The international working class is fighting back, from North Africa to the Mid-East, to Europe to the U.S., against the effects of capitalism’s world economic and political crisis. It has sparked social movements that have captured the imagination, with many comparing 2011 to 1968. Wherever PLP is present it is playing a political role in these movements.
Four billion working-class families are trying to exist on $1 to $2 a day under the weight of the International Monetary Fund-induced austerity. This global economic crisis was fed by capitalism’s drive for maximum profits, centered on Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2011 upsurge.
‘68 General Strike Rocked France
“The French 1968 upheaval took the French ruling class by surprise,” said Alan Woods, the English Marxist historian. Students in France responded both to U.S. imperialism’s Vietnam War genocide) and to French bosses’ university repression. When linked up with the working class — suffering as the lowest-paid industrial workers in Europe — it resulted in a general strike which rocked the very foundations of French capitalism. This qualitative change stemmed from quantitative internal contradictions in French capitalism.
The General Strike paralyzed France. The French National Police could barely contain the insurrection. French bosses feared that an Army call-up might induce many working-class soldiers to side with the strikers and mutiny, so they called up reservists but restricted them to military bases and away from television and radio. DeGaulle almost lost his grip on state power and called on the German military to be ready with tank warfare to put down the revolt.
Ultimately the insurrection failed because, without a viable communist party to lead the working class to revolution, the French “Communist” Party made a deal with DeGaulle and took the electoral road, relying on “lesser evil” bosses.
Woods mentions that DeGaulle so feared revolution that he planned to imprison 20,000 left-wing activists in the Winter Stadium where they would have met a similar fate that Chilean workers and students would face five years later.”
Also in ’68, left-wing students in Mexico used the approaching Olympics to champion needed social reforms: freedom for political prisoners, dismissal of the fascist Mexico City Police Chief, and use of tax money for Mexico’s working class instead of for the Olympics.
Their fight-back began in Mexico City, trying to free an imprisoned railway union leader. The fascist Mexican President Gustavo Ordaz refused to meet with the students’ Strike Council but instead ordered the police and the Army to shoot to kill. Hundreds died or were wounded. October 2nd became known as “The Night of Sorrows.”
The students had three political weaknesses: (1) No revolutionary communist party; (2) No link-up with workers in a general strike; and (3) no ties to working-class Army troops which might have prevented the massacre.
IMF Austerity Takes Its Toll
Now in 2011, the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Mid-East erupted — as with France 1968 — because of capitalism’s insoluble contradictions. Tunisia, like many North African nations, suffered from the 2008 global capitalist crisis. The IMF austerity was taking its toll on the working class. The self-immolation of Mohammed in Sidi Bouazizi, frustrated and poverty-stricken, was the final straw. The section of the Tunisian bosses represented by President Ben Ali was overthrown. Insurgencies soon spread to Egypt, Syria, Libya and Bahrain.
This was a positive development; Arab workers were fighting back, but again, there was no communist party to lead to the overthrow of ALL bosses. One capitalist group was simply replaced by another in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The Arab Spring is a bourgeois revolution. Anything short of communist revolution is a defeat for the international working class, unless in the course of that class struggle workers and youth are won to building a communist party that aims to overthrow capitalism.
In the U.S., the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement began in September, 2011, responding to the increasing economic inequality and mass unemployment precipitated by the capitalist crisis. Globally over 200 million workers lost their jobs because of the instability of capitalism. Wall Street was the flashpoint for the crisis, hence the name OWS, but it soon spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. and then around the world.
Rulers Trying to Co-opt OWS
While many OWS rank-and-filers have political disagreements with capitalism, the OWS leadership is reformist. Ruling-class influences (George Soros, Obama, the Democrats) are trying to co-opt the movement, to keep it within capitalist bounds, away from becoming radicalized and posing a danger to capitalism itself. The pro-capitalist leadership of unions like the SEIU pulls OWS toward reformist tactics, preventing it from openly challenging the capitalist system.
Rank-and-file Occupiers include workers — employed and unemployed — students, union activists and soldiers, black, white and Latino, women and men.
Many PL’ers trying to move the rank-and-file toward a communist class analysis, explaining why capitalist reforms cannot work, given the system’s internal contradictions centered on racism, sexism and imperialism. Thousands of CHALLENGES distributed to OWS workers and students across the U.S. play a vital role in that effort.
Election Circus vs.
