NEWARK, NJ October 30 — While there are certainly many weaknesses in the Occupy Wall Street movement, one positive aspect is that it has motivated many workers and students to begin fighting back.  Around 25 students and workers in Newark gathered for a General Assembly meeting to figure out how to proceed.  From the beginning, many workers began to talk about the budget cuts made by Mayor Cory Booker while giving himself a raise in the last budget. 

One of the students then proposed creating a different budget and getting a petition to deliver it to the city council for recognition.  Then, a black worker jumped in and said, “They create these illegal laws to get away with this stuff.”  She described how workers are struggling just to survive and that we need to think about different ways to fight back beyond “protesting.”

Many people in the group agreed that we need to do more.  Then a longtime worker and resident of Newark raised the role of racism under capitalism and why we need to look at these problems (housing, unemployment, health care) as a systemic issue and not just one brought about by particular individuals. 

A high school teacher echoed those sentiments, saying “They want to divide us.  They don’t want black, Latino, Asian, and white people uniting to fight. That is why what we do here is so important.”  Everybody agreed. 

In a city like Newark, where over 20% of the population is unemployed (and many more are underemployed), fighting racism must be a main pillar of what we do.  While many students and workers involved in the OWS movement agree that racism is a problem, many of them lack a class-conscious approach. 

“White skin privilege,” a popular idea among many OWS members, overlooks the objective political and economic reasons for white workers to attack racism.  History shows that racism hurts the white working class, both politically and economically.  By keeping white, black, Latino, and Asian workers from uniting while unemployment rates for black and Latino workers are double that of white workers, wages and benefits of white workers continue to get cut. And millions of white are unemployed as well. And millions of white workers are unemployed, as well.

We in PL are bringing a communist approach to fighting racism to the Occupy Wall Street movements. Only through multi-racial unity of the working class and the commitment to get rid of capitalism — the profit system that needs and continues to produce racism — can we move forward to building an egalitarian society.J

People around the world mourned the death of Steve Jobs on October 5. Jobs, one of the founders of Apple, is credited with changing the world with stylish and easy-to-use gadgets like the iPhone, iPad and Macintosh computer. Apple built an image of ingenuity that would make life better through its products.

While Jobs and Apple can be credited for these devices, they were and are no friends of the working class around the world. In the past 14 years under Jobs’ leadership, Apple became the world’s largest company, recently surpassing Exxon Mobil. It made so much money that it held over “$76 billion in cash and investments” in a bank in Nevada to avoid California corporate and capital gains taxes (Newsweek, 9/5/11).

How did they make all that money? Pure inventiveness, creativity and will? No, they made it off the backs of the working class. Even though Apple is a U.S. company, it chose to produce the bulk of its products in China, where average wages of workers are extremely low. In 2010, the average salary for a Chinese worker in Shenzen, home city to Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn, is about 900 yuan a month, or about  $132 (Bloomberg, 5/28/10).  Foxconn is the company that manufactures most of Apple’s products.

Sweatshop-like conditions have permeated these companies. According to the UK’s Daily Mail, workers clocked almost 98 hours per week, standing most of the time. When the iPad was in high demand, workers were only “allowed to take one day off in 13.” If they performed poorly they were humiliated in front of co-workers (www.dailymail.co.uk 5/1/11). Conditions at these plants are so horrendous that workers were committing suicide. Workers at Foxconn were made to sign an agreement that if they killed themselves, their families would not be compensated.

Steve Jobs tried defending Foxconn in early 2011 by proclaiming to investors that the company was not a sweatshop. But in an internal progress report, Apple conceded that workers at 18 facilities were paying such steep hiring fees that they were basically enslaved. At 10 facilities, a total of 91 workers under the age of 16 had been hired (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com, 2/16/11).

This is how Apple and Steve Jobs made their billions. Apple couldn’t set up shop and provide jobs for workers in the U.S. because they needed to go where the labor is cheapest. Workers around the world need to see what the bosses are really like: merciless, ruthless and profit-driven. The working class must remain clear about what these bosses do and how they exploit the working class.

NEW YORK CITY — Our study/action Group has been taking students to participate in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The students looked forward to going to OWS because they’ve been inspired by the protests.   We meet for lunch, read CHALLENGE and discuss the contradictions between reform and revolution. 

The most valuable element of the OWS protest has been the fact that it is capturing the imagination of workers and youth as well as inspiring them to fight back.  Our students were quick to point out that these protests were similar to those in Egypt.  The massive uprising there led to a dictatorship without a dictator in Egypt. In Tunisia, Islamists won an  election. Both were a losing proposition for the working class.

A few days later, another group of students and some teachers went down with a PL’er who works at the school.  They saw the limits of reform for themselves, and each of them moved closer to the Party as a result.  One of the students now takes and distributes CHALLENGE, having his own CHALLENGE network. 

A week after our first trip, another teacher in our group was able to convince his students to go.  Our students then met up together and distributed CHALLENGE and had conversations about our politics.  These conversations strengthened their commitment to our Party’s ideas.  Hopefully, they too will join the Party.  The OWS movement should be seen as an opportunity for us to build the Party by discussing it, going to it, and struggling over the politics of it.J 

The recent upsurge in militant class struggle, as seen in Greece, Egypt, Spain, England, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and the United States, is a heartening development. Over the last two months, the trade union movement in New York City has moved thousands of its members to participate in its Labor Day march and at various rallies connected to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This display of the potential power of the working class has encouraged still more organized workers.

