As imperialist rulers in the U.S. face sharpening global competition, especially as they shift to prepare for a potential war with China, they must deal with two related problems. The first is a military that is both expensive and inadequate. The second is a working class short on patriotism and reluctant to enlist in the bosses’ warmongering quest to maintain their world empire.
Speaking for the dominant, finance-capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, Barack Obama’s military and national security advisors have devised a scheme that combines a revived draft, forced labor at low wages, and rabid union-busting. Taken as a whole, it would lower workers’ living standards while depositing even more profits into the banks and biggest corporations. Thomas Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), presented such a plan last week on the New York Times op-ed page (7/10/12). Ricks would present high school graduates with three options:
• Eighteen months in the military with low pay but “excellent” post-service benefits, including free college tuition [for those who survive a war];
• Civilian national service for a slightly longer period with similar low pay and future benefits;
• An opt-out for those willing to forfeit virtually all federal assistance for the rest of their lives.
Ricks thinks his plan could alleviate the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome,” which has made workers unwilling to sacrifice themselves in the next U.S. conflict after the Vietnam War slaughtered 3.8 million Vietnamese and 58,000 GIs. (This “syndrome” is in fact a healthy, working-class aversion to furnishing the imperialists with cannon fodder.) He also hopes that forced, low-paid labor on a massive scale can help revive the U.S. capitalists’ profit rate, which is plunging next to their Chinese archrivals.
Details of Ricks’ plan are even more ominous than his core proposals. Beyond enlarging the U.S. military, he would make it more deadly. Draftees would remain stateside, freeing up the hardened, presumably more committed volunteer force for combat overseas. Of course, conscripts won to the Pentagon’s “killer elite” brainwashing “could move into the professional force and receive weapons training.”
National Service = Civilian Government Slavery
Those who don’t choose the actual army could wind up “teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure” — all jobs that are now predominantly unionized in schools, parks and construction. Ricks’ union-busting scheme would create a mass army of scabs and wipe out union workers’ hard-earned gains for the benefit of U.S. bosses.
Like Scott Walker and Andrew Cuomo, the governors of Wisconsin and New York, Ricks targets workers he labels as “overpaid” public employees. All three ruling-class mouthpieces blame state and municipal workers for draining U.S. capitalists’ profit margins and tying up funds better spent on imperialist wars.
“Imagine,” gushes Ricks, “how much could be saved if a few hundred New York City school custodians were 19, energetic and making $15,000 plus room and board.” They’d replace older workers who might earn three or four times that amount plus health benefits, vacations, and sick pay — won through decades of hard struggle — and who could now join the army of the unemployed. In addition, Ricks says, “much of the labor currently contracted out to the private sector could be performed by 18-year-olds for much less.”
This overhaul would come down especially hard on black, Latino and immigrant working-class youth who are already at the bottom of the wage scale and suffer double the jobless rates of white workers, or worse. They would be even more super-exploited than they are now.
Ricks’ opt-out clause essentially excommunicates workers who are swayed by the liberal imperialists’ domestic political enemies. It is an implicit jab at libertarians (those opposed to virtually any government control), the Tea Party and others who are less than gung-ho about U.S. intervention abroad. “Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.”
In actuality, the children of the super-rich don’t need these federal government supports. But everyone else would have a gun at their heads: “Choose” the militarized national service/draft, or opt out and get zilch.
Liberal pundits and politicians (like Charles Rangel, the black congressman from Harlem) say an all-encompassing draft would foster class equality in the U.S. They also claim that it would make war less likely by putting the entire population at risk. By giving both rich and poor a stake in future wars, they say, politicians and the wealthy might think twice before endorsing such wars. But the answer for the working class is not uniting with rich kids for an equal opportunity to kill workers and youth in other countries and protect the U.S. rulers’ profits. The answer is working-class unity to wage class war against the capitalist exploiters.
The push for “universal” service hides a darker, militarist motive. The late Charles Moskos, a military sociologist who helped create the fascist Hart-Rudman reports, wrote that a draft “that starts conscription at the top of the social ladder” would “raise acceptance of combat casualties” (United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship, Brookings Institution Press, 2003). Working-class youth would be more easily persuaded to go off to war in a more egalitarian military — a theory that ignores the fact that the rich have ways of avoiding combat not open to workers.
