A report from friends of the Party travelling in Haiti:

About 100 trade unionists and students
listened attentively to a Cuban diplomat speak about the Cuban Revolution. This political
forum was organized by the teachers’ union as part of a campaign to raise the political
consciousness of their constituency as well as the Haitian masses.

After the Cuban diplomat’s talk, members of the audience raised some interesting questions about how the world viewed the Cuban and Haitian revolutions and how the reversal of socialism impacted Cuban society. Then a university student asked the speaker if the Cuban government had publicly criticized Brazil for supplying MINUSTAH with the vast majority of their troops (MINUSTAH is the UN military force which occupies Haiti today). The student pointed out that since Cuba and Brazil have an alliance, Cuba’s criticism would carry a lot of weight in exposing MINUSHTAH’S role in advancing U.S. imperialism’s agenda for Haiti.

The diplomat’s response to the student drew an angry reaction from many in the audience. She said, while making it clear that this was the official position of the Cuban government, that Cuba would not criticize Brazil because this was “not Cuba’s business” and the “Haitian people have to work out their own problems.” Like any other slick liberal politician, she pretended to take the high moral ground, making it seem as though taking a stand in solidarity with Haitians was equivalent to appropriating their struggle.

The 20,000 MlNUSTAH troops that occupy Haiti today replaced the 22,OOO U.S troops that seized the Haitian airport the day after the earthquake. Their convoys ride through the teeming streets of Port-au-Prince in full riot gear with machine guns conspicuously displayed, conveying power and control. They are doing nothing to minimize the wretched misery of the 1.5 million Haitians made homeless by the earthquake.

MINUSTAH has shot into anti-government demonstrations, arrested and threatened radical students with their lives, and aided the Haitian police in murdering prisoners. Without MINUSTAH or other troops terrorizing the masses, the plans of the Haitian bourgeoisie and U.S. capitalists to reshape Haiti would be impossible to implement.

Cuba’s refusal to oppose this repression exposes more than its opportunism. It exposes the true failure of socialism. Since socialist Cuba maintains commodity production and must, therefore, compete in the world capitalist market, it has joined with Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia to form the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). ALBA is an economic regional bloc that will strengthen their hands in competing with U.S. imperialism.

Progressive Labor Party, on the other hand, makes a complete break with this capitalist framework. We are building a new international communist movement that has learned from the reversal of the old one. One of the main lessons is that communists must make the politics of building egalitarianism primary over economic advancement or else we will lose it all, just like the USSR and China did. Cuba is rapidly moving down this same path. For the Cuban government today, economic alliances come before international working-class solidarity. This is an important lesson for all the Haitians, and others, who still look to Cuba as a model for social change. 

Melanie Gutermuth is a twenty-five-year-old veteran. She served in the Army for four years. Since the completion of her service, she has been greeted with twelve months of unemployment. Joseph Jacobo is an Iraq war veteran. At the end of his military service, only the streets welcomed him home. He has been homeless since his return. Melanie and Joseph are two among hundreds of thousands of unemployed and/or homeless veterans.

There is a lot of talk about “taking care” of veterans returning from war, but the realities of capitalism, the system of profit we live under, hit them just as hard as their fellow
civilian working-class brothers and sisters. The Department of Labor statistics report that the number of unemployed veterans has increased to more than 250,000 and the Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that over 200,000 veterans are currently homeless. While some claim that widespread problems among veterans such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or substance abuse are to blame, a closer look at capitalism exposes the real root of the issues veterans are faced with.

Capitalism is an economic system based on profit. In order to remain competitive with other bosses around the globe, U.S. bosses must maximize profits by exploiting workers as much as possible. Under the best circumstances, some members of the working class are allowed to live comfortably. The profits earned through the super exploitation of most black and Latino workers have been sufficient to keep the U.S. bosses on top. In the current economic crisis though, this is no longer enough and mass lay-offs and unemployment become unavoidable.

Although this crisis began due to some major calculation errors on the part of the big banks, economic crises are inevitable under capitalism. The drive for maximum profit will always cause these crises. As long as we continue to allow this system to exist, the working class will suffer at the hand of the ruling class’ greed. In order to guarantee that veterans and all workers have a place to live and a means for survival, we must build a communist society which will be run in the interest of the working class. This means that society will be run by workers in order to meet the needs of the whole working class.

Soldiers, sailors and marines have the potential to be the most important workers in this struggle. We are in the unique position to have been given weapons and sent into the most unstable and strategically important areas of the world that the U.S. bosses want to control. Armed with the revolutionary understanding that capitalism has nothing to offer the working class besides misery, we have the power to turn the guns around and replace this profit system with communism. Join Progressive Labor Party in the struggle to turn the bosses’ “Army strong” into a revolutionary movement for communism. 

