PARIS, April 18 — France is a country in which the Socialist government is playing its classic pro-boss role by helping them run roughshod over the working class. The Socialists are shackled to the capitalist class and its requirements. The finance capitalists want French president François Hollande to use ex-president Sarkozy’s shock-and-awe tactics to reinforce French capitalism against its imperialist rivals.
This includes by-passing Parliament with executive orders to slash pensions, government-financed health care, and welfare, as well as eliminating job protection for government workers and what remains of the 35-hour work-week.
The new french Prime Minister Manuel Valls kowtowed to the bosses, with his austerity plan: By 2017, the Socialists intend to slash 50 billion euros (69 billion USD$) from the government budget, including 21 billion euros from social security (10 billion from health care and 11 billion from welfare).
Retirement pensions, family allowances and housing benefits will all be cut in real terms, with no cost-of-living increase until October 2015, at least. Retirees will lose over 3 billion euros (4.1 billion USD$). Wages for five million government workers — without a pay increase since 2010 — will be slashed in real terms by continuing the wage freeze.
Meanwhile, unemployment, including part-timers who want to work full time, rose to 5,611,700 people — France has one-sixth the population of the U.S. — or 19.8 percent. Joblessness continues to climb, despite François Hollande’s iron-clad promise that he would “reverse the unemployment curve by the end of 2013.” Inevitably, there will be more savage attacks on the working class to meet the capitalists’ target of reducing the government budget deficit by 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
Seven rival trade union confederations have called for a day of protest on May 15. The “elastic” call preserves a façade of unity by allowing each organization to decide whether to strike, hold a work stoppage or just hold a rally. The wimpy demands and action program made it possible for even the most reactionary union confederations to support this “protest.”
While workers see their wages, pensions and health care cut, the Socialists are giving the capitalists 42 billion euros (58 billion USD$) a year in presents — 30 billion euros in lower employer social security contributions under the “responsibility pact” and 12 billion euros in lower corporate taxes.
Imperial Tobacco is laying off nearly one-third of its 1,150 workers in France. “Once again, the fat cats win out; we’re fed up,” said Christelle Notebaert, who works at the Carquefou factory. “We’re just numbers, we get no consideration…” Union steward Michel Laboureur said, “Over five years, they paid out 2.6 billion euros [3.6 billion USD$] to…shareholders. You can believe me, this factory is profitable.”
Imperial Tobacco plans to hire 130 workers in Poland, where it is shifting part of the Seita factory production (a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco.) In 2011, the average gross wage in Poland was barely one-fourth of that in France.
Pascal Lamy, former World Trade Organization chief, revealed the bosses’ plan on unemployment: “It is necessary to introduce more flexibility [i.e., make it easier to lay off workers], and jobs that are not necessarily paid at the minimum wage.” In other words, the French bosses want to introduce German-style “mini-jobs,” which have created a pool of four million precariously underpaid workers for the German bosses to exploit.
The fascist National Front (FN) is saying it would pull France out of the European Union, which they blame for the disastrous austerity policies. “We call for a radical change in economic policy by ending the euro…and true economic patriotism,” the FN proclaimed on Feb. 28, with an eye to winning workers’ votes in the May 24 European Union parliamentary elections.
But the problem is not the bosses’ European Union — it is the bosses themselves. The only solution is for workers to build a revolutionary communist party and eliminate the bosses through communist revolution, and create a society run by and for workers.

