“Infusing his speech with the type of populist language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Mr. Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class” (NY Times, 12/6/11).
On December 6, the 101st anniversary of arch-imperialist president Teddy Roosevelt’s (TR) famous speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Barack Obama returned to the town in an attempt to steer the momentum of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to serve U.S. capitalists’ war needs.
TR supposedly had come to Osawatomie to commemorate John Brown’s heroic 1856 anti-slavery battle there (see box). But in reality, like Obama and other politicians now trying to mislead OWS, Roosevelt sought to channel workers’ demands for equality into all-class unity to support imperialist wars. With U.S. rulers seeking to expand beyond their 1898 conquests of former Spanish territories (including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines), he called for a “New Nationalism,” the patriotic ideology that would help push the U.S. into World War I five years later. At the same time, he created a template for Italy’s Fascists and Germany’s Nazis: a highly centralized and regulatory capitalist government that can control all classes, and the propaganda that service to such a state is for the greatest good.
TR aimed to reform capitalism. He ran for president on the so-called Progressive Party” ticket, and became known as a “trustbuster” for wanting to discipline the ruling class and save the system from its own excesses. Meanwhile, he popularized his case for imperialist aggression with a famous saying: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
A century later, Obama is working overtime to revive TR’s deadly pronouncements. Here are some Rooseveltian sound bites that Obama has embraced:
Equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest [read “military”—ed.] service of which he is capable.
I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us abroad that respect which is the surest guaranty of peace.
[I] ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole.
By championing the “national interest,” Roosevelt was hiding the fact that the government’s job is to protect the interests of those who control society, namely the capitalist bosses, both in the U.S. and abroad. Throughout the world, local bosses in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have used nationalism to spur workers to oust imperialist powers and “liberate” former colonial countries. Then the local capitalists take their turn in exploiting workers for profit, a common thread in this year’s “Arab Spring.”
The Patriotic ‘Middle Class’
Obama is straining to preserve the concept of a patriotic “middle class,” which serves to deaden class conflict and as a buffer between rulers and most workers. In imperialist economies thriving off colonial mega-profits, bosses can be forced to respond to class struggle by conceding a higher standard of living for the home country’s working class. The bosses then cite these workers as a new “middle” class (see box below).
But this phenomenon, described by Karl Marx 150 years ago, can last only as long as the imperialist nation’s ability to dominate less-developed countries and super-exploit their workers. In the U.S., huge sections of workers in auto, steel, railroads, manufacturing and mines have lost the jobs and living standards that they’d won through militant, communist-led class struggle. U.S. bosses, no longer in a position to afford these extra crumbs for a “middle class,” due to imperialist competition, have neutralized the unions and now pay a newly hired auto worker half of what the old contracts called for.
Racism is a big part of this ruling class offensive. After centuries of super-exploitation of black workers, from slavery through post-war Jim Crow, the rulers now offer middle-class benefits to some black bosses and professionals, while extorting super-profits from the overwhelming majority of black workers, along with Latinos and immigrants. At the same time, the capitalists have used the Great Recession to steal back benefits from black workers and others that were won through long struggle. The black workers themselves, whose ‘60s rebellions won those higher-paying jobs, began to be laid off in the recession of the early 1980s. As proof that racism hurts all workers, now white auto workers are suffering the same fate. (See page 4 on unemployment.)
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin who greatly admired TR, held out the promise of potential prosperity — later supported by full employment in war plants — to mobilize workers for World War II. But the social contract over which FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presided, the so-called “American way of life,” has crashed..
Obama acknowledged as much in Kansas: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.” The president’s myth-spinning about an improving economy flies in the face of economists’ warnings that today’s mass joblessness will last for years — and that many of these unemployed may never get another job.
Populist Fascism
To deal with these domestic crises, Obama has pounced on the working class by sustaining many of Bush’s policies. Obama’s administration has detained and deported record numbers of undocumented immigrant workers, while pushing for a “Dream Act” that would send tens of thousands of immigrant youth into imperialist wars. The Obama Justice Department has endorsed military tribunals and enforces the most oppressive provisions of the Patriot Act, which Obama extended earlier this year. He bailed out the big banks with workers’ money while allowing millions of foreclosures. His federally backed bankruptcy plan forced workers at GM and Chrysler to accept a ban on strikes. And even as he spouted empty phrases about “democracy” and “freedom” for workers abroad, Obama imposed a wage freeze on hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the U.S.
We should make no mistake. Obama’s goal, like TR’s, is not to better the lot of workers, but to lead them to support an imperialist solution to a capitalist crisis. One such solution from the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies involves “major U.S. attacks on military and civilian targets” in Iran, specifically up to 2,500 cruise missiles and strike sorties that “hit all suspect facilities for nuclear...targets including universities” (CSIS, 11/28/11).
