a href="#‘When The Working Class Unfurls The Red Flag Of Communist Revolution’">Ma" Day Marches: ‘When The Working Class Unfurls The Red Flag Of Communist Revolution’

Janitors At SF May Day Product Of Long-Term Struggle

a href="#Workers In Dom. Rep. Bare Bosses’ Ballot Baloney">"orkers In Dom. Rep. Bare Bosses’ Ballot Baloney

a href="#G.I.s Join Workers’ Army">".I.s Join Workers’ Army

Mexico City: Sign Up For Communism

The Red Flag: Symbol Of Working Class Revolt

• Bibliography:

a href="#‘We’ll Eat The Fruit Our Labor Brings...’">‘We’"l Eat The Fruit Our Labor Brings...’

a href="#O’Connor Preyed For Capitalism">"’Connor Preyed For Capitalism

Truth About Kosovo Air Wars Stirs Pot For Ground Invasion

Imperialist Vultures Descent On Diamond-Rich Sierra Leone

Rules Of Engagement: Hitler Would Give It Four Stars

LETTERS

Journey Thru Hell

Workers From Ecuador Want Info On PLP

Birds Of A Feather

a href="#Don’t Hold Back On Red Ideas">"on’t Hold Back On Red Ideas

a href="#‘Rock The Capitalist Boat’">‘R"ck The Capitalist Boat’

Capitalism = La Vida Loca

a href="#‘My First May Day: One I’ll Never Forget">‘M" First May Day: One I’ll Never Forget

Watch Out Bush, Reds In Texas

---

May Day Marches

a name="‘When The Working Class Unfurls The Red Flag Of Communist Revolution’"></">‘W"en The Working Class Unfurls The Red Flag Of Communist Revolution’

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 6 — "Today is a special day. It is the day in the year when we, the working class, march under one flag, the red flag of communist revolution. As you stand here, look around and you will see black, Latin, white and Asian workers, men and women....All here on May Day, standing together in unity. We are here today to build a movement to smash racism and exploitation of our class once and for all."

These were the welcoming words by a young teacher that inspired Progressive Labor Party’s May Day. Although there was a modest turnout of 1,300 workers and youth, 60 people joined the PLP, 70 signed up to be in study groups, and 100 bought subscriptions to CHALLENGE.

May Day was built this year through work in factories, unions, schools and churches. We held dinners and invited workers to our homes to discuss the importance of fighting for communism. In the last several weeks, we put up stickers in New York, Newark and Chicago. We brought workers, soldiers and youth who we met fighting against police terror, the KKK and sweatshop labor. This work in the mass organizations produced small breakthroughs. 20 workers and their families came from work in a church soup kitchen, 20 from an ESL class, 15 from the factory organizing project, and several busloads of high school students. As fascist conditions for workers intensify and the bosses prepare for another oil war, opportunities are created to win more workers.

Red flags flew high as all chanted and marched. "It was a great experience," one marcher said, "and it seems to me that the people were dedicated and knew what they were fighting for."

Youth from Boston and NYC gave electrifying raps about police terror and building for May Day, and the PLP chorus sang lively communist songs.

After the opening speeches, we marched through Washington chanting, "Fight For Communism, Power to the Workers!" People came to their windows to see the enthusiastic marchers. Many onlookers waved clenched fists in the air and bought CHALLENGE. Some people ran to our sellers to get a copy. As we roared, "Join the March!" Some did!

The stream of red flags lit up the streets as we arrived at the White House. When we reached the house of U.S. imperialism, anger and enthusiasm rose. One student from Brooklyn’s Clara Barton H.S. said, "This was my first May Day march and I think it turned out well but I thought we were going to take one step further by entering the White House. I would definitely attend another one next year."

By day’s end, May Day had given everyone a feeling of workers’ power. "I never went on May Day before," said one student. "I only read about it in history class. To actually be in a May Day March was a wonderful experience."

Another student from Brooklyn’s Murrow H. S. exclaimed, "People were disciplined and excited. We marched for freedom from the bosses’ chains, and we came one small but sure step closer to it. I am inspired." Another added, "This march made me feel powerful."

When the march was over, we had a picnic, with songs and raps.

The bus rides home provided time to consolidate the new friends met during the day. We signed up people for summer projects and made plans to participate in more class struggle. However, for PLP to become a mass Party of thousands and then millions, we must improve our work and spend far more time developing close ties with our co-workers and fellow students and become entrenched in their daily lives. Only if we do that can we win many more workers and youth to march next year, and more importantly, win them to join PLP and become May Day organizers themselves!

Janitors At SF May Day Product Of Long-Term Struggle

LOS ANGELES, May 9 — How did a group of 120 janitors come to march at our communist May Day in San Francisco? This has been a long-term process with many ups and downs.

We first met the janitors about ten years ago. The SEIU (Service Employees International Union was organizing the janitors into a hospital workers local. A comrade and some of his friends had been very active in that local, fighting racism against patients and unjust firings of workers. A group of his friends read CHALLENGE.

Some CHALLENGE sellers went to a janitors’ contract vote. Workers were outside cursing the leadership. They grabbed CHALLENGE and some gave their names glad to find communists in LA.

The hospital workers began meeting with a group of these janitors. Some wanted to run a multi-racial slate of hospital workers (higher-paid black, Latin and white, mainly non-immigrant) and janitors (almost all latino immigrants) for union office. They formed a caucus to fight for the rank and file.

Our comrade spent many hours and weekends at these meetings, raising the need for a militant, politicized rank and file, and for building the Party to fight for real workers’ power through communist revolution. He said winning positions in the union hierarchy by toning down the defense of rank-and-file workers would be a huge mistake. He always brought CHALLENGE to the meetings.

Over time, he became a friend of the workers, especially those most interested in CHALLENGE. Some met from time to time with a Party club. Some in the group were increasingly intent on winning the election, and less and less on politicizing the workers with revolutionary ideas.

He stuck with the group for several years. They won the election. But SEIU head John Sweeney nullified the election and put the union into receivership. He did this at the very moment he was preparing to run for president of the AFL-CIO based on his "great record" of organizing janitors! Sweeney put the janitors into a separate local from the hospital workers. Both groups fought this racist action. But the division was made.

The caucus kept meeting, now predominantly janitors. When PLP led an attack on the racist anti-immigrant group VCT (Voice of Citizens Together), caucus members invited PLP’ers to speak at a fund-raising dinner about it. Party members were introduced as heroes. They linked the growth of racism and fascism to the bosses’ crisis, showing Clinton as worse than VCT, and cited the need for revolution.

Some janitors became regular CHALLENGE readers and May Day marchers. In organizing last year’s May Day March in San Francisco, a janitor asked for 20 more tickets for union members. Plans were made. Twenty workers paid for their tickets and marched; many more knew about it. Several began attending study groups and club meetings. CHALLENGE was welcomed by many. During the AFL-CIO convention, some of these workers, who have a deep hatred for Sweeney & Co, demonstrated against him and his AFL-CIO cronies.

Building for a strike this year, it became clear there were many militant, angry janitors. At an International Woman’s Day march of 1,500 janitors, there were silly staged arrests. A PLP’er brought CHALLENGES and leaflets; the workers eagerly grabbed them.

However, some of the more angry workers abstained from some of these events. They saw the coming strike as a "show," knowing a settlement had already been agreed to. Some didn’t want to participate, but after discussion, they realized that not participating to expose the leaders wasn’t good for the working class! The leaders are mobilizing the workers for the needs of imperialism. We must be there to offer the alternative.

Several of these workers liked the idea of striking and simultaneously building for May Day as a way to win workers to the long-term fight for workers’ power and revolution.

They exposed the leadership-sponsored appearances of Jesse Jackson, Gore, Kennedy and LA Mayor Riordan as a show to win workers especially these immigrant workers) to be loyal to their system, building patriotism and nationalism to get workers to fight and die for the bosses. For that, they make promises to the workers but can’t deliver because the bosses need to maximize profits, compete with their rivals and prepare for war. These union leaders don’t act in the interests of any workers!

Before and during this year’s strike, in marches, picket lines and meetings, the Party had a presence with leaflets, CHALLENGES and by bringing workers to the picket lines. This also helped build for May Day.

In one of these marches, we re-met an old Party friend, a striker not seen for several years. He was leading a group of strikers and was known by many workers. We were both happy to become reacquainted. He introduced us to other workers and became another organizer for May Day.

Other experienced workers, angry with the union leadership, were looking for an alternative. We met with some of them to explain our politics. "But you don’t put limits on the militancy of the workers?" asked a rank-and-file leader, saying the union only focused on attacking a few buildings, not on paralyzing the whole industry.

"Well, the only limits are the workers’ strength and determination based on the circumstances," replied a comrade. "Our goal is to get rid of the bosses with armed revolution," he continued. "The May Day march won’t be an armed struggle, but a political march. We want to win millions to confront the bosses and to take power. For example, when we confronted the VCT racists we were prepared for them."

"I like that," said the worker, with a smile. "Here’s my list of 20 workers for the march."

The match was lit, and many began calling for information about the march to ask about bringing friends and family. Obviously this involved workers at different political levels, but in the final analysis 120 janitors marched. Now we have a big job, to get to know and win many.

It’s a grave error to only assume workers are won to support the bosses’ agents. When the bosses launch a war, they’ll boast that the workers support them, as they did during Desert Storm. But that’s only one side. The workers are open to alternatives, communism included! We can’t get frustrated. It’s a long-term struggle, with many ups and downs, learning from mistakes—all leading to winning.

A group of workers who came to May Day asked to be in study groups. Several called Party members to ask when the first meeting was.

Many workers are angry over the union leaders settling for different wages for janitors from different parts of the city. Scabs are getting preferred treatment.

There are hundreds of thousands of workers here in low-paying jobs. Like the group of janitors who marched on May Day, they have much class hatred. The rulers’ lackeys mobilize them to either accept their conditions under capitalism or suppress their resistance with fascism. Our job is to encourage and organize that resistance, pointing them towards joining PLP and the long-term fight for communism.

May Day’s Red Flag Flies Across Continent

a name="Workers In Dom. Rep. Bare Bosses’ Ballot Baloney">">"orkers In Dom. Rep. Bare Bosses’ Ballot Baloney

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, May 1 — The Progressive Labor Party here Challenged the bosses’ electoral politics at the gathering of workers on May Day. Revisionist (fake leftist) and union groups were at the march, but the largest political presence was that of the PLP. We brought workers from various factories in the maquiladora zone, school and university teachers, as well as youth and workers in general.

PLP distributed a Party leaflet with communist chants and 86 CHALLENGES, which were very well-received. The unions and left-wing groups have been fitting themselves into the bosses’ schemes, to culminate in the May 16th presidential election. They used this as a pretext to avoid participating in the May Day march and called on other groups to stay away as well.

During the day, four people joined PLP and contacts were made among workers who will be visited soon, to take them CHALLENGE and try to win them to the Party.

Having planned a PLP meeting after the march, we invited a number of marchers to join us, and some did. (See below.) We collectively vowed to better organize for next year’s May Day, to double the the number of workers the Party brings.

The PLP luncheon meeting after the March included members, friends and sympathizers working in different factories in the country’s northern region. Our goal was to discuss how to build a mass Party, how to overcome our weaknesses and how to make the organizing for May Day more collective.

Reports and discussions included criticism and self-criticism, commitments to strengthen the work in the zones where the Party is being built, and plans to distirbute the international CHALLENGE in the factories where Party members and friends work. We also planned a series of cadre schools.

We analyzed the weaknesses of the revisionist and economist movements and the opportunities this presents for building PLP. We also discussed the conflict between Old and New Money bosses in relation to the Dominican presidential elections and what may result from it. This conflict also creates a favorable framework to attract new workers to PLP.

a name="G.I.s Join Workers’ Army">">".I.s  Join Workers’ Army

There was a great feeling of collectivism among the growing soldiers group that went to May Day. We stuck together in the march and later went out to eat. Through all this we saw that workers and soldiers can come together as one Party to organize something big.

The study group the next day went well. The soldiers who participated in the march went through four lessons on political economy, inter-imperialist rivalry, the role of the military and what the Party is fighting for.

Seeing soldiers who traveled miles to listen to, and be involved in communist philosophy motivates me to push my small club of soldiers to do more back where I am stationed. There are plans for us to get together with some of the other soldiers again.

Red Private

I thought the May Day March was cool. It was my first one, it was different but cool. I liked being with everybody. A little too much like the military, with the marching and all. But it was good getting away and seeing something new.

A Soldier

The May Day March was really inspiring. It was very diverse, people of different races. The drums were good, the youth that rapped and the reggae was good

A Soldier

Mexico City: Sign Up For Communism

MEXICO CITY, May 9 — "The PLP has confidence that the masses will fight for communism,. Communist ideas can be understood by all those who are exploited," concluded a student in a speech during a meeting before the May Day March here. These ideas kept spirits high during the entire march. From Chapultepec to the Zócalo (the city square facing the Presidential Palace) you could hear, "Struggle…Struggle…Struggle, don’t stop struggling for a communist society."

During a year-long strike, hundreds of UNAM (National University of Mexico) students heard and read PLP’s communist ideas through Party members active in it. Twenty of these students marched, raising high the red flags of PLP. "Rebellious worker, sign the list of those who fight for the communist cause." Chanting, "Reformists, step to one side, forward, forward Marxists Leninists," a group of these students joined our contingent. Our lead banner proclaimed, "Scientific and Popular Education—Only Communism Can Give it."

Electrical workers from SME and GM workers marched near us. We asked them, "What do the electrical workers, GM workers and all the world’s workers need? Communist revolution!" we answered in a chorus. A GM worker waved our banner in the middle of his contingent throughout the whole march. Dozens of CHALLENGES were distributed to these workers and they gave us donations. "One class, one Party, Workers of the World, Unite!" was our slogan.

When we neared the Zócalo where tens of thousands of workers were concentrated, the emotion of our contingent grew. "End, End the electoral farce. Advance, Advance, Communism will triumph." We sang Bandiera Rossa and Bella Ciao repeatedly. In the center of the Zócalo we ended with the workers’ anthem, Internationale. It was a good day of communist struggle.

The Red Flag: Symbol Of Working Class Revolt

This May 2000 Progressive Labor Party proudly unfurled the red flag of workers’ revolution in several cities on this continent. Why do we carry high the red flag?

In 1890, just before history’s first May Day marches, Frederick Engels wrote, "The proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces. It is mobilizing for the first time as one army, one flag, one class..." The flag was the red flag.

The red flag had first appeared as a workers' symbol in Britain during the 1768 London seamen’s’ strike. The strikers used it because it was the navy's battle flag and they were going into battle against their bosses. Again in London in 1780, when 100,000 workers marched on Newgate Prison to burn it to the ground, the multi-racial leadership carried the red flag. Their cry was, "Away with all prisons," because the working class was being increasingly incarcerated in them.

In 1831 the red flag was part of the struggle of the working class in Wales as well as in the revolution to topple the monarchy during the French revolution (1789-1794), especially during the struggle in July of 1791. But the general adoption of the red flag as the workers' own symbol occurred in 1848 when the flag appeared spontaneously on the barricades in Paris, and then everywhere throughout revolutionary Europe.

During the Paris Commune of 1871—when workers first took over a whole city and held it for two months—the red flag of the working class flew over the city of Paris. It had become the symbol of emancipation. By 1892 it flew above the May Day marches throughout Europe, Australia, South America, Cuba and Japan. In 1889, in order for the newly formed Labour Party of Great Britain to win the masses, a song was written about the red flag which became the anthem of the Party. One of the most stirring stanzas in that song goes, "The people's flag is deepest red. It shrouded oft our martyred dead. And e'er their limbs grew stiff and cold. Their heart's blood dyed its every fold." In Italy, too, the song "Bandiera Rosa" became a symbol of May Day. In it we hear the words, "Arise you workers. Your chains of slavery will vanish under the scarlet banner."

In the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the red flag became the symbol of the working class in power. And as revolutions spread around the world in the next 50 years—from China to Eastern Europe—the red flag of working-class emancipation was raised on high.

In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red flag from where it had been dropped and has marched proudly with it in every gathering we hold throughout the world. The red flag is truly the flag of workers’ internationalism, as opposed to the hundreds of flags that the bosses-of the world fly to symbolize their respective capitalist states.

Bibliography:

"Big Red Songbook," compiled by Mal Collins, Dave Harker and Geoff White; Pluto Press, London, 1977.

"The Penguin Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century History," Edited by John Belchem and Richard Price; Penguin Books, London, 1994.

"The London Hanged—Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century," by Peter Linebaugh; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.

"May Day—A Short History of the International Workers' Holiday 1886 to 1986," by Philip S. Foner; International Publishers, New York, 1986.

a name="Can’t Get Rid of Stalin So Easily…"></">Ca"’t Get Rid of Stalin So Easily…

Russia’s new central bank has issued a new coin with the face of communist leader Joseph Stalin, commemorating the 55^th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Hitler fascism in World War II. Giant posters carrying medals, photographs and slogans from the communist era have been put up all across Moscow. Is the newly-installed war-maker president Vladimir Putin bringing back communist leadership? Hell no! But he is attempting to win support from war veterans and workers who still treasure the achievements of the Stalin-led socialist state.

While the memory of Stalin and communism may be "dead" in the Western bosses’ media, it appears to be very much alive in the hearts and minds of workers in the former Soviet Union, which lost 20 to 30 million lives in their smashing of Hitler’s Third Reich.

a name="‘We’ll Eat The Fruit Our Labor Brings...’"></a>"We’ll Eat The Fruit Our Labor Brings...’

Rockefeller’s shiny dime
can't buy this rhyme
I don’t have the time
for the blind sublime
I wanna shut the main breaker off
burn, loot
flip the car of the man
in the business suit
toss a monkey wrench
into the machine
of industrial pollution
derail all trains
bound for debt distribution
Or will we decide to take over
seize the means of production
as use value liberates technology’s function
our hammers and our sickles swing for equality
they flatten and cut out economic brutality
the war makers’ guns will point the other way
the solders will march on May Day
as united fists smash badges with nightsticks
we bust straight through their crowd control tactics
‘cause they can't hold us back
this time we're on the attack
they can't hold us down
we'll rename this town
the day is near
when we will kick the thugs and the parasites
off the end of the pier
and if they decide to swim back to shore
they will know injustice and greed
does not fly here anymore
‘cause workers run things
and we will eat the fruit
that our labor brings

a name="O’Connor Preyed For Capitalism">">"’Connor Preyed For Capitalism

NEW YORK CITY, May 7 — John Cardinal O’Connor died here last week. He had served his god well. That god was capitalism. Excelling in hypocrisy, O’Connor aided the rulers’ most vicious attacks on the working class, all the while claiming to be the "workers’ friend." The crowds at St. Patrick’s Cathedral show that thousands have made the serious mistake of falling for O’Connor’s pious lies.

In one of his last public acts, O’Connor bestowed his blessing on the cops who savagely murdered Amadou Diallo. At a meeting designed to stifle working-class outrage at the cops’ acquittal, the Cardinal intoned, "Our prayerful thoughts are with all of our police who face difficult situations each and every day, some of which end in deep tragedy for themselves and for others'' (Catholic News Service, 3/1). O’Connor had supported Giuliani’s racist thugs all along.

Shortly after Diallo’s murder, members of NYPD’s Holy Name Society heard O’Connor speak at their annual banquet. And every March 17th, O’Connor would wave an approving sign of the cross over the decadent copfest known as the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. None of these racist acts prevented ruling class lieutenants like Al Sharpton from hailing O’Connor as a "man of principle," or Local 1199 union boss Dennis Rivera from calling him "a union man."

O’Connor enjoyed a reputation for being ecumenical, that is, for being a good Catholic who nevertheless befriended those of other faiths. Reality reverses the image. O’Connor strongly supported the Opus Dei (God’s Work), a secretive, virulently anti-Semitic, anti-communist sect within the church. Opus Dei backed John Paul II’s rise to the papacy. In 1998 O’Connor said a special anniversary mass for Opus Dei’s late founder Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, a Spanish fascist, before 1,000 sect members at the cathedral. Escriva idolized Hitler for his military aide in defeating the United Front government of Spain, the majority being communists and other left-wing forces in the Spanish Civil War. An ex-member of Opus Dei recalled Escriva’s words of praise, "Hitler against the Jews; Hitler against the Slavs; it was Hitler against communism" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 9/95). Known as "a friend of the Jews," O’Connor devoted his sermon to extolling this Nazi. Tear-jerking eulogies for O’Connor from New York’s leading rabbis appear especially disgusting, given their choice to ignore this man’s vile record.

