ALGIERS, January 18 — The SNVI autoworkers ended their nine-day wildcat and street protests yesterday as the UGTA union misleader, Sidi Saïd, succeeded once again in rapidly stifling worker protests.

The SNVI workers almost walked again when a UGTA communiqué said they’d have to make up the work-time their boss lost in the strike! “How can it be that the union is taking the place of management?,” a group of workers told the press. There should be discussions with the rank and file…before anything is decided.”

The strikers only obtained an opening of negotiations on their wage demands, modification of the minimum wage law and suspension of the increase in years needed to earn a retirement pension. The workers have established a committee to follow the negotiations.

The government mobilized thousands of cops, armed with water cannon, riot clubs and tear gas, to beat up workers whose families have suffered years of poverty. Labor Minister Tayeb Louh tried to discredit the strikers by saying they were “manipulated by political forces” hostile to the government.

But actually it was the union misleaders who delivered the crucial blow. “In truth,” said R. Hasni, a strike leader, “we were pushed to go back to work by the undermining of the strike conducted by the union headquarters. Last Thursday [Jan. 14], very early in the morning, local union hacks went to the foundry, vehicle-body workshops, and the industrial vehicles division to persuade the workers to end the strike. They even threatened rebellious workers, saying, ‘Those who don’t go back to work are likely to be fired.’”

At their January 14 general assembly local union officials reported on their negotiations with UGTA confederation leader Sidi Saïd. A group of militant workers told the press, “They talked to us about [repealing] article 87 of the labor laws, a wage hike in the upcoming industry-wide contract negotiations and a freezing of the new law on retirement until 2011.”

One worker declared that, “Our union leaders act for the government, which pulls the confederation leaders’ strings every time in order to stifle the workers’ struggles….If this wage increase depended on Sidi Saïd alone, why didn’t he decree it beforehand?....We’ve been on strike for over a week and now the trade union leaders say they have finally decided to grant us a wage hike. We didn’t ask the UGTA to decide on…our demands, we only demanded that it put forward our demands….We demanded straightforwardly that our ‘negotiators’ withdraw and leave us alone,” he concluded.

Another angry worker told interviewers, “They aren’t paying attention to our demands; we’re going to continue the strike. [Local officials] tell us that if we demonstrate in the street, they won’t back us. That’s what upsets them, street demonstrations. It’s clear that ‘sidhoum’ [master] Saïd gave them the job of busting the strike. Today, we stayed inside the plant to debate the problem in depth, but next week we’ll occupy the streets again.”

But the pro-capitalist union misleaders had already broken the back of the strike, and yesterday the workers voted to end it.

However, the workers’ poverty continues. “My doctor prescribed glasses for me, but I’ve never been able to buy them,” said a 52-year-old SNVI truck driver, a 28-year veteran worker. “My basic monthly salary? $193.” That’s roughly the average monthly wage in the Rouiba industrial zone.

Bonuses can push salaries up to between $344 and $413 a month,” said a 42-year-old mechanic, father of four. “In a week, I’ll be obliged to ask my family for money because my wages will already have gone up in smoke [all been spent],” he added.

“We who work in the tannery are the worst off in the Rouiba industrial zone!” shouted a tannery worker. “I’ve got 21 years seniority and I make $275 a month!”

“Aysheene goutte-à-goutte, ashr yam tmoot” is one chant the workers shouted during the strike — “we live from day to day and our [monthly] pay gives out in ten days.”

These conditions will inevitably force the workers to strike again. But what’s lacking is revolutionary communist leadership to turn these strikes into schools for communism, getting workers off the treadmill of reformism under which the bosses always have the power to take back any gains. The fight must be to destroy the profit system and establish a worker-run communist society in which the working class, led by its communist party, will collectively share the fruits of their labors. 

NEW YORK CITY, February 6 — After the successful, but small, rally in front of our school (as reported in a February 3rd CHALLENGE article) planning for another rally took place on two levels: the union leadership and the rank and file. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was fully in support of having the rally, yet they wanted to make sure that the rally was within the narrow confines of their own political demands.