For the U.S. rulers whom Obama serves, this aggression could lead to a mobilization for a larger invasion in the Middle East as the U.S. military expands its presence in the region, adding tens of thousands of troops in countries surrounding Iran. Another would be an intensifying conflict with Iran’s primary enabler: China, the U.S. capitalists’ main strategic foe.
For the international working class, the only real solution to the misery wrought by the profit system is to get rid of it altogether with communist revolution. This is PLP’s goal in immersing ourselves in workers’ class struggles. Our goal is to win our class to the communist ideas that will free us from the hell of capitalism.J
Myth of the ’Middle Class’
Obama, alongside his political buddies and the bosses’ media, constantly invoke the mythological “middle class” while never mentioning the working class. They are trying to convince workers who earn — or who aspire to earn — $50,000 or $75,000 a year that they are not workers. They want to hide the reality of a working class with its antagonistic relationship with an opposing, parasitic ruling class. The latter controls the means of production and reaps profits from exploiting worker’s labor power, the source of all value. Capitalists own; workers create.
Many workers’ struggles may have won incomes that enable them to afford a home, a car and a college education for their children, but they have no security under capitalism. Come the next crisis of overproduction and the next wave of mass unemployment, these higher-earning workers promptly get laid off and made homeless. Their “middle-class” life goes up in smoke. One’s class is not determined by income, but rather by the source of that income.
Opportunist-in-Chief ‘Forgets’ Anti-Racist Hero John Brown
Barack Obama spat on our class’s militant, anti-racist history by excluding John Brown from his December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was there, in 1856, that the great abolitionist led thirty-eight fighters, black and white, to counterattack 250 pro-slavery troops and kill twenty of them. Brown’s boldness at Osawatomie, Harpers Ferry and elsewhere helped encourage millions to take up arms against human bondage.
At Osawatomie, Brown wrote, “There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for.” But the United States’ first black president, whose own wife has slave ancestors, omitted John Brown because Obama understands that he’s on the other side. Far from fighting against oppression, the president wages war to heighten capitalist exploitation of workers around the globe.
Just before Virginia’s pro-slavery forces hanged him in 1859, after years of guerilla warfare, Brown acknowledged, “I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Brown was right. The main scourge attacking the working class today is imperialist war and its racist, fascist preparations. To rid ourselves of capitalism’s endless profit wars, we will need to transform the demonstrated anger of OWS into militant action and a long-term plan toward communist revolution.
LOS ANGELES, November 30 — Over 2,000 workers converged on LA’s City Hall on November 27, anticipating the police raid to remove the Occupy encampment. PLP mobilized a group of about 20 students and workers to show solidarity and help organize a defense of the camp. In the hours leading up to the midnight deadline, the PL group distributed 100 CHALLENGES and organized a picket line chanting, “The workers united will never be defeated” and “Whose streets? Our streets.”
As midnight neared, PL led the picket into the streets, defying the police who told the PL’er on the bullhorn leading the march to get back on the sidewalk. Eventually, what was a relatively small picket turned into several hundred protestors, taking over a street intersection next to the main Occupy encampment on the south lawn of City Hall.
Many expected a confrontation with the LAPD that night. However, it was not until the following night that the kkkops raided the camp, overwhelming the couple of hundred occupiers with a force of 1,400 cops. Under orders from the “progressive” LA Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the cops utilized their best “community policing” techniques to avoid an all-out confrontation with the occupiers.
Part of the plan included pre-selecting which media outlets would be allowed to participate. This was important for the LAPD and the Mayor since they were keen on not letting the media cover the brutality of the police in their violent arrests of occupiers who refused to leave the encampment. The media also made no mention of the skirmishes between racist cops and protestors in the streets near City Hall when the occupiers were trying to disrupt the police operation.
The media did, however, glorify the LAPD’s military-style attack to clear the encampment. Besides mobilizing over 1,000 cops, the LAPD established a police command and processing center at Dodger Stadium for potential arrestees. They also turned dozens of MTA buses into police buses in which they transported close to 300 arrested occupiers. The following day Mayor Villaraigosa celebrated the efficiency of this fascist operation, lauding the “restrained” police behavior.
Despite the clearing of the Occupy encampment, PL’s participation in the nights of the police operation showed the potential leading role a disciplined organization can play in militant struggle. The next step is to transform this militancy into class struggle in our workplaces and campuses around our vision of revolutionary communism.
- Information
Cops’ Attacks Can’t Stop Protest of Racist Tuition Hike
- Information
- 15 December 2011 556 hits
NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — Today the City University of New York (CUNY) trustees outdid themselves in fascist absurdity. They locked all Baruch College students, faculty, and other workers out of their own school so that they — bankers and ruling-class stooges appointed by the mayor and governor — could impose a racist 33% tuition hike on the mostly black and Latino and immigrant students.
