Detroit, MI June 5 — The 36th United Auto Workers (UAW) Constitutional Convention ended today as delegates followed newly elected UAW President Dennis Williams and Teamster President James Hoffa across the street to the Crowne Plaza Hotel to support a union organizing campgain. Following Williams and Hoffa across the street is already more than they deserve.
The endless self-congratulations and standing ovations for all the “great labor leaders” crowded onto the stage stands in stark contrast to the miserable conditions faced by workers and retirees and the storm clouds gathering for the coming year. It stands in even greater contrast to the racist attacks by the bankers and auto bosses on the workers and youth who live in the City of Detroit, where the jails are full and unemployment is about 50%, and significantly higher for black youth.
The two main goals of the convention were to raise morale among the delegates, who are mostly elected officers and the base of the International leadership, and to raise the dues for the International union. The hot item was a 25% dues increase, the first since 1967, which will go entirely into the International Strike and Defense Fund.
The urgency behind the dues increase is that 50% of the UAW membership is now in anti-union Right to Work (RTW) states. If Ohio goes RTW, that will jump to 60%. When the contracts at GM, Ford, Chrysler and others expire next year, workers living in RTW states will have the option of quitting the union. What’s more, in every RTW state there will be a massive campaign to win workers out of the UAW, financed by Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers, similar to the one that derailed the UAW campaign at VW earlier this year.  The dues increase is mainly to try to aggressively counter the anti-UAW campaign, and to build a cushion against potentially big losses.
Much was said about the 2015 contract talks and the need to have a strong strike fund in order to “show the bosses we mean business” in closing the two-tier wage gap. But the odds of a strike in the auto industry are slim to none. The UAW leadership is partners with the bosses, even more so since the Obama administration orchestrated the 2009 federal takeover and bailout of the industry. The only two-tier gap that was closed this week was among the UAW staff, who went from starting at 70% pay and taking six years to reach full pay, to starting at 90% and taking three years to reach top pay.
Back at the worksites, there was mass resistance to the proposed dues hike. At some plants, local President’s chose not to run for delegate rather than campaign for it. Every Ford assembly plant except one opposed the increase. One local President who ran in favor of the dues increase was defeated by a 3-1 margin. But that opposition was never organized to do battle on the convention floor and after some debate, it passed easily.
After more than 40 years of “Buy American” and partnering with the bosses, the UAW leadership has painted itself into a corner where they have to rely on the bosses to survive. This strategy has seen the union shrink from 1.5 million members to just under 400,000 and has left Detroit, Flint and many other auto towns in ruins. If they can’t win some significant reform in the 2015 contracts, workers will be able to vote with their feet and resign from the union. The chickens have come home to roost.
Beneath the balloons and standing ovations, between the hospitality suites and Directors’ dinners, despite the video message from Obama and the awards given to politicians, a battle was being waged to challenge the UAW leadership’s grip on the workers. It’s a struggle over whether we will be led by the Democratic Party to a future of fascism and war, or whether we can build a mass base for PLP and international communist revolution. This week, that struggle took place among a handful of delegates. Over the next year, it can grow.

HARLEM, June 13 — Today 150 angry residents of 2 Harlem housing projects and fighters held a militant rally in the pouring rain at the State Office Building nearby. Longtime local church friends gave out fliers and invited protesters to our next action group meeting and a flier decrying racism and calling for revolt against racist police and housing authority abuses. Progressive Labor Party distributed 60 CHALLENGEs.
Grant and Manhattanville are two huge public housing projects on either side of 125 St in West Harlem. Altogether there are about 4,500 residents and 1,900 youth.
The residents, poor and nearly all black, are treated like dirt by the racist cops and politicians. There are no after-school programs in the local schools, and there are none in the projects either. There isn’t even an indoor recreational area, and the outside sports courts are in poor repair.
The unemployment rate for young men is around 50 percent, and there are no job training programs. Columbia University has taken over the property across the street to expand its campus, driven hundreds out of their homes, and is gentrifying the whole area.  In return, they had promised to spend millions to provide services and opportunities to local youth, but have done nothing.
It is no wonder that some young people turn to drugs and violence in these conditions. There has been one murder and 19 shootings in the last three years.  But in response, hundreds of police with helicopters overhead made a military incursion into the projects on June 4. They broke down doors with battering rams,  trashed whole apartments, and handcuffed old women and children. Over 100 indictments were handed down, many more than the numbers who have been involved in gang activities. If any of these young men are convicted of even minor crimes, they will be banned from living with, or even visiting, their families. There is no doubt that fascism is here in the projects of NYC.
All the residents of Grant and Manhattanville are angry, as well they should be, although some say we just need better cops. Many have the illusion that better trained “community” police would keep young people on track and decrease crime. In reality, the role of the police is to protect the interests and property of the rich. The NYPD can shoot black and brown youth — murdered 16 in 2012 — with impunity and inner city youth rightly hate them. Seventy four percent of people shot in the first half of 2013 were black. Twenty two percent were Latino.
The young people do need to fight back, but it should be against racism, unemployment, poverty and lousy schools, not against each other.
We need to help build an ongoing organization among these tenants and youth that exposes the nature of the system and fights back militantly against this capitalist cesspool that is destroying its poorest workers and youth.

