NEW YORK CITY,  May 7 — More than 1,000 low wage workers and their supporters jammed into Riverside Church tonight, in a “Service for Low Wage Workers.” The service was billed as “We Are All Workers!” The very integrated and international crowd of women and men were in high spirits, feeling their unity and ready for a fight. The speakers included fast food, airport, retail and car wash workers. Challenge was sold.
The rally was mainly organized by SEIU, United NY, and the various unions involved in the different organizing drives. The idea was to rally 25 clergy from around the city to give “moral authority” to the campaign to raise the minimum wage. The low wage workers who spoke were given two-minutes each, and if they went over, someone was there to tap them on the back. The clergy, on the other hand, preachers, rabbis, priests and imams, couldn’t shut up when given a microphone and a big crowd. Throw in the head of the NY Central Labor Council and the Speaker of the NY City Council and workers were eager to get out of there and on the buses taking them home.
The class struggle may be heating up a bit, and the unions and Democratic Party are looking to increase their numbers by targeting low-wage workers. In the process of organizing them, they are leading workers away from communist revolution and into the arms of the imperialist war-makers and their religious lackeys. We have to do better at fighting for the political leadership of these workers. The union leaders want to win mostly black, Latino, Asian and women workers to settle for a wage that might put them just above the poverty line. PLP wants to abolish wage slavery with communist revolution.

PLP Saturday night movie events at Roxbury Community College have developed from social events to serious base-building, with friends joining with us to learn and discuss our ideas, based on the films. The discussions have been very sharp and informative: Everyone who came with us knows we fight for communism, and the movies we chose open up real discussion. Multiracial and multigenerational groups of 20 to 30 have attended.
The February movie was John Pilger’s “Apartheid Did Not Die,” a documentary of post-apartheid South Africa that shows how Mandela and his successors in the black-majority government and African National Congress (ANC) have strangled the working class under the tight grip of rampant capitalism. The film was selected to critically analyze Nelson Mandela and his political work with a “red eye.” The participants included students, professors, current and retired workers from South America, Haiti, U.S., Africa and the Middle East.
The documentary shows how Mandela joined forces with President F. W. de Klerk claiming to “abolish apartheid” and establish multiracial elections in 1994, which has left the black majority in extreme poverty and still under brutal capitalism and segregation. In this compromised state, Mandela became President. He and the ANC had become the new faces of capitalism. Continuing dire poverty and misery demands communist revolution as the only real alternative.
The discussion was both sharp and informative. When asked:  “How did Mandela serve the ruling class and capitalists by cooperating with de Klerk?” several people pointed out the contradiction that Mandela is portrayed by the Western ruling class and media as a hero to his people and an inspiration to all. All agreed that this documentary exposed a very different view of Mandela. Pilger’s interviews and film clips of miners, and the dangerous and desperate conditions under which they live, really moved people to anger when contrasted with the excessive wealth of the South African ruling class portrayed in the film.
It becomes apparent from the documentary that, like many others who start out opposing colonial capitalist rulers, Mandela sold out to them in the end, striking a deal with de Klerk to cooperate and collaborate with the ruling class. A belief in nationalism often leads to new faces on capitalism, but only a working-class revolution can end it.
Our March movie,  “The Price of Sugar,” shows the organizing efforts of immigrant sugar cane cutters from Haiti against horrific working and living conditions in the Dominican Republic. The film reveals the crimes of the sugar capitalist Viccini family and the role of the Dominican and U.S. governments in perpetuating this racist exploitation.  
In the documentary, we see the workers are under armed guard and not allowed to leave the plantation. They make 90¢ a day — but only in vouchers for the high-priced company store. They come to the Dominican Republic to hope for a better life, but their lives are like those of the first African slaves who were used in the Americas to cut sugar cane. Recently, the Dominican Constitutional Court ruled to strip citizenship from several generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent, including many who had come to cut cane and hope for a better life.
The discussion helped many understand the limits of reform movements. Without a class analysis, without communist revolution, the same system continues in power. Even if some workers burned down the plantations, the sugar capitalists still have their government and military to oppress the workers. One important point was how racism justifies cheap labor. Why do these subhuman conditions exist under capitalism? They exist to maximize bosses’ profits from the labor of some workers while at the same time driving down the wages of all workers.
Both movies helped reach out to more people politically and spread the understanding that capitalism is a brutal system, which must be eliminated. Some joined us in NYC for May Day.

