Communist Response to Racist Unemployment: Employed and Jobless, Unite to Fight the Bosses

• U.S. Unemployed Soars to 30 Million

a href="#Rulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers">Rule"s’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers

a href="#Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?">"raq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?

Fighting Racist Deportations Can Build PLP

a href="#Calif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts">"alif. Students Battle Bosses’ Crisis Cuts

a href="#Oaxaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress">"axaca PL’ers Make Mark At APPO Congress

50,000 Rally in NYC: Cut the Bosses, Not the Budget

Union Leaders Have No Real Answer to 30,000 Layoffs

AFL-CIO Hacks Deflate Angry Workers

a href="#Katrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery">Katr"na Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery

Germany: Patriots, Socialists, Union Fakers, Neo-Nazis Thwart Workers

Obama-Bosses-UAW Gang-up Mugs Ford Workers

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Hero of Salvador War Is Reborn in PLP

a href="#Airport Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down">Ai"port Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down

Castro Brothers Continue Perestroika

a href="#Anger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker">"nger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker

Bangladesh Army Mutiny, Sri Lanka Civil War Tied to Oil Dogfight

a href="#Working Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women">"orking Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women

a href="#France’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops">"rance’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops

RED EYE on the NEWS

• Marx got no respect, but now…
• Old-time reds built China’s base
• Asbestos poisoning for a profit
• For Arab public, US is terrorist

• ---

Communist Response to Racist Unemployment: Employed and Jobless, Unite to Fight the Bosses

World capitalism has produced an economic earthquake that is throwing tens of millions of workers onto the streets. U.S. unemployment is approaching 30 million (see box). In China, 26 million jobless migrants are seeking work (which is not even the total unemployment figure) provoking protests at factories and riots at government offices. Hundreds of thousands are being laid off in Europe, and if GM goes under, it’s curtains for another 300,000 there.

In The U.S., ‘These Jobs Are Not Coming Back’

The current crisis is leading to a "wrenching re-structuring of the American economy." (NY Times, 3/7) "These jobs are not coming back," says Wachovia’s chief economist. "Many companies are abandoning whole areas of business."(NYT) With U.S. car sales having plummeted nearly 50% since 2007 — an annual pace of 17 million down to 9 million — which would "leave a lot of unneeded auto factories."(NYT)

This is exactly what Karl Marx analyzed as the fundamental contradiction in capitalism causing such crises: a planless system in which each capitalist tries to capture as much of the market as possible, resulting in the overproduction (over capacity) of the means of production. All the capital investment in hundreds of factories is lost as they close. Laid-off workers can’t buy the tremendous amount of products manufactured in these "unneeded factories," leading to more layoffs and home foreclosures, which in turn depresses house values, aggravating the crisis still more.

The Obama Administration: Of, By and For the Bosses

Obama’s bank-bailout program only serves the capitalist class which he and all U.S. presidents represent. They will use fascism to discipline their own class to toe the line; to counter workers’ rebellions against the bosses’ attacks; and to promote their oil wars which Obama is expanding in South Asia. Their class interest is to save the profit system at the expense of tens of millions of workers, employed and unemployed, and cannot solve the crisis for us. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who suffer racist unemployment, double the jobless and home foreclosure rates. This is based on centuries of racist discrimination and super-exploitation which nets super-profits for the bosses, a foundation for their system.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s — which this deepening downturn is fast approaching — communists led millions of jobless workers into the streets demanding jobs and unemployment benefits and organized hundreds of thousands in sit-down strikes in the mass production industries for unionization and the 8-hour day. But unfortunately they did not point out to workers that these crises are built into the system. Unless there is a communist revolution to overthrow these bosses, the control of production and state power will always be used to take away any reforms — which is exactly what happened.

U.S. union leaders are defenders of the system and therefore are in the bosses’ hip pockets. They have demoralized workers and have sunk union membership from 35% of the private industry workforce to 7%. When these hacks are forced by rank-and-file pressure to do something about these attacks — like the March 5, 50,000-strong march in New York City — it is to deflate the anger of the workers. After decades of betrayals and anti-communism by the union hacks, workers’ anger is slowly growing. To channel this anger into fighting capitalism, the real cause of their misery, instead of looking for other "saviors" (be it a liberal fascist á la Obama or a conservative fascist), communists must build a base for our politics while involved in any fightback — using CHALLENGE as our ideological tool. This fightback could include any or all of the following:

Mass Action Is The Order Of The Day

• Organize strikes against layoffs; stop work if co-workers are being laid off;

• Establish union committees to unite those still working with the unemployed, led by rank-and-filers defying foot-dragging by sellout union leaders;

• Win local unions to organize marches on government buildings and mass demonstrations surrounding companies that announce future layoffs;

• Raise demands in unions, community groups, churches, schools and colleges to unite with workers in their areas to protest bosses’ attacks;

• Support striking workers in our areas, such as those at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx, NY and elsewhere, with funds and by joining picket lines;

• Organize students to participate in these actions and to support their parents who are either on strike, face layoffs or can mobilize their co-workers into action;

• Reach across all borders in solidarity with workers internationally who are facing these same attacks, especially auto workers who are in a unique position to unite against the auto bosses who have "globalized."

No doubt many rank-and-file workers will come up with additional ideas for action. But it is the job of communists in PLP and their close friends to inject our red ideas into this struggle, to do what was not done in the 1930s: advance the need for communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven capitalist system that has thrived on unemployment, forcing workers to suffer the losses caused by the bosses’ crisis. These ideas can be spread effectively by the mass sale of CHALLENGE, the expansion of CHALLENGE networks and winning workers to subscribe to the paper.

By upping the ante of class struggle around the issue of mass unemployment, we can raise the level of understanding within the working class to the question of capitalism’s inability to provide a decent life for workers everywhere. This leads to the need to destroy it and put in place a communist system within which workers receive the full benefit of all the value we, and we alone, produce.

U.S. Unemployed Soars to 30 Million

Behind the phony government unemployment rate figure of 8.1% is the fact that this represents "only" 12.5 million. It doesn’t count the 5.6 million who have given up looking for non-existent jobs nor the 8.6 million underemployed who are forced to work part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs. (All figures from the NY Times, 3/7)

Add to that 26.7 million total the 1.6 million in prisons for non-violent, mostly drug "offenses" (of the total 2.4 million inmates in the U.S.) who never should have been jailed in the first place, plus several million on welfare because there are no jobs, plus the hundreds of thousands who joined the military because they couldn’t find jobs (and are continuing to do so during this depression) — all told the real unemployment figure is easily 30 million, or 20% of the labor force.

Even the government’s monthly figures are distorted. They just admitted that the jobless figures for December and January were under-reported by 161,000, which means that the latest February figure of 651,000 will probably increase to well over 700,000 a month from now.

Figures don’t lie, but liars can sure figure.

a name="Rulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers"></a>"ulers’ Financial Crisis, ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ Means War on Workers

As imperialist rivalry, now aggravated by economic crisis, keeps intensifying, potential bloodbaths far deadlier than Iraq or Afghanistan are emerging globally. Andrew Krepinevich, a Defense Department strategist has just written "7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century." (Krepinevich is no armchair pundit; see box at right for his résumé.)

Publicity for the book identifies as plausible cataclysms: "(1) the unraveling of the state of Pakistan; (2) a nuclear attack on the United States with materials covertly transported across borders; (3) a pandemic influenza sweeping across the globe; (4) escalation of an Arab-Israeli conflict toward a nuclear showdown; (5) a U.S. standoff with China over Taiwan; (6) the crippling of an increasingly fragile global economy; and (7) a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq gone bad." Any one could cause massive loss of life and provoke an all-out U.S.-led war.

(An influenza pandemic scenario has produced bosses’ plans to use cops and the military to prevent any movement of large segments of populations to go to their jobs, in or out of the country or anywhere else without permission. A future CHALLENGE article will detail this fascist scenario.)

Though things can change rapidly, the first and last cases seem the most immediate. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is already inflamed by the Taliban and a military bent on war with nuclear-armed India. But additionally, Foreign Policy Magazine, an arm of the liberal Washington Post (March/April 2009), says: "Pakistan’s small but politically powerful middle class has been slammed by the collapse of the country’s stock market. Meanwhile, a rising proportion of the country’s huge population of young men is staring unemployment in the face. It is not a recipe for political stability."

a name="Iraq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?">">"raq: GI’s Back Sooner Than Expected?

The murderous efforts of 147,000 regular U.S. troops and an equal number of allies and mercenaries in Iraq can’t stop frequent bombings. On March 8, a suicide attack killed 28 people at Iraq’s police academy, and 33 more the next day. Obama’s proposed shift of U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan can only embolden Islamic militants in Iraq. GIs may be back in Baghdad sooner than expected.

Scenarios Four and Five, standard Pentagon doctrine for years, take on enhanced urgency in the current economy. The U.S. counter-threat to Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel over Palestine dates back to the Clinton administration. Checking the growth of a Chinese blue-water navy that can dominate Mid-East/Far East oil-supply routes was one reason President Jimmy Carter began his Persian Gulf Rapid Deployment Force. The latest financial crash only increases U.S. rulers’ needs to forcibly control the world’s cheapest — and thus most profitable — fuel supplies.

Item Six concerns a more belligerent Russia. Oil at $140 per barrel enabled Putin to buy off his population with jobs and other material incentives. Now he must resort to whipping up the warlike empire-rebuilding spirit that brought him to power a decade ago. As Foreign Policy (March-April, 2009) says, "He stirred dormant nostalgia for the lost Soviet empire...." Now Putin faces "an imploding economy, expanding economic hardship, and an increasingly desperate Russian state that must rely on repression and nationalism."

Rulers Preparing for Two Simultaneous Wars

Krepinevich’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) says the Navy must "prepare to fight and win two overlapping conflicts" against a continental-sized adversary [China or Russia] and a mid-sized nuclear-armed regional adversary [Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, or India]. It urges the Navy both to cut costs and to fire all its bullets before they rust. "Exploit ships now in production to greatest extent possible. Reduce total number of different ship types. Reduce crew sizes." (CSBA website). CSBA reports underlie an ongoing series of New York Times editorials on restructuring the military.

Workers Need to Take the Offensive

Two scenarios are missing here. One is the kind of mass anti-war organizing in the Vietnam era (led most militantly by our Party) that has made restoring the draft politically unacceptable. The CSBA considers conscription an "extreme measure" even in a deepening depression with sharpening challenges to the U.S. rulers’ empire.

But the rulers sorely need to beef up their forces. They’re not giving up on an expanded military. That’s why they’re organizing a "back-door" draft — Obama’s National Service, with pumped-up patriotism and loyalty (to the bosses) to induce millions of youth to join the military in exchange for college tuition or, for undocumented immigrant youth, U.S. citizenship.

This leads to the most important scenario of all, the need to fight for communist revolution. Because of the demise of the old communist movement rulers worldwide have been able to channel workers’ anger down dead-end nationalist, ethnic and religious paths.

That’s why communists and other militant workers need to up the ante of class struggle against the profit-driven ruling class, hell-bent on imperialist wars. We must mount an offensive on racist unemployment (see front page), win soldiers and sailors to join their brothers and sisters in other countries to rebel against the common enemy: the capitalist warmakers. We must organize strikes against the rulers’ attacks on workers’ living standards, against their wars and their attempt to implement fascist measures in the workplace.

In all this, we must unite the working class — black, Latino, Asian and white, men and women — against the rulers’ crises that worsen workers’ misery exponentially. All this will move us towards our Party’s long-term goal, rebuilding revolutionary class consciousness to prepare our class for communist revolution.??

CEO For Murder, Inc.

Andrew Krepinevich has a 20-year career as an Army officer, teaching at West Point and serving in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and Quadrennial Review, the Pentagon’s top long-range planning bodies. He participated in Clinton’s 1997 force review that set the stage for U.S.-led mass murder in Serbia and Iraq. Today Krepinevich runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an outfit studying which hardware and troop configurations can give the U.S. war machine its "biggest bang for the buck" in coming wars.

Fighting Racist Deportations Can Build PLP

CHICAGO, March 8 — "La lucha obrera no tiene frontera!" ("Workers’ struggles have no borders!") As the chant filled the banquet hall, hearts swelled with pride. Workers and youth, citizen and immigrant, especially the wonderful BP oil refinery workers swept up in a racist immigration raid last December, celebrated the unity we have found in fighting back. After a PLP member delivered her message of solidarity, salsa music filled the air.

On only a week’s notice, a small grassroots community center organized a fundraiser to help the BP workers meet their daily needs. They had worked for a contractor cleaning the giant BP refinery in East Chicago, Indiana, when they were arrested last December. At a meeting to discuss "parking in the lot," doors were locked and ICE agents swarmed in, arresting 11 women and four men. Since then, they’ve been fighting courts, cops and crooks.

One crook, their priest, held a fundraiser that collected over $14,500, reflecting the support the workers’ enjoy. But most of the money has gone to a politically-connected lawyer the priest hired to represent only a few workers. This lawyer doesn’t speak Spanish and comunicates only through the priest.

Most workers are seeking their own legal representation with community center help, but are being denied funds for attorney fees. Those who found other attorneys see their cases moving much more quickly than those going with the priest’s lawyer, leading many to suspect they’re dragging the cases out to drain more money from the funds raised for the workers and their families.

Workers are outraged over their trust being abused. Those families the fund was created to help continue to struggle to pay legal fees. Because the BP workers, many single moms, are unable to work, rent, utilities and grocery bills are mounting, causing tremendous stress. The community center has taken women to food pantries and assisted them in finding discounted or free legal aid, but that has done little to ease the incredible economic burden.

PLP members donated time and money to make this event possible. But the largest contribution was our revolutionary communist politics and our message of internationalism and multi-racial, working-class solidarity, delivered by our comrade’s talk and evidenced by our example. Three tables of comrades and friends of all colors, immigrant and citizen, were among the first to arrive, took tickets at the door and picked up garbage before leaving.

A vigil has been organized for the 9th of every month, to show support for the BP workers. While it is difficult to win many away from being under their priest’s manipulative thumb, we’re sharpening the contradiction. Our dedication stands in contrast to this opportunist priest.

Through disciplined work, spreading CHALLENGE and patiently building strong ties, we must help the BP workers day-to-day, and remind them capitalism will never solve their problems, a system in crisis and headed to fascist terror and wider wars. Only communist revolution can defeat the bosses who profit from our misery.

We steel ourselves for the long haul, but fighting for a communist world, with no borders and based on equality, is the solution. Out of this struggle we can win BP workers and others to march on May Day under the red flag of PLP! ?

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PASADENA, CA, February 27 — Hundreds of students from fourteen community colleges rallied to fight the budget cuts that are devastating their campuses. College administrators tried to divert their anger into praise for the state legislature, but PL members and friends helped to organize chanting that disrupted the official event and led to a short breakaway rally.

"I thought we changed the vibe overall," commented a student. "Our group felt good leaving there. I had so many comments of empowerment, courage, and fight unlike anything I have ever seen before."

