OAKLAND, CA., December 13 — Thousands of Occupiers, confronted by police in riot gear, shut or disrupted ports from Anchorage, Alaska, to Southern Ca., highlighting economic inequality and high unemployment.

Thousands of pickets chanting “Whose ports? Our Ports!” forced the closing of four shipping terminals here. Hundreds shut two of Portland’s four main terminals. Seattle cops used “flash-bang” percussion grenades against protestors blocking the port entrance, arresting 11.

Pickets in Longview, Wash., demonstrated in solidarity with longshoremen fighting EGT Investment over the latter’s takeover of their jobs. They were also protesting Goldman-Sachs which owns a stake in the largest cargo terminal operator, SSA Marine. Other demonstrations occurred as far south as Long Beach, CA. and as far north as Vancouver, Canada and Anchorage, Alaska.

Although the longshore union refused to support the actions, an Oakland docker said “the rank and file have spoken today by not crossing the lines.”

Reuters reported (12/13) that in Oakland, “Two longshoremen outside the gate said they would refuse to cross the picket lines to get to their jobs and assumed others would follow suit” (Sacramento Bee 12/13).

Doug Seaman, a 35-year-old unemployed construction worker, told the San Francisco Chronicle (12/12), “We need to make the public aware that Wall Street’s tentacles have infiltrated every facet of our lives.”

“Infusing his speech with the type of populist language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Mr. Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class” (NY Times, 12/6/11).

On December 6, the 101st anniversary of arch-imperialist president Teddy Roosevelt’s (TR) famous speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Barack Obama returned to the town in an attempt to steer the momentum of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to serve U.S. capitalists’ war needs.

TR supposedly had come to Osawatomie to commemorate John Brown’s heroic 1856 anti-slavery battle there (see box). But in reality, like Obama and other politicians now trying to mislead OWS, Roosevelt sought to channel workers’ demands for equality into all-class unity to support imperialist wars. With U.S. rulers seeking to expand beyond their 1898 conquests of former Spanish territories (including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines), he called for a “New Nationalism,” the patriotic ideology that would help push the U.S. into World War I five years later. At the same time, he created a template for Italy’s Fascists and Germany’s Nazis: a highly centralized and regulatory capitalist government that can control all classes, and the propaganda that service to such a state is for the greatest good.

TR aimed to reform capitalism. He ran for president on the so-called Progressive Party” ticket, and became known as a “trustbuster” for wanting to discipline the ruling class and save the system from its own excesses. Meanwhile, he popularized his case for imperialist aggression with a famous saying: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

A century later, Obama is working overtime to revive TR’s deadly pronouncements. Here are some Rooseveltian sound bites that Obama has embraced:

Equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest [read “military”—ed.] service of which he is capable.

I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us abroad that respect which is the surest guaranty of peace.

[I] ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole.

By championing the “national interest,” Roosevelt was hiding the fact that the government’s job is to protect the interests of those who control society, namely the capitalist bosses, both in the U.S. and abroad. Throughout the world, local bosses in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have used nationalism to spur workers to oust imperialist powers and “liberate” former colonial countries. Then the local capitalists take their turn in exploiting workers for profit, a common thread in this year’s “Arab Spring.”

The Patriotic ‘Middle Class’

Obama is straining to preserve the concept of a patriotic “middle class,” which serves to deaden class conflict and as a buffer between rulers and most workers. In imperialist economies thriving off colonial mega-profits, bosses can  be forced to respond to class struggle by conceding a higher standard of living for the home country’s working class. The bosses then cite these workers as a new “middle” class (see box below).

But this phenomenon, described by Karl Marx 150 years ago, can last only as long as the imperialist nation’s ability to dominate less-developed countries and super-exploit their workers.  In the U.S., huge sections of workers in auto, steel, railroads, manufacturing and mines have lost the jobs and living standards that they’d won through militant, communist-led class struggle. U.S. bosses, no longer in a position to afford these extra crumbs for a “middle class,” due to imperialist competition, have neutralized the unions and now pay a newly hired auto worker half of what the old contracts called for.

Racism is a big part of this ruling class offensive. After centuries of super-exploitation of black workers, from slavery through post-war Jim Crow, the rulers now offer middle-class benefits to some black bosses and professionals, while extorting super-profits from the overwhelming majority of black workers, along with Latinos and immigrants. At the same time, the capitalists have used the Great Recession to steal back benefits from black workers and others that were won through long struggle. The black workers themselves, whose ‘60s rebellions won those higher-paying jobs, began to be laid off in the recession of the early 1980s. As proof that racism hurts all workers, now white auto workers are suffering the same fate. (See page 4 on unemployment.)

Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin who greatly admired TR, held out the promise of potential prosperity — later supported by full employment in war plants — to mobilize workers for World War II.  But the social contract over which FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presided, the so-called “American way of life,” has crashed..

Obama acknowledged as much in Kansas: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.” The president’s myth-spinning about an improving economy flies in the face of economists’ warnings that today’s mass joblessness will last for years — and that many of these unemployed may never get another job.

Populist Fascism

To deal with these domestic crises, Obama has pounced on the working class by sustaining many of Bush’s policies. Obama’s administration has detained and deported record numbers of undocumented immigrant workers, while pushing for a “Dream Act” that would send tens of thousands of immigrant youth into imperialist wars. The Obama Justice Department has endorsed military tribunals and enforces the most oppressive provisions of the Patriot Act, which Obama extended earlier this year. He bailed out the big banks with workers’ money while allowing millions of foreclosures. His federally backed bankruptcy plan forced workers at GM and Chrysler to accept a ban on strikes. And even as he spouted empty phrases about “democracy” and “freedom” for workers abroad, Obama imposed a wage freeze on hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the U.S.

We should make no mistake. Obama’s goal, like TR’s, is not to better the lot of workers, but to lead them to support an imperialist solution to a capitalist crisis. One such solution from the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies involves “major U.S. attacks on military and civilian targets” in Iran, specifically up to 2,500 cruise missiles and strike sorties that “hit all suspect facilities for nuclear...targets including universities” (CSIS, 11/28/11).

For the U.S. rulers whom Obama serves, this aggression could lead to a mobilization for a larger invasion in the Middle East as the U.S. military expands its presence in the region, adding tens of thousands of troops in countries surrounding Iran. Another would be an intensifying conflict with Iran’s primary enabler: China, the U.S. capitalists’ main strategic foe.

For the international working class, the only real solution to the misery wrought by the profit system is to get rid of it altogether with communist revolution. This is PLP’s goal in immersing ourselves in workers’ class struggles. Our goal is to win our class to the communist ideas that will free us from the hell of capitalism.J

Myth of the ’Middle Class’

Obama, alongside his political buddies and the bosses’ media, constantly invoke the mythological “middle class” while never mentioning the working class. They are trying to convince workers who earn — or who aspire to earn — $50,000 or $75,000 a year that they are not workers. They want to hide the reality of a working class with its antagonistic relationship with an opposing, parasitic ruling class. The latter controls the means of production and reaps profits from exploiting worker’s labor power, the source of all value. Capitalists own; workers create.

Many workers’ struggles may have won incomes that enable them to afford a home, a car and a college education for their children, but they have no security under capitalism. Come the next crisis of overproduction and the next wave of mass unemployment, these higher-earning workers promptly get laid off and made homeless. Their “middle-class” life goes up in smoke. One’s class is not determined by income, but rather by the source of that income.

Opportunist-in-Chief ‘Forgets’ Anti-Racist Hero John Brown

Barack Obama spat on our class’s militant, anti-racist history by excluding John Brown from his December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was there, in 1856, that the great abolitionist led thirty-eight fighters, black and white, to counterattack 250 pro-slavery troops and kill twenty of them. Brown’s boldness at Osawatomie, Harpers Ferry and elsewhere helped encourage millions to take up arms against human bondage. 

At Osawatomie, Brown wrote, “There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for.” But the United States’ first black president, whose own wife has slave ancestors, omitted John Brown because Obama understands that he’s on the other side. Far from fighting against oppression, the president wages war to heighten capitalist exploitation of workers around the globe.

Just before Virginia’s pro-slavery forces hanged him in 1859, after years of guerilla warfare, Brown acknowledged, “I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Brown was right. The main scourge attacking the working class today is imperialist war and its racist, fascist preparations. To rid ourselves of capitalism’s endless profit wars, we will need to transform the demonstrated anger of OWS into militant action and a long-term plan toward communist revolution.

LOS ANGELES, November 30 — Over 2,000 workers converged on LA’s City Hall on November 27, anticipating the police raid to remove the Occupy encampment. PLP mobilized a group of about 20 students and workers to show solidarity and help organize a defense of the camp. In the hours leading up to the midnight deadline, the PL group distributed 100 CHALLENGES and organized a picket line chanting, “The workers united will never be defeated” and “Whose streets? Our streets.”

As midnight neared, PL led the picket into the streets, defying the police who told the PL’er on the bullhorn leading the march to get back on the sidewalk. Eventually, what was a relatively small picket turned into several hundred protestors, taking over a street intersection next to the main Occupy encampment on the south lawn of City Hall.