Los Angeles — The new film Cesar Chavez is a distorted testament to one of the best friends the agribusiness bosses ever had. Like virtually all movies made under capitalism about class struggle, the movie mangles history. It celebrates the life of a self-serving individual whose legend was created by the ruling class he served. It mostly overlooks the collective contributions of thousands of honest and courageous farmworkers in the militant labor reform fights in California and Texas in the 1960s and ‘70s. And it is a reminder that communists have an obligation to the working class to call out sellout misleaders like Chavez!
Almost a dozen workers from my clinic went to see a prescreening of the film. The event was sponsored by the organization we work for, a “not-for-profit” that collects huge revenues from sales of pharmaceuticals and by intimidating workers attempting to unionize. In a marketing move to make inroads in the Latino community, the company invited Hilda Solis, Barack Obama’s Secretary of Labor, as the keynote speaker. Solis emphasized her connection to Delores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW) with Chavez, and the reactionary Latino nationalist movement. But she somehow never once mentioned the word “union.” Nor did she acknowledge her complicity with the Obama administration’s record-breaking, racist deportations of more than two million undocumented workers, the overwhelming majority of them Latino and Filipino.
Pacifist Thugs
The rulers’ admiration for Cesar Chavez shouldn’t be surprising. Like his hero, Mahatma Gandhi, he subscribed to pacifism when it came to confronting the bosses. But in dealing with workers whom Chavez thought might undermine his power, the UFW routinely resorted to coercion and violence. The union actively collaborated in the expulsion of undocumented workers: “One of [Chavez’s] strategies during the lettuce strike was causing deportations: he would alert the immigration authorities to the presence of undocumented workers and get them sent back to Mexico” (“The Madness of Cesar Chavez,” The Atlantic, July 2011).
Epifanio Camacho, a farmworker and later a communist who joined and developed as a leader of Progressive Labor Party, was one of the early leaders of the group that became the UFW. Many undocumented workers, Camacho said, had “hope of finding protection in the union in exchange for their participation in the long struggle.” But from early on, these workers were barred from union membership. They were confronted with a huge sign over the hiring hall that read, “No workers without legal residence papers in the United States may work where there are (UFW) contracts.”  
But that was just the beginning, Camacho said, of a ferocious campaign that Chavez waged against undocumented workers. The union established an “Illegals Campaign, a central piece of strategy which saw the UFW direct members to report the presence of undocumented immigrants in the fields and turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service” (Latin Times, 3/28/2014). By 1973, Chavez had established a “wet line” near Yuma, Arizona. His cousin, the notoriously corrupt Manuel Chavez, directed three hundred UFW thugs in assisting federal agents and stopping anyone trying to cross the Mexican border into the U.S. without papers. Dozens of immigrants were brutally beaten. According to one ex-UFW organizer, three men from Queretaro got caught by Manuel’s vigilantes and were never seen again (Village Voice, 8/21/84).
Chavez, Bosses’ Agent
Throughout the movie there were shouts of “Huelga!” (Strike!). But like the UFW itself, the film diverts its attention from class struggle and picket lines in the fields — at the point of production, where workers’ real power lies — to mostly futile boycotts that relied on the support of Chavez’s liberal capitalist patrons. It highlights Chavez’s trip to France to boycott a wine producer, showing scenes of frustrated bosses. This builds the capitalist illusion that one lonely, exceptional man can shepherd the masses and change their lives.
Michael Pena, the actor who portrays Chavez, persuasively conveys the supposed saint-like figure — especially during his famed hunger strike. Still, one young healthcare worker said that Chavez “really didn’t know what the workers were going through on the picket line because he wasn’t a worker,” and that “his hunger strike was selfish and all about him.” While Chavez worked in the fields as a teen, as a young man he was groomed to become an “organizer” by the anti-communist Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation. Alinsky had a long history of channeling workers’ anger into electoral politics and pulling them away from challenging capitalism. (He also mentored Barack and Michelle Obama.)
The movie culminates with Chavez and the bosses shaking hands as the workers won the right to collectively organize and formed the UFW. Shortly thereafter, Chavez dedicated himself and his Latino following to Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Liberal unions and many community-based organization still use the same tactics to mislead workers and build class collaboration with the capitalist rulers, a hallmark of fascism. Chavez’s legend was cemented by a two-part 1969 profile in The New Yorker, and later a full-scale biography, by Peter Matthiessen, who’d been recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency by a professor at Yale.
Fighting Fear and Cynicism
Most of my co-workers seemed to like the movie overall, and in particular the way it showed the growers’ racism. In the early scenes, as “strike” and “union” blared across the screen, many snickered because they knew I was trying to unionize healthcare providers and that our company was actively trying to halt the process by disciplining me and other providers. They recognized the company’s hypocrisy right away. There was one decent scene in the movie that described the farmworkers’ fear of losing their jobs and how they overcame it. Many healthcare workers share the same fear and have been reluctant to join the unionizing struggle here. 
While the young worker said, “I’m not scared and I’m down to try and fight back,” she acknowledged the fear of others. She has read CHALLENGE and helped me with this article. Another young worker said he was reluctant to join our union campaign — not out of fear, but because he thought the UFW was an example of how unions in general have sold out to the bosses. While I agreed with him, I also tried to make the point that a union struggle could expose these contradictions and offered a different solution: the PLP and the fight for communism.
Both of these workers have been invited to our annual May Day Dinner. Although worker cynicism and misleaders abound, what we do matters, especially in the bosses’ unions, their community organizations, and on the job. We must use mass organizations to build the Party and turn cynicism into class-consciousness. In this difficult period, growing the Party by ones and twos will make all the difference down the road to revolution.