Smash Capitalism
PLP’ers in OWS go beyond the language of the “99%,” terms Democrats cynically use to steer OWS class struggle toward re-electing Obama. PLP’s message is clear: Capitalism is a crisis-ridden system which only serves the interests of the billionaires. Because of its racist and sexist nature, it can never be reformed, never help billions of workers. It must be smashed with communist revolution led by the international PLP to create a communist society with the Party as its leading force. This goes beyond OWS bourgeois reforms.
The 2011-12 class struggles of OWS, the trade union fights in Wisconsin and Ohio and the Arab Spring are important because they demonstrate that workers will fight back against all odds. But workers from OWS to Cairo’s Tahir Square need a winning Marxist class analysis and revolutionary strategy that only PLP can offer.
There are some historical similarities between current global class struggles and the social explosions of 1968. There are also important political lessons:
• The international working class needs a revolutionary communist party, the PLP, to win state power. The absence of such leadership in 1968 France doomed a valiant insurrection to failure. Workers can have the material conditions necessary for a revolutionary situation, but without communist leadership the capitalist bosses will live to continue their oppression.
• PLP must be prepared to lead the masses of workers to revolution. At some point a social explosion in North America — the heart of capitalist imperialism — on the scale of 1968 France could offer the opportunity to violently overthrow U.S. bosses. As Mao said, “One spark can start a prairie fire,” but it requires a mass base for communist ideas.
• In order for a communist revolution to succeed, all sections of the working class must be united — workers, students, men and women, black, white, Latino and Asian.
• The PLP must win working-class members in the military away from defending the bosses, which contradicts their class interests. This did not happen in France and Mexico.
With hard work, PLP can and will win our class to be on the right side of history. We, the international working class, have a world to win! Dare to struggle! Dare to win!
Bibliography:
• The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 by George Katsiaficas; (South End Press)
• The French Revolution of May 1968, by Alan Woods (Well-red Books)
• Arab Spring by Hamid Alizadeh in the journal Socialist Appeal (Issue 65 January/February 2012)
• A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000 by Michel Beaud (Monthly Review Press)
In early December a group of 30 members and friends of PLP gathered to learn about political economy, and specifically to discuss who produces all wealth and what causes crises. We also discussed the alternatives presented by the Party in Road to Revolution IV.
The majority of participants were youth; nine of them participated in the discussion for the first time. Several workers, members of the Party, presented the topics well, combining the experience of the old with the enthusiasm of the young.
We discussed that our only alternative to this racist, criminal system is to organize ourselves as a working class, as a Party to destroy it. We heard examples of how we workers generate wealth. We also learned that the future capitalism offers is imperialist war for markets and cheap labor.
We saw a movie that illustrated the concepts of our discussion. The movie showed how the bosses use nationalism and religion as ideological tools to divide workers. Currently, liberal capitalist leaders promote and support large upheavals, like the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, to try to resolve their global financial problems and control workers’ anger against their own oppression.
One of the comrades gave examples of the capitalist crisis and described the growing unemployment, the merging of corporations and banks, as moves towards a larger inter imperialist confrontation, which may eventually lead to World War III.
We all recommitted to continue organizing at the grassroots level for a communist revolution.
Mexico Red
WASHINGTON, DC, March 8 — Capitalism has always created ways to weaken the unity and militancy of workers. Its ruling class primarily uses racism to stereotype and demean black, Latino, and Asian workers and divide the entire working class. These stereotypes portray black workers, in particular, as lazy and criminal. Politicians then use these lies to explain high rates of unemployment and incarceration among black workers and to justify policies to cut services and benefits even more.
These negative stereotypes or prejudices are called stigmas. In ancient times, Greeks branded criminals and slaves with a physical mark called a stigma and treated them as outsiders, people to be scorned, avoided, mistreated and exploited.
Today, the ruling class and its media brand people whom they want to be considered immoral, dangerous, abnormal, inferior or simply different in some way. Stigma pushes shame onto people who are poor, women, gay or transgender, incarcerated, mentally ill, or HIV positive. It also contributes to high rates of HIV and AIDS, since people who are blamed for their conditions are less likely to take care of themselves and their partners or to seek health care.
Need Class Analysis of Stigma
The Health Disparities Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) has been holding workshops to reduce the stigma associated with HIV. Where some committee members focused on individual biases, which they attempt to counter with facts, Progressive Labor Party members and committee leaders argued for a class analysis of stigma. We linked the stigma placed on people living with HIV to the need for the ruling class to shame and distance workers from one another, leaving the working class weak and divided. This analysis directs us to involve people targeted by stigma in the fight against capitalism and racism.
