PARIS, October 31 — Two million workers and youth took to the streets in massive nation-wide demonstrations — 170,000 marching in Paris — to protest the ruling class’s raising the retirement age and the rising unemployment caused by the bosses’ economic crisis. A movement that began in the spring over pensions broadened to encompass a fight for jobs amid workers’ rage over the tremendous disparity in wealth between the ruling class and the working class.

Large numbers continue to join the anti-retirement demonstrations against low wages and President Sarkozy’s connivance with the wealthy. The focus on retirement “reform” stems from the fact that it affects the largest number of people. “The wage problem is overshadowed by the jobs problem which is overshadowed by the retirement problem,” explained Antoine, an unemployed worker in his forties. “It all results from the unequal distribution of wealth.” And all that is integral to capitalism’s drive for profits. Only a communist revolution that destroys this system and replaces it with one run by and for workers can end these evils.

Initially Sarkozy and the sellout union leaders had figured that some one-day strikes and demonstrations would allow the workers to vent their anger and then the pension changes would sail through. But this became a miscalculation when the rank and file pushed past the union leaders, organizing unlimited strikes, with polls reporting from 65% to 71% of the population supporting them. It then became difficult for the union hacks to back out of the struggle and to control it.

While falling short of a general strike resembling the uprising in 1968, this rank-and-file-led movement spread to accomplish the following:

• Halted 50% of industry due to a lack of raw materials and fuel;

• A 33-day strike which included dock and refinery workers, aided by other workers supporting them, paralyzed 40% of oil refinery production, idling 99 ships, including 20 crude oil tankers and 15 refined fuel tankers, in harbors from Fos (near Marseilles) to Le Havre, costing the oil companies up to 300 million euros ($420 million);

Blocked major highways leading to industrial parks and occupied toll booths, allowing free passage to drivers;

University cafeteria workers provided free meals to students;

Supportera joined with striking sanitation workers to dump garbage in front of the homes of leading CEOs;

Caused cancellation of half the flights at Orly Airport on October 28;

A hundred youth fought a police tear-gas attack after a demonstration in the ship-building city of Saint-Nazaire;

Student unions shut six universities;

Sanitation strikers blocked truck depots in Nantes and other cities, creating huge piles of garbage throughout the area.

Workers are very conscious of the tremendous disparity in wealth and blame the rich — and Sarkozy who they view as representing the rich — for the economic crisis and resulting threats to their jobs and to the gains made since World War II. Rank-and-file refinery strikers told a PL’er at the Total Company facilities on the Atlantic coast that their grandparents had fought for many of their gains in wages, vacations and pensions and that not fighting to retain them would be a betrayal of their forebears.

This fight against the government, and the workers’ view of the struggle as one between classes, to a certain degree reflected a political consciousness which the reformist union leaders did not foresee when they tried to limit the strikes to one-day walkouts. Many workers feel that the union officials are betraying the movement. The sentiment of auto and rail workers and truckers was expressed by one, saying the union leaders “have been doing that for 40 years. Urge people to go out on strike, wave red flags and then negotiate with the bosses. But who gives a damn about the union bureaucrats. At least we’re fighting and that’s all that counts. Won’t be a revolution but it [is a] chance to show them what we think.”

The union mis-leaders’ reformism was stark when including in a press statement a demand for “respect for private property” which implied a condemnation of the militant youth who were fighting the cops

But the inter-generational unity of the working class was mirrored in the support for the strikers shown by the youth who not only closed hundreds of high schools but showed up at picket lines to back the workers. The picketing workers point to that development with pride. Both young and old felt that by fighting Sarkozy’s raising the retirement age they were fighting for more jobs for first-time job-seekers.

However, a weakness in the struggle was reflected in the movement’s weak links with the 400,000 undocumented immigrant workers, but possibly even more importantly with the millions of documented immigrant and French-born largely Arab and black African workers who face daily racist discrimination. They are a potent force that could immeasurably strengthen the working class’s overall fight.

Workers at the docks and refineries and on the railroad have now voted to suspend their strikes. But meanwhile workers in six Air France unions have called for a strike for November 4 and another mass demonstration is planned for November 6, despite the passage of the pension law changes and Sarkozy’s expected signature.

Assuming the enactment of this law, and the presumed scaling down of the struggle, it will have reflected the failure of even this massive movement to defeat the rulers’ attack on workers’ pensions. On the other hand the movement has sharpened the class struggle and the class consciousness of millions of workers who have stood ready to fight the bosses and their government and recognize the tie between both.

