CHICAGO, November 1 — While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement continues to grow worldwide, Occupy Chicago has moved in that same direction. Progressive Labor Party has been there since the beginning, selling CHALLENGE and trying to channel the movement towards communism. For the past month students, workers (employed and unemployed), doctors, nurses, teachers and others have built Occupy Chicago from a few angry people into a lot of angry workers. PL applauds this effort, but without communist revolution we’ll continue to be at the bosses’ mercy.

There’s a lot we communists can learn from this movement and there’s also a lot we can teach those in it. One is that non-violence doesn’t work when the bosses’ main tool is violence. On Occupy Chicago’s main website, they list their “Declaration of Nonviolence” which reads: “Occupy Chicago reassures its members and the public that we are a social movement dedicated to nonviolent action.”

We’ve struggled with OWS to see that non-violence is useless when the ruling class is committing genocide against the working class on a daily basis, whether it’s on the streets of Chicago, Oakland, New York, Rome, London or Rwanda; whether at Cook County Board meetings where they close hospitals, or in the schools or the jails. As long as capitalism exists, there can be no peace anywhere.

That lesson was taught the hard way to this movement. Over the past three weekends, the Chicago kkkops have arrested hundreds of the occupiers. On October 24, they arrested 130 people just for being in Grant Park after hours. The cops say they’re “protecting the peace.” But when a concert or a football game at nearby Soldier Field ends late and people are just hanging out in the park, there’s not a cop to be found.

One student protester who was there that night told us: “We were just sitting in the park peacefully. We made our tents and were prepared to stay for the night. The cops told us to leave at 11 PM. Some did but the majority said no, we’re not moving. At 12:30 AM, two big spotlights went on and about 200 cops in riot gear came out of nowhere and started arresting and beating people. They cut up tents and destroyed people’s stuff and just took people to jail. It was surreal.”

Also arrested were two nurses, there to make sure that protesters received proper medical treatment. Funny, the bosses say they have no money to keep open Oak Forest Hospital, from where 243 long-term patients have since been moved and have died. But they somehow have money to pay killer cops to arrest non-violent protesters. That’s capitalism!

We relayed that fact to the student protester who described that night. We gave her a copy of CHALLENGE and she gave us her contact info to stay in touch.

Another point that we raised to the Occupy movement is its lack of black and Latino workers, on whom capitalism’s hammer comes down first and hardest. They’re the ones who know the hard fact that racism and capitalism go hand in glove.

Without racism, the bosses could not keep the working class divided. The Occupy movement knows this because PL’ers keep raising it. Now they’re reaching out to the Occupy Gary and Occupy the Hood movements. As long as the working class continues to be pushed into the bosses’ elections and reforms, we’ll continue to be prey to the dead end of capitalism. We need communist revolution.J

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