DETROIT, MICHIGAN, July 30 — Comrades from the Midwest and East Coast joined thousands of teachers at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Detroit to expose the dangers of supporting the ruling class liberals. New and veteran comrades joined together for four days of forums, leafleting, selling CHALLENGEs, and meeting teachers nationwide. The peak of our Summer Project was direct political action at the AFT against Vice President Joe Biden (see box).

Capitalism Destroyed Detroit

On the first night, a comrade from Detroit held a meeting to talk about the current state of Detroit. Many of the people of Detroit relied jobs in the automotive industry. Due to the collapse of the auto industry in the 1980s and the recession that followed in the 1990s, factories closed down and many workers were laid off. The initial cut-backs disproportionately affected black workers. The unions in these factories did not fight back against these racist layoffs. As a result, white workers were attacked and lost their jobs as well. 

According to our comrade from Detroit, the factories were moved down South and to Mexico where the labor is cheaper and union activity is low. It was a move clearly to maximize profits. Whatever happens to the workers left behind is of no concern to the auto bosses.

Due to the recession, Detroit has suffered greatly. The automotive plants closings led to a sharp decrease in tax revenue. As a result, Detroit ‘sresidents have had to deal with high taxes and cuts to public services such as the fire department, transit system and its schools. 

As we drove through the streets of Detroit, we saw the aftermath of the destruction for ourselves. Many of the buildings were either run down or abandoned. Supermarkets are located beyond city limits. There were areas where there was nothing but huge fields of overgrown grass. Some comrades went to Henry Ford high school to do a CHALLENGE sale and noticed that the football field, tennis courts and track field were covered with weeds and overgrown grass.

Fighting Racism in and out of the Classroom

The planning and execution of the Summer Project from the youth leadership of PLP led to the distribution of over 1,500 CHALLENGEs and over 5,000 leaflets that exposed how the capitalists have destroyed Detroit; how the “liberal” Democrats are just as dangerous as the Republicans; and how Diane Ravitch is a ruling-class tool and an enemy of the working class.

Many people, visitors and AFT delegates alike, took notice of our literature and held discussions with us. As the convention went on, some people eagerly took the next piece of literature or could be seen reading CHALLENGE intently. In addition, we received 242 signatures on a petition supporting the struggle in New York to find justice for Shantel Davis, a 23-year-old black woman who was murdered by NYPD detective Philip Atkins.

A forum was held on the limits of unionism, showing the advancements in education past communist revolutions have made. There was also discussion about how the communist revolution PLP is organizing for will be setup to meet the needs of all students.  

The horrors in Detroit and the attacks on our children’s education are just a few of many reasons why capitalism fails the working class. What workers need is communism, an egalitarian society based on need, not profit.  Progressive Labor Party fights for this goal. Join us in our struggle!

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ATTACK BIDEN!

On the day of Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival, we formed two groups. One stayed outside the hall,distributed CHALLENGEs and a leaflet titled “Democratic Party Attacks Education Workers.” Young PL’ers marched up and down, holding signs reading, “Don’t’ Vote. Revolt!” while chanting loud enough for workers inside and outside to hear.

The second group passed security and snuck a big banner inside that read, “Obama, Biden, Romney: Education Reform for Imperialism. Fight Back with Communism!” With the banner unfurled, we marched together through the convention hall, chanting, “Democrats and Republicans, all the same. Racist terror is the name of their game!”

The Secret Service and Detroit police grabbed our banner. We pushed back to stand our ground. Young PL’ers seized the banner back, raised it high, all chanting. While they were shoving us out the building, we were chanting even louder, “Racist Biden you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide!” We chanted for all of the workers Biden and Obama have murdered worldwide in the name of U.S. imperialism, but the union leadership edited this out of their video. PLP was a striking group of young multi-racial teachers and students in a crowd of majority white delegates. 

New comrades stepped up to take responsibility for the Party. There was a qualitative difference in many of our newer comrades after this Project.  Many commented on how they realized we have no choice but to fight. 

One student used the word fascism to describe the conditions for workers worldwide. He said he had never been taught that word in school and now sees exactly what fascism means.Everyone came away from the weekend politically stronger and more committed to advance the fight for communist revolution.

