NEW YORK CITY, October 16 — TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 representing most of NYC’s transit workers sent 20 buses to the October 2 “one nation” rally in Washington, D.C. However, many buses were largely empty. The international TWU “contingent” of mass transit, airline and railroad workers was nothing more than a distribution point for lunch, T-shirts and temporary tattoos. Many Local 100 members, including recently laid-off transit workers, were motivated to go to fight for jobs and against MTA bosses. But the rally was nothing more than a big pre-election photo-op for Democrats.
Preparing for the rally, in September PLP protested at two of five MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) public hearings on fare hikes, confronting the MTA Board face to face. Along with a few spirited transit riders and workers, PLP pointed out that layoffs, service cuts and fare hikes hit the city’s mainly black, Latino and immigrant workers the hardest.
PLP’s goal on October 2 and in confronting the MTA Board was to build mass, anti-racist class struggle for communism among students, workers and soldiers internationally. We knew that the rally was a scam to persuade U.S. workers to vote for agents of super-rich Wall Street capitalists and that the MTA board’s mind was made up on fare hikes. But PLP struggles to influence workers and riders towards uniting for international communist revolution.
Speakers confronting the Board enabled more and more workers and riders to learn about the role of Wall Street banks in causing the budget gap, service cuts, layoffs and fare hikes.
At the hearings crowds chanted, “Fire the MTA”; “Cut the banks, not the buses”; “No cuts, no war, the cuts are for the war”; “They got bailed out, we got sold out. Make the bosses, take the losses.” Speakers defied the three-minute time limit. The crowd demanded more time for speakers who attacked the MTA Board. The unions had none of that energy in D.C. on October 2.
At the Bronx MTA hearing on fare hikes, PLP distributed transit supplements tying U.S. mass transit cuts to the bosses’ need to finance their wars against other imperialists, the richest most powerful capitalist ruling classes. Blind and wheelchair-bound speakers cited the Board’s disgusting disregard of disabled passengers.
One wheelchair-bound woman testified she had to call the fire department to get carried out of the station in the middle of the night because laid-off station agents were not there to assist her.
Nearly every speaker exposed the hearings as an MTA scam to pretend the MTA “listens to the people.” One pointed out that although some local politicians spoke against the hikes, capitalist money backs both the MTA Board and the politicians.
Another speaker, a one-time real estate lawyer and urban studies expert, admitted that real estate developers calculate exactly how much property values rise from being close to mass transit. He proposed that instead of hiking fares the government tax landlords based on their proximity to mass transit.
In both hearings and at the October 2 rally PLP made contacts with transit workers. While we failed to organize as many workers as we wanted to attend the hearings or the October 2 rally, we did not sit out the struggle.
The working class may not win reform struggles for jobs, higher wages or lower fares, even with militant fight-backs. But the recent battles against these transit layoffs show that unions organize only lawyers and politicians, not workers. The recent MTA lawsuit to overturn Local 100’s legally-binding 2009 arbitration award reveals that when bosses break their own law, they get away with it because they, not workers, hold the dictatorship of state power.
Only a May 4 break-away rally that surprised both Local 100 leaders and cops delayed station-agent layoffs. It was a short-lived victory but only mass class struggle achieved anything at all. On May 4, only hours after the break-away demonstration, a judge placed a temporary injunction against layoffs until the MTA held public hearings on station-booth closings.
PLP struggles consistently to use all these struggles as schools for communist ideas and actions.

