BROOKLYN, NY, March 8 — Hundreds of workers left Downstate Hospital, on our lunch hour, eager to blast the Democratic Governor Cuomo’s closing of this vital, viable hospital along with nearby Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, the only adult state psychiatric facility in Brooklyn. The three unions, CSEA, PEF and UUP, finally rallied against the attack. 

For several months, workers have been demanding union leadership to halt the proposed closings. This week, on very short notice, we spread the word and workers were excited to be there. The rank and file organized the only chants. Union “leaders” called for more emails. Politicians shouted they wouldn’t vote for the restructuring, but it’s the Governor’s prerogative — no Legislature voting is involved.

No real change has ever come from e-mails or phone calls to politicians or bosses. The civil rights and labor movements made advances only with strikes, rebellions and masses of people in the streets. To stop these attacks masses from the community, the churches, and many other union members from Kings County Hospital across the street must be involved. 

The community is still unaware of the pending closing. When rank-and-file union members have leafleted the community informing residents of Cuomo’s plan, people are shocked and ask what they can do. Unfortunately the union flier only calls on people to phone their opposition to an AFL-CIO recording that will forward their message to Cuomo, the very politician the union chiefs helped elect.

Workers at the rally were skeptical of the politicians’ promises. When a union leader said CSEA represents 300,000 state workers, one worker commented, “With that number of informed, unified members, something surely could be done to stop this!” One worker remarked that mental health care has already deteriorated so much that there are more psychiatric cases in Rikers Island prison than in all state facilities!

A Racist Attack

A serious campaign is needed and this is a ripe opportunity. The avalanche of attacks against the working class here by the big capitalist players in New York State are kicking us workers when we are down and showing NO mercy. This is a racist attack. In this borough of 2.5 million, the majority of them black and Latino workers who experience 20 percent poverty with 40 percent uninsured, there is half the number of acute-care hospital beds per capita as across the river in Manhattan.

Cuomo, in the face of Brooklyn’s health crisis, decided to cut state funds for Downstate in half. He and his appointed policy-maker, Stephen Berger, the CEO of a multi-million-dollar slash-and-burn firm, want to close hospitals, tear up our pension plans and bust the unions. There is a heist going on by Cuomo, his Department of Health, and local corporate forces represented by Berger and Brezenoff. The latter is CEO of Continuum, which bankrupted Long Island College Hospital, forcing the state to pick up the bankruptcy note in a non-disclosed partnership.

These times are both similar and different to the Great Depression. Unemployment was also high then, but now U.S. rulers are seriously trying to slash workers’ living standards to compete with other world capitalists. They’re also allotting 60 percent of taxes for their war machine to protect their empire. The rich get richer and workers get poorer.

This capitalist system will always prize profits and world domination over workers’ needs. Become a regular CHALLENGE reader and join with PLP to learn how to break the control of the capitalists and destroy their system with communist revolution.

U.S. rulers are shifting focus from encouraging an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities to a Libya-style, “humanitarian” proxy invasion of suddenly strategic Syria. Cynically seizing on the worsening carnage there, the imperialists served by Obama seek to deal the burgeoning China-Russia-Iran axis a major setback. “In the minds of many on President Obama’s team, nothing would undercut Iran’s capability to cause trouble in the region faster than if the mullahs lost [Syria’s ruler] Bashar al-Assad” (New York Times, 2/25/12). (see box)  -

A Libya-like overthrow of the Syrian regime especially would be a blow to Putin’s Russia whose main Mideast base has been Syria, the recipient of huge military supplies from the Kremlin. It would make more secure U.S. control of oil in neighboring Saudi Arabia, which simultaneously raises the question of what to do about Iran itself. 

Bosses Say U.S. Must Occupy, Not Just Bomb, Iran

Early last month, both the Times and the U.S. war department chief Leon Panetta had predicted an imminent attack on Iran from Israel. But by February 20, the Times warned that “pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.”  

“It ain’t going to be that easy,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who retired last year as the Air Force’s top intelligence official. But Israel’s bosses, whose needs often clash with those of their bankrollers, may strike despite U.S. reservations.

U.S. and allied imperialists, however, realize that they are now incapable of launching the kind of massive military effort that defeating Iran requires. As the British ruling class’s Economist magazine pointed out, “Short of occupation, the world cannot eliminate Iran’s capacity to gain the bomb” (3/25/12). Tom Ricks of the Center for a New American Security, a Rockefeller-funded think tank that backs Obama, sounded the same note in quoting an unnamed U.S. policy planner: “If we do go to war, it will not be small...[I]f we go after [Iran’s] abilities to project military power, we’d open a 15-year window” (Foreign Policy, 2/24/12).