BROOKLYN, NY, July 16 — Shouts of “Save our patients! Save our jobs!” rang out as hundreds of workers, with red t-shirts flashing in the hot sun, picketed yet again to protest downsizing and layoffs in the Downstate inner-city hospital.  Inside, state politicians, SUNY and Downstate bigwigs met. When they came out, the politicians found themselves on the hot seat about racist cuts in jobs and services. Within a week hundreds of pink slips were sent out between the Downstate and Long Island College Hospital campuses of SUNY Downstate.

Are We Winning?

Can we win this fight against powers from Albany to Wall Street? In the 1960s, mostly black women hospital workers decided they were no longer going to stand working for $40/week, below poverty-level wages. For years they organized, picketed, struck, defied courts and police (and sometimes 1199 union leaders) and went to jail, but finally won union representation, a living wage and benefits. Now it looks like the bosses want to push us — still predominantly black, Latino and women workers — back to subsistence wages.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes you Stronger

There is another kind of victory we can win under capitalism if we have the will to engage in the kind of all-out struggle those workers did. We can become a more savvy, active and united working-class force. Getting involved in this struggle can expand our limits, get us out of our ruts. It can help us identify our enemies: the wealthy and their politicians, courts, cops, media and union hierarchies.  It can help us identify our friends. At our June 28 rally, we united workers, the community and three different unions. This multi-racial unity consisted of women and men, black, white and Latino, from professional and non-professional departments.

Taking a step further, we can look beyond our own hospital to see that our fight is the same as that of workers and patients at Brookdale, or Cook County in Chicago.

Taking another step we may feel kinship with the struggle of the ConEd workers who were locked out because they refuse to accept give-backs or even the struggle in our neighborhood against the racist police murder of 23-year-old Shantel Davis mere blocks from our hospital. We could come to realize that workers in Haiti, Egypt, Nigeria or China are fighting the same struggle.

Take It To Another Level

Right now you are reading CHALLENGE, the newspaper of the revolutionary communist PLP. CHALLENGE does not waver from pointing out the enemies and friends of the working class. 

We keep our eyes on the prize of finally overthrowing the wealthy ruling classes of the world to run things as the working class, for the working class. Read CHALLENGE regularly. Help distribute it to friends, family and co-workers. Write for it. Join a CHALLENGE discussion group. Contact us at PLP.org.

WASHINGTON, DC, July 24 — Several thousand workers and students from around the world marched to the White House today to demand that bosses and politicians take the steps needed to stop the racist AIDS epidemic worldwide. PL’ers distributed about 2,000 CHALLENGEs and communist pamphlets, arguing that the bosses and politicians would never serve the workers’ needs. Communist revolution is the only path to victory against AIDS. Many people responded with interest and were pleasantly surprised to meet serious revolutionaries. Many asked us to contact them for further discussions.

The “We Can End AIDS Mobilization” united a multi-racial group of activists led by people living with HIV attending the International AIDS Conference. Organizations mobilized thousands of workers to travel to DC to march along with thousands from Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, the Russian Federation, and many other countries in an inspiring display of international solidarity.

Nevertheless, a revolutionary strategy will be needed to stop the epidemic. The bosses may wish to limit the spread and severity of the disease when it actually debilitates its workforce, but their relationship to profit always prevents solving the complex HIV/AIDS epidemic. Capitalism reinforces the epidemic every day. AIDS activists must turn away from piecemeal, NGO-driven, partial if well-meaning initiatives, and tackle the even harder task of making communist revolution if we are to succeed in eradicating HIV/AIDS.

The march demanded cheaper HIV drugs, taxes on stock transactions to pay for HIV programs, needle exchange programs, stable affordable housing, reproductive rights for women, and an end to mass imprisonment of blacks, Latinos, and immigrants. En route to the White House, the march made stops at UPS to condemn its bosses’ homophobia. We also protested Wells Fargo in response to the local campaign of the Criminal Injustice Committee of Occupy DC that attacks the bank’s investments in profit-making prisons and support for mass incarceration.

