PART I

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, October 17 — If “a strike is a school of revolution,” as Lenin said, then this October 25-26 in Haiti a national school of revolution may be on the class schedule. The teachers’ union UNNOH (a union of the graduates of several Haitian teachers’ colleges) is not a revolutionary organization. But, like the Chicago Teachers Union which just carried out a successful teachers’ strike in Chicago, UNNOH’s strike-call and nine strike demands have many progressive features which can drive our class, the working class forward. All workers internationally should support this strike.  

Four demands refer to teachers’ own needs — back pay, a minimum living wage of $1,185/month, credentials giving job security, and a say in social insurance policies.  These improvements lifting teachers above abject poverty and insecurity will also benefit their students because teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

But the imperialists have absolutely no interest in, and no intention of, granting such massive reforms (the wage demand is for a 70% hike.) Poverty is their racist plan for the schools of Haiti and all who teach and study in them.  

In addition to these just demands, UNNOH is issuing its strike call to the entire teaching body. It appeals to students, parents, college students and teachers, other workers in education and other industries to support the strike. Its call for international solidarity, with all the strike demands, is posted in English at www.psc-cuny.org/unnoh and asks for letters of support. 

Progressive teachers in UNNOH know that the unity and numbers of the whole working class are a source of the strength they need way beyond their own numbers. That’s why UNNOH is a key part of the federation of left-leaning unions, the CTSP (Confederation of Workers in the Public and Private Sectors), who came to march with UNNOH, students, and other teachers’ unions in Port-au-Prince in a stirring 1000-strong demonstration on October 5, World Teachers’ Day.

The union of part-time college professors, STAIA, also stands with UNNOH in this strike. Such class unity — against the bosses’ preaching of everyone for themselves — is hard to create, to mobilize, and to sustain, and that too is part of learning in a school of revolution. 

Other strike demands are clearly mainly for their students and for the whole working class. These include a hike in the education budget to 30% of the national budget (for K-12) and 4% (for public colleges, who now struggle along on 0.55%), which clearly benefits all students and their parents; a free, quality, public school system; cafeterias in all schools and colleges guaranteeing one hot meal a day to all students, teachers, and school workers; and a program to end the cholera epidemic, starting with vaccination of all school and college students. 

These class demands are the foundation for advancing the struggle beyond trade unionism to a mass fight for communism. As capitalist ideology has preached to them all their lives, many UNNOH teachers right now are more focused on their own salary and security than on a universal public education system or ending cholera, let alone revolution.  Everything in a struggle that advances class consciousness and class unity will move our whole class one step further up the road to revolution. (See adjoining article)

“In this bitter struggle national and international solidarity is essential,” says the UNNOH call. They have worked since last November to create a national network of union branches, each attempting to integrate teachers with other workers, in all ten departments (regions) of the country. Out of those trips they have built a national leadership body of fifty members.

In the mass demonstrations of September 10 and October 5, following mass meetings of the teachers, there were hundreds of teachers marching on the same day in each of eight towns on September 10 and in twelve on October 5, and these numbers doubled between September and October.  

The strike call is therefore not for a “Hollywood strike” or fake strike, but built on a solid foundation of organizing. It will be combined with mass action in the streets in the militant Haitian tradition. It is also a test of the teachers’ organization and strength.

PLP salutes these teachers who know that “power concedes nothing without a struggle.” They are fed up with inaction in the face of a cynical government and a fascist regime imposed by the imperialist troops in the U.N. MINUSTAH force and are standing up to fight.

Win, lose, or draw in this strike, may they learn the lessons of revolutionaries before them (starting with the bold fighters who ended slavery in Haiti), and come out of this important and risky moment stronger for the battles ahead.  We stand alongside them and will learn along with them.

PART II

Whether this strike remains a strike only, or becomes a step towards communist workers’ taking state power away from the bosses by armed revolution, depends on the activity of revolutionaries with their fellow workers during the struggle. They will be arguing for striking for the whole working class rather than only for the teachers’ interests. They will argue that “winning” the strike means not winning the strike’s reform demands (urgently necessary though they are in the misery of Haiti), but building the revolutionary party PLP and its communist influence. 

