LOS ANGELES, February 29 — In the months following the clearing of the Occupy encampment in downtown Los Angeles, the idea of the 99% has penetrated college campuses and workplaces throughout Southern California. From public college students facing tuition hikes to transit and airport workers confronted with wage-cuts, the Occupy message resonates deeply in their respective fights. This political development is an opportunity to build the strategic worker-student alliance that can serve as the basis for a revolutionary communist movement. 

Student members of Progressive Labor Party recently organized a conference on the economic crisis of capitalism and higher education at a state university here. The students collaborated with transit workers, high school teachers and friends from the Occupy movement to hold workshops on the need for a worker-student alliance. One political goal was to show the similarities between the struggles of students and teachers in high schools and colleges. 

Point of Disunity

At the morning plenary, one group of students raised a “point of unity” that called for the exclusion of communist parties from the conference. Some Occupy participants, particularly the self-proclaimed “facilitators” (the de facto leaders of this “leaderless” movement), red bait organizations they see as “authoritarian.” 

But on this campus, where a PL comrade has spent months building a base around communist politics, most disapproved of this red-baiting. A PL teacher pointed out that this proposed “point of unity” was both anti-communist and dishonest at a conference that was designed for the exchange of ideas. Many in the audience responded with applause, and the anti-communist proposal was shot down. 

Later in the afternoon, the worker-student alliance workshop explored the real points of unity between student and worker struggles. One transit worker recalled his experiences as a student organizer in Central America and pointed out capitalism will continue to oppress us regardless of any victories in reform struggles around tuition hikes or wages. The discussion then turned to consider what kind of revolutionary movement was necessary to destroy capitalism. 

Connect Cuts to Capitalist Crisis

At a writing workshop, teachers and students planned a pamphlet to explain the economic causes of the problems in education and to strategize fight-backs that unify students and teachers on high school and college campuses. Another workshop connected the rapidly rising cost of higher education, firings of teachers, and cutbacks in class offerings to the current crisis of finance capital. 

Students and instructors understood that a failing economic system is to blame for these problems and enthusiastically agreed that this discussion should be part of future conferences.  

Between now and May Day, PLP students and workers plan to organize similar events in various worksite and campus struggles in Southern California. The Occupy movement shows that many are angered and frustrated with the crisis of capitalism but also unclear as to how to respond.  By building a mass, militant worker-student alliance, PLP can advance toward the development of a revolutionary communist movement that is powerful enough to destroy capitalism.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, February 17 — PLP members joined 500 workers and students in a march and rally to support the 200 undocumented workers and families fired by Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) in Berkeley, California. 

We distributed a leaflet and CHALLENGES, focusing on racism in capitalism as a labor policy. Many gave thumbs up to our poster: “A world without Borders is a Communist World” (Un Mundo sin Fronteras es un mundo Communista).

We are following up on contacts among these workers and some of the younger activists on the march, which included NGO’s, community organizations, churches and Occupy Oakland. There was no official presence from the labor movement.

Using CHALLENGE and actions in our various mass organizations, we’re aiming to make May Day truly a march to unite the international working class and the many individual struggles in this area.

Workers at Pacific Steel Foundry, members of Glaziers, Molders and Plasterers Union Local 164B had a 3-day strike last March against a company-threatened 10% pay cut plus an increase in the cost of health benefits.

Later, the workers filed a $30 million class action lawsuit against Pacific Steel for failure to provide rest and meal breaks. By December, ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) had conducted “silent raids” which required Pacific Steel to verify all workers’ Social Security status (I-9 audit raids). 

The company then fired 200 workers (a third of the workforce). Most had 5 to 20 years seniority. Now their pension benefits are “in question” even though they paid into the union pension fund for years. Many have citizen children, pay taxes and own homes. One fired worker, 14-year veteran Jesús Navarro, was denied a kidney transplant by UC Medical Center here due to his undocumented status. After huge protest and outrage, UCSF medical center is now negotiating a transplant. 

Bosses Profit, Union Misleaders Collaborate

While the steel industry “off-shored,” these workers have produced huge profits over the years for this “family-owned company.” It is the 4th largest such plant left in the U.S. Current wages, $11-$19\hr, used to be substandard for the steel industry up to the 1980’s. Union leaders negotiated these low wages, with the justification of “making the company productive” and “keeping the jobs here.”

Pacific Steel has now rehired about 200 workers, presumably at the lowered $11\hr starting wage. Both the company and the union leaders (including Vice-President Ignacio De La Fuente who is also president of the Oakland City Council) say their hands are tied by “Federal Policy” and the law. 