O’Connor was surely no friend of the Vietnamese working class. He served as a Navy chaplain at the height of the Vietnam War, absolving U.S. sailors when they carried out the bosses’ genocide and giving them last rites when they failed. In a book he wrote about his tour in Vietnam, O’Connor repeatedly spoke of the need to "confront and destroy" communism. He was accomplice in the murder of the four million Vietnamese by the U.S. imperialist Vietnam war.

The Pope’s elevation of O’Connor to Cardinal made him boss of a vast empire of Catholic schools and hospitals. Like any boss, he followed the dictates of the profit system, somehow ignoring his "social conscience." New York’s Catholic schools cram rotten ideas down students’ throats in overcrowded classrooms (like the public schools), with many parents forced to work extra jobs to pay for the privilege. Teachers in Catholic schools make less than half what public school teachers can. When archdiocesan teachers went on strike in 1996, O’Connor, in his consummate compassion, threatened to fire them. In his hospitals, which largely serve the poor, O’Connor has left a legacy of under-staffed, poorly equipped hellholes.

For more than a millennium, the Catholic church has not missed a chance to help the ruling class of the day by stomping on the exploited masses in the name of "Christian charity." O’Connor joins the hallowed tradition of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Vatican’s support of Hitler.

Ending this pattern of murderous deceit means replacing capitalism and its religious lies with workers’ rule through communist revolution. The thousands of workers who marched with the Progressive Labor Party on May Day were, by implication, "celebrating" O’Connor’s funeral with far more love and concern for the world’s working class than O’Connor ever showed in his entire life.

Truth About Kosovo Air Wars Stirs Pot For Ground Invasion

The U.S. claim that last year’s aerial bombing decimated the Yugoslav army was grossly exaggerated according to a secret Air Force report revealed in Newsweek magazine. It found that the initial claim of 120 tanks, 220 armored personnel carriers and 450 artillery pieces being destroyed turned out to be 14 tanks, 18 carriers and 20 artillery pieces, or 93% less than first reported.

NY Daily News interviews with military experts in the area found "miles long lines of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces being driven out of Kosovo after the bombing stopped." (Daily News, May 8)

Air Force inspectors also found that, "NATO’s high-tech aerial assault, which was carried out from an altitude of three miles to avoid casualties among pilots, was easily foiled by fake bridges, fake artillery and phony anti-missile batteries."

So much for the "overwhelming victory" of U.S./NATO forces.

Maybe the reason Newsweek magazine exploded this story is to help shatter the illusion that "invincible" air armadas win wars. It’s ground invasions, stupid....

Imperialist Vultures Descent On Diamond-Rich Sierra Leone

Since the start of the violent civil war in Sierra Leone in 1991, tens of thousands have died and half a million people have become refugees. The various warring factions mutilated many thousands. Finally, last year Britain and the U.S. got UN chief Koffin Annan to send "blue helmets" (UN "peace-keeping" soldiers) to enforce a cease-fire. They came mainly from African countries. The Nigerian army was the leading force, imposing a brutal "peace" among the various factions. Once the Nigerian army left, the 10-month old cease-fire between the government and the "Revolutionary" United Front (RUF) ended when the RUF kidnapped 500 soldiers from the remaining UN forces.

Like many other conflicts in Africa and the rest of the world, this civil war is not mainly about ethnic rivalry, as the racist Western capitalist media says. It’s about which of these warring factions will control the rich diamond mines, used to finance the armies and the power of faction leaders. The Libya-trained RUF, which began in the early 1990s as a "people’s movement" fighting the corrupt Sierra Leone ruling elite and its imperialist backers, degenerated into a brutal reactionary force. The RUF now controls the lucrative mines in eastern Sierra Leone. Over the last two years, the value of diamond exports has dropped from $60 million to $30 million. The RUF has grabbed this $30 million.

For the imperialists it is more than regaining control of the diamond mines for British and U.S. mineral companies and saving the government of their puppet, President Kabbah, from the RUF forces closing in on Freetown, the country’s capital. British and U.S. bosses fear the Sierra Leone conflict will endanger the cease-fire planned in the Congo. UN forces will be sent there shortly to end the civil/regional war involving armies from Angola, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa. Congo is the largest country in Central Africa, and rich in many key minerals, including those used for military weapons. France, fighting for its imperialist interests, is also involved in the Congo, many times conflicting with U.S. interests.

Also, oil-rich Nigeria is not exactly a land of stability for Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron, with billions invested there. Recently Nigeria has been wracked by religious and tribal clashes. Also, many workers and youth are fed up with the corrupt ruling classes, who share the oil bonanza with the big imperialist oil companies while the masses get poorer and poorer.

Britain immediately sent 800 elite troops from the 1^st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, which led the NATO forces that occupied Kosovo when the war ended there last year. These paratroopers supposedly were sent to evacuate foreigners. In reality they’re trying to save the President of this former British colony. Royal marines will follow. Britain also sent a carrier off the coast of Sierra Leone, the sixth Royal Navy ship in the region.

Increasingly, oil, minerals and other huge deposits of wealth are being uncovered throughout Africa. Internally, different factions are fighting for control of this wealth. Civil wars are erupting with murderous violence, with no clear end in sight. So while UN chief Koffi Annan asked U.S. Secy. of State Madeleine Albright to send a U.S. rapid deployment force to Sierra Leone, Albright appears reluctant to committing any troops. U.S. bosses are still affected by the Vietnam and Somalia Syndrome. Both U.S. invasions ended in costly defeats, militarily, financially and, at the time, in rising opposition of an anti-imperialist character.

For African workers, already ravaged by civil wars, AIDS, mass poverty and hunger, imperialism and capitalism are a living hell. This situation cries for organizing a mass communist movement to unite workers and peasants against all their local and international tormentors.

Rules Of Engagement: Hitler Would Give It Four Stars

If there ever was a film made by U.S. bosses to promote fascism, this is it! It opens with scenes of Vietnam in which the Viet Cong kill U.S. marines with almost documentary-like realism. It focuses on the friendship of two colonels, one black, the other white. Billed as a "courtroom drama," its political implications are both subtle and glaring! The black officer (Samuel L. Jackson) is shown executing a Viet Cong soldier for refusing to call off (by radio) a group of Viet Cong soldiers about to kill his friend.

Later in the movie the black officer, ostensibly to save his own troops, orders a massacre of hundreds of men, women and children who are attacking the U.S. embassy in Yemen (The film is based on a true incident in which U.S. rangers massacred Somalians who attacked and killed several U.S. rangers and shot down a Black Hawk chopper.) Another black officer initially balks at this order, but then agrees. The scenes of gratuitous violence are impressive in their realism, right down to scenes of maimed children seen later in a decrepit hospital.

A civilian national security officer and the U.S. ambassador are portrayed as cowardly and corrupt, trying to blame the massacre on this one "rogue" soldier. The protesters, including children, are later seen in a videotape shooting at the embassy, supposedly justifying the massacre, in line with the so-called "rules of engagement."

The reason for this protest, U.S. imperialism’s role in the Middle East and its need to control oil at all costs are not addressed. For that matter the Vietnam scene implied that war is hell, but for an "honorable" cause. Near the end of the movie the Viet Cong officer, who was not summarily executed because he called off the attack, is forced to admit he would have killed a POW in an effort to save his own troops. He is seen shortly thereafter saluting the black officer.

The movie tries to imply this was a "true story" by reporting in the credits what "happened" to the characters." The theater drew an integrated audience. To their credit there was no revelry at the outcome. It was a subdued group as we filed out.

Interestingly, this movie opens right at the 25th anniversary of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and of John McCain's fascist pronouncements while visiting there recently. McCain, a former POW, won't "forgive" his former captors. As a bomber pilot he undoubtedly participated in the killing and maiming of untold numbers of men, women and children. He himself is a war criminal!

Jackson's character, like McCain, comes off as a hero (if a flawed one) because he followed the "rules of engagement." The message? Fight, die, kill and maim for the glory of U.S. imperialism). I'm sure the Nazi storm troopers felt the same way fighting for "Deutschland Über Alles!"

LETTERS

Journey Thru Hell

I made a long journey north from my country because I couldn’t find work there and have a family to support. The trip was miserable. The first border was crossed in a locked trailer holding 150 of us. We endured this for eight hours, but eventually couldn’t take it any more. The "coyote" (smuggler) in Guatemala had provided us with three hatchets to break open the walls just in case we ran out of air. We had to hack out a few holes from inside the trailer to keep from suffocating. Once we were unloaded from the truck, we were taken to a mountain where for eight days we were without food or water. After the fourth day, when we were starving to death, we spotted some monkeys and thought of catching one to eat, but couldn’t do it.

Following our ordeal in the mountain, all 150 of us were shoved into a bus with a maximum capacity of 70, one on top of the other. The ride was supposed to be 60 hours non-stop, but the tires could not sustain this extra weight. Frequent stops were made to fix many flat tires. After another 30 hours drive to Agua Prieta, we were dumped in the desert, but couldn’t walk because of exhaustion. We were left there that entire night amidst a huge snowstorm. Everyone began to freeze and shout or pray or demand that God explain why he had abandoned us in this endless nightmare. Everyone, particularly the children, could no longer walk because our feet had turned purple and lost all feeling. We still had no water or food. The "coyotes" told us the "solution" was "not to think about food or water."

To get us moving they showed us numerous crosses marking the graves of all those who died trying to cross the border. In the desert an older man became very sick and fainted. We helped him to his feet, but he became delirious. Another brother got very ill after losing a lot of weight. The "coyote" said, "I cannot take this guy as he is." Two coyotes grabbed him, one at his feet and the other at his wrists, and threw him to the ground. The man struggled back to his feet and begged not to be left there to die. We never found out what happened to him.

After a nightmare crossing from Mexico, we were imprisoned in a "jail" run by the Coyotes in Phoenix for another 28 days, unable to see any light this whole time. We were kept that way until our families came up with the money to get us out.

The saddest part of it all is that now I am here in the "land of opportunity" without work, without money and without family.

In El Salvador, I had met a member of PLP and now I understand what he told me about communism. I’m thinking about joining the PLP to fight for communism.

A Traveler

Workers From Ecuador Want Info On PLP

Greetings from Ecuador from a group of workers that were fired unceremoniously without any severance pay or explanation. This experience has made us form a bloc of workers willing to fight for social and labor changes. We want to know more about PLP and its politics.

Please e-mail me any comments or information about PLP.

Thanks,

A Fired Worker in the Middle of the World, Ecuador

CHALLENGE

responds: Thanks for your letter. We will gladly report about your struggle. Please send us more information about it.

Birds Of A Feather

I am writing to thank you for publishing the letter (CHALLENGE 5/10) concerning Harvard's pro-Nazi past in the context of its current Hillel controversy. I am shocked and appalled that a Jewish organization would use such a song with such obvious connections to the Nazis.

Many people consider Harvard the be-all, end-all of post-secondary education, but many don't realize it used to be, at least, a very exclusive organization that denied entry to minorities, including Jews. As a Jew, I don't think I could attend an organization that sponsored such anti-Semitism, no matter what the reputation.

Thanks again,

Avi

a name="Don’t Hold Back On Red Ideas">">"on’t Hold Back On Red Ideas

The most enduring impression I have from the May Day march in San Francisco is the many, many people who saw us in the street and began honking their horns and raising their fists in salute. Many times we ourselves hold communism back because we are afraid of what people will say. While many times people can be hostile, it is also true that lots of people have come to similar conclusions as we have, albeit independently, and are moved when they see us putting it forward on the streets.

A May Day marcher

a name="‘Rock The Capitalist Boat’"></">‘R"ck The Capitalist Boat’

As a PLP member, I learn many things each time (and over time) that I march on May Day. It helps me understand what my job is, so to speak, and what capitalism is. My job is to organize for international communist revolution. Capitalism is a system that produces profits for the few, not for the needs of the many.

Our work to build revolution can mean starting with something as simple as asking friends to look over a copy of CHALLENGE. Perhaps he/she may agree, or disagree, with PLP's active stand on an issue and be willing to come to a forum, study group or rally in your community for open minded discussion/action. Every person's collective work in the Party is unique, but equally important to the working class and our future. It all starts with our choice to accept the job or not. The working class cannot be neutral in this struggle. One can remain part of the problem (capitalism) or become a part of the solution (communist revolution).

PLP members stand up for communism and rock the capitalist boat, so to speak. It may temporarily scare those around us when we do this. While working, one may often hear, "sit down and shut up!" but just ignore that. We have no time for that because the bosses are killing us in the streets and storming into our houses like Nazi troopers whenever they please. The contrast between our work for communist revolution and its effects, and the daily effects of capitalism will show people we are telling the truth, so push on.

There is plenty of "on-the-job training" available from comrades who know your true value and potential as a member of the working class. We're just waiting for you to choose your side. Hope you joined our side, the communist side, this May Day 2000. If you did, I want to say hello and welcome to the Progressive Labor Party and communism; you won't regret your choice. Let's get to work, then.

Mid-West Comrade

Capitalism = La Vida Loca: Capitalism Makes You Nuts

A recent study of 30,000 people by the World Health Organization shows a rapid rise in mental illnesses in some of the world’s leading capitalist countries. It reports that 48% of the population in the U.S. and Germany, 40% in Holland, 37% in Canada, 20% in Mexico and 16% in Turkey suffer some kind of mental problems at least once in their lives. In those countries, half of those affected get no medical attention or are given insufficient therapy. As usual under capitalism, poor people are the most affected: "These illnesses tend to affect more unfavored social groups, especially persons with low incomes and little education as well as the unemployed and single people."

Some problems, like anxiety and behavior, become chronic and affect more women than men. More men suffer alcoholism and other addictions. The WHO blames these problems on the lack of proper health care, particularly preventive care. Gro Harlem Bruntland, WHO’s general director, said most psychiatric services are usually centralized in big cities and are inefficient and even counterproductive for those affected. She also blames the cost-efficient method prevalent the capitalist medical care systems. She warns that the rise of mental illnesses have become a modern crisis.

The WHO implies, without saying so outright, that capitalism and its many evils are the main cause of these problems. Work or jobless-related stress, war, racism, rotten medical care, drugs, alienation, sexism, etc., literally drive many workers and youth crazy. Even many forms of exploitation and mistreatment among workers themselves can be traced to a capitalist system that treats people as commodities. Indeed, only communism can free us from the ravages of capitalism.

Mad About Communism

a name="‘My First May Day: One I’ll Never Forget"></">‘M" First May Day: One I’ll Never Forget

On May 6, I was privileged to participate in the PLP May Day march in Washington, D.C., and have nothing but many positive things to say about this experience. It would take a book to give all my views.

The sight of red flags flying under the hot sun was very uplifting. I no longer felt alone in my views. I experienced camaraderie with my fellow workers, something somewhat missing in the rural area of Pennsylvania where I live. I was also extremely impressed with the youth, who demonstrated such commitment and determination to really make the march a very disciplined and militant one for workers’ power and a communist future. No reformism was present at this march.

I watched as youth and others distributed CHALLENGE to onlookers, and noticed very little, if any, hostility. I saw many reading it with great interest.

I was extremely happy with the march’s multi-racial character. I met people from various places. On the bus, I sat next to a woman who had emigrated here from Mexico. Though she spoke mostly Spanish and I know little Spanish, we communicated quite easily with each other. She was a very fine person and very moved by the march. Sitting across from me was a younger woman from Ethiopia, also very friendly and I enjoyed talking with her as well.

The experience made me realize it is truly possible to win workers and the oppressed to the need for a workers’ revolution and that those groups who attempt to hide their so-called Marxism behind reformist politics to be "popular" are doing no one in the working class a favor.

I came home feeling more inspired to keep up the fight and to reach out to more workers. I want to thank all the great people I met and all the others for making May 6 a day that I will never forget. Long live communism!

Red Rocker

Watch Out Bush, Reds In Texas

As college students in Texas, we began reading CHALLENGE and PLP’s ideas four months ago. In studying fascism, we decided to initiate a local campaign reflecting our struggle against it. We discovered that Texas has a contract with Dell Computers, which uses prison labor to make their computer components. After discussing this with our friends and members of other student groups we belonged to, we started a petition campaign demanding the university stop purchasing prison-made goods. Although the spring semester is ending, support and signatures will be gathered throughout the summer and fall.

We also wanted to attend the San Francisco May Day march to demonstrate against capitalism and fascism. To raise money for plane tickets, a garage sale was organized, helped by comrades and supporters who donated goods. Faculty and students were invited to a May Day dinner, showing the May Day video. A student spoke about our campaign against prison labor and collected donations. These projects raised enough money to fly five people to San Francisco.

When we arrived at the march site, a sense of pride filled the air, the pride of communism. Soon large numbers of Los Angeles youth arrived as well as janitors who had just come off a militant strike. The overall organization of the march was great. People stayed close together and marched in solidarity, turning hundreds into a single unit, whose chants resonated through the streets. This led many bystanders to honk their horns and raise their fists in support.

By nightfall many friends had been reunited and many new ones made. The speeches opened our eyes and inspired us to more struggle. Each of us now has a new level of understanding and dedication toward the Party, enabling us to grow stronger, each one of us working to the best of our ability until the hammer falls on capitalism and smashes it forever.

Comrades in Texas

Militant Janitors, Youth Inspire Communist May Day March

Which Side Are You ON? Excerpts of a speech to the San Francisco May Day.

El Salvador: Communists Are "Alive and Fighting"

Workers March Against War, Bosses’ Caused Misery

Vieques: Rulers’ National Security Is Deadly for Workers

Fired PLP Teachers, Janitors Fight Common Enemy

Real Vietnam Syndrome: Mass Red-Inspired Heroism Can Defeat Worst Form of Imperialist Terror

Capitalism Creates Beasts Like Racist Killer of Pittsburgh

PLP Workers’ Committee Links Class Struggle to the Fight for Workers Power

PLP Leads Campaign vs. Harvard/Kelling Axis

Hell on Wheel: Bosses’ Racism Is Deadly for Livery Drivers

LETTERS:

Vietnam: Politics Trumped Hi Tech

Workers’ Flag: The Color Is Red

May Day Stickers: a Hit in DC

Who Will you Entrust the Future With?

Greetings from Iran

May Day Made Pessimist an Optimist

Nazi ‘Congress’a Flop in Chile

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Militant Janitors, Youth Inspire Communist May Day March

SAN FRANCISCO, April 29-- "It was the most working class, communist May Day I've been to in years. Let me make a donation," said a supporter of the communist movement for half a century.

This was the reaction of one of over 600 workers and youth who marched here for the unity of workers world-wide to end racist exploitation and imperialism and for Communist Revolution.

A highlight of this West Coast May Day was a contingent of 120 janitors fresh from their three-week strike against the LA real estate bosses and cleaning contractors. "You fight openly for communism. I want to be in a PLP study group," said one woman janitor. "Call me right away for the next activity."

"This was a great march," declared another woman janitor who has spent years fighting to build unity among the janitors in LA and years before that fighting fascism in Latin America. "You talk about things we don’t hear in the union," she continued. "I want to be in a study group. Call me soon." Another janitor applauded "the multi racial unity of black, Latin, and white youth and workers."

The march began with speeches from two women comrades who’ve been building PLP for many years. (see box) They said this fight must be a life-long battle, whose rewards consist partly of seeing these young people giving leadership to the Party. A woman janitor who came to her first May Day March with PLP brought a message of unity and militancy from her brothers and sisters who just ended their strike.

Another janitor, listening carefully to these speeches and who helped bring a group of his co-workers, said, "I need to read more of the Party's literature. It's very important to learn as much as possible."

Over 700 CHALLENGES were sold and distributed by aggressive youth under the leadership of young workers on the security team. Unfortunately we made only 120 red T-shirts with the star and fist and "PLP" on them. Everyone wanted to buy and wear one.

The march ended with a dinner and rally in a local school cafeteria. A young factory worker recounted the fight of her co-workers against the mis-leadership of the IAM honchos and the fight to build PLP on her job. "Who are you going to trust?" she asked. The crowd shot back, "The workers!" (see box) So she asked everyone to join PLP to build workers' power, to rely on the working class and not the AFL-CIO leaders and the bosses.

A young garment worker riveted the audience to attention with a communist poem entitled, "There will be war again."

