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.

This school year, my three-year old son and I attended a school program called Family Literacy. The program is scheduled for half a day and is designed for 2-to-5 year-old children to learn phonemic awareness and social skills while the parents are receiving English instruction in another classroom. Not only are the children learning but they also have the opportunity to interact with their parents at certain times during the day.
Three weeks before the school year ended, teachers and staff got the news: we had one week to pack up all our belongings and school material and turn it in to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). These racist district officials told the school staff that no school funds are available for the program serving immigrant families, which was a operating on a grant from First Five LA.
Fighting this massive cut and not giving up, teachers, staff, parents, and children have led rallies in front of LAUSD headquarters, inside the Board of Education meetings and last week in front of one of the four schools involved. Reporters from a local radio station and major TV channel interviewed parents and children at these rallies. Mothers, students, and staff shouted their anger at the abrupt termination of a program that has been recognized nationally for its approach to cooperative learning and job skill effectiveness.
The racist LAUSD does not want to provide funding for this program ($750,000 out of a $6 billion budget!) because it benefits immigrant families and working-class parents who are learning English as a second language and completing their GED, parents who cannot afford childcare or private schools. Because the program is for children and adults, it is funded under the Adult Education budget, which the racist LAUSD continues to cut. Teachers and staff will lose their jobs.
What do they want to fund? School superintendent John Deasy and the Board of Ed want to implement the use of IPADS in the classroom. This will only benefit Deasy’s ruling class friends, who have invested their capital in selling their software to the district. Cutting programs for working-class families — whether in education, jobs, or healthcare — continues as corporations like Apple and banks struggle to gain more profit.
This is a good example of how capitalism imposes limits on the working class’s ability to meet its basic needs for work, housing, food, education, and healthcare. With communism, the working class can change education so that it won’t be based on profits. Having participated in this rally and attended the program I understand the need to organize those close to me and win them to fight for a communist future.

PARIS, June 16 — Tens of thousands of railroad workers are striking the government-owned railroads against a proposed law that would split the system into three public companies. It would open the railroads to private company competition in accordance with a 1991 European Union (EU) deregulation directive 91/440.
The workers refuse to bow down to an EU globalization plan laid down for all countries in the EU: turning public-service railroads into for-profit railroads. The workers know that this is a capitalist scheme to push through a race to the bottom, channeling everyone into the worst possible working conditions and wages existing in the most backward countries in the EU.
The Socialist government is introducing legislation to do this in France. Already the French national budget for 2014 includes an austerity plan to eliminate 2,500 jobs.
The system is drowning under a 40-billion euro debt (US $55 billion) incurred when the high-speed rail system was developed in the 1980s. The EU’s destruction of public sector monopolies in passenger and freight transport, scheduled for 2019, will lead to creeping privatization. The government officially plans to stabilize the public railroad company’s debt, but reducing the debt to allow the public company to compete with private railroad companies will depend on even more job cuts and the worsening of working conditions. The bosses want to “save the system” on the workers’ backs, axing their jobs and throwing safety out the window.
As one 30-year veteran locomotive driver said, “I’ll tell you what I see from my cab. Management talks to us about safety, but it’s the high-speed train that is clipping the branches off the trees! We sounded the alarm a dozen times and the hierarchy plays dead. We’re fed up with bailing out a company that is taking on water” (Liberation newspaper, 6/15).
A TV report recounting the “comfort” of train drivers disgusted him. “Come and see… It seems we have bucket seats and a micro-wave oven! But we don’t even have toilets!”
The unions that called the strike are not challenging the EU dictum that the rail network has to be opened up to private company competition. They’re not challenging the fact that the capitalists are using the EU to make these so-called reforms obligatory. They’re just advocating a different reform that would be less unfavorable to the workers, to maintain reunification of the whole rail system. Nor are they organizing for a Europe-wide working-class unity, building ties with rail workers in Germany, Britain and Italy to oppose these pro-capitalist reforms.
The walkout began on June 10. Every 24 hours workers across France hold local general assemblies and vote on continuing the strike. The workers are demanding that the government postpone introducing legislation (scheduled for June 17) in the French National Assembly and that the government rewrite the law to suit them. Workers have blocked tracks in a number of cities and the rank and file appears to be highly mobilized, ahead of the union leadership and intent on broadening the strike. Only the largest and third-largest of the six rail unions are striking, with possibly half of the 250,000 rail workers participating.
The workers are caught between a public-sector rail company that answers to a bosses’ government which does not have to represent the workers’ or riders’ interest and a bosses’ plan to have private companies run the industry with even greater ability to oppress the workers. The union leaders do not challenge the capitalist system that presents these “choices” to the workers but rather look to the crumbs of a reform that would be “less unfavorable” to the workers.
There is no communist leadership to advocate a real alternative, a system run by and for the workers, with no bosses, profits or reliance on a bosses’ government. That is the only answer to the problems these strikers and all workers face. The organization of a communist party must become the future for these workers and the whole working class.