It appears that capitalism’s Great Recession has created such long-term unemployment that it is leading to “a crisis of historic proportions,” says the policy director of the National Employment Law Project. (NY Times, 2/21)

Of the 15 million “officially” unemployed, 6.3 million have been out of work for more than six months, the highest total since such numbers have been tracked (1948). It is already double the amount of the previous worst record, in the 1980s.

But that’s only half the story. That 15-million figure doesn’t include another 15 million who can’t find full-time jobs or have given up looking, so the long-term jobless number is far more than 6.3 million.

No wonder the NY Times, the capitalists’ leading mouthpiece, laments that “even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.”

Already between the 8.4 million jobs lost in this Great Recession plus another 2.7 million needed just to absorb new entrants into the job market, the economy would require over 11 million new jobs just to get back to when the collapse started in December 2007 (which even then was not full employment). That means “more than 400,000 new jobs a month for three years — wildly in excess of even the most optimistic projections.” (NYT editorial, 3/6)

With all the phony talk of a “recovery” starting (and admittedly a “jobless recovery” at that), even the Times confesses (3/6) that, “The job market may be hitting bottom, but it seems likely to remain mired there.” And the jobs that have been lost are “unlikely to return” — ever.

In effect the Times virtually admits what CHALLENGE has been saying repeatedly; it’s the profit system that is grinding workers down: “Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits,…often achieved by cutting payrolls.” This is exactly the fate that befell the Stella D’Oro workers when an investment company bought the bakery and then sold it when they decided they could make a hefty profit.

Now we can also see the monstrous effects of Clinton’s “welfare reform.” Their rationale for cutting off millions was that it would provide “incentive” for recipients to get jobs. But what happens with a “work-based ‘safety net’ without any work”? More jobless and destitute workers, and not even eligible for unemployment benefits.

So this is what capitalism has brought to the working class, a bottomless pit of unemployment, foreclosed homes, one of four children going to bed hungry. This is even twice as horrific for black, Latino, immigrant and Native American workers, who because of the system’s inherent racist discrimination, suffer twice the jobless rates of white workers.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, when one-third of the working class was on the street, communists led a national movement of the unemployed and organized the basic industries, winning unemployment insurance, welfare and the 40-hour week. But now we see that, as always under capitalism, its economic crises inevitably reverse those reforms.

Communists in the Progressive Labor Party must take up the mantle to organize masses of workers into an anti-capitalist movement that not only fights this insidious racist unemployment — which will be lasting for years and years — but points out to workers that only the destruction of the profit system can end this hellhole of capitalism, something the old “Communist” Party failed to do. Such a movement can become a “school for communism” whose goal would be a society run by and for workers, without bosses, profits, racism and oil wars, a society in which every worker will have a job and work for the advancement of our class. That’s communism. Join us! 

CALIFORNIA, February 17  —  University campuses in this state have erupted against the racism sparked by a racist “Compton cookout party” that mocked black history month. The so-called “Cookout” urged all participants to wear chains, cheap clothes and speak very loudly. Female participants were encouraged to be “ghetto chicks.”

Students at UC San Diego led the way with a series of protests and walkouts condemning the “cookout.” Days later a noose was hung in the school library and more protests  erupted.

Thus far, the anti-racist campaign has spread to other colleges in the UC system. At UC Irvine demonstrating students were arrested after a sit-in at the Chancellor’s office against racism and the budget cuts that face the entire California system. Students at UC Berkeley rebelled against the budget cuts. Many other campuses experienced racist incidents and students have responded with mass protests and related actions.

Many students are linking the racist “cookout” to the decreasing number of black students enrolled each year in the California university system, now down to 2% — victimized by the ending of affirmative action and the lower income resulting from racist unemployment and skyrocketing
tuition costs. 

In office just over a year, Obama has achieved mixed results for his beleaguered U.S. ruling-class masters. On the home front, Obama still struggles to pass heath care “reforms” which they need both for cost-cutting as well as for putting the system under tighter government control to deal with all the competing capitalists in this industry. Globally, however, he works wonders for the billionaire owners of J.P. Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, and allied U.S. imperialists.

For their benefit, liberal Obama has extended the deadly reach of the U.S. war machine in ways right-winger Bush, Jr., could never achieve. He’s added Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Haiti to the ruling class’s ever-expanding theaters of operation. Israel may soon contain U.S. combat units joining forces with its military to deal forcefully with the Middle-East tinderbox (see below). Obama’s Afghan surge is brutally “securing” towns along the route of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.

