TEL-AVIV, January 5 — Fifteen thousand African refugees, mostly working class, demonstrated in central Tel-Aviv against their racist treatment by the Israeli government. This climaxed a week-long strike of 30,000 by most African refugees and immigrants in Israel — mostly in restaurants, cleaning and housekeeping — protesting their maltreatment by the capitalist regime. They are also demanding an end to their deportation to the “Open Residential Facility” — actually imprisoned in barbed wire detention centers with three roll-calls a day in the Negev desert.
However, among Jewish workers in the southern Tel-Aviv slums, this demonstration drew mixed feelings and even hostility. Why? Because the Israeli bosses’ regime, with a hand in the crisis and in genocide in East Africa, has even turned the arrival of a handful of refugees — 60,000 in a country of eight million, less than 0.5 percent of the population — into a humanitarian crisis. In working-class slums around the country, particularly in Tel-Aviv, the long-time residents and refugees both suffer.
Haaretz newspaper (6/25) reported that Israel is the world’s sixth largest exporter of weapons, and traded $2.4 billion worth of instruments of death in 2012 alone. All this is subsidized by the Jewish and Arab workers’ tax money, as well as that of U.S. workers’ taxes. Meanwhile, a handful of well-connected businessmen enjoy its fruits.
Among the happy customers of this industry of death is Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s tyrant, who buys weapons at discount prices from the Israeli bosses’ government. This dictator has enacted a mandatory “Civil Service” in his country, sometimes even for decades, which is nothing but slavery, all for the profits of the ruling clique surrounding the tyrant. Those who try to escape this “service” to preserve their freedom risk imprisonment, torture or even death. Most Eritrean refugees in Israel have escaped from the claws of this dictator.
Similarly, the Israeli regime, with U.S. backing, sells weapons to the belligerents in the Sudanese civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed, and millions more rendered homeless since 2003.
So the Israeli government has a hand in forcing Africans to flee their homes and risk crossing the Egyptian border (facing death from Egyptian soldiers) to reach Israel. As long as the Eritrean dictator continues to oppress workers there, if refugees return to their home country many will be killed, most likely by Israeli weapons.
Tens of thousands of refugees from East Africa have reached Israel’s southern border. The Israeli government quickly dumped them in the slums of southern Tel-Aviv, without a work permit and without any aid. Adding tens of thousands of unemployed refugees, who don’t know the local language, to already impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods is a recipe
for humanitarian disaster. And, indeed, crime rates have risen sharply, providing city hall with even more excuses to not invest in maintenance in the slums. All of this was perpetrated by the Israeli ruling class and its government.
The rich profit in three ways. First, a group of tens of thousands of workers without work permits, who face hostility from their environment, are a huge reserve army of cheap labor for Israeli bosses. They’re unprotected by Israel’s already flimsy labor regulations and work for very long hours at below the minimum wage with no social benefits — all for the super-profits of their bosses.
Second, the humanitarian disaster in the slum neighborhoods, with additional racist filth spread by the regime, turns the slums’ long-term residents against the refugees, whom they now blame, in many cases, for the situation there. This is divide-and-conquer, pure and simple. It pushes Jewish workers to blame their African sisters and brothers for their own misery rather than blaming the real culprit, the regime and the ruling class.
Third, because slum life is intolerable, the government can now pretend to “solve” this problem by imprisoning people for a year without trial when their only “crime” is their skin color. This makes the government appear as “saviors” to many workers having been brainwashed by racist ideas. Racism like this serves only the rich and ravages the workers.
A solution to the neighborhoods’ crisis would be to allow the refugees to hold legal full-time jobs, such as in agriculture, instead of dumping them in poor neighborhoods with no jobs. Even a tiny fraction of the tycoons’ riches — all stolen from us, the workers — could rebuild the south Tel-Aviv slums in order to provide good housing and jobs for their residents. But this is unprofitable for the tycoons. They want all of us — regardless of skin color — as slaves to hate each other rather than to hate them.
All workers of all creeds must blame the real culprits, the racist capitalists and their servants in the government. Once the working class unites and seizes state power, we could manage the economy collectively in an egalitarian manner, so that everyone — regardless of skin color or their area of origin — will have decent, safe, dignified lives. This is the essence of the communism for which the Progressive Labor Party fights.