The payoff for the bosses would be huge. While he avoids mentioning China, a potential World War III foe that has more people of military age than the total U.S. population, Ricks salivates over the prospect of mobilizing an average school graduation army “of about four million.”
While Obama’s CNAS-influenced re-election team is clearly promoting Ricks’ plan, Obama is unlikely to publically endorse it before the election. He knows that Senator John Kerry’s calls for national service cost him public support in the 2004 presidential election. Obama needs to maintain the U.S. rulers’ scam of the “lesser evil” — that no matter how bad things may look under his administration, the Republicans’ Mitt Romney would be worse. But all the “lesser-evil” Democrats elected in the past 50 years, from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton, have wound up establishing the very policies for which they bashed their Republican rivals.
In fact, Obama has pushed U.S. imperialism beyond what George W. Bush ever dared. He has expanded the Afghan war by 30,000 additional troops. He has effectively invaded Pakistan with U.S. Army Special Forces, bombings, and CIA drone killings. He has escalated the regional war in the Middle East in Yemen, Somalia and Libya and ratcheted up attacks on Iran while fortifying U.S. bases in and around Iraq. Domestically, Obama has deported far more immigrants than Bush ever dreamed of while expanding government spying on millions in the U.S. He has cynically executed all of these racist, fascist, and murderous policies behind the façade that his Democrats are “the workers’ party.”
But the Progressive Labor Party says: Evil, yes; lesser, no!
Today our Party can build on working-class revulsion to killing and dying for Uncle Sam/ExxonMobil. By bringing communist politics into the mass organizations where we belong and injecting our ideas into the class struggle, we can win workers and youth to see the fight for communist revolution as the only alternative to the horrors of capitalism. In that way we can build a mass PLP, the essential weapon to destroy the bosses and their profit system and usher in a world run by and for workers.
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Fascism on the March
Thomas Ricks, whose fascist scheme is outlined on this page, is no lone howling wolf. He speaks for the dominant wing of U.S. capitalists. At the Center for A New American Security (CNAS), he works under the think tank’s president, Nathaniel Fick, and its chairman, Richard Danzig. Fick served as a military adviser to Obama’s 2008 transition team. From 2007 through the 2008 election, Danzig counseled then-Senator Obama on national security issues. Michele Flournoy, CNAS founder, was Obama’s defense undersecretary from 2009 to 2012. Ricks, Fick, Danzig, Flournoy and Obama all, in turn, answer to CNAS’s arch-imperialist donors: Chevron, JP Morgan Chase, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Why do we call this a fascist scheme? Consider its elements: lowered wages and racist super-exploitation to expand bosses’ profits; driving the unemployed into the military; union-busting and forced labor; increased racist police attacks on black and Latino youth with stop-and-frisk terror, gung-ho patriotic fervor against “foreign enemies.”
All of these have their parallels in the program enforced by Hitler’s Third Reich in the run-up to World War II. Nazi Germany gassed millions in their concentration camp ovens. The U.S. already employs mass incarceration, with black and Latino workers and youth representing 70 percent of those imprisoned in the world’s largest prison system. But history tells us there is no reason to believe that the U.S. capitalists will stop there. They will go to any lengths to meet the challenge of a rising China in a competition for the world’s vital resources, especially oil and gas.
Can World War III be far behind?
ANNABA, ALGERIA, July 12 — A strike by 250 phosphate company workers at the port installations here proves once again that nationalization of industry is just another form of capitalist exploitation and rule.
On June 5, 250 workers shut the Installations Portuaires de Annaba (IPA), a subsidiary of the Ferphos Group — one of many of Algeria’s state-owned companies — and have blocked all exports since.
The workers are making the same demands they advanced in a 2011 strike which saw every company promise broken, including: changes in the wage scale plus a guaranteed bonus and promotions; rectifying working conditions which are endangering workers’ lives due to collapsing tunnels; on-the-job illnesses involving dermatological and respiratory problems; and broken locomotives hauling the phosphate on run-down railroad tracks.