As for Iraq, Obama has shattered his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. troops, who will remain indefinitely to safeguard the oilfields they seized, and to threaten neighboring Iran. A February 24 NY Times op-ed piece by Thomas Ricks, an “expert” from the Rockefeller-funded Center for a New American Security, urged Obama to “find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come.”

Mounting Massacres in Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan Surge

Although many who voted for Obama now express disenchantment, his liberal cover still enables him to get away with murder, literally. If Bush, Jr., had ordered Navy Seals to shoot teen-aged Somali pirates or send CIA/Special Operations death squads and Predator drones into Pakistan and Yemen, the anti-war outcry would be deafening. But Obama pulled off these atrocities plus a U.S. military takeover in Haiti, with appalling, racist neglect of the stricken, while posing as a “humanitarian.” (See CHALLENGE editorial, 3/3) U.S. rulers’ motives in Haiti, are in fact drenched in potential oil reserves, as usual. (See article, page 4)

Obama’s Afghan surge force seems to commit a massacre a week, with impunity. “The Afghan human rights commission reported Wednesday that 28 civilians had been killed so far in NATO’s offensive on the Taliban stronghold of Marja.” (NY Times, 2/24)

Noncombatant deaths are sure to mount even higher as Obama targets more densely populated areas: “[T]he United States military is looking ahead toward taking the fight to Kandahar...a much bigger prize than Marja. The city is the second largest in Afghanistan” (NYT, 2/26). The Times forgot to mention what makes Kandahar such a prize — it straddles the TAPI gas pipeline route.

But the free hand in relatively small wars that Obama’s liberal credentials — and the Pentagon’s unchallenged killing power — gives U.S. rulers has limits. Their rivalry with China and Russia, powers which are far stronger than the Taliban or al-Qaeda, is intensifying. U.S. generals’ boasts of success in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot hide the fact that Chinese- and Russian-proxy Iran is relentlessly pursuing nuclear weapons.

Imperialist Dogfight over Mid-East Oil Intensifies; Is It Nuke Time?

U.S. bosses are considering three basic counterstrategies, one ineffective and the other two incredibly dangerous:

• Plan A, already in place, involves negotiations and sanctions. Teheran’s oil-soaked ayatollahs, backed by Beijing and Moscow, mock them.

• In Plan B, which U.S. rulers seem to favor, or at least are resigned to, Iran supposedly gets the bomb. Then the U.S. initiates a Mid-East version of the Cold War — with ally Israel (already possessing nuclear bombs) and the oil-rich, pro-U.S. parts of the region like Saudi Arabia — under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. But actual U.S. nuclear response would have a shorter fuse than during the U.S.-Soviet standoff.

The journal “Foreign Affairs,” the U.S. imperialist establishment’s leading public mouthpiece, laid out the ground rules in its March/April 2010 issue: “When Washington publicly presents its policy on how to contain a nuclear Iran, it should be explicit: no [Iranian] initiation of conventional wars against other countries; no use or transfer of its nuclear weapons; and no stepped-up support for terrorist or subversive activities....[T]he price of Iran’s violating these three prohibitions could be U.S. retaliation by any and all means necessary, up to and including nuclear weapons.” Nuclear-armed China and Russia would hardly stay on the sidelines.

The article continues:  “Washington should also be prepared to deploy U.S. troops on Israeli soil as a tripwire.”

• Plan C has the U.S. (or more likely, Israel) pre-emptively wiping out Iran’s nascent nukes in air strikes. Such an attack would increase tension in U.S.-vs.-Chinese and Russian flashpoints from the Koreas to Taiwan to Georgia to Poland. Iran would unleash its monster “weapon”: closing the Strait of Hormuz, though which most of Iraq’s and much of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports flow.

Our Party has long held that inter-imperialist rivalry inevitably ends in world war (see World Wars I and II). For workers to back imperialist servant Obama is thus a dead-end. But so is supporting any new politician the rulers put in the White House to mislead us. The only sane course is to reject the electoral circus altogether and build a party — the PLP — that can eventually eliminate the billionaire class and their endless profit-driven wars through communist revolution. J

SAN FRANCISCO, March 1 — Operators in the MUNI transit system, members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 250a, bucked the national trend of accepting concessions negotiated by union mis-leaders. Almost 60% rejected a union leadership demand that we give back $14 million over two years. The TWU leadership’s newsletter boasted, “We are part of the solution” while admitting to “have already given up over $4.5 million in salary savings due to service cuts and other give-backs.” Momentarily, the TWU leadership has lost its ability to sell “deals” with the ideology of fear, as it collaborates with the city’s ruling class to justify cutbacks.