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Enough is Enough! Workers’ Armed Struggle in Michoacán
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- 01 February 2014 204 hits
MICHOACÁN, January 26 — Progressive Labor Party applauds the angry workers in Michoacán who have had enough of the drug cartels’ violence and have picked up guns and fought back. In an inspiring example of working-class rage, many workers not only took up guns, not only attacked the criminal cartel but also attacked the police and federal agents.
This armed struggle marks the intensification of the conflict between the exploited and the exploiter. It also illustrates another contradiction: the dialectical concept of appearance vs. essence. It appears that this workers’ uprising against the cartels is spontaneous and fully rooted within the working class. But in essence, there may be another cartel arming and directing this movement as well. There also may be opportunist elements within Mexico’s ruling class helping them.
The workers are attacking a symptom of capitalism, not its cancer. Either way, the fact that many workers have turned to armed struggle to challenge the cartel brutally dispossessing them as well as the capitalist state apparatus is a very positive development — workers here are not lulled by pacifism and are willing to pick up arms to fight the bosses.
A major question is, where did these workers get their guns? They appear to be following Mao Tse-Tung’s tenets of guerrilla warfare. A small group began with a few hunting rifles and shotguns. They then raided the police stations and some of the cartels’ arms caches.
This is one way how PLP can arm itself, develop a Red Army and seize state power. However, our primary way is by organizing directly in the bosses’ military, backed by a mass base in the working class.
The armed workers now have automatic weapons and armored vehicles. Needless to say, much of the ruling class is worried about masses of armed workers taking power into their own hands and thereby setting an example to workers worldwide — from Cambodia, to Bangladesh, to France to the U.S. — armed struggle against capitalism!
PLP also recognizes that politics are primary. Though the armed workers have had enough — “Basta Ya!” (Enough is enough!) — they are not fighting to seize the means of production, institute the dictatorship of the proletariat and transform society through communist revolution. We must recognize the contradiction between the positive aspects of workers arming and organizing themselves against a ruthless oppressor and the fact that without destroying the systemic structures of capitalism, they wind up either simply putting a new boss in charge or preserving the social order that allows Mexico’s capitalists to rule. In fact, the cartel they’re deposing actually started as an armed reaction against exploitation!
We applaud the armed struggle, but we’re critical of the lack of a political thrust alongside a populist reaction to the terrible exploitation and brutal violence that the cartels enact upon them. The armed workers also recognize that the Mexican police and agents, despite the millions that they receive in U.S. aid, are ineffectual in stopping the cartels.
The police, the agents, the bosses, the banking system, the Drug Enforcement Agency and a whole line of federal agents all make some money off the very lucrative drug trade. The poisoning of the working class reaps big money flowing into a lot of pockets.
A breaking scandal is exposing how U.S. rulers directly helped the Sinaloa Cartel. Another scandal, “Fast and Furious,” reveals how the U.S. directly supplied weapons to the cartels themselves.
PLP recognizes that the cartels are part of capitalism’s exploitative apparatus because they divide and brutalize the working class and make vast profits for the bosses, either indirectly through money laundering or directly through kickbacks, bribes or outright gun sales that echo the British gun-running in Africa during slavery.
The vast majority of the armed workers appear to be those who were deported from the U.S. and are refusing to passively accept the burden of brutality that the workers in Michoacán have stoically accepted until now. This illustrates a consequence of the U.S. deporting so many workers into Mexico and destabilizing the extortion rackets on which the ruling classes of the U.S. and Mexico have been enriching themselves.
These armed and masked workers are not fighting for some religious ideology, but actually challenging elements of the state apparatus in order to improve conditions of workers in this life, here and now. This struggle will not end the tyranny of the cartels, since too many capitalists are enriching themselves from our class’s addictions. It lacks a communist center, its politics and, most importantly, a Party to organize it and defend the working class’s gains. That communist Party is PLP and it needs to be built in the furnace of the Michoacán uprising. The PLP, both in Mexico and worldwide, will continue to struggle to bring communist politics to this armed struggle.
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Workers Shafted by Boeing-Union-Gov’t Sweetheart Deal
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- 01 February 2014 222 hits
Seattle area workers have gotten two sharp lessons lately in the limits of reform and why only a revolution that dumps capitalism can make real change for the working class. In one week, a judge condemned SeaTac airport workers to poverty-wage slavery despite a referendum that passed a $15 minimum wage law. And Boeing machinists found their boss and their International union leaders forcing a disastrous 10-year contract down their throats after they had rejected it in a 2-1 vote.
