FLORANGE, FRANCE, September 26 — Workers waving trade union flags jeered French president François Hollande when he came to the Florange steelworks today. Workers also demonstrated their bitterness in front of the ArcelorMittal Steel Corporation offices.
In February 2012, the corporation was threatening to shut down the Florange steelworks. The union leaders endorsed Hollande for president and led the workers to welcome him with open arms when he came to the site during his presidential election campaign. He promised a law to force corporations to sell a factory instead of shutting it down.Gravestone that the bosses quickly removed from the Florange site after it was erected in April 2013. It reads: “Betrayal. Here lie the promises of change that F. Hollande made to the workers and their families in Florange on Feb. 24, 2012.”
Today, the steelworks has been shuttered and the law has been watered down to an obligation to “look for” a buyer.
For months, Hollande has been promising to bring unemployment down. When the latest figures showed the number of unemployed falling by 50,000 in August, the Socialist Party exulted that “the president has made the strategic choices that our country requires.”
In reality, the fall resulted from 77,500 workers being struck off the lists because, the phone system to which they are required to regularly call was broke. This resulted in the loss of unemployment benefits. Since opinion polls show support for the Socialist Party plummeting in the run-up to the March, 2014 municipal elections, the Socialists will stoop to any trick to try to persuade workers that the French economy is improving.
Official figures show 5,397,200 jobless workers, 19.1% of the workforce, including part-time workers who want full-time jobs.
Rulers’ Racism Rampant
When the government isn’t trying to deceive the working class with misleading data, it’s trying to divide it with racism. Interior minister Manuel Valls — France’s “top cop” — said on September 24 that “it’s illusionary to think that we’re going to solve the problem of the Roma population through integration alone.” He added that “the Roma are destined to go back to Romania or Bulgaria.”
This sort of racism can be expected from Valls. In June 2009, as mayor of Evry, he complained about seeing too many “non-white” faces at the municipal flea market.
An additional 840,000 households — mostly previously-exempt low-paid workers — will pay income tax this year. The Socialist government labels this “sharing the burden” of the austerity measures taken to guarantee that France pays its sovereign debt to finance capitalists.
This is the capitalist hell of unemployment and racism that the “lesser-evil” Socialist government presides over. It exposes the futility of participating in the bosses’ electoral circus and depending on their promises to solve workers’ problems.
Toasting Pesticides with French Wine
But workers here would be ill-advised to try to drown their troubles in wine. A report just published by the consumer protection group Que Choisir indicates that all French wines contain pesticides — from 300 to 3,000 times as much as is legally allowed in drinking water.
France does not limit the amount of pesticides that wine can contain. This makes the capitalist grape-growers happy while poisoning the working class (seven of the 33 different pesticides detected cause cancer). Scientific studies also show that vineyard workers have up to 11 times as much pesticide in their bodies as other people, and die more frequently of cancer.
Meanwhile, French bosses offered to lead an attack on Syria which workers in France roundly rejected. In France, like everywhere else in the world, the only solution to the ills of capitalism is communist revolution.

Worcester, MA,  September 19 — Members and friends of PLP, and many workers from an unemployed workers’ organization held a rally outside of Harry’s Pizzeria.
The workers here are fighting back against physical assaults, sexual harassment, and poverty wages.
In March of 2013 the manager at the restaurant struck a worker on the job. When the worker filed a battery complaint, the bosses’ court dismissed it.  A woman worker filed a separate complaint against the restaurant for sexual harassment from the bosses.
The workers from the area took our flyers and agreed that something should be done to stop the injustices.  The working class needs communism to take the bosses out of the driver’s seat of society.  Only then will these attacks on the working class be ended.

NEW YORK CITY, September 30 — Nearly 400 workers and students rallied in front of the Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College today. We attacked our local enemy, the trustees who are responsible for hiring general David Petraeus, raising students’ tuition, decreasing services on campus, and forcing professors and staff to work to petty wages and under fascistic control of their departments and curriculum.
The Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union for the workers of the City University of New York (CUNY) had called a protest, demanding the trustees respond to the no-confidence in Pathways and the workers’ lack of a contract for the past three years. Pathways is the racist common core of this public university system that went into effect this semester. It is an assembly-line style curriculum that limits what professors can teach, lowers the standards for these working-class students, saves the administration loads of money. Pathways is a crisis-ridden curriculum for a system in crisis.
Over 60 protesters were inside the trustees meeting, calling them out on their anti-worker agenda. They chanted, “A good contract makes a good education.” The Trustees are bankers, former counterintelligence FBI agents, former presidents of multinational corporations, members of the ruling-class think tanks such as Council on Foreign Relations, corporate lawyers, politicians who control labor forces, and more minions who have international ties for the U.S. imperialists.
Meanwhile, protesters picketed outside, drawing attention from passers-by and other students getting out of class. We need to make the connection that these local bosses are tools for imperialism. Our decision on uniting with our professors and attacking the trustees while still having some forces hound Dead Squad Petraeus at the Honors College was a step in that direction.
We also need to struggle for our friends to see the limits of unions as the negotiator of exploitation. They chanted,

Who’s got the power? We Got the Power!
What kind of power? Union Power!

Some student PL’ers tried to change the chant to “workers power!” but without much success. Our professors and staff need more than just a good contract. We need political control of our own labor. For that we need to build a communist movement. Progressive Labor Party is doing just that. We have a long way to go in building a worker-student alliance that even machine guns can’t break.