World War III Call to Arms

Obama may not put GI boots on Syrian soil or bless Israel’s use of U.S.-made bunker busters in Iran. But that hardly makes him a pacifist. The imperialists whom Obama serves have far bigger goals. Richard Betts, a CIA adviser and David Rockefeller fellow at the U.S. rulers’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has written a World War III call to arms. 

Rejecting the neo-conservative notion of waging relatively small wars on the cheap, Betts openly revives the General Colin Powell Doctrine as head of Bush, Sr.’s Joint Chiefs of Staff: deploying “overwhelming, decisive force.” The following, chilling citations from Betts come from a CFR publicity event for his new book, American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security, held in January: 

[E]xcessive emphasis on dealing with minor current challenges, I think, can detract from the resources we’ll have available in the future, when we may face big ones again, such as a more difficult China. 

China is doing as much...as the United States, in terms of planning militarily for the contingency of conflict with the other. 

[T]here’s no alternative for great powers to planning for the possibility of conflict with other great powers that share some conflicting interests.

Betts is pushing to get plans in place for a full-scale militarization in the U.S., like those of the 1917 and 1941 World Wars. A controversial restoration of the draft, which the rulers inevitably will need to wage a broader war, is implied rather than mentioned explicitly. 

So that’s why I put emphasis on a mobilization strategy, one that’s oriented towards, in large part, organizing the military for a rapid readjustment if things in the world go really bad.

Betts outlines the main coalitions in the coming global conflict: a U.S.-Europe-India axis arrayed against China, Russia, and various vassal states like Iran, the old Soviet republics, and North Korea. He emphasizes the need to re-militarize NATO members that contributed too little, in his view, to recent U.S.-dominated campaigns. Betts calls it “burden shifting, getting the allies to do more.”

[The U.S. should] avoid increasing incentives for China and Russia to form a more direct alliance against the West.

 [T]he extent that we can cultivate and develop strategic ties with India, that helps in regard to China.

Betts hardly cares about the mass murders from nuking smaller anti-U.S. regimes. Even as it trims its costly nuclear arsenal, the U.S. could wipe out Iran or North Korea. 

We could go down to a thousand nuclear weapons and that would still astronomically outclass anything Iran or North Korea has on the horizon.

For the present, Betts argues, the main thing is to get along with China in order to buy time for the big build-up.

I think it’s important to do as much as we can for as long as we can to avoid making conflict between the United States and China a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

In the run-up, Betts foresees “uncomfortable adjustments” within the U.S. — in other words, fascist discipline imposed on capitalists and workers. Of course such “adjustments” for capitalists mean paying for a more efficient war machine. But they fall far more heavily on the working class: massive wage cuts, mass unemployment, intensified racist and sexist attacks, slashed healthcare, as well as sending youth off to fight and die in imperialist wars. In the U.S., this means a DREAM Act that propels immigrant youth into the military. 

Arch-imperialist, war criminal Henry Kissinger, who as Nixon’s secretary of state, directed the U.S. genocide in Vietnam, concurs, on both counts: the wisdom of avoiding conflict with China in the immediate future, and the necessity of a severe housecleaning to prepare for an impending clash. 

The rise of China is less the result of its increased military strength than of the United States’ own declining competitive position, driven by factors such as obsolescent infrastructure, inadequate attention to research and development, and a seemingly dysfunctional governmental process. The United States should address these issues with ingenuity and determination... instead of blaming a putative adversary (Foreign Affairs, March-April 2012).

Despite the recent surge of Tea Party candidate Rick Santorum, reflecting divisions in the bosses’ ranks, the two most likely winners of this November’s presidential election — Barack Obama and Mitt Romney — are fully on board for this long-term war agenda. 

None of these bosses’ politician servants care one bit for the tens of millions who would die in these mass slaughters. But this is the logic of profit-driven capitalism — anything to maintain their exploitative system, and, in the case of U.S. rulers, to remain top dog among their rival imperialists. 

What We Must Do

The only solution to such wars, fascism, racism and sexism for the world’s working class is to organize for the overthrow of capitalism with communist revolution. This means fighting and leading class struggle in all aspects of our lives — in the factories and unions, in the schools and on the campuses, in the churches and other mass organizations run by the bosses. 

Through such fights communists in PLP can gain the confidence of masses of our co-workers and youth. Thereby, we can win them to the understanding that nothing less than the creation of society — led by a mass party —  run with workers’ power, without bosses and profits, can achieve a decent life for our class and our children. 

