CHICAGO, January 16 — “We know what we’re fighting for!” echoed down 63rd Street in Englewood, drawing people out to watch the multi-racial group of youth and adults march, chanting “No more rich and no more poor!” The march, hosted by a church in Hyde Park, was against poverty and for equality, to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but the tone turned militant when youth around PLP, mostly Englewood residents, took over the chanting.

We distributed a flier connecting the capitalist-inflicted poverty and the devastation in Haiti following the earthquake to the similar economic-related Hurricane Katrina disaster. PLP’s “Fight-Back!” chant had people dancing in the streets, at the bus stops, raising their fists and chanting. It was a welcome change from the usual gang members walking down 63rd Street!

After the march, there was a panel discussion with professors and community activists. Half the audience was youth, but the discussion was definitely not geared towards them. In fact, activists on the panel repeatedly said that students needed to try harder in school and listen to their elders to fight poverty. If that worked, we would have fixed these problems a long time ago!

The professor spoke with his back toward the students, holding posters that identified high poverty areas. We know where the poor people are —  just walk through the segregated communities and look for boarded-up buildings! We walked past plenty of them on 63rd and King.

To engage the students, a PLP member wrote questions down and passed them around. The youth responded, read each other’s responses, and wrote more questions. This was a more insightful discussion! When the panel ended, three youth informed one of the speakers that the way she talked about students was ‘adultist’ — meaning it had a bias against youth and didn’t value their opinions and abilities.

After we left the church, we had a student panel discussion over pizza. This gave us a chance to debrief. We agreed that the walk was too long and the panel was too dry, but it was overall a good day. We discussed how poverty came from the creation of class society; that it hadn’t always existed, and that a lot of the poverty we see today is based in racism. Students who had been around PLP explained what the Party is and everyone who came took a CHALLENGE. Participating in events like this brings more youth around the Party and, at the end of the day, we gained a new member for PLP! 

“Public-Transit Passengers Face Rough Ride.”  This is the happy New Year message from the Wall St Journal (WSJ) (Jan. 2, 2010). As spokesperson for the big financial capitalists like Goldman Saks, Bank of America, and Citibank, the WSJ only confirms what we transit workers already know about the destruction of transit jobs and service in our own particular cities.

Here are some Facts:

$8.4 billion of the $787 billion federal stimulus package or 1% went to mass transit; while most of the $787 billions went to bail out Wall St.

The cost of riding public transit rose at a 17.8% annual rate in the six months ending in November. San Francisco’s Bay Area
Rapid Transit increase will be 27% in Jan. 2010. Those on the economic margins will have to choose between giving up necessities or staying home.

Budget deficit: NY, $383 million, Chicago, $300 million, S.F., $129 million.

3.8% fall in riders over the whole year; rising to a 6.1% drop during October, November and December. Some cities estimate ridership could fall as much as 10%.

What Is Behind The Facts About The Crisis In Mass Transit?

Finance capital and the big corporations which own property in every Center City in Urban USA caused the revenue and funding crisis as they refuse to pay for the value that a mass transit infrastructure adds to property and businesses in urban areas. They support the most regressive tax for transit, a “Sales Tax” which hits the poorest the hardest and shrinks in periods of economic bust. 

 Financial Capital has made billions in profits off loans, public bonds, and financial schemes (like leases, buy-backs) used to pay for transit infrastructure.  Like everything in capitalism, transit must be profitable for some boss if it is to develop. Workers needing mass transit, its value as a “green” alternative, and transit workers providing an important social service are not reason enough for it to exist in an economic system that is based upon profit over human need.  

The funding crisis is a result of U.S. imperialism and the budget priority for wars around the world to control resources like oil.

The capitalist class is dismantling jobs in the public sector like transit (teachers, medical workers, etc.) much as they did after the 1970’s in the industrial, manufacturing sectors of auto, steel, textile, etc.  They cannot outsource transit jobs, but they have a consistent policy of part-timing, speeding up schedules, called “efficiencies,” outsourcing to non-union, or subcontracting to cut labor costs.

At the same time politicians and the corporate-owned mass media try to mobilize the working-class tax payers against their class brothers and sisters in the public sector. This is a divide-and-conquer strategy. In S.F., politicians characterized a legal provision that provides partial payment for dependent medical care as a “Year-end Bonus;” this spread in the media as a thinly-veiled attempt to link transit workers with bankers and fat cat Wall Street bonuses. 

The impact of this crisis is heaviest on the poorest riders, the disability community, black and Latino neighborhoods, the elderly, students, and transit workers (who themselves are predominately black and Latino), immigrant, single parents and sections of the working class that saw transit as a way to maintain a family and life in this economy. In New York City, subsidies passes for the mostly black and Latino students who commute to public schools are on the chopping block — another example of the rulers’ institutional racism.

