WASHINGTON, DC, January  25 — For more than two months, the Criminal Injustice Committee (CIC) of the Occupy DC movement has been battling the Wells Fargo bank to stop its support of the racist private prison system. In mid-December, more than 100 occupiers protested at the Wells Fargo branch in the mainly black Shaw neighborhood. Every Friday afternoon since then, a team of occupiers has leafleted there to urge its customers to close their accounts. Recently the CIC has expanded its boycott activities to a second branch office in Columbia Heights, where many black and Latino workers live.

On January 24, a second demonstration was held there in solidarity with protests at the Florida meeting of financiers involved with the GEO private prison company. The CIC also marched in the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade on January 22. The black working-class onlookers gave a rousing cheer to our “Jobs not jails!” chant, and quickly took all of our leaflets and CHALLENGEs.  

The capitalist system requires and reinforces racist institutions in order to maintain social control and maximize its profits (see “Smash Racism: A Fighter’s Manual” at www.plp.org). Capitalism systematically ensures the super-exploitation of African American workers by criminalizing and marginalizing them in what has been called the New Jim Crow (see adjoining article).

More than 60,000 DC residents have criminal records, mostly due to the bogus, racist “war on drugs.” The majority are jailed not for new crimes but for parole violations that are almost impossible to avoid. Half of those with criminal records are unemployed because it is lawful to discriminate against individuals for prior convictions. Wages and working conditions are driven down for these workers, and ultimately for all workers, as a result of this massive branding of black workers.

A similar institutional process is apparent for Latino immigrants, who face intense harassment, unjust jailings, and massive deportations. In the last three years, more than a million immigrants have been forced out of the U.S. under Barack Obama’s accelerated deportation proceedings. Meanwhile, 35,000 individuals are held in camps under the expansion of mandatory civil detention for non-citizens by Obama’s liberal predecessor, Bill Clinton, in 1996.

The surge in detention has resulted in horrid conditions, including grossly inadequate health care, physical and sexual abuse, and overcrowding. One Latino worker pressed a twenty-dollar bill in our hand to support our work against detention centers. We learned that his entire family was being held with no end in sight.

The Wells Fargo campaign is merely one element of the attack on the criminal justice system and by extension the entire capitalist system. Why Wells Fargo?  All banks are ruthless. But Wells Fargo in particular profits from its extensive business with the GEO Group, the second largest private prison owner, and second to none in its brutality towards incarcerated individuals. Wells Fargo is GEO’s largest investor (owning more than $100 million in stock) and serves as its underwriter, broker and financial advisor. 

At the Rivers Correctional Facility in Winton, NC, GEO incarcerates nearly a thousand residents of the District of Columbia. CIC members have met many former Rivers inmates with horror stories to tell, from snakes in the toilets (from the adjacent swamp) to negligent health care (one doctor for 1,300 inmates) to physical and psychological damage. As a profit-maximizing private facility, Rivers refuses to spend enough to provide decent food, health care, education, or job training. The truth, however, is that all prisons, public or private, are vicious tools of capitalist oppression. They must be smashed through revolutionary action.

During weekly CIC meetings, PL’ers have argued that the anti-racist Well Fargo boycott campaign will require more participation by the industrial working class to gain clout. While quite a few Wells Fargo customers have told us that they have already closed their accounts, more force is needed to pressure the bank and also to broaden the campaign. PL’ers have invited other CIC members to join the Party’s regular distribution of anti-racist and communist literature to bus drivers, an effort to gain transit workers’ support for this campaign. PL’ers have also made clear, through discussions and the distribution of CHALLENGE, that only by building a revolutionary PLP, smashing capitalism, and replacing it with a communist system can the New Jim Crow be defeated.

MINNEAPOLIS, January 28 — In international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters of Tahir Square and our fellow anti-capitalists in Athens, London, Paris and Rome, the Minnesota Occupiers held Occupy Space Day in Minneapolis. It was thrilling!