Black, Latin and white high school and college students told of fighting and walking out against racist terror, a campaign against prison labor, and the fight to build the Party in the boss-led mass organizations. At several LA schools, having a UNAM student striker speak helped build the Party’s work. A veteran Muni driver told of the on-going fight on his job. "This was a great march," said an aerospace worker. "I want to get more active in the Party."

Another worker saluted the janitors who marched, saying its very significant for our Party. She explained that their militancy and unity was in sharp contrast to the show put on by the union leaders who had Gore, Kennedy and LA Mayor Riordan address the strikers. She urged workers to choose the path of relying on the working class and fighting for communist workers' power and rejecting the bosses' politicians plans for more exploitation, war and fascism.

When the PLP singers sang the militant song "Venceremos," which says "The workers will win!" (adding that the future is communism), two enthusiastic marchers stood up and sang it in Turkish.

A group of LA workers made delicious tamales for all the marchers from that city.

There were friendly, lively discussions on many buses about the Party's ideas. On one, when protest/revolutionary songs were played, workers started cheering and dancing. On some buses there were debates about the janitors' strike between workers who supported the union leaders and those who were furious at them. There were also discussions about Elián, which included a discussion of the inter-imperialist rivalry, and much more.

"Please break down the history of May Day so my 13-year-old daughter can understand it," requested a black worker on one bus. "I want her to be part of this movement." On the return she said, "Thank you so much for inviting me to this march. I want to get CHALLENGE in the mail, and I want to help build this movement."

On one bus students saw and discussed the anti-fascist movie "The Seventh Cross." On another, they saw and discussed the movie, "Three Kings." Several people joined the party and many subscribed to CHALLENGE. Some asked to participate in study groups and cadre schools. A group of 23 workers came from one factory. They spoke on the bus about building the fight against the boss and building the Party. Larger groups of workers came from other industrial concentrations as well. A group of garment workers marched with their brothers and sisters janitors. A number of black and latin youth gave enthusiastic leadership to march security.

This May Day march, with groups from San Diego, LA, Delano, Seattle, San Francisco, Texas and Canada, was a modest improvement in numbers over last year. But it was a qualitative advance in terms of the response to the Party, the participation of the recently-striking janitors, who comprised 20% of the marchers, of other workers as well, and the expressions of a desire to join PLP study groups and the Party itself.

We have a long march ahead of us. Our first order of business is to solidify our ties with, and recruit, the many new forces who came to, and applauded, this May Day We need both patience and urgency in accomplishing this. The presence of the janitors testifies to our persistence over time in trying to deepen our work in the factories and unions, as well as the schools, to train new communist leaders of the working class and build a mass communist party. It seems that workers are starting to fight back more. As PLP gets more involved with workers in class struggle, they increasingly respond to our communist ideas. Significant sections are winnable to the Party if we fight hard to win them.

This march gave a strong push forward to that process.

Which Side Are You ON?

(Excerpts of a speech to the San Francisco May Day.)

This is my second May Day. I want to recount events at Boeing and in the Seattle area since I was here last year. Boeing union president Bill Johnson appeared on all the local talk shows with none other than Boeing CEO Phil Condit to sell the contract. A shop steward and friend of the Party called, asking why Bill and Phil were misleading the membership about the pension plan. He was the first caller and the host assured him he would get to ask that question. The steward waited for an hour until finally the host told him there wouldn't be enough time for his question. The steward was furious. "You told me I had a great question and I'd get to ask it" The host then admitted that neither CEO Condit nor the union president would answer that question on the air.

Now I ask you: should we put our future in the hands of a union president that collaborates with the boss to hide the facts about our exploitation from us or should we take the future in our own hands, trusting our class and our Party?

While tens of thousands filled the streets of Seattle in opposition to the bosses' imperialism and exploitation of the world’s workers, the leadership had other ideas. John Sweeney, AFL-CIO president, signed a letter to President Clinton saying he "supported U.S. objectives": finding the cheapest labor possible, here or abroad, so U.S. capitalism can compete with other imperialists around the world.

So I ask you again, to whom do you trust your future, the Sweeneys of the world or the working class guided by the communist PLP?

Nearly 12,000 unorganized Boeing workers have petitioned the unions at Boeing to begin an organizing drive. We, in PLP, will be there with these workers every step of the way.

The choice is clear: trust your future, and your kid's future, to our class, the working class.

This year's May Day marches show there are thousands who share our vision of a communist future free of exploitation. Many more will join us as the class struggle heats up.

Power to the working class! Fight for communism! JOIN PLP!

One Class, One Party, One Flag:

El Salvador: Communists Are "Alive and Fighting"

SAN SALVADOR, May 1 — A sea of workers wanting communist literature, rushed toward our column of members and friends of PLP distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES literature and making contacts in the May Day March in the capital city.

Seven hundred CHALLENGES 1,500 stickers and 2,000 leaflets proved insufficient for the approximately 5,000 workers commemorating the Workers’ Day. The workers exposed the capitalists who are attacking workers’ rights, including firing workers and increasing the cost of basic necessities, especially food.

University students marched, showing their support for the UNAM students in Mexico and those in Guatemala, as well as their hatred of US imperialism which has established a military base of operation in the Compalapa airport here. At the end of the march they burned a figure of "Uncle Sam" along with the U.S. flag.

"It’s very inspiring to be distributing the paper," said a teacher who has recently joined the Party. "The workers practically grab it out of your hands," said another youth, a farm worker, who had never been to the capital before but who marched from one end to the other to pass out the only communist leaflets in the march.

Our leaflet read, in part:

THE COMMUNISTS ARE ALIVE AND FIGHTING

Revolutionary greetings from the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to the working class in all the corners of El Salvador. Around the world our Party fights for Communism. We support the revolutionary slogan, "Workers of the World, Unite!" Our Party is multi-racial; its members come from countries the world over. We are united in the struggle for revolution and the dictatorship of the working class. Our belief is: only one world, only one class, one Party.

Communists are internationalists. With their nationalism, the bosses want workers to respect the border created by the capitalists. These borders are artificial. They exist to divide the workers and maintain different groups of bosses in power.

The workers don’t need borders. The workers in one part of the world are no different or better than the workers in another part. Nationalism creates false loyalties. We workers must be loyal only to other workers, never to any capitalist or imperialist.

Our Party fights for a communist society under the dictatorship of the working class. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the capitalists, who maintain their power through their electoral parties, police, courts, army, and their control of the media. What the bosses fear most is the specter of communism, which will continue haunting them until the workers destroy them.

Workers March Against War, Bosses’ Caused Misery

SF BÓGOTA, Colombia, May 1 — Over 100,000 workers celebrated May Day amidst the growing threat of imperialist military intervention and economic attack. President Pastrana is negotiating a deal with the International Monetary Fund to get $1.6 billion in military aid.

While the reformist union hacks and fake leftists offered workers and youth no real solution to the capitalist attacks, the PLP contingent of workers and students was able to lead a good number of workers with our communist slogans against capitalism. We distributed 3,000 PLP leaflets and sold 250 CHALLENGES and 50 PLP pamphlets about the history of May Day. PLP youth took a leading role in these activities and in carrying the Party banner that led our contingent.

Instead of the reformists’ and pacifists’ calls for "peace" and pleas to the bosses and their goons to stop attacking and killing us, our politics show the nature of these attacks and the need to organize a mass communist movement to end them with communist revolution.

Vieques: Rulers’ National Security Is Deadly for Workers

Three U.S. warships carrying 1,000 marines, federal marshals and cops from the PRPD are ready to evict the demonstrators who have occupied the U.S. Navy’s prime Atlantic training ground for almost a year. It began after civilian security guard was killed by stray bombs from a fighter plane which "accidentally" hit the guard’s post.

The Pentagon insists the firing range is vital for "national security." In January, Clinton and Puerto Rico’s governor Rosello signed a deal allowing the Nazy to resume limited bombing until the 9,400 residents of Vieques decide in a referendum next year whether the Navy should leave the small island.

The main lesson to be learned from this struggle is that the "national interest" of the imperialists is deadly for workers and youth. Not only have the people of Vieques lost a good chunk of the island to the Navy, but the training weapons used here for half a century have raised the cancer rate higher than in the rest of Puerto Rico. U.S. Navy out of Vieques! Smash the imperialist warmakers!

Fired PLP Teachers, Janitors Fight Common Enemy

CHICAGO, May 2 — The same Board of Education that is trying to fire two communist teachers is putting the squeeze on 1,500 mostly black and Latin janitors, cutting their wages and benefits. In a speech to a janitors’ rally where School Board boss Paul Vallas was given the "Hypocrite of the Year" award for his attack on the workers, a PLP high school student told the workers:

"We came to support your struggle for better pay and health care for your children. We students are struggling too. We have teachers that don’t teach, we are attacked for not having the right shoes or uniforms. Every day we suffer from Paul Vallas’ wrath. I’m a member of Progressive Labor Party and we have two teachers from CVS High School who Vallas is trying to fire because they taught students to fight against racism, against police brutality. They are being fired because of their political beliefs, communism. Keep fighting and never give up."

Chicago’s public school janitors were Board of Education employees, entitling them to benefits and wage increases. However, Mayor Daley and his "city that doesn’t work" for workers and youth have privatized their jobs by hiring outside contractors. The Board has eliminated mandatory family health insurance from its bids, meaning contractors will only be required to cover the individual workers, not their families.

When the janitors worked for the Board, they averaged $8 an hour and were promised an increase to $11.40. But now the same workers, when employed by the contractors, average $7 an hour, a 30% cut from their former scheduled rate. Furthermore, seniority rules are out the window. No matter how long janitors have worked at a school, they will return to the starting rate once a new contractor is brought in.

PLP student comrades and friends joined the rally and distributed leaflets exposing Vallas and the Board in trying to fire communist PLP teachers Moises Bernal and Carol Caref from CVS H.S. Many workers at the rally who took the leaflets and CHALLENGE gave us their names for future contacting.

The workers were supportive when we explained the teachers were "charged" with teaching students to take a critical look at capitalism and why our class must change society. They were taken aback by the Board’s "charging" Carol and Moises with taking students to anti-Klan and anti-police brutality rallies. They should be rewarded, not fired, for these anti-racist actions.

Our young comrade is correct; we must never give up fighting and having confidence in our class to support us when we do fight. We have a defense committee to help with fundraising and will fight to pack the open hearings on May 9-11.

Real Vietnam Syndrome: Mass Red-Inspired Heroism Can Defeat Worst Form of Imperialist Terror

U.S. rulers’ war of aggression in Vietnam ended 25 years ago with the biggest defeat in U.S. military history. The media are spilling a lot of ink to mark this anniversary. The bosses hope to turn a war they lost on the battlefield into a series of lessons their class can use as it prepares for future imperialist wars. The working class can also use the occasion to draw our own lessons as we gear our Party for the long struggle that will lead to communist revolution.

• Lesson 1—In class struggle, political ideas and the commitment to fight for them are more important than weaponry and technology. In the 1960s and ’70s, U.S. imperialism had the most awesome military machine in the world. Vietnam was a poor agricultural country with little heavy industry. Yet, despite a death toll of nearly four million (more than ten percent of the entire Vietnamese population), Vietnamese farmers and workers, often armed with little more than rifles, bloodied and battered the cream of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The "secret" weapon: a concept known as "People’s War." Vietnamese communists in both the north and south mobilized the vast majority of the population to struggle against the U.S. invaders. Mass heroism, inspired at least in part by a communist outlook, defeated the best-equipped fascist terror.

• Lesson 2—Fighting for anything short of communism inevitably turns the most valiant struggle into its opposite. The Vietnamese leaders fought for a blend of socialism and nationalism, not for workers’ dictatorship, and unfortunately the workers and peasants followed them. Socialism preserves the wage system and, therefore, capitalist social relations. Nationalism is a deadly form of all-class unity, with bosses on top. The result, after all the blood and sacrifice, is the brutal capitalist dictatorship ruling Vietnam today, with every one of the profit system’s typical horrors, including mass poverty, drug addiction and prostitution. The Vietnamese working class battled valiantly for a decent society, free of imperialist exploitation. Instead it has seen its country once again invaded, this time "peacefully," by Asian, European and U.S. corporations scrambling to squeeze maximum profit from cheap Vietnamese labor power. The result proves overwhelmingly that nothing can substitute for communist politics, leadership and social relations at every stage of a struggle.

• Lesson 3—The specter of "Vietnam Syndrome" still haunts U.S. rulers. The main internal weakness that crippled the U.S. military machine was the unwillingness of working class GIs and sailors to fight for imperialism. This "syndrome" took many forms. Tens of thousands deserted. Many others engaged in "fragging," acts of violence against their racist officers. In 1971, for example, the Americal Division reported one "fragging" incident a week. A significant number of enlisted men defected to the other side and began fighting against the U.S. Gustav Hasford’s novel, "The Phantom Blooper," describes this phenomenon. As a leading military apologist for U.S. imperialism admitted in 1971: "The morale, discipline, and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are…lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States" (Col. Robert D. Heinle, Jr.; North American Newspaper Alliance; Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971).

But this morale problem isn’t ancient history. Despite George Bush’s claim that Exxon’s 1991 "Desert Storm" for oil had ended the "Vietnam Syndrome," the U.S. military is far from cured. The rulers are still worried sick that they can’t motivate their armed forces to make the massive sacrifices necessary for a sustained ground campaign. Most U.S. military adventures since 1991 have been conducted from the air. Last year’s "humanitarian" slaughter for oil pipelines in Yugoslavia is a case in point. Clinton made clear from the outset that he wasn’t about to send in ground troops. He had several reasons, among them a split within the U.S. ruling class about the importance of Caspian oil. But the main reason was the bosses’ continuing fear that their Army may not fight when the going gets tough. The PLP estimates that this fear is based on reality, and that for the foreseeable future U.S. imperialism will be unable to field a politically reliable military machine. This doesn’t mean that the bosses won’t go to war, or even that they won’t send in a large ground army to defend their Persian Gulf oil interests. However, the gap between the rulers’ needs and their ability to meet them will offer our Party and the working class a tremendous strategic opportunity as conditions continue to sharpen over the coming 10-20 years.

Lesson 4—Even a small number of determined communists can provide crucial leadership in the fight against imperialist war. The PLP was a fledgling organization when U.S. rulers began their Vietnam escalation. Yet, despite our many weaknesses and limitations, we were able to play a key role on a number of fronts. When various liberals initially supported the war, PLP organized the first demonstration to demand the U.S. get out of Vietnam. Then, when the U.S. appeared to be losing, the liberals and fake revolutionaries began calling for a negotiated settlement and to "stop the bombing." But PLP continued to fight for U.S. imperialism to get out of Vietnam and for GI’s to "turn their guns around." When ruling class-backed opportunists pushed the illusion of a "new working class" and openly expressed contempt for industrial workers, our Party fought to build a militant worker-student alliance. When these same opportunists tried to turn racist, war-making universities into "counter-institutions," the PLP organized strikes to shut down these same universities and drew the correct political lessons about the nature of state power in capitalist society. For many reasons, we were unable to retain leadership of the mass movement that erupted against the Vietnam War, but our accomplishments at the time and the lessons we learned from them should enable us to do much better the next time around.

Lesson 5—Never take aid from the class enemy and never negotiate when you’re winning. The Vietnamese leadership committed both of these crucial errors. They relied on the Soviet Union for military hardware and advice. The Soviets had long since abandoned the fight for communism to become imperialists in their own right. They viewed the Vietnamese workers’ struggle as a trump in the rivalry between the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. The Vietnamese leadership’s continued reliance on Soviet "aid" made the Vietnamese anti-imperialist struggle a hostage to Soviet rulers’ designs. The Soviet rulers wanted a negotiated settlement that would give them favorable terms for the redivision of world markets. And so they forced the Vietnamese leaders to the bargaining table, at the very moment when People’s War was routing U.S. imperialism. This seeming paradox was the inevitable result of a bad political line. Workers today are paying the price all over the world.

But we will not have to pay it forever. The ultimate defeat of the Vietnamese people’s heroic struggle and the collapse of the old international communist movement cannot obscure the titanic, inspiring achievements of both. More imperialist wars lie on the horizon. Communists today are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. We must learn from them, rebuild our forces, and do everything we can today, tomorrow and forever to wipe the profit system and its horrors from the face of the earth. Fighting to build the international PLP today is the best way to honor the millions of heroic Vietnamese workers and farmers who fought and died for aspects of this goal and whose leaders betrayed them.

Capitalism Creates Beasts Like Racist Killer of Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH, PA — On April 28, Richard Baumhammers, 34, white supremacist and fascist thug, went on a murderous, racist shooting spree over a 20-mile area throughout the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pa., killing five people.

His first victim was a man of Indian descent at an Indian grocery store. Then he shot two Asian employees of a Chinese restaurant, a black man at a martial arts school and finally a 63-year-old Jewish woman was found dead at her home.

Witnesses claimed Baumhammers carried out his killing orgy while appearing very calm, climbing into his Jeep and methodically driving from place to place. The police had been notified after the first murder. Yet it was nearly two hours and four murders later before the cops caught up with him. By then he also had shot at two synagogues and had enough time to spray-paint a swastika and the word "Jew" on one of them (attended by the slain Jewish woman). So where were these "defenders of law and order"?

This sharply contrasts with the quick action of racist cops when "suspecting" black or Latin workers, pumping 41 bullets into an innocent Amadou Diallo as one example.

In recent years, fascist groups such as the Klan, the Adolph Hitler Free Corps, National Alliance and Nazi skinheads have been very active in Western Pennsylvania. The KKK held a rally in downtown Pittsburgh a few years ago. According to reports, Pennsylvania ranks fourth in the nation for fascist groups. Western Pennsylvania was targeted when the steel mills and mines shut down in the late ’80's.

There is no doubt that this racist killer was emboldened by his friends in these fascist groups and also by the killing spree by KKKops across the country recently. A few years ago, Jonny Gammage, a young black man, was pulled over by the cops in an all-white neighborhood in Pittsburgh and a half-hour later was dead on the road. "Strangulation" was ruled as the cause of death; the cops had him on his stomach and were pressing their knees into his back. They got off scot free, and one of them was promoted.

The recent racist TV ad about China placed by the AFL-CIO social-fascist leadership does much to spur racist terrorists such as Baumhammers. Recently, Hitler-loving swine Pat Buchanan spewed nationalism at a Teamster rally, blaming exploited workers in other nations for the problems facing U.S. workers.

In recent years there have been numerous racist killing spree by some associated with a fascist group such as the Aryan Nation. The capitalist press loves to blame this sort of racist terror and murder on the "lone deranged individual," but it is clearly the capitalist system and its drive towards fascism that spawns such fascist activity.

In the final analysis, the only real solution to racist shooting sprees and growing fascism is to build a mass movement for a workers' revolution against capitalism. This movement must have communist leadership to fight for workers power and a communist society where there will be no room for such people as Baumhammers and others of his ilk. March on May Day with PLP for Workers Power and Communist Revolution and against police and fascist terror.

PLP Workers’ Committee Links Class Struggle to the Fight for Workers Power

NEW YORK CITY, April 28 — Organizing for May Day 2000 has energized PLP’s Factory Committee here. In early March a PLP factory worker spoke at a May Day dinner. A construction worker, a regular CHALLENGE reader, responded, "We’re fed up. This system has got to go." The comrade’s Party club produced her story as a May Day invitation to other factory workers. This leaflet reached workers in several factories. The bosses at our member’s factory saw "red" as they searched for the leaflet’s "writer."

Hundreds of leaflets were distributed outside a local factory and at two locations where factory workers board buses and vans to their jobs. "Miss, this is all true. Give me extra copies." "It’s even worse," said a worker waiting for his van. "Where I work there are large numbers of undocumented workers paid below minimum wage and even under-age children."

The Factory Committee launched a Project for Factory Workers in New York and New Jersey. It links the May Day march to plans to fight back inside the factories and to learn how the capitalists profit from workers’ labor all over the world. The Project will also begin Saturday classes in English as a second language (ESL) for factory workers. Hundreds of flyers about the Project were distributed.

Soon afterwards, a group of workers called us. They had been laid off from a large industrial factory. These documented immigrants had refused to work mandatory overtime on Good Friday. They were denied paychecks, called stupid and violent, and told to leave. Cops escorted them out. Three male cops and two male supervisors followed one of the women workers into the bathroom to take her out. They pushed another woman. Cops told the workers waiting for their van to get off company property.

