JOLIET, IL, May 19 — About 800 Caterpillar (CAT) workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 851, struck at 12:01 a.m., May Day morning, after rejecting a proposed six-year contract that includes pay cuts and almost doubled healthcare costs. CAT made $1.5 billion in first-quarter profits.

“You can only bend people so much until they can’t take it anymore,” said one striker. “Put it this way,” said another. “Under their proposed contract, I wouldn’t be able to afford to take my kid to the doctor.” 

CAT wants to determine starting wages for second-tier new hires on a “market-based” formula allowing the company to pay even less than the current $13/hour. CAT also wants to eliminate guaranteed healthcare for current retirees, key seniority provisions and put workers on unpredictable schedules with shifts that change every week.

Despite increasing profits by 44 percent over last year, CAT is stepping up attacks on its international work force. And while the workers have taken a bold a step by walking out, they should have no confidence in the pro-capitalist union leadership.

   • In January, CAT locked out 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers union at a locomotive facility in London, Ontario, after they refused to accept a 50 percent wage cut. CAT then closed the plant and moved the work to a non-union plant in Indiana. 

   • Last year, 840 IAM members at a Honeywell plant in Kansas City and almost 200 IAM union members at Manitowoc Cranes in Wisconsin struck against concessionary contracts. After a few weeks, both strikes collapsed in the face of scabs, and then strikers, crossing the picket lines. 

Similar things could be happening here. It underlines the need for revolutionary communist leadership, with the goal of leading the workers to power to abolish wage slavery, as opposed to hanging on at any cost to keep the dues money rolling in.

The current International leadership is mainly concerned with making sure the bosses are profit-healthy and then, at best, hoping workers can “share” in the profits. These pro-capitalist union hacks are looking out for “their” country, “their” company and “their” factory, and then “their” workers. While it works for the bosses, it’s a dismal failure for the workers. 

Red leadership would have shut CAT down internationally to keep the Ontario plant open.  And while the whole U.S. labor movement has been focused on Wisconsin for two years, it did not defend the 200 Manitowoc Cranes strikers in that state, even as they gathered one million signatures to recall Governor Walker.

These union sellouts are marching the working class into the bosses’ electoral circus, away from sharpening the class struggle and supporting striking workers. We have our work cut out for us.

Without the question you can’t think at all. “If you had an island to work with, how would you create a communist society?” This question and twenty others like it were asked by a young immigrant worker in our study group. Of course it made all the comrades think furiously. We’re so caught up in the daily political work that it takes a fresh eye sometimes to make us see anew our own political vision. 

This worker was convinced, for example, that socialism in East Germany was inferior in productivity and drive to capitalism in West Germany, that the capitalist West had to rescue the backward East when they reunited the country. How could we explain that, as communists? He agreed that capitalist society did NOT work. But didn’t the German example mean that for a communist society to work we had to take some of the things capitalism is good at and use them to build communism? Such as motivating people by letting them get ahead or by technological innovation? We went at that one for a while. 

We got tangled up about socialism because when we criticized socialism as practiced in the USSR, China and Cuba, and advocated moving directly to communism, he was confused. He had to ask us several times, what was the difference? Socialism, communism, which was which? Could we show him an example of communism the way we meant it? 

We realized that socialism, in the sense of the USSR, China, and Cuba, is communism to most people because it is what communists built. They were communists, the only ones who ever won state power, and as communists they built socialism with unequal wages and commodities and markets held over from capitalism. On our theoretical communist island we would have none of those things. Communists made great steps forward, before it all got reversed. 

So part of our discussion was in fact DEFENDING what our communist predecessors had built, before we could move on to a criticism of how their best efforts fell short, how their very advances revealed gaps in the communist theory they used. If we start with the criticisms and not the defense we confuse everybody. Our criticisms make more sense after we have showed the value of the steps socialist societies took to abolish capitalism. We realized that this is what had angered a Caribbean member of the study group, who loved the Cuban revolution and thought our criticisms slighted it, so much so that he left.

Another productive question was, “If I have a plot of land to feed my family, and the communist state comes along and says, ‘We have to take your land to make a collective farm which will be better for everyone,’ why would I accept that? I have to feed my own family first.” One thing we realized in answering is that the question comes from the fact that capitalist society forces every one of us into this kind of defensive individualism — it’s true that under capitalism you have to feed your own family or they starve. But collective, egalitarian communist society means that no one starves, no one is left to themselves to fight off everyone else as competitors for scarce resources. 

And so it went. The new worker had a lot to think about and veteran comrades went home buzzing with fresh thought about some of the most difficult and most valuable questions humanity has ever asked itself. Without the question, you can’t think at all. He’ll probably have twenty more for us on May Day. 

A lover of study groups

FORT WORTH, TEXAS, May 19 — A strike by 3,600 Lockheed Martin workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 776, is entering its third week. The workers make F-35 and F-16 fighter jets, and are striking against healthcare and pension cuts. Lockheed Martin had $17.34 billion in federal contracts in 2010, making it the largest U.S. defense contractor. The company is threatening to “implement our contingency plan” to meet their blood-soaked commitments.