WASHINGTON, DC, May 20 — Today several hundred east coast transit workers, members of the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union (TWU), rallied and lobbied Congress for increased capital funds (for buses, subway cars and new track) for city mass transit systems. International union officers spoke, along with former FBI stoolpigeon Al Sharpton. PLP members came to oppose the lobbying strategy and instead distributed hundreds of PL flyers calling for sharper class struggle against the racist attacks on transit workers throughout the country, a large proportion of whom are black and Latino.
The ongoing economic crisis of capitalism, the flyer noted, demonstrated the need for communist revolution to take power out of the hands of the bosses and put it into working-class hands. A communist workers’ government would organize transit to meet the needs of workers and riders instead of the profits of the capitalists and bondholders.
The rally’s speakers demonstrated misleadership at its highest level. President John Samuelson of New York’s TWU Local 100 sang the praises of their new contract with the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority bosses. Rank-and-file New York TWU members at the rally said, however, that the agreement was trash. It had been ratified, they said, because they saw no other option — there was no fightback planned by the leadership.
Several PL transit workers and their friends who passed out PLP’s flyer learned that, without a doubt, it was up to us to organize class struggle, since our union leaders have long given up on serious battles against the bosses. Transit workers are under sharp attack since they’re generally better paid than the average worker and the bosses want to push them back down, using racism to divide and isolate the workers from the rest of the working class.
To resist attacks, it is critical for transit workers to go beyond their own immediate interests and build anti-racist and revolutionary politics among themselves as well as the general community. Then a broad militant class struggle against the bosses can be built in cities with major transit systems — uniting black, Latino, white and immigrant workers. This can turn the sharp attack against us into a resurgent working-class movement that can fight effectively against the bosses and move our class towards revolution.

Along the shores of Lake Malawi in Africa schistosomiasis — a disease that causes abdominal pain, diarrhea, malnutrition and in long-term cases liver damage, kidney failure, and even infertility — has become common over the last few decades. According to a medical researcher in the area the disease has become ubiquitous, “In some villages around Lake Malawi up to 70 percent of the people and 95 percent of schoolchildren are infected” (All Things Considered, 5/28). Lake Malawi is no small region either, it is about the size of New Jersey and borders Tanzania, Mozambique, and Malawi with over 14 million people living on its shores.
One perspective is that the outbreak is caused by parasitic worms whose life cycle takes them from snails on the lake’s shoreline to the intestinal tract of people and back again. Another view might argue that the disease is caused by overfishing in the lake that has removed the snail’s primary predator and by increased farming in the area that has raised sediment levels along the shoreline making them an even more favorable environment for the worm-carrying snails. Finally one might argue that the profit motive in agricultural production has forced millions of people to pack in around the lake’s shores so that they can overfarm the land and overfish the water, creating the perfect conditions for an outbreak of schistosomiasis.
One analysis mechanically looks at the life-cycle of the diseas; the other examines its root cause. In capitalist production the seizing of profit is the only concern while the pillaging of the environment and the damage it causes to the workers forced to live there is ignored or dishonestly rebranded an act of nature.
Today health officials seem flummoxed on how to stop the spread of schistosomiasis along Lake Malawi’s shores, but half a century ago a similar mass outbreak in China was contained and the disease eliminated within less than a decade. Thousands were organized to comb river banks finding the snails one by one and killing them until the parasite was eliminated. As English surgeon Dr. Joshua Horn noted, the mass campaign against the river snails was only made possible by a communist mass political line (Away With All Pests). In capitalist Africa today this is impossible. The profit system does not allow for thousands of people to abandon “productive” labor — labor that makes a capitalist profit — to engage in “unproductive” labor — the kind of work that would improve the living conditions of millions.
Horn stressed the Chinese Communist Party’s reliance on the peasantry and their knowledge in dealing with the fight against the snails writing, “To mobilize the masses does not mean to issue them shovels and instructions; it means to fire them with enthusiasm, to release their initiative and tap their wisdom.” Along the shores of Lake Malawi no capitalist is interested in firing up the enthusiasm of the working class. After all, once the working class killed the parasites along the lake they might turn their sights on the capitalist parasites that daily rob them of their labor and health.