PARIS, April 17 — Striking undocumented workers and their supporters rallied outside city hall here today as their strike entered its seventh month. Most of the 6,000 strikers are from Africa and work in construction, the restaurant trade and as guards.

They’re demanding general “legalization” according to “improved and simplified criteria that are the same everywhere in France.” Presently, “legalization” is decided arbitrarily and on a case-by-case basis by the 100 French prefectures. Estimates of the number of undocumented workers in France run from 200,000 to 400,000.

On April 1, Immigration Minister Eric Besson said he had no intention of easing “legalization” criteria: five years in France, one year of steady employment at a company promising to employ the worker for an additional year, and in a sector where there is “a shortage of native-born workers.”

Ruling Party’s Electoral Defeat
Leads to More Repression

The ruling UMP party and the government were defeated in the March 21 regional elections when the fascist National Front reappeared as a political force. It seems neither the debate on “national identity” nor the immigration minister’s inflexible anti-immigrant and anti-undocumented worker policy was enough to persuade the far right to vote for the UMP party.

Now it appears President Sarkozy’s regime has reacted by veering to the right, hardening its position and increasing repression of immigrants.

On March 24, the workers at the oldest Paris sit-down strike were evicted. Following the March 31 Council of Ministers [Cabinet] meeting, the occupants of the FAF-SAB premises were evicted the next day, and simultaneously the immigration minister announced no change in the anti-immigrant policy.

Strikers’ Victories

Nevertheless, the undocumented workers’ movement has been able to score victories. On March 8, 60 CGT trade unionists accompanied undocumented workers to the STN cleaning company in Aulnay-sous-Bois and forced the boss to promise hiring 28 striking undocumented workers. (This “promise-to-hire” is one precondition for “legalization.”)

On March 17, the Bagatelle restaurant was forced to issue eight promises-to-hire to its striking workers. On March 25, one of the Bouygues construction company’s renovation sites was occupied by undocumented workers and CGT union activists.

On April 1, hundreds of activists opposed the eviction of the undocumented strikers from the FAF-SAB premises for the whole day. Ultimately, the workers were evicted, but the struggle showed the strength of workers’ support for the strikers.

An April 6 editorial in Le Monde, the French “newspaper of record,” called on the government to abandon its policy as “sad and sordid.”

On April 12, a Paris appeals court recognized the right to strike and the right to sit in of the striking undocumented workers employed by Synergie, a temporary work agency.

Trade Union United Front Is Broken

On April 6, the Solidaires trade union confederation announced that it would encourage undocumented strikers to file “individual legalization” requests at the prefecture, without waiting for a new ministerial circular. This was the first break in the united front of 11 associations and trade union organizations supporting the strike.

On April 7 the organizations of the striking undocumented workers discussed the decision and remained unconvinced of its wisdom.

The government can react in two ways to this disunity:

(1) It can “legalize” a certain number of undocumented strikers on a case-by-case basis, the better to refuse all further demands, no new ministerial circular having been issued; or,

(2) It can refuse the requests for “legalization” and deport the undocumented strikers who filed the requests.

In either case, the six-month strike will have been in vain, since the undocumented workers will remain insecure.

The April 9 meeting of the committees of support for the undocumented strikers failed to re-establish unity and asked the 11 trade union organizations and associations for more material help, more means of communication and more initiatives in the struggle, all of which would help win across-the-board, not case-by-case “legalization.”

Presently, the undocumented strikers are torn between uncertainty and the possibility of victory. The strike has gone on too long for some, and some are discouraged. Many strikers have lost their jobs and their housing, unable to pay their rent. They expected a tough fight, but thought they would win mass “legalization” by the end of 2009.

Need for Communist Class
Consciousness

Another important factor in this strike is the development of revolutionary class consciousness. This means winning the strikers and their supporters to see the big picture, that the strike — as historic as it certainly is — is only one battle in a much greater fight: the struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish communism, a system in which the workers run society by and for themselves. Winning workers to this perspective guarantees that, however many battles we may lose, we will be on the road to winning the class war. J



SEYNE-SUR-MER, FRANCE, April 19 — The 120 Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) workers won a victory of sorts today in their struggle for a separation bonus (see CHALLENGE, 4/28).

The workers were demanding a 15,000-euro separation bonus (a total of 1,800,000 euros — $2,250,000) and a fund to tide them over until unemployment benefits kick in.