This consciousness and anger of the working class in France cries out for revolutionary communist leadership. The absence of the latter is very evident. The French “Communist” Party, which has had a big influence in the main union, the CGT, long ago abandoned communist principles and actively tries to steer the rank-and-file’s militancy into voting for them.

Certainly fertile ground exists on which to advance revolutionary communist consciousness. This could lead to workers’ recognition of the need to destroy the entire profit system, the bosses and their government servants; and not just to try to maintain the reforms which the ruling class inevitably takes away as part of its attempt to deal with capitalism’s crisis. 

BOSTON, MA., October 29 — About 50 students and faculty from Roxbury Community College (RCC) marched to the police station today to protest the vicious October 22 police beating of a sixteen-year-old-youth in the Administration Building. The youth had run away from a Department of Youth Services facility in order to be present at the birth of his child.

A student recorded the incident with her cell-phone camera and posted it on Youtube while a cop attempted to intimidate her. If not for her, the incident would have been swept under the rug.  No one except those who had witnessed it knew it had happened. The RCC administration kept it silent for almost a week, helping the police cover up their crime. They didn’t address it on the campus until the Youtube video made it an issue in Boston.

At that point, the RCC President Gomes and VP Mercomes tried to distance the college from the ”bad press” since “the boy was not an RCC student.” They showed their true colors as lackeys of the local ruling class, who will do anything to protect the interests of capitalism. 

Students immediately organized a response, posted signs around the school announcing a march to the police station. Once there, students expressed their outrage at the police and college administration while demanding the firing of the cops guilty of the beating. One student spoke about the police “serving and protecting” the rich and not the working class, giving a political analysis to the class anger being expressed.

Now it remains the task of these student leaders along with PL’ers and other anti-racists to organize the whole RCC community to take a stand against racist police terror. 

The workers of the world are struggling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Jobs are disappearing, wages are falling, and millions of people are being thrown out of their homes and into the streets. In the U.S., over half of the federal budget is going to fight imperialist wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and the rest is being funneled into the hands of the capitalist class through bank bailouts and other giveaways.
Naturally, the ruthless greed and relentless attacks provoke anger in workers. This mass anger represents an opportunity for communists, who must strive to transform this unorganized and often misdirected anger into a mass communist movement. To do this, we must expose one of the bosses’ primary ideological weapons: elections.

Elections are a Ruling-Class Charade

The controlling forces in society — government (including elections), cops, military, schools, culture, etc. — comprise what we refer to as “the state” and are funded, organized and led by the ruling class. They function solely to reinforce the existing, racist structure: bosses exploiting, workers exploited. Elections, no matter who is elected, can NEVER change this.
 The 2008 election provides a recent glaring example of this general statement: Millions of workers turned out to cast their vote for Barack Obama, the highest voter turnout in decades. Perhaps more than in any recent election, many who turned out were expressing their anger at imperialist war, racism, environmental degradation, bank bailouts and foreclosures.
Yet, immediately after being elected, Obama proved that he serves the bosses: He intensified the war in Afghanistan, he refused to fight racist police attacks while always defending the racist cops, he intensified the racist attacks against workers by militarizing the southern U.S. border and he continued the economic policies of the Bush Administration.

It’s Only a Fair Election if U.S. Bosses Approve

Elections are primarily an ideological weapon to disarm the working class, and do not represent a high ideal of  “freedom” or “democracy.” When the “free expression of the people” doesn’t conform to the interests of U.S. imperialists, they freely ignore their own words.
• Patrice Lumumba, the first “democratically elected” Prime Minister of Congo, was assassinated under orders from the U.S. and Belgian governments.
• Salvador Allende, a socialist elected as president of Chile, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the C.I.A.
• In Guatemala, the C.I.A. organized, funded and equipped the 1954 coup against the elected government of Jacobo Guzmán. The ensuing civil war resulted in more than 200,000 dead.
•uMohammed Mossadegh was the elected Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953. When he challenged the interests of U.S. and British oil bosses, he was deposed after a C.I.A.-backed coup.
These examples and others make it clear that “democracy” means nothing to the bosses when their imperialist goals are threatened. But when masses of workers view elections as the only route to societal change, the bosses’ power is secure.
Only Workers Fighting Back Can Change Things
Just as the hollowness of the bosses’ “democratic” ideology is plain when we look at the historical record, so is it equally apparent that only when workers have abandoned the electoral circus and collectively struggled against the bosses have they been able to win any real reforms.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 where over 200,000 workers went on strike; the 1886 May 1st strike that included over 350,000 workers, and tens of thousands of other strikes led to the eight-hour workday. The police and the army brutalized and murdered the strikers throughout this entire period.
The Civil Rights Movement and the push to end segregation was the fruit of the multi-racial struggle against racism. Before the 1960s, they were often led by communists. They organized unions in the South, they held rallies against lynchings and attacked the Klan. For leading the fight against racism they were attacked by the FBI, murdered by police and Klan vigilantes.