The union is not fighting the budget cuts, but instead pushing the misleadership of “fair budget cuts.” The union’s narrow politics might have dominated the rally, led to a small number of teachers that would have weakened everyone’s confidence, and discouraged a lot of angry students who increasingly are seeing that the school system isn’t working for them. None of this would bother a UFT that does not want to unite parents, teachers, and students in any case.

The Chapter Leader took the lead in organizing the rally and wanted it to be large in order for the media to show up and capture it.  Our view is that relying upon the media is never a good tactic as the bosses own and manipulate the media in order to maintain their class rule.  Our city is especially susceptible to media blackouts since the mayor basically owns the media, and widespread coverage of broad discontent would threaten his tight grip on the city.

Understanding the limits of the rally, PL saw that a state school challenging the state’s needs has revolutionary potential. As communists we wanted to mobilize a mass action against the state and organize students and teachers to move to the left away from the narrow union politics of just opposing school closings. Our goal was to show the connection between the war and budget cuts, and to build a large mass protest that would give students, teachers and parents the unity and confidence to carry the struggle even further. 

Our PL club came up with two plans: plan A being to try to move the rally across the street to protest in front of a Citibank branch, and plan B to have the student PL’ers at the school break off from the main protest and move students to the Citibank in order to link the banks to the budget cuts.  The interest and payments that are given to the banks are paid before the schools get their money, and are a major reason for the budget cuts.

Well, the bosses gave even more fuel for our fire as the transit authority announced that they would be cutting free Metrocards for students.  This racist attack (which would basically reintroduce segregation by making it too expensive for black and Latino students to travel to schools outside their own segregated neighborhoods) made the students in our school livid. They saw it would increase the number of dropouts. 

The day of the rally, several students organized to put out a flyer that was distributed to students telling them to join the rally.  The administration told the Chapter Leader that this was against the contract, and she promptly confronted a PL’er about the flyer.  The PL’er replied that he didn’t print it nor distribute it.  The flyer said, “rob from the banks not the schools,” making a class analysis of why the rulers’ oil wars lead to the budget cuts. This was not what the union wanted to say as the UFT refuses to lay the blame where it belongs — on the bosses and their banks. The students themselves organizing to write, print, and distribute a flyer that linked the war, the budget cuts, and the need to fight back against them.  Party influence was illustrated in many areas, including students taking charge of making signs in an art class.

When a PL teacher came to the lobby to get the signs and plan the rally, a possible Plan C developed: march to the local park that has a Christmas shopping center and shops there.  Unsure of the forces we could organize, the PL teacher thought that maybe the rally across the street would be enough, and that they could march around the block, hoping to get the school nearby to join the rally.   Much to the chagrin of the Chapter Leader, the PL teacher grabbed a sign made in one of the art classes that said, “Rob the banks not the schools” and joined another teacher outside the school. They started chanting and students joined in droves!

Though nobody from the media showed up, close to two hundred students, two parents, and nearly 20 teachers did and made the rally happen. We were loud as we marched six blocks to the park, had people join the march, join the rally at the park, and then marched back loudly shouting “fight back,” and opposing the war. Instead of relying upon the media to spread the message, we relied upon the working class.   

This rally is a sign of things to come as the Party can now mobilize hundreds against the needs of the ruling class.  We moved the rally to the left with patient and careful organizing and many discussions, both in the classroom and individually. The students are excited and looking forward to the next rally. 

Though the administration may help us to organize more rallies for their own reasons, PL views the struggle as long-term and these rallies as providing opportunities to build the Party. As Bob Dylan once sang, “The times they are a-changing”!  The future for Party growth is great, and we must seize every opportunity that the bosses give us to organize, grow and spread communist ideas through increased struggle. 

