While at an Advisory Board hearing for parents and teachers in Newark, NJ, we had several hours to distribute 400 CHALLENGEs. There was time to take in the bitter cold. I glanced at the nearby cemetery. It was there I made my decision to join Progressive Labor Party. I used to study there, as it’s a beautiful spot, full of trees, shade and quiet.
My boyfriend back then had urged me to get a subscription to CHALLENGE, though he was not himself a PLP member. After a year of reading the paper, I wrote PL asking if I could do Spanish translation. Not long afterward, a newly married couple came to my door, themselves students and members of the Party. They had checked with my (now former) boyfriend to see if he vouched for my honesty and asked if I’d like to meet for a few months with them. (Back in the day, a six-month period of candidacy was required.)
That very week I went to “my” cemetery to contemplate about what I’d been reading in CHALLENGE: the organizational powers of the wealthy had waged the Vietnam war; the logical conclusion being that a revolutionary party was the only way to end the atrocities of capitalism. I recalled how words like revolution and communism had at first grated on my mind. Gradually, they took shape with each article as part of the logical beauty of science. Though joining seemed like the right thing, I knew to do so would put me in difficult situations, and sometimes danger. I might lose my life.
I pictured closing the lid on my own coffin, there in that cemetery. I then knew I couldn’t die with integrity unless I lived a life making progress for the working class. While my anti-sexist pride takes joy in the fact that I joined without my boyfriend’s urging and before he did so, it’s only right to thank him today for insisting I pick up the subscription.
These are the reasons why, for forty-eight years, CHALLENGE has been so essential to my life. It is much more than a newspaper — it’s more like a comrade.
Longtime Roja
PITTSBURGH, March 5 — Militant protests rocked this city on March 3 and 4, bringing traffic to a standstill. Over 1,000 workers, some beating drums and others carrying banners, gathered at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) headquarters here to protest the anti-worker policies of the UPMC bosses. Members of the Service Employees International union, they are paid starvation wages while the bosses rake in millions, similar to tens of millions of other workers nation-wide. These protests in Pittsburgh demonstrate that workers are prepared to fight back against the bosses.J
Rap artist Jasiri X fired up the crowd with his song, “People Over Profits” which seemed to sum up the sentiments of all the workers. However, workers must fight for a society without profits. It will take a communist revolution to gain true equality and justice for all workers.
CHICAGO, March 8 — A multiracial group of 30 workers gathered here to celebrate International Women’s Day. The purpose of the event was three-fold: to give a presentation and speeches concerning the history and importance of the holiday; to be social with friends and comrades; and to formally invite those present to May Day in Brooklyn and raise some of the funds for transportation.
After everyone got settled and ate their fill of some delicious international cuisine, the presentations began. A new comrade, originally from Michoacan, Mexico read aloud in Spanish a letter she had written to CHALLENGE recently. It highlighted her satisfaction with finding an international communist party, committed to the working class and the destruction of capitalism. Coming from a region of Mexico suffering from poverty and drug cartel/police violence, she expressed that she knew firsthand the importance of fighting back.
Next, a slide presentation was given by another PL member which provided history of women-led struggles in the former Soviet Union, revolutionary China, and Cuba. It showed the massive social, political and economic advancements that can be made when sexist and patriarchal capitalist ideology is rejected and workers of all genders are allowed to contribute to many different types of labor.
Both presentations generated important conversation and criticisms. It was pointed out that while the slideshow explained the importance of women filling roles traditionally held only by men, it didn’t go far enough to recognize the immense significance of domestic labor (child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, and so much more) and why it is best when those tasks are equally shared among all genders.
The comrade explained that men also suffer because of sexism because without performing the activities of raising a child, male workers don’t reach full human potential.
The event was a success. The local Financial Committee was able to raise some money for May Day, and a number of friends committed to taking part in the celebration. I was very happy to have learned a great deal more about International Women’s Day, and even happier to have spent the evening with other workers involved in the fight to destroy the sexist and racist society in which we currently suffer, and replace it with one that will value all labor which moves humanity forward.
Red Nurse
PARIS, March 18 — Nearly a quarter million workers marched in 140 rallies across France — 60,000 here and 42,000 alone in Marseilles — under slogans like “Frozen wages, job cuts, enough!” They were protesting the “Responsibility Pact” (read: Profitability Pact) engineered by Socialist president François Hollande who appeared to give a virtual blank check to French bosses. Hollande’s “Pact” would reduce employers’ contributions to social security and place fewer restraints on corporations, including lowering their taxes in the billions.
In 2013, the 16 multinationals listed on the Paris stock exchange made profits of € 28 billion (USD $40 billion) while receiving a tax credit of € 1.72 billion (USD $2.4 billion).
