DETROIT, MI — On June 22, more than 50,000 workers and youth marched here to begin celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.   The speech was written at UAW headquarters and first delivered in June 1963, at a march in Detroit to begin building for the August march. Likewise, today’s march kicked off a mass mobilization for Washington, DC on Saturday, August 24. While thousands of marchers came from outside of Michigan, the vast majority were from the Detroit area, brought by the UAW, NAACP and many churches and community organizations.
But more than celebrating the past, workers and youth were protesting the ever increasing attacks of the racist profit system. Like many cities in Michigan and the Midwest, Detroit was sucked dry by the auto bosses, who left behind mass poverty, over-crowded jails and empty shells of cities. In response to the near economic collapse of 2007, Obama bailed out the bankers and auto bosses. After the bosses got their billions, they continued the assualt on the workers: cutting wages in half, closed plants, traded guaranteed pensions for stock market-driven 401ks, cut healthcare benefits and got five-year no-strike contracts. The racist character of these attacks was evident to the largely black workforce.
In sum, the bankers and bosses got billions, the workers and the cities got nothing! Detroit is facing bankruptcy, massive school closings and cuts in all essential city services. The racist Governor placed Detroit under an Emergency Manager, who has the power to open or break every city contract, sell off any city asset and cut pensions of retired city workers, leaving the elected mayor and city council powerless. Detroit is just the latest as Flint, Pontiac, St. Joseph and every majority black city in Michigan except Jackson, has been placed under an Emergency Manager, basically disenfranchising millions of mostly black workers. This has since been compounded by the recent gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. While these decisions are racist, voting in the bosses electoral system will not end racist oppression.
The preachers, politicians and union leaders will use the racist Supreme Court ruling to mobilize all out for the August 24 March on Washington, with their sights set on the Congressional elections of 2014. Here in Michigan, the UAW & Co. are also aiming at the Governor’s election, in hopes of overturning the state Right to Work law. This poses a great challenge for the revolutionary communist movement. On the one hand, we will have to fight alongside workers and youth who will try to overturn the racist Supreme Court decision. At the same time, we will have to expose the dead-end nature of voting and win people to the need for mass violence and building a mass PLP to overthrow the racist billionaires. It is in struggles like these that we will earn the right to lead the working class to power.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 — Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) workers struck today and shut the rail system tight. They’re demanding a 23 percent wage hike while the bosses want workers to pay more for their healthcare and pensions. Oakland City workers also had a one-day strike, shutting Oakland’s downtown (see photo). Bart carries over 400,000 people daily and mainly serves to bring the workforce from outlying areas to Wall Street West — corporations, banks, government offices, retail stores and education buildings concentrated in downtown San Francisco.
Bart is part of eight major unionized transit systems in the Bay Area. Its workers belong to Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555. AC transit workers’ contract (East Bay bus system, ATU Local 192) expired the same day as Bart. So far the leadership of Local 192 and the ATU International have succeeded in dampening the sentiment of many AC workers to strike in solidarity and for their own issues.
Corporate think tanks let the cat out of the bag when they estimated the strike would cost $73 million a day in lost worker productivity. PLP members point to this as a real example of the potential of workers’ power and the bosses’ need of workers’ labor for their profits.
PLP members are building transit solidarity, particularity at AC Transit and MUNI (San Francisco public transit), where we have a long history of organizing. We’re circulating a solidarity pledge for passengers and workers.
Some workers, have taken matters into their own hands by calling in sick, refusing to do extra service or overtime. In contrast, the union leadership has refused to organize anything, leaving members to their own individual decisions. Some passenger groups and non-profits have come forward to unite with transit workers against  fare hikes and service cuts. (More next issue.)

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL, June 30 — Since mid-June hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in Brazil’s main streets, many inspired by the recent rebellions in Turkey and Egypt. The trigger was a bus and metro fare hike of US25¢ but (as in Turkey) the overall causes are the ever-growing worldwide capitalist crisis. A third of the population of this “emergent world power” lives in extreme poverty.
Feeding the flames of the rebellion, the government is wasting more than 12 million dollars on the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. “We don’t need the World Cup,” reads a banner in a Sao Paulo march. “We need money for hospitals and education.”
When the communist movement advances anywhere, when we fight  the bosses — transit workers in Washington, Oakland and Los Angeles, or the textile workers in El Salvador, Mexico and Bangladesh, or against racist police brutality murdering our youth in New York — the workers and youth worldwide draw important lessons.
After weeks of protests in Brazil’s main cities, thousands of people continue to take to the street demanding better social services. After the new fare hikes were rescinded, new demands have emerged. The main struggle now is against the military and political repression of the working class, especially the evictions of workers because of the construction of the stadiums, sports centers and related infrastructures.
Mass Organization
Workers and students are tired of the pseudo-radical opportunist speeches of the Worker’s Party (PT) which claims to represent them. They’ve taken to the streets against the insufferable exploitation and repression heaped upon them during this last decade by the so-called leftist government led by Lula and now by Dilma Rousseff under which the rich have become richer.
This is the world’s eighth largest economic power, produced by increased worker exploitation while in the favelas (slums) poverty grows, children are trained by mafia gangs, opportunities for the unemployed are lacking and there’s no access to health services or education. As PLP maintains, the tiny reforms of the Brazilian “left” won’t change the real situation for workers.
The creation in 2005 of the Free Fare Movement (MPL) during the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre began as a small group of a few hundred but has grown into the tens of thousands. They are no longer willing to put up with hunger and terrible living conditions but are willing to fight. In many places these battles have been guided by small organizations with specific aims such as obtaining food from big supermarkets that have been looted, disobeying the orders of the politicians.
On June 25, the Homeless Workers and Free Fair Movements marched on the outskirts of Sao Paulo for demilitarization and against police violence; for control over rents; for better healthcare and education services and free public transportation. The rebelliousness has moved quite rapidly.
Fascist Cops Attack Protests
Brazil’s military and police have been trained by MINUSTAH, the UN troops in Haiti, for these kinds of events. CHALLENGE (6/13/2012) reported these troop actions when more than 10,000 people had gone into the streets, at that time the biggest mobilization achieved by the MPL here. The cops jailed 234 protesters, saying it was a crime to carry vinegar, which combats the effects of tear gas. Over 100 people were injured — including many who had nothing to do with the protest — on orders of the “left” to put down the protest.
As always, the media — the TV channel Globo and the newspaper Folha — depicted the protesters as bandits and called on the cops to repress them.
President Rousseff admitted the inferior quality of public services and cynically announced a “national pact” with congressmen, judges, mayors and governors to improve the schools and hospitals. She repeated her plan to bring in foreign doctors and repeated her proposal — already dismissed by Parliament — of investing 100% of the profits of the new oil fields in education.
Communism, Yes! ‘Democracy’ No!
Brazil has been praised as an economic success and a stable democracy, what presidents Lula and Rousseff called socialism. Many in Latin America view them as models. But many youth and workers in Brazil now see they have no freedom, with their job opportunities, education and health continuing to worsen. The capitalist attacks on workers are brutal, no matter who is in power. They’re all enemies of our class. Their democracy hides their capitalist dictatorship. By participating in elections, we elect our own executioners. They name the candidates, all of whom represent the bosses.
We need to aggressively organize our working-class youth so they don’t become the soldiers of the imperialist armies. We, the workers, don’t need a World Cup, new stadiums, “heroes” who reap millions while we starve to death. They are capitalist pawns who help maintain their system. We need to mobilize our Party for a communist revolution, distribute our paper to the masses and use study groups to win all these potential workers. We must direct this anger against the profit system and organize a communist world.