Six IPA strikers told the El Watan newspaper (7/9): “We’ve been on strike for over a month, and no official notice has been taken….Ferphos is a rich company. This wealth profits others and not us poor workers. In addition to the precarious wage situation that we’re locked into, our working conditions are inhumane, worthy of slavery….Are we subhuman? In the eyes of our director…we are subhuman since he has not hesitated to use disrespectful and insulting words about us.”
Algeria’s state-run companies were the product of the overthrow of French colonial rule which ended 50 years ago (depicted in the famous film “Algiers”). While much was made of a national liberation movement freeing workers from the imperialist French bosses, the latter were merely replaced by local bosses who have run these nationalized industries in their own class interests.
In 2011, the Ferphos Group and its holding company had sales of nearly $100 million, from which they netted substantial profits. They made out like bandits by gaining a good share of the market because of the turmoil surrounding their three main Arab Spring rivals, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt. The slowdown of phosphate exports from those three countries — amounting to over six million tons — opened the way for Algerian phosphate.
But, of course, it was not the workers who profited from this, it was the Algerian state capitalists who continued to exploit the working class, leading to their two strikes. So with all the hoopla in the bosses’ media about the Arab Spring “freeing” these workers of dictatorial rule, capitalist exploitation simply continues under the façade of nationalization.
Meanwhile, the union fakers are in cahoots with the bosses, fearing to even publicly back the strike because it might cost them their jobs as “union leaders.” The rank and file can only depend on themselves, not these union traitors.
The only chance of the workers winning some of their immediate demands is by spreading the strike to all of Ferphos Group’s subsidiaries and to all of the workers involved in the industry. Yet the real solution lies not in these nationalist movements nor in clerical rulers (like in Iran) but in a class revolution that destroys the profit system, its bosses who run it and their state apparatus that enforces it. That’s communism, and requires the leadership of a communist party. Reaching these workers with that understanding is a task to which the Progressive Labor Party is dedicated.
MADRID, SPAIN, July 12 — A seven-week general strike of 8,000 miners in the northern coalfields of Austurias, Aragon and Léon protesting the Socialist government’s austerity attacks has turned into a mass uprising reaching all the way to this capital. After having seen 40,000 jobs destroyed in the past 20 years and facing the potential extinction of another 40,000, the miners said “Enough!” They have fought daily battles with the hated Civil Guard.
Scores of miners have locked themselves into the pits. Strikers have erected burning barricades, blockaded 16 main highways, shut rail lines and used improvised rocket launchers in their response to the rioting cops’ use of tear gas, clubs and rubber bullets. When special anti-riot squads of the military police tried to remove the barricades, the miners answered with dynamite. A Civil Guard terrorist invasion of a mining village using anti-riot gear against women, children and the elderly was routed by furious strikers and their families (see box). Their militant fight has inspired walkouts of transportation workers, teachers and shipbuilders.
The strikers have gone beyond the local Occupy movement’s protesters (the “indignados”) by shouting, “No estamos indignados, estamos hasta los cojones!” — “We are not indignant, we are pissed off to our balls!”
The uprising has drawn mass support from the working class which is suffering 25 percent unemployment — 52 percent among youth — a four percent sales tax on bread and medicine, and facing an increase to 21 percent on clothing and telephone charges. The strike was provoked by a government edict of a 63 percent cut in subsidies for the mining region, sales tax hikes, and an increase in the retirement age to 67, costing the working class 65 billion euros ($81 billion U.S. dollars) over the next 30 months — this all to bail out the bankers’ toxic assets and loans resulting in the collapse of the real estate market.
On June 24, thousands of miners took their protest on an 18-day march for 250 miles straight to this capital city where they were hailed as heroes by a half million workers and their families. Escorted by the city’s firefighters into the main square when they arrived at 2:00 AM, the crowds greeted the miners with raised fists, red flags, revolutionary chants of “Long live working-class struggle!” and the singing of the Internationale.
Support for their struggle has reached the British working class where the Spanish Miners Solidarity Committee was formed on June 11 in Sheffield, England by former veteran miners of the 1984-85 strike. They have organized a national campaign to send funds to the strikers’ families in the northern and eastern coalfields.
