YERUCHAM, ISRAEL, March 25 — Late last year, workers at the Ackerstein factory — one of Israel’s largest construction material manufacturers — in this southern town decided to stand up and fight their boss’s terror by establishing a democratic and independent union. Their struggle culminated in a strike and occupation of the factory, demanding union recognition and a union contract. Yerucham is located in Israel’s “deep south,” where most residents are low-wage Jewish workers, as well as super-exploited Bedouins. Their multi-racial unity carried the day.

The spark igniting this conflict was management’s firing of some of the most veteran skilled workers, to increase profits. Their fellow workers felt this was totally unjust, especially since this group of workers was highly committed to the job and to their friends in the factory. This occurred amid the impoverishment and unemployment prevailing here, especially among veteran workers.

Fifteen years ago, Ackerstein workers tried to unionize as part of the state-run, phony pro-employers Histadrut union federation. But local Histadrut officials gave the organizers’ names to the bosses who then threatened to fire them if they continued to build the union. Even though Histadrut didn’t unionize the workers, they charged them membership dues.

The management forced the workers to sign an illegal contract, pledging them to avoid future unionizing attempts. The bosses blacklisted workers who led the unionizing.

The threats and terror didn’t change the ugly horrors inside the factory. The management even attempted to create a fake mask of Wallmart-style patronizing “family harmonious relations of production” between the bosses and the workers.

Beside the low wages, workplace insecurity, lack of collective bargaining and pensions, there is a critical problem of unhealthy exposure to dust and toxic chemicals which can cause cancer and respiratory diseases. The bosses refuse to recognize the dangerous health risks, denying appropriate protection for the workers.

Then the bosses forced the workers to sign another draconian and illegal contract, stating that if they became ill because of the factory’s health risks, they would not file claims against the company because they “were aware of the job’s risks.”

Due to the management threats and terror, workers began unionizing secretly.  Now, almost all the workers joined. The workers also decided democratically to affiliate their union to the new, more democratic “Workers’ Power” federation.

Ackerstein refused to recognize the union. Initially, they tried to fire the union’s leading members. This failed because of the workers’ solidarity. They then went on a short strike. Soon afterwards, management tried another divide-and-conquer tactic, but workers’ unity defeated that.

Throughout this period, the local union and the Workers’ Power federation offered to start negotiating a contract, but the boss refused to bargain.

The bosses then brought in scabs. They also began removing the machines, threatening to move the assembly lines to Eastern Europe, or even to close the entire factory.

Those threats failed to break the workers’ spirit. It only increased their motivation and militancy in defense of their union. They answered the bosses’ brutality by occupying the factory. Soon the boss changed his attitude and seemed more willing to negotiate. The solidarity from unions in neighboring factories in the industrial zone and from the working-class community of Yerucham also helped the workers to stand together in their struggle.

The successful strike forced the local court of labor affairs to recognize the union’s legitimacy and demanded management start negotiating. But management is now collaborating with Histadrut to unionize the company’s other facilities into its fake sellout unions. They intend to isolate the southern factory’s workers from the rest of the company’s work-force and install the pro-state, pro-boss Histadrut as the “official” union.

This struggle has shown how powerful the workers can be when they refuse to back down when faced with the capitalist’s attempts at coercion. But even though this was a local victory for the workers, in the long run even a strong union can’t change the ugly face of capitalism, a system based on the exploitation of workers by the ruling class. In order to guarantee the working class a decent life, occupying a factory and scaring the boss for a few hours unfortunately is not enough. We need to smash the bosses and their system once and for all, and win state power under the banner of revolutionary communism! 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, MARCH 16 — As we gathered to mourn a fallen comrade in Haiti, Janil Louis-Juste, the famous cry of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) “Wobbly” rebel Joe Hill, before the bosses executed him in 1915, came to mind. “Don’t mourn; organize!” Janil was a leader of students and faculty at the State University of Haiti in their militant 2009 campaign against cuts and in support of the Haitian workers’ struggle for a livable minimum wage.

Janil’s death was a political assassination, probably on the orders of the UN “peacekeeping” mission, MINUSTAH. He was shot by two professional killers not far from his campus on January 12, just two hours before the earthquake struck. His OCHAN, or memorial service, March 12 in the courtyard of his ruined university was strong and beautiful.

