London Bombing: Imperialist Rivalry For Oil the Cause of Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism

• a href="#RACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool">"ACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool

PLP Leads Shutdown of Fascist Anti-Immigrant Meeting

Bosses Create Borders to Divide Workers

a href="#Liberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers">"iberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers

a href="#Spread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally">"pread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally

CHALLENGE A Big Hit At Immigrant Anti-Minutemen March of 10,000

Protestors Link Minutemen and Liberal Racists At Anti-Immigrant Rally

a href="#PLP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight">"LP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight

Ford, VW, GM, Mercedes Workers Block Highway, Shut Plants in Argentina

Boeing Contract Battle Should Teach Us How to Think As a Class

AFL-CIO Dogfight: Only Red Leadership Can Put U.S. Workers on the Offensive

Disrupt Army Flag Day Recruiting Spectacle

a href="#Boston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting">"oston Utility Strikers Defy Hacks’ Red-baiting

a href="#PLP’S Songs On One CD">"LP’S Songs On One CD

a href="#War’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s">Wa"’s Horrors Build Conflict Between Brass and GI’s

Threat of Class Struggle Hangs Over EU Rulers

UNDER COMMUNISM: How Would Health Care Be Better?

LETTERS

Learning About Communism At Chicago March

N. Africans Suffer A Lot More Racism Than Oprah

Fight Nationalism, Privatization in Pakistan

Disagrees About Stewart Prosecution

• CHALLENGE Comment

D.C. Project Showed Power of Red Ideas

Youth Write About the NJ Anti-Minutemen Protest

Group Relations Influence Health

Inspired to Defy Fascist Cops

Money Under Communism?

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

• US, China will clash as oil runs out
• ‘Missile Defense’ is plan to control globe
• Recruiting: 4 times harder than year ago
• ‘Made in USA’ can still mean slavery
• White ex-prisoners: More job offers than never-arrested black men
• CAFTA: blood-sucking drug lobby plan
• US loves terrorists if they’re anti-left
• With 9/11 excuse, FBI gets your secrets

• ---

Imperialist Rivalry For Oil the Cause of Growing Anti-Working Class Terrorism

A coordinated terrorist attack has hit several London Underground (subway) stations and a bus. Many have been killed and injured, presumably mostly workers. Supposedly, an Al Qaeda European cell has taken responsibility for this attack.

It occurred during the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. Tony Blair returned to London from the meeting while Bush condemned terrorism. All the world’s big bosses have condemned this attack. How hypocritical! These same bosses are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of workers and their families worldwide due to wars, poverty, starvation, lack of decent health care, mass unemployment, racist police brutality, and more - all created by a capitalist system driven by the need for maximum profits. This is mass terror.

Whoever is responsible for the July 7 London attack (either Al Qaeda—which represents a section of the Saudi bosses which want to control the oil wealth without sharing with Exxon-Mobil, etc.—or some rogue operators from one of the various imperialists’ spy agencies), one thing is clear: we live in a world full of danger for the international working class. Imperialist war for control of oil and other resources has put millions at risk, from Baghdad to Kabul to London. We in PLP condemn all forms of anti-working class terrorism, whether coming from reactionary groups like Al Qaeda or from the world’s big imperialists..

While the G-8 bosses have condemned the London attack, don’t hold your breath if you think the imperialist rivals of the U.S.-UK war in Iraq will help Bush-Blair in their troubles there. The rivalry among the imperialist blocs is sharpening. These bosses have inflicted war and tremendous terrorism on the world’s workers and their families. The only way to smash all forms of capitalist terrorism is to fight for a world without any bosses, a world run by and for workers: communism!

a name="RACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool">">"ACISM: Still Bosses’ Number One Tool

With disgusting hypocrisy, U.S. rulers are portraying themselves as anti-racists, even as they build a racist police state at home and wage racist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. NYC Mayor Bloomberg vows "zero tolerance" for the recent baseball-bat assault on three black men in New York City. Mississippi finally convicts Klansman Edgar Killen in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. After 50 years, the FBI has resumed "searching" for the surviving killers of Emmett Till. The U.S. Senate has "apologized" for failing to outlaw lynching.

But believing that the rulers oppose racism would be a serious political error. Capitalists will never end racism, because they cannot do without the profits that racism produces. By oppressing one group of workers with particular viciousness, the rulers drive down the wages and living standards of the entire working class. Racist divisiveness undermines workers’ struggles on the job and in the community. And in their endless wars against rival capitalists overseas, U.S. rulers use racism to motivate working-class soldiers to kill.

Bloomberg rehashed the lie that "we have come a long way" in overcoming racism. In reality the rulers have integrated the power structure, which helps them control workers more effectively. There are now black and Latino cabinet members, politicians, cops, judges, military officers, principals and business executives. But for the working class, the systematic racism created by U.S. capitalism is as bad as, or worse than, the days of Jim Crow, by every measure imaginable. As they have for decades, black workers continue to earn one-third less than whites. Unemployment for black workers is more than double the rate among white workers. Schools have become even more segregated in many places. Black people can expect to live five years less than whites. Black infant mortality stands at 245% of the rate for whites. Amid a tripling of "persons under correctional supervision" from 1980 to 2003, one young black man in three languishes behind bars, compared with 10% of whites. Similar percentages victimize Latinos as well. And, just as the rulers brand black and Latino youths "criminals," they have jailed without trial hundreds of Arab-Americans as "terrorists."

While they preach equality and democracy, U.S. rulers actively promote racism to serve their imperialist needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pacifying those countries for the likes of Exxon Mobil requires soldiers willing to kill Arabs and Muslims in large numbers. As a "condition for success," the Army War College demands of the troops "a primordial hatred" resulting in an "impulse to destroy the enemy." (Parameters, Summer 2005) Aiden Delgado, an Army reservist, recalled receiving a thorough racist indoctrination, orchestrated from the top down, before shipping out to Iraq: "I remember Army chants. We sang in cadences. And the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads, killing the Taliban. Our drill sergeants would give us motivational talks to pump up our fighting spirit. The theme was the need to get revenge, to go to the Middle East to fight Arabs…. My own commander was infamous for anti-Arab speeches." (Online Journal, 4/1/05)

With larger conflicts looming, the rulers are seeking more widespread loyalty to the government. By harking back to the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, they hope to repeat the political coup they pulled off then when they duped millions into viewing the state as a "protector" against racism. The harsh reality remains, however, that the state employs racism to enforce the rulers’ tyranny over the working class. The troops that "integrated" Southern schools were soon carrying out the rulers’ genocide in Vietnam — although many GI’s there rebelled against these racist orders — and brutally suppressing workers’ anti-racist rebellions in Detroit and elsewhere.

Following the lead of any capitalist politician on racism is suicidal for workers. Racism is inseparable from capitalism. Racism will never be wiped out until the working class, through communist revolution, eliminates the profit system and takes power for itself. That is the eventual goal towards which our Party is continually building.

PLP Leads Shutdown of Fascist Anti-Immigrant Meeting

BRIDGEWATER, NJ, June 25 — The Progressive Labor Party organized 70 militant protesters to shut down the recruitment meeting of the United Patriots of America (UPA), a racist, fascist organization that — under the guise of "Homeland Security" — blames immigrants for U.S. economic woes and equates undocumented immigrants with "terrorists."

While anti-racists chanted and marched with banners outside, ten people including PLP’ers, infiltrated inside and completely disrupted the meeting, stunning the fascists.

The UPA — affiliated with the infamous "Minutemen Project" that places armed vigilantes at the Arizona border — advocates closing all U.S. borders to "illegal aliens," enforcing English as the only language spoken, supporting fascist educational policies of "traditionally American curriculum" and monitoring the activities of "liberal" or "left" teachers.

Outside the arena, the police, working as tools of the ruling class to protect the racist UPA, descended on the group of approximately 60 chanting protestors to force them from the Sports Arena property. Defying police commands, two PLP members were arrested while the rest of the group was aggressively pushed and prodded to the road below. But the cops’ intimidation only motivated us more to continue demonstrating.

Meanwhile, inside the 10 anti-racists, including PLP members, raised hell. Initially posing as "supportive and interested" persons, they responded to a leadership signal during Minutemen Ed Whitbred’s speech to about 35 listeners, standing up and unfurling two huge banners while chanting, "SMASH RACIST DEPORTATIONS! WORKING PEOPLE HAVE NO NATION!" As they militantly marched to the front, the cops and attendees were frozen in shock while Whitbred dashed from the podium. Action proceeded quickly: the microphone cord was ripped from its socket, a comrade moved to the front to belt out a speech, and local police and the County SWAT team quickly filled the room. The PL speaker was arrested as the rest of the group was pushed out the door and down the stairs. A brutal attack on the staircase by the Somerset County SWAT team — armed to the teeth in full riot gear — left one member with a broken shoulder. He was subsequently arrested on false allegations of simple "assault."

The remaining eight infiltrators emerged from the building chanting just as the 60 protestors were marching back up the grassy hill. They joined forces in the Sports Arena lot.

The youth led the day, both outside and inside, showing great determination, courage, discipline and commitment. This leadership bodes well for the future of our Party.

The effective disruption of the UPA meeting was only made possible by the unending leadership and organizing efforts of every PLP member present — just as it will take the unending leadership and organization of the entire working class to successfully fight for the end of racism, of artificial borders, of fascist police control and of capitalism itself. This event marks one more step forward for PLP and the international working class.

We will fight these charges and the fascist police attacks on our comrades, in the courts, in our mass organizations and on the streets. We will raise money from our friends and will recruit more members to PLP, to bring closer the day when the bosses, their homeland security police state and their gutter racist supporters will be a forgotten chapter in history.

Bosses Create Borders to Divide Workers

Borders are a bosses’ creation to mark their nation-states. They use nationalism and patriotism to portray workers who live outside these borders as "foreigners" or "aliens." However, when it suits them, the rulers ignore these borders, always searching for the cheapest labor, no matter its origin. Imperialism requires that capital be exported outside the "home country." And bosses’ wars send one side’s armed forces to invade the "territory" of the other side.

The working class is one class, worldwide, with one class interest — to seize the world away from the profiteers who run it now and to make communist revolution all over.

UPA publicly calls for "border control" and mass deportations. They want to spread the "Minuteman Project," enlisting vigilante "volunteers." They falsely portray themselves as the voice of "middle America" and "the forgotten little guy." But behind the UPA is an openly fascist anti-immigrant ideology, decrying "the loss of American culture and values" resulting from a "foreign invasion." Their platform dovetails with the rulers’ current push to win a mass base for a Homeland Security police state. UPA and others like them are potential foot soldiers for U.S. fascism.

a name="Liberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers">">"iberal Bosses, Politicians — Main Enemies of Immigrants and All Workers

Borders are a bosses’ creation to mark their nation-states. They use nationalism and patriotism to portray workers who live outside these borders as "foreigners" or "aliens." However, when it suits them, the rulers ignore these borders, always searching for the cheapest labor, no matter its origin. Imperialism requires that capital be exported outside the "home country." And bosses’ wars send one side’s armed forces to invade the "territory" of the other side.

The working class is one class, worldwide, with one class interest — to seize the world away from the profiteers who run it now and to make communist revolution all over.

UPA publicly calls for "border control" and mass deportations. They want to spread the "Minuteman Project," enlisting vigilante "volunteers." They falsely portray themselves as the voice of "middle America" and "the forgotten little guy." But behind the UPA is an openly fascist anti-immigrant ideology, decrying "the loss of American culture and values" resulting from a "foreign invasion." Their platform dovetails with the rulers’ current push to win a mass base for a Homeland Security police state. UPA and others like them are potential foot soldiers for U.S. fascism.

a name="Spread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally">">"pread PLP’s Politics Despite Cop Defense of Nazi Rally

YORKTOWN, VA., June 25 — With militant chants, powerful signs and the only speeches with political content, a group of PLP’ers gave communist leadership today to protesters demonstrating against a rally of a new Nazi-KKK coalition. The racists chose the historic battlefield where the U.S. War for Independance ended to promote their goal of ridding the U.S. of Jews. "Just as Washington kicked out the British, so shall we kick out the Jews" was their Hitlerian motto. The Nazis and their supporters, numbering less than 90, were protected by police barricades keeping protesters — Progressive Labor Party militants, anti-racist anarchists and supporters of U.S.-Israeli nationalism — more than a football-field-distance away.

PLP comrades, young and old, truly challenged these fascists with our political speeches, offering our bullhorn to fellow anti-racists who were dissatisfied with the religious pacifists and partisan nationalists. We chanted "I don’t know but I’ve been told, These Nazis getting way too bold, Time to put them in their place, Kick a Nazi in the face!" and "Death, death, death to the Nazis, Power, power, power to the workers!" We held signs like, "The Progressive Labor Party, kicking Nazi ass since 1962" and "Which pig is which?" with a pig dressed in a combination Klan/police uniform.

Amnesty International members from Norfolk attended the rally, and discussed our chants and speeches with us. All bought CHALLENGE. PL also had a contingent at the rally exit, distributing the paper to all who passed, while chatting about revolutionary politics.

The cops searched everyone with metal-detectors, filming and photographing only the protesters, for future attacks on anti-racist radicals. One cop being told, "You got your gun and your nightstick, but where’s your noose?" responded, "In my car." One young comrade explained how cops never break down big corporations’ doors to fight for workers’ interests, but are always there to protect the bosses and break strikes. We also linked police brutality to the courts’ compliance with racist cops.

Almost 30 media people sat in the front row for 90 minutes listening to the racist group’s fascist ranting, before recording five minutes of token footage of the anti-racists’ action. Thus, the police and the media provided direct auxiliary support for these racist terrorists. Our chant, "The cops, the courts, the nazis and the Klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan," pointed out these ruling-class connections.

PL youth and supporters had a sign-making party preparing for the rally, discussing how PLP militantly disrupted past rallies. The most disturbing moment was dissecting the Nazis’ National Socialist Movement ideology, explaining how advocating the mythical superiority of some workers over others can be twisted into a barbaric capitalist war machine.

Communists show that all workers deserve sustenance and should use their abilities in the interests of the working class as a whole. In response to the pacifists and other-worldly mystics, communist revolutionary love of human-kind will prevail over the fear of oppression and over the capitalist oppressors themselves.

CHALLENGE A Big Hit At Immigrant Anti-Minutemen March of 10,000

CHICAGO, July 2 — Today more than 10,000 workers, students and youth marched for immigrant rights on the Southwest Side. PLP distributed 1,100 CHALLENGE-DESAFIOS and 1,000 leaflets in under an hour. Many responded enthusiastically to our anti-racist line, helping us distribute literature and listening eagerly to what we had to say. Many joined our chanting, "Este puño si se ve, los obreros al poder" ("This fist you see means the workers are coming to power"). Workers selflessly donated hundreds of dollars for PLP comrades arrested in New Jersey (see front page) while protesting the racist Minutemen.

Several Spanish radio hosts organized the march, responding to a local Latin woman who invited the Minutemen to speak here. The March leadership was incredibly nationalist and opportunist. Many workers and youth waved Mexican and U.S. flags, chanting, "Viva Mexico!" We struggled against these classless ideas, pointing out that the bosses manufacture national borders to divide us. We chanted, "Stop Racist Deportations, Working People Have No Nation!" and "La Lucha Obrera, No Tienen Frontera!" ("The Workers’ Fight Has No Borders!"). Workers enthusiastically joined us, taking up our internationalist line. A young woman comrade made a speech in Spanish explaining the role of groups like the Minutemen, how nationalism divides the working class and how all workers are exploited under capitalism.

A close friend of the Party said, "I couldn’t believe the response of the workers to the Party. People just came up to me and took CHALLENGES right out of my hands." She saw how welcoming the working class could be to the Party in action. She got out 50 CHALLENGES "accidentally." When asked, she said that all the people who got the paper came up and asked her for it

Newer comrades took most of the leadership throughout the march, leading chants, making speeches and other decisions. Self-critically, we collectively felt that we could have given more effective political leadership with more people, especially Spanish speakers, with more literature, and with better political preparation. This event brought more of our friends closer to the Party and inspired one young woman to want to become more of a leader as a communist and a Party member.

The politicians and clergy, who attacked us for spreading communist ideas, cannot and will not lead workers to smash racism. All these tricksters will lead us down the dead-end road of reformism. Our experience today shows that we should have confidence the workers will see through their lies. Communist leadership will lead the struggles against racism towards communist revolution and a world without borders.

Protestors Link Minutemen and Liberal Racists At Anti-Immigrant Rally

BALDWIN PARK, CA., June 25 — About 800 workers and students protested a rally by anti-immigrant racists called "Save Our State" and the Minutemen. These racists were demonstrating at a monument that says, "These were Indian lands, then they were Mexican…and they will be again." The racists alleged this would bring an "invasion of immigrants."

Hundreds of the anti-racist protesters and Baldwin Park residents enthusiastically received PLP leaflets and CHALLENGES, contrasting with the liberal and nationalist politics of other groups there. We exposed the Minutemen as being part of a long history of attacks on immigrants to divide the working class. We also showed how the liberal Dream Act and the McCain-Kennedy Bill are ploys to induce immigrant youth to fight and die in the bosses’ war in Iraq.

The PLP helped organize a neighborhood march of over 100 people, trying to get to the racists, who were protected by over 200 cops armed to the teeth. At one corner the police formed a line to stop the marchers. As they called in reinforcements, several youth gave speeches attacking racism, the war in Iraq, and bosses’ borders and calling for communism.

After demonstrating in front of the cops, they joined the main group of protesters at a cultural event to try to get to the racists via another route. On the busy street, their chants rang out: "La clase obrera no tine frontera" ("The working class has no borders"); "The workers, united, will never be defeated"; "The cops, the courts, the Minuteman, all are part of the bosses’ plan." Many drivers honked in support while others joined the march.

Many protesters re-grouped with others closer to the racists, but hundreds of cops protected them. Still, the crowd took up chants like, "SOS, Policia — la misma porqueria" ("SOS, Police — the same crap"), contrasting with those only saying "SOS — go home." When the cops tried to clear demonstrators from the street to let the racists through, the anti-racists refused to leave.

While this was very positive, the main gain was the political struggle waged in schools and factories to bring friends to this action. The anti-racist fight is part of the long-range struggle for working-class unity and the building of a revolutionary movement for communism, which will bury all the racists and the system that created them.

a name="PLP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight">">"LP Gains Amid Militant Hospital Workers’ Fight

The intensive drive to organize a strike of 1,100 workers at our large hospital defied the management’s demands to wreck our health plan — the major dispute — and led to a contract settlement that hugely increased the bosses’ payments to the union benefit fund, needed to maintain the present level of our health benefits. We also won annual 3% wage hikes for the next three years in a 5-year contract, with wage and benefit-re-openers in the last two years that will possibly necessitate a strike then. We also prevented the bosses from carrying through a doubling of worker payments to the health plan, resulting in a lesser amount spread over the next three years. The workers approved the settlement 500 to 50.

Ultimately, what can turn out to be the biggest victory for the workers is formation of two PLP study groups. One began functioning during the contract fight. They include several union activists who’ve become CHALLENGE readers. The paper’s circulation rose slightly; one new reader and study-group member said, "The way I’m feeling now, I’m agreeing more and more with that paper!"

