INDIANAPOLIS, IN, September 18 — After being run out of the Local 23 union hall by hundreds of angry GM stamping plant workers last month (see CHALLENGE, 8/22), the International UAW is trying to ram through a new contract that would cut wages in half. Rather than directly confront the workers again, they’re imposing a mail ballot, something never done in a factory where votes occur either in the hall or in the shop. The ballots, going out this week, will be counted on September 27.

As part of Obama’s GM bailout and restructuring, this plant is to be closed. JD Norman Industries made an offer to buy the plant, and sign a UAW contract, if the union agreed to a 50% wage-cut. Last May, the workers voted 384-22 against reopening the contract, but the International UAW and Local 23 President Ray Kennedy continued negotiations, reaching a deal not one of the “negotiators” will have to live with.

‘Traitor Go Home!’

They had scheduled a ratification meeting for August 15, but hundreds of angry workers drowned them out with shouts of “Traitor,” and “Go Home,” forcing them to slip out the back door.

Since the union hall isn’t safe for the sellouts, their senior partners at GM are allowing them into the plant to speak to the workers either one on one or in small groups, where workers are subject to GM disciplinary actions if they “act up.” This is what UAW President Bob King calls the “21st Century UAW,”
a boss-union partnership. (See Box)

The majority of workers here have high seniority and many are GM “migrants,” having moved from plant to plant as factories shut down. They don’t fear one more closing since they are eligible for transfer to another GM plant. They don’t want massive wage-cuts following them for the rest of their lives, although that die has already been cast.

Indiana Governor Threatens Workers

GM wants to sell this plant and turn it into a low-wage parts supplier. The UAW wants to hold onto more than 600 members, and they’re ready to sacrifice workers’ wages and health care to do so. Meanwhile, the scab Governor of Indiana has threatened to deny these long-term GM workers unemployment benefits if the plant closes because they reject the wage-cuts.

Decades of “concessions to save jobs” and partnering with U.S. auto bosses has reduced UAW membership from 1.5 million to under 350,000, with the domestic auto industry now more than 50% non-union. The recent bailout and restructuring has cost yet another 200,000 jobs and cut wages in half.

The racist nature of these attacks is evident in the streets of Detroit, Flint, Lansing and many other GM towns. Today it’s wages and jobs. Tomorrow it will be the lives of our sons and daughters in an endless war for control of Mid-East oil and pipelines that has already costs millions of workers’ lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will use the October 2 March on Washington to build the revolutionary communist PLP in the auto industry and in the UAW. J

‘A UAW for the 21st Century’:Boss-Union ‘Partnership’

On August 2, fresh from his coronation as head of the UAW, President Bob King delivered a talk to the Center for Automotive Research Conference, an industry group, where he laid out his vision for the union’s future:

• “We are deeply grateful to the Obama administration…for saving the American auto industry. Enabling our companies to survive and turn around has saved hundreds of thousands of good jobs that would have been gone forever.…UAW members took wage-cuts of $7,000 to $30,000 a year. Benefits were also reduced significantly. Restructuring resulted in the loss of nearly 200,000 jobs.”

• “The UAW of the 21st Century must be fundamentally and radically different from the UAW of the 20th Century. This is a new world, and we must reinvent our union….”

• “The 20th Century UAW fell into a pattern with our employers where we saw each other as adversaries rather than partners.…The 21st Century UAW no longer views…management as our adversaries or enemies, but as partners.…Our new relationships…are built upon a foundation of respect, shared goals and a common mission.”

• “So the keywords of the 21st Century UAW are flexibility, innovation, quality, teamwork, productivity, continuous cost savings and respect. The rigid demarcation between management and labor that was so entrenched in the old model is discarded.”

That’s it, from the horses’ mouth, proof positive of what PLP has always warned. The greatest threat to the workers and the revolutionary communist movement is not the gutter racists and open fascists, as bad as they are, but the liberals! The Tea Party or Sarah Palin didn’t wipe out 200,000 auto jobs and cut wages in half, although they certainly support it. It was Obama and the union leaders.

In a period of growing war and deepening economic crisis, “Shared goals and common mission” means doing whatever is necessary to maintain U.S. imperialism at the top of the heap. It means war and fascism, with a “thank” you from UAW President Bob King.



CHICAGO, September 17 — Chanting “Si se puede” and “We want a library, we’re not criminals,” about 100 mostly Latino parents, elementary school children and supporters crossed the police line when a veteran comrade made the call to crash the police tape. They were supporting the dozen parents and children who were occupying the elementary school field house the Chicago Public School (CPS) bosses want to demolish.