Reforms Won’t Liberate the Working Class

The reforms that workers fought and died for were granted by the capitalist class as temporary measures designed to pacify the masses so that power ultimately remained with the capitalist class. The decrease in working-class consciousness and militancy has allowed the bosses to roll back these reforms: The unchallenged devastation of the Detroit auto-industry illustrates the corruption of union leadership. The U.S. ruling class is unleashing racist attacks on the border, on the job, in schools and overseas that the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movement fought valiantly against.
If the working class wants true liberation we must recognize the class nature of the state and give up on phony elections and half-hearted reforms.
Workers have to seize state power through violent revolution and establish the dictatorship of the working class. We can’t let our fellow workers be pulled in by the elections charade because no matter who gets elected it will be the capitalist class which is in power. If you are sick of the daily exploitation and degradation, don’t vote, organize the working class; don’t vote, fight racism and sexism; don’t vote, build Progressive Labor Party. Don’t vote, BUILD REVOLUTION!

Billions of people cheered the recent rescue of 33 heroic Chilean miners. This outpouring of admiration and sympathy for the workers and their families encourages our revolutionary communist Party. It shows that worldwide class-based solidarity is indeed possible.
But the cheers and tears that filled the world’s media for the miners rescued from the San Esteban Primera Company’s San Jose copper and gold mine occurred amid an orgy of Chilean patriotic nationalism led by billionaire President Sebastián Piñera. It should not obscure the collaboration of profit-hungry mining bosses with Chile’s capitalist government which caused this disaster and many others.
José Rojo, a 20-year veteran miner, charged that the bosses had “turned a blind eye to the San José mine. They told us it was coming down; every so often there were cave-ins. They knew it was going to happen. At times when I was there with the Jumbo drill, I had to stop because I saw that the roof was coming down on me.” (Argentine daily, “Pagina 12”) On the day of the cave-in, he was lucky — the machinery he operated was broken, so he was not at work!
Philippe Sanchez, 51, who worked at the mine between 1987 and 1999 and whose nephew was among those trapped, told a reporter, “It is one of the worst mines in the area. It has always been dangerous. There are accidents all the time and when you are hurt, you had better not complain or you will be sacked — there is a culture of silence.”
Two factors saved the miners: their own courageous working-class egalitarianism and the capitalists’ opportunistic grab at a rare chance to appear benevolent. In the crucial first 17 days, the miners, left for dead by the pit’s owners, selflessly rationed scant food supplies. “They had two little spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours,” said Dr Sergio Aguila, who was part of the rescue team. (London Telegraph, 8/24/10)  They took turns at finding water and trying to get messages to the outside. That’s when the capitalists decided to cash in and launched their nationalistic orgy.
Just like West Virginia’s Massey Coal Company whose illegal unsafe conditions killed almost 30 miners this year and the deaths in the Chinese Wangjialing coal mine earlier this year (an average of seven miners die in China every day; 24 miners die every year in Chile), the capitalists are happy to pay fines rather than paying for more expensive safe working conditions for miners. Less than a week after the drama in Chile, at least 25 miners perished in preventable incidents in China and Ecuador. The yearly worldwide mine death toll numbers in the thousands and doubles with deaths from lung disease.
Under capitalism, we, the working class and its allies, are locked in a death struggle with the bosses that profit-driven mine disasters lay bare. In every case, it’s cost-cutting shortcuts on safety procedures that keep killing workers. With capitalism rampant, concern for the bottom line continues to trump workers’ well-being.
For safety on the job, workers need the power to make it safe. That can only come with communism, when workers rule society and the capitalists and their profit drive at any cost no longer exist.
This San José mine has had 80 “accidents” since 2004 when a miner died after a cave-in. In 2006, a truck driver was also killed in an “accident.” That same year 182 workers were injured, 56 of them seriously. The mine was closed in 2007 after a geologist died in a rock explosion. The owners were charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was dropped after they agreed to pay the family $170,000.
To re-open the mine, the government required that San Esteban construct an emergency ladder that would lead to the surface from the very shelter where the 33 trapped miners huddled together. The miners got only one-third of the way up before discovering that the mine owners had never bothered to finish the ladder to the top! Moreover, one of the trapped miners said that when they reached the shelter itself, “The energy was cut off and there was no ventilation,” forcing them to sleep in the shafts.