The world’s capitalist media — dwelling on Spain’s need to bail out the bankers — has tried to keep this struggle out of the headlines as they did with the months-long strike of 300,000 students in Quebec. But the march to Madrid broke through this blackout.
The bosses’ have smeared the miners with accusations of “terrorists” and lies about their wages and “early retirement.” However, workers have not fallen for this garbage. When Spain’s national soccer team won the Euro Cup recently, the ruling class created a mood of flag-waving national unity. But the thousands in Madrid’s Puerto del Sol main square chanted to the miners, “Esta es mi selección” (“This is my national team!”)
Spain’s main unions have played their usual pro-capitalist role. After having called a short general walkout in March, they never followed up with a long-range mass strike. They are allied with the Socialist Party which has sponsored this anti-working-class austerity. But they cannot control the anger of the rank and file.
The miners are part of a long tradition of struggle against the ruling class, which has been an occupying force in the Asturias coal fields. The first general strike against the fascist Franco, in 1962, was initiated by the Asturias miners, who organized guerrilla actions against the regime. Solidarity among the miners is a part of their way of life and work as brothers and sisters dependent on one another in the mines.
To turn this class struggle into a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system — the source of these attacks on the working class — requires the leadership of a communist party, which unfortunately is lacking in Spain. But the building of such an organization through the Progressive Labor Party is occurring in many countries worldwide and inevitably will reach the workers of Spain.
Meanwhile, workers everywhere should applaud their struggle and follow the example of the miners in England by sending solidarity greetings and money to the miners in Spain, as well as picket the Spanish embassies to send a message that the workers of the world are one international class. We will unite against the capitalists wherever they attack us, and eventually drive them into the dustbin of history.
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Workers’ Power Wins the Day
On June 5, the Spanish Civil Guard arrived in force in the Asturias region to clear a roadblock erected by the striking miners on Highway N-630. But then the miners responded. They took up their shields and, supported by the whole population of the nearby village, they launched an assault on the Guard, driving them from the town center. In a veritable manhunt, they chased them through the residential areas and the surrounding countryside, driving them from the motorway to the edges of town, forcing them to abandon their attack.
Their flight was celebrated with long applause from the local population, expressing their solidarity with the miners’ struggle.
WASHINGTON DC, July 5 — Teachers and students from the East Coast attended the largest teachers union convention in the U.S., the National Education Association (NEA). We had two demonstrations inside the convention hall and with help from delegates inside the different committee/caucus meetings presented resolutions calling on teachers to stand with their students against the re-segregation of the public schools and the racist budget cuts that primarily hurt students.
We received a warm reception from many with comments like, “Keep up your good job! Excellent work! I’m so glad you guys are here!”
Over 1,700 CHALLENGEs were distributed along with thousands of daily leaflets examining issues from the role of the Democrats in ushering in fascism to analyzing the phony “school reforms.”
One of our demonstrations took place after one of our resolutions supporting the student strike in Canada against tuition increases was raised to the union delegate assembly.
In the English Language Learners (ELL) Caucus we led a struggle to get the union to take a stand against the racist cutbacks for ELL/bilingual programs. The state of Nevada has cut all funding for ELL students and done away with bilingual education. The caucus called on the NEA to reaffirm its commitment to funding for ELL students.
During discussions in the caucus we began the struggle with other teachers to view this fight as part of a racist attack on all students. Although we were unable to win the battle to include this language, we were able to make contacts and get to know some of the members better.
One thing was clear: many teachers and education workers are hungry for an answer to the crumbling school system and are open to our communist ideas.
- Information
AFT: Unity with Students and Parents Only Way to Fight Bosses’ Racist Attacks
- Information
- 18 July 2012 420 hits
School systems across the globe serve two related purposes: an economic goal of churning out the next generation of workers to exploit, and the political purpose of building loyalty to the capitalist system. The teacher unions worldwide accept this two-fold mission and the attacks on students it requires. These unions are part of the problem, not the solution!
Capitalist school systems are giant sorting mechanisms that absorb, train, rank and spit out millions of young people each year. From the supposedly great school systems of Finland or Shanghai to the pits of racist neglect in Detroit, this relentless labeling and ranking of our youth — each one of whom is brimming with potential — maintains a “tight” labor market at every skill level, from fast food to PhDs. As a result of this forced competition, fear becomes the rule on the job. Fight-back all but vanishes.
