NASHVILLE, TN, February 20 — Much is being written about the loss suffered by the UAW in the union election at the Volkswagen (VW) assembly plant in Chattanooga, TN. The plant is one of only three non-union VW plants in the world (the other two are in China). This campaign was the key to a strategy of organizing a number of foreign-owned auto plants, including BMW in South Carolina, Mercedes in Vance, Alabama, and Nissan in Canton, MS. (The State of Mississippi passed three anti-union laws just days after the VW vote, targeting the UAW Nissan campaign). The UAW has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), challenging the interference of Tennessee’s top elected officials, but that could linger for years before it is resolved.
The election reflects just how far down the road to fascism the U.S. has travelled, and how workers are caught in a crossfire between right-wing, Tea Party union-busters and a union leadership that sees its main job as guaranteeing the bosses’ profits.
VW and the UAW signed a neutrality agreement, where the company agreed not to oppose the union campaign and the union agreed to “maintain VW’s competitive advantage.” In other words, the UAW promised to maintain the same anti-union advantages that the right-wing politicians gave to VW in the first place! This was the result of many trips to Germany to meet with the company and with IG Metall, the German metal workers union.
There was a very active union committee inside the plant. VW workers from around the world were brought to Chattanooga to meet with workers and show international solidarity for their campaign. The union was confident. Yet, on the 77th anniversary of the victory of the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which won union recognition at General Motors after a 44-day plant takeover, the UAW lost the VW vote 712-626. A swing of 44 votes would have changed the outcome.
Along the way, the UAW ran into what John Logan (Director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University) called, “a firestorm of interference” from a fascist coalition led by Grover Norquist. In an openly racist appeal to the mostly white workforce, billboards referred to the United Auto Workers as the United Obama Workers, and pictures of abandoned Detroit factories were displayed as the work of the UAW.
One racist group even compared the union campaign to a Civil War battle in Chattanooga where the Union Army was defeated. “Let’s stop them again,” was the message. Anti-union town hall meetings were held in the area and the top elected officials threatened the loss of jobs if the union won. These threats, made during the voting, are the basis for the UAW’s NLRB challenge to the election.
This reflects one of the fault lines in the U.S. ruling class, the anti-tax, anti-union billionaires, led by the Koch brothers vs. the liberal rulers who want to maintain some safety net and raise the minimum wage. This struggle reflects that, at least for the moment, the more open fascists have a mass base and a plenty of clout in the South.
But even more important, convincing workers that bosses and workers have the same interest, and our security lies in the bosses being fat and rich, is also leading the workers to fascism. In a period of growing imperialist rivalry, trade wars and the growing threat of shooting wars, unity with the bosses will lead to going to war against other workers to guarantee markets and profits for “our” bosses.
The fact is, workers and bosses have nothing in common! The bosses profit from our exploitation. We can only secure our future by abolishing wage slavery and building a communist world, where we produce for the needs of our class, not the profits of the shareholders. We should view these organizing campaigns, from auto to fast food workers, as opportunities to sharpen the class struggle and to win more workers to PLP.

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Bowing to Bosses Brings UAW to the Brink

The UAW has been collaborating with the auto bosses for over 60 years, especially in the 1970s, again in the financial crisis of 2008 and the auto bailout of 2009.
Anti-Asian Racism Rampant
The more U.S. auto bosses were threatened by international competition, the more the UAW came to their defense. Instead of “Workers of the World, Unite,” the slogan was “Buy American!” In the 1970s, anti-Japanese racism was rampant; local unions would charge $1/shot to smash an imported Japanese car with a sledge hammer. The racism hit a fever pitch when a young Chinese student, Vincent Chin, was beaten to death in a Detroit bar by two Chrysler employees who thought he was Japanese! Foreign cars were banned from UAW parking lots, and tires slashed.
Meanwhile, the UAW forced through billions in wage and benefit concessions to help U.S. bosses compete against the “foreign competition.” While factories and union halls closed, the palatial UAW/GM Training Center was being erected on the Detroit River. The threat moved from opposing imports to Asian and European auto bosses building factories in the U.S., mostly in the South, where they still enjoy a huge labor cost advantage. The UAW has failed to organize any of them. The union became so tied to the auto bosses that they would share their fate.
Then in the economic crash of 2008 and the auto bailout of 2009 the UAW agreed to the “restructuring” of the industry, meaning that 70 years of hard won gains would be wiped out for new workers. As the UAW shrunk from 1.5 million members to 380,000 (only half of that manufacturing), the union became the target of the growing anti-union Right to Work (RTW) movement. With the GM, Ford and Chrysler (Fiat) contracts expiring next year, over 50 percent of the UAW membership is in RTW states, including Michigan (60 percent if Ohio goes). When these contracts expire, union membership will be voluntary. Thousands of new workers, doing twice the work for half the pay, with diminished health care and no pensions, may very well leave the union.

