PARIS, November 23 — The working class here is reeling as one austerity plan after another destroys social gains won through generations of bitter class struggle. But the trade union misleadership, having lost last year’s battle to save retirement pensions, is marching workers straight into another Waterloo (British defeat of the French).

On November 18, five union confederations issued a call for workers nation-wide to rally on December 13 to protest the government’s austerity plans. In the build-up to that demonstration, they’re urging workers to “question the government and elected officials” — a give-away of their election treadmill aims.

With presidential elections five months away, the union misleaders are walking a thin line. They want to organize just enough action to mobilize workers to vote for Socialist Party candidate François Hollande. But they also want to avoid any disruption of French society that might cost the Socialists the elections.

Sellouts Control Workers’ Anger

This is a mirror image of last year’s losing kid-glove approach, in which 24-hour strikes were held at six-week intervals so that workers’ anger remained controllable.

On September 7, the National Assembly adopted a 12-billion-euro austerity plan (US$16 billion), followed by a November 16 vote on a new 7-billion-euro austerity plan (US$9.3 billion), now being debated in the French Senate.

The new plan includes higher taxes for 86% of the population, cutting health and welfare benefits further and forcing people to work one year longer before retiring and until 67 for a full pension. Even subsidies to associations providing services to elementary school children are being axed.

These austerity plans are racist in that they fall most heavily on immigrant workers — most of whom are of North African or sub-Saharan African origin — and are disproportionately among the poorest workers in France

All these measures are being taken to satisfy the finance capitalists, who worry that the government will be unable to pay back the money they’ve lent it. And a third austerity plan may be in the works.

On November 8, the day following the announcement of the second austerity plan, Natixis, the corporate and investment banking arm of the BPCE group (the country’s second-biggest banking corporation) complained that the plan is based on “overly-optimistic” estimates of economic growth and reduction of government spending.

This drive to make the working class pay for the rulers’ economic crisis mirrors world capitalism’s inevitable “solution” to its problems: make the workers take the losses — “inevitable” because all these recurrent crises grow directly from all bosses’ drive for maximum profits to “stay ahead of the competition.”

The inter-imperialist rivalry for control of resources and cheap labor has had a particularly devastating effect on the billions of workers worldwide who are forced to exist on starvation wages of a dollar or two a day. Only communist revolution can end the profit-system’s horrors.

As the tailspin of the world capitalist economy continues, the old recipes of the union misleaders are being revealed for the poison that they are. Now’s the time for new communist leadership to orient workers’ struggle away from reformist electioneering and pro-boss trade unionism and towards anti-capitalist revolution.

BRONX, NEW YORK, November 28 — For the past month, Occupy the Bronx, one of the offshoots of the main Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, has met every Saturday morning, providing further evidence that the anti-Wall Street sentiment is shared by large sections of the working class. The largely black and Latino group here expresses the same outrage and anger at bankers and bosses that is found on Wall Street. PL has been participating in the group’s activities, attempting to bring communist analysis and leadership into the darkness of reform and pacifism that limits this movement.

Perhaps the primary weakness in OWS is its lack of understanding of how racism is essential to capitalist inequality. In the Bronx, the links between racism and unemployment, poor education, and inadequate health care are more obvious.  But even here, the task of bringing communist or even anti-racist ideas to the forefront is not necessarily any easier. For one thing, the leadership of the Bronx group is straight from OWS, and they’ve brought the same organizational style with them. Called “direct democracy,” it is actually a strategy to block radical motions and stifle revolutionary ideas. Also prominent is vague, idealistic thinking, typified by slogans like “the power of the people” and “This is what democracy looks like.” While they sound good, these slogans leave the working class unprepared to confront our class enemy.

Idealism versus Materialism

Idealism says that thoughts and ideas are the most important things, and that they determine our material reality, the way we live. The opposite of idealism is materialism, which says that the way we live (including social relationships between workers and bosses or protesters and cops) determine the ideas that we have. To put it simply: Positive thinking, by itself, will never stop the police from attacking us. It will never stop capitalists from exploiting us. Materialist philosophy calls for a deep understanding of the role played by the police and politicians in maintaining capitalism — and the extent to which the ruling class will go to maintain its class rule.   

It is unclear how the recent attack by Mayor Bloomberg and the cops to clear OWS from Zuccotti Park will affect Occupy the Bronx and other offshoots in New York. Whatever happens, we will continue to participate in the group. Our first goal is to correct our major weakness: to begin to distribute CHALLENGE to the Occupiers.

We are involved in various “working groups,” including one on education and another called the “think tank,” where we try to bring communist ideas into the group. We are meeting people who are completely fed up. They are looking for answers and finding reformist, dead-end, idealist solutions. CHALLENGE will help us transform the idealistic struggle against Wall Street and corporate greed and into the materialist struggle against the profit system and for communism.

The main weakness of Occupy Wall Street is its implication that only a tiny minority, mainly bank presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs, benefit from the gross inequalities of capitalism, and the rest of us need to unite to make things fairer.This idea hides the class nature of the capitalist profit system and all the agents it uses to enforce the exploitation of the working class. The Occupy slogan, We Are the 99%, distorts people’s understanding of the ranks of our class enemies.

Have you ever been directly supervised by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Koch, or any other billionaire? Hardly. In fact, many corporate vice presidents, human resources directors, managers, administrators and supervisors are links in the chain that binds us to the capitalist system.

