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Japan: Youth Shift to Left Needs Real Red Leadership
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- 31 March 2010 350 hits
The capitalist crisis that hit Japan in the early 1990’s has sharply increased unemployment and homelessness, forcing many workers into “Capsule Hotels.” The deepening global financial crisis has worsened this situation, leading to a staggering 25% unemployment rate, but also to an emerging fight-back by workers, teachers and students. In a country once boasting to be the stronghold of economic equality, now over one-third of Japan’s workers are hired on “flexible” and temporary contracts. Over 200,000 have been laid off since October 2008.
Immigrant workers from Southeast Asia, China and Latin America are employed in super-exploitative factory jobs originally held by unionized Japanese workers making a “liveable” wage. The fascist right-wing uses this in their sharply increasing racist attack on immigrant workers.
“Contingent” (temporary) labor is a reality for young workers. High rents and short jobless periods throw workers on the streets. An unknown number now survive for varying periods by sleeping in internet cafe cubicles, costing a fraction of what even a cramped one-room apartment would run.
Those who are poorer still, both homeless and jobless, barely exist in “cardboard cities” of major towns and often are subjected to vicious police attacks during round-ups and evictions. The rising phenomenon “Karoshi,” or death from overwork, is common at capitalist giants like Hitachi. Many workers must work up to 80 hours a week to keep their jobs.
The newly-elected liberal Yukio Hatoyama government of the Democratic Party of Japan has vowed to “solve” the crisis by “fighting corruption” and reorganizing Japan’s geo-political position, namely its relationship with China and the U.S. Hatoyama has promised to end the decade-long recession, to focus on reformist policies that benefit public need over corporate interest, and to redefine Japan’s relationship to what Hatoyama calls “U.S.-led globalization.”
Yet it’s clear that Hatoyama, who comes from one of Japan’s wealthiest families (dubbed the “Japanese Kennedys”) is using the rhetoric of change to mask ruling-class interest in disciplining the rogue capitalists, to smooth out the rough spots so that profit accumulation won’t stagger. While not a military power, Japanese finance capital is central to the inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China, both in technological advancement and capital re-investment.
Recent articles in the NY Times and Asian Times Online reveal that Japan is closely aligning with China. Hatoyama’s government is also urging the U.S. to move its massive military base in Okinawa. Hatoyama’s hope of remaining neutral within inter-imperialist competition is unsustainable and will likely lead to Japan’s realignment with either the U.S. or China, both economically and militarily, squeezing unemployed young workers in the middle of the bosses’ battle for global economic control.
Workers and students have not stood idly by while corrupt Japanese rulers have run the country into the ground. In the early 2000s, militant unions like the National Railways Union, with over 200,000 workers, have led demonstrations against railway privatization. The rank and file, some with links to the reformist Japanese Revolutionary “Communist” League (formed in the 1960’s), have also led strikes against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They especially criticized Japan’s involvement in refuelling U.S. warships anchored in the Indian Ocean for deployment in the inter-imperialist confrontation in Afghanistan.
Tokyo’s teachers have been resisting Japan’s re-militarization that began after 9/11, forcing many into a battle with the racist and openly sexist Mayor Ishihara Shintaro who controls the Education Ministry with an iron fist. These teachers have also joined demonstrations opposing Japanese involvement in Afghanistan and have played a key role in curbing the ultra-nationalism emerging in the post-9/11 period.
Students at Keio University have rebuilt some of the militant organizations of the 1960’s, which led massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1968, and have protested discriminatory university policies.
Without communist leadership, however, many young workers have turned to the Japanese “Communist” Party which has gained 14,000 members since 2008; one-fourth of these new members are under 18. This generation grew up without having experienced the relative stability existing in Japan during the post-war “boom” and has suffered hard conditions, instilling second thoughts in young workers about their relationship to the profit-driven system of exploitation and wage-slavery.
The increasing presence of worker-led street rallies has galvanized the surge in communist sympathy, benefitting the JCP in its attempt to rebuild its base in mainstream political circles. The JCP claims well over 400,000 members in 25,000 local branches, making it one of the largest “communist” parties of the industrialized countries.
While this trend indicates a seemingly leftward shift amongst Japanese youth, the resurgent JCP doesn’t offer revolutionary change, favoring instead “pragmatic” solutions to the present crisis and the “peaceful transition to socialism” without destroying capitalism. Some attempts are being made to establish a base of workers and students in Japan who ignore the false hopes of Hatoyama and JCP reformism, to turn the recent fight-back into a school for communist revolution.
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‘Jobs, Not Jails!’ Baltimore Youth Blast School-to-Prison Pipeline
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- 31 March 2010 367 hits
The following is an interview of a friend of PLP about the protests in Baltimore on March 4.