These two sharp attacks came on the heels of a feeling of victory by many workers, as the town of SeaTac, home of the airport, voted for a $15 minimum wage — highest in the U.S., defeating a harsh campaign by some of the country’s biggest corporations, first to keep the issue off the ballot and then to defeat it. When neither worked, they got a judge to declare that the town law didn’t apply to businesses on the airport or Port of Seattle property — which means most of the jobs in SeaTac.
The contract overwhelmingly rejected by the Boeing workers, members of machinists’ Local 751 International Association of Machinists (IAM), followed Boeing’s long-term plan to rid itself of unions and decent wages and benefits. The contract would liquidate their pensions and destroy their wages. No sooner had the machinists voted down the sellout contract than Boeing began plotting with the top leadership of the union to ram the contract down their throats anyway.
Walking away from renewed contract negotiations, Boeing met with top union officials to plot a new vote. On the first day of the Dec. 25-to-Jan. 1 “winter break,” a holiday won in previous contract fights, the IAM International leadership announced a new contract vote for Jan. 3. That was timed to reach as few members as possible and insure low turnout, since many older and more militant workers use vacation time to extend the holiday.
The contract was the same bad deal, but this time the media, local politicians, and the International leadership launched a coordinated full-court press to get a “yes” vote. Radio and TV ads, editorials, and mayoral press conferences all told workers that if they voted no again they would ruin the lives of their children and destroy the economy of the Puget Sound area and Washington state forever.
Even that was not enough: the IAM International leadership rigged the vote. They required special eligibility cards, but many at the 17,000-member Everett plant never got them and had to wait in long lines in the cold to obtain “good standing” cards. Ballot counting was moved from the central Seattle union hall to various local halls making it more difficult to monitor. Clearly the fix was in. This is what capitalist democracy looks like!
With 25% of the membership absent, as planned, the contract passed by a razor thin margin of only 600 votes. Members sobbed openly in the Seattle union hall while others cried “bull****!” and one demanded the Local leave the International.
A Historic Defeat
The defeat this represents for workers cannot be understated. Local 751 was the largest and most militant local left in the IAM. The precedent set by this sellout contract has probably dealt the Local a fatal blow.
Under this new deal members lose their defined-benefit pension plan, conservatively estimated to reduce Boeing’s retirement costs by 40%. Pay increases change from 2% per year, barely keeping up with inflation, to 1% every two years, a reduction of 75%. The health care plan was gutted. Wage scales were frozen. That means that by 2024 when the contract expires, the three lowest labor grades will be minimum-wage jobs.
And to top it off, workers forfeit their right to strike for ten years! The fact that this rollback is occurring while Boeing rakes in record profits ($4 billion last year) only adds insult to injury. And, while turning relatively good paying jobs into minimum-wage jobs with no benefits, Boeing is getting $8.7 billion in tax breaks from the state of Washington, the largest “corporate welfare” payout by a state ever. No surprise that this sweetheart deal was spawned by Boeing lobbyist David Schumacher who is now director of the Office of Financial Management for Gov. Jay Inslee.
The ripple effect through the state was immediate. Boeing has demanded a 15% price cut from its suppliers who employ thousands in the Seattle area alone. As a result pay freezes, benefit reductions, and speed-up have become normalized for workers already living paycheck to paycheck.
Teachers find themselves under attack as the state legislature has retaken the offensive on tying teacher pay to standardized testing results. At the University of Washington graduate instructors in at least one department began the quarter with a lecture on how meager wage increases in the union contract would cost them Teaching Assistant, Resident Advisor, and teaching positions.
The Limits of Reform
Events in Seattle reveal the limits of reform. Anything that workers win capitalists immediately set about undermining. To win back the gains lost in this new contract, Boeing workers will have to aggressively fight back in the streets and on the shop floor. For workers in SeaTac to gain a living wage they will need to learn to strike and shut their shops down rather than playing within the capitalist’s “democratic” system. To end exploitation once and for all we must drop the mirage of reform altogether and fight for communist revolution!
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Christie BridgeGate Scandal: Rulers Need Discipline for 2016 Election
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- 01 February 2014 227 hits
NEW JERSEY, January 29 — There’s more than meets the eye in the public exposé and slapdown of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie over his closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge to create chaos as payback to local politicians who opposed his re-election. And the “more” is not just the continuing revelations of withholding Sandy aid funds and other dirty tricks.