Smaller contract victories included vacation, sick and holiday time for hundreds of part-timers, many of whom work almost full-time hours. Without vacation or sick time, they were a valuable cheap-labor source. Until recently, none were active because they had few benefits. But now a group has come forward and will be developed to lead their fellow part-timers. Also, now those retiring will take unused sick time with them.

Without the union members’ militant strike-preparation response to the bosses’ attacks — the best in the union’s history here —the final settlement would have been a disaster for the workers. Strike teams were organized. Every other week hundreds of workers attended solidarity meetings. An early June rally drew over 400 workers, the largest turnout ever. Union delegates were constantly being pulled into conversations or secret meetings. The hospital buzzed about a possible strike. Security was on alert. The workers voted for a strike 700 to 100.

Organizing for a strike meant uniting a diverse group of workers — largely black but also white, Latin and Asian, young and old, full-time and part-time. But the more we politicized and developed men and women rank-and-file activists of all ages and colors, the better we overcame any potential divisions. An anti-scab campaign appealed to thousands of non-union workers.

The union delegate group leading the strike preparation was the largest and most militant ever at this hospital. Black workers from the inner city, white tattooed ex-bikers from the surrounding states, Vietnam vets, ex-Marine Corps Sergeants, middle-aged church-goers, workers from other countries — this was the diverse group whose unity and differences were sharpened as we organk zed. We also had to deal with weekly BS from our union hall — personal rivalries among the full-time organizers, confused and contradictory decrees from the union leaders, and downright sabotage of the rank-and-file organizing.

Amid this whirlwind of activity, PLP had a crucial role, and responsibility to grow and expand our political base. The workers’ main internal weakness reflected capitalist ideas: racism, sexism, passivity, obedience to the pro-capitalist union leaders, nationalism, patriotism and anti-communism. The main external problems involved the capitalist state: anti-working class laws, courts and cops, and pro-boss media, with possible deployment of the Army and National Guard waiting in the wings.

While daily organizing was truly intoxicating, the most important victory required resolute concentration on advancing the Party. PLP’ers were involved in the strategic and tactical leadership of the struggle, while trying to turn the fight into a school for communism.

Initially, PL’ers struggled with workers to broaden the contract issues into strike demands against capitalism. The 30-member delegate group endorsed a demand of "No cuts due to the Iraq Oil War" but the union leadership omitted it from the official demand list. We championed a fight against the attacks on patient care, advocating improving it by hiring more full-time workers. We said the demand for more jobs would also fight the epidemic of unemployment-fueled violence killing our youth. But the fight to preserve health benefits overwhelmed this demand.

We tried to link various questions to the need for communist revolution. For example, after the successful march of 400 workers to the city-wide strike authorization meeting, some union delegates wanted to organize a larger rally at the hospital. The union leaders derailed this plan by citing possible conflict in the law’s 10-day notice requirement for the June 27 rally vs. the 10-day notice required for a June 30 strike. The rally was cancelled. One delegate commented, however, that if our recent march had drawn 800 workers, we could have forced the rally no matter what the legalities, "and burned down the union hall!" PL’ers then explained how the bosses’ laws and their government are weapons against our class which is why we need to seize power with communist revolution. THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES.

Ford, VW, GM, Mercedes Workers Block Highway, Shut Plants in Argentina

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, June 30 — A powerful march in early June of thousands of workers from Ford, VW and Mercedes-Benz that blocked Pan American Highway traffic for six miles was symptomatic of the anger and militancy gripping this country’s workers as they pressed for strikes to recover part of their wages stolen by bosses here, especially since the December 2001 economic collapse. The workers must fight the companies and the government as well as their own union hacks.

Autoworkers are leading the fight-back. The auto industry has recovered, and production is double of what it was in 2001, but wages are the same as 20 years ago.

Just before May Day, delegates from Ford, GM, VW and Mercedes Benz met to demand higher wage hikes than the bosses offered. At mass meetings, workers from different companies united against the bosses’ threats of firings and discussed work stoppages leading to an industry-wide walkout. When GM announced the firing of 320 contract workers, a strike was planned.

Then the union hacks began their sabotage. Stoppages were carried out for only two hours and only in certain sections of plants. Despite this, Ford and VW workers shut down two plants. When workers began organizing an all-out strike, José Rodriguez, national leader of SMATA (the autoworkers’ union) called for a 10-day cooling-off period, with no concessions from the bosses, succumbing to pressure from President Kichner’s Labor Minister. (The bosses, the government and the union hacks are all part of the ruling Justicialista [Peronist] Party).

Fearing workers’ anger, Rodriguez made a deal with GM, while the other plants were on strike. Workers are irate at the sellout which was less than their 2,000-peso monthly base-pay demand (about $900).

The angry workers continued their fight-back, forcing the union to agree to a 2-hour stoppage. Then SMATA reached another separate deal with VW-Cordoba for 1,500 pesos base pay. The workers booed Omar Dragun, union head in Cordoba. They accused the hacks of joining the bosses’ fear mongering of threatened firings if the strike continued. The hacks managed to jam through ratification by a 55% to 45% margin.

Workers throughout the country then demanded union buses to take them to a mass protest in Buenos Aires, while the top union leaders were meeting with the government and the bosses’ association. National union head Rodriguez tried to divide the rest of the autoworkers from the militants from VW-Cordoba.

But in early June, workers at VW-Pacheco, angered because they weren’t paid for the previous two weeks, refused to enter the plant and stopped any supervisor or manager from going in our out. Many workers from the neighboring Ford-Pacheco plant supported the VW struggle. Both groups, along with Mercedes workers, voted to carry out the mass march that blocked the Pan-American Highway. It was the most militant and powerful autoworkers’ march in 15 years. Young and old workers united to flex their muscles. Some workers wanted to seize the plants, but the hacks prevented it.

The government, fearing these angry workers could ignite more working-class struggles, told the bosses to give a little more than originally offered. It wasn’t quite what the workers wanted, but the struggle continues.

Fittingly, this month is the 20th anniversary of the historic Ford-Pacheco sit-down strike. In June-July 1985, 4,500 workers took over the plant for 18 days, causing country-wide tremors. At a mass assembly, only 17 workers decided to leave the plant. Mass support guaranteed the feeding of all sit-downers. Rank-and-file delegates played a leading role in organizing workers in all departments. Workers were opposing the Plan Austral, economic attacks carried out by President Alfonsin. And aping the fascist military dictatorship of the mid-1970’s, the "democratic" Alfonsin government attacked the workers, sending 3,000 cops to evict them.

Then, during the economic collapse of 2001, after the bosses abandoned hundreds of plants, the workers decided to continue production without any bosses, foreshadowing the hundreds of plants occupied by other workers today.

We in PLP believe industrial workers are the key to fighting the bosses’ attacks against our entire class. Just last month saw general strikes in Greece and South Africa (where autoworkers played an important role). When those workers grasp revolutionary communist politics and turn their struggles into schools for communism, then the bosses and their hacks will have plenty to fear.

Boeing Contract Battle Should Teach Us How to Think As a Class

SEATTLE, WA — International Association of Machinists (IAM) District 751 will hold its strike sanction vote on July 13. The result is a forgone conclusion. Almost all these Boeing workers will authorize a strike, as all the union misleaders will brag how "tough" they’ll be during negotiations. The actual strike vote will be Sept. 1 when the old contract expires.

Most of us know it will take more than wearing a T-Shirt that says "Do the Right Thing" or "supporting your negotiators" to ward off disaster. Big cuts in wages, health care, pensions and work-rules marked all recent IAM aerospace negotiations. Lockheed workers lost medical benefits for new hires when they retire. United Airlines defaulted on their pensions, then cut wages and benefits for the third time. Just last month, the Boeing Wichita plant was sold to Onex; then a new contract cut wages and benefits, gutted work-rules and eliminated the Boeing pension plan. In each case, the IAM local leadership, backed by the International, railroaded these contracts through despite initial rejections and even a short strike at Lockheed.

When rank-and-filers moved to build solidarity with each of these groups, they were stonewalled by the local and national IAM leadership. Isolated, each group eventually gave in.

In fact, Jerry Calhoun, Boeing’s chief negotiator, reported to Auburn, Wash. managers that he was "impressed" by the way things were handled during the IAM/Onex negotiations. When you get praise from sources like this, you know you’re in trouble!

But the collaboration between the union leadership and the bosses goes beyond praise from the company mouthpiece. The country’s biggest bosses plan to reorganize basic industry to pay for their "stunningly expensive" wars to secure Mideast oil, which they intend to use as leverage against any up-and-coming imperialist challenger. They are hell bent on eliminating defined pensions, rationalizing medical care and reducing wages to a bare minimum to finance this reorganization in preparation for "small" wars now and bigger wars later. The chairman of the Council of Foreign Affairs, the bosses’ main foreign policy think-tank, warns we have to choose between "retirement security and national security." "[It’s] weapons or walkers," he says. Goose-steeping right in line, the AFL-CIO industrial conference focused not on the unprecedented attacks on our brothers and sisters, but on China’s military potential.

Let’s have no illusions! This contract battle is part and parcel of an overall attack against our economic survival so the bosses can prepare for more deadly imperialist wars. That’s all this system has to offer us. Trying to negotiate our way out of these attacks has been an abject failure. Building class solidarity and rank-and-file militancy that inspires our fellow workers is the only way out of this death spiral. Using PLP’s ideas can teach us, even in this difficult period, how to employ our strength to put an end to this bosses’ nightmare with communist revolution.

AFL-CIO Dogfight:

Only Red Leadership Can Put U.S. Workers on the Offensive

With the upcoming AFL-CIO Chicago convention about to witness a possible split-off of unions comprising 40% of the federation’s membership, various "pro-labor" pundits are lamenting the sad state of affairs in the labor movement and remembering those days when workers were on the move. One such advocate, sociologist Ruth Milkman of UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations, wrote an op-ed piece in the N. Y. Times (6/30) in which she recalled a previous "time of trial for organized labor," in the early 1930s during the Great Depression when "Employers impos[ed] wage cuts and speed-up on their workers while the AFofL [stood] by helplessly."

She then points out that "a few years later" the CIO, "an insurgent group within organized labor…set off America’s greatest surge of unionism." She says that the present move by four of the largest unions — the SEIU, the Teamsters, Unite Here and the UFCW — to triple the funds for organizing the unorganized and combine competing unions could "restore labor" as the force "it once was in an era" of "remarkable gains…for all Americans."

Ms. Milkman conveniently forgets the central feature of the 1930’s surge: communist leadership.

It was communists who put over a million workers on the streets on March 6, 1932 in the battle that eventually produced unemployment insurance and welfare relief for 17 million jobless workers, one-third of the work-force.

It was the communists who were the major force in building the CIO, who championed industrial unionism to organize millions of workers in the basic industries — auto, steel, electrical, rubber, mass transit, chemical, longshore and the rest.

It was the communists who led the fight against racism and for unity of black and white workers in the multi-racial CIO, in contrast to the lily-white craft unions of the old AFL.

It was the communists who organized and led the sit-down strikes in auto that swept the country and forced the giant corporations — GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, US Steel, Republic Steel among many — to agree to unionization and the 8-hour day.

In the key strike — the sit-down at GM in Flint, Michigan — that sparked the organization of four million industrial workers in four years into the CIO, six of the seven members of the Committee that ran that strike and mobilized 40,000 workers from four states to surround the struck plants were members of the old Communist Party.

Compare that record to the likes of the Teamsters’ James Hoffa, the SEIU’s Andrew Stern, and their ilk. This latest crop of labor "leaders" see as their main role "rescuing" the unions to be able to serve the bosses’ capitalist system — which they defend — a lot more effectively than John Sweeney & Co.

It is ironic that the achievements of that communist-led industrial union movement should produce the components of what the ruling class now "proudly" refers to as "the American Dream": the 8-hour day, regular wage increases, health insurance, home ownership, etc. Unfortunately the old Communist Party fell victim to reformism. It did not turn its gigantic organizing efforts into "schools for communism." It did not build for revolution, but rather ended up supporting the liberal, Roosevelt wing of the ruling class that was out to save capitalism from a communist revolution that would eliminate the profit system.

But with the rulers’ massive attack on the working class’s wages, hours, health benefits and the rest, with the drive for imperialist wars in which the rulers use young workers as cannon fodder to keep control of Middle East oil and fend off their imperialist rivals, the "Dream" is becoming a nightmare, especially for the super-exploited black, Latin and immigrant workers who produce super-profits for the racist bosses. It will take a new communist movement, led by a mass PLP, to produce a workers’ society that will be a nightmare for — and destroy — the ruling class.

Disrupt Army Flag Day Recruiting Spectacle

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., June 14 — A crowd of anti-war protesters, including a PLP contingent, disrupted an orgy of patriotism today as the U.S. Army combined with the city government in attempting to turn a Flag Day celebration into a recruitment drive from the local high schools. The extravaganza included police SWAT teams cordoning off the area, Blackhawk helicopters circling the Common, National Guard groups displaying military vehicles — all trying to wow the spectators, mostly grade school children and their teachers.

The black-suited SWAT teams herded protesters into a "Free Speech Pen," but the PLP’ers outmaneuvered them, taking their banner and bullhorn outside the security perimeter and concentrating on selling CHALLENGE and injecting sharp political chants into the demonstration. When some black-suits confronted a PL leader demanding the bullhorn, she steadfastly refused to surrender it and carried it off to a safe place.

The protesters greeted the main speaker, an Army Undersecretary, with angry chants denouncing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Iraq war, disrupting the program. When six flag-bearing parachutists jumped from the Blackhawks and floated to the ground, the protesters’ booing dominated the scene, lasting through the singing of the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance. One person snuck into the audience of mostly schoolchildren and soon had 50 of them chanting anti-war slogans! Then the black-suits arrested seven demonstrators who tried to break into the podium area.

When the ceremony ended, its purpose became clear: the Mayor and Deputy Secretary signed an agreement bringing Cambridge into the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success (PaYS) to improve its recruitment at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High Schools. The nationwide PaYS program dupes youth into joining the military with promises of training and jobs in participating corporations — how the bosses directly combine with the Army to get cannon fodder for their oil wars.

We learned that rank-and-file demonstrators are eager to hear our ideas on imperialism, racism and fascism and are ready to follow our leadership. But we must try to move these actions beyond simple protest and booing to a higher level — which in this case could have been leading them to break out of the infamous "Free Speech Pen." This could inspire all those school kids to join with us in the struggle when they come of age.

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Recently the striking NSTAR gas and electric workers were voting on a proposed contract. A few PLP’ers distributed a flier entitled, "Vote No on the Contract!" It broadened the perspective on the decision facing the workers, stating that company attacks on pensions and benefits are part of the "life-and-death war between ...the capitalist class...in crisis...and the working class...[that] must fight not just for its livelihood, but for its life."

The flyer called on workers "who are ready to up the ante and fight the class war against capitalism...[to] see the proposed contract for what it is — a trick to keep the workers’ struggles confined to a narrow legal process that the bosses control — and vote it down.... But however they vote, the important thing is that they begin to fight as members of the working class."

The workers gladly took the leaflets, eager for any analysis about their struggle. Soon the Utility Union hacks threatened us, ordering us off the property, and calling the cops. They baited us McCarthyite-style, telling the workers to "Rip that up! That’s the communists! It has nothing to do with the union!" This, however, inspired more workers to take the leaflets. Not one worker was seen throwing it away or ripping it up. They carefully began reading them setting them aside in their cars, defying the hacks.

This experience showed again that strikes are important opportunities to politicize workers. The union hacks, desperate to get the sellout agreement passed, were freaking out mostly because the flier called for a "no vote." They’re running scared and must lie to prevent workers from thinking things through. But many NSTAR workers are starting to see that the attacks on them are part of a broader attack on their entire class. They couldn’t have missed the fact that it was communists who had enough respect for them to present a real analysis and long-range program for victory.

Comrades, strike support and boldness will go a long way!

Boston Reader

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The 1970’s PLP LP’s "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers — in English and Spanish — such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Señor Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.Rekindle old memories and live new ones.

Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals, and mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202

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U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez has been charged with killing two superiors, Lieutenant Louis Allen, his operations officer, and Captain Philip Esposito, his company commander. On June 7, the two officers were in their quarters when four explosions rocked their room in Forward Operating Base Danger, near Tikrit Iraq. Initially the Army thought the two deaths were caused by enemy mortar fire, but army munitions and explosives specialists later determined that the bomb patterns were more consistent with fragmentation grenades and claymore mines.

Some reported that Capt. Esposito and Lt. Allen had previously disciplined Staff Sgt. Martinez. The exact motives for the killings are unclear but some general political implications are apparent. The occupation of Iraq is beginning to strain the military.

Since the war started, over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, the vast majority by the U.S. military. Over 40,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded or mentally disabled enough to be removed from Iraq. Over 1,700 U.S. soldiers have been killed.

The enormity of the destruction of human life has moved well beyond the "small" wars to which the U.S. has limited itself since Vietnam. While this is nowhere near the number of casualties suffered in WWII or even in Vietnam, it has caused many people to question the motives for the war.

When young soldiers are ordered to kill children, smash down doors of families and drag them into the streets and shoot wounded men lying on the ground, it induces some of them to ask why and others to crack under the pressure. We don't know if Staff Sgt. Martinez killed those two officers, but we do know that murder has become a way of life in Iraq.

U.S. imperialists are having difficulties in building all-class unity within the armed forces. In October 2004, an entire platoon of the 343rd Quartermaster Company refused to go on a mission in defiance of their commander who felt delivering contaminated fuel over a dangerous road with slow, poorly-running vehicles was worth risking their lives.

The military has been trying to reduce the tension between working-class troops and their chain of command by using civilians for everything from mercenaries to cleaning porta-potties in order to ease discomforts of earlier wars. Racism against blacks and Latinos, once practically an open policy, is now more subtle as U.S. rulers depend on blacks for nearly half of their non-commissioned officers and half of female officers. Latinos, facing racist unemployment and super-exploitation, are expected to fill the military's shrinking enlisted ranks.

But no matter what the bosses do, they can't hide class antagonisms, nor will they be able to cover up racism too much longer. Imperialism asks the poor to fight the rich man's war. Every soldier, marine, airman and sailor who lost their lives died because some commanding officer found the risks acceptable to U.S. interests. Every operation that brings praise is another medal for career-climbing, resume-building officers and another day of danger in the desert for lower enlisted personnel. Pentagon officials, the general of Abu Grahib prison and the commanders of the MP units caught torturing Iraqis supposedly "had no idea of what was going on" while the enlisted soldiers collect years in jail.

The bosses need workers to commit murder, torture and occupation on their behalf but it's the bosses who reap billions while our families reap the casualties.

Threat of Class Struggle Hangs Over EU Rulers

(Part I discussed the snag suffered by the bosses of the European Union when the French and the Dutch rejected the proposed EU Constitution, and the fact that workers have no interest in either bosses’ side. It revealed two contradictions: one involving the high-tech countries like Germany vs. export-industry countries like Italy who must compete with low-wage China; and the second pits European rulers against their U.S. rivals — both of which are difficult to solve. The final one follows.)

The third contradiction reflects the 800-pound gorilla in the room: class struggle, the fight pitting workers against bosses. This was the real shadow hanging over the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution. Leaving aside the openly racist forces, led, for example, by the fascist Le Pen and his National Front in France — who predictably mobilized against unity with Turkey and against immigrant workers — this vote reflected more than anything the workers’ disapproval of a U.S.-style "free market" economy with few social concessions. The European bosses would love to reach this stage. They envy U.S. bosses’ ability to slash health care, education, etc. They took due note when Clinton, a liberal Democrat, ended welfare and replaced it with a slave-labor scheme known as "Workfare."