A rift between students and administrators broke out before the rally when an administrator scolded students from Rio Hondo College for carrying signs that read "WTF: Where’s the funding?" A student challenged her and a brief confrontation ensued. Ironically this same administrator later praised the emcee, a foul-mouthed comedian, as "the perfect representation of the community college mission."

The emcee declared, "this is a thank-you rally, not a protest rally." This was news to the hundreds of students that came out and are battling with class cancellations, disappearing tutors, overcrowded classrooms etc, as a result of the latest round of budget cuts. "What are we supposed to be thankful for?" one student asked angrily.

The rally went from bad to worse when the emcee launched into a half-hour "comedy" routine. Like many stand-up comics, his act was an unfunny mix of racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism. Many students were disgusted. "We didn’t come here to be entertained," one said, "they just brought us here to use us."

One delegation of students met briefly and then started chanting: "They say cutback, we say fight back!" The comedian responded by insulting the group of mostly black students. They chanted louder disrupting his act. He asked the audience to applaud if they wanted him to continue. Some did, but most didn’t. Shaken, he quickly ended his routine and a brass band started to play, signaling the official end of the rally. Then the entire delegations from three colleges — almost fifty students — moved to the sidewalk and started their own rally!

While most students bought into the rally theme that community colleges are "the key to the California economy" and that a college education was their key to the future, many took PL leaflets, CHALLENGE and talked with Party members about the nature of the capitalist crisis. Our leaflet attacked these illusions, stating, "Students need to ally with industrial workers and soldiers who are the key to bringing down this capitalist system..." We also explained, "the alternative is communism a classless society where workers hold power."

Earlier discussions about the economic crisis, and a video showing mass communist-led protests in Detroit during the Great Depression, helped to prepare students politically for the rally. By ones and twos, more are reading and distributing CHALLENGE, and thinking seriously about joining our Party. The struggle against cutbacks will continue on our campuses and on buses to Sacramento and open more doors as we build for more class struggle leading up to May Day 2009 and the Industrial Summer Projects in Seattle and LA. ?

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OAXACA, MEXICO, Feb. 21- 22 — The 3rd Congress of APPO (Popular Assembly for the People of Oaxaca), met here with over 700 delegates — teachers, farm workers, indigenous communities, workers, students and others — on a reform agenda: popular democracy, against privatization, freedom for political prisoners and the firing of Governor Ulises Ruiz, among others.

During the two days, a few dozen members and friends of PLP distributed 1,000 CHALLENGES (asking for voluntary donations) and 300 leaflets among the participants and our friends in Oaxaca. A comrade who was active inside the Congress brought 100 CHALLENGES to the participants.

It was impressive to see how many people sat reading our revolutionary newspaper, especially the article that specifically exposed the APPO leaders’ reformist, opportunist line while also calling on the masses to join us in the fight for a real communist revolution. We expected to be attacked verbally since the article above sharply criticized opportunists in APPO for trying to use the movement to obtain elective office. But, on the contrary, people read the article and leaflet with great interest. And then the majority of the Congress decided that all those who want to belong to APPO must renounce participating with the capitalist politicians, and that APPO leaders can’t use their position for electoral careers. We believe that was partially due to our Party’s position, showing that our presence had a big effect, even though we’re not the only group in APPO against the bosses’ elections. We were very inspired by this and our other activities there.

In the afternoon, PLP had its own communist school with 28 people attending. We discussed the international situation, the CHALLENGE article about the militarization of Mexico and the PLP document on Democratic Centralism.

The discussion was comradely but sharp, mainly on democratic centralism, which was used to discuss the best way to present the Party, communist ideas and our hatred of the rotten capitalist system during the May Day marches. Some thought it was important to consider the fascist militarization and its relation to the Party’s long-term life and development. Others thought about the moral need and anger to show that the Party, its red flags and communist ideas are alive and well.

One comrade said, "We have to vote" on this issue, but the majority disagreed, saying we must use democratic centralism and more discussion to come to an agreement that benefits the whole Party and the international working class. The responsibility lies with the collective, not with one person.

Part of the event included visiting an organic products co-op. One of the partners explained that previously it had been a big ranch, terribly super-exploiting the farmworkers, but now they had taken it over. Some comrades explained that unfortunately, because of their high prices, these products are not accessible to people with little money. They’re for an elite market. In this area we had a friendly get-together.

This weekend was one more step in the development of the political understanding of each Party activist, in developing personal relations where the essence of our lives, the fight for communism, unites us struggle by struggle, reaffirming that our road is communist revolution and our life is one of struggle.??

50,000 Rally in NYC: Cut the Bosses, Not the Budget

NEW YORK CITY, March 5 — "Students and Labor: Shut the City Down" chanted hundreds of City University of NY students and teachers blocking traffic as they marched into a City Hall rally of over 50,000 workers and students demonstrating against multi-billionaire Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts. The rally included members of the United Federation of Teachers, the Hotel Workers Union, 1199-SEIU and several other major unions. The cuts fall particularly hard on black and Latino workers who, because of racism, suffer double rates of unemployment and whose communities are especially hard hit by the cuts in services.

The usual suspects of union misleaders and politicians dominated the speakers platform, including Congressman Anthony Weiner who’s running for mayor declaring that "too much" is being paid to city workers.

PL high school teachers and students had planned to rally at one location and then march into the demonstration chanting and holding a banner. Throughout the day they urged their co-workers and friends to join their contingent. They arrived at the rally holding their banner on a metal fencing, and then formed a picket line within the rally while chanting on bullhorns, "Make the bosses take the losses," calling on all workers to strike against the budget cuts. Workers joined our chants, raising their fists and taking CHALLENGES and leaflets. Many of the students felt it was a positive experience, militantly expressing communist ideas and helping the Party’s growth.

Hundreds of CUNY students from Hunter College, joined by a number of professors and staff, including PL’ers, had walked out of their classes to protest tuition hikes, layoffs and the budget cuts. They were chanting, "They say cut back, we say FIGHT BACK!" and "money for schools, not for war!" They then joined a rally of another several hundred college students from CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College condemning the budget cuts and marched to the larger rally at City Hall.

The proposed 600-dollar per year tuition hike will push thousands of CUNY’s mostly black, Latino and international students out of the university. Speakers angrily described how there already aren’t enough resources to meet Hunter College student needs; most are already stretched thin by working and attending school. Several condemned the bank bailouts and tied the current struggle to the history of CUNY students’ fight for free tuition, against racism, layoffs and imperialist war.

One hospital worker led a contingent of 70 from his workplace on the very day that two hospitals shut their doors for good in Queens. Many workers wanted to participate and take action but the union mis-leaderships limit them to supporting liberal Democratic Party politicians, refusing to organize strikes against the cuts.

The ruling class is pushing workers to the wall to take the losses from the bosses’ worldwide economic meltdown. The hundreds of billions Obama’s plan is siphoning off to the banks and spending on expanding the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is coming out of workers’ hides. This is all testimony to the failure of capitalism to provide for workers’ needs and intensifying their oppression. It opens the door to win millions to communist revolution as the only solution to the hell created by the profit system, with its bosses, bankers, racism and imperialist war.

Union Leaders Have No Real Answer to 30,000 Layoffs

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, March 6 — Workers from several public-worker unions picketed La Fortaleza, Governor Luis Fortuño’s building, protesting his March 3 announcement threatening possibly 30,000 layoffs among public workers here. The new governor claims this is the only way to deal with the island’s enormous budget deficit. This is another example of the bosses and their politicians trying to make workers pay for capitalism’s crisis.

Unfortunately, the union leaders here have themselves helped the bosses. In exchange for some crumbs, they agreed to accept Law 45 which basically bans public-worker strikes. During last year’s militant mass teachers’ strike, unions like those here that are part of the SEIU-Change to Win federation sided with then governor Acevedo Vila against the teachers. (Dennis Rivera, a former pro-independence activist here and now a big-time hack in SEIU was behind this). So this history of sellouts has left workers with still another obstacle in fighting the latest wave of attacks — one reason why today’s protest was smaller than expected.

But nothing lasts forever. Workers are beginning to realize that playing nice with the bosses doesn’t pay. Workers need to build a revolutionary communist leadership to learn that a system that cannot provide jobs and services for workers must be destroyed. ?

AFL-CIO Hacks Deflate Angry Workers

CHICAGO, February 17 — It was hard not to be moved when you first entered the Plumbers Union Hall at the rally to pass the Labor Free Choice Act (union certification based on a majority of signed union cards, not on a vote). Thousands of workers stood shoulder to shoulder wearing T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts and carrying signs reading, "Strength in Unity," and "UNITE for Power." Men and women, young and old of all colors, speaking all languages, greeted friends and introduced themselves to strangers.

The energy and enthusiasm was electric. It was easy to see how unions seduce workers. On one level, parts of their message is somewhat similar to ours. But as the rally proceeded, it became clear that the similarities are barely skin deep.

The AFL-CIO fat cats got the crowd "in the mood" with a black youth gospel choir singing "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful." Every time a misleader said it was "time for action," and "the City runs on our backs," workers cheered and exchanged high fives.

But enthusiasm waned as speaker after speaker praised Barack Obama and told the workers to call their Congresspeople and tell them to vote for the Free Choice Act. Soon, the room emptied; the remaining speakers spoke to less than half the original crowd. Momentarily, teachers and machinists, auto, transit, healthcare and buildings trades workers and more were united in one place, ready for action, waiting for direction on how to express their power. It seemed almost everyone but the "leadership" felt the potential in that room, and that "calling your Congressperson" fell way short. The very life of the city sat within those walls.

One was both inspired and outraged, and couldn’t help but wonder what a difference if our message linking capitalist crisis and imperialist war, fighting racist terror and cutbacks, and organizing a general strike and moving on the banks and centers of power for communist revolution were blaring from the stage. I could imagine the cheers becoming a roar as workers greeted the truth finally ringing from the stage.

AFL-CIO President Sweeney told everyone to "call and vote." I told a worker beside me, "imagine if he had said, ‘STRIKE!’" (Which, of course, he never would.) The worker looked around the room, smiled and said, "We’d run the city." Exactly!

As the economy spirals into a deeper crisis, workers are growing increasingly weary and frustrated with a system that bails out billionaire bankers and closes factories and health clinics. Some already realize Obama is not the "change" we need.

Capitalism will do what it will; fall into crisis, reinvent itself, and fall into crisis again. We must resolve more firmly than ever to take advantage of every opportunity to bring our revolutionary communist politics to the masses, organize workers and develop new communist organizers for PLP.

The 75 CHALLENGES distributed at the rally was good, but only a drop in the bucket. Without new soldiers in this battle, the bosses will dig themselves out of this mess by burying the workers even deeper into oppressive pits. Now is the time to act. We’ve been exploited long enough. The world runs on our backs. It’s time workers ran the world. Win workers to the only solution — communist revolution!??

a name="Katrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery"></a>"atrina Sequel: Court O.K.’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Slavery

Last month, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the Decatur Hotel chain owed not one penny to 300 immigrant workers from Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic who each paid contractors $3,000 to $5,000 for the "privilege" of coming to the New Orleans to be super-exploited. In one more sign of growing fascism in the legal system, the Court OK’d these slave labor conditions on the grounds that the workers couldn’t prove that Decatur "required" or "approved" of these payments.

These workers were recruited to come to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city in August 2005. New Orleans’ hotel bosses like Decatur saw a big chance to lower the already rock-bottom wages of the mostly black hotel workforce there. Conniving with other local bosses, recruiters promised the workers 60-80 hours work per week, time-and-a-half for overtime, free food and rooms in hotels with swimming pools.

The recruiters lied through their teeth! The hotel bosses jammed four workers into each room, charging $50 per week per worker, plus $8 per meal. The workers only got 24-40 hours per week at $6.39 per hour. Of course, as "guest workers," termination or leaving the job could result in immediate deportation. And their every move was under the watchful eye of the hotel bosses.

Despite this racist and fascist set-up, these workers organized against their slave-like working conditions. Unfortunately, the leadership of this struggle fell into the hands of opportunists, including Saket Soni, now head of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Soni and his fake-leftist friends convinced the workers that they should mainly rely on the bosses’ courts to win this battle. He and others viciously attacked PLP members when we tried to expose the workers to a real communist view of how to fight these bosses’ attacks with class struggle.

Immigration laws, like all bosses’ laws, are designed to insure that U.S. employers reap maximum profits from the labor of the working class. The liberal Southern Poverty Law Center exposed this collaboration of the government with the bosses in its report "Close to Slavery." In order to legally hire guest workers, it was necessary to show that attempts to hire local residents failed. U.S. citizen workers would most likely have told Decatur where to stick their $6.39 per hour. However, Decatur’s obviously false statement that they had tried to recruit workers from among "hurricane evacuees" was accepted by the U.S. Department of Labor, no questions asked.

This gave Decatur the green light to go ahead with its plans. They let the contractors handle the dirty work. This separation allowed them to claim that they "didn’t know anything" about the recruiters’ extortion. This gave the courts all they needed to legalize this workers’ slavery.

Communists will never promote confidence in this bosses’ system of "justice." Instead, we call for class warfare against the whole capitalist system and its attacks on workers. We encourage anti-racism and internationalism to win citizen workers to support the struggles of their immigrant brothers and sisters. Most importantly, we organize for a communist revolution. In a communist world, the bosses’ national borders would be abolished, and none of our working-class brothers and sisters would endure slave-labor conditions in order to survive. ?

Germany: Patriots, Socialists, Union Fakers, Neo-Nazis Thwart Workers

DRESDEN, GERMANY, February 26 — The capitalist economic crisis has reached here, hitting the auto industry particularly hard. Today, GM workers demonstrated in Germany, Sweden and Russia against GM’s mass layoffs worldwide. GM is seeking 3.3 billion Euros (over $4 billion) from European rulers and has offered a restructuring plan that will close three assembly plants and cut production capacity by 30%. With the global financial crisis deepening, GM cannot get any bank loans, making government bailouts the only alternative to a shutdown that would put roughly 300,000 European workers on the street.

The major weakness holding autoworkers back is their union leaders’ patriotism and nationalism. In the U.S. the UAW pushes, "Buy American." In Germany the IG Metall union hacks push the old fascist line of "German jobs for German workers." It’s no wonder that this "Day of Action" was smaller and less militant than past ones.

Big troubled companies like Opel or Nokia, which closed its Bochum factory, line up with politicians to promise "patriotic" workers they will rebuild German industry "together." They used socialists like Thomas Jurk to calm angry workers in Saxony when Quimonda, Dresden’s biggest firm, closed.

Jurk’s friends who run the huge IG-Metall trade union join him in this Big Lie. But the working class here can punch back by discarding these misleaders’ nationalist ideas and the racism that feeds on patriotism.

Workers in Germany, the world’s leading export economy by value, are starting to feel the scourge of the crisis. The government, a coalition between the bosses’ two "alternating" parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, already approved a plan to rescue the most important banks, like Germany’s second-biggest, Commerzbank.

