PARIS, June 18 — Whatever the outcome of the June 17 second round of legislative elections, the workers will be the losers based on French bosses’ plans A and B.

Plan A is a socialist government intended to disarm workers as the bosses continue to attack using austerity plans to please the finance capitalists who own France’s sovereign debt. 

The first round of legislative elections on June 10 showed that Socialist Party president François Hollande succeeded in mobilizing working-class voters with a few crumbs. By decree, he “generously” restored retirement at 60 for workers who began working before age 18 and who have worked continuously for 41 years. The head of France’s largest union, the General Confederation of Labour, hailed this mini-measure as an historic “European event.”

Other mini-measures are a 25 percent hike in back-to-school aid for low-income families’ school supplies; a promised 1 percent increase in the minimum wage in July; and wage and benefit limits for public-sector company bosses.

Only 56 percent of the voters went to the polls, a record low. However, enough working-class voters did cast ballots to put the Socialists in the leading position for the elections’ second round in which Hollande won a majority in the National Assembly. This would allow the Socialists to rule without their junior partners in the Green and Left Front parties.

However, Hollande is dispelling any illusions about his future policies. He warned the Greeks — prior to their June 17 balloting — that “if the impression is given that the Greeks want to distance themselves from the [austerity] commitments they have made and to abandon all perspective of economic recovery, then there will be countries that will prefer to end Greek presence in the euro zone” — and then had the gall to pretend he wasn’t threatening Greek workers!

Hollande will not hesitate to impose similar austerity measures on workers. A post-election 50-billion-euro [US $60 billion] cut in workers’ social benefits over the next five years is in his presidential campaign platform.

Hollande is expected to cut spending on labor, ecology, aid to cities, social housing, health care and retirement pensions, and push through another increase in the retirement age, despite the partial return to retirement at 60 for 100,000 workers (of the 600,000 workers retiring at 62 each year).

The Socialist Party program also provides for using half the money saved through government budget cuts to pay off the finance capitalist who won France’s soverign debt, whichs stands at $2.4 trillion. To do this, the Socialists will have to cut $20 billion from governemnt services (with $10 billon going to reduce the budget deficit, and $10 billon going to reduce the soverign debt). If workers rebel against these austerity measures, then it’s:

Plan B 

The Front National finished third in the April 22 presidential elections with 6.4 million votes. Sarkozy’s UMP (Union for a Popular Movement)party has already formed an unofficial alliance with the Front National against the Socialist Party. UMP officials have praised its values and even support Marine Le Pen’s election to the National Assembly. UMP leader Jean-François Copé has called for updating UMP’s program to move it closer to the fascists. 

The fascist Front National has undergone a facelift since Marine Le Pen succeeded her father as party president in 2011. Although she’s smoother than her father, the party program remains fascist. Notably:

   • Militarist — proposing creation of a 50,000-soldier National Guard, presumably to repress worker rebellions, and a naval construction program to fight “Asian navies”;

   • Nationalist — proposing a program to indoctrinate government workers in “the meaning of the state and patriotism”;

   • Racist — proposing “a thorough-going reform of the law on French nationality,” prohibiting public health care for, and demonstrations by and for, undocumented immigrants, and making “anti-French racism” a crime;

   • Repressive — proposing 40,000 new prison cells and reintroducing the death penalty, as well as increasing the punishment for “verbal violence” against cops, doubling the number of anti-crime brigade cops, and filling the streets with plainclothes cops.

Despite this, the Front National has supposedly become respectable. Throughout his five-year term, right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy adopted the positions of the Front National, trying to counter his unpopularity, and thereby popularized its fascist ideas.

The Front National has built a base in the working class. According to an April 2012 opinion poll, in the presidential elections Marine Le Pen won 29 percent of the blue-collar worker vote compared to 27 percent for Socialist Hollande, 19 percent for Sarkozy, and 11 percent for the Left Front.

Historically, this is the weakness of the French left. There’s been no tradition of disruption of fascist marches, rallies and meetings, while for decades the Front National has been able to hold profascist “Joan of Arc rallies” on May Day in Paris.

Right now the bosses are relying on Plan A — a Socialist government to impose austerity measures on the working class. If working-class rebellion threatens that agenda, Plan B can move to outright fascism, possibly through a joint UMP-Front National government.

The future holds very bitter struggles for the working class. The only way to ensure victory is to build a revolutionary communist party to destroy capitalism and the fascism that capitalism breeds.

WASHINGTON DC, June 1 — Occupy DC, including PL’ers, marched through the streets here today to the Canadian Embassy. Occupiers banged pots and pans like their brothers and sisters in Quebec, chanting “From Montreal to DC, Education Must Be Free,”  marching in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of striking Canadian students and workers in Quebec.

The Quebec student strike is in its 16th week and must become a rallying point for opposition to austerity policies around the world. Worker-student unity is key. Over the past year, the Canadian bosses’ government has repeatedly used emergency legislation to break anti-concession strikes by Air Canada, Canada Post and Canadian Pacific railway workers.