Q. What is the school-to-prison pipeline?
A. School-to-prison pipeline is the need for our youth, especially minorities, to not be able to go to school because the system profits more if they end up in the juvenile justice system.
Q. You took part in the March 4th events in Baltimore. Can you tell us a little about what happened?
A. It was a really inspirational day. We started in downtown Baltimore at Camden Yards where we waited for students to arrive and listened to speeches about the importance of why we were marching. Next we started the march past the state school board building where we met up with more students and let the people inside know we were serious. In the following events, we marched to the juvenile justice center [and] we chanted different things such as “Jobs Not Jails.”
Q. What exactly is being demanded, and what did it feel like to be part of that major protest?
A. They are demanding that 100 out of the 300 million dollars that is being allocated for more youth jails be redirected towards education. They are demanding this from the governor because he owes the city money due to a state mandate that has yet to be paid to the youth of Baltimore. I felt like I was doing something important to help students.
Q. Why do you think the cops didn’t arrest the people who sat-in and picketed, right inside the Baby Bookings [juvenile jail] complex?
A. I think they didn’t arrest anyone who sat-in or picketed because it wouldn’t be in their best interest to arrest any of the students or adults. If they did that would cause more media coverage for our cause and it could have caused an uproar from the students.
Q. What is Progressive Labor Party’s analysis about why U.S. capitalism, year after year, incarcerates such tremendous numbers of working-class people?
A. The capitalists of America need prison labor to produce products cheap to make a huge profit. Private prison contractors make a lot more money using prisoners to labor for cheap. The capitalist state needs the school-to-prison pipeline. To end it we have to
destroy the capitalist state and establish working-class power, which means a dictatorship of the working class.
Q. There was a very good Town Hall meeting last month to help organize for March 4. Can you tell us about Progressive Labor Party’s contribution to that event?
A. During the open discussion period of the meeting a comrade took a firm position that the school-to-prison pipeline was wrong and that the only solution is a communist revolution. Then the people on the panel at the Town Hall meeting were asked what they thought of revolution. It caused the audience to begin to cheer for our comrade and showed that we aren’t the only ones here to believe in revolution.
Q. On March 4 itself, how many people helped distribute PLP’s communist newspaper, CHALLENGE, and about how many participants took copies of the paper?
A. On March 4 there were three people passing out CHALLENGE and we got out close to a hundred papers and made a couple of new friends of the Party.
Q. Last year, only 4,285 students graduated from public high schools in Baltimore City, but a larger number — about 6,000 young people — were arrested by the police. How do you think we can solve this problem?
A. As I discussed above the only solution would be a communist revolution. We should start with a class-consciousness that would help these students learn that the bosses need these numbers to keep their families and minorities as a whole oppressed.
FREEMONT, CA, February 26 — “TOYOTA BETRAYS AMERICAN WORKERS,” screams the glossy, very expensive flier being distributed at the U.S. Auto Show. “Help save 50,000 American jobs,” is what those leafleting are instructed to tell those entering the auto show. This red, white and blue nonsense is what passes for a UAW campaign to “save” the NUMMI assembly plant that is scheduled to close on March 31, tossing 4,500 workers and their families into the street.
NUMMI was a joint venture between GM and Toyota, formed almost 30 years ago and is Toyota’s only unionized plant in North America. During the recent GM bankruptcy, ordered and plotted by the Obama administration, GM pulled out of NUMMI and any contractual obligations, leaving it to Toyota to close the plant.
The plant closing will also affect over 40,000 workers who either work in supplier plants or other related jobs, from small businesses selling work boots and work gloves to bars and restaurants, to companies that clean the factory and many more. NUMMI is very productive and profitable, with maybe the largest workforce of any assembly plant in North America, and sells two-thirds of what it produces in California.
But even that is not enough. More money can be made by moving the work to non-union plants in Canada, San Antonio, Texas and Mexico. In these factories, the “Toyota” workers do the final assembly and make up about one-third of the workforce. The rest are sub-contractors that assemble doors, dashboards and other components, and make about one-third of what the Toyota workers make. The newly refurbished Jeep plant in Toledo, OH now runs the same way, with a UAW contract.
The UAW “SAVE NUMMI” campaign is a patriotic fraud to turn workers’ anger and public opinion against Toyota and away from GM. It’s a repeat of the racist campaigns of the 1970’s that led to the racist murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese student in Detroit, beaten to death by two Chrysler workers because they thought he was Japanese. Nowhere does the UAW hold GM responsible. In fact, while the Auto Show was in Chicago, the UAW staging area was the plush Drake Hotel, on the Gold Coast. This also happened to be where all the GM execs were staying.