The events of the previous Monday triggered the lock-down. On November 21, a militant group of 500 students arrived at the “public” meeting where the CEOs and other bosses that make up the Board of Trustees (BoT) supposedly listen to testimonies from the community. This is another capitalist lie. The decision had already been made.
Nevertheless, students and workers gathered, ready to make the BoT listen to them. CUNY responded with baton-wielding “public safety officers” and NYPD cops. Students were sitting in the lobby chanting, “Occupy the Lobby!” The cops attacked, swinging their batons wildly. In discussion during and after the event, PL’ers stressed that this was, and is always, the role of the kkkops: to terrorize workers, especially black, Latino and women workers, into submission.
We were not intimidated, and returned today for the BoT to officially vote on their racist plan. So angry were students and workers over last week’s cop-attack that CUNY bosses had to shut down the entire college to hold this meeting! Like slave-owners whose greatest fear was the slave revolt, the bosses today acted out of fear for they could not trust anyone at Baruch. More than 15 students were arrested, including one student whom the cops sexually harassed.
With their state power on full display, they could lock us out. One professor got into the meeting and disrupted it with a protest against police brutality. Though he was thrown out of the room, they could not drown out the more than 1,000 protesters outside, chanting “Get up! Get down! There’s revolution in this town!” and “Education is a right! Fight! Fight! Fight!” The multiracial crowd was a mix of older, more organized union workers and the younger, less organized, angry students taking the streets and challenging the cops.
The union workers deferred to the students’ leadership and stopped their moving picket line. The students then led the whole crowd in a march around the neighborhood and back to the front doors, in time to yell “Shame!” at a few last trustees scuttling out of the building. The last speech given using the human-mike was a student thank-you to their worker-allies for being there to the end.
Where does this leave us, in a town that is somewhat rebellious but far from revolution? We need a deeper understanding of the class system to really “get up, get down” with revolution. The capitalist university is not, as one sign wished, “a free speech zone,” but an ideological apparatus carefully tailored to reproduce the system. Inequality is not caused by unfair taxation but by the exploitation of labor. Capitalism is not an “economic” system fixable by a “political” electoral process or the protest of a militant crowd. It is a political economic system where the exploitation of labor is guaranteed by an armed, vicious, racist dictatorship of capitalists. The ruling class not only owns the means of production but also owns the cops, the army, the laws, the courts, the judges, the politicians and parties, the media, the schools, and the churches.
There will be a communist revolution in this town and every town. But when there is, the prophetic, anarchic feelings of youthful revolt now surging in the Occupy movement will have had to become the cold rage of a conscious and fully organized working class. Led by PLP, we must be ready to smash the capitalist system and take state power. Self-critically, although the Party, CHALLENGE and revolutionary politics were present today, it was not nearly enough. We too have a tough transformation to make to become the Party that our class needs and our history demands. And we will.
- Information
Brazil: Cops Occupy Workers’ ‘Favelas,’ Kill Youth
- Information
- 15 December 2011 574 hits
The working class in Brazil continues to pay a high price for having a pseudo“leftist” government. These rulers work only to benefit the international capitalist class, spending the country’s international reserves to save Europe’s bosses from their financial crisis. Meanwhile, they continue to exploit Brazil’s workers.
During the first five days of November, 1,800 workers went on strike against LG Electronics, the Korean multinational, demanding the rehiring of ten workers fired for fighting to improve their miserable working conditions. In the state of Ceará, university professors and students have been on strike since November 11 against budget cuts.
Meanwhile, as pseudo-leftist president Dilma Rousseff talks of “democracy,” police in Rio de Janeiro occupied the favelas (slum neighborhoods) of Rocinha (which alone has 70,000 residents), Vidigal and Chácara do Chapéu. The action was justified as part of the Police Pacification Unit (UPP). The occupation began on November 13, to continue indefinitely.
The UPP, initiated by Governor Sergio Cabral in 2008 in the Santa Marta favela, is supposedly designed to expel drug-trafficking gangs from the favelas while installing community security systems. According to Rio de Janeiro’s town council, 29 of the city’s 605 favelas are already controlled by the UPP. Most are in the southern part of the city, where is also home to some of the richest neighborhoods. A good example is Rochinha, sandwiched between such luxurious neighborhoods as São Conrado and Leblon. Unlike most big cities, where the poor population is isolated on the periphery of the city, Rio’s poor occupy the hills throughout the city. The social inequalities are more obvious and transparent here.
Does it fight drug trafficking?