The laid-off workers, members of a Teamster local, said they know the company is trying to get rid of documented workers, especially militant ones, while hiring many undocumented workers (including under-age children) from a local contractor. The Teamsters take $14.85 in dues from documented workers and $21.00 from undocumented ones! The laid-off workers told us they know the boss is the enemy and want to unite with the undocumented workers.

The PLP Factory Committee and workers made plans to fight for their jobs. This included a protest at the local office of the governor and inviting workers from immigrant and legal rights groups, from other union locals and university students, especially those involved in the anti-sweatshop movement. We will expose sweatshops in the state and the hypocrisy of the AFL-CIO, which calls for "labor standards" outside the U.S., but are bosses’ goons in factories here.

A contingent of these workers plans to march on May Day. Six have signed up for ESL classes and the project, joining up to 70 more factory workers. Three long-time friends of PLP "discovered" each other in a van they take to their job. "Rosa is winning a lot of our co-workers to come to May Day," Fresa informed us enthusiastically. About 30 workers are coming from several other factories. More factory workers have become May Day organizers. They all will help organize the Factory Workers Project and summer ESL classes on the May Day buses and after the march. This is possible because PLP’ers have solidified ties with these workers over many years, eating, struggling, crying and hanging out together. The road is bumpy but our hands always reach out.

We plan to connect with garment workers and janitors in California and with factory workers in "free enterprise zones’ in the Caribbean and Central America. "Workers of the World, Unite. Same Enemy, Same Fight." "Las Luchas Obreras No Tienen Fronteras." These well-known May Day chants in English and Spanish come alive through the long-term, ups and downs of many struggles, persistent efforts and leadership of communists in PLP. Workers: join our Party on May Day. For us, "Si, se puede" means, yes, workers can take power!

PLP Leads Campaign vs. Harvard/Kelling Axis

CAMBRIDGE, MA, April 25 — "Hey Harvard, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" chanted workers and students today at a PLP rally against Harvard’s association with Rutgers professor George Kelling. The rally occurred at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Kelling is a fellow (a paid researcher). Kelling’s fascist zero tolerance idea on policing has strengthened the ruling class’ official policy of racist police terror. The rally was the culmination of this semester’s, campaign to force Harvard to stop funding Kelling's research and expose the University’s role in developing fascism in the U.S. We’ve collected over 300 signatures against Harvard’s association with Kelling.

Many people walking and driving by supported our rally with some honking their horns against racist police terror and racist professors. We sold CHALLENGES and distributed several hundred leaflets. A friend from Wellesley College came with two other students and spoke on the bullhorn.

This campaign has increased PLP’s presence at Harvard, in the classroom, in mass student group meetings and on the campus in general. Many students now know about Harvard’s support of fascist Kelling’s racist police. We must now develop the long-term struggle of deeper ties with students and organizing class struggle. Most importantly, we must win students to the Party and to fight for communism.

Hell on Wheel: Bosses’ Racism Is Deadly for Livery Drivers

NEW YORK CITY, May 2 — Manuel López became the 9^th livery taxi driver to be murdered in the last few months. He was found shot in his car at 3:50 A.M. on Elton St. in Brooklyn, with $8 in his pocket. He left a widow and three young orphans. Driving a livery cab has become one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.

Livery drivers are demanding a fund for the relatives of those murdered and for partitions in their cars that could save their lives. All workers must support this demand. A meeting of yellow cab drivers in the Taxi Workers Alliance agreed to raise money to help the relatives of murdered livery drivers. In an English as a Second Language class in the Bronx, a group of home attendants, members of Local 1199, are writing to the union to help the livery drivers.

While workers are trying help these drivers, politicians and cops are trying to take political advantage of their misery. Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner organized a special unit of 300 cops to "help" the drivers. Giuliani, who did nothing in the past when these drivers were murdered and robbed, suddenly saw a golden opportunity to clean his dirty image after the rash of recent police murders. With the support of the self-appointed "leader" of the livery drivers, businessman Fernando Mateo, Giuliani sent the Street Crime Unit, the same unit responsible for murdering Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, to "help" the drivers. It hasn’t helped. Since the cops were sent out, more drivers have been killed and robbed.

Bronx borough President Freddy Ferrer and Senator Charles Schumer, both Democrats and supporters of Hillary Clinton, couldn’t let Republican Giuliani get all the credit. They’re asking for federal aid to help livery drivers put partitions in their cars.

All these politicians are part of the problem. They all have supported the powerful Medallion Taxi (yellow cabs) owners, which pressured theTaxi Limousine Commission to ban livery drivers from picking up street fares. So when the already low-paid livery drivers have not made enough money after 12 hours or more of picking up passengers who call their taxi base, they risk driving late at night, particularly where, because of racism, yellow cabs won’t go. Eighty percent of all robberies and seven of the nine livery drivers murdered recently have occurred because of these conditions.

There are no easy solutions to livery drivers’ problems. Capitalism is dangerous to workers all the time, but some changes could be fought for. One would be ending the monopoly of the 12,000 medallion bosses (it cost some $200,000 to buy a medallion). One union of all taxi drivers, both livery and medallion, might also help. Today there is no union for any drivers. In 1970, when AFL-CIO Local 3036 representing 39,000 yellow cab drivers struck for 15 days, they forced taxi owners—after years of reneging—to provide partitions in cabs. The labor boss Van Aarsdale eventually dissolved the local.

In the final analysis, however, low wages, crime and rotten working conditions won’t disappear as long as capitalism exists. Fighting for a society without the profit system is the only real long-term solution. That’s what PLP fights for. Join us!

LETTERS:

Vietnam: Politics Trumped Hi Tech

Twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War haunts the ruling class and shapes its military strategy. The main lesson of the war was that political commitment will defeat technological superiority. The Vietnamese were able to defeat the U.S. because they mobilized the entire population to fight U.S. imperialism. This was primarily a political victory for the Vietnamese. Based on defending Socialism and anti-imperialism, the Vietnam workers made tremendous sacrifices to defeat first the French and then the U.S.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this sacrifice, was the willingness of the Vietnamese to die in battle.

Participants in the war say it over and over again. In the first chapter of a very good book called "Flower of the Dragon," a war correspondent witnesses U.S. soldiers mutilating a North Vietnamese soldier alive, in an effort to make him talk. The writer commented on the stoic look in the young boy’s face as he died without talking, and the writer concluded the U.S. would never win the war.

The lack of political commitment of U.S. soldiers is still a fundamental weakness for the capitalists. Although able to field an army that will kill for imperialism, they have been unable to field one that will die for it. This weakness has shaped their military strategy for the last 25 years and is the core of what they keep calling the Vietnam Syndrome. It is partly why they pulled out of Somalia after 18 soldiers got killed, why they pulled out of Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks, why they have yet to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

The capitalists have been unable to solve the contradiction of having to rely on hundreds of thousands of black and Latin youth, who have been brutalized by a racist system, to field an army. Obviously this doesn’t mean that all these soldiers are ready to pick up guns to fight for communism today. The collapse of the old communist movement, combined with decadent culture, selfishness and the limits of our own movement are all things we must overcome. Still, the specter of the military falling apart as it did in Vietnam, and young soldiers with rifles not following the bosses’ orders, sends shivers up and down the spine of the ruling class.

Red Soldier

Workers’ Flag: The Color Is Red

A group of PLP’ers went to the "May Day" march in NYC organized by the garment workers union UNITE, by Tepeyac, a Mexican immigrant group, and others. The crowd of about 2,000 mostly Mexican immigrant workers gathered at Union Square and then marched to City Hall chanting, "We are here and we are not leaving"; and "Amnesty for Undocumented Immigrants."

Helmeted cops were all over and even arrested a group of young anarchists for "wearing masks while loitering."

It was good to see so many workers marching in what they thought was May Day, but the history and significance of May Day was hardly mentioned, particularly its revolutionary content of workers fighting for a new society.

The few of us in PLP did bring that message. Many took our CHALLENGES and May Day stickers which they pasted on their jackets and signs.

May Day also means internationalism and the carrying of the red flag of workers’ revolution, not nationalism. It doesn’t mean waving the flags of different countries, like marchers did here.

We made some contacts and hope to bring some of these workers to the PLP May Day march in Washington, D.C. There they will see the difference between PLP’s communist politics and those of the UNITE union hacks who have a long history of helping the bosses keep workers in garment sweatshops in the U.S. (despite what they say about "fighting sweatshops" overseas). March on May Day for communism and internationalism on May 6!

NYC PLP’er

May Day Stickers: a Hit in DC

I wish to tell the high school students who designed the May Day stickers that they were a great success in Washington, D.C. We stickered on Sat., April 15th near several IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank conferences. When people saw PLP's table, they commented on the stickers. They were pleasantly surprised to see that a May Day march was planned.

On Sunday, PLP set up a table at the ellipse and members stickered the area. The young demonstrators eagerly grabbed extra stickers on the table. They were impressed with the eye-catching colors and the design. Having the website on the sticker was a real plus. Keep up the good work and keep making our Party vibrant with creative ways to get our revolutionary message across.

In Solidarity,

D.C. Red

Who Will you Entrust the Future With?

(The following was part of a speech given by a PLP teacher at San Francisco’s May Day.)

Progressive Labor Party offers workers and students the red flag of the international working class. It is red with the blood of workers all over the world who have fought the whip of the capitalist oppressors. It is red with the blood of 30 million Soviet workers who died beating back Hitler, and with the blood of the workers who sacrificed their lives for their class in fighting for the Paris Commune, the first communist workers state.

The red flag unites workers all over the world in the struggle for workers' power and a communist society where there will be no rich and no poor, where each will work and contribute to the society according to ability and commitment, and where scarcity or abundance will be shared.

The bosses lie when they offer young workers instant gratification. We tell the truth: most of life will be one of struggle. The first May Day Progressive Labor Party celebrated on the West Coast was in 1971, here in San Francisco. I marched in that May Day (pregnant with the young poet you will hear in a minute) when Richard Nixon was negotiating with a Chinese "Communist" Party that had betrayed communism. Progressive Labor Party picked up the red flag that the Chinese threw in the dirt, and has proudly carried it ever since.

This May Day we ask you, will you entrust your future to the bosses' liberal politicians or to the working class? Will you join Progressive Labor Party? You need to fight to put an end to this bloody capitalist system—you need communism, and for that you need Progressive Labor Party.

Living a life where you put your trust in the working class is the best life, a life-long struggle as a member of PLP to become a good communist, to understand capitalism and how to fight it, to develop the qualities of serving the people while we struggle against the weaknesses that capitalism has saddled us with, both personally and with our friends. It’s a good struggle, one which brings the deep happiness of knowing that your life has meaning, that you’re fighting not just for yourself but for the whole working class around the world.

Join PLP and help to put an end to a system based on racist murder, exploitation and war, to create a communist world where people can join together to work for human need, where workers are not divided by "race" or national boundaries, but where the international working class will be the human race. Long live Communism! Long live May Day!

LA Teacher

Greetings from Iran

(The following is drawn from a letter received from an Iranian revolutionary living in Europe.)

It is time for Revolution in Iran! Twelve pro-USA, liberal-fascist newspapers have been shut down by the Islamic "hardliners" who want to be more closely tied to Russia.

Students and workers are protesting all over the country. I have been working hard, but we need funds for our solidarity with Iranian workers! We read CHALLENGE regularly and thank you for sending the article about Stalin. I wish all my comrades strength and unity to fight together on this May Day!

Comradely,

Iranian Comrades

May Day Made Pessimist an Optimist

This was one of the best organized May Day marches I have attended. The group was disciplined, very serious, focused and most importantly very conscious. They had done their homework to organize and bring workers hit worst by the system.

It was the best mixture of people—mostly Latin working class blacks and most importantly the youth. The slogans were well selected. It was not your every day touchy-feely demonstrations with women strapping chain saws around their waists as "dicks" (environmental marches), or clowns on stilts. This was a POLITICAL march.

CHALLENGE was distributed to onlookers by young people and to my amazement people really took them with curiosity and support. I was watching this closely, since it reflects (to me anyway, this is my gauge) how the message of the rally goes to the people. Many more cars than usual supported with their horns, and shaking fists. People accepted the literature well.

Slogans I loved: "The Only Solution is Communist Revolution" and "Kick the bosses in the ass; Power to the working class." I for one, a pessimist, was surprised by this march that showed people still do care and that all youth are not hedonistic and apathetic. It is which youth you look at I guess.

I am very glad I went.

A Friend of PLP

Nazi ‘Congress’a Flop in Chile

A group of Nazis from several countries held an international meeting in Chile celebrating Hitler’s 111th birthday. The so-called "National-Socialist Convention 2000" was organized by a local Nazi group which got lots of free publicity from the commercial press here. Even though the Nazi group tried to "cleanse" its racist image by "uninviting" a Nazi group from Uruguay because of its too open racism, Nazis and racist terror go hand in hand.

So while the local Nazis denied they were "racist," the head of the Chilean Nazis which organized the group even tried to deny the Holocaust saying: "I don’t know if six million Jews were really murdered since there is a debate between the traditional historical view of this and a revisionist one." There is no debate. The Nazis murdered millions, most of whom were Jews, communists and other political opponents. Gypsies, homosexuals and other "inferiors" were included.

A group of fake leftists and some intellectuals led the opposition to the Nazi meeting. These people never present any alternative that will lead to smashing fascism. They are supporting newly-elected President Lagos, of the Socialist Party. But Lagos has continued the free market policies of the previous conservative President, so workers are still paid low wages, putting huge profits into the pockets of a few local and international bosses. Local Jewish groups also protested the Nazi event.

Eventually the Nazi "congress" turned out to be a flop. Alexis López, local Nazi head, was arrested for bouncing checks. He was jailed during the Nazi meeting.

Workers in Chile suffered a small imitation of a Nazi regime for many years under Pinochet, when former SS Nazis were used to train fascist torturers and murderers. Pinochet also came to power through the biggest Nazis ever, U.S. imperialism. Kissinger, the CIA, Nixon and AT&T were directly responsible for the fascist coup that put Pinochet in power. Although we are not yet a real alternative to fascism here, we must grow to achieve what the Red Army did to Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945, and then bury capitalism and its creation, fascism, once and for all fighting for a communist society without any bosses.

PLP Club, Santiago, Chile

1. MARCH ON MAY DAY
   FIGHT FOR WORKERS' POWER
   1. Workers and Youth Fight Back
2. CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST FOR FASCIST CUBAN EXILES
3. FIERCE CLASS STRUGGLE SOLD OUT
   YES, WE CAN WIN JANITORS TO MARCH ON MAY DAY
4. PHILLY HOSP. BECOMING MAY DAY ORGANIZERS
5. HAITIAN WORKERS MARCH:
   `STREET CRIMES UNIT=NYPD DEATH SQUAD'
6. How Capitalist Medicine Is Dangerous to Your Health: Three Case Histories
   1. Case #1: Diabetes + Capitalism = Coma
   2. Case #2: Staff Cuts Nearly Kill Baby
   3. Case #3: Early Discharge Can Cause AIDS
   4. "Serve the People"
7. NY/LAPD-STYLE TERROR
   HITS AGENTINIAN WORKERS
8. WHO REALLY WON THE BALKAN WAR?
9. A RED DAWN CAN GROW OUT OF A DARK NIGHT
10. May Day and the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the International Working Class
11. LETTERS
    1. `WORKERS NEED THE WHOLE COAT...
    2. CONN. STUDENTS NEED PLP
    3. REFORM CAN'T END SWEATSHOPS
    4. HARVARD HILLEL SINGS NAZI TUNE

---

MARCH ON MAY DAY
FIGHT FOR WORKERS' POWER

Workers worldwide will be marching on May Day 2000. Progressive Labor Party will be proudly waving the red flag of communism in its marches in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. and in marches in several Latin American countries. It is no exaggeration to talk of the period between last May Day and today as "the best of times and the worst of times!" It is a world of sharpening contradictions.

* Even with its latest "corrections," when compared to last year, the stock market has gone through the roof. So too has the prison population. A world record two million are now jailed in the USA.

*A recent Wall Street Journal article claimed "peace has broken out" throughout the world, with fewer wars than ever in recent memory. Yet India and Pakistan test atomic bombs. Today, thanks to the U.S./NATO 78-day air war on Yugoslavia, you would be lucky to see even a water-rat swimming in the Danube. Only last summer it was Europe's busiest waterway. Today Russian imperialists have once again reduced Grozny to rubble, along with other Chechnya towns. And the U.S. and British imperialists continue their genocidal embargo and virtually daily bombing of Iraq.

* The U.S. boasts more billionaires than ever. Simultaneously, the Tribunal on Africa, meeting in February, asked if there would be another generation of Africans, concluded that --because of poverty and preventable disease--for parts of Africa, the answer is "No!"

Workers and Youth Fight Back

This last year also saw growing numbers of workers and students battling some aspect of this rotting system. In South Carolina, nearly 50,000 demonstrated against the slaveocracy's confederate flag. Hundreds of black and white longshoremen battled the cops there to fight union-busting. In Seattle, thousands marched against the World Trade Organization. Boeing engineers and technicians led a five-week strike filled with growing solidarity between machinists and the strikers, and growing treachery by the IAM leadership. In New York City, workers marched and fought against police terror.

In Washington, D.C. tens of thousands demonstrated against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, demanding they stop impoverishing the world's workers. AFL-CIO leaders blamed China for low wages, not the world's bosses--including U.S. outfits like Boeing--who exploit Chinese workers, as well as hundreds of thousands of prisoners in U.S. jails who are paid even less.

In Los Angeles, workers and students marched and walked out against racist Proposition 21, which will imprison more teenagers, especially black and Latin youth. Meanwhile, liberal politicians say "vote" to stop fascism.

Over 8,000 LA janitors struck, stopped scabs, picketed and marched in a month-long struggle against the richest landlords in Southern California. When a cop from the Rampart police station attacked one of the women strikers, her brothers and sisters planned a march to the police station. This inspired other workers and youth to prepare to join them. The union leaders called it off, instead diverting workers to march elsewhere against the building owners.

The worldwide anger of workers and youth against the capitalist system in crisis spilled onto the streets as well. The UNAM student strike in Mexico lasted almost 10 months, with mass mobilizations every week against the planned school cutbacks. Battles against attacks by the government's fascist goons continue today. From El Salvador to Brazil, workers have led mass strikes against privatization and murderous cuts in services. In China, 20,000 miners struck against the privatization eliminating their jobs.

Clearly workers and youth are unhappy, angry and fed up. The crucial question before us is this: to whom do we entrust our future? Whose leadership will we follow in the coming greater battles against racism, exploitation and imperialist wars? Progressive Labor Party is determined not to abandon the working class to the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO leadership, nationalist politicians and other outright agents of the bosses! We will fight tooth and nail in every boss's organization.

In times of crisis, the working class, led by its communist party, has taken up the challenge, and twice in the last century has seized power and built a society run by the workers. That it was reversed, that socialism retained too many features of capitalism, doesn't change the fact that communists led workers to take power. And communists, especially the heroic Soviet Red Army under Stalin, led workers to smash Hitler's fascism during World War II.

Capitalism is a deadly system, serving only the needs of the capitalist bosses by attacking the world's workers. It can't be reformed to meet the workers' needs. There are no lesser evils, "good" corporations, or "friendly" cops! Racist, fascist terror and war are the "riches" that the profit system "bestows" on our class!

PLP's long-term goal is for workers to take power once more, this time to destroy capitalism once and for all and build communism! Communism means production for the needs of the international working class, not the bosses' profits...from each according to commitment, to each according to need. This is not an easy fight. Yet, even in this period we are growing modestly. And we can continue to grow! Join the PLP. Help make it a mass Party of the working class, a Party steeled in fighting and giving leadership in small and large battles against the bosses--in the factories, unions, schools, churches and other mass organizations.

The only sure path for victory for the working class is fighting for communism. Each new member of PLP, each new CHALLENGE subscriber, becomes a step forward on the long march to working-class liberation. Each member is a fighter against racism and imperialism, a potential leader of the working class. Join us! Fight to put the future in the hands of the workers.

CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST FOR FASCIST CUBAN EXILES

After the kidnappers of little Elián González defied the federal government for months, after fascist Cuban thugs made U.S. imperialism look like a pitiful, helpless giant, Attorney-General Janet Reno ordered an INS tactical squad to seize him and reunite him with his father. Many right-wing Cuban exiles and their conservative allies in Congress cried foul. "I thought this country was a democracy"; "these are tactics are only used in totalitarian countries like Cuba," they complained. Even racist NYC Mayor Giuliani got into the act, criticizing the raid. What gall! This is the same Giuliani who has defended and encouraged the NYPD to declare open hunting season on black and Latin workers and youth.