Following the rejection, operators blocked both a “revote” and hiring an “insider operative from SF Mayor Newsom” for an expensive PR campaign. Instead, they’re organizing a drive to directly reach out to passengers through protests, on the buses and at public meetings. They’re uniting with California public workers on March 4.

A Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) February 28 hearing reflected an atmosphere of class war, with operators and passengers exposing the racist and anti-working-class proposed cuts.

‘No time to breathe...’

In an interview, one operator declared: “Did you blame the tellers when the banks” crashed? Others commented, “The government bails out the rich Bank of America which is foreclosing on our homes — operators should not bail out MUNI”; “The banks created this, let them solve it!” Another said MUNI had “to reach out to transit workers throughout California.”  Others spoke about how the Schedule cuts “rob me of my humanity, no time to pick up the seniors, go to the bathroom, or even breathe.”  Some operators advocated job actions — sick-outs, work-to-rule slowdowns and ultimately strikes. 

Leaflets circulated opposing the union-leadership strategy of “giving up,” demanding that the downtown big business community handle their deficit by paying the Transit Impact Fee. PLP members circulated CHALLENGE articles and leaflets with a class analysis of the transit industry.

Weeks of calculated, racist vilification of the workers ensued in the mass media, among politicians, think-tanks, and the SF MTA (which runs MUNI). Since the ‘60s, driving for MUNI was identified as a “black job.” Now, there are many immigrant workers. In this context, calling paid medical benefits for family members “an undeserved bonus” encourages the idea that these workers are “undeserving.”

• SFMTA president Nolan threatened to double the cost of discounted monthly passes for seniors, the disabled and youth and cut service 10%, without the workers’ give-backs. Ultimately, the discounts were saved but Noland demanded more concessions from workers.  Service cuts impact poorer, isolated, black and Latino neighborhoods and predominately their youth the most as resources are concentrated on rush-hour service.

• “The first and foremost concern for MUNI should be ‘labor reform,’” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the think-tank SPUR” (SF Chronicle, 2/8), meaning less for workers’ wages and benefits, and more speed-up.

• Metcalf and Supervisor Sean Elsbernd called for part-timing driver jobs because they “just sit around doing nothing and get paid” in mid-day (more thinly-veiled racism).

• Elsbernd is using the Ballot Initiative process to mobilize the public against drivers with a Charter amendment to change the process determining drivers’ wages and benefits.

The political direction in this fight to “make the Downtown bosses pay” and for passenger-worker unity comes from the intertwining of communist organizing over many years at MUNI and mass anger among operators over this new stage of attacks on unionized workers.  First the bosses decimated manufacturing as an entry-level job (without college). Now it’s dismantling public-sector jobs like transit with the “deficit” justification that “there’s no money.”

Communists have named the cause — capitalism — during 40 years of class struggle in transit combined with ideological agitation and education. Communists expose the system as one based on competition for maximum profits that motivates these bankers\CEOs, not personality, greed or political party. Inter-imperialist rivalry (capitalists of different nations competing for world domination) is part of the engine of capitalism that drives the deficit. PLP has advanced communist class consciousness over many years at MUNI. That means:

• Uniting with other workers, rejecting the “PR” approach, and going directly to the working-class public; unity with other transit workers; recognizing that our labor creates profits for the Downtown bosses; and job actions can bring them to a halt.

• Recognizing a capitalist class and system dictates this crisis; therefore, they should pay for it.”

• Viewing capitalism as a whole system; the same banks that caused the attacks on our jobs have also foreclosed our houses, cut education, increased medical expenses and the war budget.

• Organizing against U.S. imperialism; opposing the trillions spent on oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and seeing U.S. corporate robbery worldwide as directly hurting U.S. workers.

A friend told people of the impact of communists in the class struggle: “In a washing machine, you have the water, the soap and the clothes but if you don’t have the agitator, you can’t get the dirt out.” Someone else declared, “I’ve heard all this from you before, but now it’s clear what you were talking about.” CHALLENGE distribution and its content played a central role in this ideological struggle, with follow-up and study groups having a critical imapact.

To escalate this battle, we need more communists to make all these connections among our coworkers. Strictly focusing on “just surviving this budget deficit”, as the union leadership does, will not prepare us for the battles ahead as the U.S. capitalist class tries to save itself by destroying workers’ living standards. During this long process, U.S. capitalism’s decline will draw more workers into harder fights. Communists in PLP are in the fight. We will advance the long-term strategy of overthrowing capitalism and constructing a society where transit jobs serve the working class and fulfill many drivers’ aspirations for meaningful work; schedules will be about taking workers where they need to go, not delivering a workforce for the profit needs of the Downtown bosses.

(Next: Communism as a solution to serve the working class in transit.)