The Progressive Labor Party has repeatedly warned workers of coming wars leading to a major war to decide which imperialist(s) will control the world. We’ve said that the U.S. ruling class will use its state power to prepare and try to mobilize the population for war.
On March 20, 2012, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) Independent Task Force (ITF) on U.S. Education Reform and National Security issued its 96-page report. The CFR is the key U.S. ruling-class think tank directing U.S. imperialism’s foreign policy and influencing government officials who are instrumental in their plans. It’s significant that it appointed a Task Force headed by Condoleezza Rice, former George W. Bush’s Secretary of State (a key figure in both Iraq wars), and Joel Klein, ex-chancellor of New York City’s schools.
U.S. rulers are trying to seize an opportunity created for them by the right-wing “education reform” (ER) movement. It has successfully mobilized some parents and others to attack unionized public school teachers; demanded the use of standardized test scores to produce “data-driven” evaluations of teachers; popularized the call for charter schools and the closing of public schools; and called on state governments to institute a “common core curriculum.” The ER movement is responsible for right-wing superintendents like Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. and Cami Anderson in Newark.
Based on this ER platform, the ITF proposes using the common core curriculum standards to “ensure that students are mastering the skills and knowledge necessary to safeguard the country’s national security,” i.e., military, foreign service and defense industry skills; to push patriotism more sharply in civics classes and other school curricula; to sharpen competition between public, charter and private schools; and to institute a “national security readiness audit” in order to censure those educators not falling in line with the bosses’ plans.
This audit will also inculcate nationalistic and competitive ideas in students’ and teachers’ minds. All this enables the ruling class to institute a higher level of social control in the schools and prepare U.S. youth for major conflicts — imperialist war — with one or more of its main competitors in the world.
Wrapping its rhetoric in the specter of threats to the U.S. “leadership role” in the world, the ITF report gives away its real agenda early on. It says explicitly that the U.S. “Education Crisis Is a National Security Crisis” (page 7). Its “five distinct threats” include U.S. economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, global awareness and unity and cohesion (pp. 7-13). Each of these “threats” signifies an area this ruling class-led group has identified as critical to address in the lead-up to imperialist-led genocide.
The ITF’s citing of these threats reflects the current rise of China and other competing imperialists, whose goal is to replace the U.S. in its current number one position. The ITF says U.S. workers lack the skills necessary to enable U.S. businesses to turn back these challenges by maximizing productivity per worker, bringing the bosses higher profits. They bemoan the reality that 75 percent of U.S. youth (particularly black and Latino youth) are not qualified to join the military. This is mostly because many don’t graduate from high school or are not otherwise prepared to be soldiers in today’s high-tech armed forces.
The report further criticizes U.S. schools for not producing enough graduates proficient in foreign languages who can work as diplomats and/or spies, Special Forces and overseas agents for U.S. corporations. The ITF also cites the growing “education/mobility gap” (really just a product of the bosses’ economic crisis on top of their racist and anti-working-class policies). They believe this growing inequality will impair workers’ loyalty to, and willingness to die for, U.S. imperialism.
The ITF fears that “this trend could cause the United States to turn inward and become less capable of being a stabilizing force in the world.” This view represents the thinking of the most powerful capitalists, for whom “stability” is a codeword for continued U.S. political and economic domination.
PLP forces, both inside and outside the schools, must expose these atrocious profit-driven goals. Just as the “education reform” movement has given the rulers an opportunity they might use for their purposes, communist leadership in the schools can turn the tables on them. A militant left-led mass movement of students, parents and workers against racism, sexism, fascism and imperialist war would be an important component of PLP’s drive towards communist revolution.
Tel-Aviv, Israel-Palestine, March 8 — Over 100 working women and men marched in central Tel-Aviv to mark International Women’s Day. Two PL’ers joined the march and distributed CHALLENGEs in Hebrew and English.
This march was dotted with red flags and represented multi-ethnic unity of working women. While small, the march was very sharp, politically speaking, with the red flags and energetic chants of “The Answer to Racism is Revolution” and “The Answer to Sexism is Revolution”.
We in Progressive Labor Party welcome the demand for revolution. Indeed, while we do disagree with the organizers of the march on many subjects, to have International Women’s Day marked with red flags and chants calling for revolution was a very welcome change from the liberal feminist slogans and commercialization seen on this day.