It would be easy for workers and students who have been on the receiving end of Christie’s budget hatchet, or his disgusting thuggery towards anyone who seriously challenges him, to simply be thankful that “what goes around comes around” or even to be gleeful over his troubles. But communists and others who fight the capitalist system that Christie and all other politicians serve owe the working class more than this superficial response.
First, the media, including the liberals who are denouncing him now, has built up Christie big time. He has been portrayed as a voice of sanity in a party heavily influenced by Tea Party extremists. The Star-Ledger, biggest Democratic newspaper in the state, endorsed him in the 2013 election. After Hurricane Sandy, and Christie’s appearance with Obama during the clean-up, national TV gave Christie a major platform, and helped promote his presidential candidacy.
Until now, this has assured his reputation as a (sometimes over-the-top but) tough negotiator, who ultimately “gets things done” by working with the Democrats. But what has he “gotten done?” The Democrats have given Christie 90 percent of the cuts he demanded. Christie himself has especially lauded his ability to “reach across the aisle,” getting the Democrats to join his vicious attacks on teachers and other unionized workers in 2010 and 2011.
Second, although he may be more “in your face,”, Christie certainly didn’t invent retaliatory and vindictive politics in New Jersey or anywhere else. Democratic leaders such as Steve Adubato, Donald Norcross, Steve Sweeney and Sheila Oliver are masters of it. Most recently, these power-brokers stabbed their own 2013 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Barbara Buono in the back after she portrayed herself as independent of them.
Of course, Buono would not have been “bueno” for the working class. Although portrayed as “left-wing” or “progressive,” even her own platform proposed very little for workers, including a measly $1-an-hour increase in the minimum wage. Under capitalism, any NJ politician elected has to answer to Prudential Insurance Co. and the other big New Jersey bosses.
But the real significance is not local. The most powerful section of the U.S. ruling class is trying to ensure that the key candidates in the next presidential election will work in a “bi-partisan” way. The dysfunctional state of Congress and the presidency hurts their reputation as the “world’s only superpower” while they can’t get on with the massive repair and upgrading of infrastructure that they need to prepare for the next big war. Their plans to project U.S. military power to counteract China’s growing economic and political influence in South Asia and the Pacific are stalled.
The last thing they need is a major presidential candidate who doesn’t go along with the program, or whose dirty tricks go too far. A major slap-down of Christie’s well-known arrogance and egotism was also in order. Not necessarily to push him out, but to keep him “within limits.” Christie’s public “apology” is his attempt to reassure the rulers behind the “Bridgegate” media frenzy that he can still be a team player for capitalist class interests. Whether they take him at his word, or decide to drive him from the national scene is not for us to predict.
Workers can be sure that the Progressive Labor Party will not be fooled by “lesser evil” politicians or bosses who portray themselves as friends of the working class. The lesson of Bridgegate is this: workers need to keep our eye on the bigger picture of imperialist rivalry, war preparation, growing fascism and the fear of rebellion and revolution that drive the rulers’ political moves. No politicians, but only communist revolution can change that.
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Working-Class Mothers Fight Chicago Bosses for a New ‘La Casita’
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- 01 February 2014 278 hits
CHICAGO, January 15 — On December 6, nine of the last 17 protestors, who tried to save the Whittier Elementary School field house — endearingly called La Casita — were found not guilty of trespassing charges instituted by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Applause rang out in the normally quiet West Side courtroom after the charges were dismissed.
These community fighters and Chicago Public School teachers were charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass after they formed a human chain outside the field house last August 17 trying to stop its demolition. The protestors made sure the moms were not arrested that day.
Cook County Associate Judge Clarence Burch agreed that the prosecutor didn’t prove that the field house — a separate building next to the school — was operated and funded by the government. Interestingly, neither the witnesses for CPS called to testify nor the prosecutor had seen a copy of the so-called “demolition” work order handed to them by the defense lawyers. It turned out to be a “construction” work order. The judge asked, where was the “construction” in all this when the building was being demolished?
One defendant, a former Whittier School teacher and teachers union organizer, felt that the verdict was “a real victory for people who want to stand up for the rights of children.” Another protestor, however, felt it didn’t bring back the field house which served as a community center and library. “I know how much La Casita meant to the community. They need a new place.”
A playground, a turf field for soccer and two basketball courts replaced the razed field house. According to the school director, these new courts will be lent out to other schools, with revenues going to Whittier School. The question still remains as to who will benefit from this new renovation, the Whittier school kids, the existing community, a new charter school or Cristo Rey High School.