They will try to mobilize support for striking teachers among every other sector of our class — students, workers, peasants, professionals, employed and unemployed — internationally as well as inside Haiti. They will highlight the need to end the structural inequality between teachers in the public schools (only 10% of all schools) and the even more oppressed and exploited teachers in the private schools (around 85% of all teachers.)

They will point out that reforms such as a better public education system will always fall short of what workers need, even if we can wrench them out of the unwilling hands of a cruel, racist ruling class (imperialist and local.) These reforms can always be taken back from us, whenever the rulers think they need to use their state power to do so.

They will point out that the role of education under capitalism — adding certain skills to our labor power, but mainly training obedient workers who believe in the system — cannot be transformed without workers’ seizing state power. They will show how the imperialist system of our day maintains Haiti for imperialist interests as a valuable “reserve” of manpower, resources, and military assets. Therefore the imperialists (the U.S., in rivalry with others like the European Union and China) will never “reconstruct” the education system or anything else in Haiti for the well-being of the working class. 

For the PLP, this strike is international. We do not respect the bosses’ borders nor their “national sovereignty.” These struggles in Haiti are best seen not as national but as part of an international working-class movement, which needs an international revolutionary communist party. Each struggle must become a step towards the next wave of international communist revolution.

Why?  Because state power in the hands of the working class is the first essential thing we need to reconstruct the world from the ruins in which four hundred years of capitalism has left it. Some live now in incredible luxury and waste while at least half the world’s people go hungry and unchecked capital accumulation destroys the planet.

We say “ruins,” because the racist inequality of world capitalism — so stark in Haiti — is the ruin of all the hopes which ever inspired the oppressed to struggle upwards. Also because, most likely, the conflict between rival imperialists will result in a massive world war, even worse than the two we have already endured. The reasonable course is not to reform capitalism but to destroy it before it destroys us.

In Puerto Rico, as in the U.S., the “War on Drugs” is another ruling-class weapon in the class war waged against the working class to prevent it from organizing and seizing control. In the name of this fraudulent “War on Drugs, Puerto Rico has suffered years of devastation by the U.S. and its law enforcement agencies.

The coined phrase “War on Drugs” was invented by the Nixon administration in the late 1960’s to use drug laws to suppress student agitation, the civil rights movement, and urban protests in impoverished black communities. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration added mandatory sentencing laws to exert social control over such communities, as neoliberal economic policies slashed government aid.

The “War on Drugs” — supposedly to stop the export of drugs from South America into the U.S. — was, in fact, a thinly veiled scheme, disguised as drug interdiction, to send funds and military personnel to fascist regimes in South and Central America to suppress communist and nationalist movements.

The racist “War on Drugs” in the U.S. has suppressed and destroyed black communities through massive incarceration of young black men. 

In Puerto Rico, where the population exhibits less apparent racial differences, the “War on Drugs” is still truly racist as well as a merciless class war. It massively jails the poorest of the poor, targeting Puerto Rico’s Public Housing Projects. With the U.S. military substantially forced from the island because of popular protests, the “War on Drugs” has allowed the U.S. to remilitarize Puerto Rico with a flood of federal agents ready to suppress its long tradition of revolutionary struggle.

Jailing the Unemployed

Historically, enforcement of drug laws was the province of the Puerto Rico Police Department, the second largest police force in the U.S. (including its colonies). Federal law enforcement targeted only large drug importers while local law enforcement dealt with daily drug traffic, especially in Public Housing Projects. In 1995, with poverty and joblessness continuing to rise, and fearing rebirth of the recently crushed armed independence movement, Puerto Rico was declared a High Density Drug Trafficking Area, flooding more personnel and funds onto the island. Thus the “War on Drugs” invaded Public Housing Projects, arresting the unemployed and imprisoning them in the U.S., using mandatory minimum federal sentencing laws.

Today, there’s little work in Puerto Rico. Official unemployment is around 15%, but Puerto Rico has a large underground economy, not counted in jobless figures. On most street corners one sees people selling fruit from their gardens, bottled water, newspapers or anything else they can find. They earn almost nothing but are not counted as unemployed, which tops 30%. Public Housing Projects — the biggest containing approximately 40,000 residents — are where many of these oppressed and unemployed workers live. Drug trafficking is often the only way families can survive. 

