NEW YORK CITY — Our study/action Group has been taking students to participate in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The students looked forward to going to OWS because they’ve been inspired by the protests.   We meet for lunch, read CHALLENGE and discuss the contradictions between reform and revolution. 

The most valuable element of the OWS protest has been the fact that it is capturing the imagination of workers and youth as well as inspiring them to fight back.  Our students were quick to point out that these protests were similar to those in Egypt.  The massive uprising there led to a dictatorship without a dictator in Egypt. In Tunisia, Islamists won an  election. Both were a losing proposition for the working class.

A few days later, another group of students and some teachers went down with a PL’er who works at the school.  They saw the limits of reform for themselves, and each of them moved closer to the Party as a result.  One of the students now takes and distributes CHALLENGE, having his own CHALLENGE network. 

A week after our first trip, another teacher in our group was able to convince his students to go.  Our students then met up together and distributed CHALLENGE and had conversations about our politics.  These conversations strengthened their commitment to our Party’s ideas.  Hopefully, they too will join the Party.  The OWS movement should be seen as an opportunity for us to build the Party by discussing it, going to it, and struggling over the politics of it.J 

The recent upsurge in militant class struggle, as seen in Greece, Egypt, Spain, England, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and the United States, is a heartening development. Over the last two months, the trade union movement in New York City has moved thousands of its members to participate in its Labor Day march and at various rallies connected to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This display of the potential power of the working class has encouraged still more organized workers.

Black, Latino, Asian and white workers from scores of unions, in both the public and private sectors, have made what appears to be a statement of solidarity and unity. Once you get past surface appearances, however, the essence of this activity is something very different. Progressive Labor Party was present at the Labor Day march and lifted the struggle level by raising questions like:

What was the focus of the unions’ Labor Day march? Did it aim to stop the racist threat of public hospital closings at Brookdale in Brooklyn or Peninsula General in Queens? Such a fight would do much to stop the erosion of desperately needed medical care in the predominately black and Latino communities that these hospitals serve — and the layoffs that these closings would require. PL’ers have supported these struggles by joining picket lines and demonstrations at the hospitals, along with our coworkers and friends. Our solidarity efforts, communist ideas and CHALLENGE were warmly received by rank-and-file hospital workers, many of whom have become our friends.

It would have been great if the Labor Day march had taken a stand against the racist crisis of unemployment that grips every segment of the working class at an “actual” rate (including underemployed and “marginally attached” workers) of more than 21 percent (shadowstats.com). We say that unemployment is racist because black, Latino and immigrant youth are victimized by joblessness by a multiple of three times the overall rate. But the union “leaders” have no plan to fight either health care cuts or massive, racist unemployment.

What if workers organized to force the New York City Central Labor Council (NYCLC) to call for a citywide general strike to stop the layoffs of some 800 public school support workers? The struggle led by PL earlier this year at the John Jay High School campus in Brooklyn showed how students, teachers and parents could be won to unite and militantly confront the racist Department of Education.

What if such a general strike had demanded an end to the imperialist oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? If the NYCLC organized such a strike, we would begin to see real working-class power in action. Instead, we saw calls for patriotism and support for U. S. imperialism via signs “remembering” those who died on 9/11.

If the Labor Day march had been intended to build real working-class unity, it wouldn’t have stopped at East 66th street. It would have continued into Central Park and joined striking restaurant workers at the Central Park Boathouse as the PL did. Plers built support for this strike in the weeks before Labor Day and leafleted that march to guarantee that many marchers, including those we brought, would indeed show their solidarity with the strikers. The valiant, mainly women immigrant restaurant workers were able to win union recognition and a contract. Still, a massive outpouring of marchers into the park would have helped build unity and fought racism, sexism and anti-immigrant sentiments. From this New York restaurant to a Chicago library to a California grocery chain, PL has sought to build solidarity campaigns to fan the embers of working-class struggle. In the process, we have met wonderful people who are excited by our revolutionary communist ideas.

What if workers demanded that instead of marching up 5th Avenue, past the luxury buildings housing the richest 1% of New York, we had marched in the working-class areas of Brooklyn where the 99% live? What if we had rallied in front of the Flatbush Gardens housing complex where unionized workers have been locked out since last November? Or if we had joined the picket lines at Long Island University, where teachers were on strike and in opposition to tying any raise to tuition increases? Then we could have been built worker-student unity!