BROOKLYN, NY, October 12 — “What’s the purpose of these schools? Is it for you to get educated OR to keep you under control?” This is what one PLP member asked his class last week in response to this schools’ administration harassing students about their participation in the October 2 March for Jobs in Washington, D.C. Many students attended this event, sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers, with family and friends, as well as staff members.
The administration has pursued campaigns of intimidation before when students and staff members have attended various events together, such as when teachers and students worked alongside each other in helping to rebuild New Orleans. This effort to create a climate of fear and hysteria has backfired on them before and will again. The Washington rally was attended by politicians as well as thousands of students from all over the East Coast.
This witchhunt is another racist attack by the administration. Who is investigating the students from mostly white specialized schools who attended the rally? Nobody. Is anyone investigating the private school students who attended? Why investigate the black and Latino students and their teachers who went? Who is investigating the New York City Comptroller, who brought a busload of students as well?
Better yet, let’s investigate the administration. Year after year they program Haitian students to take history classes with uncertified teachers from other departments. Then these students face the State Regents Test with no preparation.
Parents plan to take this to the Parent-Teacher Association. As one parent said, “These students should be in D.C. fighting for jobs — this is exactly what the young generation should be doing!” When teachers passed out fliers announcing the rally at the last parent meeting, all the parents were supportive. Because of growing unemployment (in one community near the school the unemployment rate is 20%) many parents encouraged their students to attend the protest. Some even attended it themselves.
This attack on students and teachers is part of a citywide attack on public education. While the Mayor continues to scapegoat both the union and teachers, it is increasingly crucial that we fight back. Students are the main targets of these attacks — whether it’s overcrowded classes, lack of textbooks or rising transit fares. The school administration, while failing miserably to provide a decent education, gets an A+ for harassment and intimidation. Communists have always led and must continue to lead the fight-back.
Students are plenty angry about being interrogated about what they do on their own time. They are getting a real education in fight-back as they take leadership in planning a mass campaign against the administration. This will include everything from petitions to demonstrations. The school bosses want to frighten teachers and students with their investigations.
We must take the offensive, put the administration on trial and be bold in our defense of the October 2 marchers. Capitalist education teaches all of us to be docile and passive, but with the leadership and support of communists in the PLP, we have confidence that young people will conduct “investigations” of their own and come to the right conclusion about the need for a communist society based on egalitarianism and dignity!

PLP must go where the workers are, get our newspaper around and motivate the class struggle. Reforms are not the workers´ way to victory but can be used as a way of learning to fight, since what we really need is to destroy this murderous system. The workers of the Mexican electricity company have been on strike since March, and they need solidarity as much from the outside as the inside. We need to make our presence known there. We will also motivate the workers from Volkswagen with our solidarity.

Our class ties will grow as well as our feelings of brotherhood. We will grow and learn from the class struggle there. That´s what we communists do. We learn a lot from strikes such as the one from Stella d’ Oro in New York, and they elevate our level, encourage our revolutionary spirit and our commitment to fight until we accomplish our objective. We contribute collectively and win new comrades to communism in the struggle, and we expand the distribution of our newspaper.

While we learn and teach, we prepare for the destruction of the capitalist system and building a new society in the service of workers, where everyone will have what they need and where collectivism, not individualism, will determine our actions.         

There are 10 billionaires in Mexico, includng Carlos Slim, the second biggest billionaire in the world. Meanwhile, 70% of the population is poor, the tenth part of the poorest population earns 1.1% in income, 53% are malnourished, 24% are extremely poor and 18% of indigenous children don´t attend school. The capitalist system is unable to meet the most basic needs of workers, but if we build the PLP, we can make our own communist history which will solve these problems.  

Mexico is the second largest oil provider for the United States, with oil reserves of 47 trillion barrels which cost about $102 trillion. Oil represents about 40% of Mexico’s internal production, with 4 million barrels a day. Mexico is the world´s 5th largest oil producer; 75% of this oil ends up in the United States. The petrochemical industry provides Mexico with a profit of more than $45 million, but 140,000 of its workers get dirt-poor wages as a result of the deals made by the union to serve the greed of the oil bosses.

Places such as Chiapas and Tabasco are towns in misery, with killings and drug trafficking everyday happenings, and the workers don’t understand where the profit they create as part of the industry goes to the bosses’ pockets. The supposed achievement of the union, putting five of its representatives on the board of directors of the company, hasn´t benefited the workers. It has helped the oil companies to exploit and oppress the working class even more.

There are more than 5,000 assembly plants along the border of the United States, the second most important area in the economy, employing about two million workers. Because of the NAFTA treaty, the bosses can get the most work out of them and maintain their profit even in a crisis. The NAFTA agreement has generated more poverty and allowed international companies to exploit Mexican workers even more, as the profits of these companies show earnings of thousands of dollars even in the time of crisis.  

Drug-trafficking generates about $40 billion dollars annually and is the third generator of profits in Mexico according to Seminario. The bourgeoisie profits, even if they hypocritically say they are fighting drugs. They need the violence, killings and kidnappings to intimidate the workers and keep them passive.

The supposed fight against drug-trafficking also works as a screen to disappear and kill union leaders, human rights activists, reporters and politicians that step out of line. Curfews have been imposed like those that were used in dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile. The police raid homes for supposed drug traffickers, when they really know their names and where they are hiding. There are cases such as the 72 immigrants to the United States who were killed in August and found after some of the workers that escaped filed a report. They still don’t want to say in whose house the others were killed and are scared to tell the truth, because they know the the power of the owner. In reality the ruling class is knee-deep in this, and that is why the investigators have never found an answer.          