In January, MWPHA held a community workshop in a public housing neighborhood. More than 80 people, including health and prison activists, students, and public health workers ventured out on an icy morning to discuss how stigma affects our health and how we can fight back. A number of students said they had never visited a public housing community and that this workshop had led them to see the residents as neighbors, friends, and allies. While the residents liked students and public health workers visiting them for a change, some warned that they didn’t want to be used as research subjects for academic projects, an important point for students to hear.
In the short run, there are many ways we can unify to fight stigma and oppression, from hosting more workshops to joining struggles to demand housing, jobs, and treatment of people with HIV. But to eliminate stigma, we need to end the conditions that require stigma and exploitation. We need to abolish the system that profits by dividing workers: capitalism.
Communism creates a society where the working class makes the rules. A true communist system requires the cooperation and unity of all workers in order to contribute to a world that is safe and healthy for everyone. Join the Progressive Labor Party!
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CUNY Profs Slam Racist, Sexist ‘Pathway to Ignorance’
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- 16 March 2012 274 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 8 — Today, International Women’s Day, more than 350 City University of New York (CUNY) faculty and staff, at a mass meeting called by the PSC (Professional Staff Congress)-CUNY union, denounced “Pathways,” a scheme for faster graduation imposed by the CUNY Administration. It would standardize and gut the academic quality of basic required courses. Many speakers — a majority women — pointed out that this is a sexist move against the 2/3 of students who are women, a racist attack on the 3/4 students who are black and Latino, and a nationalist attack on the large percentage of immigrant and undocumented students.
Even conservative business profs showed outrage at this insult to their working-class students, calling out “the subtle racism of low expectations.” Other speakers expressed solidarity with K-12 teachers who have already been hit hard by standardized, dumbed-down curriculums, pushed nationally by the think-tanks and government agencies of the capitalist class. The mood was angry and ready for action; we all felt the need to stand up for our students and defend our efforts to teach them well; there was power in our common outrage.
The union is organizing an online petition (2,500 signers in the first two days, 500 in the first hour), two major lawsuits defending both faculty control of curriculum and students’ right to a quality education, and grassroots faculty action to organized non-compliance. Student speakers said they would stand by us in this fight to repeal Pathways — “a pathway to ignorance,” the Queens College student newspaper called it. We need to reach many more students, because the opportunist bosses are appealing to their desire to graduate sooner, downplaying their loss of science labs and languages.
The CUNY Board of Trustees meeting April 30 is the deadline for killing Pathways, and there will be an action at the Trustees’ meeting. It was pointed out that Benno Schmidt, the ruling-class figure who heads the Board, is also a chief investor in a new private school, Avenues, which boasts of graduating students fluent in two or three languages — while Pathways cuts required language study to a single semester.
A PLP flyer, “Pathway to Ignorance or Road to Revolution?” supported organizing a militant fight, and showed how Pathways, like the tightening of control over K-12 teachers, was “another step on the road to fascist control of all workers as the ruling class prepares for war with other imperialists…The decline we see at CUNY simply reflects this decline of the [U.S.] empire.”
While fighting the CUNY bosses we have to fight too for the egalitarian communist society for which workers have dreamed of and fought for centuries. Academic freedom fights in the 20th-century U.S. were often led by communists like the Anti-Fascist Committee at City College in 1938. But there will be no lasting freedom for any workers without communist revolution. The many young profs without tenure who spoke out courageously for their students tonight have a proud communist tradition to carry forward.
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Syria: Russian, U.S. Imperialists’ Battle Leading to Wider War?
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- 16 March 2012 241 hits
U.S. rulers are hypocritically decrying the slaughter raging across Syria while they seek to intervene there in the guise of “humanitarianism.” But Syria’s regime has a history of savagery that stretches back decades, and it never seemed to bother Washington before. Now that their Russian rivals are backing Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. rulers suddenly care. Why? They see an opportunity to strike a blow against their Russian adversaries in this oil-rich region.
There’s a general consensus among U.S. imperialists that ousting the Syrian ruler would deal a heavy blow to his allies in the Iranian ruling class and their regional ambitions. This would help safeguard both Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the crown jewels of U.S. bosses’ energy-based empire.
But U.S. ruling-class politicians, think tanks and media disagree on how best to profit from Assad’s bloodshed. Their options include “diplomacy” (which, after it failed, could justify an invasion), arming the opposition, or direct, Libya-like military action (another “humanitarian” invasion).