Ridership is down due to unemployment -— a product of capitalism in crisis.

To understand what is really happening in transit, passengers and transit workers need a communist analysis of capitalism which explains the source of these attacks and helps develop class consciousness: knowing which side of the fence we’re on and who’s there with us.  Mass transit moves people and goods; the vascular system of world capitalism.  Transit workers have tremendous potential power to disrupt the smooth operation of the profit system.

Even though, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) top leadership have encouraged and negotiated concessions, transit workers have the potential to step up and fight back.  Groups of workers, with some communist ideas, like “make the bosses take the losses,” have refused to accept that the working class must pay for the transit crisis. 

Transit workers need unity with passengers to oppose fare hikes and service cuts.  Work slowdowns, mass meetings over schedule cuts, newsletters to riders and drivers, rank-and-file caucuses, participation in Union elections and demonstrations with other pubic workers can organize the opposition to the racist fare hikes and attacks on transit workers that the bosses need to finance their expanding oil wars. 

PLP members are immersed in these daily battles, as reported in CHALLENGE, but as long as the profit system remains in place, with financial capitalists running the show, mass transit will not be run to satisfy workers’ needs. Communists organize now to develop collectivity, knowledge of how capitalism works, and class consciousness.  These are some modest steps towards a revolutionary movement, eventually a class war, to get rid of the Wall St parasites. 

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 27 — PLP joined several friends in public health  as well as 40 other AIDS activists as they picketed the White House on the afternoon of Obama’s State of the Union address. Chanting, “Money for AIDS, Not for War” and holding signs saying, “Frozen AIDS Budget Means Waiting Lists for AIDS Housing and Treatment,” we protested Obama’s racist and sexist proposal to freeze federal spending on domestic programs for three years. These are areas where mostly black, Latino and female workers need services the most: public health, housing, literacy, and transportation.

As one activist wrote in her call to action, “This is a nightmare scenario. We’re in the middle of an economic crisis, and people are losing their jobs, their homes, their healthcare. This budget freeze would devastate efforts to address HIV in our communities, and around the world. Waiting lists are growing every day for housing, and AIDS treatment and care. Syringe exchanges can finally get federal funding, but now there’s no new money to fund them. We have to push back!”

Pushing back is okay, but is actually reformist. Such anger must be turned into action to destroy capitalism, a repressive economic system that forces and requires banks and big business to protect their profits at the expense of the working class. The capitalist system places ownership of production in the hands of those with the most wealth.  The super wealthy ruling class, the bankers and corporate owners, own the government, and dictate economic and political policy through their ability to control politicians like Obama.  They don’t get rich by providing money for free AIDS drugs or subsidized housing!

Already, one of the country’s richest counties near D.C. has a waiting list for AIDS medications while people in Uganda wait for others to die so they can get care. The working class must join PLP in order to smash the bosses’ state and create a communist world based on meeting each other’s needs in order to solve these problems.

Communism is a system that prioritizes health because it operates without a capitalist wage or profit system. Communists fight for the working class as we are the ones who produce all value. Communists strive to equalize the opportunities for everyone to contribute to the good of the world.  This future will take a great deal of personal and collective struggle to achieve, but it is the only alternative that can create a world without AIDS, poverty, racism, and inequality. Though our friends have not yet been won to fight for communism, more public health workers and students are struggling to find the solutions to these problems. Ultimately logic, the sharpening class struggle, and conversations with PLP must convince them that only revolution for communism can solve these problems.

PLP talked to friends about the freeze and their faith in the system on the way over to the protest.  One admitted how frustrated she was that Obama would propose these cuts and feared that it would be harder to find a job actually helping people improve their health. Another took it further and explained how the president always represents the interests of the rich. Others differed in their views of Obama.  A young professional wrote how proud she was to see Obama applauded by such important people at his State of the Union speech, while another blasted him for betraying his supporters.  These debates will continue.

PLP joined 65 public health students at a gathering of young professionals the previous weekend in order to discuss the road to struggle. Amid images of Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the homeless here, two speakers described the structure of capitalism in which a small minority control the wealth created by the masses of people. A public health student and a woman living with, and fighting HIV described their transformation into activists. Breaking into smaller groups, we spent the next hour discussing our role as social activists, identifying our fears and motivations, and providing collective support for each to do more.

It is up to our Party and its friends to point out that it is racism and sexism that allows capitalism to exist and that no amount of social activism will get rid of it.  PLP needs to transform these good intentions and concern into an organized movement for communism that battles the bosses at every step so we can realize our goals of health and equality.

PARIS, January 27 — Class struggle sharpens contradictions and reveals the truth, proven again by the undocumented workers’ strike here, now in its fourth month.