One year. And what is a year? A year is something that can be added on, but can never be taken away… A year is that nervous craving to do your good job and to draw down your good pay, and to join your good union… And a year of work is three hundred and sixty-four, or –five, or –six days of the run, the hurry, the walking, the bouncing, and the jumping up and down, the arguments, fights, the liquor brawls, hangovers, headaches, and all.

Such is the beautifully evocative earthy prose of House of Earth, Woody Guthrie’s only novel. Written in 1947 by the radical organizer, poet, singer, and songwriter, just published now. Guthrie writes of one young hardworking family — Tike and Ella Mae Hamlin — during the Depression and their struggle to make a living off the land, keep body and soul together and have a child in a shack that can barely stand up to the beating of the Texas Panhandle. He paints a sympathetic but clear-eyed and honest portrayal of working people — real people, not the noble, but often one-dimensional, portrayals of workers that can be found in some other works, or the sneering condescension George Orwell shows toward the simplistic “proles” in 1984.
The Hamlins rent a rickety house on decent farmland, but it’s an endless struggle to keep the crops coming up and food on the table, especially with their first child on the way and the bank breathing down their necks. Tike’s dream is an adobe house. Not the cheap wooden houses built by the tight-fisted landowners that leak and creak and rattle in the wind, but a mud brick house literally made of earth that stands up to the climate and can’t be blown down, burned down, or repossessed by the bank. Tike sends away for a pamphlet from the government on how to build one, and he keeps it in his pocket at all times, almost like a latter-day bible, drawing an almost religious hope from his goal of living in an earthen house.
It’s a book about struggle, but not a book about strikes and picket lines. This is the day-to-day struggle to raise kids, stay fed, clothed, housed and sane with only the barest of tools to make it happen. But most workers, even in the 1930s, didn’t spend the majority of their time organizing, however heroic the efforts of the Communist Party and other organizers in fighting the ravages of capitalism. It was mostly a constant struggle just to hold on, even with faith in a dream like an adobe house. It’s hard to know if Guthrie really thought that was a solution, or was just using the vision to show that even something as basic as a solid roof is unattainable under capitalism, because if it doesn’t generate profits, it doesn’t get built.
As the son of hardscrabble Oklahoma farmers, Guthrie wasn’t at all afraid to show both the strengths and flaws in his characters, from the diligent workers to their sometimes not-so-diligent neighbors, their tenderness and their less admirable traits, like Tike’s occasional sexism. They need each other to survive. Ella Mae works every bit as hard, if not harder, than Tike, acting as the real anchor to the family. It’s to Guthrie’s credit, incredibly for a book written over 65 years ago, that he doesn’t shy away from straightforward dealings of relationships and sexual relations between a working-class man and wife as a real part of their life on the plains.
Aside from their conversations, sex, occasional interactions with the neighbors, and a very faulty radio, there’s not a lot to distract from the constant work. But the lyrical and honest descriptions of life on the farm during the Depression, of life in general, the nuances of the characters and the tense, desperate scenes of childbirth on the open plains in the midst of a blizzard are gripping. They take the place of the more elaborate stories and plots in other fiction. For the most part, Tike and Ella Mae don’t succumb to defeatism. But that, too, is a constant effort, with the ever-present threat of foreclosure a dark cloud over them and thousands of others, no matter how bright the real sky might be.
For communists and anyone who opposes the profit system, this is an important book, and well worth reading and discussing. It’s a great read, but that’s not the point — it’s best used to discuss the depictions of working-class people and life, their strengths and weaknesses, and the choices — however limited — people without money make under capitalism. As so graphically portrayed in House of Earth, the dream of something as basic as a house of earth will remain just that, a dream, as long as the bankers own the land, until we take it away and return it to the people who work it.