At the very least, these workers were under UAW contracts and should have been offered the same buyouts, severance packages and bumping rights as thousands of other GM workers. Recently a fight broke out at a packed UAW Local 2244 meeting over this issue. Many workers know the campaign is a fraud and want GM to settle up with them. The UAW leadership is focusing on “saving” NUMMI, to get GM off the hook. No one in Solidarity House (UAW international headquarters in Detroit) believes the plant can be saved, because they are not willing to shut the whole industry down to save it!
And how could they? After helping GM, Ford and Chrysler close dozens of plants and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, after cutting the pay of Detroit 3, Delphi, American Axle and others to $12/hr., after helping turn Detroit into a ghetto victimized by 50% racist unemployment, after losing two-thirds of its members and representing less than half of the domestic auto industry, the UAW leadership couldn’t fight the bosses if they wanted to. And they don’t want to.
The Toyota workers who wrote in the last issue of CHALLENGE, and UAW members facing endless threats to their jobs and living standards, will unite across company and international borders, because the times demand it and because PLP is committed to making it happen. And we will fight to turn every attack and plant closing into a struggle to win our coworkers to abolish wage slavery with commnist revolution.
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General Strikers Shut Greece, Beat the Hell Out of Cops, Union Hacks
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- 31 March 2010 342 hits
ATHENS, March 29 — The class struggle is raging in Greece, and the working class is beginning to advance against the bosses’ cutbacks. The working class shut Greece down on Thursday, March 11, for the second time in less than a month (see CHALLENGE 3/17). Planes didn’t fly, factories and schools were closed and the Corinth Canal was shut down. TV, Radio, electronic news websites, and the press — the whole country was brought to a standstill. Over 100,000 workers marched, possibly the largest demonstration in 15 years. Some factories that did try to stay open were forcibly shut down by protesters and striking workers, with many scabs being stopped from entering.
Earlier in the week, the striking workers attempted to storm parliament. When one of the major union leaders tried to stop them, they beat the snot out of him. It’s inspiring to see the bosses’ dogs get stomped. A few days later, the union put up wanted posters of the workers who beat him up, echoing one of the Nazi’s favorite tactics.
During an event organized by the Ministry of Education, teachers invaded the conference room while the Minister of Education was speaking. The teachers unfolded a big banner against the measures and chanted slogans against the regime. When a plain-clothes policeman tried to stop them, the teachers surrounded the man, disarmed him, and beat him, culminating with the man crawling on the floor towards the exit. The teachers then continued to chant slogans against the Minister.
Greece is suffering from massive budget cuts being inflicted upon it by the international capitalist class — the bosses. The Socialist government is crying that they must inflict these cuts on the working class and that it’s out of their hands. These bootlickers are not saying that capitalism cannot meet the needs of the working class. They can’t, because they are not against capitalism. They want to control it so that they can continue to sell out the working class for their capitalist masters. Socialists will always betray the working class because they don’t fight directly for communism, even if they pay lip service to wanting to fight for it at all.
The communist movement in Greece has been diverted down two dead-ends: anarchism and socialism. The socialist parties, many of whom call themselves “communist,” are saturated with false ideas that capitalism can be reformed. The anarchists are saturated with the false idea that communism can be achieved without a centralized party apparatus to organize the revolution and society. The anarchists led attacks on police stations, luxury shops, representations of wealth, banks, and the police themselves, and leftists did lead the one-day strike, but it will not be enough to stop the socialist PASOK government from instituting the cuts that the capitalist bosses need.
It is amazing to see the photos of brave workers fighting against the cops. A favorite chant is “Cops are not children of the working class, they are dogs of the capitalists.” It is exciting to see class consciousness inspire the strikes. It should inspire us all to step up our attacks on the capitalist state as they continue to attack us.
Examples of Greek students being attacked by cops on motorcycles trying to encircle them, and then encircling the cops, smashing their motorcycles and sending over 15 of them to the hospital after they beat them up, should inspire us to not fear the state and its armed apparatus. When the working class faces increasing repression, they begin to resist the new social order that the rulers try to impose. But, without communist leadership, that resistance will be co-opted into narrow reform movements and one-day strikes.
It will take a lot more than a one-day strike to stop the capitalists from trying to preserve their profit rate on the backs of the working class, both in Greece and internationally. The same enemy is attacking workers in Haiti with hundreds of thousands dead, and soldiers walking around with weapons instead of food. The same enemy is attacking the workers in Afghanistan with radioactive weaponry and paying for the war by cutting services and education of students from New York City to Los Angeles.
If workers around the world shared the Greek workers’ anger and class consciousness the rulers would be shaking in their shoes. However, we know that anger, militant action and reform demands are not enough to change the system to meet the needs of the working class. We need communist leadership from the PLP to make a revolution to wrest state power from the capitalists.