For many years workers in France and Germany have been able to count on a social security system with affordable medical care, unemployment insurance, retirement benefits and lengthy paid vacations. But these reforms didn’t fall from the sky. The massive class struggles in France during the "Popular Front" period of the 1930s brought them about. French rulers at the time were split. Some felt that granting significant reforms was the only alternative to communist revolution. Remember, the Soviet Union was in its heyday 70 years ago. Other French bosses took the hard line and preferred junior partnership with Hitler to the Popular Front. The second group won out in the short term; the first won in the longer term. After World War II, newly resurgent German bosses decided that throwing some crumbs to the working class was the best way to stifle class struggle and co-opt the threat of communist organizing. Again, this was at the height of the Cold War.

Well, the Cold War is over. The old communist movement has died of its own opportunist political weaknesses. The former Soviet Union is now a capitalist Russia hell-bent on becoming a major imperialist. So the rulers of France and Germany would love to move more quickly to grind down workers’ living standards and keep the profits for themselves.

But the French referendum sounds a warning signal. Voting is one thing. Militant class struggle is another. In 1968, a rebellion by French university students spread like wildfire throughout the working class and shut down the entire country for three weeks. French and German bosses haven’t forgotten it. Neither should we.

The memory of this rebellion provides the second lesson our class must draw from the European bosses’ disarray. The specter of communism continues to haunt the rulers. It made them grant the reforms they now want to take away. It gave rise to the 1968 revolt which occurred in the international context of anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Rebuilding a new communist movement in Europe must now become the rallying cry of workers throughout the European Union.

Despite the claims of the European fake-left, the "No" vote is not in and of itself a victory for workers. Our class can never win anything in capitalist elections. Rather, it is a sign that workers are thirsting for an alternative to this system.

Working with its European friends, our Party accepts the challenge and responsibility of helping provide this alternative. The specter of communism can and will eventually become flesh and blood. Even in the direst of periods, like the present, it will continue to haunt the rulers. Over time, it will destroy them. We should take advantage of the rulers’ momentary disunity to increase the boldness and vigor with which we build international working-class unity for communism.

UNDER COMMUNISM

How Would Health Care Be Better?

(This column continues a new CHALLENGE series on how life under communism would differ from life under capitalism; how it will represent the interests of the international working class and our allies. We invite all readers to contribute both questions and answers to this column for discussion, relying on either history, examples from our own lives, or hope and imagination.)

The June 8 issue described some of British surgeon Joshua Horn’s experiences in China from 1954 to 1969. In his book "Away With All Pests," Horn describes the progress made then in burn treatment.

In 1958 a Shanghai steel worker, Chiu Tsai Kang, was splashed with molten steel causing severe burns over 89% of his body. British and U.S. medical experience at the time would have given Chiu no chance of survival. But despite being technically backward, the Chinese refused to accept such a diagnosis. They were able and willing to provide better treatment to workers than other countries gave to monarchs and billionaires.

A constant stream of workers gave blood to save Chiu’s life. The hospital workers built him a room with air under positive pressure to prevent infection to his open wounds. His nurses cut off their braids to lessen the spread of germs. Anyone entering his room bathed and changed into sterile clothes.

Meetings of doctors, nurses, cooks, cleaners and maintenance workers developed treatment plans. They provided Chiu round-the-clock care. When Chiu became discouraged and refused to eat, Shanghai chefs sent him tempting food, while his comrades urged him to eat. Daily bulletins kept the whole country informed.

To keep his wounds draining, and to keep him as comfortable as possible, Chiu needed an air mattress that could be inflated in sections. In the middle of the night Horn and a colleague went to a nearby plastic raincoat factory. The workers met, designed such a mattress and, based on everyone’s suggestions, modified the drawings. By dawn they had produced a 12-section inflatable mattress.

Chiu recovered. The experiences gained from his treatment greatly improved burn care, not only across China, but worldwide. In 1961 a U.S. expert, Dr. T. G. Blocker, wrote in the Journal of Traumatology that the Chinese mortality rate from severe burns was 30% lower than in the U.S.

Thus, in a communist system, the tremendous attention and care given by thousands of working people to one injured steelworker saved the lives of countless people throughout the world. Still today in the U.S. some 50 million people have no health insurance, while companies massively slash employee health coverage. Why? It doesn’t make profits for the big capitalists. You tell us, which is the better system for workers?

LETTERS

Learning About Communism At Chicago March

I want to publicly thank the young comrades who organized our Party’s participation in the anti-Minutemen protest today (see p. 3 ). It was so energizing to be amongst people who literally took leaflets out of my hand, asked for Desafio and generously donated money. To think I almost didn’t go because I was "too busy"! Congratulations also to the comrades on the principled way they handled one group of marchers’ anti-communism. They advanced our line forcefully but politely, trying to "win the person, not just the argument." PLP turned what could have been just a nationalist, anti-Minutemen march into an exciting, provocative invitation to learn about communism and join us. We, and everyone who heard us or inter-acted with us, were able to glimpse a future society without bosses or nations.

Older comrade

N. Africans Suffer A Lot More Racism Than Oprah

When Oprah Winfrey was denied entrance to a Paris department store, she received only the slightest taste of the racism that hits North Africans here. The Canard enchaîné reports (6/22) that when 18-year-old Haroun jay-walked in Sucy-en-Brie on June 4, the cops started beating him up with their flashlights and Billy clubs. Three neighborhood youths and Haroun’s brother got mixed up in it and were beaten up as well. Haroun’s mother arrived to get smashed in the face with a flashlight. Haroun’s father was maced.

In all, eight people were arrested, suffered cuts requiring stitches, slight concussion and bruises and spent three days in jail. Seven of the eight have been charged with "insulting a policeman" and "rebellion." They go to court September 6.

This is what Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s top cop, means when he says he’s going to "clean up the poor neighborhoods."

Comrade in France

Fight Nationalism, Privatization in Pakistan

(In our last issue, the initial part of this letter reviewed the exploitation of workers in Pakistan, especially the brutal oppression of women, how the bosses use the fundamentalists, and the role of PLP.)

The bosses use "nationalist" slogans in Baluchistan, Sind, NWFP (Northwest Frontier Provinces) and the Saraikee territories to divide the working class and to protect their rotten system. Meanwhile, the rulers exploit the masses’ emotions to divide them by nationality, territory, "race," religion and sect to prevent a united fight of the working class against wage slavery, inequality, illiteracy and fundamentalism. This is a worldwide tactic of capitalism, especially in this less industrialized region. China’s bosses are investing a lot of money in Baluchistan’s industries. This is a threat to U.S. rulers who want to create chaos there to ward off the Chinese. Autonomy for these provinces does nothing for these workers. It only diverts them from their real problems: poverty, exploitation, unemployment and injustice.

The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service between India and Pakistan is another attempt by these bosses to strengthen their capitalist economies. They need markets to sell their commodities. But their colliding interests won’t allow peace in this region, Actually, if Kashmir’s workers had no bosses’ fight to contend with, they might direct their struggle against their exploitation, which would be a real threat to the bosses’ economy. We communists are the real force fighting for internationalism. We stand for opening all borders in a communist world; these borders just protect capitalist interests.

Pakistan’s rulers are privatizing all industries, making workers’ lives even more miserable. While workers do fight this greed, their union leadership plays the role of puppets of the bosses. The telecommunications workers are resisting the privatization of the state-owned PTCL, making it difficult for the government to sell it to the bosses. Our comrades are playing a revolutionary role in this strike and are standing firm against bosses’ privatization moves. We believe they will fight back if we provide them real communist leadership.

Our Party is struggling for communist internationalism, serving the working class. We ask the working class all over the world to join us.

Comrades from Pakistan

Disagrees About Stewart Prosecution

Lynne Stewart's client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, is a vicious, racist, religious fanatic and a murderous fascist. He is not merely an "anti-government" client. The charges against the lawyer Stewart were not an "attack on anyone who seriously challenges capitalism." Neither he nor Stewart is militantly opposing imperialism, racism, or other attacks on the working class, as suggested in the Challenge article of March 19. Abdel-Rahman was in prison under a tight lockdown and prohibited from communicating with his fanatic followers, much the same as Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale who tried to have a federal judge killed.

The fact that both Abdel-Rahman and Hale promoted racist holy war on the working class was not enough under capitalism to land either of them in jail. Like with Osama Bin-Laden, the FBI & CIA ignored Abdel-Rahman when he was "only" promoting fascist slaughter in the Mid-East. Hale was not seen as a threat as long as he "only" organized for racist attacks on African-Americans. The ruling class does not consider being an active fascist a crime. The prosecutions came only after Abdel-Rahman was involved in bombing the World Trade Center and Hale tried to have a Federal Judge killed. Attacking the ruling class itself is considered a crime by their state apparatus.

The charge against Stewart is not a frame-up. To act as Abdel-Rahman’s civil (not criminal) lawyer, she had to sign agreements to abide by the prison rules and to not smuggle messages out for him. His other lawyers refused to smuggle messages, just as Matt Hale’s lawyer refused to carry coded messages out of prison for him.Stewart foolishly smuggled out of prison and released to the press a call by Abdel-Rahman to his followers in Egypt to withdraw from a ceasefire and return to military attacks which in the past had focused on slaughtering unarmed "infidel" tourists to further the goal of an Islamic theocracy. By then, Egypt had become a more important ally of the U.S. in its war planning. If we held state power, we would not treat either Abdel-Rahman or Stewart less harshly. Stewart took an active part in Abdel-Rahman’s fascist plans. She was not prosecuted for being an activist lawyer.

None of Abdel-Rahman’s other lawyers were prosecuted, as they refused to get sucked into his fanatic scheming.

Stewart did not just commit an ethical violation, or break prison administrative rules. She did not merely improperly smuggle personal or fund-raising messages out to her client’s family or friends, or violate the rules in seeking to rally public support for his legal position. She smuggled out his call to his supporters to return to a fascist armed conflict.At some stage in her legal career, Stewart may have believed herself to be fighting against an oppressive government by legally defending her clients. She crossed a major line when she sided with her client by providing direct tactical support to his pursuit of a religious war. We could conclude that Stewart was once well-intentioned, but Stewart does not deserve our political support. We should waste no energy on Stewart, not because of who her legal client was, but because of her own later choice to give active support to religious-based fascism. Stewart may have deluded herself into believing that she was aiding a liberation struggle. We do not have to join in that delusion. Capitalism is at best oppressive; in bad times it is vicious.

When cornered, it turns to fascism. But to call every exercise of capitalist state power a step toward fascism minimizes the inherent every-day brutal nature of the capitalist state. Worse, it trivializes the qualitatively different and pervasive use of state terror that defines fascism.

Red Lawyer

CHALLENGE Comment: We thank Red Lawyer for his letter. He seems to disagree with PLP’s position that fascism is growing in the U.S. Presently, under the guise of "fighting terrorism," it is taking the form of a legal structure which allows the ruling class to do away with, or circumvent, rights that are supposedly "guaranteed" by U.S. law. The rulers would like to build a mass movement to support this Homeland Security police state. It is in this context that the Stewart case must be viewed.

Stewart is not a fascist, as Red Lawyer implies, although we have many sharp disagreements with her politics. Nevertheless, we believe the Stewart case is one more step, among many others, toward a full-blown fascist U.S. We think it would be a serious error not to make that point to all our friends and readers, and not to organize workers and others to fight this type of legal fascism.

D.C. Project Showed Power of Red Ideas

My experience in the Washington, D.C. Summer Project, especially the rally against police brutality and in meeting the Metro workers, was eye-opening and a big boost for the Party, the Metro workers and the anti-racist Coalition for Police Accountability.

Organizing a multi-racial mass of young and old supporters at the rally energized the Coalition. For the first time, we appeared in force with a truly militant attack on the capitalist system which uses the police and racism to oppress youth and the working class. When a cop threatened us with a police dog if we did not move, maybe it was because this time we were a force to be reckoned with. I think the mother of the murdered Archie Elliott III was impressed by the youth turnout, the energy and support at the rally.

The Metro work was also effective. Riding the buses, talking to the drivers and passengers, helped us learn how to share our ideas with the masses, and was of huge significance for Metro workers themselves. To see so many people, especially youth, come out and support them, to take the time to ride the bus and talk to them about their day, their families, their daily struggles, the grind and ups and downs of driving a bus — all this showed the workers we do care and that we’re united in solidarity with them, in fighting the bosses but also in fighting the capitalist system that chains all workers in the shackles of wage slavery.

Our actions during the Summer project brought more workers closer to the red-led union, closer to the Party and has raised class consciousness to a level not seen since the 1978 strike. It highlighted the crucial role played by industrial workers.

Project Participant

Youth Write About the NJ Anti-Minutemen Protest

Traveling to this protest, we really didn’t think we’d have this much of an impact on the police. Those protesting for the first time felt excited and happy to be part of a coalition of the working class.

Preparing for the protest we were told we could get arrested. Running through our minds were thoughts of lawyers, parents and that we were way too young to be jailed. After realizing the rally’s importance, we quickly got over it and were ready for the challenge. Workers of the world united as the fascist Bridgewater police came to support the racist "Minutemen."

As we approached the arena, police quickly identified our New York plates and our multi-racial passengers and followed us all the way to the parking lot. They were expecting trouble from us, and they were right!

Exiting the car approaching the entrance, we chanted, "Obreros unidos, jamas seran vencidos!" (Workers united will never be defeated). The cops immediately demanded we move off the property. We stood firm at the entrance. Then two of us were arrested. The police expected this would intimidate us and we’d run home but little did they know we came to send a message and weren’t going to be pushed around like their little puppets.

We rallied on the road down below, excitedly chanting many great slogans. Then people from local anti-racist and immigrant groups arrived and began chanting with us. Our protest grew, it was HOT but we were dedicated and determined to be heard. Racism and fascism are growing. As communists we believe capitalism’s chains must be broken.

While outside chanting, more police cars showed up, calling for more and more back-up. Now look who was scared! When the cops appeared with tear gas and guns, it just made us chant harder. We were dedicated, willing to put ourselves on the line. We must fight back against the "Minutemen" and their fascist propaganda. The people of the world will one day stand up and dismantle the capitalists’ poison.

******************

Today was a truly inspiring day, workers united against fascism and racism. These racists are the modern-day equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Our first goal was to oppose the injustice directed against immigrants. It was over 90 degrees, but that didn’t deter us. As soon as we began protesting, the Bridgewater cops tried to disperse us. Two members were arrested and subjected to police brutality. These fascist cops slammed one of our elder members onto a car. We only protested harder.

It was truly inspiring to see people randomly joining the demonstration. We were truly united. Police SWAT teams and an excessive amount of cops showed up, but we would not be moved, not be pushed down or away. We stood strong and continued to fight for the cause.

******************

Before the protest, I must admit I was a little nervous. But the possibility of being arrested only showed me that participating was essential.

When I actually arrived at the protest, the experience was surreal. We, especially the students, showed that we would express ourselves no matter what the police tried to do.

The truly beautiful thing was that so many people — Asian, Latin, black, white — protested and got our message across. We united around the idea that workers of the world have the power to unite to change society. It starts with one person taking a stand one day, one moment to make a difference and we all can work together to do our part.

Group Relations Influence Health

I was very pleased to see a series on life under communism, but I think the first article (6/8/05) was written more for health professionals than for the rest of us. It would have been stronger if it had drawn the conclusion that we should all be part of collective groups wherever we work so that everyone would help each other take responsibility for the work of society. These groups would be a safe place where we would struggle with each other to improve our relationships and our work.

Research has shown that the interpersonal relationships we have with people have a big effect on our health. (For more information, see a book which summarizes many studies, written by Dean Ornisch, a well-known doctor who has reversed heart disease through diet.)

I think the bigger picture related to health is sanitation, clean water, availability of medical care and how it will be paid for.

I want to contribute to this discussion, as well as life under communism, in more detail in future letters.

A regular reader

Inspired to Defy Fascist Cops

When I arrived at the anti-Minutemen protest in NJ, I saw three of the racist nationalists cradling rolled-up U.S. flags and carrying anti-immigrant signs. I started to open up my car door to attack them. The only difference between me, as an Hispanic male, and the undocumented workers is that I have U.S. citizenship. These patriots were trying to organize against workers like my grandmother who slaved in a sweatshop so that my father and uncle could eat.

As I was about to jump from the car and pound these patriots with my red rage, I was told to wait and follow the agreed-upon plan. With the communist understanding of the importance of discipline and following the collectively decided-upon plan, I refrained from attacking them.

No sooner had we assembled in the parking lot and moved to protest in front of the center, the cops surrounded us, told us to move and then arrested one comrade. As she pounded on the squad car with her free hand and shouted to fight the fascists, she inspired all of us to continue protesting. A cop then told me to leave or I would be next. I saw what the rest of my comrades were doing, still shouting and protesting, so I shouted the same slogan at the cop. I was quickly arrested.

While I was being hand-cuffed, I heard three racists saying I was probably one of those "illegals" who came here to steal jobs and cause trouble. I recognized one as a guy I saw from the car, and told him he's lucky I didn't get at him. He quickly shut up with a look of shock and surprise when he heard my English.

At the police station I was asked a series of questions that led me to believe a special database is being kept on left-wingers.

This was my first arrest, but it was a small price to pay in the long struggle for communism. Our Party will continue to fight the fascists, the bosses and any patriots who dare to organize against the international working class.

Defiant Red

Money Under Communism?

"What would the role of money be under communism?" is a question I've heard many times. The answer is simple: there won't be any. No currency, no cash, zero, zilch.

To understand why money must be abolished, we must consider why money exists in the first place. Cash is a medium of trade that simply represents a portion of wealth created by labor. What a nation's currency is based upon varies. The U.S. dollar is the de-facto currency for oil. The Euro is based upon gold. But mainly, money is used to steal working-class labor. This labor is the real value of anything.

Under communism, the only goods produced would be that which the working class needs. A major failing of socialism was that it required cash to operate. The only way to get currency is by extracting the surplus value the working class creates. Commodity production for trade eventually overrides the agricultural, medical, educational and residential needs of the working class. The socialized capitalism that earlier parties fought for can never lead to communism because it didn't remove the root of capitalism — Capital!

By destroying the base of the bosses' power and reorganizing society based on producing for need, we can construct a world of "from each according to ability, and to each according to need." We will build a society to share and meet needs, not create surplus value. For communism to exist, all forms of currency must be destroyed. We don't seek to redistribute wealth; we seek to destroy it.

A Reader

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

US, China will clash as oil runs out

…In 30 years oil production could be down by 75%....

This is a staggering figure . . . A world without oil is bound to represent a massive economic, social and political shock.…There will be a power struggle over dwindling oil stocks. Already, there are signs of a new cold war emerging as the US and China seek to curry favour with poor African countries that are seen to have potential as oil suppliers. It could get a lot worse than that. The oil junkies of the West will be like heroin addicts suffering from cold turkey. (GW, 7/7)

‘Missile Defense’ is plan to control globe

In order to sell this space warfare program to the American people, the Pentagon has labeled it "missile defense." But in reality the program is all about offense. It was first spelled out in the 1997 Space Command plan, "Vision for 2020," that called for U.S "control and domination" of space.