But every sector is reporting big losses: auto, shipbuilding, iron and steel, other manufacturing, and the media. The bosses are using plant closings, wage-cuts, layoffs unemployment and longer working hours to "solve" the crisis by directly attacking the working class. But this is not just "a German problem."

In early February, 2,800 workers demonstrated against the Quimonda shutdown, Dresden’s largest employer, with 4,600 workers, amid an already economically struggling Saxony region. Saxony’s Socialist economic minister Thomas Jurk, along with the IG-Metall union hacks, tried to calm the protesters’ anger with typical ruling-class rhetoric: "we will make new investments and secure new jobs in the city."

But Quimonda has another plant in Vila do Conde, Portugal, where it notified 1,800 workers that it’s shutting down. Such circumstances demand not economic patriotism but a worldwide class struggle of internationalist workers allied across borders, from Portugal to Saxony.

However, Germany’s government and its trade union lackeys here are spreading national "optimism" in order to divide the working class and hold back militancy. Instead, workers here and everywhere need to turn this current financial crisis into an overall political crisis for capitalism. For that they need the ideas and organizing power of an international revolutionary communist party like PLP.

On February 14, 6,000 neo-Nazis gathered here, trying to divert workers’ anger into super-patriotism and racism against immigrant workers. They were marking the 64th anniversary of the terrible World War II U.K. /U.S firebombing of Dresden.

A counter-rally of 10,000 was soon organized behind the slogan "No pasarán" ("They shall not pass") used by anti-fascist fighters to stop Franco’s troops and his German allies from entering Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The anti-fascist demonstrators sought to prevent the new Nazis from marching through Dresden. But the cops protected the Nazis’ march, clearing away blockades and clashing brutally with the anti-fascists.

Once again an exhibition of truly ruling-class politics: protecting Nazis while attacking an alliance of workers and students. As the socialists and fascists push their lies, the situation in Dresden gets worse. Now anti-fascist militancy against these racist super-patriots needs to be turned on the big capitalists who sponsor and protect them, using them as tools to divide and hold workers back. ?

Obama-Bosses-UAW Gang-up Mugs Ford Workers

DETROIT, MI, March 9 — The new concessions the UAW granted to Ford are much more than the loss of benefits, break-time and retiree health care. They reflect that a new stage of fascism is needed to help the bosses survive 2009 and the global financial crisis that has brought the U.S. auto industry to a halt and threatened the survival of GM and Chrysler. Negotiators had to figure out how to meet targets imposed by Obama’s auto oversight committee and the finance capitalists that stand behind them. We should expect more of this where the state and bosses impose fascist conditions on workers.

But, if we aggressively bring communist leadership workers will turn to revolutionary politics to counter these attacks.

We can also expect more auto workers to turn towards revolutionary communist leadership if we more aggressively offer it. At one Ford UAW local hall, more than 150 CHALLENGES were distributed along with hundreds of PLP fliers urging workers to reject the concessions and march on May Day until panicked local thugs stopped our comrades from reaching the workers.

Ford lost a record $14.6 billion in 2008 and conditions have only worsened. Ford U.S. sales dropped almost 50% in February. The new agreement eliminates a holiday, cuts break-time and suspends cost-of-living increases and performance bonuses, offers more buyouts and allows Ford to fund the retiree healthcare trust fund with 50% worthless stock instead of cash.

Pro-Boss Union ‘Leaders’ Have Saved Nothing And No One

These new concessions are "modifications" of the 2007 agreement that cut wages and benefits in half for new hires and gave away more than 100,000 jobs, before the current crash. Since the 1979 Chrysler bailout, the UAW leadership lost two-thirds of our members and the majority of the auto industry. They’ve saved nothing and no one. Now we’re in a worldwide crisis of capitalism, shackled by a generation of pro-capitalist union leaders who refuse to fight back and who haven’t sacrificed a dime.

We’re facing a new Depression, with tens of millions jobless and losing their homes. In Detroit, Buffalo and Milwaukee, more than 50% of black males, 16-64, are unemployed, not to mention Flint, Chicago’s West Side, Gary and Hammond. Capitalism’s racist nature is evident as every measure of poverty, unemployment, and police terror hits black and Latino workers first and hardest. The bosses, the union and the Obama administration have ganged up to force us to pay for their crisis.

Ultimately, the bosses "solve" their global crises with fascist terror and more war. That’s where this new sellout is leading. The war in Iraq is spreading to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with no end in sight.

We need to build a revolutionary communist movement, led by industrial workers, that can eventually lead the working class to power. We need to follow the example of the Republic Windows workers who sat down in their factory last December; build unemployment committees in our local unions to unite the employed and unemployed and fight evictions, hunger and for jobs. Most of all, we need to vote with our feet and bring a contingent of Ford workers to march on May Day! ?

Letters

Hero of Salvador War Is Reborn in PLP

During the 1970s, a group of us peasants, workers and students worked in the eastern part of El Salvador, where nobody charged for their work. We were labeled communists, even by the parish priest. I built homes without being paid a single penny, but my family never lacked food. The others in the group supplied me. We shared everything with the conviction to do what is correct. We practiced working-class solidarity. We worked in communities collectively. This influenced the rest of our lives, preparing us for the armed struggle, unfortunately sabotaged by our organization’s mis-leadership.

The National Guard kidnapped me on August 2, 1977. I was building a home when they blindfolded me and took me with two other friends to the military barracks, where they began torturing us, tying our feet and hands to an iron post.

They later turned us over to the National Police in San Salvador where the horrible torture continued, to force us to confess we were communists. They put 220-volt electric shocks through me; my ears ruptured in blood. I fainted and dreamt that my mother, who had died three years before, visited me and dabbed camphor oil on my head because I was in deep pain. The moment she did this I felt no pain. I spent 11 days in pure torture at the police station. I had nothing to eat or drink, only blows and psychological torture.

On the 11th day I was transferred to the Santa Tecla prison. On my third day there I couldn’t eat — my jaws were stiff, I felt no stomach. There were many interrogations. They told me if I took responsibility for why I was there they would give me 500 "colones" (money) and free me. They told me not to associate with communists, saying there would never be communism in El Salvador because the army would combat it. They said I could not be a communist because they were atheists and I was Catholic (as they were). I asked what kind of Catholics are in the assassins’ army who kill everyone indiscriminately.

I was freed on August 29 because the communities and friends pressured the government of Colonel Molina. At that time partners in struggle seized 10 transmitters from the national radio in Morazán, despite being well-guarded by the army. They confronted soldiers in the Gotera barracks, but ultimately our forces captured it and issued a communiqué demanding my liberation.

All this pressure led to my release, but I was let out on the street like an animal out of a cage. Not knowing the area I hailed a taxi and told the driver what had happened, that I had no money. He drove me to the central market in San Salvador where my cousin worked. Both he and my cousin were glad to have helped me and happy I was alive, because most political prisoners were disappeared or murdered.

My cousin took me to her home to recuperate. The next day there was a workers’ protest in San Salvador and she wanted me to stay home. But I went to San Miguel and found a friend who took me by bus to the Torola river. But before arriving at a bridge where the National Guard — the same ones who had imprisoned me — had been carrying out a big inspection, I got off.

For years I organized many workers who later became commanders and combatants on different FMLN war fronts. Today, much later, we have re-connected in the ranks of Progressive Labor Party. CHALLENGE/DESAFIO has been our greatest discovery of true communist philosophy. I’m being reborn in working-class politics, overcoming my disillusionment in believing there was no other party for the proletariat. But now that I’ve found PLP I feel I’m starting anew, with the memory of my four children fallen in combat.

Communist Comrade from El Salvador

a name="Airport Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down"></">Ai"port Workers Force Union ‘Leaders’ to Back Down

At an airport where PL is organizing, workers have taken some political leadership in a reform struggle against the union mis-leadership around bogus health insurance. The company has been blatantly racist in giving the mostly immigrant workers an extremely bad medical insurance plan which has cost workers thousands of dollars.

The SEIU mis-leadership has been dragging its behind in helping resolve this issue. They have mostly been undermining the workers’ efforts to fight back because the union does not want to cause problems for the racist bosses since contract negotiations start at the end of the year.

The union went so far as to try to prevent the re-election of an anti-racist shop steward because of previous confrontations with union misleaders around anti-immigrant racism at the airport. They failed. He was reelected by the workers! The union mis-leadership stopped visiting our shift to avoid questions from workers. In one case a misleader hung up on a worker asking about insurance. The airport workers had enough!

The PL’er got together with some coworkers who all read CHALLENGE and came up with a collective plan to force the SEIU misleaders back to the airport. The B.S. leadership was sent an open letter from the workers detailing the complaints, especially about their union rep. They were given a deadline to respond to complaints, and workers threatened to go over their heads to the national SEIU in Chicago if there was no reply. It worked! A meeting was set up and the union official was forced to talk about medical insurance. This is by no means over.

An African American worker told the shop steward, "The threat made in the letter forced them to come to the airport!" There were workers from the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia who either helped proofread, and distribute the open letter or gave statements regarding the medical insurance to the union. This shows the absolute necessity of workers’ anti-racist collective action against the bosses’ racist actions.

There were many political discussions with airport workers regarding this action. Workers took a step in learning why reforms under capitalism are limited and that eventually workers need communist revolution to solve our problems. The class struggle goes on and workers, soldiers, and students need PLP for communist revolution.

Airport Red

Castro Brothers Continue Perestroika

The latest shifts among top Cuban government officials show that Cuban "Perestroika" (capitalist reform) continues. Capitalism needs these changes to thrive and to show European, Chinese and even U.S. imperialists that some "changes" are being made in Cuba.

From the sidelines, Fidel himself pushes these reforms. He admitted he was consulted about the removal of Felipe Pérez Roque as Foreign Minister and Vice-president Carlos Lage. But in reality it appears that Fidel and Raul are not fighting each other but rather both are promoting those who agree more with their scheme, while eliminating those who might oppose their economic reform plans. Neither represent any real left alternative. In February 2008, Raúl announced these reforms, which just deepen the Cuban Perestroika.

The official report from the Cuban "Communist" Party says these latest changes in leadership followed deep discussion inside the Political Bureau of the Cuban ruling Party. Then Fidel in his "reflections" writings in the Cuban press accused those demoted, his former protégées, of being "ambitious" and that "the enemy outside of Cuba had illusions about them." Even though Fidel is not officially in power, his justifications of the power shift hide the real power struggle probably occurring inside the Cuban "red" bourgeois bureaucracy.

The coming economic and political measures will show even more clearly the kind of capitalist road Cuba will take, possibly State Capitalism as what they call socialism now existing in Cuba, or following even more the example of China’s capitalism. But these reforms are bound to fail for workers, particularly since capitalism in any form — especially in this age of international economic meltdown — has proven unable to satisfy their basic needs.

Friends in Peru

a name="Anger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker">">"nger Mounts vs. Pasadena Cops’ Murder of Black Worker

PASADENA, CA, February 19 —Leroy Barnes, a 38-year-old black worker, and father of three, was shot by Pasadena cops, killing him on the spot. The cops had pulled Barnes over for a traffic stop. At first, the cops lied about what happened. They said that Barnes shot at them but he did not shoot at all. They said he was outside the car, but he never stepped out of his car. Witnesses saw the police shoot him four times while he was inside his car, then pull him out of the car and shoot him seven more times as he lay on the street! As a crowd of angry people gathered, the racist cops shot into the air, to intimidate people protesting the murder. Even so, some people threw rocks at the cops. Many people in the neighborhood, as well as friends and family, are furious at the racist killer kkkops.

PLP members have taken leaflets and CHALLENGES to the neighborhood where Leroy Barnes was killed, to a nearby shopping center, and to area schools. Many people were glad to have the Party there. Recently an Oakland transit cop murdered Oscar Grant, also a black man and a father. Since this was caught on tape, the racist killer is being tried for murder. In the killing of Leroy Barnes, even the police tape is not being released!

Racist police terror, and anti-immigrant terror, are on the rise as official unemployment in California is over 10% (it’s about double that if you count people in jail and people who have stopped looking for work). Obama and the capitalist system’s answer to this crisis is to put even more racist cops on the street to terrorize workers, especially black and Latino workers, because the bosses fear rebellion.

They’re right to be afraid! A system that can’t provide decent jobs but only racist terror should be destroyed! PLP invites angry workers and youth to protest this killing, come to our May Day Dinner and march with the PLP contingent on May First, International Workers’ Day, against racist terror, unemployment, imperialist war, and for communist revolution.

Bangladesh Army Mutiny, Sri Lanka Civil War Tied to Oil Dogfight

Nothing is safe in the oil pipeline dogfight among the world’s imperialists and Indian-Pakistani rulers. The terrorist attack against the Sri Lanka national cricket team is one example. The rulers of India and Pakistan blame each other’s intelligence services for the attack. The Sri Lanka team replaced the Indian national team which pulled out after the recent Mumbai terrorist attack blamed on the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service).

Just a few days before this attack, a mass mutiny by Bangladesh’s border guard (the BRD) killed 74 army officers, almost the BRD’s entire top brass. Years of corruption by their officers — sent from the regular army — frustrated the soldiers, who were mistreated and starved while making a miserable $70/month and seeing the officers selling their rations on the open market.

The mutiny began in BRD headquarters in Dhaka, the country’s capital. Initially the military brass tried to storm the mutineers, but then the rebellion spread nation-wide, forcing the brass to negotiate with the rebels and even agree to their demands. After the rebellion ended, the army and the government began the arrest and hunting of over 1,000 rebel soldiers.

The BRD dates back to the 18th century when the British colonialists established the "Ramgarh Local Battalion." In 1971, East Pakistan, helped by India, went to war and broke with Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh. The BRD was used to patrol over 3,000 miles of border with India and Burma (Myanmar). The BRD, like the rest of South Asia’s armies, retained all the class divisions of the old British colonial armies. Officers came from the ruling class while rank-and-file soldiers came from the working class and poor peasantry.

Unfortunately, in the absence of any real communist leadership, when these soldiers turned their guns against their officers, they were open to being misled by pro-Pakistani Islamists. The collapse of the old world communist movement reflected itself in the opportunism of the pro-Soviet and Maoist groups in Bangladesh — which supported "progressive-lesser evil" bosses and disarmed workers and their allies politically. This created illusions about "reforming" capitalism and prevented a fight for workers’ power.

Early in January, after several years of military rule, a civilian government — considered to be pro-India — took power in Bangladesh. The mutiny was reportedly supported by forces within and outside the military who supported the country’s recent "Talibanization." The new army chief, appointed by the civilian government, is considered "too secular" and pro-India and was clamping down on fundamentalists inside the military which are influenced by Pakistan and even by China.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan Sunday Times reported (3/1) that a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force might be sent to northern Sri Lanka under the guise of evacuating refugees from the civil war in that island nation. Thus, the U.S. could help the Sri Lankan army in its bloody "mop-up" operations against the nationalist Tamil guerrillas holed up in the island’s northern tip and fighting the government. U.S. rulers consider the Tamils terrorists.