Earlier, the protestors who had been occupying the field house for three days were rushed by the cops and threatened with arrests. Meanwhile, many supporters who were bringing in supplies were blocked from entry. The racist cops and ex-cop Michael Shields (a cousin of Michelle Obama), head of CPS security, taped off the entire block. The cops were preventing anyone who didn’t live on the block from entering.

We heard from a close friend inside the field house that they were preparing for arrests, predicting the cops would move in once school was out and the grounds cleared. Acting quickly, a veteran comrade from the neighborhood who had been there for two days bringing in food and building ties with those inside, called on everyone present to cross the police lines and march to the field house.

When the comrade crossed the tape line, youth and parents and moms pushing strollers began crossing en masse! Without the comrade’s militant leadership and the massive support of the workers and youth, those inside likely would have been arrested, ending the sit-in. It was a momentous afternoon for everyone. When we showed up chanting and hopping the fence, the police were taken by surprise, giving a reprieve for the parents inside.

The demolition of this field house is part of a larger racist trend to attack this city’s mostly black and Latino communities. This includes privatization of schools (Charters), massive layoffs of teachers and increasing violence and killings of hundreds of black and Latino youth as schools are shut down and students shuffled into neighborhoods with rival gangs.

Of course, with racist mass murderer Obama commanding the slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan and appointing ex-CPS boss Arne Duncan to the Education post in his cabinet, racist privatization, cutbacks and layoffs are occurring nationwide. This field house, in particular, has been used for after-school programs as well as a space for teachers and parents to organize in. They recently led a fight to win $1.4 million for school renovations and for the field house to become a library.

Instead, the school bosses and local alderman Danny Solis, a Mayor Daley lackey and new mayoral candidate, want to construct a soccer field for the local private school. But the parents have had enough, which is why they’ve occupied the place for three days.

We in PLP know that this or any reform struggle will not lead to the quality of education our children deserve, namely being taught the truth about the horrors of capitalism and the need for communist revolution. That’s why PLP’ers and friends are trying to make this struggle “a school for communism.”

Ultimately, the bosses may concede on this field house but it won’t be a victory unless we build the Party. Otherwise, it will only be another example of how the reform struggle simply builds patriotism and class-collaboration — boss-worker “unity,” a hallmark of fascism.

Thus far the Party has played a modest but critical role. Without our leadership this struggle would likely be over. However, now we must deepen our ties with the parents and youth we’ve met; bring our friends to support and distribute CHALLENGE; and fight to build PLP amid this small class struggle, one that could help start fires elsewhere.J



TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO — Capitalism has murdered, through one of its criminal gangs, 72 immigrant workers. From the moment immigrant workers cross into Mexico they are harassed and extorted by the immigration authorities, criminal gangs, and the police. These criminals steal immigrant workers’ money or kidnap them to force their relatives in the U.S. to pay a ransom that can range from $1,500 to $5,000. Some are forced to work as slaves in clandestine factories, drug fields, prostitution, or as servants in criminals’ dens. Many who refuse are brutally murdered, as was the case here, or are killed while running away from immigration cops or gangs. It’s a true descent into hell.

The worldwide capitalist crisis has added seven million more to the number of the poor in Mexico alone. Modern capitalism concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The majority of the wealth of the world has become concentrated in a few countries, like the U.S., and that’s why many of our brothers and sisters, in spite of all the risks, are forced to migrate in search of jobs.

Only a communist revolution that smashes all borders and unites our class can put an end to this living hell for all workers. The death of our brothers and sisters motivates us to fight even harder against this criminal system.

Every year, close to 600,000 immigrant workers, mainly from Central and South America, cross the borders from Mexico into the U.S. Almost 20,000 are kidnapped. These workers are desparate to escape the misery, crime and unemployment of their home countries, harshly learning that under capitalism there is no escape. Many die; the rest find more exploitation and poverty. The essence of this system, in any corner of the world, is to extract the maximum profit from workers’ sweat. The only escape is revolution.

The reaction of the Mexican government to the murder of the 72 immigrants was hypocritical. They blamed narco-traffickers and approved an empty plan that pretends to protect immigrant workers. The drug trade is one of the most profitable businesses in Mexico which couldn’t be the case if there was truly an effort to combat narco-trafficking. The actual purpose of their “war on drugs” is to terrorize workers, build the military to counter workers’ rebellions and to support those criminal gangs allied with the government. When innocent people die in their confrontations, Calderón and his accomplices mockingly say that they were “collateral damage.” That’s what workers’ lives means to them.