Bosses’ Flunkies Not On Our Side

For example, an assembly-line worker has a foreman, the foreman’s supervisor, a plant manager, and so on up the line. All of these people are responsible for extracting surplus value (the source of all profits) from our labor. None of them are on our side. Similarly, a schoolteacher must answer to various assistant principals, a principal, a district superintendent, and the people elected or appointed to the board of education. All of these flunkies are on the bosses’ side, unless and until they demonstrate otherwise by such actions as supporting a strike or joining Progressive Labor Party.

One Percenters Have Millions of Agents

Other tools of the capitalist class include politicians (Democratic and Republican); political appointees (judges, district attorneys, commissioners, regulators); high-paid lawyers, money managers and other professionals; media hacks; entertainment performers and executives; religious leaders; and professors and think tank fellows, both liberal and conservative, who are charged with churning out capitalist ideology and strategy. And don’t forget highly paid national and local union leaders, whose job is to work together with the bosses to get workers to submit to layoffs and cuts in wages, working conditions, health benefits and pensions.

Then there are those charged with violently maintaining capitalist power in the U.S. and internationally the armed forces officer corps, the police, the prison guards. The cops and prison guards have proven time and again that they are corrupt, racist and sexist. They will follow any orders to attack workers, and dream up more on their own.

The same is true, with few exceptions, of the officer corps of the armed forces. Rank-and-file soldiers and sailors, however, are workers in uniform. They can be, have been, and will continue to be won to defy the brass and turn imperialist wars into a communist revolution against the ruling class.

 In short, We Are the 99%, underestimates the number of people whose job it is to maintain inequality and who are committed to doing so. As our Party develops deeper roots in the working class, a segment of lower-level supervisors undoubtedly will join us. Nevertheless, that leaves a lot of people who are paid to support and fight for the capitalist class. At the same time, the 99% equation unites us with many bosses and their agents, in one great progressive, American mass including the cops who beat up Occupy Wall Streeters. The bosses plan for that movement is to march together, under the U.S. flag, in support of imperialist war.

“We Are the 99%,” however, contains one important aspect of truth. Whatever the actual percentages, the working class is immensely larger than the capitalist class and all its flunkies put together. We need real class consciousness based on the understanding that workers produce all value, most of which is stolen by the bosses. We need to build anti-racist, anti-sexist, international unity of all workers against all bosses and their servants. This will enable us to overthrow them and build a society based on equality and collectivity — communism.

The current struggle in Syria is between a U.S. empire in decline and rapidly rising Russia and China.  Inter-imperialist rivalry is being played out as the hypocritical Obama and his Arab League lackeys condemn the “butcher” Al-Assad regime for cracking down on his protestors.  The rulers’ press shows how the U.S. empire and allies want to use the Libyan blueprint of a no–fly zone enforced by massive bombing raids to foment regime change in Syria. But what is missing is exactly why the U.S. is desperate to place their own puppet on the Syrian throne.

Syria and Libya have parallels in the U.S. desperation to invade and control.   In Libya, though, the U.S. mainly is concerned with the threat of Chinese and Russian economic investment in Libyan oil. In Syria the U.S. wants to try to solidify its military and economic control over the entire Middle East by weakening Russia, Iran and China who use the Al-Assad fascists as their proxy. Russia has a fundamental strategic interest to preserve its military base in Syria and is in the process of sending warships to Syria as part of a drive to revive itself as an imperialist empire.

Iran Emerges Winner of Iraq War

Iran was a real winner of the U.S. war in Iraq. It still maintains its ability to arm and fund its proxy forces like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and has now developed the ability to influence Iraq’s government to a great extent.  It is Iran, to the U.S.’s chagrin, that has facilitated Iraq making an agreement with pseudo-state “Kurdistan” (see CHALLENGE 11/30/11) that challenged Exxon/Mobil’s outright conquest of an Iraqi oil field.  Iran supports Syria against the Free Syrian Army (FSA) — the Sunni-based puppet force of Syrian Army deserters that is seeking protection from Turkey and Saudi Arabia in order to topple the Assad’s primarily Alawite, Christian, and Druze regime.   

Sellout remnants of the old communist movement in the Middle East try to play up Assad’s Nasserite roots of a pseudo-socialistic outright fascist state as standing up to imperialism.  To them, allying with “lesser-evil”  bosses includes getting into bed with dictators who espouse and arm religious fundamentalists to carry out sexist and racist massacres against working class-women, men, and children.

All Bosses Are Workers’ Enemies

PLP in the Middle East consistently struggles with our friends to understand that while the U.S. continually brutalizes and murders the working class in order to advance U.S. Imperialism (all the while condemning Syria), Russian Imperialism and Iranian hegemony are not alternatives that can serve our needs.

Neither Syria, Russia, China, Hezbollah, Iran, nor the myth of a “Welfare State” is the answer the working class needs in the Middle East.  Only a communist revolution to smash Israeli apartheid, Iranian fundamentalism, Syrian dictatorship, as well as Russian, Chinese and U.S. imperialism will end the brutalization of the protestors and the working class as a whole. 

Russia will block NATO’s attempt at a no-fly zone because it is in its strategic interest to do so, and China will continue to fund and arm Iranian proxies in order to challenge the U.S.’s favorite thug, Israel, but it will continue to be the children of the working class who are sacrificed to allow the imperialists to pursue their power struggle.