I work in a pharmaceutical plant in the Bronx. Approximately 200 workers are Latino and about 30 are black. When I told several co-workers I was writing an article for CHALLENGE I asked them what I should write about. They said, “the racism of the factory.” Guys, this one is for you.

When the manager does hire, he mostly hires black temporary workers, using them for the two months that the temp agency, not the factory, pays their wages. Then, when the company has to decide if they will hire them, the company fires most but keeps what they call the few “good workers,” or favorites that they think will produce the most profits for the company.

The night crew that I’m on has 60 workers,
almost half of whom are black. The morning crew outnumbers us 3 to 1, yet the bosses still have us compete with the morning crew for more production. The bosses even told us that if the morning shift finds a mistake from our work we have to find TWO mistakes from their shift. The night crew has always been pressured to work harder than the morning crew because of our small numbers.

Our boss tries to keep us divided from our morning-shift brothers and sisters, yet he fails to do so. We stay united on the same issues, like fighting for better air conditioning in the factory. Once it was so hot a worker almost passed out due to heat exhaustion. At a recent company meeting intended to be about how much we were slacking off and costing the company money, we spoke one after another turning it into a meeting about our concerns. We supported each other concerning the heat. We controlled that meeting.

This is why we need to organize to fight for communism; a society built upon workers’ needs, where the workers lead every aspect of society. Under communism our meetings wouldn’t be based upon the bosses profit but simply what we workers need to figure out to get it done. Bosses will be a thing of the past. We won’t need any bosses standing around getting rich off of our labor telling us how we need to make them more money.

Most of my co-workers I’ve talked to recognize the racism running the factory and dividing the workers. The bosses just made a new rule that divides workers more, giving us separate lunch schedules, and preventing us from socializing with one another. Some of the black workers on the job can see the racist ways of the company but blame it on their Latino brothers and sisters. I struggle with them not to fall for another “divide and conquer” tool of the bosses.

The bosses need racism, and not only to keep workers divided. When they want to increase their profits, they hire immigrant workers, pay them less and/or don’t give them any benefits, and tell us that they are stealing our jobs. In our case, the disproportionally black night-shift workers are
being worked harder to produce the same
extreme amount of profits as the morning crew.

Now I have four workers on my job that regularly receive CHALLENGE. They all really enjoy reading the paper. They love how it’s written by the workers for workers. They find it encouraging to read about all the other workers around the world experiencing the same racist exploiting cruelty by the bosses. We need to have these discussions on the job about what concerns us, continuing to struggle with each other. The only people we should be fighting are the bosses, just as we stood up to the district manager, for they don’t care about workers’ needs. Only a communist revolution can end the tyranny of these money-hungry bosses, and allow us to unite as one international multi-racial working class. 

STRASBOURG, July 31 — In what bosses in France hope will be a trend-setting decision, workers at GM’s automatic transmission plant here approved a 10% cut in wages and benefits in return for keeping their jobs. The two-month struggle with GM illustrates the nightmare of life under capitalism.

In late September, 2008, when GM went bust, its Strasbourg plant was turned over to Motor Liquidation Company, a hollow shell charged with finding a buyer. Deals with VW, Mercedes and Weichai fell through. In June, GM offered to buy back the plant for one symbolic euro, on condition that the 1,150 autoworkers take the 10% cut and that all unions sign the three-year contract. GM promised to keep all workers on the payroll for the life of the contract. (265,000 jobs were lost in France in 2009, including 168,000 industrial jobs.)

The largest union at the plant, the CFDT, urged accepting GM’s terms as “the lesser evil.” It was backed by two smaller unions, the CFTC and FO, and by the Socialist Party. The second-largest union, the CGT, backed by the “Communist” Party, opposed the sellout.

On July 16, 200 workers struck to protest the give-back, which includes a two-year wage freeze and voids a previous agreement establishing the 35-hour work week at the plant. But one week later, faced with a GM ultimatum to accept or see their jobs shipped to Mexico, 70% of the 950 workers participating in a non-binding secret ballot referendum accepted the deal.

That same day, management organized some workers to hold CGT union stewards hostage for several hours, threatening to kill them if they did not sign the contract. On July 27, the CGT announced it was filing charges against the assailants.

But on July 28, the CGT signed a separate deal with GM, promising not to challenge the new contract in the courts for the next three years. GM allowed the CGT to save face and did not force the union to sign the contract. Today GM announced it was going ahead with the purchase, which will take two months to finalize.

Everyone knows the Strasbourg workers have gained nothing in giving in to GM’s blackmail. In 2007, the Continental Tire factory workers in Clairoix agreed to return to a 40-hour week in exchange for a management promise not to close the factory. Today, it is closed.

Firstly, the bitter defeat for the GM workers demonstrates that a lack of unity plays into the bosses’ hands. Secondly, it shows that the best our class can obtain under capitalism is rotten compromises. In both cases, the remedy is to unite around communist leadership to organize for a revolution that will put our class in power