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Pakistan: Workers Enraged over Bosses’ Nationalist Killing Machine
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- 22 June 2012 297 hits
The hell of capitalism is intensifying for the working class of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are demonstrating in the streets every day, opposing the bosses’ stranglehold on their lives. They are struggling against massive unemployment which has risen 43 percent since 1999. About 75% of the country’s population of 180 million — 6th largest on earth — earns no more than $2 a day. While Pakistan has the 7th largest standing army in the world and a nuclear arsenal, 110 million people are hard-pressed to even eat two meals a day.
Of its ten million industrial workers, half are controlled by fake, essentially company unions, puppets of the bosses while the other half are excluded from worker-led unions altogether. Eighteen million farm workers are completely unorganized. Child labor is spreading. There is no electricity from 14 to 22 hours a day and no natural gas for two to three days a week.
Industries are closing down and fleeing to even lower-wage levels in Bangladesh. Inflationary prices of essential commodities have climbed from between 300 to 500 percent.
Target Women
Women, who comprise half the population, are targeted for killing in the name of “honor” by the bosses’ religious and cultural customs and face acid attacks, torture, gang rape, forced marriages and forced prostitution. Fifty percent are physically abused, 15 percent sexually and 90 percent psychologically.
Kiln workers (brick producers) have no rights at all. Every family member is forced to work 12 to 18 hours a day and suffer virtual slavery, sold by one owner to another.
Whenever workers strike against many of these horrific conditions, to divert their struggle, the bosses raise non-issues such as “national security” or opening or closing NATO supply routes, as well as divide workers on a nationalist basis.
Recently the government began a police operation, supposedly against target killers, gang warriors and ethnic/religious/nationalist terrorists. But they started it in Liyari, a poor working-class neighborhood. This reign of terror continued for ten days but the people fought back, strongly resisting the police oppression, bringing the operation to a halt. Now the police cannot even enter the neighborhood.
Bosses Profit on Workers’ Backs
The Pakistani economy is crumbling and is becoming increasingly dependent on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the USAID and Coalition Support Fund to run its murderous capitalist system. Its domestic debt is in the hundreds of billions, has the lowest foreign investment in 60 years and the highest inflation rates, all leading to Pakistan’s ruling class trying to sustain itself by intensifying the exploitation of the working class. Workers are forced to sell their children and body organs to escape a life of hunger and poverty and unfortunately many are driven to suicide.
Corruption, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and nepotism prevail on the soil of Pakistan while the bosses push a federal budget that only benefits the rich. A 20 percent “increase” in public-sector salaries is a wage-cut in the teeth of 300 percent inflation. It’s even worse for private-sector workers who do not even receive the government-announced minimum wage.
A Dictatorship of the Ruling Class
Various bosses’ electoral parties vie for power in order to grab more profit for each. Their elections use the working masses in the name of democracy but actually establish a dictatorship of the ruling class that exploits the working class even more vigorously. In several provinces the bosses are using nationalism as a major tool to divide our class in order to prevent rebellion:
• Baluchistan — The rulers provoked an insurgency in which thousands of workers have been killed and/or “disappeared. This province is Pakistan’s largest in area, has immense resources and is of great geo-strategic importance for international imperialists, sharing borders with Iran and Afghanistan and has a newly built port. Since the fundamentalists’ presence is relatively low and the majority of people have a progressive outlook, the bosses are fueling the fire of nationalism to divide them.
• Punjab — Pakistan’s most populous province will be divided by creating a new Saraiki province which has large numbers of extremist and fundamentalist groups, leading to even more destruction and chaos and badly affecting the country’s crumbling economy.
• Sindh — This is Pakistan’s second largest in population. In the last five months, 880 people have been killed in Karachi, the province’s largest city. This is an outgrowth of rivalry between various ruling political parties that are trying to seize control of different parts of the city. They represent militant groups involved in land-grabbing, weapons dealing, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and ransom.
These bosses provoked a war between the Sindhi and Urdu-speaking populations. Nationalist parties are killing each other’s working-class activists. Many are losing their lives in an unholy combat between different ethnic groups. Karachi is a port city used by NATO to ship supplies. Interestingly, 7,000 containers have disappeared here.
• Kyber Pukhtoonkhawa — Nationalism is at the root of fighting between two large ethnic groups, the Pukhtoons and Hazarawals. It suffers from terrorist attacks as well as U.S. drone bombings. The province borders Afghanistan and China and is a battleground for the “war against terror.” It is a safe haven for various terrorist groups fighting for or against U.S. imperialism, especially in the FATA territory.