Even after the armed raid ordered by Reno and Clinton, the kidnappers have received very little sympathy from most people except for a few Republican fascists and the hardcore supporters of the Cuban exile leadership in Miami. Most people justified the INS raid when they saw Elián united with his dad. People also saw through the kidnappers, who used anti-communism to cover their economic and political greed.

As we've said previously, apparently the main section of the U.S. ruling class--represented by Clinton--has decided that the Miami exile leadership is now more an obstacle to, than a benefit for, their interests. While European and Canadian capitalists are investing in the growing Cuban tourist industry and in other joint capitalist enterprises with the Cuban government, the powerful Miami exile lobby makes it almost impossible for U.S. businesses to do the same.

The media deluge is ignoring another aspect of this kidnapping. The hard-line Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful exile group and one of the most powerful lobbies in the U.S., suffered a big defeat. This group, founded by millionaire Mas Canosa, ran U.S. policy towards Cuba for almost 40 years. Mas Canosa became strong through its connections to the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations. He also made millions from juicy building contracts awarded by crooked politicians in the Miami-Dade County government (many of them Cuban exiles in Mas Canosa's pockets).

Mas Canosa died in 1997 and his son José Mas Santo took over. But other right-wing exiles refused to recognize the son's leadership. There was a constant fight among them for control of the Foundation. Mas Santos saw the Elián case as a way to win this power struggle. He financed the kidnappers and tried to use his Washington connection to prevent the boy's father from reclaiming him. When this failed, Mas Santos was forced to confront the federal government. His side lost.

Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, who leads one of the moderate exile groups in Miami and opposes the U.S. embargo on Cuba, attacked the Foundation group, saying that no dissident voice is allowed. "They control the mass media in Miami," he charged, "and they use anti-Castroism as a cover to control Miami and the money from the contracts with the city." Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo also said that the silent majority of Cuban exiles in Miami opposes the right-wingers and wanted Elián united with his dad.

The Cuban workers in Miami who have followed these crooked fascists may have learned a great lesson about capitalism: anti-communism and belief in capitalist democracy are deadly for most workers. To side with one group of bosses against another won't win you any friends among other workers. For years, Haitian immigrants have been deported and jailed in the Krome federal concentration camp outside Miami with no protest from the right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami. This city's poverty rate is among the highest in the country, particularly among children. For years, black workers have been brutalized and murdered by cops in Miami, many of whom are of Cuban origin. Again, Cuban exiles have said nothing. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

FIERCE CLASS STRUGGLE SOLD OUT
YES, WE CAN WIN JANITORS TO MARCH ON MAY DAY

LOS ANGELES, CA., April 24 -- In the final days of the janitors' strike, many workers signed up for the May Day March in San Francisco.

When we called workers about the details of the march, one worker said, "Look, I want to go, but I have my doubts, because some of the union leaders say the police could arrest us or attack us, and that the union won't be responsible for us. I'd like you to come tomorrow to the picket line to talk to our group of strikers."

A Party member and two other workers went and boldly explained the need to march together with garment workers, bus drivers, aerospace workers and anti-racist youth, people marching against police brutality and with communists from PLP. The strikers gave them the megaphone to speak and answer the strikers' questions. One worker came close to a comrade and asked "do you have material in Spanish n Dialectics?" "Absolutely," said the comrade. When this discussion ended, more than 40 workers re-affirmed their desire to come to the march.

One rank-and-file leader from another building said, "The list is growing. We better be ready with buses!" At the contract ratification meeting, some workers lined up to sign up for May Day.

During the strike, hundreds of janitors read CHALLENGE. Thousands read the Party's leaflets. Many called the office for information about the May Day March and the Party. Many of these workers can become leaders, not only of the strike, but revolutionary leaders as well. The opportunities we have after this strike show us that, by fighting for our ideas, we can build the Party and fight for communist revolution in the mass movement. It's a long hard road and we're marching on it.

On the other hand, this is how the strike ended:

"Si se puede" (Yes, we can!) chanted the leaders of the Janitors' union. "No se puede" (No you can't) loudly chanted many janitors. The leaders were telling the workers about the "last, best" contract offer by the bosses. They asked the members to ratify the new contract. The workers received about half the increase the union had demanded. The union leaders had promised this struggle would raise the janitors out of poverty. Not true. The workers had been fighting for an increase of $3 an hour over three years. They now average $6.80 an hour. Some received $1.90 and others got $1.50 over three years. In some areas, sick days were taken away.

The day before in a similar meeting many workers yelled "sellouts, traitors" at the union leaders. The majority was not satisfied with the contract offer after three weeks on strike. But the majority voted for it because they didn't see a serious strategy to win more or to continue the strike.

However, the strike experience can be an advance for many workers. During the marches and picket lines, thousands of women and men heroically showed their courage and strength in the fight against the bosses. Dozens of scabs and abusive supervisors got a little of what they deserve. Hundreds of workers helped lead daily struggles, from keeping peoples' spirits up to organizing political discussions, to spreading garbage and dog food in the buildings where the biggest bankers and law firms have their offices, and preventing scabs from entering the buildings.

The strike exposed the police as the first line of terrorists for the bosses and their state. During the strike, the police arrested and beat many workers. We never saw them arrest any bloodsucking boss for refusing to negotiate with the workers. When a cop from the Rampart Division beat a woman striker senseless, her enraged brothers and sisters planned to march on the Rampart police station, but the union leaders, rather than upping the ante, re-directed them elsewhere.

The cops' role is to protect the bosses and their property. The bosses use their hired thugs for racist terror to keep workers' wages low and the system of wage slavery in place. The social-fascist union leaders played their role, diverting the angry workers away from a political target--the state apparatus of the ruling class--to maintain a strictly economist outlook.

Under capitalism, the wage system is a chain around the workers. The bosses only pay us what's needed to get us to work so we can produce more profits for them. It's a big lie that we're going to rise up out of poverty under the wage system.

The power to change the situation is in the workers,' relying on themselves, not on liberal politicians and their buddies who head the AFL-CIO. During the strike there was a parade of Democratic Party politicians from Jesse Jackson to California House Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, to Cardinal Mahony and even Vice-President Gore. Gore is part of the Clinton administration that brags they've deported more workers than any other administration, including the 1,500 people who've died trying to cross the border in the last five years. Clinton and Gore and the biggest bosses they represent are also responsible for the deaths of thousands of workers in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Colombia. And they've thrown millions of workers in Mexico and Central America into deep poverty. They are not the workers' friends!

One of the most important lessons of the strike is the need to destroy this capitalist system and build a new communist society. Then workers will have power and production will be planned to meet the needs of the international working class, not to enrich the bosses. This means that the janitors' struggle continues. It won't stop here.

Many workers signed up for PLP's May Day March in San Francisco and to learn more about PLP. These workers are open to seeing way beyond this contract fight and to joining the long-term struggle to destroy the fascist bosses and their wage slavery with communist revolution.

PHILLY HOSP. BECOMING MAY DAY ORGANIZERS

PHILADELPHIA, April 23 -- "This shit gets you wound up!" said Bill holding this week's CHALLENGE. Bill is a long time reader who's never marched on May Day. "Maybe it will get you so wound up that you'll come to Washington this year," said Fred. "Maybe," Bill replied. "Jane's been all over my ass about coming!"

This conversation may be crude, but it represents some modest, yet significant political developments in building May Day at Jefferson Hospital here. Making May Day a mass activity won't happen by one organizer bringing everyone. It can happen, however, when many workers become May Day organizers. Jane is one of them.

This year is the first time Jane sold many May Day tickets. She's gone further in explaining to workers why they should march. This year workers approached Fred and said, "Jane told me about May Day and I think I'll come," instead of, "Jane told me to ask you about May Day." Jane's efforts are helped by the development of several other workers who are marching for the first time and are bringing other workers.

We also learned how to better link May Day to daily struggles--from the ongoing contract negotiations to the struggle of part-timers for full-time jobs--as well as relate it to building ties at work. For example, in all of our on-the-job struggles workers complain about the many divisions among us. May Day, on the other hand, represents the interests of the united international working class. Participating in the March helps to break down these divisions.

The current contract negotiations represent the sharpest attack on workers here since the union was organized. Several negotiating team members have reported the discussions from the meetings to the union members. This has become very controversial and has raised good questions.

During the last contract talks, the Local 1199C union leaders told the negotiating team members NOT to reveal anything to the workers. The union leaders said that this would cause "trouble" among the workers. Some of the members figured the only "trouble" worrying the union leaders was trouble for the bosses, and so they continued to report directly to the workers.

As workers learn more about the negotiation process the basis exists for them to understand its limits, how this process is the bosses' way to curb class struggle. Once the day-to-day fights on the job and the principles of May Day are linked, building for the March becomes more significant. It helps workers more clearly understand the need for class struggle and the long-term outlook of communist revolution. In many ways, a busload of Jefferson workers at May Day can be more important than all the negotiation sessions combined!

HAITIAN WORKERS MARCH:
`STREET CRIMES UNIT=NYPD DEATH SQUAD'

I attended the march called by the Haitian Justice Committee against police killings. The majority of the marchers were working class Haitians, with many high school and college students. It began at Grand Army Plaza and went over the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. I would estimate there were between 5,000 and 8,000 people. Many joined the march along the route, and there was a lot of support from bystanders. It was lively and spirited, with whistles, music and colorful banners, including one saying, "Street Crime Unit = NYPD Death Squad."

Marched through downtown Brooklyn, thousands lined the sidewalks, many applauding the march. Passing by some factories, workers at the windows gave the clenched fist and shouted support. Marchers angrily yelled at the hundreds of cops walking alongside us, warning them of retribution the next time they murder a Patrick Dorismond or an Amadou Diallo.

I marched alongside a sanitation worker who energetically chanted "Giuliani Must Go!" We talked about how police brutality, especially against people of color, was rampant throughout the U.S. I offered the opinion that this wouldn't stop as long as capitalism,

with its inequality and poverty and the need of those on top to keep those at the bottom in place, prevailed. He agreed and took a copy of CHALLENGE to read.

Manhattan Teacher

How Capitalist Medicine Is Dangerous to Your Health: Three Case Histories

Good health care depends on how services are organized, facilities staffed and the attitudes of the people who provide care. "Serve the people" was the slogan of the Chinese Communists. In the first 25 years following the 1949 communist revolution, Chinese medical and public health workers brought about the most dramatic increase in life expectancy, and the steepest decline in death rates ever seen in any population in history. This stemmed from a revolution in attitudes and distribution of limited resources according to need, not because of high-tech hospitals.

In capitalist China, infant death rates among infants are rising again, now that free services have been eliminated. The following cases are from a major U.S. "public" hospital, but they could be from ANY major U.S. "public" hospital.

Case #1: Diabetes + Capitalism = Coma

A 60-year-old man was admitted with a new diagnosis of diabetes. His doctor prescribed insulin and a new diet. Ordinarily, the "Diabetic Teaching Team" (DTT) would then have seen him. The DTT is a group of nurses who go floor to floor, instructing new diabetics how to give themselves the proper dose of insulin, draw their own blood and check their own sugar level. The patient then understands how to manage the disease. But the administration eliminated the DTT two years ago, saying the floor nurses could perform this task. But the floor nurses were already overworked with other new responsibilities, all in the name of cost-cutting and "efficiency."

After only 24 hours, the patient was sent home where he lived alone. He gave himself insulin as he thought he'd been instructed by the floor nurses. Two days later, his daughter broke into his apartment and found him unconscious. He was rushed to the hospital and into intensive care, diagnosed with dangerously low blood sugar from insulin overdose. He remained in a "persistent vegetative state" (coma) and was sent to a special hospital for long-term care.

Case #2: Staff Cuts Nearly Kill Baby

A young woman having her first baby did well in labor but had a hard time pushing the baby out. After about 2_ hours, her doctors called for a Cesarean Section, but there were no nurses because a reduced staff was busy handling trauma cases. She pushed for another two hours. When the baby was delivered, it was almost dead and had to be resuscitated. Only time will tell if there was permanent brain damage.

Case #3: Early Discharge Can Cause AIDS

A woman was admitted to the maternity unit for evaluation. An HIV test was requested. The special team handling HIV had more patients than it could handle. Her blood was drawn even though the counselors had not spoken to her. She went into labor and delivered her baby. The early discharge program sent her home before doctors discovered she was HIV-positive. She wasn't notified until she had been home breast-feeding her baby for a week. The risk of her baby being infected with HIV, during delivery or through breast-feeding, and dying of AIDS is over three times what it would have been had the HIV result been known before delivery.

"Serve the People"

Honest self-criticism, anti-elitism and serving the working class are communist ideas. They reached a pinnacle in Chinese hospitals during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. These ideas inspired health care workers around the world.

As fascism develops in the U.S., we see the opposite. Mistakes are covered up. Decisions once made with collective input from nurses, therapists and interns, are now made in a dictatorial style by head doctors. Hospital budgets are cut to the bone and selfish attitudes are pushed.

We must fight hospital bosses who want to remove life-saving services from our patients. We must struggle against the insidious growth of anti-patient and anti-worker attitudes among health professionals. But none of those fights will lead anywhere unless they are connected to the overall fight for working class power. When the workers hold power, "Serve the People" will be the order of the day.

NY/LAPD-STYLE TERROR
HITS AGENTINIAN WORKERS

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, April 24 -- Police terror is not unique to New York or Los Angeles. Workers here got a taste of it last week while demonstrating outside Congress against a labor "reform" bill. Forty-nine workers were arrested and 30 were injured during the cops' attack, 14 of them hospitalized after being hit by rubber bullets. What made this attack different was the "Rodney King" effect--someone videotaped five cops clubbing a worker over and over while he lay on the floor with blood pouring from his head. One cop was filmed while taking a knife from a demonstrator and slashing the worker's back with it. The outrage was so widespread that 12 cops were suspended.

The 500 demonstrators were part of the truckers' and sanitation workers' union federation, which will be severely affected by the "reform," ending industry-wide contracts and allowing each company to negotiate separately with its workers. In late February, 18,000 of these workers demonstrated in Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires' main square, while the Lower House of Congress passed the bill. Last week's protest was to demand that the Senate reject it.

The reform bill was introduced after the International Monetary Fund demanded that the new government of President Rua reduces Argentina's "high labor cost" in exchange for a $7.4 billion loan.

The truckers' federation head, Hugo Moyano, is trying to portray himself as a defender of workers' rights. He broke with the leading CGT (the Central Labor Federation), led by the opposition Peronista Party, whose Senators already approved the bill. Moyano denounced the CGT leaders when they refused to organize a general strike against the bill.

But union leaders in Argentina are no different from union leaders worldwide. The current CGT boss, Rodolfo Daer, used to lead the Argentinian Workers Movement (MTA) and attacked the old leadership of the CGT for not opposing a similar labor reform bill in 1996 when Peronist Menem was the Argentina's President. Moyano succeeded Daer as head of the MTA, and now considers his union faction the "real" CGT.

Just as cops serve and protect the bosses, union leaders also serve them by keeping workers tied to capitalism. Sometimes these hacks sound militant, like Moyano, but they end up betraying workers. Why? Because reformists function within capitalism, according to the bosses' laws, which are geared to enforce the profit system..

This is the opposite of communist workers, who are active in unions and other mass organizations and participate in all workers' struggles precisely to raise the idea that capitalists and workers have irreconcilable contradictions. Bosses thrive on exploiting workers. The only way to end this is by destroying their system, with its police terror, and building a society where workers rule: communism.

WHO REALLY WON THE BALKAN WAR?

A year ago, Clinton and other NATO imperialists were dropping "humanitarian" bombs on Yugoslavia, a relatively poor country of 11 million people. To justify this aggression, the liberal media told horror stories about Yugoslav president Milosevic, whom they dubbed the new "Hitler" of the moment. The other side of this hypocritical accusation was the supposed U.S./NATO rescue mission to save Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's brutality. But what the Clinton-U.S. "rescue mission" accomplished was to show Milosevic as an amateur in genocide. Milosevic had made thousands of Kosovars homeless. Clinton drove out hundreds of thousands, terrorized millions throughout Yugoslavia, and wiped out huge chunks of the Yugoslav infrastructure in the process.

From the beginning, CHALLENGE exposed Washington's big lies and printed the truth about this air war. U.S. rulers' immediate goal was to keep Milosevic & Co. out of the oil pipeline business. Their long-range strategic purpose was to prevent a Russian-Yugoslav alliance which would spur the revival of Russian imperialism. Despite their overwhelming tactical superiority, Clinton and his masters failed on both counts. Milosevic still holds power and continues to make oil deals. And U.S.-Russian imperialist rivalry is heating up all over the world. New oil wars, possibly soon, are in the cards.

Clinton's bombs seem to have accomplished little more than a postponement of the inevitable. Milosevic's plans to build an oil empire call for a pipeline network from the Russian-dominated Caspian to Skopje in Macedonia, then north to Pancevo in Serbia, and west to Croatia's Adriatic coast. This scheme would enable Milosevic to make billions as a middleman supplying western European oil needs. The key to the operation is the construction of the Skopje-Pancevo link.

The destruction wrought by NATO may have slowed down this grand design. There seems to be little mention lately of the Skopje-Pancevo connection. However, Milosevic has become an energy partner with Russia, through the intermediary of Hellenic Petroleum, owned largely by the Russian oil giant Lukoil. Hellenic is building a pipeline from Skopje to Thessaloniki in Greece. In late January, Greek and Macedonian ministers celebrated the completion of its first ten kilometers, gloating about "a reply to those [e.g. Clinton & Co. -ed.] who disputed the agreement" (Athens News Agency, 1/21). Hellenic plans to export electric power to Kosovo.

As for the U.S., one of its planned Caspian export pipelines seems to be going ahead; a second never had a chance. According to Stratfor's Global Intelligence Update, the route from Burgas, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea through Skopje to Albania, is likely to be built. But there's a big drawback for Exxon Mobil: Rockefeller's rival, BP Amoco, will use this pipeline to ship Russian oil. Protecting the line would mean a permanent U.S. military presence in Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo. U.S. rulers, whose main wing represents Exxon Mobil, still haven't reached unity about what to do on this question.

U.S. oil moneybags confront a further strategic dilemma. Clinton had made a false promise to build a pipeline from the Caspian to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. This plan would avoid Russia and Iran and at the same time tempt Turkish rulers with a cut of the action. But it's too expensive to build, and Clinton probably knew this all along. Oil is far more profitable, especially for Exxon Mobil, when it comes from the Persian Gulf instead of the Caspian, and can therefore be shipped anywhere by sea under the U.S. Navy's protection. But not building the costly Turkish pipeline could politically damage U.S. imperialism's carefully built relationship with the Turkish fascists, whose support Washington needs for its overall Middle Eastern oil goals.

So after all the bombing, U.S. rulers face the same contradictions they went to war to eliminate. The main difference is that the basic conflicts have sharpened as a result of Clinton's "problem-solving." Under their new president, Putin, Russian bosses have served notice that although they may not yet be ready to tackle the U.S. head-on, they intend to mount a challenge for world supremacy. They already cancelled their "no-first-strike" nuclear war pledge. A new Russia-Iraq-Yugoslavia axis appears to be emerging. "There is a substantial history of military cooperation among the three countries" (Stratfor, April 18), and the Russians are upgrading both Iraqi and Yugoslav air defenses. The U.S. and British bosses continue their almost daily bombings of Iraq.

It doesn't take a wizard to see where all these maneuvers are headed. As Saddam Hussein and Milosevic have demonstrated, the best way for a two-bit dictator to retain power in a tough situation is to get himself declared U.S. bosses' number one enemy of the day. But U.S. rulers will keep picking up rocks only to drop them on their own feet. Their need for maximum oil profit forces them into contradictions they can't solve. The logic of these contradictions is more war. Already, the Democratic Leadership Council, which sponsored Clinton and Gore, has identified the next president's chief immediate foreign policy goal as ousting Saddam Hussein.

As the burgeoning Russia-Yugoslavia-Iraq romance shows, Putin & Co. won't give U.S. imperialism the blank check for mass murder that Russian leader Gorbachev handed George Bush in 1991, when Exxon launched its Desert Storm slaughter for oil. The next oil war may well be even bloodier than the last and will further sharpen the antagonism between Russian and U.S. bosses.