What if Verizon workers in the Communication Workers of America, who had joined the OWS activities by rallying in front of Verizon Corporate headquarters on October 21, had instead renewed their strike against Verizon? Then they would have harnessed the anger stoked by OWS against a corporation that amassed $22.5 billion in profits and paid its top five executives $258 million in the last four years — while moving to slash worker benefits, sick leave and raising health insurance costs and eliminating job security. What if the 110,000 members of the American Federation Of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37, whose contract expired a year and a half ago, went out on strike for a new contract and to restore cuts and laid-off workers? Then these workers would be taking on the fascist Taylor Law. The spark of OWS would have led to sharper class struggle.

The reason these things haven’t happened is because the unions’ role is to maintain capitalism! The leaders mimic the bosses by demanding obscene salaries. A case in point: Gerald McIntee, International President of AFSCME, was paid $479,328 in 2009. AFSCME’s District Council (DC) 37 head, Lillian Roberts, earned $343,467, or about 10 times the average wage of DC 37 members.

To fight New York State’s Taylor Law or the wave of anti-union laws passed in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, the unions would need to break the bosses’ laws and expose their rigged system. Instead, they channel workers’ anger and frustration into the voting booth.

In 2008, the unions’ political action committees spent more than $80 million on federal elections and elected their “friends” to the White House and Congress. Having “won,” they then failed to get their top issue passed, the “card check” method for organizing new bargaining units. This proves yet again that governing power is not determined by elections but rather serves the interests of the ruling class, regardless of which party wins the latest contest.

When a spark like OWS seems to challenge the hold the bosses have over our lives, the union honchos, ever faithful to their friends in high places, organize through coalitions like “stronger for all” to blunt the energy and anger of OWS protesters and to deliver the union rank and file into the waiting arms of the bosses’ “Demopublican” party operatives. Year after year, we are urged by union leaders to vote for lesser-evil candidates (usually Democrats), who promise us fewer cuts and more crumbs. The reality is seen in the current debate in Washington, which is between catastrophic or merely disastrous cuts in services that workers need. Workers choose only one thing in these elections: who will be their oppressor.

Progressive Labor Party has a different plan. We understand that workers create all wealth. We know that under capitalism, the value they produce is stolen from them every day. We want to use the power and fighting unity of the working class to destroy the capitalist system. While we support the necessary fights that workers wage for better wages and benefits, we understand that under the bosses’ system, every reformist gain that is won can be taken back from us. The process of building Progressive Labor Party in these fights strengthens our class’s ability to fight back today as well as preparing us for the bigger fight to come.

That is the fight for communism, a system where the working class takes power, and where everything produced is for the use and benefit of the working class. A society where racism and sexism are outlawed. A system where there is no immigrant/citizen divide, and no more rich and poor.

Get off the bosses’ treadmill and join us in building a society that can truly serve our needs! Join Progressive Labor Party. Read and distribute CHALLENGE. Build for communist revolution!

HASSI R’MEL, ALGERIA, November 1 — The Arab Spring that overturned three neighboring dictatorships has been meaningless for natural gas workers in Algeria, who still suffer from the capitalists dominating the country. They’ve been fighting for back pay and are demanding a 30% wage hike.

On October 27, about 400 workers sat in at the Sonatrach regional headquarters here, the site of Africa’s biggest natural gas field, and attempted a second one two days later. On October 30, the movement spread to workers in the Amont division, who staged a protest outside company headquarters in Algiers.

Multinational Sonatrach is Africa’s biggest oil-and-gas company and the 12th biggest in the world. It has 22 subsidiaries and employed 48,062 workers in 2010.

Rank-and-file workers say they will radicalize their movement if management does not meet their demands. In particular, they’re threatening to repudiate their newly elected union representatives for failing to back their demands, which also include an end to the job promotions freeze.

The movement began in the summer, after management failed to pay the wage hikes obtained in the April 2011 union contract. In June, the workers upped their demands to a 25% across-the-board wage hike (now 30%) instead of the previous contract’s 8% to 25%, depending on one’s work category.

Since then, the workers have held numerous meetings and general assemblies and have drawn up a 15-point platform of demands.