A contingent of 70 demonstrators marched through the Steven Square and Eliot Park downtown neighborhoods protesting income inequality and housing evictions. Minneapolis has one of the Midwest’s highest eviction rates, after Chicago. Our demonstrators were men and women, black, white and bi-racial, union activists, workers and college students. While many were reformist in outlook, many others were anti-capitalists.

The kkkops harassed us initially but left before the march’s main event. In Eliot Park where the march ended there was an anti-capitalist speech declaring international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters in Egypt and with other global protestors against racist, imperialist capitalism.

The speech was in front of an abandoned church that Hennepin County declared county property. An unused church could be used as a workers’ cultural community center. However, the county bosses want to hold onto it rather than give it to workers, so we took it!

One speaker declared, “We take this property in the name of the Minneapolis oppressed!” The doors were forced open and we had a party! We held it for one hour before the cops gave us 15 minutes to clear out or be arrested. We all left together, orderly and disciplined.

Despite that outcome it was a small victory because workers are slowly learning we don’t have to take oppression, that we can collectively fight back. Workers took all the CHALLENGES I had. Personally the march and occupation made me think of the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1968 general strike in France.

This is a great time to be alive because the PLP will show millions of workers globally the revolutionary path to communism! 

Minnesota Red

GARY, IN, January 21 — For over a month, a small but dedicated group of local activists have been leading a campaign against the Gary Public Library Board’s racist closing of the city’s downtown main library branch. Although the branch stopped its services last December 30th, the group shows no signs of giving up on the struggle.

The roots of the library board’s decision to close the downtown branch date back to last spring, when  the president, Tony Walker, started to unveil plans for a museum/cultural center that would operate for a profit in the current library building. Among other points, Walker stated that the building in its current state was structurally unsound and in drastic need of renovations. In a “public” meeting that hardly represented the voice or interests of the city’s citizens, the board voted to end the library services in the downtown building and forge ahead with the plans for the cultural center.

For those familiar with the political scene in Gary, the corrupt actions by the elected and appointed officials were business as usual. All meetings that are open to input from local residents involve the city council members quickly pushing their anti-working class motions through early on during the session, then opening the floor briefly to public comments, well after the point that the citizens’ opinion on the issue can have any effect!

This joke of a public proceeding is a microcosm of capitalist “democracy”: creating the illusion that the workers have a say on the decisions that affect their class, when in fact the bosses already have their minds made up about how they can screw us yet again.

On January 2nd, a few days after the downtown branch closed its doors to the public, a group of activists braved the frigid conditions and rallied in front of the facility. Gary residents and other local allies explained a myriad of harmful effects that were bound to occur as a result of the main branch closing. Some of the concerns brought up included how those unemployed could no longer use the free internet and computers to apply for jobs, how the library staff would likely not be retained to work in the new museum and how members of the whole community are losing a centralized and effective resource of information.

Aside from these unethical consequences of their actions, the library board may very well have engaged in some illegal activity as well. From the first time the plans for the cultural center were proposed, the activists have questioned the legality of using public funds — that were generated via taxes specifically designated for library use — to finance a project that will be of far less use to the community. In fact, the board members were quick to point out that the costs of renovating the library would surpass two million dollars, completely neglecting to mention the fact that to remodel the building as a museum would likely be double that!

The group opposing the closing of the library recently met with the mayor of the city to express our dissatisfaction. Though recently elected and no doubt seeking public approval, she was clearly hesitant and reluctant to agree to the group’s demand to recall the four members of the library board who voted in favor of closing the main branch. The mayor, who personally appointed one of those four members, insisted that we continue to circulate our petition. After that, she told us, she would consider holding a public hearing.