Many expected a confrontation with the LAPD that night. However, it was not until the following night that the kkkops raided the camp, overwhelming the couple of hundred occupiers with a force of 1,400 cops. Under orders from the “progressive” LA Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the cops utilized their best “community policing” techniques to avoid an all-out confrontation with the occupiers.

Part of the plan included pre-selecting which media outlets would be allowed to participate. This was important for the LAPD and the Mayor since they were keen on not letting the media cover the brutality of the police in their violent arrests of occupiers who refused to leave the encampment. The media also made no mention of the skirmishes between racist cops and protestors in the streets near City Hall when the occupiers were trying to disrupt the police operation.

The media did, however, glorify the LAPD’s military-style attack to clear the encampment. Besides mobilizing over 1,000 cops, the LAPD established a police command and processing center at Dodger Stadium for potential arrestees. They also turned dozens of MTA buses into police buses in which they transported close to 300 arrested occupiers. The following day Mayor Villaraigosa celebrated the efficiency of this fascist operation, lauding the “restrained” police behavior.

Despite the clearing of the Occupy encampment, PL’s participation in the nights of the police operation showed the potential leading role a disciplined organization can play in militant struggle. The next step is to transform this militancy into class struggle in our workplaces and campuses around our vision of revolutionary communism.

NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — Today the City University of New York (CUNY) trustees outdid themselves in fascist absurdity. They locked all Baruch College students, faculty, and other workers out of their own school so that they — bankers and ruling-class stooges appointed by the mayor and governor — could impose a racist 33% tuition hike on the mostly black and Latino and immigrant students.

The events of the previous Monday triggered the lock-down. On November 21, a militant group of 500 students arrived at the “public” meeting where the CEOs and other bosses that make up the Board of Trustees (BoT) supposedly listen to testimonies from the community. This is another capitalist lie. The decision had already been made.

Nevertheless, students and workers gathered, ready to make the BoT listen to them. CUNY responded with baton-wielding “public safety officers” and NYPD cops. Students were sitting in the lobby chanting, “Occupy the Lobby!” The cops attacked, swinging their batons wildly. In discussion during and after the event, PL’ers stressed that this was, and is always, the role of the kkkops: to terrorize workers, especially black, Latino and women workers, into submission.

We were not intimidated, and returned today for the BoT to officially vote on their racist plan. So angry were students and workers over last week’s cop-attack that CUNY bosses had to shut down the entire college to hold this meeting!  Like slave-owners whose greatest fear was the slave revolt, the bosses today acted out of fear for they could not trust anyone at Baruch. More than 15 students were arrested, including one student whom the cops sexually harassed.

With their state power on full display, they could lock us out. One professor got into the meeting and disrupted it with a protest against police brutality. Though he was thrown out of the room, they could not drown out the more than 1,000 protesters outside, chanting “Get up!  Get down!  There’s revolution in this town!” and  “Education is a right! Fight! Fight!  Fight!” The multiracial crowd was a mix of older, more organized union workers and the younger, less organized, angry students taking the streets and challenging the cops.

The union workers deferred to the students’ leadership and stopped their moving picket line. The students then led the whole crowd in a march around the neighborhood and back to the front doors, in time to yell “Shame!” at a few last trustees scuttling out of the building. The last speech given using the human-mike was a student thank-you to their worker-allies for being there to the end.

Where does this leave us, in a town that is somewhat rebellious but far from revolution?  We need a deeper understanding of the class system to really “get up, get down” with revolution. The capitalist university is not, as one sign wished, “a free speech zone,” but an ideological apparatus carefully tailored to reproduce the system. Inequality is not caused by unfair taxation but by the exploitation of labor. Capitalism is not an “economic” system fixable by a  “political” electoral process or the protest of a militant crowd. It is a political economic system where the exploitation of labor is guaranteed by an armed, vicious, racist dictatorship of capitalists. The ruling class not only owns the means of production but also owns the cops, the army, the laws, the courts, the judges, the politicians and parties, the media, the schools, and the churches.

There will be a communist revolution in this town and every town. But when there is, the prophetic, anarchic feelings of youthful revolt now surging in the Occupy movement will have had to become the cold rage of a conscious and fully organized working class. Led by PLP, we must be ready to smash the capitalist system and take state power. Self-critically, although the Party, CHALLENGE and revolutionary politics were present today, it was not nearly enough. We too have a tough transformation to make to become the Party that our class needs and our history demands. And we will.