CHICAGO, February 1 — For three years now, the Cook County healthcare system — serving over 80% black, Latino and immigrant workers — is being deliberately dismantled in one of the most heinous racist attacks in recent history. Once a “safety net” for those without the ability to pay, it is becoming increasingly privatized and downsized. Besides hundreds of layoffs, the new governing board aims to shut two of three South Side hospitals which service primarily black workers segregated by the city’s racist gentrification. There are now one million uninsured workers here, more than the entire population of San Francisco!

The Chicago Tribune (12/18/09) reported a study showing the health status between black and white workers widening and being “worse in Chicago than nationwide.” It said, “The underlying issue here is racism and poverty. Black people in Chicago are forced to live in neighborhoods… [with] no stores to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, where schools are failing… [with no] parks to exercise in and where they tend to go to segregated health facilities that are poorly funded and, in different ways, failing.”

PLP has been the only force organizing against these attacks. On the job, within our unions and in our community groups we have fought to organize workers to not passively accept this assault. Union leaders sell out the workers at every step, trying to use the commissioner elections as a campaign to mislead workers, instead of fighting the layoffs.

Within the unions we’ve organized a demonstration in front of the hospital, attacking the governing board and its proposals, plus a series of town hall meetings and smaller on-the-job forums. There we explained the root causes of the cuts and their relationship to the federal war budget and Chicago’s ruling class, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club. We’re planning future actions and a solidarity dinner for workers who may suffer layoffs.

In a difficult process, we’ve become visible leaders and fighters for the workers on the job while the union hacks visibly sell out. We’ve expanded our CHALLENGE distribution and our “County CHALLENGE,” our communist shop newsletter. More importantly, we’ve expanded our base, including recruiting two new club members. We need to remain consistent in this fight.

Currently, many workers think the layoffs have been rescinded because of their union leaders’ lies. These hacks know there’ll be layoffs but just who is unknown because of the bumping-rights and seniority fiasco. Thanks to their mis-leaders, many workers have been displaced and pitted against each other, and to date have not planned any demonstrations against the cuts and layoffs.

Facing layoffs, transit workers and schoolteachers recently started a coalition to fight them, as well as school closings proposed by Board of Education CEO Ron Huberman, former head of the transit system. We’ve joined this coalition linking public transit and public education with public health, all under fire in Obama’s Democratic backyard.

Even if the Obama healthcare bill passes, best-case scenario will leave over 20 million people uninsured. And 100% of all undocumented workers will be denied this “option.” For those of us who can afford it, it will only mean a major cost shift, saving business at workers’ expense. This “universal insurance” plan is a massive racist attack on our class. Given the nation-wide dismantling of public hospitals, this will be a death sentence for millions of workers.

Previously at public hospitals workers could essentially get “free” albeit inadequate care. Currently, private hospitals are even refusing patients with HMO’s, let alone a “public option.” As the public hospitals are either shut, privatized and/or downsized, it is these hospitals that will be “accepting” this new insurance, essentially caring for the same patient population but with less available services. This means longer lines and decreased access — and this only for those who have the ability to pay. In the current economy, this will mean more sickness and death.

This is fascist healthcare. In Chicago, the ruling class has overtly seized leadership over the County hospital. By sidelining the undisciplined self-serving commissioners to petty side deals, this new governing board directly represents the interests of the top banks and top private hospitals.

This take-over highlights the ruling class’s need to consolidate its wealth and discipline its own class. It also highlights their using the unions and mass organizations to win our class to supporting their “changes,” a hallmark of fascism.

Our Party faces such a situation, but it’s in this muck and mire where our friends and future Party leaders are, and in which we can and will build a revolutionary movement to destroy this racist profit system once and for all! Join PLP. 

As the U.S. government celebrates black history month this February, the bosses’ media are still painting Barack Obama’s presidency as the positive legacy of a pacifist-led civil rights movement. But the real history of the civil rights era is militant black workers rebelling violently against racism.

This is the history of the international working class that the Progressive Labor Party celebrates every day in our fight to smash capitalism — the system that gave birth to racism and continues to profit from it.