Neither the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), nor the PAN (National Action Party), PDR (Party of the Democratic Revolution) can solve the problems of the workers, because they all represent the billionaires and drug traffickers. All the things they represent are products of the capitalist system: poverty, exploitation, oppression and corruption.  

The union leaders aren´t happy because the workers haven´t been passive. According to the informative bulletin from IMMEX this year, there have been 918 strikes and demonstrations approved, but only five have been carried out. Volkswagen preferred to set up in Guanajuato and not Puebla, because the average wage in Puebla is higher. Also, in Puebla there is an old tradition of struggle, and the bosses don´t want to deal with it.

 But now the Volkswagen workers approved a strike for Wednesday the 29th, mainly fighting for a wage increase. We will be with the workers, just as we were with them in the teachers’ strike in Oaxaca and the strike from UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and will bring our communist ideas, because wage movements alone do not fix the lives of workers.  

The history of the working class is full of triumphs against the bosses. These are the real stories that capitalists fear and these are the struggles that today continue to inspire workers around the world. The strike of thousands of French workers against their bosses for their pensions, the demonstration of thousands in India against unemployment and for their pensions; these tell the capitalists that we have potential.

A spark lights a flame, but we need to improve the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. We can´t look only at the immediate demands, because we limit our real possibilities.  However, the struggles that are happening in the world help us learn that the working class can become class conscious and break away from these imaginary limits, erasing all capitalists with an international communist revolution. 



CHICAGO, IL, October 1 — The occupation of the Whittier field house is in its third week. It appears that following one week of direct confrontation with the CPS (Chicago Public Schools) security (see CHALLENGE, 10-6-10), the city’s police, politicians, ruling class and their school board are waiting them out.

CPS, planning the demolition of the building, refused the mothers’ demand for a library and after-school facility, so they have begun transforming this place into the library and community center they want. Volunteer librarians and donations of hundreds of books have transformed the field house into a near-functioning library, proving we don’t need these politicians and the banks and businesses they serve to provide for our needs.

The predominantly Latina mothers are beginning to see this as more than a struggle for a school library because they now know it is simply 1 of 160 Chicago schools, mainly black and Latino, that don’t have libraries!

We are mobilizing the Party and our friends around this struggle:

• Chicago State University professors have circulated a petition supporting the mothers and brought black students to the field house.

• One student who previously had made several anti-immigrant comments in class changed when she went to show her support and met some of the mothers.

• A postal worker raised this struggle in his union, took up a collection and organized a BBQ at the field house.

• Comrades have done overnight guard duty.

• When some mothers were getting sick, the PLP County hospital club and friends helped organize a health fair for them. As one comrade took a mother’s blood pressure, she whispered, “I really like your paper. I’ve shown it to some of my co-workers.” She and others have met to discuss and write this article for CHALLENGE.

She then described the 7-year struggle for this library, saying her involvement initially was very minimal due to being driven by the many problems in her life pulling her away from it, “sometimes going to the local school council meetings, but mostly I just got information from one mother who went.”

At times very stoic and at other times very emotional and teary-eyed, she described the difficulties of being a single mother raising three children and her history of being terribly mis-treated by her ex-husband. She said her new boyfriend, who is black, treats her much better but it has increased a long-standing rift with her family due to their racism.

She noted the stress on her job and lack of respect by her boss who is always trying to put her down. Then she smiles when mentioning her discussions with co-workers about this school library fight.

The mothers now see a larger picture, how this potential demolition is part of a long-standing process of privatization of “public” property, tied to gentrification and the demolition of public housing ten years ago and the ongoing downsizing of public health care.

On the one hand, this struggle highlights the workers’ courage fighting back and the potential for widening class struggle. But it also highlights the necessity of PLP’s role within it to build the long-term personal ties and a sharp ideological exposé of how racist gentrification and privatization are not simply “bad decisions” but are necessary to capitalism.

During economic crises and imperialist wars, the bosses suck even more funds from all social services, from public schools and housing as well as squeeze profits from workers’ wages, pensions and health insurance.

However this struggle turns out, state power still belongs to the bosses. Their plan right now seems to be to wait the community out, but that too could change. One thing’s for sure: this struggle will change the parents and the community too.

Our Party must step up our efforts within our own mass organizations to support the Whittier rebels. This is especially important because within the struggles against these attacks we fight against the cancerous ideas of racism, private ownership and profits and the divisive nationalism that prevents our class from uniting to fight for a society that will destroy these evils — communism.