The demands of the march could achieve small improvements. The targets (UPS, Wells Fargo, and the White House) are certainly among the enemies of the working class. But the AIDS epidemic will only end when workers abolish capitalism and take power. An egalitarian communist society will provide the conditions of life and the power to allocate resources to care for workers’ health.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, thrives in the cesspool of capitalism’s racism and poverty. It disproportionately affects people who are poor, imprisoned, use drugs, sell their bodies, and are gay. It is a major destabilizer of black communities. The bosses’ neglect of this disease is racist to the core, both in the U.S. and worldwide.

In the U.S., black men and women account for close to half of all new HIV infections. Data shows that this is not a function of personal behavior but a function of racist attacks, including incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, stigma and segregation. The marchers raised these issues which are largely missing from UN reports and plenary speakers at the AIDS conference.

The “war on drugs” that criminalizes drug possession and uses stop-and-frisk profiling techniques and imprisons so many black men and women also drives the HIV epidemic. The discrimination against homosexual people or drug users create shame and fear that keep people from seeking care and from advocating for social change. The fighting spirit of the marches broke down these barriers and brought everyone into the struggle, including thousands of unionized women who capitalism forces to sell their bodies in India. They were not allowed into the U.S. but rallied at the same time in India. The march provided a small glimpse of a mobilized international working class. 

What the working class needs is a revolutionary party to organize against and to smash capitalism – the cause of this racist AIDs epidemic – once and for all. Progressive Labour Party is doing just that. Join us!

 The vast amount of energy that is wasted in pursuit of maximum profits for capitalist corporations is the source of Japan’s energy problems.  The fossil fuel burnt to enhance automotive industry wealth, the electric power consumed in neon signs, electric vending machines, and advertising in all its forms are unfortunately, not what is being emphasized by spokespersons for a growing anti-government movement in Japan. 

On July 16, as many as 170,000 protesters gathered in central Tokyo to demand an end to nuclear power and to protest the government’s recent decision to resume nuclear power plant operations after a two-month total shutdown for a phony safety check. Pointing to a complete lack of meaningful progress in restoring disaster victims’ livelihoods and in decontamination of polluted areas, the demonstrators demanded the resignation of ineffectual prime minister Noda and his New Democratic Party administration. 

The mass movement against the use of nuclear power is growing in Japan in the wake of the nuclear disaster brought on by the earthquakes and tsunami in March 2011. The movement is well on its way to gathering 10 million signatures on a petition calling for the abolition of nuclear power. The working class in Japan knows it cannot trust government bureaucrats or their capitalist masters to safeguard public safety. Many working people know Tokyo Electric Power Company has used gangsters (sokaiya) to intimidate protestors in the past. We in PLP also know that to solve a capitalist created energy crisis, a communist revolution is necessary. 

As victims of the great U.S. war crime, the use of A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the workers in Japan understand the horrors of radiation poisoning.

The growing movement reflects a national mood in favor of sweeping social change — a new way of life. Anti-capitalist sentiment is growing, but much like the Occupy movement in the U.S., it lacks the type of clear direction that could be given by a revolutionary communist party.

Japan has been suffering from post-bubble economic stagnation and mass unemployment for more than 20 years. Of course, the U.S. and Europe are heading down the same path after their asset-bubble economy burst. 

The old Japan Communist Party gave up the fight for communism long ago. Instead it mounts electoral campaigns promising, in effect, that if only good, intelligent people, like their candidates, were given the reins of power, then the system could work with a few “scientific-socialist” modifications. The old Socialist Party that once led militant trade union struggles is now defunct. A handful of opportunist quasi-Trotskyite (fake leftists) groups only add to the confusion about Marxism-Leninism.

Of course this general situation is not unique to Japan. There are no shortcuts in the fight for communism — for real revolution. Communism is where workers control production for their needs. The capitalist class is resilient and flexible enough to withstand movements based on misleading slogans like “We are the 99%.”

In Japan like everywhere else, substituting one bourgeois party for another, building one reform movement after another that ignores the control the bosses have over economic resources — the underlying cause of unemployment and pollution — leaves capitalist bosses in power. Workers worldwide will learn this. It is up to us in PLP to help bring this about sooner rather than later.