As we prepare to demonstrate on May Day, we should reflect on our responsibility as communists. Only communist revolution can end bosses' wars for oil and profit. Communists in PLP have this as our goal. We must not only warn of bosses' wars but also prepare to act as militantly and massively as possible when they break out. Building PLP in the crucible of anti-imperialist struggle becomes the order of the day.

A RED DAWN CAN GROW OUT OF A DARK NIGHT

RICHMOND, CA, April 24 -- "What is the ruling class?" This question started a discussion and invitation to May Day at Kennedy High School in Richmond, California. Students offered up such sharp answers as, "the owners" and "the wealthy." The speaker from PLP dropped some facts: the top 1% of the population owns 40% of the wealth, while the bottom 80% owns a meager 16%. This helped to clarify the idea of a ruling (capitalist) class. As the main character says in John Sayles' great movie "Matewan," about a coal miners' strike, "There's two kinds of people in this world: them that works, and them that don't."

We discussed topics which the students are angry about, mainly the passage of Proposition 21, the new law which will make it even easier for the cops and the courts to throw young people in jail, sentencing them as adults and for longer terms. The students tied the racist prison system to the media in two ways: first, the two institutions are used to control the working class, building mental and physical prisons to lock us down; and second, the media is actually instrumental in the prison boom because of the racist, sensationalist portrayals of crime on television.

One student illustrated the racist character of the laws by explaining that penalties are much harsher for crack cocaine than powder cocaine, since crack is more commonly used in poorer, black and Latin neighborhoods than it's "designer drug" counterpart, powder cocaine (See PLP pamphlet PRISON LABOR: FASCISM U.S. STYLE).

"Why don't we see much fighting back in our community? What is holding us back?" asked the teacher. The most frequent response was that students don't feel they can make a difference. The teacher responded with an insightful comment: "I think you're right; talking about a revolution seems overwhelming. We learned about slavery in class. Don't you think, for a man or woman born into slavery, that it seemed like things would never change? But after a long struggle, it did change."

That insight reflects an important aspect of dialectical materialism, the scientific philosophy of the working class. It talks about the coexistence of the actual (what we see around us today) and the potential (what might be achieved sometime down the line). As one youth said, "It seems like we still got slavery, but instead now they give you a little money and call it something else." He's right, it is slavery; it's capitalist slavery, wage slavery. But while the actuality today is "overwhelming" and the system seems strong and invincible, we can't lose sight of the potential, that is, the society that we can build when the working class is united around the communist Progressive Labor Party.

Sign-up sheets were passed around. By day's end, 49 students had signed up to march on May Day in San Francisco on April 29. Just as these angry students have the potential to become communist organizers, so does our Party have the potential to replace the bosses' flags of exploitation, racism and war with the red flag of communist revolution and workers' power. Onward to May Day!

May Day and the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the International Working Class

May Day has always had two sides to it: one that demands reforms, and the revolutionary side that organizes to destroy capitalism. May Day commemorates a massive strike wave in the U.S., and the particular battle in Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886. The movement's leaders demanded an 8-hour day, but also advocated the "abolition of the wage system." Six of them were hung by the rulers for their allegiance to the working class and defiance of capitalism. Then and now the capitalists feared this revolutionary side to May Day.

Then and now the capitalists feared this revolutionary side to May Day. In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism." By 1886, the rulers of Chicago saw this specter. "The newspapers and industrialists were increasingly declaring that May 1, 1886 was in reality the date for a Communist working class insurrection modeled on the Paris Commune. According to Melville E. Stone, Head of the Chicago Daily News...a 'repetition of the Paris Communal riots was freely predicted' for May 1, 1886." (Page 90, "Labor's Untold Story," Boyer and Morais)

In December 1886, San Francisco transit workers joined this rising strike wave. They demanded a workday reduction from 13-15 hours to 12 hours (then 7 days a week), and for a pay increase from $2.25 to $2.50 a day. "Strike-breakers were hired, and there was a great deal of violence. Cars were damaged, strike-breakers were beaten, and one person was killed." Newspapers reported eight instances of the use of dynamite by the striking workers. In March 1887, the Governor signed a bill "limiting gripmen, drivers, and conductors to a 12-hour day." ("Transit In San Francisco" published by SF MUNI RR Communications Department.)

In the 1880's the early leaders of the American Federation of Labor were somewhat radical--it was actually an AFL delegate's report to the Marxist-led International Workingmen's Association that led to the call for the first May Day. But by the 1920's the pro-capitalist AFL leadership, fearing the growth of communist ideas in the working class, collaborated with the U.S. government to subvert May Day. At the 1928 AFL Convention, the Executive Council supported a Congressional resolution to make May 1 "Child Health Day." They said, "May 1 will no longer be known as either strike day or communist labor day."

The revolutionary side of May Day dominated when the communist movement was strong. During the peak of the communist organizing of the CIO unions in the 1930's and '40s, May Day was celebrated in the U.S. As many as 250,000 would march to New York's Union Square. However, with the advent of the Cold War, and U.S. imperialism's launching of a worldwide anti-communist offensive, the bosses' government in Washington helped oust communists from union leadership by making it illegal for them to hold union office. With the triumph of business unionism and anti-communism, organized labor discarded May Day and recognizes Labor Day in September.

From the Haymarket battle in 1886, revolutionary workers spread May Day around the globe. But history is written by the conquerors, and many workers born here know nothing of the contribution that the U.S. working class, with the support of the international working class and communist movement, made to the development of this revolutionary holiday. Today May Day is the official Labor Day in most countries, but the leadership of these marches demand reforms, and stress the "common goals" of labor and capital.

PLP has learned from the triumphs of the communist movement in the USSR and China, and from their failure to fight directly for communism. We advocate "Abolish the Wage System" as part of changing the relationship of workers and work in a new communist society.

The abolition of money, of production for sale or profit and of the wage system is absolutely necessary to establish communism. When the international working class wins and holds control over all economic, political and cultural institutions of society, it will unleash a creative power that will propel the human race to its highest accomplishments in all fields of endeavor. We call this the dictatorship of the proletariat. We need a mass revolutionary communist party to do this. The capitalists will use every means--including mass, fascist terror and war--to prevent it.

In the San Francisco Bay Area and Canada, some groups now want to "Reclaim May Day." They want to reform the "evils" of capitalism, but disconnect May Day from its communist roots. PLP seeks to keep May Day as a revolutionary international working-class holiday; to advance and popularize communist production for need as the future of the human race; to develop a strong and healthy class hatred that will destroy wage slavery and fascism everywhere.

Long live the 1st of May, the revolutionary, international, working class holiday! Fight for communism!

LETTERS

`WORKERS NEED THE WHOLE COAT...

Recently one of our progressive student clubs showed the documentary "Global Assembly Line," about major U.S. corporations moving production to low-wage regions in Asia and Latin America. It's about 50 minutes long, in color and, although made in 1986, seems amazingly current. It shows workers as leaders of struggle, not simply objects of exploitation and pity, unlike the Global Exchange film, "Sweating for a T-Shirt."

The film begins with interviews of company bosses explaining they've moved operations to Mexico and the Philippines. The attraction is not only because of low wages and benefits, but also the predominantly female workforce would be "good workers"--those willing to work long hours doing boring, repetitive detail work. Electronics workers endure toxic chemical fumes. Company bosses state they must seek lower costs or go under to the competition. When they close U.S. plants, lay off workers there and exploit the hell out of workers abroad, it's "nothing personal," just the logic of capitalism.

Mexican and Filipino workers explain how they became conscious of their exploitation and the need to unite and fight against their exploiters. There is dramatic footage showing strikes in both countries. In 1983, in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, 8,000 workers, mostly women, shut down 11 of the 12 maquiladora factories, including the General Electric and Zenith plants.

The struggle reveals the limited possibilities of reform under capitalism. First, the workers are under enormous pressure to limit their demands because of company threats to relocate to another Mexican city. The strike succeeds in winning two concessions: "a brief two-month wage increase," and the right to elect their own union leadership. Elections are held and workers celebrate their reform candidates' victory. But the local authorities prevent them from taking office. Four of the five leaders go on a hunger strike in the main plaza, but after 14 days are dragged away by the police to a hospital, where they are force-fed.

We also see a militant strike of Filipino electronics, textile and garment workers. At one point the workers form a human barricade to prevent the transfer of goods from one of the struck factories to a different city. The army breaks up the barricade and arrests the strikers, who resist bravely. In the end, workers in both countries are shown continuing their struggle.

Yet the film, funded in part by the AFL-CIO, fails to draw the important political lessons: (1) that the government is not and cannot be neutral but represents the interests of the owners, both national and international capitalists, and (2) that no reform movement can win more than a few concessions from the capitalists, who have the state on their side and can always move operations elsewhere. The workers must be won to go beyond their trade union consciousness, as militant as that is, to revolutionary class consciousness.

The only possible solution offered by this documentary is the idea of forming transnational unions in order to combat the multinationals. As Brecht once said, the goal of these mainstream unions is to convince the corporate masters to turn over a slightly bigger piece of the coat, while the workers need the whole coat, which they've created in the first place. After listening to the workers in this film, one becomes convinced that these women and men have the capacity to run these factories and a worker-led society themselves.

Manhattan Teacher

CONN. STUDENTS NEED PLP

The April 5 CHALLENGE article about Paul Robeson was very informative. The great courage of millions of comrades like Robeson cannot be questioned. Growing out of that experience it is important to learn what it means to be a communist today. The most significant lesson drawn by PLP from that era was the realization that a revolutionary communist party was needed to prevent the sellout of workers' struggles worldwide.

The 125 Connecticut working-class students who attended the presentation were most excited about the report of the recent anti-Klan action in New York City. The smashing of the Klan happened only because of PLP. The Klan is very active in Connecticut where the presentation was held and those students need to know what PLP fights for and why they need to join PLP for their own survival.

Whether we are known as PLP'ers or pro-working-class comrades, we should try to find a way to steer the enthusiasm of 125 potential comrades in that direction. They will be facing racist attack and other capitalist horrors. They should not only learn more about Paul Robeson but should be inspired by that knowledge to begin reading CHALLENGE and learning about PLP and its 39 years of serving the working class and the lessons from that.

A Comrade

REFORM CAN'T END SWEATSHOPS

Eleven students and workers from Muncie, IN, traveled to Washington, D.C. for the Sunday International Monetary Fund/World Bank protests. The cops had already shut down the first coordinating center. Another site was found and thousands gathered there for meetings on non-violent protest methods, legal procedures, logistical planning and emergency first aid.

The next day protesters blocked off as many intersections as possible to prevent the IMF and World Bank delegates from reaching their meeting site. Some linked arms across intersections, others chained themselves together. Some moved parked cars into the middle of the street.

We were out there at 6:00 A.M., but the delegates--anticipating our blockade--arrived at 5:30 A.M. With no heavy clashes between the cops and protesters that day, the event began to resemble a street fair. Some even played stick ball.

Our group included PLP members, environmentalists, Anti-Racist Action members, a local university newspaper photographer, and some unaffiliated people. All of us were angry over the way people worldwide are being exploited for profit, and how the IMF and World Bank are facilitating that. For our group, going to D.C. was mainly a way to take a stand against corporate "globalization," or its proper name, imperialism.

The question is, how do, or can you "reform" "globalization," the IMF, the World Bank or the World Trade Organization? Many groups advocated debt relief for countries owing so much money to the IMF that they can't even pay the interest. Others wanted to "democratize" the IMF and World Bank.

One example is an oil pipeline through Chad and Cameroon in Africa. The World Bank is funding it in the name of "development," but without the input of the inhabitants who will be displaced. So reform was on the minds of many protestors.

Reform, however, is sure to get us another version of the World Bank with a friendlier face, but serving the same oppressive purpose. PLP's main theme was that capitalism was the number one enemy and that the World Bank and IMF are only tools of that system. One comrade said exactly that at a teach-in. People couldn't believe he'd said it! But globalization (imperialism) is not new. It's been around since the beginning of capitalism. What about Columbus? American ventures into Latin America (Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Chile)? European adventures into Africa (Congo, Algeria, Egypt, South Africa)? Japanese invasions in Asia (China and Korea)? No reform will eliminate such fundamental components of capitalism. These institutions and the system that surrounds them need to be wiped out. Then we can talk about ending human exploitation.

PLP needed a stronger presence in D.C., but the literature we distributed at the main rally raised peoples' interest in the idea of communism. PLP is organizing for a future without IMFs and World Banks. No more capitalist exploitation. No more debt. Instead a future communist society--to each according to need, from each according to commitment. Elements of this future will be on display in full force at May Day marches in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco in the coming weeks. There we will see it isn't about reforming these capitalist institutions, it's about organizing a revolutionary army to take them down once and for all, and building our future as a communist society. To paraphrase muckraker Lincoln Steffens, "We see the future, and it will work!"

A Midwest Comrade

HARVARD HILLEL SINGS NAZI TUNE

Here's a story so ludicrous that even Mel Brooks couldn't have invented it. Can you imagine that a leading Jewish organization would sing a Nazi song in Hebrew? As absurd as the idea sounds, Harvard's Hillel Society has come close. More precisely, Harvard Hillel has just released a CD of it's a capella group singing a bilingual English-Hebrew version of the song that gave Hitler & Co. the idea for their fascist mass rallies.

The ditty in question is "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard." It's Harvard's main football song. It got to Hitler via a character named Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl. Putzi, a German with family ties to the U.S. establishment, had graduated from Harvard in 1909. As heir to a Berlin art publishing fortune and one of the Nazis' earliest supporters, he used his social connections to introduce Hitler to the German ruling class. It's no exaggeration to say that Hanfstaengl was crucial in helping Hitler get the contacts and financial backing necessary for the Nazi party's rise to power.

Hitler and his propaganda minister, Goebbels, needed gimmicks to use in mass mobilizations. According to John Tolland's book, "Hitler, A Study in Tyranny," Hanfstaengl proposed the song, "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" and Harvard pep rallies as models. Hanfstaengl played the song for his Führer on the piano and later told an interviewer: "Hitler loved it." This is how the Nuremberg rallies were born. Hanfstaengl broke with Hitler in 1939, probably over the plan to double-cross the western European bosses by attacking them before the Soviet Union, and made his way back to the U.S., where he became an advisor to President Roosevelt.

Harvard Hillel has now made this source of Nazi inspiration part of its own repertory. Why not, after all? Given Israeli racism against Arab workers, the choice seems fitting. The next song on the CD after "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" is "Jerusalem the Golden." What's to follow? A Hebrew rendition of "Deutschland Über Alles" and "The Horst Wessel Song?" Or are the leaders of Harvard Hillel going to trot out the old excuse: "It's not our fault. We didn't know?"

Harvard Hillel's directors may well be unaware of the football song's links to the Nazis. But ignorance is no excuse here. They certainly know Harvard University's long history of anti-Semitism, which was particularly virulent in the 50-year period between the start of European Jewish emigration to the United States and Hitler's rise to power. In fact, as Allen Chase has shown in his valuable book, "The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Cost of the New Scientific Racism" (1975), the "American Anti-Semitic Association" was founded in 1893 by two Harvard professors. For many years, Harvard had strict admissions quotas limiting the number of Jews it would accept. Harvard Hillel's leaders surely know of this history as well. And if they took the trouble to spend a few minutes researching the illustrious graduate who gave "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" to Hitler, they would also discover that on February 17, 1933, Harvard's alumni notes boasted that Hanfstsengl, "one of the best known and most popular undergraduates of his time in College," had just become "confidential aide to Adolf Hitler, recently appointed chancellor of Germany." Hitler's anti-Semitism was no secret at the time, but the blurb about Putzi doesn't mention it. Harvard seemed quite proud that one of its sons was engaging in "public service."

As Chase's book shows, Harvard's anti-Semitism is exceeded only by its long and shameful record of contribution to intellectual racism and imperialist war. Harvard Hillel's leaders cannot possibly be ignorant of this history as well. But ignorance and choosing to ignore, not knowing and not wanting to know, are two entirely different things.

It's good to read in the pages of CHALLENGE that the PLP is once again active at Harvard, particularly around the school's recent contributions to the rulers' plans to expand racist police terror. Our Party has a long and honorable history of sharp struggle in this bastion of liberal fascism. Obviously, plenty of important work remains to be done.

A Former Harvard SDS'er, still plugging away

 

March On May Day! Cop Terror + Global Injustice =Capitalism

a href="#DON’T INVEST IN CAPITALISM, STOCK UP ON COMMUNISM">"ditorial: Don't Invest In Capitalism, Stock Up On Communism!

How Big Bosses Use State Power To 'Correct' the Stock Markets

Building Workers Needs Support of All Workers

Garment Workers Support Janitors -- Beware of Being Gored!

Union Hacks Push Pro-War Anti-Communism Garbage -- But It Is Hard for Workers to Swallow It

a href="#May Day Dinner: Workers’ Political Leadership Developing">"ay Day Dinner: Workers’ Political Leadership Developing

Painting The Crimson Red: Communists At Harvard Launch Campaign Against George K K Kelling

What Fidel Castro Forgot in His Speech: Communism Is the Way Out of Imperialist Hell

a href="#New Jersey: Feel Workers’ Power on May Day!">"ew Jersey: Feel Workers’ Power on May Day!

a href="#Excerpts From Speech ‘Marching On May Day’">Ex"erpts From Speech ‘Marching On May Day’

a href="#It’s More Than Just Jobs; It’s About Promoting US Imperialism">It"s More Than Just Jobs; It’s About Promoting US Imperialism

Strike Against Lockheed Martin

The History Anti-Communists Cannot Erase: How Stalin And The Red Army Crushed The Nazis

a href="#It’s More Than Just Jobs; It’s About Promoting US Imperialism">It"s More Than Just Jobs; It’s About Promoting U.S. Imperialism

LETTERS

Becoming A Communist Gave Me Courage

a href="#D.C. Cops: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’">D.C. C"ps: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’yet’

Miami Mafia Messes Up

Hoffa Heils Buchanan

a href="#‘Reform’ Capitalism? Ain’t No Such Animal">‘Ref"rm’ Capitalism? Ain’t No Such Animal

Computers Used for Fascist Control

---

March On May Day!

Cop Terror + Global Injustice =Capitalism

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 18 — Thousands of protesters against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) converged on Washington, D.C. for a week of actions aimed at exposing and disrupting the functioning of these two international capitalist institutions. The Progressive Labor Party was involved in many of these activities, urging these young activists to join us on the road to communist revolution by joining this year’s May Day march.

The Mobilization for Global Justice underestimated the rulers’ goons, the cops, who were not about to allow a repetition of what happened in Seattle. Thousands of police, metal barriers, and over a $1 million of new riot equipment, creating an army of robocops that blockaded 90 blocks around the two institutions. Moreover, the cops carried out preemptive attacks on the demonstrators, closing down the protest headquarters on the pretext of "fire code violations," arresting 600 the night before the opening meeting in an obvious ploy to reduce the numbers of the demonstrators the next day. They periodically gassed, pepper sprayed, beat and arrested demonstrators. Ultimately, over 1,400 were arrested. D.C. Police Chief Ramsey gloated, "I have absolutely no regrets about anything….I make no apologies for anything that anybody [in the police department] did during this time."

But despite these police attacks, many of the IMF and WB delegates were, in fact, blocked, at least temporarily, from getting to their meetings by chains of demonstrators blocking streets. More importantly, thousands of young people joined in a great upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment. It is up to us in PLP to make sure this sentiment take a revolutionary road, instead of the reactionary one pushed by many forces in this movement (see PLP’s pamphlet "Know Your Enemy: Capitalism. The Truth About the Fair Trade Anti-Globalization Movement).

PLP was actively involved in many of the meetings, teach-ins and planning that led up to the major events and met dozens of young people interested in going beyond non-violent protest. Throughout the main day’s events, the PLP held a vigorous bullhorn rally calling on the demonstrators to link the fight against the IMF and WB to the fight against fascist police brutality, prison labor, anti-immigrant attacks and domestic sweatshops in the U.S., and thereby build a mass anti-fascist, pro-communist movement that spans the globe. The response was extremely positive. Over 1,000 CHALLENGES and PLP pamphlets were eagerly received, along with thousands of leaflets. Many asked to be contacted, and a local study group is already forming. Several old friends and members of the PLP were thrilled to see us; one attended his first Party club meeting in over 14 years the following day.