We were summoned to attention by the solemn bass drone of the LAMBI, the conch-shell trumpet used by Haitian revolutionaries in 1791 to call the slaves to revolt. A ceremonial wood fire blazed under repeated libations of rum, candles flickered in a block of lava, and poetry, music, theatre and an amazing river of words flowed powerfully for over four hours.

In this blaze of speech, mourners became organizers. Some PLP comrades and friends had been invited to speak in a gesture of international solidarity. One of us, a professor who knew Janil, paid him a personal tribute as a fighting philosopher and internationalist. Another, a Stella D’oro striker (see CHALLENGE, 9/09-7/10) from the Caribbean, recalled a revolutionary friend from his student days also shot down by the police, and called for international class unity of all workers and students to fight back against repression.

A veteran Party leader ended by saying that when the conch-shell sounded for international communist revolution, we in PLP would be there to fight alongside our sisters and brothers in Haiti. A teacher in the audience told us afterwards that these words made him want to get out of his seat and march in the streets. (Students did hit the streets immediately after the assassination, some escaping death in collapsing buildings as a result.)

Of the speeches by students, peasants, organized and unorganized workers, intellectuals and artists, more than one echoed our communist sentiments. A student MC quoted Janil: “The struggle... knows no borders.” His widow read a political essay, saying that as he had taught her the art of political writing this was her best tribute.

Janil’s death was joined to the “many thousands gone” of the old U.S. slave song, our casualties and our heroes. The heroes of the working class, “who as workers have no country,” as Marx wrote, come from all times and places and “races” and nations. The defiance with which revolutionaries greet the capitalist state that kills us broke through in call-and-response chants like: ”Camarade Janil: Présent!” and “Liberty or Death!” (the slogan of Dessalines, the Haitian slave general who defeated a Napoleonic army in 1803).

A kind of revolutionary mass education took shape at the ceremony, following Janil’s critique of bourgeois education: “Education is a trap where capital makes its pile.” One of our speakers got the most applause for saying the state university served the state, not the working class, and only a communist revolution could create real workers’ schools. Some discussed opening up “freedom schools” run by workers in place of schools closed by the earthquake.

As many said, the truest tribute is to carry on the struggle. And in the succeeding days we did so, in intense meetings with our sisters and brothers regrouping to organize in terrible circumstances. They asked us to help by putting pressure on the Haitian and U.S. governments and bosses to stop killing and jailing and firing students, faculty and workers who fight back. We agreed to raise resolutions in our unions and other organizations against this repression and to get the imperialist troops (both U.S. and UN) out of Haiti.

All PLP members and friends should bring such resolutions to their groups. They also need, rather than money or medicines and food, material political aid to help organize, such as video projectors and cameras, printers and laptops they can share, students and workers together. When you collect for this, think that you are defying Janil’s killers, proving right one speaker’s cry: “You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill the revolution!” 

PHILADELPHIA, March 29 — Communists in PLP want a world where our children are collectively nurtured regardless of the color of their skin. Racism is not human nature, but is a creation of capitalism. Racism allows the bosses to make billions in extra profits by paying lower wages to black and Latino workers, dragging down the wages of all workers. Communist revolution will get rid of the capitalist profit system that must use racism.

If that sounds like a far-fetched dream then surely the Nazi-like attacks on black working-class children in Philadelphia can show us how much that “dream” is needed.

Racist banking and real estate policies have caused housing in segregated black working-class areas to degrade until they look like a war zone. Those areas are stripped of food markets, movie theaters and safe and clean playgrounds. Black children in those areas are sent to the worst schools and then the police beat up and arrest those children when they venture out to the city areas supposedly designated for tourists and commerce.

Sounds like South African apartheid, but it’s right here in Philadelphia!

There have been four instances here since December of young black students gathering to meet their friends and see what’s going on. They use their phones and the internet to pass the word about possible happenings, then arrive and mill around looking for something fun or exciting.  The gatherings are called  flash mobs because word is quickly spread through Twitter or Facebook or mass texting. This way things are announced very quickly, in a “flash.”

There have been a few minor outbreaks of violence as the throngs congregated, but nothing to warrant calling out battalions of cops and helicopters.  However, in a city oppressed by financial collapse, foreclosures, stock gyrations and tax declines, the bosses who rule the city are worried that these gatherings of young black students will “scare” away the suburban middle class and harm city tourism.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, the main voice of the local ruling class, warned, “Visitors from the
suburbs will surely think twice before coming into Philadelphia for dinner, to shop, spend the
night in a hotel, visit a museum, or attend a live show. The same goes for tourists from other
states making travel plans this spring or summer. Not to mention organizations planning
conventions.” (Philadelphia Inquirer 3/23/10)

On March 24th, Philadelphia’s black mayor, Michael Nutter, held a press conference flanked by 36 uniformed cops plus his Police Commissioner!   His intended message to Philadelphia’s ruling class: “Don’t be alarmed.  Our tourism income is safe from rampaging black children!”  Twenty- eight of the arrested children were charged this week with felony riot and were thrown in jail.