Black, Latino, Asian and white workers from scores of unions, in both the public and private sectors, have made what appears to be a statement of solidarity and unity. Once you get past surface appearances, however, the essence of this activity is something very different. Progressive Labor Party was present at the Labor Day march and lifted the struggle level by raising questions like:

What was the focus of the unions’ Labor Day march? Did it aim to stop the racist threat of public hospital closings at Brookdale in Brooklyn or Peninsula General in Queens? Such a fight would do much to stop the erosion of desperately needed medical care in the predominately black and Latino communities that these hospitals serve — and the layoffs that these closings would require. PL’ers have supported these struggles by joining picket lines and demonstrations at the hospitals, along with our coworkers and friends. Our solidarity efforts, communist ideas and CHALLENGE were warmly received by rank-and-file hospital workers, many of whom have become our friends.

It would have been great if the Labor Day march had taken a stand against the racist crisis of unemployment that grips every segment of the working class at an “actual” rate (including underemployed and “marginally attached” workers) of more than 21 percent (shadowstats.com). We say that unemployment is racist because black, Latino and immigrant youth are victimized by joblessness by a multiple of three times the overall rate. But the union “leaders” have no plan to fight either health care cuts or massive, racist unemployment.

What if workers organized to force the New York City Central Labor Council (NYCLC) to call for a citywide general strike to stop the layoffs of some 800 public school support workers? The struggle led by PL earlier this year at the John Jay High School campus in Brooklyn showed how students, teachers and parents could be won to unite and militantly confront the racist Department of Education.

What if such a general strike had demanded an end to the imperialist oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? If the NYCLC organized such a strike, we would begin to see real working-class power in action. Instead, we saw calls for patriotism and support for U. S. imperialism via signs “remembering” those who died on 9/11.

If the Labor Day march had been intended to build real working-class unity, it wouldn’t have stopped at East 66th street. It would have continued into Central Park and joined striking restaurant workers at the Central Park Boathouse as the PL did. Plers built support for this strike in the weeks before Labor Day and leafleted that march to guarantee that many marchers, including those we brought, would indeed show their solidarity with the strikers. The valiant, mainly women immigrant restaurant workers were able to win union recognition and a contract. Still, a massive outpouring of marchers into the park would have helped build unity and fought racism, sexism and anti-immigrant sentiments. From this New York restaurant to a Chicago library to a California grocery chain, PL has sought to build solidarity campaigns to fan the embers of working-class struggle. In the process, we have met wonderful people who are excited by our revolutionary communist ideas.

What if workers demanded that instead of marching up 5th Avenue, past the luxury buildings housing the richest 1% of New York, we had marched in the working-class areas of Brooklyn where the 99% live? What if we had rallied in front of the Flatbush Gardens housing complex where unionized workers have been locked out since last November? Or if we had joined the picket lines at Long Island University, where teachers were on strike and in opposition to tying any raise to tuition increases? Then we could have been built worker-student unity!

What if Verizon workers in the Communication Workers of America, who had joined the OWS activities by rallying in front of Verizon Corporate headquarters on October 21, had instead renewed their strike against Verizon? Then they would have harnessed the anger stoked by OWS against a corporation that amassed $22.5 billion in profits and paid its top five executives $258 million in the last four years — while moving to slash worker benefits, sick leave and raising health insurance costs and eliminating job security. What if the 110,000 members of the American Federation Of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37, whose contract expired a year and a half ago, went out on strike for a new contract and to restore cuts and laid-off workers? Then these workers would be taking on the fascist Taylor Law. The spark of OWS would have led to sharper class struggle.

The reason these things haven’t happened is because the unions’ role is to maintain capitalism! The leaders mimic the bosses by demanding obscene salaries. A case in point: Gerald McIntee, International President of AFSCME, was paid $479,328 in 2009. AFSCME’s District Council (DC) 37 head, Lillian Roberts, earned $343,467, or about 10 times the average wage of DC 37 members.

To fight New York State’s Taylor Law or the wave of anti-union laws passed in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, the unions would need to break the bosses’ laws and expose their rigged system. Instead, they channel workers’ anger and frustration into the voting booth.

In 2008, the unions’ political action committees spent more than $80 million on federal elections and elected their “friends” to the White House and Congress. Having “won,” they then failed to get their top issue passed, the “card check” method for organizing new bargaining units. This proves yet again that governing power is not determined by elections but rather serves the interests of the ruling class, regardless of which party wins the latest contest.

When a spark like OWS seems to challenge the hold the bosses have over our lives, the union honchos, ever faithful to their friends in high places, organize through coalitions like “stronger for all” to blunt the energy and anger of OWS protesters and to deliver the union rank and file into the waiting arms of the bosses’ “Demopublican” party operatives. Year after year, we are urged by union leaders to vote for lesser-evil candidates (usually Democrats), who promise us fewer cuts and more crumbs. The reality is seen in the current debate in Washington, which is between catastrophic or merely disastrous cuts in services that workers need. Workers choose only one thing in these elections: who will be their oppressor.

Progressive Labor Party has a different plan. We understand that workers create all wealth. We know that under capitalism, the value they produce is stolen from them every day. We want to use the power and fighting unity of the working class to destroy the capitalist system. While we support the necessary fights that workers wage for better wages and benefits, we understand that under the bosses’ system, every reformist gain that is won can be taken back from us. The process of building Progressive Labor Party in these fights strengthens our class’s ability to fight back today as well as preparing us for the bigger fight to come.

That is the fight for communism, a system where the working class takes power, and where everything produced is for the use and benefit of the working class. A society where racism and sexism are outlawed. A system where there is no immigrant/citizen divide, and no more rich and poor.

Get off the bosses’ treadmill and join us in building a society that can truly serve our needs! Join Progressive Labor Party. Read and distribute CHALLENGE. Build for communist revolution!