As usual, the capitalist-controlled media considers UPP’s military operation in Rocinha a ´´success,´´ praising the police and the residents’ acceptance of them inside the favela. Tomás Ramos, an advisor to State Deputy Marcelo Freixo (the human rights activist who recently fled to Europe after receiving seven death threats), says that many residents actually have mixed feelings about the UPP: “What they approve of is the end of frequent shooting between the drug-trafficking gangs and the cops, but they don´t necessarily approve of how the police manage the territory in which they live.”
In reality, the UPP’s mission is not to fight against trafficking or to reduce crime, but to control the favelas in economically strategic areas. Even Governor Cabral publicly acknowledges that the UPP cannot solve the drug problem. As he noted just before the first UPP occupation, “The [objective] is not to end trafficking; no one has been able to do that….The objective is to reach a civilized level of crime.”
Pacification for Sports
This UPP project was never designed to make the entire city safer. The pacification units are concentrated in wealthy areas of the city that are frequented by tourists, to protect revenues from the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. They also occupy the favelas bordering these areas, like those around Maracaná, the scheduled site for the World Cup final. As Luiz Antônio Machado, a sociology professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, noted, “The big [sports] events were decisive for the creation of UPP.” Brazil needed to guarantee security in these neighborhoods to be awarded these games. “The objective,” Machado said, is to criminalize poverty and impose public order with a military occupation.
Meanwhile, little is done to develop social programs in these communities. While the police have sponsored some school sports and sweet-sixteen parties to gain acceptance by favela residents, no one is addressing the needs of poor workers. The government demonizes young people as criminals instead of pointing to the root of crime in Brazil and elsewhere: capitalist unemployment.
Cops Defend Property of the Rich
History shows that the police are in place to defend the capitalist state and the rich. The cops have yet to arrest a boss for stealing workers’ labor each day, but they are always ready to arrest striking workers for the “crime” of fighting for raises. The police in Rio are considered the most violent in Brazil. According to data from the security secretaries in each province, the Rio police killed three times as many people as the cops in Sao Pablo (who are also considered extremely violent) during the first half of 2011. In 2010, the Rio police officially killed 885 people in the province, half of them in the capital. Many were the poor children of the working class.
As CHALLENGE has pointed out (6/8/11), Brazil´s government has trained its forces within the United Nations’ MINUSTAH army in Haiti to prepare them to pacify its favelas at home. Brazilian bosses are using the UPP to evict and silence the poor and show a “friendly face” to the World Cup, excusing the murder of workers with stories about drug trafficking or terrorism. But workers’ potential power was evident as they rose up and organized the favelas to resist these evictions. Workers in Brazil and around the world need to join the PLP to build a society of true social equality, and to destroy this putrid system of exploitation and profit.
HAMMOND, IN, November 27 — Demonstrations at Purdue U. Calumet (PUC) against racist Professor Maurice Eisenstein show no signs of dying down. Students have been campaigning without let-up to force the administration to fire Eisenstein.
The students’ actions include circulating petitions, urging victims of Eisenstein’s racist and sexist attacks to file formal complaints, and organizing public demonstrations and a campus-wide forum. Despite right-wing opposition and institutional apathy, students are demanding nothing less than immediate termination of Eisenstein’s professorship at PUC, and won’t back down until that goal is achieved.
Eisenstein has used his classes to disseminate his extreme Zionist and imperialist rhetoric — advocating extermination of Arabs, and the colonization of their lands by Israelis and Americans. He has stepped far beyond the usual pro-imperialist stance on current events, propagating into hateful dehumanization of Arabs, blacks, Latinos, migrant workers, and women. His extremism has culminated in direct personal attacks on students and faculty.
Despite much evidence to show his complete unsuitability as a professor, the university has been apathetic to the point of complacency for almost two decades. Only after the impassioned protests from a multi-racial coalition of angry students has the university begun to take the issue seriously. Meanwhile, both Eisenstein and a small group of his supporters are hiding behind a right-wing excuse of “free speech” while turning a blind eye to his abuse of power as a professor and the potential consequences of racist indoctrination.
PL’ers have been active in this fight since its onset, working with fellow class-conscious demonstrators to inject a much-needed energy and radicalism to the struggle. While some demonstrators want to fight within the restrictive confines of university policy, PL’ers and friends have been ensuring that the struggle won’t be diluted to fit a weaker liberal agenda.
We in PLP don’t see Eisenstein as just one “bad apple,” whose dismissal will automatically cure the university system of racism and bigotry. Even if Eisenstein is fired, PL’ers intend to keep the militant fire burning in our fellow students, many of whom have faced the brunt of racism their whole lives from imperialist propaganda. It is our goal to build solidarity with fellow students fighting bigotry and help them see that racism will be eradicated only with the destruction of the capitalist system that needs the extra profits from racist wage differentials to survive.
We will continue working with students and workers who face similar racist intolerance and intimidation. With solid communist leadership, these small struggles can harness the energy and commitment to destroy racism and capitalism once and for all.