However, it’s not the Tamil guerrillas that really worry the U.S. and India, but rather it’s China’s growing economic and military presence in Sri Lanka. China has supplied Sri Lanka with modern military hardware, including fighter planes, and is helping build a modern port at Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka, near one of the world’s most important oil-supply sea lanes.

All these bloody conflicts occur in a capitalist world wrecked by an economic tsunami. The Indian economy, supposedly an example of what free-market globalization could achieve, is now reeling from this crisis. Bangladesh is already one of the world’s poorest countries and has lost a lot of markets for its exports of textiles.

Workers and their allies in all of South Asia must break with all these bosses, their imperialist backers and all the Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists, and build a revolutionary communist leadership as the only way out of this hell.??

a name="Working Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women">">"orking Class Must Unite vs. Capitalism’s Special oppression of Women

March 8 marked International Women’s Day, inspired by the 1908 New York City march of 15,000 women demanding better pay and shorter hours. Throughout the history of class struggle every major movement that made progress for the oppressed class has had women as leaders. From the fight against slavery, to the Paris Commune and revolutions in Russia and China, from the mass strikes of 1848 in Europe to the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960’s women workers around the world have joined with men in the struggle against capitalist oppression.

Today these battles continue. In India, Hindu women and men fought back against brutal attacks against women in cafes by groups trying to build a society where women are kept in their homes. In New York, the Stella D’oro strike has united men and women workers on the picket lines in the cold of winter. They are fighting back against the wage and benefit cuts that are being forced on them by their factory’s owners. These militant struggles are an important inspiration for all of us.

With a black woman as First Lady, more female role models to idolize than ever and a new law that seems to help women get equal pay, it appears the only limit to women advancing is imagination. But the boss-worker relationship is the fundamental one under capitalism — bosses own and control their workers and workers fight to get as much they can from their bosses. If we peel back the appearance of upward mobility, women are suffering more than ever and no amount of media spin will cover up the horrible conditions all workers must deal with.

Sexism and Capitalism go Hand in Hand

According to the International Labor Organization, 22 million women around the world are expected to lose their jobs in 2009 as the bosses shift the burden of their financial crisis and wars onto the backs of the working class. The ruling class uses the special oppression of women the same as they use racism and nationalism – to oppress the entire working class. Besides lowering wages for all workers by increasing competition, sexism politically weakens the working class by dividing women and men on the job, in our homes, and during the class struggle. Black and Latino, women suffer triple exploitation from racism, as women, and as workers.

PLP fights sexism by taking on attacks against women, developing women leaders of our movement and spreading communist consciousness. The struggle against sexist ideas cannot be separated from the struggle against this system that is breeding it.

Sexism increases oppression through economic, cultural and social forces. Women make less, are treated worse on a political level and have less access to social mobility than their male counterparts. Early class oppression was seen as long ago as ancient, pre-capitalist, slave society, where women were captured and enslaved, then forced to produce more slaves. Today, with sexism as a tool, billions of dollars in profit are funneled into the coffers of today’s capitalists.

Sexism is not just the attitude of chauvinism from a couple of right-wing men and women on a personal level or the result of a brutal regime like the Taliban. It is a rampant aspect of the capitalist world. In England the unemployment rate for women is at 33%. In the U.S., where women are consistently paid less than men, the best "solution" Obama could come up with for women’s rights is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which extends the statute of limitations, to a mere 180 days, for a woman to sue if she is being paid lower wages on the job. This law is just a stop-gap to placate workers into thinking Obama is doing his best, since he’s got so much on his plate waging profit war in Afghanistan and asking for more bailouts for the ruling class.

Sexist Culture Fuels Attacks

As long as this system exists, where economic exploitation makes women a commodity, women are going to be abused and disrespected in big and small ways. The abuse inflicted by teen icon Chris Brown on singer Rihanna was another revolting example of the kinds of sexist beatings that happen to millions of working class women regularly but are never publicized.

The beauty, fashion and music industries that portray women as property to be owned and displayed drive this sexist culture, which reaps billions in profits. Women and men workers not only suffer living with this culture, but end up giving back hard fought for wages trying to chase the bosses ideal of beauty by paying for make-up, "fashionable" clothes, and beauty treatments.

Attacks on women are on the rise around the world. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, many hundreds of young women have been murdered in the last few years. While these killings have received some publicity, in other countries woman are being murdered in even higher numbers. In Guatemala the murder rate for women is twice as high as Ciudad Juarez.

Sexism is pervasive in day-to-day discourse, within romantic relationships and friendships. Women are used as sexual objects. Female workers have to contend with unequal pay and an attitude that women are either overtly sexual beings, prim, proper ladies, or something in between – assertive as long as they "look good" doing it. This mechanical portrayal of female identity keeps capitalism alive and well by keeping the working class focused on how men and women are unequal.

All workers need to fight the inequality that is endemic to capitalism. Attacks on women keep their working class brothers in chains as well. Divisions between men and women workers help the bosses slash our wages. Sexist ideas weaken our class as men and women fight each other instead of the rulers. It inhibits the needed leadership of women workers, and inhibits men from being better fighters and stronger leaders for our class. Victory for the working class demands that we break down this division by uniting as equals in the struggle to smash the rulers system. The working class needs to smash sexism to defeat capitalism and build a communist revolution that will eliminate the oppression of all workers. ?

1971 Temple U. Strike Won Equal Pay

The power of working-class unity among women and men was demonstrated in the 1971 Temple University strike of black and white male janitors and female maids. Both men and women struck for equal pay for equal work for women workers and won. This unity also broke Nixon’s 3.2% wage freeze. An important element in this struggle was the worker-student alliance. When the college Administration attempted to use scabs to clean up the campus (which couldn’t function with all the uncollected waste strewn about), the PLP-led SDS chapter dumped all the garbage back onto the campus. After two weeks, the bosses gave in.

a name="France’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops">">"rance’s Overseas Departments Continue Wage-Price Fight, Battle Martinique Cops

POINT-A-PITRE, GUADALOUPE, March 9 — Mass protests continue in this French Overseas Department and in the neighboring island Department of Martinique even after the United Against Profiteering coalition (LKP) reached a deal winning some of their demands. The French government will provide 100 euros ($120) of the monthly wage hike for three years and the local government 50 euro for one year. But the local bosses’ group, MEDEF, has refused to sign the deal. The strikers’ original demand was a 200-Euro increase.

In Martinique, where a similar partial deal was reached, the February 5 Collective leading that strike refused to end the strikes, picketing and roadblocks because prices have not been cut (prices in both islands are much higher than in continental France).

On March 6, cops clashed with youth and workers attempting to block a bosses’ back-to-work motorcade, which drove provocatively into the capital, Fort de France. Four cops were injured as shots rang out and Molotov cocktails exploded. Ten people were arrested and the cops injured many.

A similar mass strike is developing in La Réunion, a French colonial possession in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the French labor movement has yet to express real solidarity with these struggles, showing the need for workers and students in all of France to fight the racism and nationalism of their labor mis-leaders, behind the slogan: Same enemy, same fight, workers and students of the world, unite!

RED EYE on the NEWS

Below are excerpts from mainstream newspapers that may be of use for our readers. For more, go to challengenewspaper. wordpress.com. Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times,

GW=Guardian Weekly, LAT=Los Angeles Times

Marx got no respect, but now…

NORTH STAR GROUP – Poor Karl Marx. Never got any respect. Not in the U.S.A., anyway. Seldom in the course of human events has one man been so derided, so reviled by such a great herd of ignoramuses, virtually none of whom have even the faintest notion what the object of their derision actually said, thought or stood for…. In light of current events… his insights concerning capitalism’s structural defects were spoton…. Marx wrote that in the end, capitalism’s fate would be sealed… by its internal rot…. If Marx were around, he’d be laughing his head off, but there are going to be plenty of tears to go around for [his deriders].

Old-time reds built China’s base

NYT, 3/8 – In the early 1950s, shortly after the Chinese Communist revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong set into motion one of the largest peacetime mobilizations in modern history…. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps built roads, canals, bridges and dams, turning wasteland into fields of cotton, maize and rice. They built entire cities in the desert…. A survivor of the force… recalled…. "At that time there was nothing I couldn’t bear…" she was honored at the time as a "Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought."

Sun’s recollections of Communist Party zeal, sacrifice and staggering economic transformation are among the personal narratives assembled by Xinran, a Chinese journalist now a resident of Britain, in "China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation." Many of the older Chinese Xinran meets still take a glossy view of the Communist Party.

Asbestos poisoning for a profit

NYT, 2/19 – At least 200 deaths and thousands of illnesses are known to be related to the town’s exposure to the mine….

The mine’s owner, W.R. Grace & Company… and its managers knew as far back as the 1970s that asbestos… posed a risk to their workers, but they conspired to continue releasing it into the air and to misrepresent the peril….

More than 30 years ago Dr. Teitelbaum, a retired toxicologist… was sent hundreds of chest X-rays of Libby workers and of workers at [a non-tainted] mine in South Carolina….

"At the end of the study, I wrote a letter saying that 30 percent of the miners in Libby have asbestosis, and nobody in South Carolina has asbestosis…. "They said thank you very much and did nothing with it."

For Arab public, US is terrorist

NYT, 2/26 – A battle over the term terrorist has become a proxy for the larger issues that divide Washington and the Arab public…. In Gaza… most Arabs came away certain who the real terrorists were.

"Public opinion views what happened in Gaza as a kind of terrorism…. They see Hamas and other such organizations as groups who are trying to liberate their countries…."

The case may be even more tangled with Hezbollah…. "If Obama thinks these organizations are terrorists, there will never be peace…." In this region… the invasion of Iraq is often referred to as a terrorist act.

• Obama Steps Up Afghan, Iraq Massacres
  • U.S. Bankers and Oil Barons Demand More GIs and More GI and Afghan Deaths
  • Possible All-Out Mid-East Oil War Keeps U.S. In Iraq Indefinitely
• Rockefeller Think-Tank Helps Biggest U.S. Capitalists Wield State Power
• Bosses’ Stimulus Package: Force Workers to Bail Out Bankers
  • Capitalism’s ‘Public Works:’ Make War, Kill Millions
  • Rulers Seek Fascist Unity
• Worker-Student Alliance Fights Budget Cuts at Howard U.
  • Thain’s Top 16 Outrages
• Battle D.C. Transit Layoffs, Service Cuts
• Debate Highlights Need for Class Analysis of Palestine-Israel
• Mexico’s Militarization Crucial to U.S. Rulers’ War Plans
  • Bosses’ Dogfight Over Oil Could Ignite Mexican Civil War
  • U.S. Assumes Military Control Over Canada-Mexico
  • U.S. Militarization of Mexico Under Way and More Urgent
  • Turn Imperialist War into Class War for Communism
• Homicide or Genocide?
• CORRECTION
• ‘Good Bosses’ are Deadly for Workers
• Solidarity with Guadeloupe General Strikers Spreads to Mainland France
  • Build Anti-Racist International Unity from the Caribbean to France!
• ‘Better’ Boeing Bosses Mean More Fascism On The Job
  • It’s Not Bad Management, It’s Capitalism
  • Need Communist Revolution To ‘Repeal’ Laws Of Capitalism
• Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling
• Shatter Capitalism’s Double-Edged Sword
  • Competition for Maximum Profits, Falling Rate of Profit Caused this Crisis
  • Obama Can’t Change This World
  • Revolution Is Our Answer!
• Book Review: During World War 2, Communists Led Women’s Revolutionary Fight Against Fascism
• Movie review ‘Frozen River’ — System Fails Working-Class Women
• LETTERS
  • Co-Worker’s Communist Attitude Inspires PL’er
  • Priest: No Passing Marks for Belief in Marxism
  • Postal Bosses’ Speed-up Stamping on Workers’ Jobs
  • PL Youth ‘Retreat’ Shows Big Advance
  • Forum About Armed Insurrection
• RED EYE ON THE NEWS
  • World’s workers in a stir
  • Like old times, fighting eviction
  • Obama keeps US line on Israel
  • Dems continue Bush detentions
  • It’s really a war on workers
  • Who is La Migra arresting?

Obama Steps Up Afghan, Iraq Massacres

U.S. Bankers and Oil Barons Demand More GIs and More GI and Afghan Deaths

Possible All-Out Mid-East Oil War Keeps U.S. In Iraq Indefinitely

Rockefeller Think-Tank Helps Biggest U.S. Capitalists Wield State Power

Bosses’ Stimulus Package: Force Workers to Bail Out Bankers

Capitalism’s ‘Public Works:’ Make War, Kill Millions

Rulers Seek Fascist Unity

Worker-Student Alliance Fights Budget Cuts at Howard U.

Thain’s Top 16 Outrages

Battle D.C. Transit Layoffs, Service Cuts

Debate Highlights Need for Class Analysis of Palestine-Israel

Mexico’s Militarization Crucial to U.S. Rulers’ War Plans

Bosses’ Dogfight Over Oil Could Ignite Mexican Civil War

U.S. Assumes Military Control Over Canada-Mexico

U.S. Militarization of Mexico Under Way and More Urgent

Turn Imperialist War into Class War for Communism

Homicide or Genocide?

CORRECTION

‘Good Bosses’ are Deadly for Workers

Solidarity with Guadeloupe General Strikers Spreads to Mainland France

Build Anti-Racist International Unity from the Caribbean to France!

‘Better’ Boeing Bosses Mean More Fascism On The Job

It’s Not Bad Management, It’s Capitalism

Need Communist Revolution To ‘Repeal’ Laws Of Capitalism

Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling

Shatter Capitalism’s Double-Edged Sword

Competition for Maximum Profits, Falling Rate of Profit Caused this Crisis

Obama Can’t Change This World

Revolution Is Our Answer!