On April 17, a majority of the workers’ general assembly voted to end the one-week sit-down strike and lift the threat to burn down the factory after the prefect in Toulon promised to free up 450,000 euros for job training and to speed up the payment of unemployment benefits. Those measures were finalized today at a round-table meeting with the trade unions.

This, of course, is far less than what the workers were demanding, but they would have got nothing if they had not taken militant action. Only organizing for communist revolution can get workers off the treadmill of fighting for — and accepting — crumbs from the bosses’ table.

[Correction — PIP is owned by the U.S. company Heritage Worldwide, Inc., not Falic Fashion Group, as previously reported. CHALLENGE regrets the error.] J

“The Hurt Locker,” winner of six academy awards, follows a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. William James, Owen Eldridge and J.T. Sanborn are members of a U.S. Army “Bravo” EOD unit. They contend not only with defusing bombs but the insurgency of the “enemy.” Advertised as a suspenseful picture, which is “near perfect,” audiences know in advance that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have killed many U.S. soldiers and thousands more Iraqis. Bigelow sets us up in a “perfect” omission of the reason for the U.S. Army being there in the first place. Soldiers are portrayed as life-saving heroes.

A quote that begins the film is from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by war correspondent  Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The final scene, where James begins his new turn of hundreds of days, to leave his son and wife, speaks to irrational reenlistment. But the implied reasons for his returning to this war are much more compelling: the Iraqis are portrayed as the real fanatics and James as a complex character.

James is no stereotypical junkie-addict to violence. He forms a bond of affection with an Iraqi boy.  He has a “good marriage” and a child of his own. He comes within inches of sacrificing his own life to save that of an Iraqi man who is unwillingly locked into a suicide bomb jacket. His only Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome seems to be that of compulsively wanting to return to the thrill of performing a useful, highly-skilled humanitarian mission. His motivation could as well come from the exhilarating feeling of being extremely productive, emphasizing a human element that begs for some meaning or purpose in life. 

The film obliterates the real history of imperialist war. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers murdered by the Clinton “sanctions” of the 1990s and the U.S. decade-long war of aggression are nowhere to be found. The imperialist drive to control oil resources is not an Oscar-winning subject.

Two scenes in particular highlight the insidious message of the film. Iraqis, in the very beginning, are shown to be as unpredictable an enemy as the IED’s. They watch, portrayed as a potentially dangerously vigil in the wreckage of Baghdad, surrounding the Bravo Unit as it attempts to “secure a safe street.” Iraqis become ominous, dismissing the reality that it is that country the soldiers are occupying.

A second more powerful episode occurs when a pitiful, unwilling “suicide bomber” pleads for his life so that he can return to his family. He is literally padlocked into his jacket filled with explosives so that he cannot escape. In one frozen moment, he is the symbol for many suicide bombers who are victims of a terrorist minority (or a sick Iraqi society) rather than motivated people intent on driving the U.S. invaders out. While terrorism as a political modus operandi serves only to murder the innocent, the terrorist acts of U.S. army officers, pilots of bombers and robot plane technicians upon civilian Iraqi’s, Afghanistan and Pakistan people never enter the lens of the director’s camera.

The message the media industry wishes to convey is that Oscars make a film worth seeing, and that enlisting in a cause worth fighting for can be satisfying as well as addictive enough for re-upping that enlistment.   Hollywood is not interested in the communist motivation that empowered millions in the red armies of the USSR and China to smash fascism during World War II.

The history of working classes with communist leadership who have challenged capitalist wars of profit are left out entirely.  Instead, we are encouraged to identify with the individualist acts of one soldier who appears to resolve the problems of war by dismantling one explosive device at a time. Hollywood can only offer mind-numbing defenses of U.S. wars of aggression from Rambo and The Deer Hunter (a racist Oscar-winning movie that portrayed Vietnamese workers as crazy gambling killers of U.S. “innocent” soldiers) to Blackhawk Down and now “The Hurt Locker.” 

Part 1:

Global warming is not simply “man-made” as the Nobel committee stated — it is in fact capitalist-made. Capitalism, and not humanity, is the cause of global warming.

Grow or die is the law of capitalism. The net effect of this planless competitive system is that as each corporation is driven to expand by the drive to stay alive, the total accumulation of capital grows.