The Pentagon and its aerospace corporation allies understand that they cannot come to the American people and ask for hundreds of billions of dollars for offensive weapons in space. Thus the claim of "missile defense"….

…Federal expenditures on missile defense [are] about $ 10 billion per year—enough to provide health insurance for every uninsured kid in America. (Distributed by MinuteMan.Org)

Recruiting: 4 times harder than year ago

…Marine recruiters are spending an average of 12 hours per recruit they enlist, up from about 3 hours a year or so ago, Marine officials say. (NYT, 6/30)

Pol: US prisons worse than Guantánamo

…As a response to increasing calls to shut down the…facility, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the panel’s ranking Democrat, said that Guantánamo was in many ways better than state and federal penitentiaries… (NYT )

‘Made in USA’ can still mean slavery

…The Northern Marianas, DeLay said, was no haven for cruelty but a "perfect Petri dish of capitalism."

…Garment industry sweatshop workers and sex slaves in the Northern Mariana Islands — a U.S. territory — were exploited in a system that resembled indentured servitude.

Brokers — traffickers, really, in human beings — brought thousands to work in sweatshops for as many as 70 hours per week. They lived in crowded barracks; some were locked behind guarded fences. And because the territory is a U.S. possession, garments bore this seal of approval: "Made in the U.S.A."

Some who failed to get work were forced into the sex trade, though they may not even have been paid for prostitution since they still owed the brokers. (Wash. Post)

White ex-prisoners: More job offers than never-arrested black men

White men with prison records receive far more offers for entry-level jobs in New York City than black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often — if not more so — than black men who have never been arrested, according to a new study by two Princeton professors.

The study, the first to assess the effect of race on job searches by ex-convicts, also found that black men who had never been in trouble with the law were about half as likely as whites with similar backgrounds to get a job offer or a callback. (NYT, 6/17)

CAFTA: blood-sucking drug lobby plan

…Washington’s biggest and wealthiest lobby, appears to have succeeded in the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement would extend the monopolies of drug makers and, critics say, lead to higher drug prices for the mostly impoverished people of the six Latin American countries it covers….

…In Guatemala,...poor AIDS patients have marched in the streets to protest. (NYT, 7/2)

US loves terrorists if they’re anti-left

Colombia has just passed a law to demobilize paramilitary fighters that the government calls the "Justice and Peace Law." It should be called the "Impunity for Mass Murderers, Terrorists and Major Cocaine Traffickers Law."

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary armies, one party in a 40-year civil war, have massacred thousands of people. They control 40 percent of Colombia’s cocaine exports….

The new law, which reflects the paramilitaries’ considerable political power, will block the extradition of paramilitary leaders wanted for trafficking to the United States and allow them to continue their drug dealing, extortion, land theft and other criminals activities undisturbed. Even those responsible for the most heinous crimes against humanity may go free because of strict time limits for prosecutions. The few who are convicted will likely serve sentenced of only 22 months….

The Bush administration could have pushed President Alvaro Uribe to pass a good bill. Instead, Ambassador William Wood enthusiastically backed the new law, giving Washington’s endorsement to…a terrorist mafia. (NYT, 7/4)

With 9/11 excuse, FBI gets your secrets

The Social Security Administration has relaxed its privacy restrictions and searched thousands of its files at the request of the F.B.I. as part of terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, newly disclosed records and interviews show….

…The Social Security agency agreed to an "ad hoc" policy that authorized the release of information to the bureau for investigations related to Sept. 11 because officials saw a "life–threatening" emergency, internal memorandums say.

The Internal Revenue Service also worked with the bureau and the Social Security agency to provide income and taxpayer information in terror inquiries, law enforcement officials said.

" But an ad hoc policy like this is so broad that it allows law enforcement to obtain really sensitive information by merely claiming that the information is relevant to the 9/11 investigation….There appears to be very little oversight." (NYT, 6/22)

1. PLP Youth Spreads Red Ideas
   D.C. Metro Workers Confront Transit Bosses
2. Liberals' Exit Strategy Means More War
3. `Dream' Act A Nightmare for
   Undocumented Youth
4. GI's in Iraq read CHALLENGE
5. Capitalism's Contradictions Trip Up Euro Bosses
6. PLP'ers, Anti-Racists Expose Lying Liberal State D.A.
7. Racism `Birmingham-style'
8. AFL-CIO Dogs Fiddle While Workers Burn
9. Must Oppose Liberals' Lesser-Evil Line
   At NEA Convention
10. Union's Racist `Strike' Threat A Loser At Northwest
11. Anti-Racist Fight Nets
    More CHALLENGE Readers
12. UAW Presides Over GM
    Job Massacre
    1. GM GETS CUT DOWN TO SIZE
13. Bolivia's Mass Rebellion Betrayed Again;
    Need Revolutionary Party
14. Discussions on Communism
    `Mind-blowing' To Youth
15. Campus Rally Poetry:
    Weapon Against Imperialist War
16. Memories of World War II
    `Stalin's Soviet Union will be no pushover, son...'
17. UNDER COMMUNISM
    WHOSE FACTORY IS IT?
18. Movie Review
    CRASH, Just Another Racist Movie
19. LETTERS
    1. Garment Worker Mom Learning Through Class Struggle
    2. Students and Teachers Enthused by D.C. Summer Project
    3. Drown out Democrat
       Hack Ferrer
    4. Colombia PLP Excites Young Comrade
    5. CHALLENGE COMMENTS:
    6. Salvador's Rulers Are The Real Criminals
    7. Bush's Pakistan Pal Enforces State Terror
    8. Racism Made French Bosses Rich
    9. `Rude' Teachers Not the Problem
20. RED EYE ON THE NEWS
    1. More $$ -- but it all goes to the richest
    2. Maquiladora workers fight gov't-union deal
    3. Pension laws show who runs the show
    4. Abuse of Islamics needed high planning
    5. Liberal media help imperialist warmakers
    6. `Big 8'nations profit from Africa poverty
    7. Pakistan, a close US ally, brutalizes woman

---

PLP Youth Spreads Red Ideas
D.C. Metro Workers Confront Transit Bosses

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 9 --For two hours in a blazing summer sun, over 120 transit workers from Metro, joined by over 100 supporters from the PLP summer project and several other unions, boisterously challenged Metro, demanding they negotiate honestly for a decent contract. In a dramatic moment, we angrily confronted the Metro Board of Directors, shoving our signs in their faces as they tried to slip past us. We also are demanding a serious commitment from ourselves and our brothers and sisters as the wave of capitalism's crisis breaks over our heads. There must be no step backward in this struggle!

Distribution of a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE to everyone on the picket line created a strong communist presence at the march. Even some of the union's more conservative Executive Board members appreciated our presence, which emphasizes the value of a unified working class.

A diverse group of Metro workers from virtually every department marched today -- young and old, black and white, bus drivers, mechanics, station attendants, and maintenance. Rail car maintenance and the Northern bus garage each brought 15-20 workers.

Although this was a relatively small action in a local of 9,000 members, for the last 25 years the union leadership has trained the membership to be passive, always backing away from sharp struggle, accepting contract arbitration and usually neglecting workers' needs. This business unionist approach has intensified racism in the ever-lengthening 2-tier wage progression (now at 7 years) as the workforce changed from mostly white to mostly black. For a generation Local 689 has lost the basic working-class concepts of class struggle, solidarity, militancy and unity. With the recent election of PLP'er Mike Golash as president, a communist with a well-developed strategy for reversing these losses, new possibilities have emerged. The subterranean fire of class hatred and militancy is beginning to surface, even as the bosses have begun to sharpen their knives as they look for cost savings by slashing workers.

The Washington Post has attacked Metro workers for earning "six-figure salaries," while the life-deadening 75-hour work-week of the handful of workers who made this amount is ignored. The workers answered these attacks at the rally, condemning management for its efforts to shift the blame for Metro inefficiencies onto the union. It will take more than just a few months to turn the union around, but the downward spiral has been slowed, hope is in the air, and workers are beginning to feel their long-lost power.

Dialectics teaches us that the quantitative changes of 30 years of consistent communist agitation and base-building lays the foundation for a qualitative advance. Materialist philosophy teaches us that Metro workers know they are oppressed by capitalism and are open to learning the scientific truth about how to defeat the bosses.

This demonstration can be the beginning of the qualitative transformation at Metro as workers regain their hope and optimism of defeating the bosses, and begin to join the PLP to make this a reality. The next big step is creating a substantial PLP club of Metro workers. This is crucial because no matter how militant the union becomes, the bosses will retain the upper hand since they control the whole system. The role of PLP'ers would be to show workers their local struggle must be linked to the struggle against the war in Iraq and the Homeland Security police state. The latter could be used to smash a Metro strike, claiming it's against the (bosses) "national interest" because it affects the capital of U.S. capitalism. Once workers understand this, we become a key force in fighting for a society based on our needs: workers' power.

The PLP summer project organized a couple of dozen activists to leaflet the entire city, politicizing and radicalizing workers. We've had long talks with many bus and train operators, station managers, mechanics and custodial workers. We've also seen, first-hand, the response of the bus riders; support was expressed everywhere we went.

The future is bright for working-class solidarity! But the hard work lies ahead.

Liberals' Exit Strategy Means More War

Liberals in Congress are feigning shock at recently-leaked British documents showing Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses and without an "exit strategy." Some are demanding the U.S. begin drawing down its forces as of October 1, 2006. But don't hold your breath waiting for the troops to come home. The liberals serve the dominant imperialist faction of U.S. rulers. GI's will continue to kill and die in Iraq as long as it retains strategic importance for U.S. imperialism.

The liberals' exit-strategy furor actually promotes the rulers' war aims. It helps divert sincere anti-war sentiment into futile e-mail-your-congressman politics. Rep. John Conyers, with the help of MoveOn.org, gathered 560,000 electronic signatures for a letter scolding Bush for the Iraq quagmire. Founded in 1999 by Larry Rockefeller, among others, MoveOn's original goal was to shift Washington's focus from the Clinton impeachment scandal to more pressing issues, like the war in Serbia. More importantly, the exit strategy flap revives the rulers' main criticism of the Bush gang: it failed to militarize the nation following Sept. 11. Consequently, Bush & Co. could muster less than half the troops needed to accomplish the rulers' goal of ousting Hussein and controlling Iraq's oilfields. Larry Diamond, a senior official in the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, writes in his new book, "Squandered Victory," that deploying an adequate force "would have necessitated an immediate mobilization of the military reserves and National Guard."

Commenting on the British memos, Sen. Jay Rockefeller called for a more effective war machine: "the American people deserve answers. Only then can we provide a full and complete accounting of the mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq and what changes are necessary to fix them." (New York Times, 6/14/05) The liberal Times' Thomas Friedman thinks he has the solution: "before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground." (6/15/05) But the rulers have a problem. Army and Marine recruitment is falling far short of its targets. So "anti-war" Conyers has joined Rep. Charles Rangel in proposing restoration of the draft.

Max Boot, senior fellow at the rulers' Council on Foreign Relations, openly pining for the armies of the Roman, British, and French empires, has another idea: "I would...offer citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve a set term in the U.S. military. We could model a Freedom Legion after the French Foreign Legion. Or we could allow foreigners to join regular units after a period of English-language instruction, if necessary" (Los Angeles Times, 6/16/05)

Rather than seeking an exit from war, U.S. rulers are constantly searching for the means of waging broader and deadlier conflicts. A study done by the Army War College weighed prospects for a World War II-scale military mobilization of the U.S. in the near future. Amid the rulers' planning for World War III, however, lie signs of promise for the working class.

Along with deteriorating infrastructure, a shortage of skilled workers in basic industry, and Bush's tax policies, the Army found "diminished civic militarism as an obstacle to such efforts." It noted "formidable political resistance among citizens to...serving in the military. The widespread support for military action following the 9/11 attacks did not translate into an equally widespread willingness among Americans to enlist." (Parameters, Autumn 2004) This lack of "civic militarism" is a legacy of the Vietnam era, when the anti-war movement, led in key sections by PLP, laid bare to millions the profit motive behind imperialist war.

Our Party, understanding that the profit system itself ceaselessly causes -- and needs -- this carnage, has an exit strategy. We're building for the only way out of the ever-worsening spiral of imperialist wars. That's a communist revolution that will someday eradicate the capitalist butchers. History has twice shown, in Russia and in China, that when the profiteers engage in global conflict, the working class, united by a communist party, can seize power.

`Dream' Act A Nightmare for
Undocumented Youth

One answer to the bosses' need for "more boots on the ground" (see editorial, front page) -- and their eventual need for a "mass mobilization" to fuel their imperialist wars -- seems to be a neo-Bracero "guest SOLDIER" program! The DREAM Act points in this direction. It targets children of undocumented workers, offering them citizenship after graduation from high school and two years of military service.

The rise of nativist fascist groups like the MinuteMen Project works in the bosses' favor, impelling immigrant workers to find the fastest ways to become "legal" residents and citizens. The bosses are more than happy to help, making immigrant workers "prove" their patriotism by fighting and dying in U.S. imperialist wars. While liberals try to separate themselves from open racists like the MinuteMen, citizen and immigrant workers shouldn't be fooled into thinking these liberals have their interests in mind. Sure, immigrants are just fine -- for cannon fodder and to be super-exploited! This should make us even more committed to reaching out to young people with all of PLP's ideas. These youth can think and can help fight for the interests of the international working class.

GI's in Iraq read CHALLENGE

The picture (see PDF version) shows GIs somewhere in Iraq reading CHALLENGE. In fact, the Vietnam Syndrome is still haunting U.S. bosses. Despite Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice claims that "all is going well," Iraq is increasingly becoming a quagmire, and the Democrats' call for "more boots on the ground" will only sink it deeper. Army Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez, has been charged with "fragging" -- hurling a fragmentation grenade -- killing two of his superior officers near Tikrit, Iraq. This is the second reported such incident since the U.S. invasion began. During the 12-year Vietnam War there were more than 800 such "fraggings," especially as the U.S. was losing the war and GI rebellions spread more and more. (More on what's happening in Iraq and a short history of Vietnam fraggings in our next issue.)

Capitalism's Contradictions Trip Up Euro Bosses

Only yesterday, European bosses seemed poised to launch their "Union" as a political entity capable of harnessing their economic clout and competing with U.S. rulers for world domination. That dream may yet materialize. But momentarily it's hit a major snag. Workers can learn two important lessons from this fiasco.

Firstly, when capitalists have a dogfight, the working class doesn't have a dog in the fight. Our job remains the task of building our own forces, the most important of which is our revolutionary communist Party, the PLP. We have one goal: to overthrow the entire capitalist class and its murderous profit system and replace them with a workers' dictatorship and a decent society.

Recently, the much-vaunted "European Constitution" fell flat on its face when voters in France and then Holland rejected it by overwhelming majorities. In the wake of this vote, European rulers began battling among themselves over money. Under capitalism, it's always about money. British, Polish and Scandinavian bosses are lining up against their French, German and Italian counterparts over two tactical visions of European capitalism. The first group wants to push as quickly as possible for "free trade"; the second wants more governmental control over the economies. In some ways, the bickering reflects the current standoffs in the U.S. between the Liberal Eastern Establishment and "conservative" bosses.

Three contradictions lie at the heart of the matter. The first two concern the capitalism's dog-eat-dog, competitive nature, even among supposedly close pals. For example, the euro as common currency now forces Italian capitalists to compete "on the same playing field as Germany." But Germany makes high-tech industrial equipment and high-end automobiles. Italy's main export industries "are in sectors like shoes, textiles, and clothes that are particularly vulnerable to Chinese competition." (New York Times, 6/19) With the euro, trade issues are now handled at the European rather than the national level, and so Italian shoe magnates have little wiggle room. Yet their need for maximum profit remains. The creation of the euro hasn't solved this contradiction and dozens like it, any more than the creation of the United States of America eliminated competition among the rulers of different regions or states (i.e., Northern capitalists vs. Southern slaveholders).

The second contradiction pits European rulers against the U.S. This rivalry isn't new. In fact, it's as old as the existence of the U.S., which has already fought two wars on European soil. During the Cold War, U.S. imperialism used the threat of communism to keep the major European powers in line. For several decades, the aspect of unity overshadowed competition.

But competition is now dominant, and the Europeans face the dilemma of putting their differences aside for the sake of building a united front against the U.S. As events are proving, honor among thieves is difficult to establish.

But there's a third contradiction, and it reflects the 800-pound gorilla in the room: class struggle, the fight that pits workers against bosses. This was the real shadow hanging over the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution. (To be continued next issue.)

PLP'ers, Anti-Racists Expose Lying Liberal State D.A.

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MD, June 7 -- Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? The ruling class, that's who! A fatigue-dressed K-9 cop used his dog to harass us Birmingham-style (see box) at our courthouse rally demanding accountability for the 12-year old murder of Archie Elliott III by the County cops. He threatened arrest if we didn't stop, but we roared our anger over the bullhorn at the racist attacks. This time, at least, when the workers stood up, the bosses backed down! The highlight of the rally came in a face-to-face confrontation with the lying State's Attorney.

Over 20 youth from the PLP D.C. Summer Project joined local Maryland activists with the communist message that racist police brutality is inherent in capitalism because the bosses need racism to intimidate and divide workers so they can keep churning out profits. Linking racist killing by cops to the vicious worldwide exploitation of workers, these youth presented the alternative vision of a communist system based on meeting people's needs, not meeting capitalism's quarterly profits.

The Summer Project youth had earlier attended a forum on the historical fight against racism in the D.C. area. Now they brought their revolutionary energy to Prince George's County, whose cops killed more citizens with impunity than 50 of the country's largest police departments over an eleven-year period.

Today's rally was protesting the killing of unarmed Archie Elliott III by County cops twelve years ago while handcuffed in the front seat of a police cruiser. Dorothy Elliott, Archie's mother, requested the files pertaining to her son's death. The State's Attorney, "Mr. Liberal" Glenn Ivey who once worked for liberal Congressman John Conyers, claimed the files were lost! Dorothy filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to demand the files and asked the People's Coalition for Police Accountability to support her in this courthouse rally. The Coalition responded. The Summer Project distributed over 2,000 leaflets county-wide, at subways, malls and parking lots, informing residents about the case and rally.

The participants chanted, "The Cops, the Courts, the Klu Klux Klan, all a part of the bosses plan!" and heard militant speeches! An older friend of Dorothy's explained how Archie did nothing wrong that night. A comrade reported that many officers ("The Dirty Dozen") were still on the police force after committing atrocious brutal acts, some killing again and again, according to one of the victims -- Prince Carmen Jones -- who was a former student of his. A younger Latino comrade linked this fight to the international struggle against racism, connecting it to U.S.-trained torturers in Columbia, Paraguay and Bolivia, showing how the cops globally serve fascism and imperialism. A sister comrade, a Summer Project leader, exposed the gross injustice within the County and the need to fight back.