Marchers briefly picked up two chants in French, expressing unity with the French-speaking Québecois:  “Prend les rues (Take the streets!)” and “Ce n’est qu’un debut, La lutte continue (This is only the beginning; the struggle continues.)”

 Shocked embassy staff quickly locked down the building to prevent Occupiers from entering. Despite the pouring rain, demonstrators rallied and kept the embassy closed. A Canadian student waved his passport in the face of the embassy, declaring that it was an illusion that Canadian bosses are more compassionate than U.S. bosses and that their fascist crackdown on the student strikers proved this.

The Quebec government passed Bill 78 outlawing demonstrations near universities. In response, over 300,000 protesters have attacked this law and faced 2,000 arrests and brutal attacks by the police.

For decades, university education in Quebec has been seemingly free, since education is actually paid for by workers’ taxes. But the bosses’ government is determined to make a “user-pay” principle the new Quebec norm for public services, starting with university education, which will actually be an additional tax on working-class students. The government is demanding tuition fee increases of 82% over seven years. If it succeeds, it will then move on to other “user fees” for other public services, increasing the exploitation of the entire working class.

Despite the boldness and militancy of the Quebec students, illusions still run deep. Many students here and around the world are convinced that education is the ticket to a better life. While communists believe in learning for everyone, we know that a bourgeois university serves the ruling class, teaching capitalist ideas to tie students to the needs of the profit system. To make this bosses’ education more accessible to all is a reform to a system that can never serve workers’ interest. In their struggle student leaders have been willing to make concessions, allying with sellout union leaders and the “lesser-evil” Parti Québecois (PQ) to oppose the “more evil” Liberal Party that is in power. 

But no electoral circus will address the underlying crisis of capitalism that is driving austerity measures from Greece to Quebec to the U.S. The bosses worldwide seek to increase the surplus-value or profit extracted from workers by driving down both wages, benefits, and “social wages” (public services used by the working class). They redouble their efforts to do this when they are in a severe economic crisis.

Capitalism can never meet our needs. Instead of allying with a party that works within the capitalist system, whether it’s the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Socialist Party in France, or the PQ in Quebec, workers and students need to build the Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary organization with the goal of abolition of the profit system through a mass communist revolution and workers’ power on a global basis. Marx’s declaration in 1848 still rings true. “Workers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains, we have a world to win!”

Intensifying imperialist competition has saddled U.S. rulers with an impossible political mission. On the one hand, they must brutally crush their international rivals and enemies to protect their dwindling sources of profit. On the other, they must sustain their facade of law-abiding democracy to hold the ebbing loyalty of workers.

This dilemma explains why the New York Times — representing finance capital, the dominant faction of the U.S. ruling class — both praises and admonishes its presidential candidate of choice, Barack Obama. On May 30, the Times published a multi-page exposé of Obama’s assassination-by-drone campaign: “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” The following day it printed a cautionary editorial on the same subject (“Too Much Power for a President,” 5/31). 

Both the article and opinion piece portrayed Obama as an extremely capable if flawed leader. Taken together, they were more a fawning character study than a hostile critique.

U.S. capitalists face challenges to their global energy empire from al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Iranian bosses, and ultimately their Chinese and Russian rivals. In an effort to rally the rulers’ camp around Obama’s response to this challenge, the Times article depicted a fearless, remorseless warmaker who is prepared to cross any border to search out and murder U.S. foes. “[Obama] approves lethal action without hand-wringing....he has followed the metastasizing [growing] enemy into new and dangerous lands.” The newspaper also praised Obama’s “legal skills” in preserving George W. Bush’s military kangaroo court [judge, jury and executioner] and torture practices under the heading of “rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention.”

The Times spun Obama’s early threats to invade Pakistan as brilliant, farsighted militarism: “In a 2007 campaign speech...Mr. Obama had trumpeted his plan to go after terrorist bases in Pakistan — even if Pakistani leaders objected. His rivals at the time, including Mitt Romney, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton, had all pounced on what they considered a greenhorn’s campaign bluster.”

Run-up to World War III?

Unfortunately for the U.S. imperialists, however, Obama’s drone killings create other problems, a point that’s been duly noted by the Times. One is the potential for a free-for-all, drone-dominated run-up to World War III. “With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.” (See drones article, page 4.) Another is the foolish notion that drones can replace ground war. “Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. ‘It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness’” (NYT, 5/29).

The Times’ superficially critical editorial was aimed at the other segment of its readership, one that is equally critical to the imperialists’ wartime goals: the U.S. working class, and especially those workers who vote. In line with the bosses’ charade that they follow the rule of law, it focused not on Obama’s mass racist killing of Islamists, but on procedural issues: “[Obama] is a politician, subject to the pressures of re-election. No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners...without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle.” Since White House-ordered assassinations might seem open to question in an election year, the Times demands that an “outside” ruling-class authority rubber-stamp these atrocities.

The Morality of Mass Murder

To help consolidate the patriotic allegiance of its working-class readers, the Times portrayed drone-launcher Obama as a latter-day example of President John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.” (In 1955, JFK published this ghost-written book to extol eight senators who took unpopular stands for the greater good of U.S. imperialism.) After weakly censuring bomber Obama, the Times editorialized, “To his credit, Mr. Obama believes he should take moral responsibility for these decisions, and he has read the just-war theories of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” (In the name of killing infidels, both of these saints justified and endorsed “just wars” by the main expansionist forces of their day.)