As our Party continues to grow we will have our own contingent marching on International Women’s Day under our own flags and with our own chants, not merely calling for a revolution, but for a communist revolution.
HAITI, March 13 — Communists must fight against the capitalists and their ideas everywhere. A small group of communists in a provincial city in Haiti waged an ideological struggle for communism on the weekend of International Women's Day. Several young women university students of proletarian background wanted to organize an event. We presented phrases of famous women to show the history of women’s participation in the struggle. They called it a plea for fighting sexism in all aspects of society.
We began discussing our plan over several meetings, trying to give a more revolutionary and working-class character to this initiative. We discussed women revolutionaries such as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, among others. Current struggles for equality need to become more class-conscious: to make it a struggle of working-class women and men against the ruling class. We are discussing the importance of communism in women's struggle against capitalist exploitation for our class’s liberation. Today millions of women are striking against this exploitation worldwide. Capitalism uses sexism as a basis of the exploitation and oppression of women is the social division of labor.
With the support of communist comrades, these young women posed some revolutionary acts. They saw that in the bourgeois feminist movement, women bosses defend their class interests. Because our relationship is only beginning with these young women, they found it sufficient to carry out their activities by asserting certain rights of women, without entering into class struggle.
This experience shows us, however, that communists must be present everywhere — because opportunities are everywhere to fight capitalism in all its facets. We must fight sexism, racism, and all the other forms of exploitation that the bosses use against us. In order for working-class women and their allies to be liberated, the whole working class must be liberated. We have to engage in ideological as well as practical battles against the bosses.
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France: 200,000 March vs. Job Cuts Sarkozy, Socialists: ‘Same Hot Air’
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- 14 March 2013 240 hits
PARIS, March 5 — Tens of thousands of workers demonstrated here today against the fraudulent agreement on “secure employment.” Nationwide, 200,000 joined 174 protest marches.
The loudest contingent in the Paris march comprised 250 Peugeot auto workers from nearby Aulnay, who chanted “Forbid layoffs, no factory closures!” and “We’re here today, we’ll continue tomorrow!” One worker, Mohamed, declared, “I didn’t vote for [Socialist president] François Hollande because I knew it was the same thing, the same hot air.”
“There has been no break with the previous [Sarkozy] government,” said Jean-Pierre, who marched here. At 66, having just retired, he fears retirement pensions will “not be guaranteed.”
In Lyons, Renault autoworkers waved signs reading. “Shame on the agreement!” In Toulouse, the main banner condemned “the blackguard January 11 agreement.” In Nantes, large contingents of metalworkers and workers from the Airbus factory participated.
In Le Mans, the workers chanted, “Flexibility, competitiveness, mobility, no, no, no!” In Rheims, the demonstrations halted bus and tram traffic. Over 200 Michelin rubber workers joined the protest march in Clermont-Ferrand. “Young people don’t want to see their careers made precarious,” commented one rubber worker.
In Lille, contingents from the Dunkirk ArcelorMittal steelworks, the Valenciennes Peugeot factory, the Toyota auto factory, the Conforama furniture chain stores, and the Fraisnor lasagna factory all marched.
The demonstrations were organized by three union confederations, the CGT, FO and Solidaires against government plans to adopt anti-worker laws in May. The “lesser-evil” Socialist government sponsored talks between the unions and the bosses’ associations. On January 11, three union confederations, the CFDT, CGC, and CFTC, representing a minority of workers, signed a sellout agreement on which new laws will be based.
The main feature of the proposed law allows a company to cut wages and change working hours, supposedly for a limited two-year period, in order to “increase competitiveness” — exploitation — and allegedly avoid layoffs.
The law would also create “intermittent permanent job contracts” — allowing bosses to bind a pool of workers to a company, free to employ them as much or as little as they choose. It would also allow bosses to close a factory in one region and open a new one in another region. Workers who refuse to follow their jobs will be fired and will be ineligible for unemployment benefits.
In exchange for these give-aways, the three sellout unions supposedly won “compensatory rights” for workers. But none are in the signed agreement that was signed. All are subject to future negotiations and no one is discussing guaranteeing them legally.
The deputies belonging to the right-wing UMP party, which lost the last presidential and legislative elections, will vote for the Socialist Party’s law, although former labor minister Xavier Bertrand criticized it for “not going far enough.”
The Socialist government, says it will allow superficial changes in the future law, but none are substantial.