Continuing their arrogance, the mine bosses did not pay the miners’ families while their breadwinners were trapped, forcing their families to rely on charity. When a court ruled that the company freeze $1.8 million for future compensation to the miners, the bosses threatened to declare bankruptcy.  Meanwhile, San Esteban is poised to open another mine in the Atacama Desert! The union leadership has proven ineffective in rallying workers to fight these bosses because they’re defenders of the capitalist system and therefore did virtually nothing to fight for the workers during the previous 80 “accidents.”
Chile’s politicians are partners in these capitalist crimes. President Piñera, who has milked this rescue mission for every ounce of patriotic fervor he could mount, ran for president on a platform of privatizing Chile’s copper mines, provoking miners’ strikes against his proposal.
Piñera, a billionaire businessman, is a political descendant of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime his brother Jose served as minister of labor and of mining. Under Pinochet, Jose Pinera pushed through a Constitutional Mining Law in 1981 that privatized much of Chilean mining, leading to more severe declines in safety conditions.
The right-wing president has tried to claim ownership of the rescue effort, appearing at the mine site and attempting to turn the entire operation into an exercise in patriotism. He furthered capitalism’s classless myth that “we’re all in this together” as a nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even more shamefully, Socialist Party Senator María Isabel Allende Bussi, the daughter of former president Salvador Allende (who Pinochet had assassinated with CIA help), embraced Piñera at the mine, responding to Piñera’s call for “national unity.” The revolutionary left of the 1970s that fought the fascists, conservatives and liberals, virtually disappeared during Pinochet’s murderous regime. Now it’s necessary to build the Progressive Labor Party in Chile to take on the Piñera-phony leftist gang-up.
Chile is sharply divided between rich and poor. Chile’s bosses subject the indigenous Mapuche people to vicious racist attacks, driving them off their ancestral land. Currently, 34 Mapuche fighters, jailed under the Pinochet era’s “anti-terror” laws, are continuing a two-month hunger strike, demanding an end to those laws. There has been no media circus around the efforts of these anti-racists.
Chile’s modest 4.1% annual per-capita growth rate over the past two decades has been accompanied by widening social and economic inequality. Fourteen percent of Chile’s population — 2.3 million people — live in poverty, with millions more barely making it above the poverty line.
Lucrative book and movie deals with U.S. media giants, absolving the guilty pit operators, await the traumatized miners. That’s their next form of exploitation under capitalism in this age of weak class consciousness. Not so long ago, however, mine cave-ins helped spur communist organizing. It is our Party’s task today to rekindle that revolutionary working-class spirit.
Communist revolution is the path towards freeing the working class from racism and exploitation, and establishing workers’ power.

Box 1

‘SAVIOR’ CHILE CHIEF PINERA IS U.S. BOSSES’ LACKEY
Harvard-educated Pinera’s close ties to the U.S. ruling class shaped his self-serving, U.S.-boosting crisis management. He immediately put mining minister Laurence Golborne — a former boss at Exxon Mobil’s Chilean subsidiary — in charge. Pinera owes a good part of his fortune to his recent sale of Chilevision TV to Time Warner. Two years ago, Pinera was a keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. (Rockefeller and his daughter serve as its advisors.) Pre-presidential Pinera touted “New Horizons for Opportunities” to potential U.S. imperialist investors.

Box 2

U.S. COVERAGE REFLECTS GROWING SPLIT AMONG BOSSES

Back in the U.S., capitalist rivals for state power in the mid-term elections seek to turn the San Jose “miracle” to their own purposes. Tea-Party booster Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal trumpeted (10/14/10), “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.” That’s because, the Journal says, the drill used in it came from a small, unregulated company in Pennsylvania.
On the other hand, the liberal, Obama-loving Brookings Institution brays, “An Act of People, Leaders and Good Governance.” Brookings just as fancifully insists that the workers survived mainly because of extensive Chilean government regulation. The liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalism that Obama serves needs tighter control of the economy by Washington for its current and future wars. Financing current U.S. military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia and looming conflict with Iran, China, and Russia requires enforced fiscal focus.