Book Review:
During World War 2, Communists Led Women’s Revolutionary Fight Against Fascism

Movie review
‘Frozen River’ — System Fails Working-Class Women

LETTERS

Co-Worker’s Communist Attitude Inspires PL’er

Priest: No Passing Marks for Belief in Marxism

Postal Bosses’ Speed-up Stamping on Workers’ Jobs

PL Youth ‘Retreat’ Shows Big Advance

Forum About Armed Insurrection

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

World’s workers in a stir

Like old times, fighting eviction

Obama keeps US line on Israel

Dems continue Bush detentions

It’s really a war on workers

Who is La Migra arresting?

a href="#Bosses’ Stimulus Plan: $4 Billion for More Racist Cops">"osses’ Stimulus Plan: $4 Billion for More Racist Cops

White House Militarization Intensifies, Despite Clumsy Cover-Up

a href="#Rebellion, Not Non-Violence, Is Black Workers’ Real History">"ebellion, Not Non-Violence, Is Black Workers’ Real History

• Black Workers’ Armed Struggle
• Black Politicians Have Never Served the Working Class

a href="#500 Marchers Back Stella D’Oro Strikers">"00 Marchers Back Stella D’Oro Strikers

a href="#Strike Diary: ‘Peaceman’ and ‘Hopeman’ — Gaza and Stella D’Oro">Strike Dia"y: ‘Peaceman’ and ‘Hopeman’ — Gaza and Stella D’Oro

• Budget Cuts, Tax Hikes:Racist, Anti-Worker
• Capitalism is the Problem,Communism is the Solution

$20 Billion Mayor Laying Off 23,000 NYC Workers

Gary Protestors Keep Heat On Racist Killer Kop

General Strike Jolts France:

Teachers Shut Universities

Guadeloupe General Strike Spreads to Martinique

a href="#Chavez’s Cops Attack Strikers, Kill 2 Auto Workers">"havez’s Cops Attack Strikers, Kill 2 Auto Workers

In Memoriam: Joseph Furr

LETTERS

From Oakland to Athens: Solidarity vs. Kop Killers

a href="#‘Get out in front’ on Politics Behind Capitalist Crisis">‘G"t out in front’ on Politics Behind Capitalist Crisis

Sunday School Teaches Class Solidarity

a href="#Arab-Jewish Workers’ Unity - Antidote to Nationalist Poison">"rab-Jewish Workers’ Unity Antidote to Nationalist Poison

Lauds PLP at Boeing, Poses Sit-Down Strike Strategy

Win Oaxaca APPO Congress Rank & File to Red Ideas

REDEYE

• Migra lied on immigrant raids
• Clinton workfare strangles poor
• Army suicides at 30-year high
• Workers see capitalist betrayal

Afghanistan Center of Imperialist Dogfight over Oil, Gas

Russian Imperialists Ready to Defend Their Backyard

Racist D.C. Metro Bosses Attack Transit Workers, Riders

a name="Bosses’ Stimulus Plan: $4 Billion for More Racist Cops">">"osses’ Stimulus Plan: $4 Billion for More Racist Cops

To help keep a lid on the New Depression’s growing millions of angry, jobless workers (now 26 million unemployed and under-employed), Barack Obama is giving new life to racist community policing. Obama earmarked $4 billion of his $827-billion stimulus package for Community Oriented Policing Services and "other law enforcement needs." (New York Times, 2/6).

The Clinton regime, in a glaring example of fascism disguised as liberal "progress," had put 100,000 new cops on the street in the name of "community policing." Now Obama wants to double that to 200,000.

Community policing began in earnest in Boston during the early 1990s. The Boston Police Department (BPD) then formed the Ten Point Coalition with pastors in the city’s mainly black Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan sections. The cop-loving clergy created a network of stoolpigeons. Tips about "criminal activity" — usually minor offenses like drug use or vandalism — poured in from pastors, principals and merchants. Arrests soared.

Under this scheme, cops expand their ability to terrorize black and Latino neighborhoods by finding allies among church, school and other local leaders. Pretending to combat gang violence, community policing in fact targets rebellion. That’s why it hits the most oppressed — unemployed black and Latino young people — the hardest and why Obama needs it desperately in today’s collapsing economy.

The cops had won the ministers to consider "all youth as their responsibility regardless of the parish the youth lived in or the youth’s denominational affiliation" and to "spend time on the streets at night, getting to know the kids." (Encyclopedia of Police Science, 2006) In effect, the notoriously racist BPD succeeded in creating a new version of the Nazi’s World War II-era Judenrat. The Judenrat were Jewish "community leaders" who, collaborating with the Nazis, betrayed their neighbors to the gas chambers.

Boston’s top cop in the early 1990s was Bill Bratton, the rulers’ leading apostle for community policing. Bratton has since brought the liberal rulers’ racist gospel, with varying success, to New York and Los Angeles.

Liberals have a long vicious history. It was the liberals (anti-communist Social Democrats) who ushered in Hitler in Germany. And his party adopted the name "National Socialist" (NAZI in German) because a majority of German workers had voted for socialism so the Nazis figured they could use the liberal fig-leaf of "socialist" to win the working class to fascism.

That’s why it would be wrong to think that the beleaguered U.S. bosses need to assert police power only in inner cities. They need to control all of society and Bratton-style policies help immensely. In mostly white, suburban, middle-class Topsfield, Mass., "Police are arresting twice as many people and writing twice as many citations as they were just two years ago [after the police chief] adopted several community policing strategies." (Salem News, 1/22)

With the whole working class — black, Latino and millions of whites — being hit by the bosses’ Depression, the rulers fear working-class rebellions like the ones in the 1930s, when they had to order out the National Guard every week in 1937. With Guard troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ll need those 200,000 extra cops here, while pushing patriotism among white youth as well to get them to join the Army.

White House Militarization Intensifies, Despite Clumsy Cover-Up

Intensifying militarization — again masquerading in liberal guise — accompanies Obama’s burgeoning police state. Facing armed conflict now in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and eventually with Iran, China or Russia, Obama seeks to avoid imperialist predecessor Kennedy’s disastrous choice of advisors.

Obama has put four-star officers in key war-planning posts. General James Jones is National Security Advisor and Admiral Dennis Blair directs national intelligence. In launching the U.S. genocide in Vietnam, Kennedy relied on academic Ivy League experts like McGeorge Bundy, who had read all the books but hadn’t a clue about the technicalities of waging war.

"Anti-war" Obama’s preference for war-bloodied brass has become so obvious that he backed off on appointing General Anthony Zinni as ambassador to Iraq, whom he had already promised the job. "Late last week, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former top military commander in Afghanistan, was named as the next ambassador to Kabul. That made it unlikely that the White House would name another general to a high-profile diplomatic post, and fuel criticism that it was militarizing American foreign policy." (NYT, 2/6) Phony peacemaker Obama then made the obvious move of replacing Zinni with Peace Corps alumnus Christopher Hill.

Obama’s coziness with the cops and generals destroys his credibility as an agent of pro-working-class change. His choice of Paul Volcker to head a panel on economic restructuring proves Obama serves only the highest, imperialist echelons of the U.S. capitalist class. Volcker was once top economist at Chase Manhattan Bank when David Rockefeller ran it. In the early 1980s, as Federal Reserve chief, Volcker threw millions out of work by jacking up interest rates for the bankers’ benefit. Now he and Obama preside over an effort to restore U.S. rulers’ profits through misery and war.

In these hard times, workers can rely only on our own class. And the only purely working-class political organization is the Progressive Labor Party. We encourage the rebellions Obama and his bosses dread. It is our long-term goal to crush their top-down oppression with bottom-up base-building in the working class for a communist revolution.

a name="Rebellion, Not Non-Violence, Is Black Workers’ Real History">">"ebellion, Not Non-Violence, Is Black Workers’ Real History

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

The many gains of the civil rights era — the end of legal race segregation, free breakfast programs, jobs for blacks, affirmative action — were concessions won by militant, mass working-class struggle. 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 whites, 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.

Obama is part of King’s legacy of misleading working-class anti-racists into the dead end of supporting the bosses’ politicians and laws. 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.

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" (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, smashed downtown store windows.

Black Workers’ Armed Struggle

Black workers’ militant and sometimes armed struggle won the victories that are credited to King. In 1964, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense emerged as an armed organization to defend non-violent civil rights workers and spread to 23 communities across the south. Their actions helped win integration battles and fight off racist terror from the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and racist white mobs ("The Deacons for Defense," Lance Hill, 2004).

Then, in June 1964, the first mass big-city rebellion erupted in New York City’s Harlem when masses of black workers and youth took to the streets to protest a police murder of a black teenager. They marched through Harlem’s streets, displaying the front page of CHALLENGE as their "flag." PLM (Progressive Labor Movement, forerunner of PLP) was the only organization to support the rebellion — all the reformist black leaders and the "Communist Party" tried to cool the rebels and attacked PLM. The latter was barred from Harlem but defied the ban and held a mass demonstration, which sent several in PLM to jail. This rebellion laid the basis for many to follow, including in Newark, NJ in 1967.

The Detroit rebellion of 1967 — sparked by police harassment of a party for returning black Vietnam veterans and suppressed by 82nd Airborne troops diverted from Vietnam — led directly to 10,000 jobs in the auto industry for black workers.

When King was assassinated in 1968, anti-racist rebellions flared up in hundreds of U.S. cities. These rebellions led to an increase in jobs for blacks, especially in the public sector, although unemployment and underemployment remained (and remains) higher for black workers than for white.

Black Politicians Have Never Served the Working Class

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.

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 cops get away with racist terror — such as the murders of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California and Sean Bell in Queens, New York — 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.

In referring to the "muslim world" as a "clenched fist" Obama uses anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to win U.S. workers to support oil wars in Afghanistan and continued occupation in Iraq, which have killed over one 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.

Obama will not wage the battle against racism. So, just as workers in the ‘60s did not rely on a servant of the ruling class to wage their battles, we can’t rely on the current servant to wage ours.

The gains won by our class in the ‘60s have been reversed. Those good-paying auto industry jobs won by black workers in Detroit have vanished. The mass anti-racist rebellions were good, but the crumbs given our class in response have been taken back. 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 and its racism.

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‘No Contract, No Cookies!’

BRONX, NY, January 31 — Braving freezing temperatures, 500 Stella D’Oro strikers and supporters marched down Broadway chanting, "No Contract, No Cookies!"

As CHALLENGE readers know, the 135 Stella strikers are 100% solid on the line. They’ve been out for nearly six months but are determined not to let the Brynwood bosses (who own Stella D’Oro) bust their union and take away holidays, healthcare benefits and sick days, while demanding annual wage-cuts for the next five years.

While the strike involves a limited number of workers, it is significant on two counts: (1) it not only sets an example of militant workers fighting back against the bosses’ attempts to make workers take the losses resulting from the bosses’ crisis; and (2) it involves predominantly black and Latino workers — who, because of racism, suffer disproportionately from the bosses’ attacks — giving leadership to the whole working class.

This march and rally was larger and more spirited than previous ones. Supporters came from the PSC (Professional Staff Congress-CUNY), the teachers union, District Council 37, RWDSU (supermarket employees), nurses from the NYS Nurses Association, other unions and the community. But critically important, most speeches at the closing rally were by the strikers, not politicians who had dominated earlier rallies.

PSC’s president vowed continuing support for the struggle, telling Stella strikers that, "You must win; we cannot allow you to lose." A George Washington H.S. student took the mic and showed the crowd support letters from his fellow students and funds collected at their school.

In sharp contrast to this genuine display of solidarity from working-class youth was the shameful performance of Ed Ott, NYC Central Labor Council director. He appeared for only a few minutes at the pre-march rally. When someone in the crowd called out, "Ed, Ed, tell us how much money the Central Labor Council has given to support the struggle," his pathetic answer was, "We haven’t been asked yet."

PLP members have played an active role throughout the strike. At the closing rally, a PL speaker explained how the Stella workers inspired all workers and how communist revolution is necessary to eliminate the bosses and their system. During the rallies and march, 555 people bought CHALLENGES.

When some phony leftists chanted, "People’s power," PL’ers overrode it with "Workers’ Power!" And when they said, "People, united, will never be defeated," PL’ers responded with, "Workers, united…" In both cases, the great majority of the crowd joined PL’s most class-conscious chants. PLP opposes the slogan of "people’s power" because it means an alliance of workers with bosses and politicians.

One weakness in the strike is scabs working in the plant. It’s estimated that production in 30% of normal. With mass support at the picket line, stopping scabs becomes possible. While workers try to build a successful city-wide boycott of Stella products, the bosses’ strategy may be to take losses until August when the strikers’ benefits run out.

PL organizers are encouraging greater militancy. The Stella workers can reach out to other members of Local 50 in other bakeries and to other locals of the bakers’ international union.

In picket line conversations we have found that the workers are interested in discussing political questions, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the collapse of Wall Street, and how these events will affect the working class. One worker e-mailed us a set of pictures showing the horrors resulting from the Israeli invasion and massacre in Gaza.

Many strikers are reading CHALLENGE. We plan to organize a contingent of Stella workers and their families and friends to attend this year’s May Day dinner. Fight the bosses! Build the Party!

a name="Strike Diary: ‘Peaceman’ and ‘Hopeman’ — Gaza and Stella D’Oro"></a>Strike"Diary: ‘Peaceman’ and ‘Hopeman’ — Gaza and Stella D’Oro

BRONX, NY, January 13 — Today, a multi-racial group of 500 Stella D’Oro strikers and supporters, including PLP’ers, marched to a Target store that’s selling scab-made cookies. In thinking about this strike, much in the world situation comes to mind: the economic meltdown, the imperialist oil wars, racist unemployment, and in particular, the Israeli invasion of Gaza and this strike — two sieges in a long class war — so this diary is dedicated to Peaceman and Hopeman, two friends on either side of the Gaza border who write a blog together: http://gaza-sderot.blogspot.com

They’re ordinary folks (Hopeman is a student who can’t get out of Gaza to attend his college), not very "political," who maintain their friendship to have something to rebuild with when the war and siege forced on them are over. Of course that’s very political!

They’re showing how workers can build solidarity across borders, dodging Israeli bombs and Hamas rockets to find cell phone reception so they can talk, at least when Hopeman has enough electricity to charge his phone. Most of the Stella strikers who are becoming my friends are like that — they’re building a base for the future. Communism does that too.

Recently A. told a young teacher and community arts organizer (who’s planning a video documentary about the strike) that it was forced on the workers. The Israeli fascists and Hamas religious nationalists did the same thing to Palestinian and Israeli workers with their war.

But hidden behind the Israeli and Palestinian politicians who the bloggers despise are all the rival imperialists who’ve shaped the Middle East: the Ottoman emperors who ruled there until World War I; the British Mandate rulers who set up this impossible situation by guiding the founding of Israel as a European settler colony; the U.S. rulers funding Israel as their client state and military proxy; and all the others (the EU, Russia, China, Japan, Iran, India) feeling their way into a serious challenge to the declining U.S. empire.

Those same clashing imperialist elephants are trampling the grass in this bakery strike too, hard to see until some communist comes and talks it up. Three strikers are now reading the article "A Class Analysis of the Israel/Palestine Conflict" from PL’s journal "The Communist."

Imperialist rivalry caused the economic crisis smashing into the Bronx bakers and also intensifies it. Brynwood Partners, which own Stella D’Oro, is a Wall Street speculator like those who brought us this deepening depression, a "vulture capitalist" who swoops down on struggling companies to strip and flip them for resale.

Economists call it "financialization," turning real plants into fictitious capital and trading them like bad mortgages or baseball cards. The capitalist economic pressures that forced this strike are the same ones producing war in Gaza.

A. tells the young video artists the strike was forced on them, but there’s nothing forced about how these workers love and honor one another, just as no one is forcing or even organizing Peaceman and Hopeman to continue their blog. The strikers stick together, like Peaceman and Hopeman, so there’s something to rebuild with when the strike ends (win or lose). This solidarity grows from their working together so long, but it’s really for the future, as they pull on their long johns and layer up for picket duty on the five-month anniversary of their brave strike. (Continued on PLP blog: challengenewspaper.wordpress.com.)