Those fired have formed a rank-and-file Workers Committee for Mutual Support. The official union leadership has abandoned them but they are reaching out through mass leafleting in mainly Spanish-speaking communities and social justice organizations. 

Racist War on Workers

“If, through enforcement, a large fraction of illegal immigrants returned to their home countries, there would seem to be an ample supply of idle American workers to replace them, particularly workers who have relatively little education.” (Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), think tank on immigration policy)

The 200 replacement workers (mainly Latino and black) Pacific Steel has hired — U.S.-born or “legal” residents — are the “ample supply” mentioned above which unemployment has forced into these “substandard conditions.” 

With Obama’s Secure Communities program, deportations have reached record numbers, 300 000 annually since 2009, almost double that of George Bush. ICE “silent raids” (I-9 audits) have focused on companies with unionized workers. 

These are parts of the racist, anti-immigrant policy. This is how fascism operates, as a virtual gun to the heads of these workers.  

The Communist Alternative

“We want to feel proud that working our jobs means we are contributing to the well-being of the human race and to ourselves.” This is Progressive Labor Party’s view of a future communist society. We organize to fight for a better life today while struggling long-range for communist revolution.

We learned from the successes and failures of communists in the Soviet Union and China as they attempted to build new societies. While those communists abolished private profit, they still maintained a capitalist mode of production: production for buying and selling in the market, wages and wage inequality for workers. 

They became a ruling party that controlled and distributed what the working class produced, turning it into state capitalism, the socialist economic model. This produced a return to capitalism. 

Our goal is REAL communism, with a mass communist party, with production for need and abolition of the wage system: from each according to commitment and ability, to each according to their need. When the international working class wins and holds control over all of society’s economic, political and cultural institutions, it will unleash a creative power that will propel the human race to its highest accomplishments in all fields of endeavor. This is workers’ power.

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Government Policies: Legalized Racism to Increase Profits

 • Chain gang and Jim Crow laws in the South from 1880-1920’s; the anti-loitering laws of those years are equivalent to the nonviolent “drug arrests” and deportation policies of today. Both result in racist jailing. 

   • Workers from Mexico were “repatriated” (deported) in the 1930’s and re-imported in the 1940’s to replace workers drafted in World War II.

   • Workers of Japanese ancestry were interned when World War II began. Their property and jobs were stolen. They were replaced by Latino, black and dust-bowl refugees (often white) to perform farm labor. 

   • The vast prison population today, disproportionately comprising black and Latino workers, provides profits from free or below-minimum-wage labor for U.S. corporations. Those on probation increase the ranks of the desperate unemployed.

   • The present destruction of jobs in the public sector (transit and schools) disproportionately hurts black workers because 1 of 5 employed black workers have jobs in the public sector. 

As Karl Marx pointed out, “the reserve army of labor” is built into capitalism. It condemns millions to misery and helps suppress the wages of those who have jobs.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 27 — Many workers in many industries in Haiti have been fired for organizing a union or striking, including printers, hospital workers, archivists, transportation workers, teachers, city workers and others. This treatment violates labor laws on the books but never enforced. One such group who has stayed together in their union and are still — years later — demanding their jobs back, met with PLP to find out about the Party and to ask how it could help them expand their campaign. 

This is a very determined group of workers, including many active women, who have dared to oppose the repressive and cruel capitalist system here by staging  demonstrations, confronting the corrupt management, organizing petitions and press conferences, and requesting the support of various unions and organizations. Although their efforts so far have been ignored by the rulers, they continue their fight-back.

Those of us present were thrilled to see such courageous workers who, in spite of the misery being imposed on them by the deadly duo of capitalism and imperialism in Haiti, continue the struggle for dignity and bread. We explained that we will do what we can to obtain the support of other unions where we have a presence. Our student friends will continue to meet with a workers’ committee to plan how students and workers can help one another’s struggles. The workers clearly understood the need for this unity of workers and students in confronting a common enemy.

Spreading the Struggle 

Our exchange of experiences and ideas gave rise to a pledge on our part to work harder in the U.S. to denounce these attacks on workers in Haiti and to step up circulation of a petition in their support. We delivered some petitions containing hundreds of signatures for the workers, who received them with great appreciation and will show them to other unions. They will also gather signatures on a petition of their own supporting U.S workers’ struggles.

We stated, however, that we have no “magic bullet” to help them win their demands. The capitalist system is a deadly treadmill of attacks against workers worldwide. Like any reform struggle, even if they succeed, the bosses can take those wins away the next day, or make new attacks. Without an outlook that involves the destruction of capitalism and the fight for communism, we will  always be fighting the next assault against our class since that’s what the system produces in its thirst for profit from our labor. 