This is Progressive Labor Party’s goal. Join us! 

 The only day the world recognizes women is the one to celebrate their “reproductive” role as mother and wife, Mother’s Day. But it was the Soviets, the communist movement, that celebrated women as political beings with revolutionary power. March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD), the day that communists organized to salute the strength and contributions of women workers.

Women are not docile but have been organizing and fighting back for hundreds of years. In the United States, the fight of the slave and of women began from the same thread. The Grimke sisters fought against slavery and for women’s rights as one and the same battle. Angelina Grimke declared, “Until he [a slave] gets his rights, we [women] shall never have ours.” Struggles led up to the German communist Clara Zetkin taking the initiative in 1910 to organize an official International Working Women’s Day. Anti-sexist struggle makes it a historic day for all workers, women and men. 

Communists Fought to Smash Working Women’s Oppression

During Czarist Russia, the struggle for working-class women became synonymous with the open call for the overthrow of the government. During World War I, the Russian Bolshevik Party tried to turn March 8th into a demonstration of women workers against imperialism. On that day, the women of St. Petersburg began and led the February revolution in 1917.

Re-centering IWD within its rich revolutionary communist history helps increase the class-consciousness and organization of working-class women. This militancy is crucial to the future of the working class.  

What is Sexism?

Much like racism, sexism is a systematic tool used by the bosses to divide the working class against itself. It is the special oppression of female workers. This is manifested in many forms. In 1921, Lenin wrote that “under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed….not only are they exploited as members of the working class, “they continue to be ‘household slaves,’ for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and family household” (in a Supplement to Pravda No. 51). Part of this women’s unpaid housework includes raising children, which is seen as an extension of their “reproductive” role. These children go on to become the next generation of workers. 

Bosses also use women as a disposable labor force. Not only are they paid less to do more work than their male counterparts, they are also sexually harassed, objectified, and subject to mass violence and genocide. Black, immigrant, Asian, and Latino women are triply exploited because of the racist nature of capitalism (see PL pamphlet Smash Racism).  The super-exploitation and oppression of women workers affects the whole working class.

Men’s wages are depressed precisely because women’s are especially depressed. The differential pay between male and female wages serves to divide the working class. If men buy into the idea that their work is worth more, not only are they making it easier for bosses to super exploit women, they are also making it easier for bosses to exploit them. 

Women working in unpaid labor at home are seen as profitable for men. The inexcusable violence against women is used to justify that it is “natural” for men to beat women. Both notions disregard the class content in sexism. When women are treated as domestic slaves, men become complicit with capitalism’s systemic inequality. Violence is a safety valve for capital, projecting men’s frustrations in their exploitation as wage slaves onto women. 

How does a man who degrades his wife and children hurt from sexism? That male worker has divided himself against his family. In what could have been his source of strength against his alienation at work is now a source of disunity. And any temporary “gain” from having women perform tasks for men is greatly outweighed by the losses he experiences as a worker and as a father, partner, or friend of a female member of his own class. 

Sexism Inherent in Capitalism

The inherent sexism in capitalism is clear within the context of maximizing profits. Historically, profits haven’t always existed as part of society. When people began accumulating wealth, society changed from a primitive egalitarian society to one defined by class (see PL pamphlet Communism and the Struggle Against Sexism). In fact, the enslavement of women, the ultimate producers of labor, was essential to class society. To produce surplus, despots had to have unpaid labor and therefore they subjugated and enslaved women. As bosses increased their accumulation of surplus value (profit, value produced by workers over and above their wages), the gendered divisions of labor — previously based on mutual agreements in hunter-gather societies — became coercive. Hence, sexism is an inherent part of capitalism.

Capitalism has become an international parasitic system, and the world is made dependent on the major capitalists. Women and families are alienated, coerced, evicted from their land, and forced to migrate to imperialist countries to earn wages. These women are given the lowest-paying, labor-intensive jobs, which again profit the ruling class. The U.S. profits significantly from the sweat and blood of black, Latino, and Asian immigrant women. Immigrant women are ruled under fascist conditions — working nearly from meal to meal, while nonimmigrant women workers, such as single mothers on welfare, are also treated in a viciously sexist and racist manner. 

Sexism Means We Must Fight Back

Women workers have always fought back against oppression. In Bangladesh, thousands of garment workers, mostly women, shut down 700 factories and the roads to the capital, Dhaka. They also hurled bricks at the sexist cops who tried to tear gas and beat them. 

These workers produce billions of dollars of profit for corporations such as Walmart and H&M clothing stores, while only earning pennies. Part of the struggle against sexism begins on the factory floor, where women learn to fight fear, an instrument through which the bosses’ state rules. 