Students Fighting Cuts: Ally With Workers, Not Liberal Pols

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA — "The rally for community colleges on February 27 is being organized by Chancellor Jack Scott and college public-relations officers," a student leader commented, "so members of our club will need to make sure students’ wants are voiced."

Most community college students belong to the working class. Like other workers, they’re hit hard by the current capitalist crisis. They don’t want classes cut, teachers to lose jobs, and student fees to go up.

Unlike tuition at California’s two university systems, community college fees go into the state General Fund. They help pay interest going to banks and investors, which the state constitution requires to be paid before any other expenses! Community College fees also help pay for the state’s huge and viciously racist prison system.

The governor plans to cut funding for state financial aid by $87.5 million by freezing income eligibility limits, reducing the maximum award and eliminating the "safety net" for recipients’ children.

Budget Cuts, Tax Hikes:Racist, Anti-Worker

Most students don’t want higher taxes either, but that’s what the Democratic Party and the California Teachers Association want us to fight for. California Community College Chancellor Scott, as a "pro-education" legislator, pushed for a sales tax hike at a Pasadena rally against education cuts last spring.

Sales taxes are racist and regressive. They come down hardest on lower-paid workers and the unemployed, including a high proportion of black and Latin workers. The poorest 20% of California households paid nearly 12% of their income in taxes, while the richest 1% of households paid only 7% of theirs.

Budget cuts are racist, too. Cuts in Medi-Cal eligibility and benefits will make things much worse in a health care system so overloaded that it already turns away many – especially in neighborhoods like South LA, where the MLKing Hospital was shut down and clinics are closing.

Legal immigrants and US citizen children of undocumented immigrants are singled out for specific racist cutbacks. Gov. Schwarzenegger has proposed eliminating the California Food Assistance Program, which feeds certain legal non-citizens who are ineligible for federal programs because of their immigration status.

Capitalism is the Problem,Communism is the Solution

The California budget crisis is a direct result of the capitalist crisis of overproduction and imperialist war. Because capitalists compete to maximize profits, and because lower wages mean higher profits, they produce more than can be sold. Then workers are laid-off so that they can afford to spend less on consumer goods.

Meanwhile, "corporate income taxes have declined over time as a share of General Fund revenues and as a share of corporate profits. If corporations had paid the same share of their profits in corporate taxes in 2006 as they did in 1981, corporate tax collections would have been $8.4 billion higher," concludes the California Budget Project. (www.cbp.org) Because of Prop 13 (1978) huge corporations pay property taxes on the assessed value of their property — like Disneyland — 30 years ago!

Community colleges are promoted as a "way out of the working class." But they are training the workers who can be the key to building a new system. Students need to ally with industrial workers and soldiers in a movement to destroy this capitalist system that brings us economic insecurity, racist inequality, and increasingly murderous imperialist war.

The alternative to capitalism is communism, a classless society where workers hold power. Cynicism will get us nowhere! PLP communists are in the class struggle – like the fight against California budget cuts – to win workers and students away from reform and to the long-term fight for communist revolution. We invite you to subscribe to Challenge, join a PLP discussion group, and march with PLP on May Day – International Workers Day!

$20 Billion Mayor Laying Off 23,000 NYC Workers

NEW YORK — Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg has unveiled his doomsday budget proposal for workers here. To close a projected $4 billion budget deficit, Bloomberg — whose private fortune totals $20 billion (Forbes, 10/6/2008) — wants to lay off 23,000 workers and get the city worker unions to give back $1 billion from pensions, health benefits, etc. He counts on the union leaders to convince members to take all these attacks without fighting back. That’s exactly what happened during the NYC fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Union workers were told they were saving the city. What they really saved was capitalism. They never regained the contract givebacks from thirty years ago. The working people of NYC lived with a level of city services that didn’t come close to meeting their needs. As is always the case, black and Latin workers were hit the hardest by both layoffs and the resulting service cuts. Let’s not make the same mistake this time.

Strikers at the Stella D’Oro bakery show that some workers are willing to fight against their vicious bosses. Communists in PLP vow to give leadership in the struggle to fight Bloomberg’s proposed layoffs. We will help to build the unity needed to fight the cutback plans. We will explain the nature of the capitalist system that exploits us and destroys our lives. We will explain how a communist revolution will put an end to racism, inequality and oppression.

Workers here as elsewhere are already reeling from the financial meltdown, home foreclosure crisis and an uncertain future for themselves and their children. During 2008, city agencies twice had their operating budgets slashed by $1.5 billion. What do an additional 23,000 layoffs mean? 15,000 of the layoffs target the city schools. They mean more students per teacher, less support staff and longer waiting time for needed repairs in school buildings. In city hospitals, people will literally die from the layoffs. That’s what happens when wards, rooms and halls are not kept clean. That’s what happens when patient-to-staff ratios increase. Every city agency will see similar results as they become less able to provide needed services from providing clean water to repairing pot holes.

What about the so-called fat pensions, health benefits and pay those on city payroll get? "Good government" types say that the average city worker earns about $100,000 per year. In reality, the average wage of 120,000 District Council 37 city workers is about $33,000 per year. Since 1995, they have lost between 7-10 % in real wages because their pay hasn’t kept up with the rising cost of living. Contrast that to the pay of New Yorkers making $200,000 and over. They saw a real increase in pay of 96% during the same period (3/28/08 Chief Leader). Since pensions are a fraction of gross pay, DC 37 members can hardly have fat pensions. Likewise, city workers have been forced to pay an ever increasing share of their medical costs. If this seems similar to what’s happening to you, it’s because workers all over this country and around the world are facing a similar attack on their living standards.

We shouldn’t pay for the problems that capitalism creates. We didn’t cause the financial crisis. We should make the bosses take the losses caused by their system and their greed. If the union leaders call for sharing the pain of cutbacks "fairly," we should say no! Rather than saving this racist, exploitative rotten system, we should be fighting to overthrow it. We should be planning to replace it with communism, a society of production to meet human needs not greed, a society where working-class unity is built while racism and sexism is outlawed.

Gary Protestors Keep Heat On Racist Killer Kop

GARY, INDIANA, Feb. 6 — A mistrial was declared today in the trial of the racist cop who murdered Vincent Smith. In near zero degree weather, a group of protestors again held a demonstration at the courthouse to keep this struggle alive. The judge declared the mistrial because supposedly some jurors had "contact" with some of the workers and youth who came to protest the racist murder and demand justice. This has fired up the community and the campus. A new trial is set for July — more time for members of PLP and friends to build a bigger movement and recruit to communism.

Vincent Smith, who was a freshman in high school, was shot in the back while running from the killer cop three years ago. The police claimed that young Vincent was a criminal because he was once arrested for shoplifting! As a result of the demonstrations organized by community groups, a local campus organization and PLP, the state had to charge this cop.

When a Gary cop admits to shooting a fleeing, unarmed teenager in the back of the head, and is indicted by the prosecutor for murder, he is assigned to desk duty with full pay until the trial! That’s the racist, capitalist "justice" system at work! The phony internal police investigation concluded that the killer cop did everything right, and the city is asking the state to drop the charges – basically saying that it is legal for cops to hunt children in Gary.

Gary is among the most depressed, oppressed cities in the USA, where the steel mills sucked the life out of the working class for a hundred years and capitalist chaos has left much of the city abandoned or in deep racist poverty. The Gary police force is known for corruption and brutality. A past chief was just convicted of breaking into someone’s home and brutally beating him. Young people often talk about which cops are brutal and which cops work with drug dealers and gangs.

The bosses need vicious cops to control the working class that does not buy into the empty promises as our lives get worse day by day. So there will be more police terror and more innocent young lives will be lost. Organizing protests against police terror are one way to build a movement that can grow and bring anti-racist, communist ideas to life.

Beyond these courthouse demonstrations, we will continue to publicize and organize workers on the job, students and teachers in school, and other members of the community to fight back against these racist attacks—to take this killer cop off the streets forever, to send a message to other cops that we will not let these racist killings just pass by, and to build a movement and a Party for communist revolution, workers’ power!

General Strike Jolts France:

2.5 Million Marchers Say Make the Bosses Take the Losses

SAINT-NAZAIRE, FRANCE, February 7 — On January 29, as part of a massive general strike of hundreds of thousands of workers, 2.5 million people marched for jobs and against government cutbacks in almost 200 cities across France, with 300,000 demonstrating in Paris and 200,000 in Marseilles.

At least 18,000 demonstrated in this ship-building port in western France. When the sub-prefect (the local representative of the national government) refused to receive a union delegation, protesters began throwing beer cans at the riot police protecting the sub-prefecture. When the police attacked with tear gas, workers tore down the entry gate and four hours of street fighting ensued. The cops injured a number of protesters, one seriously and rounded up 16 people, partly at random, some of whom have already been sentenced to jail.

The bosses in France are very nervous. Even the government’s under-stated figures show nine months of rising unemployment have left 2.1 million workers jobless, while another 2.8 million have given up finding a job. Result: a real unemployment rate of at least 17.5%!

This high unemployment has made workers anxious and angry, sparking this huge general strike and demonstrations called by eight union confederations. From 20% to 40% of public sector workers — hospital, telephone, postal and electric company workers and half or more of secondary and elementary school teachers — walked out.

All the major state radio networks shut down, and a third of television network workers struck. Almost one-third of flights from Orly airport were cancelled. Almost all the Paris commuter train workers, half the Métro (subway) workers and at least a third of urban transport workers in the rest of France went on strike.

In addition, unexpectedly large numbers of private-sector workers went out, in the banks, Renault auto plants and at Alcatel-Lucent (the world’s second-biggest telecommunications equipment-maker). Autoworkers completely shut down PSA’s Poissy and Rennes factories, and partly closed the Sochaux plant.

Private-sector workers do not enjoy the same job security as public workers and consequently strike less. Thus, many Auchan supermarket, Celanese chemicals, Dynastar ski, Ford auto, Free telecommunications and Tefal kitchenware workers used their holiday time to join the protest marches.

Many marchers bore signs saying, "Can you see this strike, you stupid jerk?" — a reference to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s July statement that "nowadays, when there’s a strike in France, nobody notices" and his telling a farmer who refused to shake hands with him in February, 2008 to "beat it, you stupid jerk."

As usual, union leaders here are tailing the militancy of the working class. The bosses wanted to reduce the duration of unemployment benefits. The signature of two trade unions was necessary for the measure to pass, so on February 2 the traitorous CFDT and CFE-CGC obliged the government and signed.

President Sarkozy responded to the workers’ strike with insult and scorn, reflecting the ruling class’s estimation that any deviation from the set course could lead to their losing control. In his February 5 speech, his "answer" to the general strike, Sarkozy offered another, 8-billion-euro tax break ($9.5 billion) to French bosses and told the working class he would continue to push through his neo-conservative counter-reforms, notably the non-replacement of half the public workers who retire. He announced a meeting with union leaders on February 18.

The more radical unions want to stage another strike and protest before the 18th, a move the conservative unions are resisting.

These struggles need to confront racism since police repression, mass unemployment, among other problems have hit non-white and immigrant workers here for a long time. International solidarity with strikers in Martinique and Guadeloupe must also be part of the struggle. In this age of endless imperialist wars and economic meltdown, this means developing a revolutionary anti-racist communist leadership of these militant struggles, breaking with the union misleaders and fake leftist electoral parties.

Teachers Shut Universities

On February 2, teachers struck at over half the 83 French universities on February 2, with the strike continuing and general assemblies being held on February 4 on many campuses. Students are gradually joining the protest movement.

The teachers are opposing counter-reforms which make it harder for members of the working class to become primary and secondary school teachers and give university presidents greater control over faculty working conditions and careers. These counter-reforms are the French enactment of a May, 2006 European Commission decision to force all European universities to serve the capitalist class more directly. A national university protest is scheduled for February 10.

Guadeloupe General Strike Spreads to Martinique

FORT-DE-FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, February 7 — The general strike which began January 20 in the French overseas department of Guadeloupe spread February 5 to neighboring Martinique, 122 miles to the South. These workers — 90% African or African-white-Indian mixture (Indian from India) — are refusing to pay for the world capitalist crisis.

Over 20,000 people demonstrated here February 5, completely halting public transport. The marchers included all job categories from dockers to Catholic schoolteachers. They chanted, "Sarko [French President], Fillon [Prime Minister], we want jobs!" and "Jobs, yes! Precarity [poverty], no!" The twelve unions calling the strike united in a Collective, welcoming other unions and associations to join.

The Martinique strikers are demanding price cuts and higher wages for all, especially those in low-paying jobs. A Collective study shows milk costs 44.7% more and noodles almost 80% more on this island than in mainland France.

On Guadeloupe, the junior minister for the overseas departments, Yves Jégo, claimed agreement on about one-third of the 146 demands advanced by Lyiannaj kont pwofitasyon (Link Against Extreme Profiteering - LKP). In a clear maneuver to pressure LKP and Guadeloupe’s workers to end their strike, French interior minister Michèle Alliot-Marie immediately released a lying communiqué claiming "an agreement has been found on most of the questions raised."

The people of Guadeloupe are super-exploited by capitalist monopolies and the Guadeloupe wealthy class. This island’s population of 405,000 is 69% African or African-white-Indian mixture.

A trade unionist told French radio that four or five families control imports to the island, so rice is almost twice as expensive here as on mainland France; a toothbrush costs four euros ($5.14).

Gasoline and diesel fuel distribution is effectively monopolized by the Caribbean Refinery Inc. (SARA), owned 50% by France’s Total company, with Exxon and Texaco also holding a stake.

Jégo claims to have obtained a one-year 10% price reduction for 100 staple goods in 60 supermarkets. He says he’ll "put heavy pressure" on the bosses to grant demands for higher wages. LKP wants an across-the-board, 200-euro-a-month wage hike. Jégo said before negotiations even opened that all workers would get at least a 2% raise. If accepted, a percentage-based raise would widen the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid workers, potentially dividing workers when the bosses inevitably move to eliminate the increase.

LKP is also demanding a rent freeze, improved health care, permanent jobs for all temporary workers and no racism in hiring. "The high rate of unemployment on Guadeloupe [35%] has to be taken into account," said Jean-Marie Brissac, CGTG trade union general secretary. "Even though our young people are highly qualified, they can’t get a job here. The big corporations get their job applicants through Paris job agencies in order to exclude Guadeloupe youth."

Jégo claimed LKP has asked him to be the "moderator" in negotiations. Posing as a "neutral mediator," Jégo has induced the strikers to lower their guard. All gas stations were to re-open February 5, and two hypermarkets and a large number of shops have re-opened.

Meanwhile, in this good-cop-bad-cop routine, Guadeloupe bosses are dragging their heels at throwing any crumbs to the strikers. "Have a thought for the companies!" one local boss is said to have shouted at Jégo.