During the meeting we discussed the ten PLP principles stated in “Our Fight”” from the Kreyòl issue of CHALLENGE.  In response, women workers were especially passionate in their hatred of the system. One told us she lives in a single room with four grown children since being fired. She asked how workers could win an armed revolution when the state has all the weapons. One answer stressed that our strength is in our numbers, if we get organized.  

Some liked “Our Fight” but asked how these ideas could help win their long struggle for their jobs. We stressed that each battle, win or lose, can “win” if we come out of it stronger in numbers and with more comrades committed to revolution. One comrade found it very painful to have to tell such hard-hit workers that only revolution and expanding the Party can win. But that is the challenge we all face.

Their determination is a good example of a working-class fighting spirit. No matter how destitute, hungry and oppressed the workers might be, they are fighting back and refusing to submit to the nightmare of misery and neglect that their masters have created for them in Haiti. They have our support and admiration as communists. In the course of their struggle, they can understand that capitalism, just like a leech sucking up our blood, must be destroyed so that we can live and prosper under a system of justice and equality: communism.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 18 — The ruling class is stepping up its attacks here. The government has turned its fascist power against the students, especially those at the State University of Haiti, and particularly the Faculty of Ethnology, invading the campus and brutally assaulting the students. However, the students fought back with rocks, sending Haitian President Martelly running off with his personal guards while a large force stayed.

At 3:00 p.m. on February 17 a Toyota with tinted windows pulled up to the Ethnology Faculty. An envoy from Martelly had come to announce his imminent arrival. This was the same campus — the most militant left-wing campus in Haiti — where Martelly had organized a December 27 raid to win over certain students and divide the rest.

Anti-Martelly students vowed not to let him on the campus as had happened in December when the pro-Martelly “pink” student-mercenaries (as they are known) took advantage of student vacations to open the gates for him. Now again they and his militia thugs were prepared to invade the Ethnology campus.

Martelly arrived at the head of a crowd in a Carnival-like entrance as performer “Sweet Micky” (Martelly’s stage name as a pop singer), shirt unbuttoned, urging on his thugs. After two turns around the campus shouting slogans (“Martelly, the country belongs to you, show your buttocks as you want. Micky is not afraid of anything!”).

Well-Planned Assault

Martelly tried to enter the campus grounds by force, along with his armed men. It was all well-organized. People in civilian clothes carrying guns, machetes, knives and clubs broke down the fence and invaded the courtyard. Eighteen windows on cars belonging to students and faculty were totally smashed. Dozens of students were manhandled and clubbed by the thugs who brutalized them with their batons and anything that could wound or kill.

All this occurred under the gaze of the well-armed security forces, who simultaneously used their heavy weapons to prevent the students from escaping. Those with heart conditions or asthma had trouble breathing. Many were taken to the hospital.

The cops took some students away after having beaten them nearly to death. The police fired their heavy weapons to scare off the students. Thus, the armed forces protect the profits of the criminal leaders who want to hang on to power!

Workers in the Ethnology department office, where some students had taken refuge from tear-gas attacks, were pushed around by Martelly’s thugs, who broke everything they couldn’t steal. They burglarized the office of everything of any value. Martelly’s armed gangsters in civilian clothes surrounded the campus until the last students left, ransacked and bruised.

This organized criminal act made certain students targets of Martelly’s thugs, one being attacked by a pro-Martelly “pink” criminal. The massacre targets this campus to erase any denunciation of those in power, who lie and make false promises to the people and use mercenaries to divide them.

This recipe for fascism shows clearly that the rulers plan to re-institute dictatorship in its most ferocious form. All this explains the massive presence in the Martelly government of Duvalierist-Macoute forces (murderous holdovers from the former Duvalier dictatorship). Down with fascism! Long live communism!J

Editor’s note: The above eyewitness account came from a student at the scene. We thank him and his comrades for fighting back and giving leadership to the international class struggle against fascism. As the 1930s Spanish communists said of Franco’s fascists, “No pasaran!” (“They shall not pass.”) We would add that Haiti’s rulers are a local capitalist ruling class who are clients of U.S. imperialism, not simply the gutter fascist Martelly and his thugs.

From an international perspective, this student struggle is an antiracist one. The fact that Haiti is being left to rot as a pool of reserve cheap labor for the region, and a possible military asset in the U.S. imperialists’ battles with their rivals, is a gross racist assault on all workers and students in Haiti. Antiracism, too, is an international fight.

[Note: An international petition campaign is being organized to condemn this raid and support the students’ struggle. Please sign it at www.ipetitions.com/petition/condemn-raid-on-haiti-university-campus. The students in Haiti will use it there.]