New York City, May 6 — Today a small squad of 30 City University of New York (CUNY) students and 10 faculty bid a noisy farewell to the hated mass murderer general David Petraeus. He has been masquerading as a professor for a year to cover his war crimes and his disgrace after a sex scandal drove him out as CIA director.  This was his last public appearance here and chants of “Death Squads Petraeus, you can’t hide, We charge you with genocide!” greeted him as he slunk into Macaulay Honors College behind a wall of uneasy administrators and city police.
“Drones” Petraeus is also chairman of the KKR Global Institute, Judge Widney professor at USC, senior fellow at Harvard, and co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on North America. He recently co-published an article in Politico titled, “The Great American Comeback” where he argues that this racist country is on the cusp of a “great revival.” This is exactly the kind of warrior scholar the ruling class desires, one who mucks up the minds of working-class youth with bourgeois ideas and practices.  
Recently, Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel her commencement address at Rutgers. Homeland Security czar Janet Napolitano faced big protests at the University of California. Now, Petraues leaves CUNY after a semester of pushback.
While the chants and speeches were spirited enough, PLP members were joined only by a few of our student and faculty friends and some leftists. It was good to protest Petraeus as he moves his warrior-scholar self to other colleges, and militant students did make his tenure here pretty uncomfortable. But the small numbers show that imperialist war, preparations for war, and the militarization of the capitalist university are not on most people’s minds.  We have a lot of work to do. This campaign was good practice for the Party’s forces, young and veteran.
The campaign against the CUNY ROTC officer-training corps will continue in the Fall, along with a focus on opposing military research. The faculty/staff union has set up a Committee on Militarization and is considering a resolution against ROTC later this month. Faculty are working with students on events to make the danger of imperialist war better understood on CUNY campuses.
Our anger will continue to disrupt the use of the university by the war machine and the police state. PLP’s view is that the bourgeois university, an integral part of the capitalist state, must be smashed along with its military power. Communist revolution will have to transform all levels of education so that it contributes, not to profit wars, but to a society capable of abolishing war.

SOMA, Turkey, May 19 — “This is not something that suddenly happened. I can tell you that there are people here who are dying, people who are injured and it’s all because of money…They send us here like lambs to slaughter. We are not safe doing this job.”
That’s what a surviving coal miner told CNN Turkey about the fire that officials claim killed 301 miners. The actual number will be much higher. He also accused a supervisor of giving the wrong directions to trapped miners, leading them away from the oxygen supply. This fire was not a random accident. It was mass industrial murder.
On May 13, just days after two U.S. coal miners were killed in a collapse in West Virginia, an underground coal fire in Soma knocked out the mine’s elevators and ventilation system, trapping the miners in toxic fumes. It happened during shift change, with 787 miners in the mine. Some of the 301 bodies recovered so far were burned beyond recognition. More are still underground. Many who were rescued may not survive their injuries.
Another miner said of the official numbers, “We are not even counting outsiders who come here as part-time, unregistered workers,” including many youth who turn to the mines due to extreme poverty and the high cost of education.
On April 29, during a hearing in Parliament, the government of Prime Minister Erdogan rejected a call for a safety inspection at the mine. And when he travelled to Soma the day after the explosion, Erdogan told angry mourners and relatives, “Explosions like this in these mines happen all the time.”
Anti-government demonstrations broke out across the country. Student protests in Ankara and Istanbul led up to a one-day strike by the major trade unions on May 15. A march was held in Ankara from the Middle Eastern Technical University to the Energy Ministry.  The marchers erupted in a rock-throwing protest in front of the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In Istanbul, there were demonstrations in Taksim Square and young people laid down in the metro station, representing those killed in the mine. A demonstration of thousands was attacked by hundreds of riot police firing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
As a result of the mass actions of workers and youth, four mining company executives, including the manager, were arrested charged with causing multiple deaths and injuries through negligence.
U.S. Investors Reap Millions
Soma, with a population of around 100,000, is a major center for lignite coal mining. Turkey has rich supplies that are used for domestic power. The Energy Minister recently announced that Turkey would invest $118 billion by 2023 to meet their doubling energy consumption. According to Pieter Verstraete, a Türkiye Burslari Researcher at Bilgi University in Istanbul, these investments have been accompanied with privatization, deregulation and wage-cuts, to keep the mines profitable and attractive mainly to U.S. investors. The average wage for miners is only $500/month.
What these investors also find “attractive” is cutting safety costs, “flexible” work conditions, less training, and subcontracting unskilled and unregistered under-age workers. And it’s not just the privatized mines. A report by the General Miners Union in March 2010 stated that between 2000-2009, there were 25,655 “accidents” in the state-owned mines of the Turkish Coal Corporation (TTK), and that 98 percent could have been prevented with proper training and safety inspections.
Such mining disasters due to bosses’ profiteering at the expense of safety also occur worldwide. In 2010, 29 miners were killed in West Virginia.
But what’s proper to the bosses is anything that generates more profits. Whether its hundreds of miners in Turkey — or more than 1,000 garment workers  buried/burned alive in the factory collapse in Bangladesh, or coal miners in the U.S. —our lives are just the cost of doing business. And as horrible as these numbers are, they pale in the face of those being slaughtered by growing imperialist wars, poverty, and curable disease around the world. The best way to answer these murders is to rebuild the international movement for communist revolution. The truth is, nothing less will do.