Pakistan has fast become a laboratory for nationalism, racism, fundamentalism and sexism, the results of which can be applied worldwide. But it also provides increasing opportunities to build a base for PLP everywhere — in the factories, farms, offices, campuses, villages, kilns, among women and wage workers. The Party is striving to become more and more involved in class struggles in these areas, organizing PL clubs.
Amid this poverty, injustice, exploitation, mass unemployment and gender discrimination, only a PLP-led international communist revolution can free the working class from these capitalist evils.
OAKLAND CALIFORNIA, June 18 — PL’ers along with parents, teachers, students and Occupy Oakland Education have been fighting the closing of five Oakland elementary schools that serve mainly black and Latino youths. We’re currently occupying Lakeview Elementary in Oakland and are running a free summer school, “The People’s School.”
The bosses already decided the fate of the schools. Lakeview Elementary is scheduled to be transformed into Administrative Offices. Another will become a charter school, one is being leased to neighboring Emeryville, (for revenue) and the other three will close, pushing their students elsewhere creating even more overcrowding.
In discussions with people, we are working to make communist ideas the topic of conversation. (More next issue.)
NEWARK, NJ, June 4 — The attacks on students and education workers in the Newark Public Schools are continuing. As previously reported in CHALLENGE, there have been budget cuts, school closings and dual locations of charter schools. The newest attack comes in the form of layoffs of about 200 teachers and support staff. These workers were notified a month before school ended that their positions will be eliminated next fall because of budget cuts.
These attacks are part of a larger, nationwide plan to “reshape education in the United States and put this country on track to be an educational, economic, military, and diplomatic global leader” (cfr.org — U.S. Education Reform and National Security). In other words, the ruling class will continue to use the education system to prepare the working class to fight in imperialist wars and maintain U.S. domination throughout the world.
In response to the latest attacks, a newly formed caucus in the Newark Teachers Union organized a demonstration of over 200 education workers, community activists, parents and students outside the Newark Board of Education. This call for worker-parent-student unity reflected the struggle within the caucus to develop class consciousness. Through weekly caucus meetings, members and friends of Progressive Labor Party have fought for all caucus members to understand that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Now the real work begins. As our base has expanded, the bosses’ attacks have given us many more opportunities to engage with our co-workers, students and parents. In one school, a PLP member struggled with her co-workers and their initial response to “lay low.” As individuals, she pointed out, we are more susceptible to the bosses’ attacks. Only when we unite do we realize the potential and strength of the working class.
By fighting these attacks against the schools, we will organize, build our CHALLENGE networks and recruit new members. The struggle continues.
TEL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PAESTINE, June 9 — Thousands of workers and activists, both Jewish and Arab, marched in central Tel-Aviv . They protested the apartheid enacted by the Israeli regime against Palestinians in the West Bank and within the “green line” (the western part of historic Palestine). This rally came at the time when the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to build hundreds of new apartments in West Bank settlements, marketed exclusively to well-off religious Jewish settlers. The marchers chanted “Occupation is a Crime — Freedom Now for Palestine!” “Jaffa and Ramallah — the same Revolution” and “The People Demand to End the Occupation.”
Many of the rally’s leaders, however, were liberals and revisionists (“leftists” in words, but not in actions), who also added slogans such as “Struggle for Peace,” “No Peace, No Security — Disband the Government” and “Bring Down the Government.” While we in PLP wish all working people around the world to live a peaceful life free from war and oppression, we understand that the only way to achieve this is by an armed workers’ revolution and open class war against capitalism and imperialism, not “peace” between capitalist leaders such as Netanyahu and Abbas.
Even if the Netanyahu government will be “brought down,” the capitalist alternative to him and his ministers are more of the same. The real enemy is not only the current administration, but the capitalist regime in general. Another weakness of the march was that almost all the slogans targeted only the West Bank “occupation” since 1967, but not the racist, fascist apartheid regime in the western part of Palestine since 1948; workers on both side of the apartheid fence must unite and smash all forms of the Zionist apartheid regime, from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean sea.
Two PL’ers took part in this rally and marched up front, distributing dozens of leaflets calling for “Neither Two States Nor One State - but Workers’ Power” and leading several other workers in chanting “The Answer to Apartheid is Revolution!” and “Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, Gaza — Same Revolution!” The international Progressive Labor Party calls for a united, communist-led struggle of workers from all nations against racism, imperialist war and capitalism and for a worldwide communist revolution. We PL’ers fight for this goal in our area. We strive to unite all workers from both ethnicities to smash the racist Zionist state and build towards a red Middle East and a borderless communist world.