A few PL members have been active in this struggle since the Jan. 2nd rally. Although those currently involved in the small group are very motivated and passionate in their efforts, the struggle will no doubt need to expand to include a wide variety of activists, especially the youth of Gary, if we hope to succeed in not only re-opening the library, but keeping the flame of working-class militancy burning as well. We PL members plan to commit much time and effort to raising the issue at our local university in order to get more people involved in the fight.

With fierce commitment and sharp communist leadership, the crooked politicians in Gary will begin to notice that the working-class residents of the city are no longer taking their racist attacks lying down. Under capitalism, libraries and a proper education are luxuries for an increasingly elite few. Under communism, both will be top priorities for all workers. It is our task to convince the working-class that a communist future is the only one worth fighting for. More on this struggle to come!

NEWARK, NJ, January 26 — Education workers are angry.  The Newark Teachers Union (NTU) has let teachers and support staff go two years without a contract with no end in sight.  Most schools are falling apart and some are hazardous.  Students are forced to suffer through state testing every year only to be told their improvement is still insufficient.  The NTU addresses neither issue with members or the Newark community.

This is hardly surprising given the lack of resistance from NTU leaders against ruling-class unity on education reform.  The recently passed Urban Hope Act is a prime example. It allows private companies to build and manage public schools using public funds. Up to 12 schools in the mainly black and Latino districts of Newark, Camden, and Trenton will be affected. The largest teacher’s union in the state, the New Jersey Educators Association (NJEA), supported this pro-corporate, for-profit legislation.

The NTU leadership did nothing to inform the rank-and-filers about this law, much less organize against it.  Further, liberals and conservatives in the privatization debate want teachers to churn out pro-capitalist ideas to maintain this crisis-ridden system. Under capitalism, education is a private industry for the accumulation of profit.

Workers’ Response

Some education workers in the NTU are responding to the union misleadership by forming a caucus.  To align the caucus with the class nature of Newark, it was named Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus. The NEW Caucus held three steering committee meetings and two general membership meetings. PL’ers participated to push the struggle to the left.

Three main ideological struggles took place. The first was winning workers to understand the importance of developing a working-class consciousness. The second was to recognize that alienation — the commodification and separation of workers from their labor and from themselves as producers — is a product of capitalism. Alienation makes workers feel like a cog in a wheel. Overlooking this is the primary issue preventing more education workers from fighting back, not apathy. Apathy is a bourgeois myth that functions to blame workers for their inaction, not the misery-inducing capitalist system. The third was to increase the fight against oppression, especially racism, both inside and outside the NTU.

When working on the mission statement for the caucus, it did not take much struggle to persuade education workers that alienation was the primary barrier to more workers participating in the union.  Members of the NEW Caucus are also working toward building unity with all workers and students in Newark, the source of proletarian strength.

Fighting Against Racism is Primary 

Much to the surprise of a PL’er, the issue of fighting racism took much struggle. A caucus member said union leaders were not defending black and Latino workers in the NTU. Another person then brought up the need to defend students by fighting racist attacks within and outside of the school system.  

For some, racism was seen as a personal thing that individuals use against one another and thus no longer a primary problem in society. PL’ers must point out that racism is a class issue and source of immense super profits. Some workers believe we live in a “post-racial” society, a myth the ruling class has worked hard to spread. Another member added that if the mission statement opposed racism then it would have to include all the other “-isms” like ageism.  

After much struggle, caucus members acknowledged racism as a major social problem necessary to fight back against. It is one of the ruling class’s main weapons in dividing and conquering workers. Anti-racist language was included in the mission statement. 

The next step is another mass meeting in two weeks with rank-and-file education workers. Committees will be formed, direct actions will be proposed, and discussion will ensue over how best to introduce the caucus to NTU (mis)leaders.  Be assured that the essence of the NEW Caucus will be reformist, even if militant at times.  But with struggle and CHALLENGE, PLP can build a base with fellow education workers by consistently pushing anti-racist class struggle towards communism.  PLP hopes to win these workers to fight for a communist world where education is for the benefit of all workers, not for the profit of the ruling class.