Under communism, the masses will be liberated from the terrorizing prospect of unemployment and the drudgery of wage slavery, and also from capitalism’s dream scenario, the “career.” Communist work develops a diverse set of capacities within each individual in its aim to meet society’s needs, with a mix of mental and manual labor for all. It is work motivated by social, not material, incentives.
Communist education means a lifetime of socially meaningful learning, both in and out of the classroom. We have seen glimpses of this kind of work and education when workers held power in Russia and China. It is just the opposite of what now prevails throughout the world.
Education Reform: Why Now?
The bosses’ assault against students and teachers in the United States has reached epic proportions. The capitalists are using standardized curricula and tests for more direct control over what is taught. They attack wages and conditions for school workers even as they blame teachers and their students for the system’s decay. In large and overcrowded urban districts, where students are predominantly black and Latino, dress codes, rigid discipline, and metal detectors are the norm. Students are treated like criminals, with no time off for good behavior.
In this climate, terrorized teachers help the bosses lay an ideological foundation for intensified fascism. It’s now the norm to intimidate and militarize youth for the inevitable broader wars against the bosses’ surging imperialist rivals like China. The U.S. rulers use the schools to protect their profits and shore up their dominant but declining position in an increasingly competitive world economy.
Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, which contain 30 percent of all U.S. union members, have willingly collaborated with the bosses in the new evaluation systems.
The leaders of these organizations are loyal to the capitalists, not to the workers. Writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, finance capital’s most influential think tank, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice worried that more than 75 percent of U.S. students are unqualified to enter the military. (Klein is the former chancellor of the New York City public schools; Rice was George W. Bush’s national security adviser.)
As competition heats up with China, Japan, Russia and the European powers, the U.S. needs to be able to field a competent mass army. The billionaires’ true concern is not quality education, but preparation for imperialist war. It’s no coincidence that Obama’s education reforms include the reestablishment of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs at a number of colleges.
Trillions for War, Zero for Schools
The bosses’ economic crisis and the trillions sunk into Afghanistan and Iraq have led to a wave of racist budget cuts and layoffs in public schools throughout the U.S. The results have been devastating.
• In New York City, the graduation rate hovers around 60 percent. Most graduates require remedial work before they can take college-level courses.
• In Philadelphia, under state stewardship for nearly a decade, district officials estimate it would take until 2123 to get all students up to grade level in reading and math.
• In Detroit, fire marshals have responded to complaints of kindergarten classes of 53 children. In the upper grades, district rules allow for as many as 61 students per class.
In recent memory, nobody has attacked education workers worse than Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education. Supported by billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, Obama and Duncan are now pushing for an all-out emphasis on “teacher quality.”
In fact, teacher evaluations are based mostly on student performance in standardized testing, where the margin of error is so high, they are statistically useless. But as the bosses’ political tool, the evaluations are invaluable. They give the rulers easy scapegoats for the failure of their schools: “bad teachers” and the unions that “protect” them.
Strikes: Schools for Communism
Short of revolution, nothing demonstrates the power of the workers like a strike. A strike opens up the potential for teachers’ union members to feel their power and build multi-racial unity of the parents, students, and school workers against the capitalists who control society. A strike of education workers can be a great opportunity for a militant, united, anti-racist fight against the children’s exploiters who run the school system. Class struggle has erupted in the form of school sit-ins and disrupted policy meetings in New York, Oakland, Kansas City and more over the past year.
Chicago teachers are leading the way in opposing anti-student education reform with a bold strike authorization vote. A pro-student strike in Chicago would be an important advance in the class struggle. Push the AFT to support a strike in Chicago! Push a strike in Chicago to unite with students and parents to break the bosses’ laws! Shut the schools and shut them tight!
But in every struggle against racist education reform, teachers must aim for more than a return to schools that perpetuate illiteracy and peddle lies. Only a communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party can smash capitalism and organize society for the workers. Only communism can allow students to flourish in schools designed to meet their needs.