As these women fight against their super-exploitation, Arab women and children are defending their village against the Israeli fascists. Women nurses in Brooklyn joined their male colleagues in multi-gender unity, are also fighting hospital closings and massive cutbacks in benefits and wages. 

Feminism HURTS Women Workers

Feminism, a bourgeois philosophy, disregards the class nature of sexism. Anti-sexist struggles must reject it, because it divides the working class by blaming male workers and shunning them from anti-sexist struggles. This all-class unity for women sets us up for fascism by mobilizing women against their own class interests and sharpening the racist attacks on all workers. 

It is communism, never feminism, that fights to eliminate the sexist divisions of the working class. Only communism can eliminate sexism by abolishing the wage system where work will be divided based on need and commitment, liberating women from the direct responsibility of pre-natal care and child rearing. It will be shared equally with men. This will remove incentives for sexist divisions and workers will struggle to eliminate gender roles. Women will be valued according to their role in giving political leadership. This egalitarian foundation will give way to producing a society free from treating women as commodities.  

For Communism, Women Must Lead Revolution

Historically, women are the most exploited of the working class. Class struggle is sharpest among the most exploited sectors of the working class. The experiences gained from this special oppression provides the basis for this leadership. Therefore, women are key to communist revolution. 

The battle against sexism is an international one. When the woman worker in Haiti is raped, when a girl in Pakistan is sold into marriage, when a mother from South Africa is faced with eviction, this is an attack on the working class as a whole. 

When we sharpen the contradictions between the ruling and the working class, workers will put anti-racist and anti-sexist politics at the forefront, doing away with the identities capitalism uses to divide us. We cannot fight sexism without having strong communist leaders who are women.

Though communists have made the greatest advances for women in the Soviet Union, most of the leadership was still male. PL has been fighting against sexism by maximizing women’s revolutionary potential and having them take more leadership roles, as occurred with the women who led the bakery workers’ fight against Stella D’Oro (see CHALLENGEs in 2009). 

We need to expose sexism at work and in all the struggles we are involved in. The fight against sexism is a day-to-day struggle. Challenge sexist notions of male supremacy among co-workers. Raise anti-sexist politics at school. Rally against sexist healthcare cuts at your workplace. Write to CHALLENGE about your struggle against sexism. Women and men, black and white, must embrace communism as the only weapon against sexism.

“The Forgotten Space” is a poetic, visually stunning, and unabashedly anti-capitalist documentary about the global transport system. The film opens aboard a massive cargo container ship carrying products from low-wage manufacturing and farming centers to major ports in Europe and the United States. 

The seas are the pathways over which 100,000 ships, manned by 1.5 million seamen, deliver materials and goods worth trillions of dollars to a web of manufacturers (like Foxconn in China), importers (like Walmart and Apple), and banks and financiers on Wall Street and elsewhere. “The Forgotten Space” interviews the normally invisible people who make and transport the goods, rather than the billionaires who get both the credit and the profits.

The film depicts how the entire transport system of capitalism relies on cheap labor: factory workers in China; Korean and Indonesian workers who service the cargo ships; low-paid truck drivers at the huge port in Los Angeles. 

As economist Minqi Li explains, capitalism relentlessly seeks to lower production costs by cutting wages and benefits and also by demanding lower taxes and minimal environmental regulations, giving it freedom to pollute the oceans. 

The cargo container — a standardized metal box that can be moved from ship to train or truck — was developed by U.S. shippers who were eager to cut the number of dockworkers required to load cargo. Millions of containers now travel the globe’s oceans, a watery conveyor belt that moves 90 percent of the world’s cargo. Once they reach their destinations, trains and trucks bring their contents to stores. 

Meanwhile, farms in Holland are uprooted to make room for the tracks the railroads run on, while the entire village of Doel is demolished to expand the port of Antwerp, Belgium. Nothing appears to stand in the way of global capitalism as it moves factories abroad and shunts industrial workers to the unemployment lines or to stock shelves at retail stores.

Yet Minqi Li argues that something does stand in the way. The workers of China are now demanding higher wages and benefits, with a record number of strikes and job actions. Li asks, What happens to capitalism when it runs out of workers it can super-exploit? 

His comments have a certain deterministic ring, as though capitalism will somehow fall apart when wages rise globally. Yet the film — which the filmmakers declared to be “openly Marxist” — concludes by suggesting, “The lowly crew must seize the helm.” 

Indeed, only when the working class destroys capitalism with a communist revolution, and takes over the global economy, can it begin to plan a society that treats people humanely.