When the State's Attorney arrived to blow smoke, he said let's meet right now. As communists having no illusions about capitalist-serving liberals, we said, fine, we'll meet right here on the bullhorn, and then we put him on trial. We read the FOIA letter aloud, demanded he comply, and then shoved the mike in his face for his answer. This slick liberal suddenly became incoherent, mumbling he'd "try." When he said he'd comply, we knew he was lying since shortly afterwards, Dorothy received a letter from him dated the day before the rally stating the file no longer existed -- the County had destroyed it after the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Dorothy Elliott then fired up the crowd with her determination to continue the struggle until justice is done. She thanked the Summer Project from the bottom of her heart for spearheading the effort, and gave a "shout-out to the PLP." She focused squarely on the County Government and vowed that her son would have his day in court. She reminded everyone that it took over 50 years for Emmett Till's murder to get to court. Emmett, a 14-year-old African American male was brutally tortured and killed by Mississippi Klansmen for allegedly "whistling" at a white woman. An autopsy was performed, after the mother, the jury and all but one of the perpetrators were all dead. This is "justice" under capitalism, about as meaningful as 80% of the U.S. Senate "apologizing" for supporting lynching for 80 years. (And 20 even tried to prevent that token gesture.)

Under communism, we won't wait 50 years to administer justice against racism and all forms of oppression! 

Despite the predicted dishonesty of the State's Attorney, we sharpened the struggle and demonstrated to the coalition members that the true role of government under capitalism is serving the bosses, not the workers. Strikingly, two veteran members of the People's Coalition for Police Accountability vowed to increase their efforts to educate and mobilize youth, and invited the Summer Project youth to help them do that.

Racism `Birmingham-style'

Over 40 years ago (1963), the face of police brutality in the U.S was Birmingham, Alabama Sheriff Bull Connor who put canines and full-power water hoses on non-violent/unarmed black protesters, a large percentage of whom were high school students. Today, the faces of many of the cops have changed (the County Sheriff and Police Chief here are both African American), but the system has remained the same.

AFL-CIO Dogs Fiddle While Workers Burn

CHICAGO, IL, June 15 -- Today the presidents of the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in threatening to quit the AFL-CIO at their convention here in late July. Together they represent nearly one-third of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members.

Along with the Laborers' International Union of North America, these five unions are forming a coalition, allegedly to promote more aggressive union organizing among non-union workers, even talking about taking on Wal-Mart.

But when Teamster president James Hoffa is leading the reform movement, Alice has stepped through the looking glass. Last fall, the pro-Hoffa Teamster leadership of Local 743 joined University of Chicago bosses in firing a dissident worker after they stole a local election his slate had won. A few years ago, the Teamsters left the Supremo workers, all Latin immigrants, to twist in the wind after calling them out on strike to win a first contract. The company hired scabs and fired the most militant workers, while the Teamsters never mobilized even their own membership to shut the factory down. What's more, there are thousands of black and Latin Teamsters working in small factories around the city, making poverty wages.

While the Teamsters bring a reputation for being "tough," the real stars of this coalition are SEIU and UNITE-HERE. With over three million members combined, they've made the biggest inroads in "organizing" black, Latin, immigrant and women workers in the service industry. Campaigns like Justice for Janitors have attracted many college students and would-be organizers, giving these unions the aura of a social movement. But the reality is far different.

June 15 marked the second anniversary of the UNITE-HERE "strike" at the Congress Hotel. Some of the workers have crossed the lines and returned to work while most of the original strikers were forced to look for other jobs. UNITE called a picket line to "celebrate" the two-year strike, which could only muster 500 people (last year's first anniversary had 1,000), and gave "bravery medals" to the 31 remaining strikers. The picket line was very lively and integrated, but politically rotten. The hotel has never been shut down, not even for a day. No attempt has been made to stop the scabs or occupy the hotel. Despite their "bravery medals," UNITE's cowardly leadership is afraid to wage class war and unleash the workers' fury. Instead they re-enforce the workers' fears, keeping them loud but passive.

Andrew Stern, president of the 1.8 million-member SEIU, is the former protégé of AFL-CIO boss John Sweeny, but they're no longer buddies. Under the guise of "not being taken for granted by the Democrats," Stern has donated thousands of dollars to the Republican Governor's Association, a notorious anti-union right-to-work group. (Indiana's Republican governor recently stripped all state workers of collective bargaining rights.) Stern supported Pataki for governor in NY, and was given the O.K. to sign up tens of thousands of home healthcare workers into the union. A similar scenario was played out in California. So while more than 100,000 home healthcare workers now have purple T-shirts and union cards, the vast majority of these black and Latin women workers have no contract, no health insurance and still make poverty wages. What's more, hundreds of Cook County health care workers are trying to decertify SEIU.

Because of the union honchos' pro-capitalist outlook -- constant concessions and give-backs to the bosses, refusal to fight mass layoffs and racist unemployment -- less and less workers are following them. This becomes a problem for the main section of the rulers since they need these labor misleaders to control the workers and prevent them from directly confronting the bosses over these attacks. But if, because of their class collaboration, the union hacks can't deliver enough workers, especially to the Democrats, they lose their usefulness to the ruling class.

The Stern-Sweeney battle is a dogfight among thieves over how to stay in business while serving a U.S. imperialism bent on war and a police state. Their patriotic, anti-communist, pro-capitalist outlook and practice has brought the labor movement to the brink of extinction.

PLP is organizing a Summer Project to build a revolutionary communist worker-student alliance, and a mass international PLP. We will show industrial, postal and health care workers that we have no dog in the fight at the AFL-CIO Convention.

Must Oppose Liberals' Lesser-Evil Line
At NEA Convention

LOS ANGELES, June 20 -- Ten thousand delegates representing 2.6 million teachers and support personnel will hold the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA) here in July. The NEA is the country's largest union. Teachers and public employees, along with all workers, are under serious attack. Politicians propose to cut their pensions, following the example of United Airlines and other corporations. No Child Left Behind and other measures blame teachers for the failures of the schools, so teachers and other educational service providers (ESPs) -- para-professionals in the classroom -- are faced with stricter requirements to keep their jobs. This is accompanied by a mandate to (1) leave no child untested; (2) prescribe scripted, often inappropriate curricula; and (3) tighten graduation requirements. All this while funding is slashed.

Politicians talk about improving the quality of education, but then cut social services in order to pay for a permanent war budget. According to http://costofwar.com/, the War in Iraq will cost $207.5 billion by September 20, 2005. This doesn't reflect the ongoing cost of military bases worldwide, base pay for soldiers, the cost of the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan or the Homeland Security police state apparatus.

Teachers who are committed to high standards of excellence, and the belief that all students can learn, support the existence of highly qualified teachers and the expectation that students will be proficient in subject matter at graduation. We must fight to give students the tools to understand the world. But recent calls for doubling ground troops in Iraq and increasing Green Card soldiers (see editorial, front page) indicate more of our students will become soldiers. Many more will be in arms factories as industry is reorganized for expanding low-wage war production.

Capitalism, despite the "highly-qualified" and "no-child-left-behind" rhetoric, is really about attacking teachers and ESP's and forcing more students into low-paid factory jobs and the military. We must expect students to learn everything they can, because the youth in the military and in the factories will be the generation that can and will change the world. While the bosses need a few proficient young people, U.S. capitalism's intensified crisis mainly means war, attacks on workers' standard of living, increased racism and a police state.

As these attacks unfold, the response of the NEA and the entire AFL-CIO has been to blame Bush and the Republicans, who are currently leading the charge in an ongoing sharp attack on working class that began in the 1970's. Starting with the Carter administration, U.S. rulers' stated policy has been that maintaining control of Middle East oil is in the bosses' "national interest." Neither liberals nor conservatives call for dismantling U.S. military bases in over 60 countries.

The problem is capitalism and its sharpening crisis, not which political party is in office. From Carter to Reaganomics to Bush, Sr. to Clinton killing welfare with workfare, these anti-worker attacks have gone unchecked. It is the most dangerous illusion to think that electing a Democrat will end the war and funnel the money to schools, hospitals and pensions.

Teachers and other workers have enormous potential to fight the attacks on the working class, if we shift our efforts from backing bosses' politicians to uniting to use our power -- on a state and local level -- as organized workers in strikes against the cuts, the war in Iraq, racist cop terror and anti-immigrant vigilantes, as well as supporting students' interests

Workers are the key to capitalism -- economically, militarily and politically. Our future lies in building a revolutionary movement of all workers, students and soldiers, not in voting for "lesser evil" politicians. Together we'll forge the long-term commitment to fight for communism, utilizing to the fullest the creative power of the working class. That's PLP's goal; join us.

Union's Racist `Strike' Threat A Loser At Northwest

TWIN CITIES, MN, June 9 -- "We would be striking for our survival,"said one worker today as hundreds of Northwest Airlines mechanics, members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) picketed Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, distributing fliers warning of a possible strike.

Northwest has lost about $3 billion since 2001 and wants to reduce labor costs by $1.1 billion annually by year's end. They want to lay off 2,000 mechanics, cut pay of those remaining by 25%, while outsourcing the work to low-wage non-union shops. They also ran to federal court after United Airlines was allowed to trash its four employee pension plans, to seek the same treatment. Northwest has slashed the AMFA workforce from 9,300 to 5,300 in five years.

Ironically, mechanics at United, Northwest and other airlines recently decertified their old union, the IAM, in favor of the "independent" AMFA, but switching pro-capitalist unions has failed to save pensions or stop layoffs and wage-cuts.

What's more, AMFA is trying to build public support for a possible strike based on union mechanics being U.S. citizens who "can pass FBI background checks." Their flier read, "In March 2005, the FBI arrested 27 illegal aliens working at TIMCO, one of the biggest outsourced shops. One had been working on planes there for 10 years, using false papers." This flagrant racism, implying that undocumented workers are a terrorist threat, totally plays into the bosses' hands. A racist strike against undocumented workers, instead of an anti-racist strike against capitalism that builds international solidarity, would surely be smashed by the same fascist Homeland Security police state AMFA leaders embrace.

Also today, the National Mediation Board rejected Northwest's request to declare an impasse in contract talks that began last October. Negotiations will resume on June 20, but the airline is recruiting scabs in case of a strike.

An impasse ruling would have left the union free to strike after a 30-day cooling-off period. We should reach out to Northwest workers wherever we can and offer a revolutionary alternative to the pro-capitalist union leaders.

Anti-Racist Fight Nets
More CHALLENGE Readers

Airport workers won a hard-fought partial victory in the anti-racist struggle for better treatment for part-time workers. The company transferred the majority of the part-timers, mostly African immigrants, to full-time status on a new third shift. This came from over a year of the workers' constant political pressure on the union sellouts and the bosses to reach an agreement. It's a small partial victory because the institutional racist structure of color-coding part-time jobs with immigrant labor still exists.

This struggle united full- and part-time workers, black, Latin and Asian, men and women, immigrants and citizens from the US, Mexico, Central America, Africa and Asia.

This struggle had its weaknesses. More workers could have been involved, but enough had the political understanding that the bosses' racist attacks on any group of workers are an attack on all of us. The leadership came mainly from regular CHALLENGE readers and distributors.

But no sooner did we win one small battle, than the first-shift shop steward was fired for reasons still unclear. He had helped workers circulate a petition protesting the company policy forcing them to wear faulty "safety glasses" that actually blur their vision.

The bosses tried to keep the firing quiet, but word spread as workers distributed flyers in Spanish and English. One worker posted it on the time clock! Soon the bosses wanted a meeting with the second-shift shop steward to find out as much as they could about what the workers were up to. When the steward declined, the bosses sent their flunky supervisors to spy on the workers.

It will take a protracted fight to win our brother's job back. He's a good guy, but being somewhat isolated from the workers made him vulnerable to attack. Especially in this time of growing fascism, the fight for communist revolution means having a mass base of friends and political supporters.

These struggles occur in the context of much larger struggles in the airline industry. (See Northwest article above) Throughout the struggles here, CHALLENGE readership has increased, sparking much better discussions with the workers. Winning workers to draw revolutionary conclusions from their involvement in the class war, and winning them to PLP, is laying the basis for a mass communist movement in a critical U.S. industry with many international ties, that can ultimately ground capitalism forever.

UAW Presides Over GM
Job Massacre

DETROIT, MI, June 13 -- On June 7, GM unveiled a plan to cut 25,000 jobs by 2008, more than 22% of its U.S. hourly work force. This will be followed by nearly $2.5 billion in annual cost cuts, including numerous plant closings when the union contract expires in 2007. Unimpressed, a Wall Street auto analyst with Standard & Poor's said, "...there's more they need to do." GM lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and Wall Street is demanding steep cuts in health care.

GM is the largest private provider of health care benefits in the country. It will spend $5.6 billion this year, covering 1.1 million workers, their families, retirees and survivors. GM has more than 2_ retirees for every U.S. worker. This ratio will grow with the job cuts, as about 60% of GM's workers are eligible to retire in the next five years. The cuts will not increase market share, but they might increase profits.

Two days later, the United Auto Workers (UAW) gave its blessings at an emergency meeting of GM and Delphi local union officers. (Delphi, the largest auto parts supplier, was spun off by GM in 1999, but is part of the GM-UAW national agreement.) In Solidarity House "double-speak," the UAW said they "will not reopen the contract," but will participate in the job cuts and plant closings, and negotiate health-care cuts and other concessions within the context of the current agreement. The union only "objected" to the end-of-the-month deadline when it became public. (In another example of this "double-speak," UAW "job security" contracts have reduced union membership by more than two thirds at GM, Ford and Chrysler since the late 1970s.) Not "re-opening the contract" also avoids a risky ratification vote.

GM says it wants to close the gap between the 7% union workers pay for health care and the 27% paid by salaried workers. It also wants to impose monthly premiums on retirees. Recently, the union allowed Chrysler to impose deductibles ranging from $100 to $1,000 a year for 35,000 workers and retirees.

But the fact remains that all the money spent on health care, and the creation of health care itself, comes from the wealth produced by the labor of industrial workers. We produce everything and own nothing, and we are locked in a constant struggle with the bosses to get only a small part of what we produce. This basic contradiction will only be resolved when the working class, led by a mass international PLP, destroys the bosses with communist revolution.

Like pension money, health care is part of our wages, which we have more than earned, and even then had to fight for. The attacks at GM, coming on the heels of United Airlines, its government and courts ripping off the pensions of 135,000 workers and retirees, will ripple far beyond the auto industry. More than one million jobs are directly tied to GM. Every one of them will be affected and they will affect others.

GM GETS CUT DOWN TO SIZE

Reflecting the fortunes of U.S. imperialism, the largest automaker has the most to lose, and the inter-imperialist rivalry is cutting GM down to size. GM still sells more cars than anyone else, both in the U.S. and globally, although Toyota is closing in on the top spot. In 1990, GM sold 5 million vehicles in the U.S. Last year, it sold 4.6 million.

In 1986, GM closed 11 plants with 29,000 workers. In 1992, it cut more than 70,000 jobs and closed 21 plants in the U.S. and Canada. Since 2000, it has cut 30,000 U.S. jobs. After the new round of cuts and closings, GM will be down to about 23 plants and 85,000 hourly workers. Oldsmobile is gone and Buick or Pontiac may follow.

In the 1950's, GM had 46% of the U.S. auto market, Ford and Chrysler 44%, and everyone else combined just 10%. Today, GM has 27%, Ford and DaimlerChrysler combined have 32%, and other automakers, 41%. The international competition is bigger than GM, and in a case of "be careful what you wish for," almost 50% of the "foreign" cars sold here are made here.

DaimlerChrysler is investing $40 billion in North America over the next five years, including a new assembly plant in Illinois and expanding factories in Ohio and Michigan. According to the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, in the last two years Toyota, Honda, BMW, Nissan and other global automakers have created 55,000 non-union factory jobs in Ohio, California, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama. About 800,000 cars and trucks will be built in Alabama this year. The flag-waving UAW leadership is so tied to the U.S. auto bosses that they have failed to organize one "transplant" assembly plant.

The bosses are ruthlessly driving down the wages and living standards of all workers as they fight their imperialist rivals for world supremacy. The oil war in Iraq and the Homeland Security police state are crucial to this struggle. The pro-capitalist union leaders are leading us to more wars and fascism. Seventy years of reform struggle are being stripped away as the rulers prepare for the next world war. We have no stake in backing any boss. Our allegiance is to the international working class and communist revolution. Autoworkers are in a better position than most to make this happen.

Bolivia's Mass Rebellion Betrayed Again;
Need Revolutionary Party

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA -- After several weeks of mass protests, highway blockades, occupation of this capital city by teachers, gas refinery workers and miners, the struggle by Bolivia's workers, peasants and youth have again been betrayed.

Once President Mesa was forced to resign by the mass rebellion demanding nationalization of the gas industry (the second largest in Latin America), the Catholic Church, the U.S. embassy, Petrobras, Enron, BP, Repsol, Total and politicians like social-democrat Evo Morales all put aside their differences to reach a compromise.

First, the U.S. ambassador's choice to replace Mesa with right-wing cattle rancher Vaca Diez (head of the Senate), failed. When Vaca Diez moved his Presidential swearing-in ceremony away from the masses occupying La Paz to the calmer city of Sucre, the masses followed. Army troops shot up a miners' contingent en route to Sucre, killing one, but this didn't intimidate them. They took over the Sucre airport and other key locations, and surrounded the site of Vaca Diez' swearing-in ceremony.

Then, all the anti-working class forces united and chose Supreme Court Judge Eduardo Rodriguez as the new President. Key to this was Evo Morales, the so-called "radical" friend of Chavez and Castro and leader of the "Movement Towards Socialism." Morales agreed to have Rodriguez as interim President for six months until new elections are held. Morales' party is now Bolivia's leading opposition force and he expects to become Bolivia's first Aymara ruler.

However, none of the protestors' demands were met. The gas industry is still controlled by the international energy companies; racism and super-exploitation of the mostly Aymara, Quechua and Guarani population is still rampant; and the same ruling class still rules.

Why? Because despite the militancy and anger of the masses, and their desire for a worker-peasant revolutionary government, this can't happen relying on Morales or the more "militant" union leaders, and their Trotskyite allies. They think a "dual power" situation was being created -- workers and peasants rule through People's Assemblies -- building the illusion that a real revolution can occur without a revolutionary communist leadership.

The present calm is temporary. The racist-fascist bourgeoisie in the Santa Cruz region is still planning a referendum to seize autonomy from the central government (most of the gas deposits are there, away from the Andean region mostly inhabited by indigenous people). The oil companies still control the gas industry. The united front among the various capitalist factions and Big Oil won't last long. (Brazil's Petrobras is now a big player in South America's energy industry, competing with U.S.-owned oil giants.) And the masses are still angry and want real changes.

Again, the struggle will continue and the key task remains, to turn these struggles into schools for communism, forging a real revolutionary leadership to fight for workers' power.

Discussions on Communism
`Mind-blowing' To Youth

NEW YORK CITY -- Building off the excitement of May Day, over 40 high school students and teachers from New York and New Jersey spent a day in a park discussing communist politics and practicing communist culture.

We read the new CHALLENGE column "...Under Communism," bringing to these youth the potential of an entirely new world outside of capitalism. The discussion moved in many different directions, posing how the school system would be different (delighting many of the students...and teachers); how we would decide the culture that would be accepted under communism; and how we would function without money or wages.

Although two young comrades led the discussion, the most important point of all was that most of the questions and answers came from the students themselves. At times they got so excited talking about communism that others could barely get a word in. One participant noted, "Many young comrades took leadership today in answering other youth's questions, especially a few young women. Today was a great example of what we want to build."

These discussions are important because workers and students need to know what kind of world PLP is fighting for, and that they must play an active role in the decision-making. On the bus ride home, one student said, "The discussion was mind blowing to me because I never looked at the world like that. Now that I know a bit more than before, I'm gonna try my best to learn and understand more about it." One student "demanded" weekly study groups instead of bi-weekly ones.