The overall effect of this single-minded capitalist focus on profits is continual crisis, war and world war, followed by periods of renewed economic expansion. The vicious business cycle causes devastation in the lives of workers through layoffs, increasing deaths, recessions, depressions, homelessness, starvation, drugs, filling of prisons, and the use of working-class youth as cannon fodder in wars. Adding to the misery caused by capitalism are the pollution and methods of waste disposal that destroy the lives of workers, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S., and globally in
Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Capitalism Systematically
Destroys Nature

Capitalism is a form of social organization that systematically destroys nature. It is a system driven not by need, and particularly not by the need to preserve the natural sources of its bounty. It is driven by profit. Profit-making requires efficiency not only within the individual business, but the competition inherent in profit--making requires that all businesses maximize profits continually, and particularly so over the short term — or go belly up.

Capitalism, for all practical purposes, prevents us from obtaining food, water, shelter, clothing, and other needs, unless we work for the capitalists and produce value worth more than we are paid — with the excess taking the form of surplus value, or profit.

Capitalists invade nature for their own class needs, in effect stealing it from the working class, enforcing their control over us and over the earth through their control of state power. They strip-mine and destroy entire mountains; they force over-fishing of the oceans in the competitive drive for profits; they clear-cut forests for wood products; they drain wetlands for city development without creating replacements elsewhere. Capitalism turns land into real estate, forests into lumber, and oceans into fisheries and turns the world’s working class into profit-producing commodities as appendages to capitalist machines.

Planet Becomes a Toxic
Dumping Ground

On the waste-product side: capitalists dump toxic or radioactive waste into soil, rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere. Numerous deaths result, without our class being able to do much to stop them, since the state protects only capitalist interests.

In a few local situations, through long major collective campaigns, workers have forced a few temporary concessions, but the overall destruction of lives and the environment accelerates everywhere else. The capitalists thus literally get away with this type of murder, just as they do through police brutality, poverty, racism, and oil wars.

In its single-minded drive for profit, world capitalism is fast exhausting the earth’s resources, and what is left is fast being ruined by waste products. The most important resources fast approaching exhaustion are oil (the lifeblood of capitalist economies) and fresh water (the lifeblood of all plants and animals). The primary waste products include toxic and radioactive substances and most important so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs).

GHGs are causing a rapid warming of the atmosphere — glaciers, soil, and oceans — that threaten to change the earth’s climate radically and to push the change into an irreversible phase with catastrophic results — the depletion of fresh water will become a catastrophe as well, both directly for personal use and indirectly through the effect on our food supply.

‘Greenwashing’

Particularly beginning with the Obama campaign, there has been a shift in the U.S. media and government from denial to “greenwashing.” Greenwashing involves the admission that the earth is warming and that human activity is indeed the cause, but it generally lays the blame on an over-consuming and overpopulated working class, without recognition that capitalism determines what people consume.

Overpopulation is a relative term concerning what portion of the working class capitalism can employ. Furthermore greenwashing proposes solutions that appear effective but are at best mere tokens, not radical plans that could actually stop global warming.

The U.S. rulers need to guarantee that they don’t have to change the infrastructure of capitalism or end their extremely profitable oil-based industries. The U.S. rulers also have an imperative need to try to slow the rapid economic advance of their imperialist rivals, especially China, whose capitalist ruling class promises to take the title of World’s Largest Economy away from the U.S. in the next decade or two. China’s industries, as well as India’s, thrive on coal more than on any other source of energy. Their pollution of the world’s atmosphere through the burning of coal is well known.

U.S. Rulers Adopt Tokenism

In order to lessen their own isolation and increase that of India and China, and even more importantly to find other ways to attempt to slow the economic growth of these two challengers, the U.S. rulers are now taking token steps that appear to address global warming. However, these steps are wholly inadequate to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Various international meetings among capitalist governments have produced schemes to reduce GHG emissions, such as “cap and trade” or “carbon tax,” but even the most ambitious target from the European Union, that calls for a reduction of emissions 80-95% below 2000 levels by 2050, allows continued increase in GHG concentrations.

Along with caps, alternative sources of energy have to be found. There are a number of such sources that have been touted, including solar, wind, hydroelectric, ocean wave, tide, agriculture, geothermal, and finally nuclear. There are problems with most of these alternative sources. These include the increasing amount of energy and materials that have to be put into them in order to get energy out of them (Heinberg). Aside from the profit considerations that dominate all capitalist decisions, some of these alternative forms of energy may not be practical even after capitalism becomes history. J

(concluded next issue)