Currently the company is somewhat on the defensive, scrambling to mail out checks to cover the April increases that were never paid. Obviously, they’re trying to buy off the workers and nip the protest movement in the bud before a majority of the rank and file swing over to demanding a completely new contract.

The bold actions and demands of these Algerian gas workers are a beacon to workers around the world. But as the Sonatrach workers know, the ink is barely dry on a union contract when the bosses — with the help of their junior partners in the union leadership — begin to chip away at everything the workers have won. That’s why the only way our class can make real gains is by destroying capitalism altogether through communist revolution.J

NEW YORK CITY, October 17 — Occupy Wall Street (OWS), spreading across the U.S. and worldwide, holds both promise and danger for the working class. It’s now clear that large numbers are seeking an end to the profit system’s misery and injustice. At the same time, Obama and union misleaders are embracing this protest for their own reasons. For the capitalists, OWS represents yet another ruling class effort to funnel workers’ anger down the dead-end road of reforming capitalism, especially through electoral politics (see page 2). 

The good news is that many in the movement’s growing ranks reject the patriotic goals of the “one-percenters.” On a subway headed to Wall Street, a rider asked, “Are you going to the protest? I’m with you. Your banner says ‘Fight for communism’? I’m not so sure about that, but it sure is true the current system is failing. Stronger regulation of capitalism won’t work. We need to learn from the mistakes of past communist movements because a revolution is what’s needed. Okay, I’ll read this paper.”

When this kind of political discussion breaks out between strangers on a train, it’s a sign that things are changing. The growth of OWS is driven by a profound frustration with capitalism’s inability to provide a decent future for the broad masses of workers. In the face of repeated police repression, brave demonstrators have taken to the streets of New York. More important, many are open to communist ideas and to having the Progressive Labor Party participate in their movement.

On the October 15-16 weekend, as PL members chanted some slogans — “It’s not just Wall Street, it’s capitalism”; “The 99% needs revolution, not reform”; “The 99% need communism” — they were met with near-universal agreement. More than 500 PL leaflets were distributed among protesters and others who came to Zucotti Park to check things out. Friends of PL have been critical in helping spread the communist message, an important step forward toward real change.

U.S. Flag A Banner for Imperialist War

Previously, a larger group of PL’ers, including several youth, had met with a similarly positive response, but they also encountered the dangerous patriotic ideology — the bosses’ ideology — that has infiltrated the movement. A protester holding high a large U.S. flag took issue with a Party banner that read, “Fight for Communism, Join PLP.” A lively exchange ensued in which we attacked his flag and defended our banner as being more in tune with the future that protesters were demanding and deserved. Others gravitated to the debate, and several political discussions spun off.

Attacking the U.S. flag as the flag of imperialist war, the most hated banner in the world, brought out pointed disagreement. Attacking the U.S. Constitution as a slave-owners’ document provoked other sharp exchanges. But through it all, a friendly tone of struggle won most people, some of them initially hostile, to weigh our message against their assumptions. We will continue participating in even larger numbers.

Opportunistic Democratic politicians and their union boss allies are striving to subvert OWS into re-electing war-maker Obama. “[A] consensus is emerging among Democrats that the ‘Occupy’ movement is worth tapping into, even helping along and joining with in some instances” (ABC News, 10/10/11). “I support the message to the establishment,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on ABC’s “This Week” (10/9/11). “Change has to happen.” Labor hacks from the AFL-CIO to AFSCME to the SEIU are lending huge financial support. SEIU boss Mary Kay Healy found “incredible inspiration” in OWS (“The Hill,” 10/15/11).

But meanwhile, these union sellouts do absolutely nothing to fight the layoffs of 660 NYC school aides and other low-paid workers, the 99 per-center victims of the one per-centers’ crisis. Goldman Sachs’ brokers stole $15 billion in bonuses while billionaire NYC Mayor Bloomberg can’t find the money to keep these  $14-an-hour school staffers on the job. As leaders from the United Federation of Teachers spout their lip-service support for OWS, they make not a peep as workers are thrown out of their classrooms and their jobs. Why this seeming contradiction? These union leaders are in the hip pockets of the one percent.