See Petraeus Run

It was announced this afternoon that CUNY has just moved war criminal Petraeus’s seminar from the Macaulay Honors College building to 555 W 57 St, a location with increased security. The new location provides underground garages so racist Petraeus can arrive and leave without being detected.
As CHALLENGE reported (10/2), militant students with faculty support, confronted war criminal and former CIA Director Petraeus in the street every Monday, charging him with genocide.  On the evening of last Tuesday, September 17, NYPD attacked and brutalized six students, who have come to be known as the CUNY 6 (see box on the left).
We were not intimidated by this attack!  The following Monday, over 150 students and workers came out! The cops sealed off the entire residential block from vehicular traffic. NYPD brought out their most muscular cops, lined them up directly in front of the protestors. The thugs were ready to go, with their packets of plastic handcuffs hanging off their waists. Not counting the cops waiting at the street corners, inside the building, and around the block, there were 30 thugs in blue failing miserably to intimidate us.
Shortly after 5 PM, a line of cops pressed up against the pen and contained all the demonstrators — we were not “arrested” but we were in a “frozen zone.”  Leaving his class early, bloody racist Petraeus came out and stepped into an SUV coming down the block going the wrong way on the a one-way street. Students led a march out of the pens and off to Columbus Circle, chanting:

1,2,3,4 — Defeat U.S. Imperialist War!
5,6,7,8 — Petraeus Out, We Can’t Wait!

Slowly but surely, a working relationship is being developed between students and professors and staff.  PL’ers at CUNY have developed concrete plans to build an anti-imperialist movement through film showings and teach-ins on campuses throughout the city. They will build local campaigns on their campuses through their mass organizations.

 NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 24 — Today vigorous opposition to Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) filled the auditorium at the College of Staten Island (CSI) campus of the City University of New York (CUNY), where the Administration had been forced by anti-ROTC faculty to call a Town Hall meeting. CUNY administrators are determined to impose ROTC on this campus as well as at York and City Colleges. ROTC was thrown out of CUNY during the protests against the Vietnam War and has been gone since 1971.
A growing movement of students and faculty against the militarization of CUNY has targeted the administration for trying to bring back ROTC as well as for hiring former general and CIA director David Petraeus to teach at the elitist Macaulay “Honors” College. At the Town Hall meeting, among the dozen CSI faculty or staff who spoke, not a single one supported ROTC. PL’ers in this movement believe that we need to link the concepts of fascism and imperialism to understand the current militarization of universities (see box).
A few students spoke in favor of ROTC, for their right to choose, and the character-building, career opportunities, and freedom from debt they said ROTC brings to working-class students. Other students pointed out what’s missing from this rosy picture: ROTC trains officers for a military which uses the 1,000 U.S. bases in 130 countries around the world to kill people by the hundreds of thousands and send back home thousands of dead, maimed, and psychologically devastated U.S. vets. Killing and dying is the name of ROTC’s racist game as it tries to recruit, especially, black and brown CUNY students to their killing machine.
The panel of speakers included two recent anti-ROTC vets and a student leader of the CUNY anti-militarization movement. The unimpressive speakers for ROTC included a regional ROTC officer, the head of ROTC at City College, and a faculty member from York College. The latter spoke proudly about the new War Sciences curriculum at York, allegedly to be academically respectable and to develop critical thinking.
Their pro-ROTC views were echoed by very few. Many questions came from the floor. What about U.S. military sexism and the rape and assault inflicted on a third of women soldiers? The weak answer was, “We only speak for ROTC, not for military policy in general.”  
What about U.S. use of chemical weapons like napalm, depleted uranium, and white phosphorus? “We only speak for ROTC, not for the military as a whole.”  
What about the illegal imperialist invasions and occupations, the drone strikes, the targeted assassination of U.S. citizens, torture and renditions, Guantanamo, and more?  “We only speak for ROTC.”  By the end, ROTC hypocrisy, lies, and evasions were exposed to everyone.
The anti-ROTC views were varied. Some faculty said that their ideals of bringing  mass democratic college education to CUNY students were the exact opposite of the inhumane ideals of the military. They pointed out that building character and critical thinking was the province of educators, not military recruiters.
Others objected to using their university to legitimize a military discredited by war crimes. One or two blasted U.S. imperialism as the real explanation of the recent role of the military. They correctly stated that ROTC should be kept out because the university has used military recruiting to support and enforce imperialist foreign policy, beginning with genocide against indigenous people in the Americas. One student described the racism he experiences every day at the hands of the New York police, and said the U.S. military is doing the same thing to his sisters and brothers overseas. The antiwar vets were eloquent about the abuses they saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and how their own thinking had changed. The student activist linked ROTC to Petraeus, Department of Defense research at CUNY, and pro-war curriculum.
The next step will probably be a debate in the Academic Senate. Faculty are angry at growing administration arrogance taking away their authority over academic matters like curriculum and departmental organization.
They see the imposition of ROTC on the campus as another example of university managers seizing more control. They understand that it is the CUNY bosses who are responsible for militarization.
Students connect more immediately to the racism of ROTC’s plans at CUNY because many of them experience racism every day. The ROTC move and the Petraeus hiring have exposed to some students the CUNY administration’s function of enforcing capitalist class rule. This movement must grow both in numbers and in political understanding, as PLP at CUNY forms communist study-action groups and distributes more CHALLENGEs.