Neither these union leaders, elections or laws will guarantee workers a decent life, much less the full value of the products their labor creates. As long as the bosses hold state power, laws will always favor them.
Clearly, the key to obtaining real rights for workers lies in our class eliminating the bosses’ government. That can only be done by a revolutionary party leading the working class in a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and create a society run by and for workers.
Capitalism is a dictatorship of the small group of bankers, bosses and billionaires who own and control the means of production, agriculture and transportation; the state apparatus (the government, military, courts and police); the educational system and the media. Despite the pretense of democracy, the capitalist class uses this ownership and control to maintain itself in power and suppress serious challenges to its rule.
In the U.S., the 1960s anti-racist ghetto rebellions and massive anti-imperialist movement against the war in Vietnam rocked the capitalist class to its core. These uprisings forced the rulers to step up their use of their Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In cooperation with local police forces, the FBI, through its Counterintelligence (COINTEL) program, planned or fomented physical and psychological attacks on leading communist and militant anti-racist political forces like PLP, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party.
CHALLENGE (1/16/13) quoted from attorney Brian Glick’s book War at Home. The FBI’s COINTEL tactics included : “[i]nfiltration: … [to] not merely spy on political activists … [but] to discredit and disrupt their activities; [l]egal harassment: … [a]buse the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals … [using] perjured testimony; and
[i]llegal force: … [c]onspire with local police departments … to … commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations …”
These attacks did not stop with the 1976 liberal Church Committee congressional hearings and report which partially exposed COINTEL. The following describes a police attack on PLP in Los Angeles (from a 1982 PLP pamphlet):
On June 18, 1977, PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) held a mass anti-racist demonstration in the Los Angeles garment center. The demonstration was organized to combat the sweatshop and slave labor conditions faced by L.A. garment workers, most of whom are immigrants. The demonstration was called in connection with InCAR’s campaign to organize a new anti-racist garment workers union, which had been gaining a mass base of support.
Cops Attack, PLP Resist
Acting on behalf of the garment bosses, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attempted to break up the demonstration. The cops attacked. Naturally, the demonstrators resisted. A sharp clash resulted. Many demonstrators and cops were injured. Indeed, the cops took a real beating. Subsequently, two dozen members and friends of PLP and InCAR were arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting officers …
PLP members faced serious jail time as a result of these false charges. However, before the trial, PLP exposed the fact that two undercover police spies for the LAPD, Connie Milazzo and John Dial, had infiltrated PLP meetings, including the meetings of the Legal Defense Committee set up in the wake of the police attack. The criminal charges then had to be thrown out because of the “misconduct” of the bosses’ agents in the police department and the prosecutor’s office.
But the conspiracy to get PLP continued: “The fact that the case was thrown out of court because of the exposure of their own criminal behavior infuriated the LAPD. They decided to get PLP and InCAR by instituting a new and unprecedented legal tactic.” A civil suit was filed by ten cops against PLP and 20 individual members for $2 million in damages, stating there was a “conspiracy to injure L.A. cops” (PLP pamphlet).
The cops got plenty of help from the judge who barred PLP’s lawyers from introducing any evidence showing an LAPD conspiracy to attack PLP. “While police attorneys were allowed to ask questions about PLP’s membership, policies and structure,…defense attorneys … were prohibited from asking questions about…the LAPD’s vicious record of racist attacks on demonstrators…” (PLP pamphlet).
The judge also allowed the cops’ attorneys to use the trial to subpoena and question PLP leaders about the names of Party members and of our inner workings. When Party leaders refused to name names, the fascist judge ordered them jailed. To their great credit, these leaders did not follow the bosses’ rules, and refused to expose their comrades and the organization to harm.
With this judge’s assistance, and the bosses’ agents’ predictable use of anti-communism in the trial, they eventually got a verdict of $334,000 in their favor. The cops’ attorneys then began a long campaign of harassing individual Party members to try and collect on their judgment. Nevertheless, they were unable to break the political will of the Los Angeles PLP.
A key lesson of this police assault on PLP is that members and friends must be ever vigilant in the face of attempts by the rulers’ spies and armed thugs to undermine our unity and organization. Even in a period of less class struggle, the capitalists are still haunted by the specter of communism, which would mean their loss of the trillions in surplus value (profits) they’ve stolen from the working class. As Mao said, to be attacked is a good thing. If we turn the assault around on the class enemy by building PLP, it will bring workers’ revolution one step closer.