The “Secret Kill List” article went so far as to characterize Obama’s top drone advisor as a modern-day saint. State Department chief counsel Harold Koh was quoted as saying, “If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude. It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

Of course, the Times, Obama and Saint Brennan have no moral problems with the long history of mass murder by U.S. capitalism, from the slaughter of Japanese civilians with atom bombs to the massacre of three million Vietnamese and, more recently, a million Iraqis.

Obama & Co.’s drone “morality” is proving a harder sell to people who actually live in their deadly robots’ sights. Liberal U.S. imperialists like George Soros are well aware of this problem. The multi-billionaire Soros owns and runs Human Rights Watch (HRW), which recently quoted a Yemeni activist: “These drone strikes are stupid policy....Every time they kill Yemeni civilians they create more hatred of America” (5/31). At the same time, these random killings breed anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in the U.S. and elsewhere.

‘Democratizing’ Drone Slaughter

Soros understands that Yemeni unrest might destabilize neighboring Saudi Arabia, the cornerstone of U.S. capitalists’ oil-dependent empire. He also understands that broader support for the U.S. cause is needed from the United Nations and the “international community.” Soros proposes that:

 To win Yemenis’ confidence, the U.S. should transfer command of all drone strikes from the CIA to the U.S. military and provide a detailed rationale of why its targeted killings in Yemen are legal under international law. It should insist on more transparency as well from the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which also reportedly conducts drone strikes in Yemen under a veil of secrecy approaching that of the CIA. That will not only give Yemenis information about U.S. strikes but also allow them to seek redress for any unlawful attacks (HRW, 5/31/12).

To that end, these preposterous proposals mimic those of the New York Times: Keep up the drone killings but make them “more democratic,” with stronger “legal justification” to placate the people being bombed.

Reject Bosses’ Elections and Racist Wars 

Capitalist “anti-war” measures inevitably mask a maneuvering toward greater slaughter. In reality, it’s the bosses’ system that propels imperialist war and wreaks untold horrors on the international working class. For the capitalists, war is no aberration. It is the logical extension of a profit system that feeds on misery and exploitation. War becomes necessary when the system’s day-to-day profiteering — from massive layoffs, social service and education cuts, and the legalized persecution of immigrants — is no longer adequate for the rulers’ needs. In turn, capitalist war escalates the racism and sexism used to justify the exploitation of hundreds of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as of black, Latino and immigrant workers in the U.S. 

For the U.S. ruling class to maintain its profits and its top-dog position worldwide, a president like Obama is ideal. While Mitt Romney is ready and willing to pursue the same murderous capitalist agenda, Obama is more capable of winning workers’ loyalty to the rulers’ class interests. The task for Progressive Labor Party, in unity with our supporters in mass organizations, is to blast through the capitalist fog of elections and lesser-evil candidates and expose the rotten system underneath.

Given the all-out ruling-class offensive, joining and building the PLP to organize a communist revolution is the only answer for the working class. It is the only means we have to free our class from history’s most vicious oppressive system. It is the only way to create a society without bosses and profits, run by and for the international working class. Join us!

BRONX, NEW  YORK, May 31 — The marshals stopped the march and instructed us to tighten our ranks and pump up the volume.  As we approached the 47th precinct the chants of “NYPD you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” and “Mayor Bloomberg you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” grew louder and louder.

“Haste, Haste, Haste” ”the  multi-racial crowd roared, calling for the racist killer cop who shot Ramarley Graham to death in his grandmother’s apartment on February 3 after kicking in the door.   The cops had no warrant and Ramarley had no weapon.

Led by Ramarley’s parents, supporters march every Thursday through the neighbourhood and to the precinct.  The parents and organizers of the march always make it clear that they are not only asking for justice for Ramarley but are commemorating the many other victims of police brutality and are fighting to prevent others from becoming victims.

At  the police station a PLP member was called up to speak.  He praised the parents for their courage in  waging such a  militant struggle, saying that they were an inspiration to the working class.  His major focus was on the role of the cops.  While some people say it’s just a few bad cops, we condemn the entire police department as protectors of the capitalist system.   Putting it in perspective he said that police around the world from the U.S., to China, to Syria  have the same role:  to suppress the workers from fighting back against their rulers.  

His speech was well received as were the many CHALLENGEs we distributed.   The last page was completely about the Ramarley Graham struggle (6/6/12). An article explained in detail how “leaders”  from the NAACP, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and the Service Employees International Union were trying to pacify the people.   They are organizing a mass march against the  “stop-and-frisk” policy but do not want to raise the issue of police brutality. Their plan calls for no speeches and a silent march!

Well, we will not be silent at the June 17th Father’s Day march or on any other day.   We call on all CHALLENGE readers to come to the weekly Thursday night vigils in the Bronx.  Raise the anti-racist struggle in your schools, unions, churches, and PTA’s.  Fight back!