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Workers, Students Unite: Link Racist Budget Cuts to Obama’s Wars
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- 18 March 2010 333 hits
Hundreds Sit In at UCLA
LOS ANGELES, March 4 — Today several hundred students rallied and sat in at UCLA’s administration building, backing the state-wide March 4th day of action against education cut-backs. Leading up to March 4, discussion within the student groups organizing for it exposed the cuts to the state budget and public education as being essentially racist, since they disproportionately affect low-income working-class black and Latino students the most.
These cuts in public education were linked to the U.S. ruling class’s need to devote hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out its financial system and for imperialist wars that mass murder our working-class brothers and sisters in the Middle East and Central Asia. A speaker at the main rally declared, “A capitalist system that bails out the banks and funds imperialist wars for oil” must be destroyed!
The same speaker also said the state cuts writing and retention programs on university campuses while exempting military research labs like U.C. Berkley’s Lawrence Livermore Lab and UCLA’s School of Engineering Center of Innovating Nano-science for Defense. Therefore, students must realize when defending “public education” against privatization that public universities are also an essential part of the U.S. imperialist infrastructure.
The struggle to explain the racist nature of the cuts impelled two young black women to speak at a teach-in (during the sit-in held just outside the Chancellor’s office) about the need to build multi-racial unity against racist attacks on working-class black and Latino students. These comments were especially important in lieu of the student fraternity at UC San Diego that recently held a sarcastically-themed “Black History Month” party in which it celebrated racist portrayals of black people. Soon afterwards a noose was hung from a tree, further highlighting the racism existing on public university campuses.
Today there were also efforts to occupy buildings, a popular tactic lately at California universities. But the sit-in at the administration lasted longer than expected, so no buildings were occupied. However, these events have contained confused politics that don’t clearly explain the purpose of occupations. This time there were many discussions at several meetings analyzing the university’s role in supporting imperialism and capitalism by generating racist ideology and war research.
Students concluded that strategic occupations of buildings conducting such research would disrupt the university’s ability to produce for war and fascism while also making a political statement about the tie-in between the cuts and imperialist war. PL’ers are active within this movement to win students to see that the only solution to the crisis-caused cutbacks is to smash capitalism and fight for communist revolution.
Much has been learned in organizing the March 4 events. Mobilizations of students and workers are positive, but fulfilling their revolutionary potential can only occur through consistent ideological struggle for a communist analysis of the racist nature of capitalism and its natural connection to imperialism. PLP’s effort to organize students to fight back must be oriented to see the limits of reform and the ultimate need for communist revolution. J
H.S. Students Stand Ground, Lead Walkout
LOS ANGELES, March 4 — At 7:15 A.M., about 100 teachers, staff and students rallied today in front of the high school where I work as a part of a national call to action to protest budget cuts in education. We carried signs, chanted and distributed information to parents.
The majority of the teachers in our school district have wanted to strike since the end of the last school year. Last year we lost almost 3,000 teachers and more than 1,500 staff positions to mass layoffs district-wide. Consequently, class sizes have increased, counselors have more students to program, school office staff had their workloads doubled, janitorial duties became impossible, the classrooms have been left dirty and school supplies have long since been used up without being replaced.
The teachers and staff at the school sites are
angry, but the union has repeatedly backed down from confronting the district. They keep repeating that “We have to work together in order to deal with the results of the current economic crisis.” In the schools that means we must accept the cuts, take on an impossible workload and watch our students suffer while the district bureaucrats spend money on million-dollar security systems and “consultants.”
It’s always the same story under capitalism. The working class must work harder with fewer resources while the rich bosses get richer. If we ask for support, they hire someone to “research” how to make us work even harder with still less resources. All this is heaped on an overwhelmingly black, Latino and Asian student population suffering these racist cuts while hundreds of billions are spent on Obama’s imperialist Mid-East and Asian wars — in which they hope to use these youth to kill and die to maintain their oil empire.
8:00 A.M. — As the teachers and staff walked back into school to begin the school day, many
students stayed outside to continue the rally. They were organized and motivated, even marching through the school buildings convincing other students to walk out of class to join them in a rally and march. The teachers were so proud!
The administrators, security and police harassed the students as they demonstrated, but they stood their ground and refused to return to class until the end of second period. Even though the school itself wasn’t shut down, it really taught them a lot of
lessons. They learned how to organize and what to expect from the state apparatus when they start fighting back. Many of my students returned to class energized and confident that “next time will be even better.”
3:00 P.M. — Many students and teachers were inspired by the morning’s events, but it was difficult convincing anyone from my school — in the city’s southern section — to travel all the way downtown to march with the colleges and unions. More than 5,000 people demonstrated that day throughout the city.
I’m continuing the struggle with my coworkers and students by working to build a worker-student alliance with the staff on campus and other workers from transit and industry. We will build on the actions and bring into this struggle the ideas of communism: class consciousness, working-class power and the
urgent need for revolution.
Red Teacher
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