On the other hand, LKP called for a demonstration on Feb. 4 to shut the hypermarket and shopping center in Baie-Mahault, which had re-opened.

This apparent indecisiveness is reflected in the LKP platform: "People of Guadeloupe, workers, farmers, artisans, retirees, unemployed, entrepreneurs, young people, Lyiannaj kont pwofitasyon is our organization, our idea, our tool, our consciousness." The inclusion of "entrepreneurs" — capitalists — in the Collective indicates confusion about the nature of the struggle. LKP apparently believes in unity with some bosses on a nationalist basis, because these bosses form part of "the people of Guadeloupe." Such illusions are fatal in the class struggle.

It’s the job of communists worldwide to explain that the government is never "neutral" — it is always on the bosses’ side. The working class can obtain justice only by overthrowing the bosses’ government with communist revolution, in order to institute workers’ rule.

a name="Chavez’s Cops Attack Strikers, Kill 2 Auto Workers">">"havez’s Cops Attack Strikers, Kill 2 Auto Workers

CARACAS, VENEZUELA, February 3 — Chanting "Workers, united, will never be defeated," and "Punishment for Killer Cops," over 1,500 workers and community residents marched from the Mitsubishi plant in the city of Barcelona, state of Anzoátegui, to the governor’s house demanding justice for two workers — one from Mitsubishi and the other an auto parts worker — killed by cops on January 29. In that afternoon, a judge came to the Mitsubishi Motors plant to evict the workers who had seized it.

After a January 12 workers’ mass meeting, 863 workers voted to take it over, with only 21 opposed. The workers were demanding permanent jobs for 135 Induservis subcontracted workers, used for maintenance by Mitsubishi.

The state’s pro-Chávez governor, Tarek William Saab, obeyed the company’s demand and sent a judge with cops to evict them. The company also had its supervisory staff "rally" in front of the plant to demand the occupation be ended.

When the workers refused to leave, the cops viciously shot at them, killing two and injuring many others.

This is the second time governor Saab used cops against workers. Before becoming governor, he had made a career of being a "human rights advocate." Workers should never trust any bourgeois politicians, even if they claim to be pro-worker.

Repression against militant workers is increasing under Chávez’s "Bolivarian Revolution." On January 22, the National Guard arrested two workers following a protest by 250 workers fired by contractor Costa Norte near Barcelona city.

On December 30, Caracas Metropolitan Police attacked subcontracted workers protesting at the office of the country’s Vice-President, demanding to be rehired by the Sidor steel company. Over 8,000 Sidor workers are still working as subcontractors, even after the government bought a majority share from the Argentine steel company Technit, precisely using the argument that it refused to give all Sidor workers permanent status.

Also in December, two dissident union leaders were killed by hired gunmen in the state of Aragua, provoking a regional general strike on December 2. And the list goes on.

Meanwhile, a February 15 referendum is again confronting Chávez and his Bolivarian bosses, fighting the old pro-U.S. ruling class that has lost most of its political power. The balloting will decide whether Chávez can run for re-election in 2012.

Workers shouldn’t take sides in this dogfight among these capitalist factions. Most hate the old pro-U.S. bosses, remembering how 20 years ago in 1989 Social-Democrat President Carlos Andrés Pérez sent the Army and tanks to crush the mass uprising by workers and shantytown residents of Caracas, rebelling against an IMF-imposed austerity package. Over 1,000 protestors were killed.

The workers’ anger after this massacre gave rise to Chávez. But Chávez’s "Bolivarian nationalism" has revealed its limitations. When oil prices were sky-high, he gave workers some crumbs, but now that the price has tumbled and the world’s capitalist crisis has hit Venezuela like a ton of bricks, Chávez is again trying to make deals with the foreign oil companies he attacked just a year ago.

While posturing as "anti-imperialist," he’s bargaining with Russian, Chinese, Iranian and European imperialists. He’s now hoping relations with the U.S. will improve, with Obama in power. Just last week, he even signed a trade pact with Colombia’s President Uribe, who he had labeled as a Bush lapdog in Latin America not too long ago.

Workers must shed all illusions in any so-called bourgeois "savior" like Chávez. Some militant workers are demanding the government nationalize some imperialist-owned companies, but as Sidor’s case has shown, state capitalism is no solution. The only road which will lead to workers’ liberation is to forge a revolutionary communist leadership and fight for working-class power

Recently, our Sunday School has been very politically active. Just before Christmas we bought books as gifts for the children of the striking Stella D’Oro workers and wrote them letters inviting them to take part in our activities.

We performed a play for the church showing how King Herod killed all the little boys in Bethlehem to wipe out any rivals to his power. Each of us then gave some food to our own "baby Jesus" in the name of a child who has been killed in Iraq or Gaza. Two weeks later six of us from the church marched against the Israeli attack on Gaza. Most important, three of our high school students will participate in the PLP winter retreat!

Sunday School Students and Teachers

a name="Arab-Jewish Workers’ Unity - Antidote to Nationalist Poison">">"rab-Jewish Workers’ Unity - Antidote to Nationalist Poison

"We hate Obama, too" said one comrade to me, a student and leftist active in a left-wing party in Palestine. Israeli massacres of civilians in Gaza, which killed over 1,300 men, women and children, recently have come to a temporary halt. But, in the West Bank and Gaza, dissatisfaction is boiling over with the new U.S. imperialist president Obama and his puppet, Mahmoud Abbas of the ruling Palestinian Authority (PA) party, Fatah.

Thousands of working-class Palestinians have demonstrated in the West Bank in solidarity with Gaza, fed up with the collaborationist, U.S.-supplied- and-trained PA leaders that have done nothing while civilians in Gaza are massacred. Workers are facing detainment and torture at the hands of these outsourced-Israeli-occupation forces, their supposed "representatives."

These attacks are aimed at trying to smash dissidents and grassroots resistance to the occupation and Israeli fascism. The racist Israeli ruling class has detained over 750 Arab-Israeli citizens participating in anti-occupation demonstrations side-by-side with Jewish workers. These leaders fear working-class, Arab-Jewish solidarity

more than anything!

PA leaders like prime minister Salam Fayyad, an ex-IMF executive, have close ties to international capitalists and support the World Bank, the European Union, and rich Arab tycoons’ capital investment in the West Bank, which will only lead to more worker exploitation, unemployment, and police repression. They are pushing for a "two-state" solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but this would continue to be a capitalist state, no friend of the working class.

These corrupt capitalist leaders are appearing more and more despicable to the working class in Palestine.

LETTERS

From Oakland to Athens: Solidarity vs. Kop Killers

At the airport where I work many workers heard about the outrageous police murder of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black worker in Oakland, California by racist BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cop Mehserle on New Years Day. We had many political discussions about how this racist murder is a part of how capitalism operates. Since the economy is in ruins (because of capitalism itself) the racist bosses need fascism and racist goons like Mehserle to terrorize workers so they don’t fight back against the system.

One of my coworkers, an Ethiopian woman, said "Obama will stop these things from happening." It was pointed out that this is a deadly illusion because at the time of the murder Obama was President-elect. A black president and still black workers are being murdered! His being black won’t stop business-as-usual for capitalism any more than South Africa having had two black presidents stopped racist oppression against workers there. South African workers are poorer now than they were under fascist apartheid! Black nationalism is deadly.

There was a well-received SEIU union resolution condemning this murder that was circulated to union members at the airport. This resolution was also sent to the Oakland SEIU. The Oakland murder was connected to the anti-working class murder of 15-year-old Greek student Alexandros Grigoropouls by a fascist Athenian cop, which sparked a national mass rebellion against fascism. There will also be a PLP leaflet coming out connecting this fascist killing to capitalism.

My fellow workers and I read the letter to CHALLENGE (1/14/09) from an airport worker in Greece. As fellow airport workers we share your anger over the senseless killings of our working-class brothers and sisters by these fascist pigs. We applaud your mass fight-back against the killer cops. As you might already know, there was a mass rebellion in Oakland by multiracial workers angered over Oscar Grant’s racist murder. While these anti-fascist actions are good, we as workers need to take it a step further and have a worldwide communist revolution led by PLP to get rid of the whole damn capitalist system! If you have not yet joined PLP we urge you and your friends to join us in fighting for a new world so there won’t be any more Oscars and Alexandros’s being butchered. In international solidarity, from Oakland to Athens, workers need communist revolution!

Airport Red

a name="‘Get out in front’ on Politics Behind Capitalist Crisis"></">‘G"t out in front’ on Politics Behind Capitalist Crisis

"My father is in his nineties and says this is worse than the [Great] depression," said my friend at Boeing. His father lives in Detroit; generations of his family worked for GM. My friend asked me to explain racist unemployment and, in particular, the 10,000 layoffs announced by Boeing CEO McNerney. "I just don’t get it!" he admitted.

Turned out he understood more than he was letting on. Holding a minor office in the union, his initial reaction mirrored the union leadership’s line that all the company had to do "was the right thing." After a little discussion, this CHALLENGE reader revealed his understanding of the worldwide crisis of capitalist "overproduction." "World war seems the only way out of an ‘economic’ crisis this big," he concluded.

We discussed the Obama administration’s panic over Afghanistan. They’re rushing in troops by the 10,000s, while publicly abandoning any pretext of humanitarian development and aid.

We discussed Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s overtures to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO, led by Russia and China, counts among its members all the "stans," except Afghanistan. Even India and Iran are considering joining. My friend enthusiastically agreed this military buildup was about oil and oil pipelines, not terrorism as Obama paints it.

"Just wait," I warned, "pretty soon we’re going to hear all the dirty shit about Karzai that the bosses have been hiding from us for seven years." Sure enough, within days the bosses’ press began to expose Karzai’s brother-in-law’s drug connections. It was shades of Vietnam’s President Diem all over again. (The U.S. had their own man killed in 1963 to better carry out their imperialist carnage in Southeast Asia.)

Interestingly my friend never tried to defend Obama on this issue.

I have no illusion that one conversation has won my friend to abandon his hope in the new administration, but it does show that we have to get "out in front" on the political implications of the worldwide capitalist crisis. Confidence in the working class will be richly rewarded as this crisis unfolds. We went back to our workstations agreeing that the situation cried out for more struggle and CHALLENGES.

- One who’s beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel

Sunday School Teaches Class Solidarity

Recently, our Sunday School has been very politically active. Just before Christmas we bought books as gifts for the children of the striking Stella D’Oro workers and wrote them letters inviting them to take part in our activities.

We performed a play for the church showing how King Herod killed all the little boys in Bethlehem to wipe out any rivals to his power. Each of us then gave some food to our own "baby Jesus" in the name of a child who has been killed in Iraq or Gaza. Two weeks later six of us from the church marched against the Israeli attack on Gaza. Most important, three of our high school students will participate in the PLP winter retreat!

Sunday School Students and Teachers

a name="Arab-Jewish Workers’ Unity Antidote to Nationalist Poison">">"rab-Jewish Workers’ Unity Antidote to Nationalist Poison

"We hate Obama, too" said one comrade to me, a student and leftist active in a left-wing party in Palestine. Israeli massacres of civilians in Gaza, which killed over 1,300 men, women and children, recently have come to a temporary halt. But, in the West Bank and Gaza, dissatisfaction is boiling over with the new U.S. imperialist president Obama and his puppet, Mahmoud Abbas of the ruling Palestinian Authority (PA) party, Fatah.

Thousands of working-class Palestinians have demonstrated in the West Bank in solidarity with Gaza, fed up with the collaborationist, U.S.-supplied-and-trained PA leaders that have done nothing while civilians in Gaza are massacred. Workers are facing detainment and torture at the hands of these outsourced-Israeli-occupation forces, their supposed "representatives." These attacks are aimed at trying to smash dissidents and grassroots resistance to the occupation and Israeli fascism. The racist Israeli ruling class has detained over 750 Arab-Israeli citizens participating in anti-occupation demonstrations side-by-side with Jewish workers. These leaders fear working-class, Arab-Jewish solidarity more than anything!

PA leaders like prime minister Salam Fayyad, an ex-IMF executive, have close ties to international capitalists and support the World Bank, the European Union, and rich Arab tycoons’ capital investment in the West Bank, which will only lead to more worker exploitation, unemployment, and police repression. They are pushing for a "two-state" solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but this would continue to be a capitalist state, no friend of the working class.

These corrupt capitalist leaders are appearing more and more despicable to the working class in Palestine. Now Hamas is gaining popularity throughout the Arab and Muslim world, even among some leftists, after the recent Gaza attacks. But the illusion that Hamas is the only alternative and the only real resistance to Israeli violence and oppression needs to be shown for what it really is: an enemy of the working class. Religious fundamentalism does not offer the working class liberation, and Hamas’ charity programs do nothing to attack the core of exploitation and imperialism — capitalism.

Palestine has a long tradition of leftist activism, but after years of repression and demonizing propaganda by ruling-class stooges on both the Israeli and Palestinian side, the left has been weakened. Now more than ever, nationalism and alliances between the left-wing parties and the pro-capitalist ruling agents (Fatah) are commonplace. As communists, we must struggle to build the left and show that Hamas is not the only alternative to PA capitalist-class corruption, and that nationalism is only a dead end for workers. Communist revolution is the only way to bring about long-term victories and justice for working families in Palestine, the exploited Israeli working class, and all workers of the world.

The struggle against Israeli fascism, imperialism, and capitalism must move beyond national boundaries and nationalist solutions. International unity between Palestinian and Israeli workers is vital to this struggle. PLP must push communist politics against nationalism, and struggle with our comrades on the Palestinian left as well as the Israeli left to see nationalism as the worker’s enemy. Working people have no nation! Fight the occupation and exploitation!

Red in Palestine

Lauds PLP at Boeing, Poses Sit-Down Strike Strategy

The Boeing strike has been over for a while now, but unlike most of capitalist culture, we communists don’t just forget about yesterday and move on to today’s hot news. During the strike, the Party seems to have done a good job getting out PLP’s communist ideas, especially CHALLENGE newspaper and building communist study groups. These are crucial to building a communist movement instead of a reformist movement. It seems that solid efforts are being made to deepen close personal ties with other workers, which is a key way to learn and teach that communism is a way of life.

I have a question about the Party’s strategy. In the past, during strikes, we have often called for militantly completely shutting down the plants, blocking production and organizing a sit-down strike inside the plant. Of course, we might not win enough workers to carry this out. But shouldn’t we still be putting that forward in all of our literature as the strategy to work towards?

A reader

Win Oaxaca APPO Congress Rank & File to Red Ideas

OAXACA, MEXICO, February 10 — In a very violent setting, due to the sharp contradictions among the leaderships of the organizations comprising the APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca), Section 22 of the SNTE (teachers union) has pushed for the convening of the Third Congress of APPO on February 20-22. The APPO participated in the mass social-political movement of 2006, fighting to oust the fascist Governor of Oaxaca, Ulisis Ruiz Ortiz (URO). The goal is to develop another intense period of actions locally and nationally to confront the privatization, unemployment, repression and poverty enforced by the ruling parties and to insist on the ouster of the murderous governor.