Riot batons, tear gas and rubber bullets for the workers, and kid gloves for their bosses. Why? Because the racist bosses here want and need a permanent mass of super-exploited undocumented workers.

That’s why, at the crack of dawn on January 20, 100 riot cops violently evicted 62 undocumented workers who were  occupying the Hotel Majestic — a foreign ministry conference center undergoing renovation – since they struck on October 12. Workers were beaten, shot point-blank in the chest with a rubber bullet and had their teeth smashed in.

Despite the police attack, strike leader Old Doucouré declared, “With or without the building site, we will continue to tell the truth.” Indeed, on January 22, 2,000 undocumented workers and their supporters protested near the French National Assembly to denounce the bloody eviction and demand across-the-board “legalization” for all undocumented workers.

Raid A Retaliation for Workers’ Public Condemnation of Boss’s Duplicity

The bloody eviction was retaliation for a press conference the 62 workers held at the French National Assembly on Jan. 13. They castigated Bouygues Bâtiment, which subcontracts work to ADEC Demolition — their employer — in these terms: Our boss “knows our situation [as undocumented workers] and profits from it. He has set things up so as not to hire us directly. He has us paid by temporary work agencies. He says he isn’t responsible, that we are not his employees. And yet, we have been working for him for years, some of us for ten years.”

Their boss is Martin Bouygues, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s “best friend.” Bouygues Bâtiment is just one company in the Bouygues empire, which employs 145,000 workers around the globe and raked in 32.7 billion euros ($46 billion) in profits in 2008.

The undocumented workers attacked the French fascists’ lie that undocumented immigrants come here to benefit from the social security system. “We pay social security contributions, we pay taxes,” they declared. “When we are injured on the construction sites, no medical coverage, no sick time. And often: “Mission over” for those who are unfortunate enough to have their foot crushed by rubble or get burned by a blowtorch.”

They also attacked the French government’s lie that undocumented workers are “dangerous.” Four workers even showed security clearances from having worked in French National Assembly offices.

The French government is also attacking undocumented students. On January 25, two Comorian students were arrested on their way to class at the University of Pau and sent over 400 miles away to a detention center here. Two days later fellow students demonstrated at a Pau police station to protest their arrest and transfer. Club-wielding cops broke up the demonstration.

Kid Gloves For The Bosses

While French rulers repress striking undocumented workers demanding “legalization,” it treats their employers with kid gloves. On January 12, the police mistakenly arrested three directors of SENI, a cleaning company. Documents there showed that 500 workers — one-fifth of the workforce — are undocumented, the biggest such case in French history.

The following day, the government released the bosses, saying prosecution was being postponed indefinitely. Why? Because firstly, with the bosses in jail, 2,000 workers — documented and undocumented — would be sacked, impelling them to unite and possibly stage a sit-down.

Secondly, SENI is a subsidiary of Samsic, owned by Christian Roulleau, one of the 100-richest bosses in France. Samsic and its subsidiaries clean the French presidential palace and other government offices, as well as the Eiffel Tower. It also handles nuclear plants and submarines and works for the Roissy police, charged with hunting down undocumented workers. The government doesn’t want it known how much it employs undocumented workers.

A bill enabling prosecutors to shut down companies “that employ undocumented workers in a repeated and sizeable way” has now been postponed indefinitely, admitted the labor ministry to the weekly newspaper “Le Canard enchaîné.” Such a law could shut thousands of companies and lay off tens, even hundreds, of thousands of workers, “legal” and “illegal.”

Capitalism Needs
Undocumented Workers

The savage repression of striking undocumented workers and the kid-glove treatment of their bosses proves that the bosses need and want undocumented workers. As the ADEC Demolition workers said on January 13: “We owe this life as workers without rights, as modern-day slaves, to our administrative situation. The government refuses to give us permission to work. And yet, the bosses hire us. Most of us have filed requests for ‘legalization’….but that hasn’t helped. It must be believed that the boss and the government want to keep us ‘illegal,’ the better to exploit us.”

While undocumented workers are super-exploited, the fascists and the government fabricate racist lies about undocumented workers “stealing the jobs” of native-born workers, “taking advantage” of the welfare system, and “threatening national security.” They use this stereotype to divide native-born and undocumented workers, the age-old bosses’ weapon of divide-and-conquer.

Only communist revolution — which destroys national boundaries, along with the bosses and their system that creates them, and exploits all workers — can free the entire working class from this barbarism. J

Bulletin

The overwhelming majority of the 30,000 government healthcare practitioners — doctors and specialists — in two unions are in the 6th week of a strike for higher wages and better conditions. They say they’re “ready to take blows from [police] riot sticks” to win their demands. (More next issue.)