Militant, mass working-class struggle led to the gains of the civil rights era — the end of legal segregation, jobs for blacks, affirmative action — concessions given by U.S. rulers who were afraid that these often violent struggles might expand to attacking the capitalist system as a whole.

The civil rights movement involved thousands of black workers heroically putting their lives on the line. Many, many were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and throughout the South in the fight against racism. While the movement also involved many white students and workers, including some who died, the opening of freedom schools, marching against segregation, integrating lunch counters and other struggles brought the full force of the racist system down on those black workers who stood up and fought.

There was tremendous political struggle within the anti-racist movement in the 1960’s. At the famous 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom where King gave his “I have a dream” speech, King and other march organizers toned down a student’s speech attacking Kennedy, the Democrats, and the Civil Rights bill itself for failing to address police brutality, racist unemployment, and low wages. King’s own organization was largely funded by the Ford Foundation and he wasn’t about to bite the hand that fed him.

This militancy wasn’t only, or even mainly, inside the organized movement. In 1965, police harassment of a black man sparked an anti-racist rebellion in Watts, California. King went to Watts and supported the armed cops and National Guard troops, while urging rebels to be peaceful. When his pacifism was rejected, King phoned President Lyndon Johnson (who had sent him to Watts) complaining about “all of these tones of violence from people out there in the Watts area” (New York Times, 05/14/02). King’s last campaign to support 1,200 striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968 is supposedly his most radical. But King fled the March 28th protest when a group of demonstrators, frustrated with pacifist leadership and racist oppression, smashed downtown store windows. Black workers’ militant and sometimes armed struggle won the victories that are credited to King.

Obama: Picking up the Torch of
Mis-leadership

Obama is part of King’s legacy of misleading working-class anti-racists into the dead-end of supporting the bosses’ politicians and laws. A year after Obama’s election the racist unemployment rate for black and Latin workers has jumped to over 30%.  Half of all black and Latin youth can’t find jobs and the only “jobs” that Obama has created are 60,000 more chances to die and murder workers in Afghanistan for U.S. bosses’ oil pipeline profits.

The U.S. bosses want us to focus on political victories for black politicians (like Obama) but these black bosses are part of the same racist ruling class that is responsible for the reversal of the civil rights gains and the racist conditions today.  When Harold Washington was elected as the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983, his first major initiative in the midst of a fiscal crisis was to fire 3,000 mostly black city workers!

Despite decades of black, Latino, and Native American mayors, governors and lawmakers, racism thrives by every indicator — higher incarceration rates, lower wages, more unemployment, higher home foreclosure rates, less access to health care and fewer education opportunities for black, Latino and Native American workers.  Over and over racist cops get away with racist terror — such as the murders of Avery Cody, Jr. in Compton, California and Leroy Barnes in Pasadena, California and countless more not named — while Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton urge us to be peaceful and seek victory in courts that acquit or slap cops on the wrist.

Like King, Obama can only offer empty hope and promises. His role is to win anti-racists to support the racist ruling class and to use racism when it’s useful to build support for U.S. rulers’ imperialist wars.  

In referring to the “Muslim world” as a “clenched fist” Obama used anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to win U.S. workers to support oil wars in Afghanistan and the continued occupation in Iraq, which has killed over 1 million Iraqis since 2003. (Opinion Research Business, Feb 2008). Obama constantly draws inspiration from racist slave-owning founding fathers who systematically committed genocide against Native Americans to increase their profits.

Stand on Shoulders of Giants

The mass anti-racist rebellions of the ‘60s were good, but the crumbs given to our class in response have been taken back, as is inevitable under capitalism. For our class to build a society that meets our needs, the fight against racism must take place within the context of fighting for communist revolution, the only outcome where workers can win power and establish a world free of capitalism, its racism and its wars.

This black history month we must concentrate our attention not just on the heroic history of black and white workers uniting in often violent struggle against racism but also waging our own anti-racist, anti--capitalist struggles to bring forth a better world — communism.