The “War on Drugs” in Puerto Rico is primarily the federal government’s province. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agents (DEA) swarm into Public Housing Projects and based on long surveillance and using cooperating witnesses, arrest and indict from 60-100 residents; 95% are drug addicts and petty drug sellers. They’re charged in a single massive drug “conspiracy.” The mandatory minimum sentence is 10 years, the maximum life. There’s virtually no defense to the charges since sales are videotaped by co-conspirators forced into cooperation by the threat of long mandatory sentences.

In order to avoid  20-30 year after-trial sentences, usually almost every defendant pleads out. Sentences generally run from 5-10 years. Between 600 and 1,000 young men are sentenced each year and shipped to prisons across the U.S. Another 1,700 spend each day at the Federal Detention Center in Puerto Rico, where, having been arrested and denied bail, they wait to negotiate a plea agreement and are then sent to the U.S. to serve their sentences. 

Over the past 25 years, the number of Federal judges in Puerto Rico has grown from three to ten; the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI and the DEA have doubled and tripled in size. Criminal defense lawyers have grown from a handful to over 200.

Massive Arrests, Youth Disappear

In the housing projects, young men are disappearing. Impoverished residents now have no source of income. Drug trafficking continues unabated. Usually within a week of the massive arrests, the drug-selling points are reestablished. But now they are run by 15-year-olds.

Less than two years ago, Puerto Rico’s Governor Luis Fortuno fired 30,000 already grossly underpaid public employees. The “War on Drugs” helps make such barbarities possible by justifying the mass use of police terror.  Furthermore, it permits the removal and warehousing of thousands of unemployed youth before their misery and unrest can grow into organizing and social struggle.

Many workers are deceived into believing that the government is waging the “War on Drugs” to keep us safe from violent crime. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The real crime is committed by racist U.S. rulers. Only a communist-led workers’ movement will provide an alternative to those being ravaged by drugs, capitalist-induced unemployment. racism and poverty.

Hurricanes may be acts of nature, but the damage they wreak is an act of the profit system.

As TV journalists depict in graphic detail the hardships suffered by millions from Hurricane Sandy, the one thing they hide is the root cause of this devastation: capitalism. The capitalists’ drive for maximum profits has destroyed the environment and resulted in climate change and more violent weather phenomena. At the same time, they ignore their own scientists’ warnings of the danger of floods to urban tunnels and electrical plants, and how catastrophic damage might be avoided. 

Had the Japanese government erected a seawall around the Fukushima nuclear plant, it would not have been flooded; millions would have been spared the dangers of radiation. Had the proper dams and levees been in place in New Orleans, thousands of residents would have been saved from the horrors of Hurricane Katrina.

New York City’s subway system has steadily deteriorated, in part because workers were laid off and preventive maintenance neglected from the 1970s into the 1990s. No wonder the tunnels are vulnerable to flooding! Why was this maintenance “overlooked”? Because under capitalism, profits are primary. When public infrastructure breaks down, bonds must be issued via the big banks to fix it. The workers’ tax payments go toward billions in interest on these bonds, which in turn create obscene profits for the banker-bondholders.

In assessing the 590,750 bridges in the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a “D” rating to 30 percent of them, meaning they are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete” (New York Review of Books). It would require an annual expenditure of $9.4 billion for 20 years to eliminate these bridge deficiencies. In addition, more than a third of the nation’s dams, 3,500 in all, are considered unsafe.

In New York, as Con Edison lays off electrical workers while forcing one to do the work of two, its CEO collects a compensation package of $24.8 million. With the highest rates in the U.S., Con Ed turned a $5 billion profit in 2011.

At the same time, trillions are being spent for another top priority for U.S. bosses: imperialist wars that kill millions of workers. The maintenance and repair of transportation, electrical grids, dams, levees and bridges don’t directly advance the efforts of the U.S. ruling class to control the world’s oil resources and dominate its capitalist rivals in Europe and Asia. That is where war comes in. 

Only a communist society run by and for workers will put the interests of the working class front and center. Only then will we build an infrastructure that can tame natural phenomena like hurricanes and floods.