There is much political struggle ahead. There are numerous dead-ends in this movement which must be combated. Demonstrators were systematically "trained" in non-violence by the pacifists, who reinforced a fatalistic approach to struggle. Some speakers at various events attacked bosses overseas, such as in China, letting U.S. bosses off the hook and laying the foundation for nationalism. Most of the demonstrators, however, seem wide open to a systematic anti-capitalist, militant, anti-imperialist and anti-racist approach, and are certainly winnable to communism. But we should never stop pointing out the misleading paths upon which capitalists and their agents within the movement will try to place us.

Editorial:

a name="DON’T INVEST IN CAPITALISM, STOCK UP ON COMMUNISM">">"ON’T INVEST IN CAPITALISM, STOCK UP ON COMMUNISM

Workers can learn several valuable lessons from the stock markets' recent roller-coaster behavior.

First, as long as the profit system exists, our class will be handcuffed to its stock markets. We're the prisoners of the so-called "business cycle," with its booms and collapses. It's too early to tell whether the April 14th Wall Street swoon will lead to a recession. It could. Recessions always happen sooner or later. They bring a frontal assault on the living standards of millions of workers. But even if the markets recover and a technical recession isn't in the cards, our class has already paid a heavy price for Wall Street's most recent "correction."

Our pension funds, and individual retirement accounts, especially those invested in the hi-tech sector, have taken a big hit. The markets seemed to be rebounding as CHALLENGE went to press, but that doesn't mean anything good for our retirement savings. Our pockets were picked during this "correction," as the biggest investment houses gobbled up chunks of our pensions at fire sale prices. Companies hit hard by this "correction" will try to re-coup losses by taking it out on their workers. Many, with or without IRAs or pension funds will suffer either layoffs or wage cuts or further reductions in services.

Second, the drastic Wall Street price swings show that capitalism is a fundamentally unstable system. Even in the "best of times," financial markets operate on speculation. For example, there’s a standard statistic called the "price-earnings (P/E) ratio." It shows the difference between a company’s stock market price and the value of its sales. Historically, the P/E average is 13:1. Before the current "correction," some older established businesses had a P/E ratio of 30:1. And the "dot.com" bubble had inflated to the point where numbers of newer Internet stocks were at 200:1.

Many of these Internet companies were making billionaires out of their top executives while actually losing money. Sooner or later the bubble had to burst. Now, in classic capitalist behavior, a shake-out is taking place. Many "dot.coms" will soon be "dot.gones," and many small-time speculators will find themselves holding a bag of debt for bad investments. The winners will be the biggest brokerage houses and banks, who still have the massive wealth to buy up these now cheaper stocks at bargain rates. In essence, a huge transfer of capital is taking place. The big fish are devouring the small fry.

Third, this consolidation of capital has an important political aspect. The main wing of the ruling class is using its control of the government to discipline a number of upstarts. The Eastern Establishment couldn't prevent the rise of Microsoft or the huge increases in wealth created by the New Money technology sector. But once the Rockefeller interests decided things had gotten out of hand, that massive capital was being accumulated by others independent of them, they acted quickly and ruthlessly to cut these rivals down to size.

They used every legal weapon at their disposal: the Justice Department, the leading think tanks, the Federal Reserve System and the liberal media (see box). Bill Gates and his cronies have had their wealth cut sharply. Gates still holds a huge personal fortune, but Microsoft and many other upstart hi-tech companies will no longer enjoy freedom from the eastern banks. When these newer high-tech companies need capital to expand, their reduced assets will now force many of them to borrow from these eastern banks or, at the very least, to admit Establishment bankers onto their boards. This is a good object lesson in class dictatorship and its use of state power.

Fourth, even some of the Establishment forces had to take a hit in this battle. The banks and most industries are tightly connected to hi tech, as both investors and users. Lucent, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Goldman Sachs and Chase Manhattan didn't get socked as badly as Microsoft or American OnLine since the beginning of the year, but they lost hefty percentages of their value. Interestingly, Exxon-Mobil, whose profit rate depends not on microchips but on Washington's ability to hold the Persian Gulf at gunpoint, has lost little.

Finally, as the poet Jean de La Fontaine wrote over three hundred years ago: "…the little folk/Have always paid for follies of the great." However, the biggest folly is believing that the present society can solve the problems it creates. If we want to stop paying the price for capitalist instability and the periodic blood-letting of bosses' conflicts among themselves, we have to fight for a different system. Only communist revolution can create an economy based on workers' class needs rather than on maximizing capitalist profit.

What can be said for a system whose stock market considers a drop in unemployment "bad news," except that it belongs on history's manure pile? The job of putting it there will be long and difficult, but it's the only worthwhile goal for us as individuals and members of the working class. This is the goal for which the Progressive Labor Party will lead thousands of marchers in San Francisco and Washington this May Day 2000.

How Big Bosses Use State Power To 'Correct' the Stock Markets

* Summer 1999: Two scholars from the Rockefeller-run Brookings Institution launch the Internet Policy Institute (IPI) and stack it with anti-Microsoft forces. The IPI defines "briefing the President" as its main goal. It underlines the importance of high tech as an edge for U.S. imperialism against foreign competitors but at the same time warns against exceeding "economic speed limits."

* September 1999: Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley's top high-tech analyst, cautions about "gargantuan losses" in this sector ("Business Week" interview).

June 1999-April 2000: Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan raises interest rates five times, hurting the highly capital-dependent hi-tech sector.

* April 2000. A Federal court nails Microsoft on anti-trust charges.

* April 6, 2000. Clinton presides over a White House conference on the "new economy." Bill Gates attends. Alan Greenspan tells him that the Fed will keep raising interest rates to slow down the market boom, making it more expensive for him and others in the hi-tech field to raise capital for future investment. Former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, now an investment banker, predicts: "There's going to be a correction; it's probably going to be a sharp one, at least in terms of technology equity values." But he reassures established companies like Intel that they won't be badly hurt. Even Goldman Sachs, which has big bones to pick with Rockefeller, climbs on board. Abby Cohen, their tech guru, calls for a market slow-down (Washington Post, April 7).

Building Workers Needs Support of All Workers

NEW YORK CITY, April 18 — The 26,000 workers of Local 32BJ, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) representing janitors, elevator operators, doormen and maintenance workers in 2,900 apartment buildings here are fighting for a new contract. Their current one expires April 21. They work long hours, many standing on their feet for their entire shifts. Union demands include a wage increase, improved health care and job security.

Over the last decade there has been a surge of new buildings. The rents and maintenance charges tenants pay have increased at an astronomical rate. The real estate barons have made enormous profits. And now these bosses are demanding greater "flexibility" to lay off workers. They planned to recruit subcontractors who—with Mayor Giuliani’s blessings—said they would recruit Workfare workers as scabs. However, the outcry by other unions caused Giuliani to scrap this pland.

Local 32BJ’s leadership has no plan of action to win its demands. Its parent union, 1199/SEIU, is the largest union in the state, with a membership of over 240,000. So far this union has failed to build mass support for a potential strike, neither massive rallies nor calling out health care workers in Local 1199. It’s given only limited support to striking janitors in Los Angeles and Chicago.

This leadership, especially from Local 1199, now the biggest single force in SEIU, has made deals with everyone from Governor Pataki to Giuliani to the hospital bosses. Their main thrust is to suck workers into looking to the Democratic Party for their salvation, not to their own strength as a militant rank and file that can stop production.

The last time 32BJ struck, the bosses were able to institute a 2-tier wage system. There were a number of rank-and-file marches and demonstrations. With the leadership lacking a plan and more concerned with controlling workers’ militancy, the rank and file will have to take matters into their own hands. Mass picket lines surrounding buildings can stop scabs. All NYC workers must unite with welfare clients forced onto Workfare to prevent their being used as scabs. All workers who live in these buildings must refuse to do the work of the strikers.

PLP members and friends should organize on their own jobs to win workers to join the strikers’ picket lines, raise money to give directly to the strikers, perhaps "adopting" a particular building to support. We should press our unions to turn out en masse at strikers’ rallies, help block scabs and even call one-day strikes—or more—to help the workers defeat the real estate bosses. Students in colleges and high schools, who themselves have organized anti-racist walkouts over the Diallo verdict, could repeat these actions to support the overwhelmingly black and Latin 32BJ workforce.

If a strike does occur, the union leadership may very well turn it into a political battleground allying with the liberals representing Hillary Clinton against Giuliani. But all these politicians are only concerned with enforcing the bosses’ laws that repress the working class. The class interests of these servants of the ruling class automatically unites them with the real estate bosses. Workers must not allow ourselves to be sucked into relying on liberal politicians who themselves take thousands of dollars in contributions from these very same real estate barons.

In the final analysis, this struggle is aimed at winning reforms. History shows that whatever concessions the bosses might be forced to give, they are able to take them back in other ways. They have state power and often use it to break strikes. They contract work out to non-union subcontractors who many times are able to displace the union workforce. The bosses already rob workers by paying them only part of the value of their labor. The rest the bosses keep as profits, or pay to the banks as interest, which becomes the bankers’ profits.

For workers to reap the full value of our labor, we would have to destroy capitalism with communist revolution. Communists can relate all the issues described above to why the profit system must be destroyed altogether. A big step on this road would be linking the intensification of this class struggle to winning these workers to march on May Day in Washington, D.C., May 6, uniting with workers internationally under one flag, the red flag of a communist-led working class.

Garment Workers Support Janitors

Beware of Being Gored!

LOS ANGELES, CA., April 18 — Garment workers have been supporting the striking janitors in their marches and picket lines, bringing coffee and food to the strikers’ picket lines at night. The enthusiastic reception from the strikers has inspired the garment workers. It led to vital discussions about international workers’ unity, about capitalism causing poverty level wages and about the need to destroy it.

The strikers are open to new ideas. "The workers lined up to get the Party’s leaflet," said one striker. "The comrade from PLP was passing out leaflets and distributing CHALLENGES with both hands."

With fellow strikers and friends, the strike has been useful to show the militancy of workers and their families fighting for $1/hour more per year. Most are now paid $6.80/hour. It shows the potential of workers in general once they understand we can fight for the whole pie, not just for tiny reforms the bosses don’t want to give us.

In discussions in garment factories, we’ve exposed the cops’ role of using terror to protect the private property and profits of the bosses who own the big office buildings cleaned by the janitors. We’ve also discussed why Cardinal Mahony, Mayor Riordan, other politicians and even bosses say they support the strike. Last year, Mahony told a conference of Churches for Labor Justice, "We must support labor struggles from the pulpit if we don’t want the workers to become reds and look for other alternatives."

But the cleaning contractors answered back, "It’s fine that they’re building all this political support with the Mayor, the Cardinal and the Vice-President, but even if they bring the Pope, we’re not giving in." So far the support of these politicians and the union leaders fighting within the laws and limits of the capitalist system haven’t been able to win the $1/hour per year increase. And it won’t solve the problems of the working class.

"Your fight is for everyone, for your families, for justice, dignity, equality," presidential candidate Al Gore told the striking janitors at a rally last Saturday. The day before, Gore dined with rich backers of his presidential campaign in a Hollywood mansion at $100,000 a plate.

Gore is no friend of the workers. He’s the representative of the big banks and the millionaires who dictate the policies of organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who, together with the bosses in general, murder hundreds of millions of workers throughout the world—from hunger, poverty and war. Gore represents the most bloodthirsty ruling class in the history of humanity. The blood of millions of workers from Mexico, to Central America to Africa, Asia and the Middle East is on their hands.

We can help change the balance of forces by winning striking janitors and workers from other factories, unions and community organizations to stop the scabs who are cleaning the buildings and turn this strike into a rebellion against capitalism. We must depend on our fellow workers, not on the bosses, to win.

We’re fighting to turn this strike into a school for communism, by using every aspect of this strike to show the potential of workers’ unity and power and the need for communist revolution. This is a good opportunity to distribute CHALLENGE more massively in the factories, on the picket lines and in the schools and also to mobilize strikers and other workers to March on May Day in San Francisco and join the Progressive Labor Party.

Union Hacks Push Pro-War Anti-Communism Garbage --

But It Is Hard for Workers to Swallow It

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 14 — Over 15,000 steel, auto and textile workers and Teamsters rallied on the Capitol steps, listening to various politicians and union leaders attack China. The workers came because of growing insecurity, despite the bosses’ claims about the "longest period of economic growth ever." It appeared as an effort to stop China from getting permanent normal trade relations with the U.S. The essence was politicians and union hacks winning us to war!

The Teamsters had the union-busting Hitlerite Pat Buchanan as the main speaker at their rally. But Hoffa and Buchanan had nothing on the "liberals" who lead the USWA, UAW, and UNITE!

On Wednesday, at a symposium on lobbying the next day, a speaker said that while Russia and the U.S. have cut their military budgets, China is using the $68 billion trade surplus with the U.S. to buy armaments from the Russians. He said that during the Cold War, the U.S. sold Russia some grain, but nothing of military significance. Paraphrasing Marx (although he attributed it to Lenin), he said some U.S. companies were selling China the rope they will use to hang the U.S.

He said that those who believe the old saying, "Countries that trade with each other won’t go to war with each other," are wrong. He pointed to the two World Wars, and said the U.S. could be at war with China in two to three years! There was no clapping or cheering during this speech. The workers understood the connection between trade wars and shooting wars, and are not won to going to war for the bosses.

A big aspect of the anti-China campaign is anti-communism. USWA president Becker called China an "evil empire." This was matched by a T-shirt of a pro-U.S. "dissident" being manhandled by two cops. The caption read, "Workers Rights, Chinese Style." Many refused to buy it. Most refused to wear it. They really should have put Amadou Diallo on the shirt. The truth is communism means abolishing wage slavery and the class of bosses that lives off the exploitation of our labor.

China is the world’s largest steel producer. Russia is the biggest steel exporter. In 1998 China produced 14.2% of the world’s steel. The U.S. produced 12.6%. China’s production is steadily increasing. U.S. steel imports from China are up. U.S. steel exports to China are down. As China’s industrial capacity grows, its need for oil will eventually challenge the U.S. grip on the Middle East.

China is also the world’s largest textile exporter—which threatens the racist, union busting U.S. textile industry. It was sad to see so many UNITE! (garment/textile union) members at the rally because they are so poorly paid themselves. Talk about fighting over crumbs! Clearly all the talk about "human rights" is a smokescreen to cover the increased inter-imperialist rivalry between capitalist China and the U.S.

There are disagreements among the rulers over how to treat China. Sweeney and Becker are at odds with their bosses on this, but they are 100% loyal in the long run. The revisionists (phony "leftists") suck up to the union leaders and lead workers into this fascist, nationalist trap. This racist, pro-war movement cries out for a revolutionary communist solution.

Our participation in, and exposé of this rally, is helping us to slowly emerge as political leaders in the union. We are more active in local union elections and strike support. We need to raise our communist worldview from many vantage points and confront the pro-boss, pro-war line of the union leadership. We met and talked with many workers, and got several addresses of workers to visit and show CHALLENGE. The storm clouds are gathering, and the Party is growing among steel workers.

a name="May Day Dinner: Workers’ Political Leadership Developing">">"ay Day Dinner: Workers’ Political Leadership Developing

CHICAGO, IL, April 15 — "Why didn’t you tell me more about May Day before? My friend got shot by the Chicago police 13 times, and we had a march against his murder. I’m going to see if his family can come to the march." "I wish I knew more about the march earlier. Now I have to try and change my vacation plans."

These were comments of postal and steel workers who attended our club’s May Day Organizing BBQ and Fish Fry. Postal workers helped buy the food and did most of the cooking. Amidst the aroma of barbecue and frying fish, more than 35 people attended our most successful club event yet. The house was so packed we had to have three different showings of the May Day video.

A PLP member just back the United Steel Workers’ anti-China protests in Washington, D.C. said that after seeing the racist, pro-war union leaders at work, May Day is more important than ever. A steelworker who had also been to Washington committed herself to going to May Day and trying to bring others.

The dinner itself reflected our slow but sure emergence as political leaders on our jobs, in our unions and in our communities. It became evident that years of struggle and base-building at the Chicago Post Office built up a lot of support for the Party and May Day. But we have a long way to go.

Just about everyone who attended the dinner, and many who didn’t, can become CHALLENGE distributors and May Day organizers. This will impel more workers to join the Party and become political leaders themselves. We’ll be visiting and struggling with these workers in the next few weeks to come to Washington, and to bring their family and friends.

Painting The Crimson Red:

Communists At Harvard Launch Campaign Against George K K Kelling

CAMBRIDGE, MA, April 17 — For the past several weeks, PLP members and friends at Harvard and other universities have been involved in a campaign against Rutgers professor George Kelling, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We’ve been petitioning Harvard to disassociate itself from Kelling. This is part of a broader struggle against Harvard's role in developing fascism. We are also preparing for a rally on April 25 at the Kennedy School.

The petition charges that Kelling is one of the main architects/popularizers of the liberal fascist strategy of community policing which calls for the police to "reclaim" urban areas by taking severe action against even the pettiest of "crimes." Kelling's anti-working class, racist views have helped strengthen the ruling class' official policy of police terror. Harvard's support of Kelling continues a long history of Harvard's backing of U.S. imperialism and its racist, fascist, genocidal policies..

We have now collected hundreds of signatures from students and workers at Harvard and other schools in classes, at student group meetings and during public mass leafleting. Harvard's Black Students Association and Haitian Student Alliance have not formally endorsed the campaign. However, we are struggling with Harvard La Raza and the Harvard Progressive Student Labor Movement for their endorsements. In this campaign we have linked Kelling and Harvard as being in large part respnisble for police terror. Kelling, the liberal ruling class and their community policing scheme have played a key role in the mass imprisonment of many of the two million workers in the U.S. Furthermore, Kelling-type strategies used in Boston have helped to more than doube Massachusetts' prison population. We have declared that the only way to end racism and fascism is with communist revolution.

This campaign has deepened our struggle with our friends to connect poverty wages, racist police terror and developing fascism. The many workers who have signed this petition, in connecting these struggles, have helped combat the cynicism of some of our friends.

A student from Wellesley, a women’s college near Boston, has become one of the campaign’s leaders, collecting over 70 signatures. She’s also coming to PLP's May Day march.This week we’re having a meeting at Wellesley to build support for our Harvard rally.

Many workers and students hunger for an alternative to the fascist future which capitalism offers. However, we must do more. We must strengthen all social ties to grow and ensure students move toward the need to smash capitalism with communist revolution.

What Fidel Castro Forgot in His Speech

Communism Is the Way Out of Imperialist Hell

HAVANA, April 16 — The Southern Summit meeting (or Group of 77), representing the underdeveloped countries, ended this weekend here in Cuba with a speech by Fidel Castro denouncing the ravages suffered by most of the world’s population.

Castro said: "Before people talked about apartheid in Africa. Today we can talk about apartheid in the world. More than four billion people lack the most essential rights of human beings: health, education, drinking water, food, housing, jobs, the hope for a future for them and their children…In less than 18 months the world suffered natural disasters never seen before in the 20^th century,…in Central America, Venezuela, Mozambique and many other countries, almost all of them in the ‘Third World.’ Tens of thousands died in these disasters caused by the change in climate and the destruction of nature."

Correctly, Castro blamed the rich imperialist countries for all of this: "The rich world pretends to forget that the causes of underdevelopment and poverty were slavery, colonialism, the brutal exploitation and pillage suffered for centuries by our countries. They look at us as inferior, blaming it all on the so-called incompetence of people from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America…."

This all sounds good, but an important element is missing: the rulers who met in Havana are part of the problem. They are not allied with the exploited workers and masses being ravaged by imperialism but with one group of imperialists or another against the people they rule. One reason imperialism is still able to get away with its savagery is the cooperation of these rulers. They side with one imperialist against another for their own interests, never for the well-being of the people.

Take Africa, where a "little" regional war is occurring in the Congo (Zaire). Armies from Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Rwanda are helping one side or another in the war between two sets of local rulers fighting to control the Congo’s diamonds and other mineral wealth. France, the U.S. and Britain are also deeply involved, arming and training one side or another.

The solution, long forgotten by Castro, is not for some kind of "unity" by rulers of the "Third World," but for unity of workers and peasants from Kinshasa to Paris to New York to Mexico City to Tokyo to build an international communist movement and put an end to the scourge of the earth—capitalism.

a name="New Jersey: Feel Workers’ Power on May Day!">">"ew Jersey: Feel Workers’ Power on May Day!

ORANGE, NJ, April 9 — Police terror, war and the vital need to March on May Day and join the PLP were the themes of our May Day dinner/forum here in New Jersey. Forty-five comrades and friends enjoyed a spirited evening of good food and music, strong political speeches, and a discussion about the importance of bringing large numbers of people to this year’s march.