BROOKLYN, NY, February 19 — Sixty friends and PL’ers shouted down the military recruiters at the Medgar Evers College (MEC) town hall meeting today. While the administration and recent recruits claimed the program was a way to “provide opportunities and diversity,” the protesters successfully exposed its imperialist agenda. There is potential in turning this anti-war struggle into a fight for communist politics.
PLP hung up Wanted Posters of war criminal David “drones” Petraeus, who is now a professor at one of the university campuses, directly linking these military recruiters to “warrior scholars” like Petraeus they partially aim to produce. CHALLENGE was well-received by all, including the student recruits.
ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps), a college program recruiting youth to a hyper-sexist and racist institution of war — has illegally circumvented the college council and installed itself on this nearly all black and Latino campus where 75 percent of the students are women. One PL student declared that ROTC’s presence at this particular campus is no accident. “This is the same community where Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston and Kimani Gray were killed [victims of NYC cops]. Essentially you’re trying to recruit black and brown youth — who are policed and killed here — to kill black and brown people across a fake border. That’s a racist agenda!”
Several students agreed, referring to the antiracist spirit of Medgar Evers as they pointed out ROTC’s “dishonorable” tactics. MEC is named after the fighter against segregation in Mississippi and Alabama. He was murdered by the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizen’s Council. Black and brown students are still targets of racism in this era of the new Jim Crow. No matter what the bosses say or try to do, they cannot be antiracist. Perpetuating racism is built into their system. Racism — the economic exploitation, ideology that justifies it and the bosses’ institutions which enforce it — is the backbone of capitalism.
Medgar Evers is not ROTC’s sole target. York College, another branch of the City University system, also an overwhelmingly black, Latino and female college, has also installed the military program. The bosses have been complaining that the third-largest university system in the U.S., CUNY, had no ROTC program. During the anti-Vietnam War era, students and faculty kicked ROTC off campuses. The bosses are concerned about an all-white Southern male military. Think tanks such as American Enterprise Institute worry about the “dangers of a military disconnected from the civilian population.”
Another concern for the bosses is related to the military’s sexist nature. In 2012, soldiers were 15 times more likely to be raped than to be killed in combat. Already, a half million women and men have reported sexual assaults in the past 22 years. One panelist at the town hall meeting was a female combat Iraq veteran, who stated she was “lucky not to have been assaulted.” CUNY is welcoming a sexist institution onto a majority-female campus. Sexual violence is a weapon of imperialism — towards both its soldiers and the civilians it is attacking.
Leadership for Which Class?
Behind the rhetoric of an “opportunity to succeed and diversify” is a buying of working-class youth to a war agenda. Some ROTC recruits argued, “Why are you trying to get rid of ROTC if it helps us with our dreams. It has provided me [a young black woman aspiring to be a doctor] with room and board and schooling [scholarships].” ROTC is exploiting the desperate conditions of students. The ruling class itself has created these conditions of racism, sexism, unemployment and underemployment.
Another ROTC recruit cited “pride, respect, leadership and discipline” as his reason for joining. While the students are genuine in their aspirations, what is left unchallenged is discipline to do what — be cannon fodder? Pride in what — shoot their own class interests in the back?  Leadership for which class — the imperialists thirst for oil or the workers fight for class liberation? One PL’er encouraged the ROTC recruits to aim their guns at the warmakers by organizing their fellow cadets and to read CHALLENGE. Newly gained contacts are open to such a struggle.
As one faculty comrade stated, “Are the functions of college and army compatible? The military is organized violence of the state. And colleges can reproduce those ideologies. Or college can be a site of struggle.”
MEC is a site for exactly that. This event may rekindle friends from past years to wage a fight. One brought friends from their campus club and others joined us for a study group later in the week to discuss the first chapters of Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism (more next issue).  
A growing number of students and faculty are fighting ROTC’s racist and sexist nature in particular and amplification of imperialist agendas on campus in general. This was evident last semester in our fight against Drones Petraeus as a professor on campus (see
CHALLENGE, 9/18 to 12/25). Our friends at the College of Staten Island have already successfully pushed back against ROTC. We must carry on the fight.
Why ROTC? Why Now?
As the previous CHALLENGE editorial (2/26) illustrates, the main threat of another world war seems to be between the U.S. and China, and the bosses are debating the best tactics to win such a conflict. The ruling class understands the need for youth to pledge allegiance to the bosses’ “national interest,” both as soldiers and political supporters. In 2012, the Council on Foreign Relations published a report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, stating students need to be trained to “safeguard America’s future security and prosperity.”
The ROTC move and the Petraeus hiring have exposed to some students the CUNY Administration’s function of enforcing class rule. To extend the fight from exposing to destroying these capitalists, PLP and the long march for communism must grow.