The mother of one jailed youth was herself arrested for protesting her son’s jail sentence. “Lock me up,” Theresa Guyton demanded. ‘That’s my baby,’ she yelled …The defendant’s attorney told the judge that the family has been in and out of homeless shelters and that the teen often has to care for his younger siblings. ‘That’s the problem. That’s why you are here,’ the judge said to the weeping teen. ‘Your mother thinks of you as the man of the house…’” (Philadelphia Daily News 3/24/10)

Does this sound like racist scapegoating?  It should!  That judge and the capitalist system he represents are the REAL problem. The capitalists are the real mobsters destroying things!

Capitalism has left Philadelphia with few jobs and high unemployment (officially 10.6%). Slashed state and federal assistance has led to crumbling schools and infrastructure, declining population, severe poverty and nightly murders in the streets. The bosses’ response is to blame young black people who have few alternatives to the spontaneous get-togethers.

Decades ago the struggles against U.S. and South African racism involved and inspired millions. But because those fights did not have the ultimate goal of overthrowing capitalism for a classless society, racism continues to be murderous. We must respond to this racist attack on black working-class youth on our jobs, in our unions, communities, churches and schools. But this time our fight must have the goal of eliminating racism by overthrowing capitalism with communist revolution. 

NEW YORK CITY, March 4 — Over 3,000 transit workers and nearly a thousand students protested in front of an MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) hearing to oppose a wave of MTA’s proposed racist cuts. The agency claims an $800 million budget deficit and is demanding student payments for metrocards, layoffs and a possible fare hike in 2011. It also appealed a legally-binding arbitration award for city bus and subway workers, denying raises for six months.

The MTA runs commuter rails through the mainly white suburbs but these cuts are concentrated in the city where transit workers, students and riders are overwhelmingly black, Latino and immigrant.

Capitalism is the source of these racist attacks against the working class, not greed or mismanagement. The MTA budget woes stem from billions paid to the bankers in “debt service,” nearly one-fourth of the MTA’s budget. The bosses’ dictatorship guarantees that all these payments are legal requirements under New York State law. Legally, bondholders are paid before all other expenses and MTA agreements require that fares be sufficient “to cover all debt service” (mta.info).

But TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 leaders blamed mainly Mayor Bloomberg for the cuts and promoted “good politicians” who want to use federal stimulus dollars to avoid them. One union speaker led a chant “Bail us out,” using the bank and General Motors bailouts to show what the MTA needs. He completely ignored that bailouts led to tens of thousands of autoworkers and homeowners — disproportionably black, Latino and immigrant — losing jobs, wages and property.

PLP organized many students and teachers to march from a protest against education cuts to the rally against transit cuts. From inside and outside the hearing we maintained the need for workers to rely on, and ally with, students and other workers, not on
politicians or pro-boss union leaders, the class enemy.

Local 100’s message focused on station agents, one of two main titles facing layoffs, as being “first responders to terrorism,” hoping to appeal to politicians’ “anti-terrorist” platforms. In signs, speeches and flyers, PLP members pointed out that the “war on terror” and transit cuts are different parts of the same war on the international working class and that politicians are leading these attacks.

At one point thousands of workers chanted “Let them in!” when cops blocked students from entering the Local 100 rally.

Police prevented chanting groups from entering the hearings, which moved forward as scheduled with little organized action inside. But more is needed to oppose the bosses.

Self-critically, PLP could have done more to give the bosses a taste of the disruption the latter plan to give transit riders and workers. We know MTA, state and city bosses have already made their decision and want to use hearings and demonstrations to give the illusion of “democracy.” But the movement against budget cuts present opportunities.

PLP can unite workers and students in actions that confront the bosses and expose the state as the class dictatorship it really is. Victory means building PLP to raise militancy in the class struggle and organize against capitalism. That’s the only way to ensure such demonstrations don’t just blow off steam, but serve as a small example of the tremendous class struggle needed to fight and win communist revolution