While we can’t predict exactly what Obama will do, any of these scenarios will prove deadly for workers. Thousands of our class brothers and sisters in that region will be killed, not to mention U.S. GI’s. U.S. workers will be attacked with more cutbacks to pay for yet another war. Muslim workers in the U.S. will inevitably be targeted with racist attacks.
An attack on Syria also has strong potential to widen U.S. oil wars to global dimensions, given the sharpening conflict with Russia as a Syrian ally.
U.S.- and Saudi-led war-making interests recently sent former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on a deliberately doomed UN-Arab League mission to Syria. Royal Military College professor Houchang Hassan-Yari said, “I’m not really sure if Annan is going to be successful.... [T]he UN Security Council is paralyzed with Russia and China using their vetoes to block a resolution condemning the regime. If new attempts to reach a resolution fail and the Syrian government continues its violent crackdown, there may be no other avenue to go down except military” (Canadian CTV, 3/10/12).
How Far to Go for Regime Change?
A “hit now” faction in Congress is already looking down this avenue. On March 6, Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham urged: “The United States should help organize an international effort to protect civilian population centers in Syria through airstrikes on Assad’s forces....This will first require the United States and our partners to suppress the Syrian regime’s air defenses in at least part of the country.”
But Stratfor, an influential global intelligence group, counsels waiting: “The situation in Syria — whether through the loss of territory, massive defections from the regime or the loss of Russian support — will have to change before Washington implements any of the plans it has prepared.” Stratfor’s analysts gained increased credibility of late when a cyber-hacking attack revealed that Exxon Mobil and the Pentagon are among the firm’s major clients.
A more urgent recommendation for U.S.-driven regime change comes from the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine, wrote in the New York Times (3/8), “The only sure way to quickly stop the killing and replace the Assad regime with something better would be to do what few have been willing to advocate so far: start a serious military operation to topple the government.”
Syrian Invasion No Piece of Cake
Tepperman leaves unsaid the vast anti-Russian mobilization that would be required by a “serious” operation. The Kremlin supplies sophisticated fighter planes and anti-aircraft batteries to Syria. It maintains a naval base at Tartus on its Mediterranean shore, facing Israel. Invaders also would have to contend with a Syrian army of 330,000.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s newly re-elected strongman, bluntly promises retaliation if U.S.-led Syrian initiatives run counter to his plans to restore the Russian empire. “No one,” says Putin, “should be allowed to employ the Libyan scenario in Syria...I hope very much that the United States and other countries will...not pursue the use of power in Syria without UN Security Council sanctions.”
Putin refers specifically to U.S. economic grabs in the global imperialists’ sharpening rivalry: “It appears that with the Arab Spring countries, as with Iraq, Russian companies are losing their decades-long positions in local commercial markets and are being deprived of large commercial contracts. The niches thus vacated are being filled by the economic operatives of the states that had a hand in the change of the ruling regime” (RIA Novosti, 2/27/12).
Back in the U.S., war hawk Paul Wolfowitz — a primary architect of Bush, Jr.’s attempt to run the Iraq slaughter on the cheap — claimed that arming Assad’s opponents could work: “Strengthening the Syrian opposition is not an obstacle to a peaceful end to this conflict. To the contrary, it may be the only way to achieve one” (Wall Street Journal, 3/6/12).
Another Blowback?
But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had reservations: “We really don’t know who it is that would be armed. Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria? Hamas is now supporting the opposition. Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?” (CBS News, 2/26/2012). She pointed out that both Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri and the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement in Palestine expressed their support for the Syrian rebels. Clinton and other U.S. ruling class operatives remember that arming anti-Soviet “insurgents” in Afghanistan led to the emergence of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and resulted in a Taliban takeover.
But regardless of their differences, all U.S. presidential candidates (with the exception of the unelectable Ron Paul) are backing one form or another of anti-Syrian war-making. All of them are ready and willing to escalate tensions with Iran and Russia en route to a broader war. Our class cannot support any of these capitalist factions. We must strive in all of our mass organizations to expose all the bosses, both liberal and right-wingers, whose wars kill millions of workers. We must link the class struggle in all areas to the need to eliminate the entire capitalist class.
Only communist revolution can end imperialist war, mass unemployment, racism, sexism and the horrors that the profit system visits on our class. That is what PLP fights for. Join our Party!