There’s a growing mass movement in the U.S. against mass incarceration, police brutality, and racism. But there are capitalist-class reformers waiting to co-opt this movement, directing it towards keeping the overall system of social control and exploitation.
This was evident at a January 29 talk about “a united front on prison reform” held by OAR (Offender Aid and Restoration), an Arlington, VA., nonprofit that helps people returning from prison. I went to spread the word about the criminal background checks at Metro, D.C.’s transit system, and to publicize a rally at Metro headquarters.
The speaker was Bernard Kerik, a former NYPD cop and police commissioner, and NYC commissioner of prisons. He also trained cops in Iraq after the U.S. invasion and testified to the 9/11 Commission in favor of pre-emptive strikes. George W. Bush nominated him to head Homeland Security, but had to withdraw his name because Kerik was under investigation for hiring an undocumented worker as his nanny. Then he ended up spending three years in a minimum security prison for fraud. Since then Kerik has become an advocate for prison reform, especially for getting rid of mandatory minimums in sentencing and for using other types of punishment besides prison.
In his speech, Kerik said it hurts the economy to incarcerate people because prisoners are not out working and spending money; that incarceration has a ripple effect on families; that it’s difficult for people with records to get jobs; and prison makes someone more likely to commit future crimes. Responding to an audience member, he also said private prison corporations are profiting and perpetuating mass incarceration. They offer to take over prisons from city and state governments, saving them money, but only if the governments agree to keep the prisons 90 percent full. That gives the governments a financial incentive to lock up as many people as they can, for as long as they can.
But Kerik is no friend of the working class. Before prison, he represented the capitalist class, and this speech showed he hasn’t changed. He said he doesn’t regret being a cop “because the people I put away were bad people.” He had no class analysis, and little understanding of racism. When he was asked how come 50 percent of the prison population is black (even though black people are only 13 percent of the national population), he only repeated his main point about eliminating mandatory minimums, saying this will “help black communities.” Nothing about the racism that puts so many black workers in prison to begin with.
The Flag of Exploitation
Under Kerik’s reforms, stop-and-frisk can continue, along with police brutality, capitalism’s mass unemployment and poverty, and global attacks on workers in other countries. He opened his presentation with a U.S. flag behind him, saying that he loves the flag and the country. No one at the event asked Kerik to answer for his own actions in helping U.S. imperialism and mass incarceration. He ended by praising business owners who hire prison returnees — separating the “good” capitalists from the “bad.” Yet even a boss who hires all returnees is profiting off their labor, and will exploit them harder to compete against other businesses.
My mention of the Metro background checks (see page 3) got nods and claps. Afterwards I distributed flyers about the upcoming rally and a petition to change the Metro policy. Many already knew about that policy and were interested in helping oppose it.
During a positive conversation with three people, an OAR board member asked me to stop distributing the flyers. “I thought we were on the same team,” I joked while the people I’d been talking to quickly grabbed my flyers. The board member said he just “wasn’t sure” I should be handing out anything at an OAR event if I wasn’t part of OAR. He seemed most concerned about the upcoming rally, since the only action mentioned at their event was “writing to Congress.”
The event showed growing consciousness about incarceration. The number of people affected by it is so great now that a mass movement is forming. But not everyone who says they want prison reform is an ally. Capitalists like Kerik will try to co-opt this movement. His emphasis on cost makes one wonder if the ruling class itself is divided, between those who believe they can control workers without prison, and those who’d prefer to keep large numbers of workers locked up, out of fear or because they profit directly from the prison system. In any case, under capitalism there are never enough secure jobs for all workers, in prison or out of it.
Antiracist Fighter