Brooklyn: April 26 at  11 AM

Location: Ocean Ave and Parkside Ave

Los Angeles: May 1 at 10 AM

Location: Cesar Chavez and Broadway

U.S. and Russian imperialists are engaged in an all-out struggle for control over the territories of the former Soviet Union. U.S. rulers have gained a foothold in Eastern Europe, up to the border of Ukraine. But Russia’s vital oil and gas pipelines run through Ukraine to European Union (EU) countries, netting Russian bosses huge profits and a stranglehold on EU energy supplies.
In the short run, Russian bosses appear to be winning. But this is just one battle in a long war, and U.S. bosses will not willingly surrender to the emerging Russian power grab. Given the stakes, the conflict between these imperialist rivals could easily escalate into a broader, open conflict.
Russian-Backed Rebellion in Ukraine
Putin has massed 40,000 Russian potential invaders on Ukraine’s border. According to U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, supreme NATO commander, the Russian force includes “support for planes and helicopters as well as military hospitals and electronic warfare equipment.” These troops, the general said, “could accomplish a major incursion into eastern or southern Ukraine ... in between three and five days” (Wall Street Journal, 4/2/14).  
Putin’s nationalist strategy is to oppress the Russian working class while rebuilding the Russian empire for the profits of Russian capitalists. Having overrun Crimea, Putin and his oligarch cronies now aim to grab other strategic parts of Ukraine. In addition to threatening a future invasion, they are fostering an armed rebellion among pro-Russians inside the country. The imperialists’ ultimate goal is to absorb all the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Mikheil Saakashvili, the anti-Putin politician who became president of Georgia with the backing of U.S. billionaire George Soros and the CIA in the 2003 Rose Revolution, has first-hand experience with resurgent Russian militarism. In 2008, Russia overran Georgia and carved out “independent” states in Russia-leaning South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In an April 5 opinion piece in Foreign Policy headlined “War is Coming,” Saakashvili wrote:
Russian strategists are talking about a ‘weekend of rage’ that could involve some kind of armed siege of government buildings in southern and eastern Ukraine. If these local provocateurs and ‘self-defense forces’ manage to hold these buildings as they did in Crimea, it might serve as a basis for further military intervention.
Events on the following day, April 6, lent further credence to Saakashvili’s scenario:
Crowds of pro-Russian demonstrators stormed government buildings Sunday in two major cities in eastern Ukraine. In Luhansk, 20 miles west of the Russian border, hundreds of people surrounded the local headquarters of the security service and later scaled the facade to plant a Russian flag on the roof. In Donetsk, to the southwest, a large group of people surged into the provincial government building and smashed windows. A gathering of several hundred, many of them waving Russian flags, then listened to speeches delivered from a balcony emblazoned with a banner reading “Donetsk Republic.”
U.S. Bosses’ Weak Counterpunch
NATO’s response to Kremlin aggression has been muted and rear-guard: a couple of U.S. warships dispatched to the Black Sea, increased air policing over the Baltics, Romania and Poland.
But while Russian boots cross Crimean soil, NATO, by its own admission, stands unprepared to deploy its foot soldiers beyond their barracks:
The trickiest question may be whether NATO should move troops into Eastern Europe, where the alliance currently has few installations. Countries like Poland are pushing hard for such a shift, but it would almost certainly be seen as highly provocative by Moscow. While NATO’s air and sea options are fairly clear, Gen. Breedlove said, “Frankly…we have work to do on what the ground options would be” (Wall Street Journal).
U.S. capitalists, and especially Big Oil, recognize the political advantage they gain from controlling the flow of gas and oil to maintain their top dog status among the world’s imperialists. For them this is an absolute necessity, not some breakable addiction to profits. Their long-term strategy is to counter the Kremlin by flooding world markets with newly found shale gas and free Europe from its dependence on Russian energy.  
But for the foreseeable future, the U.S. bosses have neither the infrastructure nor the unity in Congress they need to export gas. Resources expert Michael Klare warned that “increased U.S. oil and gas output have provided White House officials with no particular advantage in their efforts to counter Putin’s aggressive moves.... the prospect of future U.S. gas exports to Europe is unlikely to alter his strategic calculations” (OilPrice.com, 4/5/14).
The bosses also understand they need to ramp up militarism within the U.S. to protect those interests. One step in that direction is the ENLIST Act, now being debated in Washington. A more nightmarish version of the DREAM Act, it aims to draw undocumented youth into the Pentagon’s war machine with the promise of citizenship.
But like the DREAM Act, ENLIST is likely to fail. It lacks bipartisan backing in Congress, and — most important — has failed to win mass working-class support, a problem for the capitalists since the Vietnam War.
Workers’ Power Can Triumph
From Ukraine and Russia to Western Europe and the U.S., workers have nothing to gain from a war between the rival imperialist camps. Meanwhile, we suffer from the cyclical capitalist crises that cause mass unemployment, wage cuts, widespread poverty, reductions in healthcare, and increasing racist attacks on black, Latino, Asian, Muslim and Arab workers. The rulers use this racism to reap super-profits from super-exploited workers and also to divide the working class, weakening its ability to fight back.
The answer for our class is to destroy the capitalist system, the source of all our problems, and create a communist society free of bosses and profits, run by and for the working class. This can only be achieved through the leadership of a communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. Our goal is a communist revolution to smash the capitalists’ state power and replace it with worldwide workers’ power. A revolution means the overthrow of one ruling class and its replacement by the rule of the formerly oppressed class, the working class, which produces everything of value in society. This was never the aim of the bosses’ phony “color revolutions,” which merely replaced one set of bosses with another.
Capitalist society oppresses us today and will drive us into broader wars tomorrow, to kill our class sisters and brothers for the rulers’ greater profit. But a united, communist-inspired working class, led by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party, has the power to combat the bosses and ultimately to destroy their parasitic system. Join us!