The newspaper Le Canard enchainé reported that Hollande wants to finance the “Pact” by cutting another €10 billion (USD $14 billion) from the government budget, meaning cutting public services and giving the money saved to French bosses.
The demonstrations appeared to be aimed at arousing people to turn out in the coming municipal elections. But for workers to seek solutions to the problems created by capitalism in the system’s electoral process is a losing proposition. The winning alternative would be to destroy that system along with its bosses’ elections and create a worker-run society, communism.
Recent electoral victories of LePen’s fascist National Front and attacks on workers’ standard of living show the need for a communist party to organize the revolution.
In a recent conversation, a friend asked about the life of workers in the Ukraine. In brief, workers in Ukraine, like those in U.S. cities and around the world, are suffering from massive assaults from the imperialists of the world. But given the current war over Ukraine between the interests of U.S./European imperialists and Russian imperialists, it’s important to understand that workers’ interests lie with the workers of the world, that we cannot take sides with any imperialist power. U.S. calls for “democracy” are justifications for increasing the exploitation and oppression of the world’s working class.
In 1993, a strike wave hit Europe. Airline workers in France, steel workers in Germany, civil servants in Great Britain struck against wage cuts and privatization. So did tens of thousands of coal miners in Ukraine, who were joined by workers at large factories in the industrial centers of eastern Ukraine who were facing price increases and a rapid decline in living standards as a result of Ukraine’s independence. The strikes in Ukraine were eventually settled when the government promised pay raises.
But, as with workers in the rest of the world, capitalists in Ukraine were not conceding much to the working class. Instead they instituted an attack in a new form — a banker-led devaluation of Ukrainian currency that undercut wages and increased privatization of production.
In 1993, Viktor Yushchenko (who later became president in 2004) was appointed head of the newly formed Bank of Ukraine. He was a main architect of a 1994 agreement between Ukraine and the IMF (i.e., U.S. and European capitalism). As a result of this agreement, the price of bread increased overnight by 300 percent, electricity prices went up 600 percent, and transportation prices soared by 900 percent.
Ukrainian grain production was also under assault. The World Bank imposed a first phase of trade liberalization which lifted tariffs on imported grain. As cheap (and U.S. government-subsidized) wheat flooded Ukraine, its farmers, once the major grain producers of Europe, were forced into bankruptcy.
By 2003, Ukrainian per capita income was rising, only to come under attack during the “Orange Revolution” of 2004. Funded by U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and multi-billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Orange Revolution began another phase of the U.S. effort to reorient Ukraine under U.S. imperialism and away from Russia. The U.S. favorites in this period were Yulia Tymoschenko, who had made a fortune skimming profits from the sale of Russian natural gas in Ukraine and the U.S.-trained banker Yushchenko.
The Orange Revolution completely undermined the wages of workers who earn some of the lowest wages in the world. According to the German Economic Institute, labor costs in Ukraine are at €2.50 per hour, well below the average of €3.17 in China, €6.46 in Poland, and €21.88 in Spain. An hour of labor in Germany costs €35.66 (one euro = 1.38 U.S. dollar).
The economy and workers’ living standards were further hit with rising oil and gas prices in 2006–08, and then by the global economic crisis of 2008–10. What kept workers alive in this period were continuing (though ever smaller) subsidies of commodities such as natural gas, essential for home heating. These subsidies were paid for by government borrowing. Ukraine, like Greece among others, was in debt to the international bankers.
In 2010, voters, angry at their losses, rejected the Orange Revolution politicians for Viktor Yanukovych, a politician more closely associated with the social welfare system of pre-1993. But pressed by international finance capital to repay Ukraine’s international debt, Yanokovich, like those before him, began negotiations for closer ties to the European Union and the U.S. The deal he negotiated called for massive austerity, like that instituted in Greece. The subsidies that allowed Ukraine’s workers to heat their homes, pensions and other forms of social spending were to be eliminated. In November, 2013, fearing he could not sell this deal to his political base, Yanukovych accepted a temporary loan from Russian imperialists.
Ukraine has some of the largest reserves of coal and iron ore in Europe, and is still a major producer and exporter of iron ore (to China and India) and steel (competing with Germany, France, Russia and others). The privatization of these industries was rapidly accelerated under Yanukovych. Privatization has led to the closing down of steel plants that need modernization, and of many mines. Coal production has fallen by two thirds since 1991, as imported natural gas replaces coal in plants producing electricity. The result has been a situation in eastern Ukraine where many mine workers work in illegal mines often run by criminal networks that offer no protections to workers. That is what capitalism has wrought in the Ukraine.