Workers of the World - Unite!
[A Note on the term “Occupation:” When many in the U.S. think about “Occupation” or “Occupy,” they now think about the tent movement of the working youth and students against Wall Street and the rest of U.S. imperialism. However, when we in Israel-Palestine talk about the “Occupation,” we talk about the fascist military occupation of most of historic Palestine by the state of Israel.]
TEL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, June 11 —Dozens of immigrant refugees, mostly black workers who fled the horrors of war and fascism in Eastern Africa, were rounded up today by the “Oz” unit of the Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs (the equivalent of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit.) Violently arrested in the early hours of the morning, these workers were hauled off to detention centers, pending their deportation back to war-torn, famine-struck South Sudan or overtly fascist Eritrea.
This pogrom, carried out under the bosses’ laws, is only the latest attack in the Israeli ruling class’s campaign against the so-called “infiltrators,” workers who came to Israel either as refugees or as immigrants from East Africa. On May 23rd, a mass rally of racists in south Tel-Aviv was led by Knesset Members Regev, Ben-Ari and Danon. During this violent rally, several black passerbys were attacked (with the racists calling them “Dirty N****,”) and a pub belonging to the African community was vandalized and robbed by the incited mob.
In the last few months, attacks against black workers are becoming commonplace in Israel. The bosses’ politicians blame these refugees and immigrants for all the problems of capitalism, namely the deterioration of slums, unemployment, crime and even disease. Gangs of fascist criminal youth terrorize and rob black people in southern Tel-Aviv, KKK style. The bosses’ politicians, aping the Nazis, even called these refugees a “cancer.”
But who are these refugees and why have they come to Israel-Palestine? Most come from two countries: Sudan and Eritrea. The Chinese capitalists dominate the government of North Sudan (which has a Muslim majority,) while their U.S. rivals have long funded the Christian revolt of South Sudan against the northern government, all in the struggle for Sudan’s oil reserves. The result? A bloody civil war killing millions and pushing millions more into homelessness and famine. In Eritrea, the murderous fascist government, a close ally of the Israeli regime and a major client of the Israeli Military Industries, enslaves the working class with hard labor for starvation pay in the name of “National Service.” Others are jailed or murdered because they dare to speak against the regime.
Because of these horrors, caused by imperialism and its local servants, many East African workers flee Sudan and Eritrea on foot, heading to Israel-Palestine through Egypt. In Sinai they are sometimes robbed and kidnapped by local criminal elements until ransomed by their families, enduring physical and sexual abuse while in captivity.
When they finally reach the border between Egypt and Israel, the Egyptian border guards shoot them. Whoever survives crawls to Israel through the barbed-wire border fence. The Israeli border Guards round them up, give them basic medical treatment and jail them for a day or two, then load them on busses and drive them to southern Tel-Aviv. There they are left to their own devices without money, a home, appropriate clothes or food.
The Israeli government does not grant them the official status of refugee. Therefore, based on the racist Israeli law, they are not allowed to work legally, are not entitled to public healthcare and thus have no money for food or housing. These refugee and immigrant workers are forced to work illegally, which usually means being super-exploited by Israeli bosses and being paid far less than even a minimum wage. This leads to super-profits, and, especially, to driving down the wages of other workers by means of competition.
This shows how racism divides workers while profiting the capitalists. By inciting Jewish workers against their black brothers and sisters, the Israeli ruling class separates and weakens the Jewish, Arab and African workers. It keeps the African workers in constant fear of arrest or deportation, making them unlikely to fight for better pay or work conditions, not to mention for revolution.
Having Africans and Arabs as scapegoats also benefits the rich. Instead of having workers blame them for the horrors of capitalism, workers blame each other for crime, disease, poor housing conditions and unemployment. While the Israeli government makes a fuss over the “Refugee Problem,” the workers are blinded to the open attacks on their livelihood like tax hikes, budget cuts, and even possible war with Iran.
The only answer to this virulent racism is for us, workers and unemployed worldwide, of all races and creeds, to unite, cast out the racist ideas and leaders, and build our own working-class unity against the real enemy, the bosses and their state-machine. Progressive Labor Party fights for a communist workers’ world with no borders and no racism, where all workers will have access to housing, food, education, healthcare and all according to need. We will work together based on our commitment for a better future. Join us!