A CPS work order to demolish La Casita was found online, and it turned out that Ward Alderman Danny Solis had approved TIF money (a city fund created with property taxes for “blighted” areas) to be given to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, (a school having only one Jesuit priest) across from Whittier. Discovering that public monies were to be used for a private high school while Whittier had no library fueled the 2010 sit-in to save the La Casita field house, already being used as a community center BUT also to included a library the kids desperately needed.
Whittier Elementary School was not one of the Chicago public schools targeted for closing this past school year. But the massive anti-racist fightback of the Whittier parents and supporters made such an impact on every school and community in the city and beyond that the CPS, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Solis were temporarily held back.
But the fact remains that this land grab in a predominantly Latino neighborhood was a racist attack on all of us. The Chicago banks and real estate developers have grander schemes as the lower east side of the Pilsen neighborhood as well as other areas continue to be gentrified. Orders to demolish La Casita came from CPS, with ward alderman Solis (who had ordered the gas shut-off to La Casita some years back) giving the go-ahead. Neither CPS nor the cops felt they needed a “valid” demolition permit.
Neither CPS, the cops nor the judge (continuously smiling throughout the hearing) exist to serve the working class. Not under capitalism. So why were they found not guilty? Viewing the court proceedings, one would have thought the prosecutor bungled the job. But did CPS lose? In the long run, they accomplished what they were after. The parents and supporters using La Casita for meetings and workshops up to the day of the demolition nor the protestors were no longer seen as a threat.
This victory was short-term. There still exists a small group of parents and supporters wanting to fight CPS and the city for a new community center and library. They fear that Whittier School, sooner or later, will be turned into a charter school or an appendage of Cristo Rey High School. Without a community center to reach out to its residents and push for unity, the community is left to fend for itself.
Property taxes are rising and working-class families are losing their homes. The Pilsen area is becoming more “blighted” but no TIF monies are being used to save it. Instead, three large corporations have taken millions from the Pilsen TIF. Between 2001 and 2005, Chicago International Produce Market ($9.5 million), the Steiner Corporation ($3.5 million) and Target ($5.3 million and not part of east Pilsen) benefited from the east Pilsen residents’ tax dollars.
By 2004, no TIF funds had been used to support school improvements at any of the three schools in the Pilsen area. In 2008, Developers were reimbursed $14.4 million (25% of the total TIF) and given $22.1 million in forgivable loans. Between developers and project costs, the City gave more than half (65%) of the Pilsen TIF money to private developers!
So, under capitalism who wins? The previous Local School Committee (LSC) group of 2010 and the supporters that led the sit-in three years ago no longer exist. Because of financial troubles and low morale, many involved parents dropped out of the struggle before the demolition occurred. Others have become cynical over the loss of La Casita.
Three Whittier moms, steadfastly involved in the 49-day sit-in, are now part of the present-day Whittier School LSC. Two of the moms, and most of the other members, publicly approve of CPS’s demolition of La Casita and of the newly constructed soccer field, two basketball courts and the new playground. One mom, who had joined the Party during the sit-in, is now LSC president and a true parliamentarian. She chairs the meetings and makes sure that parent speakers don’t go over the allotted time, especially if the topic is one which criticizes the LSC or CPS. The other mom who was very active doesn’t attend the LSC meetings anymore or the La Casita parent group. She may be taken off for lack of attendance. The remaining LSC members include the school director (a very close friend of the ward alderman) and the assistant to Ward Alderman Solis. Therefore, none of the three moms have defended the existing La Casita parents’ group when they’ve brought up the fight for a new community center and library at the LSC meetings.
As much as a community center and library are drastically needed, the fightback needs much more. This writer, also a member of the small La Casita parent group, will struggle to win her friends to join a PLP study group and the Party.
One Whittier/LaCasita mom and friend of the Party has written opinion letters and submitted them for CHALLENGE. She is a staunch, outspoken fighter for her class here in Chicago and in Mexico. She has fought cynicism and subjectivity involving some Whittier moms. She is disliked for her critical comments regarding CPS. She works hard cleaning homes and streets, makes jewelry and knitting apparel to help her family and send money to her needy family and friends in Mexico.
Our group will continue to fight for a new “La Casita,” raise money and send clothes that are very much needed in Mexico and beyond. But if we really want to win, we must fight for keeps. That means building a mass PLP and becoming communists. That means struggling with each other to continue the fight, helping each other despite obstacles the capitalists throw at us. Onward in the fight for a communist world!