Our dinner was well organized and showed a new level of collective effort for us in New Jersey. Even more importantly, the evening’s political program involved several younger and relatively newer members, reflecting more working class leadership in the Party here. In particular, the inspiring speech about why workers and others should march on May Day (see below) was greeted by rousing applause.

Although our turnout could and should have been larger, several comrades seem more determined this year to organize for May Day, including some newer comrades, an important development in light of the growth of fascism this past year.

Recently, several people have joined the Party and others can be recruited by May Day. Our sales of CHALLENGE have increased. When we fight hard, we can make advances, however modest they may appear. Today’s small victories are the building blocks for our communist revolution.

a name="Excerpts From Speech ‘Marching On May Day’"></">Ex"erpts From Speech ‘Marching On May Day’

May Day is pretty special to me…I joined the Party a few years ago on May Day. It was the first time I truly felt workers’ power…Now I call on you to march on May Day.

We need to wake up and smell the fascism, the fact that our cities are turning more and more into police states, the fact that we are being exploited by the ruling class. We need to…see that there is no difference between ourselves in the working class,…we are more alike than different. That’s why we all need to march on May Day.

You see, the emancipation proclamation is nothing but a figment of the imagination. Instead of using chains and shackles…they use ideological chains to bind us. Instead of whips, they’re using bullets. The more things change under capitalism, the more they stay the same.

The ruling class and their front line soldiers, the Klan in blue, are the real culprits…You cannot be a black man in the ghetto with a wallet, a pager, a cellular phone or a set of keys because the Klan in blue will be quick to open fire on your ass.

The problem with brothers like Patrick Dorismond, Amadou Diallo, Malcolm Ferguson, and Earl Faison is that they fit the description that the ruling class wants to fill up their jails with to create more prison labor.

You may look at me and judge that I am white or latino, red is the only color that can represent me. Red, the color of our blood. The color of passion and rage that comes over me when my brothers’ and sisters’ blood is spilled. That’s why we need to march on May Day.

That’s what May Day is all about, and you will feel it, you will see workers’ power on May Day and we will do it as a collective, men, women and children, no matter the color of a person’s skin...And soon the masses of people will realize that the only solution is a communist revolution.

a name="It’s More Than Just Jobs; It’s About Promoting US Imperialism"></">It"s More Than Just Jobs; It’s About Promoting US Imperialism

Seattle, WA, April 13—I started a good number of conversations about the Teamster’s Anti-China rally today by asking workers if they knew who was the featured speaker. Nobody guessed Pat "we-shouldn’t-have-fought-Hitler" Buchanan. Some were quite upset. One friend immediately began to talk about the fight against Nazi’s in his "native" country.

Another guy hated Buchanan, but was torn because he didn’t want China to get permanent Normal Trade Relations (NTR) status.. "Boeing will ship all our jobs to China if they get NTR status," he warned.

This led to a discussion about imperialism’s need to drive down the standard of living of all workers. In particular, we zeroed in on the increase in prison labor.

"Why don’t the unions focus on prison labor here, where they can have an immediate impact," I asked.

"But prison labor here is only a small thing," my friend answered.

"That’s what the AFL-CIO would have you believe when they focus your attention on China. In fact, the US has the largest prison population in the world—half a million more than China, which has five times the population of the US—and racist slave prison labor in the good old U. S. of A. is mushrooming. Even Boeing is getting in on the act."

Then we got down to brass tacks. "Look," I said, "Let’s say the unions manage to derail MFN for China. We still loss if the hacks can use this campaign to build a big anti-communist crusade."

He smiled at that.

"If, and when, we ever actually end up fighting a war with China," I continued, "Do you thing these hacks will say, ‘don’t support this war because if the US wins, the corporations will have all this cheap labor to threatened our jobs’? "

"When pigs fly," he assured me.

Strike Against Lockheed Martin

FORT WORTH, TX, April 19 — 2,300 blue-collar Lockheed Martin workers here have shut down production of the Air Force F-16 fighter jet. Mediation talks failed on Monday, sending the strike into its second week. Because of layoffs and subcontracting, the average age of these strikers has grown to 52 years.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s competitor, Boeing, was caught trying to bribe a member of the UAW negotiating committee at its Long Beach, CA. Plant. That contract expires April 30.

The History Anti-Communists Cannot Erase:

How Stalin And The Red Army Crushed The Nazis

According to the worldwide capitalist media, "communism is dead." Yet they have kept up a constant drumbeat of how "bad" communism is, had been, would be. The ruling classes know that the international working class has not quite been won over. So they feel they must maintain this barrage of anti-communism.

The linchpin of this campaign, the bugaboo that the rulers feel they must scare workers with is one word—Stalin. Hardly a week goes by when Stalin is not somehow reviled in the bosses’ media. Books, editorials, letters, TV series and movies appear all with one aim in mind: Stalin is the most foul person who ever lived, "worse than Hitler," worse than anything one could imagine.

This anti-Stalin campaign has been occurring for over half a century. The anti-communists try to rewrite history, but there are millions that still remember the accomplishments of Stalin, the Soviet workers and their Red Army. In the dark days of World War II, when Hitler was seemingly unstoppable and threatened the world with the most brutal dictatorship ever seen, it was Stalin and the Soviet Union who first stopped the Nazis, and then, 55 years ago May 5, flew the communist Red flag over the ashes of Hitler’s Berlin and his murderous Third Reich.

For those who may have forgotten and for the many others who are too young to remember, it is instructive to read what one of the most anti-communist of all the bosses had to say about Stalin and the USSR in 1942. Time Magazine, of the Henry Luce Time-Life-Fortune empire, selected Stalin as "Man of the Year" in 1942. In its January 4, 1943 issue, with Stalin’s picture on the cover, Time entitled its story, "Joseph Stalin: Die, But Do Not Retreat." Here are excerpts from that tribute.

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"The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian…was the man of 1942….

Had German legions swept past steel-stubborn Stalingrad and liquidated Russia’s power of attack, Hitler would have been…undisputed master of Europe, looking for other continents to conquer. He could have diverted 250 victorious divisions to new conquests in Asia and Africa. But Joseph Stalin stopped him. Stalin had done it before—in 1941—when he started with all of Russian intact. But Stalin’s achievement in 1942 was far greater. All that Hitler could give he took—for a second time….

The 1942 accomplishments of…Churchill and Roosevelt pale by comparison with what Joseph Stalin did in 1942.

At the beginning of the year Stalin was in an unenviable spot….Gone was roughly one-third of Russia’s industrial capacity….Gone was nearly half of Russia’s best farmland.

With all this gone,….Stalin still had the magnificent will to resist of the Russian people….[but] the strongest will to resist can eventually crack under continued defeat….

With these reduced resources, Stalin tackled his problem, trying to pick able leaders for his Army, trying to improve its resistance, trying to maintain the morale of his underfed people….

Only Stalin knows how he managed to make 1942 a better year for Russia than 1941. But he did. Sevastopol was lost, the Don basin was nearly lost, the Germans reached the Caucuses. But Stalingrad was held. The Russian people held. The Russian Army came back with four offensives that had the Germans in serious trouble at year’s end.

Russia was displaying greater strength than at any point in the war. The general who had won that overall battle was the man who runs Russia.

Joseph Stalin…worked 16 to 18 hours a day. Before him he kept a huge globe showing the course of campaigns over territory he himself defended in the civil wars of 1917-20. This time he again defended it, and mostly by will power. There were new streaks of grey in his hair and new etchings of fatigue in his granite face….But there was no break in his hold on Russia and there was long-neglected recognition of abilities by nations outside the Soviet borders….

For his armies Stalin coined the slogan "Umeraite No Ne Otstupaite" (Die, But Do Not Retreat). It had been shown at Moscow that a strongly fortified city can be held as a strong point against attack by mechanized forces. Stalin chose to make Stalingrad another such point….Stalin was organizing the winter offensive which burst into the Don basin with the fury of the snowstorms that accompanied it….

Stalin…called to his people to sacrifice collectively to preserve the things they had built collectively….Production norms were increased, apartments went unheated, electricity was turned off four days a week. At year’s end, the Russian children had no new toys for the New Year’s celebration….But there was rejoicing. [Russia] had been saved for the second time in two years….

On the 25^th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, in his big state speech of the year, reviewed the past and for the future struck the note of statesmanship.

The Past. The Revolution that was begun in 1917 by a handful of leather-coated working men and pallid intellectuals waving the red flag, by 1942 had congealed into a party government that has remained in power longer than any other major party in the world. It began under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, on Marxist principles of a moneyless economy which challenged the right to accumulate wealth by private initiative….

Stalin faced the fundamental problems of providing enough food for the people and improving their lot through 20^th-Century industrial methods. He collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was evident in Russia’s world-surprising strength in World War II. Stalin’s methods were tough, but they paid off….As Allies fighting the common enemy, the Russians have fought the best fight so far."

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Postscript. As it turned out, the Red Army encircled the Nazis at Stalingrad and forced the remaining 330,000 troops to surrender in February 1943. The Red Army was never to retreat again, in little more than two years forcing Hitler’s legions to retreat all the way to Berlin. The Soviets had battled 80% of the Nazi army on the Eastern Front, far more than the rest of the Allies combined.

Of course, this tribute by Time accentuates the accomplishments of Stalin as an individual and underplays the role of the Communist Party he led. It was this and the dedication of the Soviet people who followed communist leadership, the Red Army and the workers on the production front at home that indisputably saved the world from a fascist victory.

It was a British general who said, in an introduction to a TV series "The War in Russia," that had it not been for the Soviet people, the Red Army and Stalin’s leadership, untold numbers of British and U.S. citizens would not be alive today.

LETTERS

Becoming A Communist Gave Me Courage

Five months ago I joined a PLP club. In the past whenever my husband talked to me about the Party, I was apathetic and said that I didn’t want to know anything about politics. He always looked for ways to bring communist ideas to me. I remember that once he told me to come with him to a cadre school to make food for those at the meeting. I went. While preparing the food I listened to the conversation and liked the way it was going. This gave me a better idea of what it was about. From that time I indirectly reminded my husband of the meetings and asked him questions about the Party. He said they were forming a club with the wives of some of the comrades to learn about the Party and the Party to learn about us.

My husband said it wasn’t correct to have a permanent club made up solely of women because we aren’t trying to form feminist groups. This would be anti-Party. The plan was to introduce us to the Party, get to know each other and share communist ideas with our children and among ourselves.

I’ve always been timid, but we started to meet and developed confidence in each other. I started understanding the main problem—the bosses’ exploitation of the workers.

I work in a maquilla. Sometimes I have to work twelve or thirteen hours a day for minimum wages. But since I wasn’t thinking about the boss exploiting us for his profits, I was thinking mainly about being careful and acting correctly so that I didn’t lose my job. Now I understand that our wages are based on eight hours and that the bosses are stealing from me and robbing me of five hours more every day in addition to the profits they make off my work for the entire day. It’s the same with millions of workers around the world.

Because of my timidity I never talked back to the bosses and I thought that was the reason I had lasted eight years on this job. I didn’t know that the bosses only saw me as a tool that was useful for their interests.

But now the supervisors have driven me to desperation. My husband was right when he said I had to confront the bosses, because I was putting myself at their mercy. I would carry out their every whim and generate more profit for them. Living in this system is living in hell.

It’s gotten so bad that I wanted to quit my job. I haven’t done it because of the great needs of my family and because now I’m a member of the Party which has taken away my fear and timidity! Now I confront the supervisors who are the servants of the boss!

The other workers support me. They tell me it took me a long time, but that’s how it has to be. I can’t let the bosses mistreat me. The workers admire me now because I used to just put my head down in front of the supervisors.

Thanks to PLP I’m not afraid of the bosses and I defend myself. I’m not afraid of being fired for responding to the supervisors. I’m learning all this from the discussions we have in the club meetings and the cadre schools, which are helping us develop communist ideas.

There are moments when I ask my husband why, having such great communist ideals, he has so many weaknesses. And he tells me that while we live in this capitalist system that isn’t for the working class, its difficult to be pure communists. But our struggle is aimed at developing the masses of workers in the best possible way to fight for communist ideas so that we can destroy the capitalist exploiter and achieve a communist society.

A PLP Comrade in El Salvador

a name="D.C. Cops: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’"></a>D.". Cops: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’

My experiences in Washington, D.C. at the recent anti-globalization protests revealed to me just how brutal fascist cops become when defending their bosses’ system. While distributing PLP leaflets, we saw the Klan in blue in full riot gear, firing shots from air rifles as helicopters flew above. The question was not would the police attack but when.

With other comrades we set up a literature table and spoke on a bullhorn. Thousands of protestors came by in waves. While distributing May Day stickers and leaflets, I asked one what the cops had done. She said a cop had run over her friend’s foot with his motorcycle. When she demanded an apology, the cop snarled "You ain’t seen nothing yet," and beat her with his nightstick, bruising her liver and kidneys. This protestor seemed ashamed over being beaten. I told her the cops are ordered to do this to workers and students, that it was "not her fault." She gave us her name and address. I gave her CHALLENGE and May Day stickers and asked her to invite other protestors to join us at May Day. She agreed to help.

I next got on the microphone and asked the protestors, "How many of you were beaten by the cops?" One third raised their hands. I then asked, "How many of you are sick of this?" and was greeted by a loud shout of agreement that the cops must be stopped. I invited them to May Day and attacked the cops for their fascist actions. Other comrades called for smashing the police and capitalism, the system which needs police brutality. While distributing stickers I spoke with 30 protestors who the cops had attacked, mostly white workers and students, many new to such experiences. I pointed out that the attacks the bosses have gotten away with against black workers for decades, they are increasingly doing to white workers today.

On the bus returning to Boston, I told all the protestors we need to destroy the fascist cops and their capitalist system, which needs cop terror and all these bosses’ global financial institutions.

This protest was the largest I’ve been to and the first time I personally saw and heard just how fascist the police are when the bosses feel threatened. Both the KKKops and capitalism must be smashed!

Red Student

Miami Mafia Messes Up

The editorial and article on little Elián (CHALLENGE April 12, 19) really shed light on this soap opera, and the capitalist forces behind it. Here are a couple of other observations.

Firstly, the Cuban exiles ("gusanos" or worms as they used to be known—now the Miami Mafia) have not only exposed themselves as fascist and arrogant, but have actually made their nemesis, Fidel Castro, look good. Despite all the anti-communism pushed by the Miami Mafia (and a good deal of the press, particularly Univision and Telemundo, the two Spanish TV networks in the U.S.), most people, including non-Cuban Latinos in Miami and throughout the U.S., support Eliancito’s return to his dad and to Cuba. Given that most people see the father and Cuba as communists, that’s a blow to anti-communism.

Secondly, even if the Miami Mafia has lost some of its usefulness among certain sections of the U.S. ruling class, it’s still treated with kid gloves. After all, they have openly defied the Federal government. It’s true that Janet Reno doesn't want another Waco, but still, if the family had been Haitian, Dominican, Mexican or Afro-American, the Feds would have seized the kid right away.

C.H.E.

Hoffa Heils Buchanan

The new PLP pamphlet "Know Your Enemy: Capitalism," discusses organized labor’s role in preparing a patriotic, "America first" working class. The union leaders have a difficult task since they have allowed corporate America to devastate the working class to fuel the current boom.

The leadership of the AFL-CIO talks about internationalism in its Campaign for Global Fairness (CGF). "We have reached an historical turning point. It is time for a Campaign for Global Fairness that writes new rules for the world economy, a campaign not just about trade and the institutions that govern trade, but a campaign for a new internationalism." But the main focus of their campaign is to attack China. They oppose granting capitalist China Normal Trade Relations or admitting them to the World Trade Organization.

Malcolm X once said, "Racism has you looking East when you should be looking West."

Enter Pat Buchanan. At the recent CGF rally in Washington, he told 5,000 Teamsters, "If I was in the White House and the Chinese communists came to my office, I'd tell them 'stop threatening my country, stop persecuting the Christians, or you will have sold your last pair of chopsticks at any mall in America." (SF Chronicle, 4/13)

Of course, Buchanan knows full well that China is a capitalist country, but he labels them "communist" to spout both anti-Chinese hatred and especially anti-communism. The media publicized it far and wide. There were no denunciations of his racist "chopsticks" remarks from the union leaders or liberal politicians who shared the stage with him.

While posing as a worker’s "friend," Buchanan actually represents the Southern textile industry, one notorious for its racism, low wages and murderous conditions. These small-fry manufacturers don't have the investment capital to move their production off-shore to make extra profits from cheaper labor in other countries so they are demanding that the U.S. Government impose tariffs to protect their markets. Buchanan already showed his fascist side when he said that the U.S. had no reason to fight Hitler. Now he is trying to lead a working-class movement based on racism and "America First," and convince U.S. workers to support their own bosses. In Germany this fascism was called National Socialism.

Here in the Bay Area in the Transport Workers Union, we plan to mobilize a counter-attack to this racist campaign and build real working-class international solidarity. It is especially important for union workers to lead the fight against anti-Asian racism because we have a large number of Asian workers in our industry. Back in the 1880’s, the union movement collaborated with the Southern Pacific RR, Leland Stanford, and the biggest Bay Area bosses to lead anti-Chinese raids that divided and weakened working-class struggles. During World War II, the internment of Japanese-Americans was centered in California, and Asian workers have been the source of huge profits in many industries such as agriculture and garment.

PLP's May Day marches are a clear alternative to Buchanan and the AFL-CIO leadership. The working class has a proud tradition of anti-racism and international workers’ unity. May Day is the workers' day around the world, and PLP has been restoring it as a revolutionary communist holiday for 30 years. This is the best answer to Buchanan and his corporate backers' filthy racism. This march is squarely against capitalism, which is killing working people here and around the globe.

Red Transit Worker

a name="‘Reform’ Capitalism? Ain’t No Such Animal"></a>"Reform’ Capitalism? Ain’t No Such Animal

On April 14th^, we attended a conference at the University of Washington. Workshops included issues such as racism, sweatshops, the UNAM strike, the Zapatistas, police brutality and the prison industrial complex, and how they related to globalization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

At one workshop panelists representing various organizations spoke about the LA janitors strike, the UNAM strike, the Chiapas rebellion and immigration. They agreed global capitalism is the source of the problems workers face worldwide. Their answer? Reform capitalism and somehow make it more "democratic."

During the discussion, a young PLP’er said these problems resulted from capitalism, which is fundamentally flawed. It is a system based on commodity production where profit is valued more than human life. He explained that this truth is kept from workers since it might lead them to crush the system and fight for communism. He said the discussion should center around that point to resolve the problems affecting the international working class.

Then the focus shifted to a debate over capitalist and communist ideology. One panelist said when you mention the "S" word (Socialism), people would not understand how it relates to their lives—"most workers don’t know socialism from shit." The other panelists agreed.

This lack of confidence in the working class stems from a misunderstanding of the revolutionary role of the working class and its capacity to change society. Another young PL’er explained that capitalists push this false consciousness on workers, all the more reason why we should educate our class.

Cynicism about the working class has no place in our movement. If anyone could understand communism and the need for revolution, it’s the working class.

Red College Student

Computers Used for Fascist Control

You read a lot these days about how computers and the Internet are supposed to improve education. It turns out that one of the ways our bosses plan to use them is to spy on students and keep them in ever more prison-like conditions.

I recently went to a teachers’ meeting to see a demonstration of video-conferencing. Instead we got a demonstration of a system that can put dozens of miniature spy cameras all over a school and send the pictures to the deans’ or principal’s office—or even, they bragged, over the internet to the local police station. They talked about putting cameras in classrooms, in the cafeteria, hallways, locker rooms…everywhere. They already have one system installed in this area, at Malcolm X Shabazz H.S. in Newark.

The presenter claimed it was for the "security" of students and teachers, and that it could have saved lives in incidents like Columbine, but it is clear that this is a next step in the increasingly prison-like atmosphere they are building in the schools. First cops in every school, now electronic watchtowers, and soon, perhaps, machine-gun towers at the school walls.

Ironically, the company claims it first invented this system so that parents could log in and watch their children playing happily in daycare! But the real agenda is to pressure and intimidate teachers and students alike, to keep us fearful of being on "candid camera." Let this new taste of Big Brother remind us that the real criminals are on the other side of the cameras. We don’t need Internet security cameras to know what the enemy is doing!

Red Eye