The war-makers’ “last, best and final offer” would force workers to pay much higher healthcare costs and eliminate defined-benefit pensions for new hires. These two issues have been at the core of practically every union contract, public and private, for more than a decade, regardless of the employers’ financial condition. 

The International’s pro-capitalist union leaders generally agree to relieve the bosses of health care costs and are campaigning either for Obamacare or single-payer coverage. This was a central part of the auto union’s bailout contracts with GM, Ford and Chrysler. PLP fights to eliminate the bosses and their racist profit system altogether, with communist revolution. Then we will all contribute to — and share in — a society that exists to meet the needs of the international working class.

Workers here went on strike in 2000 and 2003 to resist concessions. A local leader said, “Every three years they want to come and take some other benefit. Everyone is sick and tired of it. These folks are prepared to be on strike for a long time.” 

This strike, like the one against Caterpillar (see below) could be a sign that the class struggle is heating up. And such strikes show industrial workers’ potential power to not just fight for economic demands, but to cripple the imperialist war-makers.

If workers are won to that goal, they could paralyze the bosses’ slaughter of our sisters and brothers worldwide, in the interests of the international working class. Lockheed’s warplanes are used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Caterpillar’s bulldozers demolish workers’ homes in Palestine and erect Israel’s apartheid wall.

Defeating these warmakers won’t be realized without the building of a mass communist PLP and a raging debate among millions of workers. In that debate, combined with class struggle, PL’ers can win the working class to a complete overthrow of the profit system that mires our class in exploitation and perpetual imperialist wars.

As Mockingjay, the third book of the Hunger Games trilogy, begins, Katniss sees the destruction of her home district and is taken to the underground District 13. The rulers of Panem had long treated the complete destruction of District 13 as an example of what would happen to any who rebelled. 

District 13 had long ago been part of Panem rulers’ nuclear weapons program. District 13’s survivors had trained the weapons on the Capitol and agreed to “play dead in exchange for being left alone.” Katniss learns that the offspring of survivors of that fight 75 years ago were now organizing and leading the rebellion against Panem’s fascist rulers. 

District 13 has some aspects of communist egalitarian life. All, including leaders, share the limited resources available and all share in work and production. This collective life and the nuclear standoff hint at a parallel to the former socialist Soviet Union — maybe suggesting that it is communists who can be relied on to lead the struggle.

The author paints an extremely negative picture of life in District 13 which mirrors the portrayal of the Soviet Union and socialist China in capitalist media. Everyone in District 13 wears a uniform, waits in line for tasteless meals and follows strict schedules. District 13 is joyless and regimented. Leaders may share food and clothing, but decision-making and power is only for the elite. Even a small deviation from the mechanical sharing is met by violent punishment instead of collective and comradely struggle. 

While Katniss often thinks only about the needs of her own family and friends, she also sees the strength of district 13’s discipline in a fight against the Capitol and agrees to be the “mockingjay” symbol of the revolt. Most of Mockingjay is the story of the rebellion. Unfortunately it more often than not is a story that emphasizes Katniss’s propaganda triumphs and bravery rather than the masses of workers who are really the only force that could (and do) defeat the Panem rulers’ fascist forces. 

In the end Katniss is matched against Panem’s President Snow in an individual fight that undercuts earlier descriptions of a united workers’ revolution. At the same time, the leader of District 13 is increasingly portrayed as selfish and obsessed with power. In the end even Katniss is often portrayed as cold and heartless.

This pushes the same cynical ideas the capitalist media offer workers all the time: even if workers rebel and win, nothing will really ever change. At the end of the book, children are massacred and Katniss comes to believe that the rebellion leaders (including her friends) are responsible for tactics as brutal and immoral as those of the Capitol rulers.

Then the new rulers propose a Hunger Games fight to the death for the children of the old rulers. To gain revenge for the death of her sister in the rebellion, Katniss gives her approval. Finally, Katniss takes individual action to assassinate the leader of the rebellion instead of relying on the collective of former tributes who might have prevented the new Hunger Games. The epilogue of the story proposes that a new, milder leader has taken over and the system has been reformed. However, the actions required to create this new happy ending are not portrayed. 

The author’s analysis of the horrors of fascism is strong and compelling, but she cannot really picture or describe what the solution would be. The anti-communism most workers are taught in school shows clearly in the last book, where the communist-like society of District 13 is eventually revealed as just as bad as fascism. Her portrayal of strong female characters reveals an anti-sexist attitude, but individualism rather than collectivity is the defining trait of the “heroic” Katniss.

Without a communist perspective, Hunger Games has no real alternative and just leaves the reader with the defeatist idea that nothing will ever change. As communists we do have a vision where workers can rule society in a new way that smashes the capitalist state of racism, sexism, exploitation and endless wars for profit. These are the ideas we have to present to readers of the Hunger Games: join with us, we have a world to win.