Besides discussing the type of world we want to create, we also try to practice it as communists, understanding that there are limitations. Students and teachers played soccer and basketball and went swimming and hiking together. We did everything as a collective, whether it was cleaning up or ensuring everybody had enough to eat. It's great to see our communist ideas actually put into practice.

After playing soccer, a student asked if there would still be sports under communism. He imagined a world without any sports, or any competition for that matter. A comrade replied, saying there could still be sports and friendly competition, but with no material benefits for the "winners." Just as we did today, we can still compete, as long as the goal is to improve at the sport and have fun with your friends, not to win a prize.

When leaving the park, we discussed summer plans. Many wanted more such social events, while still doing more agitational work and organizing in our areas. Although the bosses aren't yet worried about the working class taking state power, one day they will be. The youth are tired, angry and looking for change. As one student said, "I felt very happy hearing about communism because this is a very hateful world." He's not alone. When millions of students and workers worldwide learn about communism and the Progressive Labor Party, the bosses will really have something to worry about.

Campus Rally Poetry:
Weapon Against Imperialist War

NEW YORK CITY -- In May, a long silence at our campus here was broken by a volley of antiwar poetry. The rally was inspired by the March 5 Educators to Stop the War conference, and built on an April teach-in. It initiated an alliance of the antiwar faculty and staff union with students to fight recruitment, the draft, military research and economic attacks due to the war budget. It also commemorated three student soldiers who died in Iraq.

A dozen speakers condemned the war's lies, racism, torture, slaughter of civilians, theft from the social budget and plans for U.S. domination. The campus student paper said a PLP student's speech analyzing the reasons people were against the war as symptoms of capitalism, "stood out the most. . . For the students who wish to end injustice, his words were clear: have a working-class movement to end all these issues."

PLP thinks antiwar students and teachers must understand that the Iraq war and occupation are necessary for U.S. bosses to maintain their eroding position in the world as they combat their imperialist rivals. To stop such wars we must end imperialism itself. Otherwise we're doomed to build one antiwar movement after another.

The campus newspaper reporter's response showed people are open to such ideas, and will unite with us to stop this war, despite ingrained anti-communism. More people wanted to speak than we had time for. An Afghani student's poem described her family's suffering under U.S. occupation. It spoke to her mother in Afghanistan about "the torture of death [that] sets across your skies," but the title still proclaimed that "Some Lives Can't Take All of Life."

How many more victims of U.S. imperialism have migrated to our city to escape atrocities like the torture death of Dilawar, a poor Afghani taxi driver, at the hands of the U.S. military? ("The Bagram File," New York Times, 5/20) They're all potential recruits to destroy the system that has disrupted their lives but not their hopes.

Another student poem honored a friend who died in Iraq, in a "motor accident caused by bad weather," the military said. The poet, however, saw the war and his friend's death not as "bad weather" but as "a condition of our climate." To honor two other dead student soldiers, Nigerian immigrants, we read a militant Nigerian poem protesting Shell Oil and its fascist government enablers in the Niger Delta: "They may kill all/But the blood will speak/They may gain all/But the soil will RISE."

Our rally poetry indeed made the blood speak, like the exiled daughter imagining her Afghani mother watching it "rain in blood throughout your land." It's our job to make the soil imperialism has drenched in blood and oil rise like an earthquake, in Kabul, Baghdad, Port Harcourt, Nigeria and New York.

Memories of World War II
`Stalin's Soviet Union will be no pushover, son...'

The CHALLENGE series on World War II brought back memories of wartime when I was growing up in Brooklyn. I was 11 years old when the previously unbeaten Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Raised in a communist family, I was old enough to know that this was going to be a titanic fight. The papers were full of stories about how Hitler's hordes would be in Moscow in six weeks. But my father told me, "Not so fast, sonny boy. Stalin's Soviet Union will be no pushover." How right he was.

As the invaders moved deeper and deeper into the world's first working-class state, people here became edgier and edgier. The U.S. was not yet in the war and the Nazis had previously run roughshod through virtually all of Western and Eastern Europe. Whether you were pro-communist or anti-communist, most everyone worried about what it would mean for us here if Hitler captured the vast resources of the Soviet Union.

Woolworth's 5cents&10cents store (the 99cents stores of that era) was selling maps of various "theaters of war." I bought one of the Russian Front. It came with tiny flags on pins, some with swastikas and some with hammer and sickles. I would listen to the radio (no TV then), get the daily reports from the front, and then set up the flags facing each other along a 2,000-mile line from the Artic to the Caspian Sea. (2,000 miles! That's like from Maine to Florida!)

Soon the military "experts" were found to be not so "expert." The Red Army began pushing the Nazis back, and I moved my little flags accordingly.

Every day my parents would come home from work and look at my map, smiling when they saw the hammer and sickles pushing the swastikas westward. "You were right, Pop," I told my father.

After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, the entire communist-led labor movement in New York began pushing for a "Second Front." Petitions were signed, rallies were held filling the old Madison Square Garden, all calling for the U.S. and Britain to invade Europe from the West, to relieve the burden on the Soviets in the East, who were carrying the war against Hitler all by themselves. We knew that the West didn't like the Socialist Soviet Union and would have loved to see it destroyed.

When I was 12, my mother took me to my first demonstration, 250,000 strong, filling Union Square in September 1942. I had never seen so many people in one place. They were all chanting, "Open Up the Second Front!" It was the same theme in the May Day marches during the war.

In July, my mother would take my sister and myself to a small town in the Catskills, Monticello, New York, where we worked all summer. My sister used to stand outside the movie theatre holding collection cans asking for donations for "Russian War Relief." They would be full in no time. The town sheriff would stand nearby, smiling. In different times, he probably would have arrested her -- "how dare you collect money for those damn communists!" But now the Soviet Union was the hope of the world. Even the sheriff had joined us!

As the world's workers watched breathlessly, the Red Army surrounded the Nazis at Stalingrad and smashed the cream of the German army. Even then people called it the turning point of the war. People here danced in the streets when they heard the news.

Now my flags on the map kept moving westward. The Red Army tanks were moving at a 40-mile-a-day clip, onward through the Ukraine and Western Russia, into Poland and towards Germany itself. Finally, the U.S. and Britain invaded western France in June 1944. By that time it looked like the Soviets might liberate all of Europe if there were no Second Front.

Then, on my 15th birthday, I went to my map and planted the hammer and sickle flag on Berlin! It was a far cry from the "experts" prediction four years ago, about "six weeks to Moscow."

When I got married ten years later, my wife told me how her Russian-born parents -- having migrated to the U.S. around 1908 -- used to come home from their garment and millinery shops during the war and immediately turn on the radio to get the "latest from the front." In those days, the Red Army was looked on as the saviors of the world. Stalin's picture was on the front of Life Magazine, hailed as "The Man of the Year." GI's slogging through Italy were told by their commanders, "Don't worry. Uncle Joe will save you!"

The bosses' media are trying to bury this history with all the lies about how the U.S. "won the war" and "saved France and Europe." They try to hide the fact that 80% of the Nazi army was battling -- and defeated by -- the Soviets in the East. But at least those of us who lived through that era know differently.

We in PLP should spread the truth far and wide about how the world's first communist-led workers' state saved humanity from fascism.

An old-time red

UNDER COMMUNISM
WHOSE FACTORY IS IT?

Much ink has flowed analyzing the June 16 Wichita Boeing plant sale to Onex Co. Some spoke to workers' anger, having lost wages, benefits and even 1,100 jobs. The best pieces called for class solidarity and militancy, citing similar attacks, sales and spin-offs throughout basic industry. CHALLENGE ran articles for the last two issues, reporting small, initial attempts to build such a movement. Nonetheless, even our paper has only hinted at the underlying question we workers should be asking: "What gives the bosses the right to sell a plant built with our labor?"

This question seems silly to some. The bosses own the plant. Herein lies the secret of exploitation and the power of Capital. We produce eight hours of value every day. They return a small percentage of that back in the form of wages and benefits. A quick calculation, using the 2004 annual report, pegs this number at 24%. The bosses appropriate the rest, what Marx called "surplus value."

Some of this surplus value is profit and exorbitant executive "compensation." Some, a decreasing percentage, funds the bosses' government which enforces the rules that keep the capitalists in power and wages war to maintain their imperialist empire.

Boeing bosses "owned" the Wichita plant because they "bought" it with part of this surplus value. Every machine, every building, every production process was paid for with our labor, but under this system we don't own the fruits of our labor.

But we agreed to work for Boeing. What choice did we have? Throughout modern history, the bosses have legally stolen the majority of the value we've created, consolidating their hold on the means of production. Despite any harbored petty-bourgeois illusions, we either work for some boss or starve. Under capitalism, we've become commodities, bought with just enough to produce a new generation of wage slaves.

But what if we, the working class, took back the fruits of our labors? Under communism, the working class would collectively "own" the Wichita plant and all the industries built with our labor. We would run them in the interest of our class, not for the profits of the bosses.

A communist government would enforce rules outlawing the trampling of workers' livelihood for the profits of a few ruling class-exploiters. We could organize and re-organize industry for the benefit of our class.

"Selling" factories would become a historical artifact. We could organize production for need, not for sale and profit.

The profit system not only pits company against company, but worker against worker. Today, the bosses sell and spin off plants and offload work to take advantage of cheaper wages.

In a communist society, organized around production for need, we would welcome any helping hands. As we collectively advance, we could cut back on the hours of work. We could use the extra time to decide not only how to produce but what to produce. We could devote more time developing the political knowledge necessary to run society. We could work to eliminate the divide between mental and manual labor. Our experiences would help us think as a class, fighting the dog-eat-dog mentality of capitalism, defeating racism, sexism and nationalism along the way.

The U.S. bosses are reorganizing basic industry because they must find a way to pay for "stunningly expensive" high-tech wars to control Mid-East oil, the key to their empire. The lives and livelihoods of the industrial working class are being sacrificed on the altar of imperialism.

A communist revolution would take this industrial might out of the hands of the imperialists. We could use our production to defend the interests of the world's workers.

Whose plant is this anyway? No boss has the right to sell the fruits of our labors. Now, there's a system worth fighting for!

Movie Review
CRASH, Just Another Racist Movie

Crash" is a movie made by the author of "Million Dollar Baby." In this case Paul Haggis wrote, directed and also co-produced it, so his fingerprints are truly all over the work.

Although there are many interwoven story lines that converge at different points, the essence of "Crash" is the story of a cop so racist and vile that, when we first see him, we find him grinning tauntingly at a husband he's wrongly pulled over. The husband is forced to stand silent (or, it is implied, be beaten up and/or arrested) while the cop sticks his finger inside the husband's wife.

Even the cop's partner is horrified by this. (Later he applies for a transfer, but the author thinks it hilarious that this "good cop" must state openly that he farts in the car and thus wants to be alone. Yes, sort of funny, but what became of his indignation? It got lost in a poor "joke.")

The bad cop, extremely well played by Matt Dillon, is then shown being kind to his aging, ill father. This is the first sign that cops aren't as bad as they appear.

This movie seems to call everyone racist. The people under attack include blacks, Irish, Iranians, Asians, most whites, some cops, nasty hospital administrators and higher-ups among black and white police and politicians. What's missing in this indictment is the fact that it's the rich who promote and most profit from racism. That fact can't be found in almost any Hollywood movie ("Bulworth" is about the only fairly recent exception. It's also the only movie where the word "Socialism!" is yelled out with approval.)

There are contradictions, also, among poor black characters, but most of them are engaged in anti-social acts. So when we finally see the Matt Dillon cop perform a noble and heroic act, we understand he's a "complex character." His complexity makes him noble; the complexity of poor blacks and an Asian family ultimately show them to be pretty rotten people -- especially the Asian woman.

The "gassy" cop "unwittingly" commits a terrible act against a young black

man (afterwards conveniently hiding what he's done). An enraged Iranian goes after the one really admirable black man in the movie, and the scene ends with a miracle so ridiculous that it works better than a finger down the throat.

Two final related points: I think I have a pretty decent grasp of the propaganda value of movies, but when I read the CHALLENGE review of "Hotel Rwanda," I realized that PLP as a collective is much smarter than any one person -- because while I knew something in "Rwanda" bothered me, I couldn't put my finger on it. A collective discussion resulting in a review is better, generally, than that which any single person could write.

Secondly is what I suggested earlier: people should watch cop shows and movies (I feel "Crash" is just a cop show in drag) in order to discuss them with others, to analyze them and enable people to understand the dangers in the propaganda.

Not long ago, when I was putting down "Law and Order" as reactionary, someone commented that the show often spoke up in favor of the Bill of Rights. But throwing "complex, multi-sided issues" into a story is the best way for Hollywood and TV networks to con us into thinking they're on our side. They're not. They want us to think -- as they do with the "good Democrats" vs. the "bad Republicans" -- that they're offering us an "alternative."

However, our alternative is the creation of a working-class culture to counter the crap they constantly throw at us. Though they sugar-coat it, it's still bullshit.u

LETTERS

Garment Worker Mom Learning Through Class Struggle

I'm a garment worker, mother of two, one a 6-year-old who needs to be in a state-funded day care program for low-income families. My city's school district informed us that starting in July, we'll have to pay $315 per month per child. Otherwise, we're out of the program. Another woman is helping me in this struggle, showing me how to organize. She sought out other mothers with the same problem, and then we asked for help from a church involved in community problems.

In a meeting one day, I got a big surprise. The woman who was helping me was sitting next to me and had a PLP May Day sticker on her purse. I had many fears, but then remembered a friend of my 12-year-old daughter had seen one of her teachers with an old May Day sticker. She asked her teacher how she'd gotten it and then offered her the latest sticker. The important lesson for me was to talk more openly with someone with similar beliefs, making it clearer on how to build the Party's work.

We've gone to the School District with more parents, taking our younger children, carrying signs and chanting slogans. Although fearful, I spoke at a School District meeting. I described the need for child care programs for low-income families, for education of our youth, and building a society that's conscious of the need to keep our children off the streets, out of gangs, a society without the social problems we confront today. We don't want our kids' childhoods spent in front of the television, or playing video games glorifying war. That's why we're demanding no to the school cuts, no to the war and no to racism.

Red Worker and mother

Students and Teachers Enthused by D.C. Summer Project

We came to D.C. not knowing what to expect. We joined a spirited and militant picket line of Metro transit workers and many young supporters. We heard transit workers and others talk about the power of the working class. Transit workers, led by communists, could shut down the capital of U. S. imperialism. Many of these workers seemed to understand the potential power they had.

We picketed while waiting for the Metro Board of Directors to exit their "big shot" meeting, and they got quite a reception. As they got on their free bus, the young people rushed forward, booing and chanting at these big shots, plastering signs against the bus windows. We put the fear of workers' power into these bosses, whose smiles quickly disappeared. For many of us, this was the highlight of our trip. As one transit worker said later, he was re-energized for the long struggle for workers' power.

******************

My main goal in attending this rally was to spread my knowledge of communism and support the working class. Workers are the cornerstone of society. This was a great day to be a communist! I witnessed hundreds of people, both young and old, supporting these transit workers. It felt great to know that we in PLP are creating an environment for people to stand up against capitalism. More rallies and demonstrations can help change many people's minds. In their day Rosa Parks and Malcolm X took extreme measures to prove a point. Now we need a revolution; we need to introduce more people to our organization. This may take many years, but this experience inspired me to fight back.

********************

When I attended the Metro rally in D. C. with students from my local high school, I was really impressed by the militancy of the drivers. We teachers could learn a big lesson from the Metro workers. Last month our union misleaders (UFT in NYC) organized what seemed to be a big bash at Madison Square Garden with music and politicians. It was a disgrace, given the horrendous conditions we and the students face and the fact that we haven't seen a contract in over two years!

******************

I've been to a few rallies before, but this was the best by far. It showed that if people fight back against injustice, they'll get support. If more people support one another we can get a lot done. I'm really glad I participated and hope we can do more to support others who are being oppressed.

******************

Drown out Democrat
Hack Ferrer

Fifteen teachers and paraprofessionals from my Bronx, NY high school attended the June 2 teachers' union rally at Madison Square Garden, sitting up front. We watched an endless parade of union hacks and politicians. One who said his mother was a teacher and he "understood what we were going through" had the nerve to tell the crowd, "we're not going to pay you what you deserve, but we'll try to get you a little more." We booed union head Weingarten as loud as we could.

When Fernando Ferrer --a Democratic mayorality candidate -- came on, we booed so loud he decided not to speak and walked off the stage. He returned, but now walking hand-in-hand with Weingarten, who kissed him and handed him the mic, expecting a warm welcome. But teachers and paraprofessionals from my school started shouting, "Racist! Racist! What about Diallo?!" Our loud chanting drowned out his speech. Teachers from schools around us joined in. Ferrer gave us dirty looks.

Only one newspaper, the Spanish-language daily Hoy, reported that "Ferrer was prevented from speaking." They failed to mention why.

Ferrer, as a Latino, secured a majority of the black and Latino vote until publicly saying, "the police were justified in how they handled the Amadou Diallo situation."

Ferrer is just another example of why bosses come in all colors, as do workers. Just because Ferrer is Latino doesn't mean he'll be on the workers' side.

We in and around PLP can do more to sharpen the contradictions with the union leadership and politicians, who did not talk strike at the rally. Any small increase from a starting salary of $39,000/year can't compare to the $1 billion a week spent on the current imperialist adventure in Iraq.

Bronx Red

Colombia PLP Excites Young Comrade

When traveling through South America I visited with comrades in Colombia. Sharing such international experiences can only help us grow as a Party.

I attended a great May Day with the Colombian comrades. Their courage and the strength of their mobilization were impressive, especially given the level of fascism there. At one gathering a 9-year-old girl read a Desafio article, and then the group discussed it. Very inspiring to say the least! This is how we need to raise our children if we want to truly smash capitalism. I was very moved by the fact that the comrades are able to struggle and do so much with so little.

Many comrades in the U.S. are not suffering economically as hard as workers in countries like Colombia, so we struggle because we can, whereas in Colombia, many of the comrades are unemployed and struggle because they have to. There's no other choice. From this we can learn commitment, resolve and courage in the face of a genocidal and oppressive capitalist system. I met one comrade who, when not having bus fare to make club meetings, walks hours to get there, with only Desafio in his hands.

In Colombia, I learned a great deal about struggle, revolution and the many faces of fascism, which isn't that different from the fascism in the U.S. Colombia is what the U.S. could be like in several years. Instead of DAS (intelligence agency in Colombia), the U.S. has the CIA and FBI; instead of paramilitaries the U.S. has patriot groups and militias. Instead of Uribe, there is Bush. We can learn about security, communist culture as well as how to struggle under a fascist police state.

I thank the comrades for their hospitality, trust, revolutionary love, courage, and inspiration, as well as taking the time to teach a comrade about struggle. It's important to see that our fight is international, that people all over the world believe in and are fighting for the same communist society that we are. This experience has only strengthened me and provided more reason to struggle. All Power to the Workers!