The brutal repression in 2006 unleashed by the criminal Oaxaca Governor in open alliance with Vicente Fox, departing President of Mexico, could not destroy APPO. However, the sharp contradictions within APPO — as revealed in the corrupt actions and betrayals of the opportunists — have divided and challenged APPO, sowing discontent, disappointment and apathy among thousands of the participants.

They and many others had great hope for APPO to bring important changes to society, eliminate injustices and corruption, and above all, to end the capitalist dictatorship, represented by the PRI, the ruling party which oppressed Mexico’s workers for nearly 80 years.

But to destroy these evils, it’s necessary to get rid of capitalism-imperialism with a communist revolution. That requires winning thousands of city and farm workers, teachers, students and soldiers to communist ideas. This means recruiting millions to the working class’s only communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. To achieve this goal we must spread communist ideas, including reading and building networks of distribution for our communist newspaper, CHALLENGE.

APPO cannot, nor could it ever, assume this role. APPO grew as a broad spontaneous movement that mobilized thousands, but lacked founding principles, discipline, organization and correct political leadership. Opportunist and revisionist (fake leftist) groups took advantage of the movement to seize the leadership of APPO and use it for their own interests.

Among them, the Popular Revolutionary Front-Union of Workers of Education (FPR-UTE), subsidiary of the misnamed "Communist" Party of Mexico Marxist Leninist, maneuvered ts leader, Zenén Bravo, to become a deputy in the local Congress. Meanwhile, Flavio Sosa, after having been imprisoned, as the most publicized leader has waged a propaganda campaign to become a deputy for the PRD (Party of Revolutionary Democracy), like César Mateos.

We workers must understand that any organization that is not a communist party fighting for communism will eventually betray our class interests. Good intentions are not enough. Even the giants of the old international communist movement saw the great Russian and Chinese revolutions reversed because they carried too much baggage of capitalism (the wage system, etc.) into their socialist society which they thought they could transform into communism. But the opposite happened. Today Russia and China are capitalist, imperialist vultures fighting with the U.S. and European imperialists for control of the world’s resources, especially oil.

Amid deepening capitalist economic crisis, expanding imperialist wars and the threat of World War III, the honest participants in the APPO Congress should think seriously about waging communist class struggle to confront the enemy and advance as the working class to our necessary goal, building a new communist society. Only then can we destroy capitalism, a chaotic and murderous system that only meets the needs of the rich.

Capitalist elections won’t help workers. Participating in them perpetuates the chains that bind us to capitalism’s evils. Only communist revolution will end them. That’s why it’s necessary to read and distribute CHALLENGE and join the Progressive Labor Party.

REDEYE

Migra lied on immigrant raids

NYT, 2/4

Run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately….Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among immigrants they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead newly available documents show the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them.

Clinton workfare strangles poor

NYT, 2/2

Despite soaring unemployment and the worst ecoomic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people recieving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years…Signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 amid bitter protest…The program, which mostly serves single mothers, ended a 60-year-old entitlement to cash aid, replacing it with time limits and work requirements….While it was widely praised in the boom years that followed, skeptics warned it would fail the needy when times turned tough….Years of pressure to cut the welfare rolls has left an obstacle-ridden program that chases off the poor, even when times are difficult.

Army suicides at 30-year high

NYT, 2/6

The suicide count for last month would exceed those killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan during the same period…."If we lost this many soldiers to an enemy weapon, the entire country would know about it and we would demand defensive measures."…Most soldiers were reluctant to seek help for fear it would derail their careers.

Workers see capitalist betrayal

GW, 2/6

Workers around the world began to mobilise in reaction to rising unemployment and increasing fear about the economic crisis. France was paralysed by a wave of strike action….But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma looks graver. Exactly 20 years ago they put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.

Afghanistan Center of Imperialist Dogfight over Oil, Gas

The U.S. imperialists are desperately trying to regain full control of their empire’s cornerstone at any cost: possessing the world’s energy reserves, especially those of the Greater Middle East. Since their main focus now is the Caspian Region, Afghanistan is Obama’s main foreign policy objective.

How many more U.S.-NATO troops Obama will sacrifice in this war is not known yet, nor how many more Afghan workers, women and children will be massacred. But the stakes are high for the U.S. rulers, and they aren’t going to let the prospect of more blood on their hands stand in the way.

The stakes are also high for their capitalist-imperialist rivals in the region, particularly the Russians and Chinese bosses. Russia’s rise as an aspiring hegemon is dependent on controlling the world’s energy resources; while China needs ever-greater quantities of crude to fuel its industrial and military might. Their contradictions with the U.S. will develop into military clashes, with large-scale war looming on the horizon.

If pacified enough, the U.S. rulers hope Afghanistan’s strategic location will transport vast energy resources, bypassing Russia’s territory, and positioning them to replace Russia as the main controller-distributor of Caspian-Central Asia’s energy.

This would break the energy chokehold Russia has on the European imperialists, crucial if the U. S. hopes to get the EU’s support on important geopolitical issues, wider wars and the coming global war (See Box). A U.S. success in Afghanistan would also pressure China to become U.S.-energy dependent.

All Roads to Afghanistan Go Through Moscow, China and Iran

U.S. bosses’ military success in Afghanistan depends on supplying their troops, which has become ever more difficult. At present, three-quarters of supplies bound for Afghanistan must pass through Pakistan where "almost half of the US supplies …… [are] pilfered by motley groups of Taliban militants, petty traders and plain thieves…" (Asian Times on Line, 1/27/09)

With the Pakistani rulers less willing or capable of guaranteeing their supplies safe passage, the U.S. rulers must find alternative routes. But, the only possible routes, besides Iran and China, run through either the Caspian Region or Russia, all of which require Russian cooperation. Thus, the U.S. rulers’ big dilemma is how to get it and at what price. Nevertheless, whatever agreement these imperialist butchers reach will only intensify their contradictions and speed up their military confrontation.

Afghan President Karzai too Close to Russia and China

After seven years of racist U. S. terror and genocide against Afghani workers, a resurgent Taliban controls between 50% and 70% of the country and the U.S.-NATO forces are losing the war. To try to salvage the situation, Obama’s approach is to pacify Afghanistan enough to build the pipelines to safely transport energy resources to market. Thus the U.S. bosses are trying something that was unspeakable in the days after 9/11, the "inclusion of the Taliban or Taliban elements in a coalition government." (George Friedman, Stratfor, 1/29/09)

This plan calls for dumping Karzai, who is refusing to go quietly. He is railing against Afghani civilians murdered by U.S. raids and moving closer to Russia and China. Against U.S. opposition, he recently accepted Russian military aid offerings. Also, in Moscow last January 23, Russian and Afghan diplomats "pledged to continue developing Russian-Afghan cooperation." (Asia Times Online, 1/27/09)

Furthermore, Moscow will host a conference on Afghanistan under the aegis of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Russian President Medvedev is adamant that "nothing can be resolved (regarding Afghanistan) without taking into account the collective opinion of states which have an interest in the resolution of the situation".

Russian Imperialists Ready to Defend Their Backyard

Russia will soon approve a new national security strategy that identifies the United States as Russia’s primary rival. It singles out controlling global energy resources as the long-term source of conflict, which could develop into military confrontation. (Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 6 Issue: 2 January 6, 2009) To this end Russian just gave Kyrgyzstan $2.4 billion to kick the U.S. out of its Manas airbase, used to supply allies’ troops in Afghanistan.

Workers, soldiers and students worldwide must realize that capitalism inevitably leads to wider wars and eventually to World War 3. We must break with all politicians and bosses, be it Obama, Putin, Karzai or the religious holy rollers. Let’s turn their imperialist wars into a revolutionary storm to wipe out capitalism and build a communist society where we share and allocate the world’s natural resources according to our needs, not the bosses’ profits.

Russian Ukraine 2009 Gas War

The European Union imports 40% of its gas from Russia, 80% of which transits through the Ukraine. The U.S. encouraged the Ukrainian bosses to shut this pipeline when Russia stopped subsidizing the price of gas sold to the Ukraine. The U.S. bosses were hoping to divide the European and Russian imperialists. Had it been successful, it would have put the EU squarely on the U.S. side, especially on Afghanistan. The gamble failed as the EU pressured the Ukraine to re-open the line. Now Obama can’t count on the EU to pressure Russia. "Given their dependency on the Russians… the Germans, - and many of the Europeans, - are in no position to challenge Russia on anything, least of all on Afghanistan." (Obama Joins The Great Game, George Friedman, Stratfor, 1/19/09)

Racist D.C. Metro Bosses Attack Transit Workers, Riders

The bosses are using the financial crisis to bludgeon workers all over the country, and the action has begun at the D.C. Metro Transit system. The Metro bosses have declared that there is a $154 million operating deficit for the coming fiscal year. That could mean layoffs and position reductions of up to 15% of the workforce. Despite the rising demand for mass transit, the local governments that own Metro have decided to cut service and lay off workers. Whether this is their real plan or just a ploy to justify a fare increase is yet to be seen.

Rank-and-file workers at Metro are getting ready to fight back. A public hearing on cutting back Metro runs in D.C. is planned for February 19 at Metro Headquarters. Workers will be there in large numbers to say no to cutbacks in service, no to layoffs, and no to fare increases, with no help from the union leadership. Although the union contract expired on June 30, 2008, a new one has not been negotiated. The union has refused to mobilize the membership to fight for a new contract. The union president’s excuse is that the workers don’t want to fight, and instead is relying on her political friends. Some good that will do! But many workers remember the mass demonstration we had with communist leadership during the last contract fight and declare that we should do more bold and militant actions.

A fight-back is needed! In addition to service cuts and layoffs, the workers’ pension fund is in trouble, having lost about 1/3 of its value due to the crash, and the bosses are trying to weasel out of their contractual responsibility to make the fund whole. The bosses are building racism by using the crisis to pit D.C. area workers against the mainly black workforce of Metro.

Metro bosses have joined in this racist onslaught and have begun a terror campaign against operators. Minor safety violations, which have always been punished with a written warning, now result in a five-day suspension. Talking on a cell phone while laying over is now a five-day suspension. An operator with a poor work record as defined by the bosses can be terminated without warning, i.e. no final warning. These attacks are to soften up the workers to be savaged by the bosses who want to take out their crisis on our class.

There have been no actual layoffs at Metro since 1995. At that time, we organized large numbers of workers and riders to protest the cuts in service and the loss of jobs. The bosses backed down and reduced their plans for cutbacks. This time the crisis is much more serious, and our efforts must reflect that.

We must unite with the community as well to oppose any fare increase that the bosses may be planning. Our brother and sister workers who use Metro are being squeezed from all sides by the bosses. We must not be part of this.

A system that can find billions (and even trillions!) of dollars for oil wars and to bail out bankers who still get billions in bonuses — but can’t pay Metro workers without further soaking the working class — such a system needs to be smashed with communist revolution. Metro workers and riders should join in this fight.

• OBAMA: SAVE RACIST SYSTEM OVER WORKERS’ DEAD BODIES
• PLP RALLIES AGAINST THE NEW CEO OF RACIST CAPITALISM
• Obama Blesses Torture, Wider Oil War, Wage-Cuts
  • The Sham of ‘Closing’ Guantanamo
  • DEADLIER WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
• Strikers, PLP Agree: ‘MAKE THE BOSSES TAKE THE LOSSES’
• Confront Aerospace Layoffs, Pension Theft with Red-Led Class Struggle
  • Union ‘Leader’ Hopes For ‘Labor Peace’
  • Class Struggle Building For Revolution Our Only Hope
• Salvador’s Election ‘Choices’: Who’s the Next Hangman?
• Jobs, Union Struggles and PL Ideas Pays Off
• Workers’ Protests vs. Bosses’ Crisis Heats Up Iceland, Baltic Nations
  • CAPITALIST CRISIS HITS BALTIC COUNTRIES
• France: Workers Must Unite Immigrants, Youth in Looming General Strike
• General Strike Shuts Guadeloupe
• The Devil Does Wear Prada
• LETTERS
  • PLP: A Compass, A Happy Birthday
  • Constructing Red Fight vs. Layoffs
  • Students, Teachers Reach Out to Marines
  • Mexico: Red School Analyzes Capitalist Exploitation
• PLP Won 6,000 to ‘71 March vs. Racist Unemployment
• Capitalist ‘SILO’ Tax Schemes Threaten All Transit Workers and Riders
  • Our Challenge in LA Transit
• REDEYE
  • Murderous capitalist world
  • Do-gooders rescue evil system
  • Ruling class IS above any law
  • U.S. pushed Korea prostitution
  • Capitalism’s ‘dream’ sweatshops
  • Poisoned on job, can’t win case
  • Churchill, not Stalin, a Hitlerian
• Valkyrie: Fascist movie about nazis versus nazis
• The Crisis of Capitalism: Earthquake for California Workers
  • Communists Fight Budget Cuts, Racism, Liberal Misleaders, Capitalism
  • Our Future Depends on Revolution, Not Reform

OBAMA:
SAVE RACIST SYSTEM OVER WORKERS’ DEAD BODIES

PLP RALLIES AGAINST THE NEW
CEO OF RACIST CAPITALISM

Obama Blesses Torture, Wider Oil War, Wage-Cuts

The Sham of ‘Closing’
Guantanamo

DEADLIER WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

Strikers, PLP Agree: ‘MAKE THE BOSSES TAKE
THE LOSSES’

Confront Aerospace Layoffs, Pension Theft with Red-Led Class Struggle

Union ‘Leader’ Hopes For ‘Labor Peace’

Class Struggle Building For
Revolution Our Only Hope

Salvador’s Election ‘Choices’: Who’s the Next Hangman?

Jobs, Union Struggles and PL Ideas Pays Off

Workers’ Protests vs. Bosses’ Crisis Heats Up Iceland, Baltic Nations

CAPITALIST CRISIS HITS BALTIC COUNTRIES

France: Workers Must Unite Immigrants, Youth in Looming General Strike

General Strike Shuts Guadeloupe

The Devil Does Wear Prada

LETTERS

PLP: A Compass, A Happy Birthday

Constructing Red Fight vs. Layoffs

Students, Teachers Reach
Out to Marines

Mexico: Red School Analyzes
Capitalist Exploitation

PLP Won 6,000 to ‘71 March vs. Racist Unemployment

Capitalist ‘SILO’ Tax Schemes Threaten All Transit Workers and Riders

Our Challenge in LA Transit

REDEYE

Murderous capitalist world

Do-gooders rescue evil system

Ruling class IS above any law

U.S. pushed Korea prostitution

Capitalism’s ‘dream’ sweatshops

Poisoned on job, can’t win case

Churchill, not Stalin, a Hitlerian

Valkyrie: Fascist movie about nazis versus nazis

The Crisis of Capitalism: Earthquake for California Workers

Communists Fight Budget Cuts, Racism, Liberal Misleaders, Capitalism

Our Future Depends on Revolution, Not Reform