by the Israeli government to divide up and take over more and more of the remaining West Bank, any “Palestinian state” will be a collection of geographically separated islands. 2) All residents of, and refugees from, Palestine of all ethnicities should be able to live together in peace, justice and equality. They also want to see the end of both the Zionist government and the Palestinian Authority, which they view as a puppet of the government of Israel.
At the conference the question of what kind of state should be implemented was raised by PL’ers. Whether there are two states or one state, as long as it is under capitalism there will continue to be inequality, racism, oppression, exploitation and wars. Only by building communist revolution will we ever have a world where working-class families can live together as one.
There was no agreement on what type of state there should be. It was left with the statement, “We encourage continued discussion on the future economic system.”
At the conference we did meet some people who are looking for ways to work for a better world. CHALLENGEs and flyers were distributed to people with whom we talked. We plan to keep in touch with some of those we met. It is important that we not ignore opportunities to reach out to people with our politics and our actions. The working class has nothing to lose but our chains.
“Peace is an extension of war by other means,” said U.S. strategist Anthony Cordesman, referring to Barack Obama’s shaky nuclear deal with Iran (Center for Strategic and International Studies website, 3/30/15). The agreement, which calls for Iran to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions, is a move toward war. While the deal may represent a temporary thaw in hostilities, the fact remains that U.S. bosses remain locked in an increasingly deadly struggle with China and Russia — the main backers of the Iranian regime — for control over the Middle East’s vast energy wealth.
At the same time, U.S. capitalists are fighting among themselves over how best to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East. What they fear most is the encirclement and isolation of Saudi Arabia — the grand prize of U.S. imperialism for its oil fields — by Iran and its regional allies.
As the inter-imperialist conflict intensifies and the U.S. inevitably wages a broader war in the Middle East to protect its vital interests, workers will be the cannon fodder. The international working class has no stake in this capitalist competition. Our only solution is a communist revolution led by the Progressive Labor Party.
Buying Time
For the dominant wing of U.S. capitalism, Obama’s Iran deal is a ploy to buy time until the bosses are ready for all-out invasion. When John Bolton, former UN ambassador under George W. Bush, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed column titled, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” (March 26), he was attacked for “criminal stupidity” by Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council, a finance capital think tank. Ullman is no pacifist. He co-authored the Pentagon’s “Shock and Awe” doctrine that guided the U.S. invasion of Iraq — and slaughtered thousands of civilians — in 2003. This doctrine stipulates the use of overwhelming force to undermine the enemy’s will to fight.
Shock and Awe ultimately failed in Iraq because it did not anticipate the scale of anti-U.S. backlash, now exploited by the Islamic State (ISIS). But the U.S. bosses will do their best to apply the lesson of Iraq to Iran. As Ullman noted,
“We will have to take out a good portion of their air defenses and other conventional forces, and that is going to get a retaliatory series of strikes by Iran... We need to know what that’s likely to be, and how we’re able to deal with it, before we make a decision to go to war” (Newsmax, 3/27/15).
U.S. Capitalists Prepare for Onslaught
U.S. rulers are nowhere near prepared — politically or militarily — to take on Iran. But they are working on it. The Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for U.S. imperialism, outlined a strategy that the hair-trigger Bolton would admire. Should Tehran drag its heels in shutting down its nuclear program on Obama’s terms, the Council laid out a scenario for action:
In week one, the Security Council or the alliance of the willing would demand that Iran verifiably reverse itself within no more than two weeks. Failure to comply would result in week three’s suspension of all international commerce to isolate Iran’s economy....Week five would bring the cessation of all commercial air and maritime travel to Iran to further isolate…Week seven, the partners would implement a Cuban missile crisis…Then, in week nine, the United States would lead air strikes to destroy all suspected nuclear sites…until Tehran opened its territory to international inspectors authorized to eliminate all nuclear contraband.
In preparation, Obama is beefing up anti-Iran firepower. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “the Pentagon has upgraded and tested the largest bunker-buster bomb in the U.S. arsenal…that could destroy or disable Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear facilities should a nuclear deal fall apart” (4/3/15). But doubts persist about the megabomb’s effectiveness in destroying sites buried under mountains. Air Force generals concede that a successful hit would require the long-shot maneuver of “guiding two or more of the bunker busters to the same impact point, in sequence” (Wall Street Journal). In response, Obama is preparing for another plan. He has initiated a trillion-dollar modernization of the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal.
The dispute over when to bomb Iran — now or later — is already shaping the 2016 presidential race. Ted Cruz, the GOP’s first announced candidate, has enlisted Bolton as an adviser. Jeb Bush, whose father and brother both led genocidal Middle East oil wars, has fallen afoul of pro-Israeli Sheldon Adelson, the arch-Zionist U.S. billionaire who wants to blast Iran tomorrow. Bush is following the counsel of James Baker, the ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase heir who applauds Obama’s more measured approach and favors an eventual massive land war over air strikes. In 1991, as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, Baker helped lead the 750,000-troop effort to “liberate” Kuwait for British Petroleum and Exxon. In 2007, advising George W. Bush, his Baker Institute engineered the bloody Iraq “surge” that Obama called a success “beyond our wildest dreams.” As for Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, she voiced skepticism about Obama’s latest maneuver by noting that “the onus is on Iran” (Washington Post, 4/5/15).
Workers of the World, Unite!
Regardless of which wing of the ruling class prevails in defining U.S. policy in Iran, the working class will pay the price in the bosses’ fight for war-driven profits. Sooner or later, U.S. bosses will need ground troops to consolidate their oil interests in the Middle East. Using racism and nationalism, they’ll do their best to win millions of working-class youth and workers to fight and support that war.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party has a different plan. We are organizing workers in the U.S. and worldwide to turn imperialist war into a war for communist revolution — and to smash the capitalist system for all time. On May 1 and May 2, PLP in the U.S. and around the world will commemorate May Day, marching for a society that will abolish imperialism, racism, sexism, poverty, and unemployment. We celebrate the power of the working class to one day run society in our collective class interests.Join us!