Red Traveler

CHALLENGE COMMENTS:

Thanks for your letter, it is very inspiring. Just one point, PLP comrades in Colombia, or anywhere else, don't struggle for communist politics because they are poor, but because they have been won to PL's revolutionary internationalist line. If political consciousness would depend solely on economic hardships, billions would be fighting for communism worldwide now

Salvador's Rulers Are The Real Criminals

"Plan `Super Hard Hand' will put an end to all the problems of the country," El Salvadoran President Tony Saca announced noisily a year ago. Then he sent thousands of cops into the streets to seize anybody who appeared "suspiciously" like a gang member or a criminal. Of course, the "most suspicious" have always been the children of the working class.

The jails have overflowed with their new "guests." Meanwhile, the level of crime makes the war of the 1980's looks like child's play. And the real criminals, the big bosses, have the run of the land.

"El Salvador is the land of opportunities," shouts Saca again, but for whom? For the Miami-organized mafia that launders millions of dollars or for the big supermarket owners who invent hurricanes to sow terror in the working class so they can sell their expired merchandise?

"We can no longer put up with this system," says a professional worker, "one that sells us illusions of "prosperity" and the opening of mega-plazas of up-scale stores where we can only look, and when we do, the security guards freak out, raising the alarm that we look `suspicious'."

The Salvadoran Association of Manufacturers wails that El Salvador can't keep declining economically at the current rate. The present government is ending its first year of suffocating the working class, and Saca comes out like an electric light, morning, noon and night, breaking ground for public works. He's on TV serving capitalism more than when he was a sports commentator. The capitalist system and its propaganda machine have turned a football announcer into the champion of lies and oppression of workers.

This past June 1, thousands of Salvadoran workers, doctors, farm workers and students marched through the country's main streets, denouncing the bosses' oppressive system. But the working class can't trust the siren song of the FMLN or other electoral parties. The fight to change the system doesn't interest those who sell the sweat, blood and tears of comrades fallen in combat against capitalism.

Bought with a fist-full of dollars, these politicians of the false left fight against our communist ideas. "Why do you go around passing that out?" an FMLN leader complained angrily to a youth on May Day. "Don't you see that you're attacking us?" These formerly poor sellouts now live like the petty-bourgeoisie serving the bosses. When they're no longer useful, they'll be bounced. Until then they'll appear at Saca's side, announcing hurricanes to win the sympathy of the ruling class.

PLP will always be on the side of the working class. CHALLENGE is our ideological arm; the working class must organize, and read and study it, understanding the vision that communism is the only system that meets workers' needs.

A comrade from El Salvador

Bush's Pakistan Pal Enforces State Terror

The poor people of this subcontinent, Pakistan, are suffering from ruthless poverty while the bosses enjoy a luxurious life. Many workers commit suicide because they have nothing to eat, wear or a place to live. Capitalism does its best to bring more misery to workers - rotten ideas, exploitation, slavery, illiteracy and injustice - making the poor even poorer. While the bosses say they're planning to eradicate poverty, they're doing exactly the opposite: eradicating workers' lives.

In Pakistan, the working class faces layoffs, cutbacks, low wages, no medical care, no job security, no pension nor even insurance covering on-the-job injuries. Their so-called union leadership serves the bosses, collecting dues for their own enrichment. Recently the power loam workers in Faisalabad struck against low wages and for job security but will be unable to hold out since the union leaders won't support them. The bosses are privatizing many industries to strengthen their economic control.

[Editor's note: "Homeland Security" Pakistani-style -- As of June 18, over 1,000 telecommunications workers have been arrested for striking against government privatization of the state-owned phone company (PTCL). Bush's "anti-terrorist" buddy Musharraf's Interior Minister says strike leaders could be tried as "terrorists according to the law."]

Women in Pakistan suffer brutal capitalist oppression. Many die due to lack of medicines and maternity care, "honour" killings and commit suicide after being raped. Like Shazia of Faisalabad, Mukhtar Mai, Dr. Shazia Khalid, many more are gang-raped daily, with no protection from the capitalist authorities. Many of these women don't tell others because they fear being exposed as having been raped which could lead to being killed by so-called traditions like "karokari."

Religious parties ruling two provinces do nothing to protect women because they themselves - the "mullahs" or preachers - rape many girls and boys in their sacred "madrassahs." Even the minister for religious affairs and the daily papers report this but it continues because they're backed by the MMA party in Northwest Frontier Province. In the city of Haripure, authorities banned female phone operators for "immorality." Although this is a violation of articles 18 and 34 of the constitution, which states that "every citizen shall have the right to enter upon any lawful profession or occupation," these women are still deprived of their right to a job. The majority of Pakistan's population are women but the bosses use their puppets, the "mullahs" (religious leaders), to keep women illiterate and less able to challenge their exploiters.

We in the Progressive Labor Party here condemn this discrimination. Both men and women have equal rights to live in the society. Only communism can eliminate this discrimination. Everyone, whether female or male, will have a job and produce value for the society as a whole.

The "enlightened" and "moderate" rulers say they're against "fundamentalists" but it's very clear that the CIA, Saudi Arabia and the ISI (Pakistan's powerful military intelligence service) financed Osama bin Laden and the tens of thousands of "jihadists" (holy warriors from the Muslim world) and organized them to to fight the Soviet army and the pro-Moscow Afghan government in the 1980's. Today, they also use "mullahs" as rulers in two provinces to reap profits for themselves and continue exploitation of the working class.

We in PLP believe that without a revolutionary communist struggle we can't eliminate these evils which were planted by capitalism during the Cold War era, so we're trying to organize an internationalist communist party - PLP - in this region. (Next issue: Nationalism and The Role of PLP.)

Comrades in Pakistan

Racism Made French Bosses Rich

An historian from Marseille here in France, whose specialty is the history of colonialism, was interviewed on March 23 on the radio station France Culture. He claimed "a debate over colonial times in this country simply doesn't exist."

He charged French authorities with refusing to erect a museum on the subject, and referred to an article stating that "after all the French colonial era has been a positive experience." "Positive" means that their marvelous motorway or their giant companies would be smaller without that sucked blood.

At a Congress years ago, some African leaders demanded Britain and France repay money for the damage from slavery. Their answer? "Those things were done by others in the past." But these rulers still eat the fruits of it.

This mock attempt to cover their bloody hand doesn't deceive those who know well these bourgeois faces (similar worldwide). In fact, if we only "count the bodies" the way, for example, BBC's World Service does (Stalin called western radio invading Russia "a sky of lies"), we can charge French imperialists with some 200,000 civilian lives during the 19th century in Haiti. (Le Monde, 2/29 and 3/01/2004) Often the life expectancy for the new slaves was just five years after arrival. There were possibly two million deaths in the colonization of Algeria up to its 1960's war; the list goes on. In that war, after the French attempt to "win people's hearts and minds," torture of civilians to get information on rebels and terrorizing girls and children became the rule, as shown last November by TV France 3.

But in Haiti, Algeria, Vietnam, and last year's uprising in Ivory Coast, French imperialism met bitter, unexpected opposition.

The French government regenerates racism: I've seen the way police "handle" asylum-seekers in the port of Calais, beating them up. Also "positive" is the way army officers among their "cousins" in Belgium treat the black soldiers in Republic of Congo (still really colonized), exploiting the lack of a decent school system to humiliate them at every step, as shown in October on Belgian state TV, shamelessly of course.

The long wave of state racism is easy to see among mounting popular right-wing extremists in Europe: the infamous parties of the NPD in Germany, BNP in England, Vlaams Block in Belgium, Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy (now ultra anti-Muslim/Chinese), all as bad as last year's deep anti-Arab feelings on the French isle of Corsica, not to mention the neo-Nazis gangs, who seem to be particularly fertile in Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Racism is everywhere. It's one of the major challenges for communists.

Italian red trucker

`Rude' Teachers Not the Problem

The interesting June 22 column on how schooling would be better under communism is timely. Teachers are under assault nationwide. No Child Left Behind drastically changes funding, credentialing, and gives the military access to the addresses and telephone numbers of high school youth.

The article's main point was that, "education under communism will not have to deal with a small class of rich and powerful racist exploiters using students as future sources of profits (which is also the basis for racism). Rather, the purpose will be to enrich the lives of each individual student so that they, in turn, can enrich the lives of everyone around them -- the entire working class."

In my mind, the purpose of education under capitalism is to create workers or managers who will enforce the rules of capitalism, be it at war, on the job, or in the neighborhood -- that is, to indoctrinate the population with a capitalist-oriented, pro-imperialist education.

The article mentions the important idea that communist-oriented education would rethink not just the size of schools and the relationship of teacher to student, but the entire relationship of school to society.

However, far too much emphasis was given to teacher rudeness, which is not universal, nor is it the core problem with capitalism's education system.  We must address how specific disciplines -- science, art, physical education, mathematics, health, language, music, dance, etc. -- could be expanded in their focus and orientation under communism.

Aspects we should retain, however, include universal public education, publicly funded. Education should still be mandatory for children under 18 (unless it can be determined that 18 is too old or too young to require compulsion).

Communism should close and expropriate all private schools, religious and non-religious, along with the private university system. 

Under communism, true equal access to education will exist for all, from kindergarten through college, and for free. This would be possible because the money currently financing the military, as well as the wealth stolen by the bosses, would be available to the masses through the communist revolution.

A reader

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

More $$ -- but it all goes to the richest

...It is hard to imagine anyone supporting the notion of taking money from programs like Medicaid and college-tuition assistance, increasing the tax burden of the vast majority of working Americans, sending the country into crushing debt -- and giving the proceeds to people who are so fantastically rich that they don't know what to do with the money they already have. Yet that is just what is happening ....

...From 1980 to 2002, the latest year of available data, the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 percent of earners more than doubled, while the ... share of the bottom 90 percent declined. (NYT, 6/7)

Maquiladora workers fight gov't-union deal

"They shouted at us, they did not let us go to the bathroom, they gave us food that made us vomit," said Ms Ávila, 21, reciting a litany of indignities she said she had suffered at the factory, in Tepeji del Rio ....

What started out as local struggle may now shift its focus to the American toy giant, Mattel, which licenses the Barbie label to the plant's owner....

The dispute has followed what has become almost a standard script in maquiladora labor conflicts over the past decade. Workers try to form their own union, only to find that they have been represented -- often without their knowledge -- by a union that is part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, the old-line federation that was a pillar of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which, ruled Mexico for 71 years....

"It's clear that the old-line labor groupings have worked out a modus vivendi with the Fox government....You can count the number of independent unions in maquiladoras on one hand and still have fingers left over," (NYT, 6/12)

Pension laws show who runs the show

Government officials reviewing United's plans have noted that the airline performed calculations -- all in compliance with the law -- that made its pension plans look robust when their true economic condition was worsening rapidly. On the basis of its measurements, United did not make any cash contributions to the plans for several years. That, too, was legal....

Since the federal pension rules permit all companies to do the same type of calculations United did....many companies had misrepresented the condition of their pension funds, and were contributing inadequate sums of money as a result. The 1,100 pensions in worst shape...were $353.7 billion short of what they need to meet their promises to workers. (NYT, 6/11)

Abuse of Islamics needed high planning

We are officially told that the abuse of detainees in American custody -- who were stripped naked and beaten, forced to simulate sexual acts, their beards shaved, leered at by women interrogators who rubbed their breasts against them, or smeared them with fake menstrual blood, or grabbed and sometimes kicked their genitals -- is the handiwork of a few rogues who are duly punished when caught. To accept this as true we must also believe that these average kids from average American towns are experts on Islam, so well-versed in its strictures about sex that they dreamed up these methods all by themselves.

This makes no sense to Ann Wright....

"It came from the minds of some of the senior interrogators who are very well-versed in Arab cultures," Wright told me...

...No young military reservist could possibly have concocted the strategy... (Newsday, 5/25)

Liberal media help imperialist warmakers

It has become popular to describe the U.S. invasion of Iraq as some kind of anomaly, a departure from Washington's previous record of seeking peaceful alternatives to war and refusing to engage in aggression....

But during the last half century -- when, for days or months or many years, U.S. troops and planes assaulted the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq again -- the rationales from the White House were always based on major falsehoods....

PBS -- the "Frontline" show, [was] airing a report about Iran's nuclear program. Every word of the May 24 broadcast may have been true -- yet, due to the show's omissions, the practical effect was to participate in laying media groundwork for a military attack on Iran. (Creator's Syndicate, 5/29)

`Big 8'nations profit from Africa poverty

For the past six years the G8 has been preaching relief yet maintaining vicious trade sanctions against Africa and Asia. It has denied them markets for their produce and flooded them with surpluses...destroying local industries and impoverishing populations. This has nothing to do with the corruption or lethargy of `ungovernable Africa'. It is economic warfare by the G8 against the poor..." (London Sunday Times, 6/5)

Pakistan, a close US ally, brutalizes woman

When Pakistan's prime minister visits next month, President Bush will presumably use the occasion to repeat his praise for President Pervez Musharraf as a bold leader "dedicated in the protection of his own people...."

On average, a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan, and two women a day die in honor killings....

While Ms. Mukhtaran and Dr. Shazia have attracted international support, most victims in Pakistan are on their own. Earlier this year, for example, police reported that a village council had punished a man for having an affair by ordering his 2-year-old niece to be given in marriage to a 40-year-old man.

In another case this year, an 11-year-girl named Nazan was rescused from her husband's family, which beat her, broke her arm and strung her from the ceiling because she didn't work hard enough.

Then there are Pakistan's hudood laws, which have been used to imprison thousands of women who report rapes. If rape victims cannot provide four male witness to the crime, they risk being whipped for adultery, since they acknowledge illicit sex and cannot prove rape. (NYT, 6/21)

 

PLP Summer Project Youth Unite with D.C. Transit Workers

Hundreds Protest Against Anti-Immigrant MinuteMen

U.S. Military Gearing Up for All-Out Imperialist War

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LA Garment Workers Back Anti-Racist Fight Against MinuteMen

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Red Army Offensive Saved U.S.-U.K.

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UNDER COMMUNISM: How Would Schooling Be Better?

LETTERS

Rock & Roll Against Minutemen

Robeson, Communists Inspired Belafonte

• CHALLENGE comments

Religion Helps Mask Immorality

Multiculturism: Help or Hinder Anti-Racist Unity?

Truth Emerging About U.S. Torture

New Column is Inspiring

Our Vision of the Future

French Bosses Scheme After the Non-Vote

• CHALLENGE Comment

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

• Muslim innocents suffer from US tactics
• Drug co. profiteers cover up health risks
• Chavez’s job: stall off real revolution
• Rich liberals keep blood-sucking system going
• ‘Pro-life’ US doesn’t fight genocide
• Capitalist China: Warm ties with butchers

• ---

PLP Summer Project Youth Unite with D.C. Transit Workers

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 6 — PLP members and friends have organized a Summer Project (SP) here in the capital of U.S. imperialism, concentrating on bringing communist politics to, and learning from, the transit workers who are immersed in a contract fight with the Metro bosses (full article next issue).

We’ve leafleted the entire city, politicizing and radicalizing workers. We’ve had long conversations with many bus and train operators, station managers, mechanics and custodial workers. We’ve seen first-hand the response of the bus riders; and realize that transit workers have a somewhat advantageous but shaky position in the working class, and will have to fight hard to keep what they’ve got. Other workers agreed that the AFL-CIO leadership has sabotaged the weapon of class war and sold us out.

In addition to working with Metro workers, we also held a series of talks and discussions on racism, police brutality, organizing for strikes, sexism and health care. This sharpened our politics and helped us grow as communists.

On the SP’s first night, we discussed the city’s history of racism, from Native American displacement to the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831 to the racist wage progression confronting the Metro workers’ contract today, as well as racist police brutality in the D.C. area. Neighboring Prince George’s County (PG) has the country’s highest rate of people shot and murdered per cop (Washington Post, 7/1/01). This discussion strengthened our understanding of the specific ways racism serves the capitalists, especially here. It also helped us struggle more effectively with the community, particularly in building for the June 7 rally to fight back against police brutality in PG County.

At our second forum a founding member of PLP gave an historical (and personal) analysis of organizing strikes and unions. We evaluated the Communist Party’s role in the 1961 New York Tugboat Strike, which sparked a general railroad strike. We noted the importance of strikes in uniting the working class, in building a base for PLP and in organizing towards communist revolution. These powerful discussions influenced the younger comrades in understanding the strategic importance of industrial organizing.

The next day, the Party’s Cultural Committee led a wide-ranging discussion on culture, how sexism is embedded in capitalist culture and ways communists can combat it.

In the remaining days of the SP we will discuss the limits of work in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) and have a full-day cadre school. Members of the community, and especially the Metro workers, have given us a warm response. We’re looking forward to — and are optimistic about — the upcoming Local 689 Metro Contract Rally on June 9. We’re here in solidarity with the Metro workers. The work we do as communists and as friends of PLP, be it agitation, discussion, including basebuilding will help us grow politically. D.C. has shown us that it is ripe for PL leadership.

Racism Hurts All Workers

Hundreds Protest Against Anti-Immigrant MinuteMen

LOS ANGELES, June 6 — When James Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen, spoke in Garden Grove, Ca. on May 25th about expanding his fascist project from Arizona to California, 300 workers and students demonstrated against this racist. Their picket line tried to prevent cars from entering the facility housing the event. While protesters continued their picketing and chanted slogans like, "Hitler rose, Hitler fell, Nazi scum go to hell!", cops in riot gear were protecting the racists and trying to intimidate the anti-racists.

Many soon realized that those protecting the Minutemen, the Garden Grove Police, were themselves fascist. Local politician and known racist Hal Netkin not only bumped the pickets with his minivan, but slammed on the gas and deliberately rammed the crowd, leaving several on the ground. The police then rushed the protesters, pushing them back and arresting several, apparently for being "too vocal." Some demonstrators responded by organizing another picket line and chanting, "The cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all are part of the bosses’ plan!" The cops "held" racist Netkin and later released him without charges.

When the Minutemen event ended, the cops began to violently move demonstrators away from the exits by swinging their clubs and charging the crowd with horses. The cops formed a line across the street as the Minutemen left in their cars behind them. Then the cops charged the crowd as they extended their line. But the demonstrators refused to be intimidated and kept chanting. Finally the police charged a second time, arresting more demonstrators and beating one in jail later that night. The police exposed themselves as the fascist armed force of the state, defending racists and attacking anti-racist students and workers.

When the demonstration ended protesters went to a local police station to demand release of the prisoners. Many spent the next few days raising bail money. The arrested protesters and their supporters now must prepare to fight the serious, groundless charges brought against them by a racist, corrupt system.

One weakness emerged, expressed by some nationalist groups who refused to cooperate with white demonstrators. This plays into the bosses’ divide-and-conquer strategy. PLP members countered this with multi-racial unity and the understanding that attacks on immigrants mean attacks on all workers and students and weaken our class.

Uniting against racism is part of the fight for workers’ power. Therefore, all students and workers have an interest in defeating this racism and the system that profits from it.

The Minutemen represent one way the ruling class is building fascism, to try to win workers to their patriotic, imperialist plans. The violent police offensive represents this rising fascism. Organizing anti-racist struggles against both the open and and liberal racists is crucial in combating it and building the revolutionary class consciousness needed to unite the working class to eliminate the system that thrives on racist exploitation for profit.

MinuteMen: Racist Vigilantes

The Minutemen are widely known for their racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric and their vigilante fascism. They carried out armed patrols at the Arizona-Mexican border. They target Latino immigrants and also exploit anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism spread by the rulers since 9/11. The dominant section of the ruling class doesn’t want to prevent immigrant workers from entering the U.S. They need their labor, which anti-immigrant racism helps them super-exploit, and to fill the ranks of their imperialist army. So Bush denounces the Minutemen while Schwarzenegger praises them and liberal Villaraigosa calls for "inclusion" and 1,000 more cops to enforce racist exploitation. Thus, the Minutemen and the liberals represent a two-pronged attack on immigrants and all workers.