BROOKLYN, February 21 — How does the working class learn and grow during a struggle? How are their contradictions resolved? These questions were raised recently with some members of Progressive Labor Party
involved with the Justice for Kyam Livingston Committee. Nothing can be resolved until people get to know each other.
The committee was formed after the criminally negligent death of Kyam Livingston. (Kyam was in a holding cell in Brooklyn Central Booking, crying out in great pain and distress for seven hours while the jailers refused her medical help. The women in the cell with her kept calling for security to do something for their sick cellmate. They were all told to be quiet. Finally Kyam went into convulsions and died.)
The committee included Kyam’s mother, Anita Neal; Kyam’s god-daughter; and members of the Malcolm X Grassroots Organization, another group that supports victims of police abuse, our church social action committee, and the retiree association of a municipal workers union. Going in we knew each other, but just slightly. The mother had decided that she wanted to have some kind of demonstration on the monthly anniversary of her daughter’s death.  She also had a number of demands:
The names of the officers on duty whose

• criminal negligence killed her daughter;
• Surveillance videos of the holding cell
• showing what happened that night;
• Prosecution of the guilty officers;

A thorough investigation of conditions in Brooklyn Central Booking.
PLP knew the family in small ways. D., the god-daughter, had been a member of our church and our social action committee, and had strong nationalist views. It was she who first called the group together. We originally met at Kyam’s funeral and talked for hours. Some of the people we drove home became part of the committee. We began to get to know the members better by discussing the issues around Kyam’s death.
Another committee member from the church knew people in other religious organizations in Brooklyn and reached out to them. In fact, he and Anita recently spoke to about 500 people at a large Baptist congregation. The senior minister promised he would bring hundreds of people to a demonstration and that they would hold a speak-out for Kyam. The mother was joyful. Activities like these have led to a deeper understanding of PLP’s positions through intense discussions and struggle with one another.
Since the first demonstration on August 21, we have held seven monthly events. Each time we meet beforehand to talk and make plans. After the event we sometimes eat together and talk and plan some more. We often leaflet together.
Anita is very angry at the racist system that treated her daughter so callously, especially since Kyam herself worked as a security guard. While the family and committee have pressured elected officials to changes in the system, Anita often remarks that one or another politician is “full of crap.” On the role of the police, she says, “Enough with this blue wall of silence!” PLP’s struggle is to provide clear leadership in showing the connection between the needs of capitalism and the functioning of the state apparatus and its flunkies.
During this week’s rally, a young black man started the PLP chant, “White cop, black cop, all the same! Racist terror is the name of their game!”  The idea behind that chant has changed the outlook of committee members.   
Kyam’s god-daughter saw that the people who  were interested in this fight were those who are politically committed to an internationalist, working-class, multi-racial future. Bit by bit, our discussions and actions began to make it clear that ideas of unity, not separation, were most useful for everybody.
A PL’er who often speaks at these demonstrations put forward the line that racist violence against working-class people could happen any time, anywhere, and we all have to fight together to end it. He brought the issue to his retiree union chapter and they endorsed the struggle.
The process moved forward with tea or coffee, conversation, struggle, practical work, and leafleting. At times individuals were unable to be present because of sickness or other problems, but they always came the next time. Sometimes they brought others from their church or workplace as speakers or supporters.
The road to communism is a long one. Unless it is filled with comradeship, friendship and caring, with laughter as well as struggle, it cannot move forward. The building of trust and unity comes directly out of working with individuals and proving we are serious. We cannot tell people we are serious; we have to show it. Practice is always primary. Theory flows from practice.