Rulers’ Shill Jesse Jackson Tells OWS’ers, ‘Don’t Fight’

The liberal phonies are making a special push to corral black workers in OWS — the ones hit hardest by the racist New Depression — away from meaningful, militant action and into futile voting. One-time Democratic White House candidate Jesse Jackson urged them to “maintain your disciplined focus, your peaceful nonviolent approach to protest and demand change. In the end, we will win” (Rainbow/Push website, 10/11/11). The “we” Jackson refers to is the U.S. ruling class, which has called his tune from the start of his public life. Back in 1978, the Rockefeller brothers anointed Jackson as their dutiful servant with their “Public Service” award.

Capitalist Press Clouds Billionaire Soros’s OWS Role

Although U.S. imperialists don’t yet control OWS as they would like, they most certainly helped spark it. The first call to “occupy Wall Street” came this past summer from an online magazine called Adbusters, a beneficiary of the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, whose biggest sugar daddy is none other than billionaire U.S. imperialist George Soros.

The ruling-class media’s bizarre treatment of this link suggests just how much they want to conceal it. At 11:09 AM on October 13, mainstream Reuters’ coverage led with, “Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.” By 5:25 PM, Reuters had changed the same article to begin, “George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics….” At 6:45 PM, Reuters had the original opener followed by a disclaimer from Soros & Co. In the face of the money-trail facts, liberal rulers spin the lie that only right-wing lunatics see an OWS-Soros tie.

Bankers Provide ‘People’s Park’ as Protest Site

Zuccotti Park, the demonstrators’ New York base, did not fall from the sky. “People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we’ll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it,” NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg told a September 16 press conference. He obliged with a private park owned by Brookfield Properties, property agents for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, among others. The mayor’s lady-friend, Diana Taylor, serves on Brookfield’s board. Brookfield head honcho John Zuccotti, the Park’s owner, once ran the big-bank-loving Downtown Lower Manhattan Association founded by David Rockefeller.

The grip on OWS of reforming capitalism is growing stronger. On the Sunday morning TV talk shows, an OWS representative blasted “shared sacrifice,” saying the “working class” had already given enough. When the news anchor pressed for a “political strategy,” his reply was, “We won’t say for whom but we want all the allies of our movement to vote.”

Clearly the liberal rulers have a plan: they want to make OWS the beginning of Obama’s 2012 election campaign. “We are the 99%” is within the scope of Obama’s “tax-the-rich” strategy to more fully fund and popularize imperialist war. Black volunteers from the Democratic Party were canvassing for Obama’s phony jobs bill.

But this movement is also a direct result of frustration with the failures of voting. OWS resonates because elections have flopped. This disdain for ruling-class politics is good. But there’s a long way to go. There was little sense of mass anger at the police. The mix of counter-cultural, religious, absurdist and reformist politics lends the scene something of a carnival atmosphere. Passers-by are looking for answers. The absence of anti-racist politics is evident, but the crowds are not all white, at least not in Manhattan.

Real Grievances Could Drive OWS Beyond Bosses’ Grip

The sheer mass of protesters, and their increasingly working-class background, may nevertheless upset the rulers’ scenario. At first the media focused on frustrated, mostly white, college grads with suffocating tuition loans. But then multi-racial representatives of the more than 30 million unemployed and under-employed workers starting showing up. That’s when Jesse Jackson felt the need to chime in. The calming post-World War II U.S. social contract — a steady job, a house, college for the kids, and a pension — lies in ruins. Black workers gained it only briefly after fierce fights in the 1960s and 1970s and were the first to lose it.

OWS’s originators claim inspiration from Egypt’s Tahrir Square activists. But what did they win, without communist politics or leadership? The new cabal of military rulers Tahrir Square eased into power recently slaughtered dozens of unarmed Christian opponents. And OWS leaders’ supposed savior Obama had his Africa Military Command send troops into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Power of the Working Class Is Crucial

OWS must spread to support strikers on picket lines and into schools and workplaces through anti-racist sit-ins and job actions in solidarity with OWS. The scope of OWS must be enlarged to oppose U.S. rulers’ oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan which will further improve the conditions for the spread of communist revolutionary ideas. It would make the movement overall more difficult for the ruling-class liberals to hijack and turn into yet another tool of imperialism.

What we do now to organize workers — the class that produces all the value that the 1% steals as profit and who more and more recognize capitalism’s failures —will significantly advance revolution for workers’ power. In participating in OWS, Progressive Labor Party can expose the capitalists trying to steer it, and win rank-and-file protestors to the long, hard struggle for communist revolution.J