The bosses’ media hyped the accounts of the massacre as part of their terrorizing propaganda. They pushed the nationalist idea of “unity of all Mexicans” as if workers and migrants have anything in common with their billionaire bosses. They shed crocodile tears for the slave-like conditions of immigrant workers, but hide or deny the wage slavery endured by millions of workers in this country and around the world.

In the U.S. the bosses and their media organize racist government and right-wing militia attacks that attempt to blame immigrants for the capitalists’ own financial crisis and runaway unemployment.

In some communities, mainly in the southern region of Mexico, people have organized to provide food and shelter to immigrant workers. This worker solidarity shows it is possible to defeat the racism and nationalism that divide us. This type of organization is the only thing that the government will try to destroy through its recently-approved agreements of protections for immigrants.

We must take the communist ideas of CHALLENGE to those communities and help transform that solidarity into a fight to destroy the cause of the problems: that the only way to escape this hell is through a communist revolution that would sweep away misery, all borders, and racism. That’s the best way to honor the death of our 72 brothers and sisters. J

This last year has witnessed the rise of the wide-spread racist “Net Far Right” (Net Kyoku) that has coordinated attacks on “foreigners” in Japan.  As reported in the New York Times (8/28/10), they organize mostly through the internet in order to conceal their identity, are “loudly anti-foreign” and direct their attack on Korean and Chinese residents, Christian organizations, and even those who dress in Halloween costumes. 

Much like the U.S. Tea Party’s racist attacks against immigrant labor from the Global South, the “Net” blame foreigners for the financial crisis that has lingered in Japan for over ten years, for the rise in crime and homelessness in Western Japan, and for the decline in pro-Japanese sentiment, particularly by young Japanese.  The similarity between the Tea Party and the “Net” is clear in another respect: they are both convenient devices used by the ruling class for creating dissonance among workers from various cultural backgrounds who should be united in fighting the real enemy, the capitalist bosses.

Apologists at the New York Times (NYT) suggest that the “Net” are distinct from other far-right groups, citing that the established right-wing (Uyoku) make themselves visible on a regular basis in Tokyo and other major cities around Japan. The “Net” racists, though, are equally sinister and cowardly in their attacks on Korean and Chinese immigrant groups, many of whom have been in Japan since they were brought as slave labor during World War II and have not been granted citizenship.

NYT apologists also fail to point out that ultranationalist groups hijacked the expanding working-class and peasant movements in the 1920’s and 30’s, leading to the rise of Japanese fascism which used racism and sexism to legitimize the rapes and slaughter of workers in most of East Asia, such as the genocides in Nanking and Korea.

Deep-rooted ultra-nationalism and racism has continued to govern the censorship of history books, which discount the genocides committed by Japan in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The grossest example of this is the recent film ‘The Truth about Nanking,’ directed by the ultranationalist and fascist Satoru Mizushima and backed by the outspoken fascist and racist Mayor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, which alleges that the Nanking Massacre was created as propaganda that intended to demean the image of Japan in the world.

Racist ultranationalists are closely linked to ruling-class parties, such as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) which ruled Japan almost continuously from its founding in 1955 to 2009. Figures like the wartime profiteer Yoshio Kodama, who helped found the LDP, and the right-wing Nihimura Shingo; who has ties to the current ruling Democratic Party of Japan; and fascists like Mayor Ishihara, who has openly called for violence against foreigners in the past, are examples of how the ultra-right and ruling-class parties are linked.

 The inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China for the control of the world’s recourses, including the struggle to dominate the East China Sea, is part of the larger framework for how the “Net” and other racist groups can be utilized by ruling elites to increase nationalist sentiment, particularly as Japan is right in the middle of the U.S.-China dogfight.  As the New York Times has been reporting since the spring of this year, China has expanded its naval power “from as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca” in order to “secure Chinese interests” which include oil from the Middle East.

The resource-rich South and East China Seas, in which Chinese engineers discovered natural gas reserves off the coast of the disputed Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, has also sparked recent political trouble between Japan and China. The U.S. is expanding its influence in the region through the continued colonization of Okinawa, which is host to one of the largest U.S. military instillations in the world. 

The struggle against ultra-nationalism by students and teachers in recent years over the censoring of textbooks and the inclusion of the fascist national anthem (Kimigayo) needs to be extended to oppose racist groups like the “Net” and other Uyoku who terrorize immigrant and foreign populations and who are manipulated by capitalist bosses.  The time has come to forget reformists like the Japanese Communist Party and other movements who offer false promises of a “peaceful transition to socialism,” and build an internationalist communist movement led by the PLP in Japan and East Asia to smash racism and nationalism and create a world built on human need, not profit! J