U.S. Military Gearing Up for All-Out Imperialist War

Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. rulers are seeking to add greater mobility to their war machine’s unmatched killing power by realigning overseas bases. Recent maneuvers in Africa displayed the Pentagon’s newly-developed "forward locations" tactics. On June 6, in "one of the largest deployments of U.S. forces in northern Africa since World War Two" (Pentagon press release, 6/3/05), more than 1,000 U.S. troops began leading live-fire "anti-terrorism" exercises in Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad. Moroccan, Nigerian and Senegalese forces also participated. Orders came from a tiny U.S. command post at Dakar,Senegal.

The operation aims both at rooting out Al Qaeda sympathizers and undermining French imperialism. Eight of the countries now hosting U.S. Special Forces are former French colonies. Most still have military pacts with Paris. The date was also meant rudely to remind French rulers of the U.S. invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. But the main message was that U.S. rulers no longer need large bases to project deadly force.

U.S. Bosses Want Faster, More Lethal War Machine

Cold War-style overseas bases with their schools, movie theaters and softball fields don’t meet U.S. imperialism’s expanding need for actual warfare. The cynical purpose of those old bases was to ensure that a lot of non-combatants would die in a Soviet invasion and fuel anti-Soviet public opinion. Today, however, the Pentagon will redeploy up to 70,000 troops (and their dependents) now stationed in Germany and South Korea to the United States, while sending fresh contingents to new bare-bones facilities in Eastern Europe, the Caspian Sea basin, Southeast Asia and Africa. Bush told the Navy graduating class at Annapolis the goal of the transformation effort is to make U.S. forces "faster, lighter, more agile and more lethal."

In the near term, Congress’s Overseas Basing Commission (May 2005 report) sees "threats that could emerge from an arc that stretches from West Africa across Southwest, South, and Southeast Asia, the Pacific and into the Andes...an area that contains more than its fair share of ethnic strife, religious and ideological fanaticism, failed government and — above all — antipathy and hatred toward the West in general and the United States in particular." Thus:

"The Pentagon has already established two forward operating locations in North Africa: At Tamanrasset Airport in southern Algeria and at Camp Lemomer, a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti. It is also looking at possible sites for bare-bones facilities in several countries south of the Sahara, including Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda, as well as São Tome and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea....The Pentagon is considering the establishment of bases in Australia and the eventual return of U.S. forces to their former installations in the Philippines, from which they were expelled in 1991." (Michael Klare, The Nation, 5/25/05)

In the oil-rich Persian Gulf, U.S. rulers are installing battle-ready, large-scale bases without facilities for spouses and children.

"U.S. military engineers are busy constructing fourteen ‘enduring bases’ for American forces in Iraq. These facilities are said to include an assortment of former Iraqi army bases; the airports at Baghdad and Mosul will also be expanded to house U.S. military aircraft. Elsewhere in the region, the Pentagon will retain its facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The large air base at Al-Udeid in Qatar is being expanded to house the U.S. personnel once stationed in Saudi Arabia." (Klare)

U.S. Moving Into Ex-Soviet Bases

In the longer term, the Overseas Basing Commission foresees a global conflict "sometime in the next quarter of a century" with "a more traditional great power competitor, possibly in our zones of interest in Europe and East Asia" — with an all-out war with China, Russia or Europe, or any combination thereof, in the cards,

"In Poland [the Pentagon] is looking into the use of several facilities once occupied by Soviet forces. In Romania much attention has been paid to the air base at Mihail Kogalniceanu and the Black Sea port of Constanta. Both were used to ferry troops and equipment to Iraq, and Secretary Rumsfeld visited these facilities in October to weigh their future utilization by American forces. The Pentagon currently maintains forward operating locations in this region: at Khanabad in southern Uzbekistan and at Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. These bases are being used to support combat operations in Afghanistan, and the Pentagon has indicated that it plans to retain them for some time to come. In addition, the United States is refurbishing the former Soviet air base at Atyrau, on Kazakhstan's Caspian Sea coast [and is] considering the acquisition of a similar facility in Azerbaijan, which is now receiving U.S. funds for the creation of its own Caspian Sea navy." (Klare)

But the rulers acknowledge that, when push comes to shove, such on-the-cheap, lean-and-mean basing tactics may fail them. They understand that eventually they will need a full-scale military mobilization of the United States. "If [global conflict] occurs, a force posture and base structure optimized for predominantly asymmetric threats emanating from the arc of instability may not be able to stay ahead of and ultimately contend with a global rival bent on direct confrontation with the United States." (Basing Commission report)

It’s our task to constantly expose the rulers’ war plans and build a revolutionary communist movement to ultimately put an end to their system and its ceaseless bloodbaths.µ

(Next: The Rulers’ Military Mobilization Plans: Danger and Opportunity for the Working Class.)

a name="Lesson of Watergate: Workers Should Never Swallow Any Bosses’ Line">">"esson of Watergate: Workers Should Never Swallow Any Bosses’ Line

The Watergate scandal is once again making headlines. The bosses’ media are filled with hot air about the "revelation" that W. Mark Felt, then an FBI Deputy Director, leaked the story that linked the 1972 Nixon re-election fund to the famous break-in at Democratic campaign headquarters.

Everyone knows the Watergate affair brought down Nixon’s presidency. The liberal rulers presented it as a "victory for democracy" over the threat of police-state fascism. But the Progressive Labor Party called it a "billionaires’ dogfight" over the use of capitalist state power. We said the Nixon crew represented mainly the interests of "New Money" moguls from the West and Southwest, who had different tactical needs from the more entrenched "Old Money" Eastern Establishment.

For example, as the Watergate hearings were reaching their height, Business Week magazine, a shill for Old Money, lambasted Nixon editorially for overheating the economy. New Money needed rapid growth rates to amass capital quickly; Old Money needed a slow-and-steady approach.

The Nixon gang also angered the Eastern Establishment by setting up its own internal police force to terrorize and spy on its opponents within the ruling class. The Watergate caper was just one among many of the extra-legal activities of the Nixon apparatus known as the "Plumbers." It’s probably no accident that a top FBI official provided the smoking gun used to bring Nixon down.

PLP’s analysis warned workers against taking sides in fights among the rulers. We said sure, Nixon’s a crook surrounded by thugs, but that doesn’t mean we should be fooled into backing the liberal imperialists who want to oust him. We emphasized that all the rulers were enemies of the working class, and that our side had no interest in supporting either faction. We treated Watergate as an object lesson about the nature of state power in class society.

We erred at the time in our over-optimistic estimate about U.S. imperialism’s weakness, describing Watergate as a squabble over the bosses’ "declining empire." We hadn’t yet begun to understand the worldwide consequences of the old communist movement’s self-inflicted demise. Among the most important of these was the new international lease on life U.S. rulers could enjoy in the absence of an international communist movement — a strategically powerful mortal enemy — that could challlenge world capitalism.

Nonetheless, our class analysis of Watergate was mainly correct as far as it went. During this period, the PLP provided important political leadership against the opportunist error of supporting "lesser-evil" bosses.

We continue this role today. It’s no accident that Watergate is back in the news during the Bush II presidency. If anything, the stakes are even higher now than in 1972-74. As CHALLENGE has frequently pointed out, the rulers have embarked on a long-term adventure of mobilizing society to preserve and extend U.S. imperialism’s world domination. This means preparation for ever-widening wars abroad and a ruthless police state at home.

The rulers made this strategy clear under Clinton, releasing the "bi-partisan" Hart-Rudman Report on National Security in the 21st Century. Then 9/11 gave Bush a green light to invade Afghanistan and establish a fascistic Department of Homeland Security, under the guise of fighting "terrorism." But the liberals are disgusted by the Bushite’s incompetence.

Bush was supposed to marshal a wave of enthusiasm for war in the Persian Gulf and surrounding areas. So far he’s failed miserably. After some initial flag-waving over Afghanistan, military recruitment for the "all-volunteer" economic draft is sinking. Bush was supposed to secure Iraq for Exxon Mobil, et al. He ignored military specialists who said he needed twice as many troops as he sent into Iraq. Now the U.S. military is facing a quagmire, with mounting casualties and no end in sight to an increasingly unpopular adventure.

Bush was supposed to impose s self-discipline within the bosses’ ranks in order to unite the ruling class around imperialism’s long-term needs. Instead, he has continued to pander to the narrow economic interests of those capitalists who helped him get elected. Rather than finance the police state and the war machine, his tax cuts are swelling the private coffers of his cronies. Skirmishes currently raging in Congress over his presidential appointments reflect this unease within the big bosses’ ranks.

Once again, we must never allow ourselves to fall into the "lesser-evil" trap. Nixon was our enemy, and so were the Democrats who overthrew him. Bush is our enemy, and so are the Democrats and liberal Republicans, who want a more ruthlessly efficient war machine and a more centralized, popularly-supported class dictatorship at home. By reviving Watergate, the liberals are sending Bush a warning: shape up or we’ll ship you out. The stakes for the rulers are high enough for this internal spat to possibly become violent.

Our job, as always, is to use a communist analysis of events as a weapon to better wage the class struggle against all of them.

(For more information about the Watergate scandal see PLP pamphlet http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/Watergate.pdf

U.S. and Mexico Bosses Profit From Exploiting Immigrants

Since the migration of Mexican workers is vital to U.S. ruling-class interests, it has traditionally encouraged that migration. In the 1880’s, U.S. railroad barons and agribusiness sent recruiters to Mexico to supply cheap labor for their expanding industries. During World Wars I and II, when millions were drafted into the armed forces, the U.S. government itself began the contracting of Mexican workers to fill the labor shortage. This was especially true in the infamous 1942 "bracero" program, designed to compensate for labor scarcity created by the forced internment of the entire Japanese-American population, which had been employed mainly in agriculture.

Today, Mexican workers play perhaps an even more vital role in the U.S. bosses’ economy, used by the hundreds of thousands in basic industries and services, especially manufacturing jobs crucial to the survival of these industries and their war production capacity.

However, there’s an important but seldom-mentioned aspect of this massive migration of Mexican workers to the U.S.: it’s an irreplaceable escape valve for Mexico’s "social pressure-cooker" that could otherwise explode in civil war. This would create great instability, not only along the more than 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border but also in the rest of the Americas. Worse yet, the bosses fear a Mexican working class eventually developing a mass communist party capable of leading it to state power and the building of communism. U.S. bosses remember the Mexican Revolution which, despite all its shortcomings, showed the power, courage and determination of Mexico’s working class once put into motion.

The objective conditions that spawned the Mexican Revolution are unchanged. If anything, they’re worse. Mexico’s bosses and the U.S., European and Japanese imperialist vultures have ground the country’s working class into dire poverty, while extracting an enormous amount of surplus value from its labor. Some 14 million workers in Mexico produce immense wealth — worth $634 billion a year.

Yet, one-half of the 106-million population lives in extreme poverty. Over five million "survive" on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, of the 43 million in the country’s workforce, over 26 million are in the "informal economy," receiving no wages nor social benefits. Another two million are unemployed. Given the militant history of Mexico’s workers, this makes for a very explosive situation, especially since Mexico has one of the world’s greatest unequal distributions of wealth. It boasts 11 billionaires — more than Saudi Arabia, Taiwan or Switzerland — and 85,000 millionaires

Given such conditions and the fact that PLP has not yet developed into a mass revolutionary communist party that could lead the Mexican workers to fight for state power, immigrating to the U.S. becomes an "alternative" for some workers and a blessing for U.S. and Mexican rulers in several ways. Each year over 400,000 Mexican workers make it across the border. In the last two decades, over 25% of Mexico’s active work force has moved to the U.S.

This immigration not only helps diffuse the unemployment situation in Mexico but is a big boost to its economy and social stability. Mexican immigrants working in the U.S. support more than one of five families in Mexico. Last year these workers sent over $17 billion to their dependents, a sum exceeding all the direct foreign investment Mexico received last year and more than its revenues in any other industry, except for oil.

These remittances also play an important role in stabilizing the whole U.S.-led international monetary system. Because of these remittances, the government cuts back on subsidies to workers and uses that money to pay off about 70% of Mexico’s foreign debt to U.S. bankers. Without it, Mexico’s bosses would most likely default on their $161 billion debt (181% higher than in the early 1980’s when they were forced to declare a moratorium on payments). Thus, despite the U.S. bosses’ public vitriolic racist ranting against undocumented Mexican workers, they greatly depend on these and other immigrant workers to help stabilize their imperialist system.

Mexico’s President Fox’s racist remark about Mexican workers "taking jobs even black workers won’t take" is another sign that bosses on both sides of the border are using the racist divide-and-conquer strategy. The labor of both Mexican and black workers is crucial to the imperialists’ super-profits. An attack on both is an attack on all workers.

As Marx wrote, capitalism creates its own grave-diggers. Our task is to organize these workers, especially at the point of production, pointing to the solution: communist revolution.

a name="IAM Hacks Rebuff Boeing Workers’ Solidarity Call">">"AM Hacks Rebuff Boeing Workers’ Solidarity Call

WICHITA, KANSAS, June 5 — Boeing workers turned thumbs-down on the new Onex contract even though 800 workers fired the day before couldn’t vote. Subsequently talks between Onex and the engineers and technical staff in SPEEA, the second largest union, broke down. Boeing and Onex will continue with the sale, imposing the rejected contracts on all workers, while firings exceeded 1,000 last weekend.

One Wichita IAM member wrote on an activist blog, "If…Onex implements the contract anyway, then [organize] a wildcat strike. What’s the worst that could happen? …The courts could seize the IAM’s assets. Would that mean that there wouldn’t be money available to pay the union representatives? It would almost be worth it."

More than two dozen Seattle-area Boeing workers sent an emergency letter to the IAM calling for "public demonstrations of solidarity" answering this attack as well as the default of United’s pensions and the firing of 472 IAM Alaska Airline baggage handlers to be replaced by an outside contractor. Although the union leadership didn’t print the letter, they did run a front-page article entitled "Turbulent Times for American Workers," saying that: "In the past month, workers have taken center stage at United, Boeing Wichita and Alaska." They didn’t propose any actions reflecting the strength of a united international working class. In fact, they did their best to separate these attacks from our up-coming contract in the Puget Sound. "It does not change our…strategy," they said. Their "strategy" has already destroyed workers’ lives and will continue to do so.

That’s a far cry from our letter stating that "solidarity now [is] crucial to our contract negotiations this fall." We must pay more attention to expanding our networks of CHALLENGE readers and sellers to carry on the fight for the hearts and minds of industrial workers. International class consciousness must become second nature to us. Then we’ll understand our potential power, paving the way for working-class revolution.

a name="PLP’ers Pose Alternative to UFT Misleaders At ‘Rally’"></a>"LP’ers Pose Alternative to UFT Misleaders At ‘Rally’

NEW YORK, June 2 — While the misleaders of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) begged Democratic Party politicians to help them get a new contract that’s already two years late, a disciplined group of members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party presented a real alternative to teachers and other school workers at a union rally at Madison Square Garden today. We had a marked effect in distributing 2,000 leaflets and several hundred CHALLENGES inside and outside the hall. We paraded a banner inside reading, "Capitalism Leaves Every Child Behind! Student, Parents, Teachers, Shut The City Down!" Some comrades, including a teacher who joined PLP on May Day, leafleted inside.

The response, especially in opposing a war contract, was tremendous. Many teachers were furious at the farce inside, a combination pep rally for the leadership, and a politicians’ parade.

The UFT, the AFT local representing education workers here, held the rally on the second anniversary of its failure to win a contract from the city. The UFT has 100,000 members. The Garden holds 22,000 people. So, from the very beginning it was clear that 80% of the membership could never get into the rally. And, at that, the hall was half empty.

Year after year the union leadership sells us out because the politicians, whether liberal or conservative, need to take money from the schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other vital services to fund their imperialist wars — first attacking black, Latin and Asian workers, and then the entire working class. With 80% of the student body being black and Latin, the racist rulers are very ready to deny students adequate textbooks and force them to sit on window sills in overcrowded classrooms, while multi-billionaire Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki offer the billionaire owner of the Jets $600 million of public money to build a new football stadium.

Our leaflet called for unity with workers, whether in the public or private sector, to fight the attacks on our class, like the one on the United Airlines workers’ pension. (See CHALLENGE, 6/8)

Masses Rock Bolivia’s RulersBolivia’s masses are again rebelling against their government. In this country of 8 million, 500,000 teachers, miners, peasants, students and others held an open town hall in the center of the capital city, La Paz, totally paralyzing it. The Catholic Church was asked to mediate and President Mesa said he was resigning. But the protestors want more than just another politician to replace Mesa. Many are demanding formation of a worker-peasant government. They’ve continued protesting, with miners throwing sticks of dynamites while being attacked by the cops.

In the last four weeks, daily mass protests have shaken this country. Mesa replaced President Lozada (a multi-millionaire friend of Bush) in October 2003, following another mass rebellion resulting in dozens being killed by the Army and the cops. Then in early 2004, another mass rebellion forced Mesa to cancel a deal with a French company to privatize Bolivia’s water.

The cause of the current rebellion is gas and oil. In mid-May, the Bolivian Parliament approved a "Hyrocarbon Law" favoring BP, Shell, Petrobras, Enron, Total and other international energy giants. Bolivia has Latin America’s second largest gas deposits. Most of the demonstrators are demanding expropriation and nationalization of the gas industry, instead of giving them to the billion-dollar corporations.

These protests have sharpened all the contradictions. There are rumors of a possible Army coup, but the generals don’t trust the soldiers (many of them Aymaras, like most of the protestors). Meanwhile, the head of the Labor Federation is demanding a "progressive" military-civilian government, which would result in workers being massacred.

Evo Morales, head of the Movement Towards Socialism, central to cooling down the 2003 rebellion and bringing Mesa to power, is trying to use the protests to get himself elected President in the next elections. But many of the demonstrators already see him as an opportunist sellout.

The rulers of the Santa Cruz region, containing many of the gas deposits, are forming a separatist movement to try to gain sole control of the gas bonanza. The Civic Movement for Santa Cruz, a fascist outfit, has been using goons to attack demonstrations by teachers, miners and peasants (most of them indigenous people) in the city of Santa Cruz. Its leader is Germán Antelo (a known Nazi) who has said a referendum will be held on August 12 to determine the autonomy of the region.

The masses are obviously on the move here, and desire a revolutionary change. But as long as there’s no revolutionary communist leadership capable of channeling the mass struggle into a fight to eliminate all local and multi-national capitalists, the impoverished workers and peasants of Bolivia (the continent’s second poorest country) will continue to be super-exploited and murdered by one bourgeois faction or another. Eventually, the different factions might even unite to impose a fascist bloodbath to crush the protests.

The call for nationalization of the gas industry and even for a worker-peasant government based on a mass "town hall" outlook was tried in the 1970’s. It was brutally crushed when military dictator Banzer came to power, aided by the CIA’s international counter-insurgency plot called Plan Condor. So, indeed, the alternative to fascist barbarism is to build a mass revolutionary communist movement to fight for real workers’ power.

LA Garment Workers Back Anti-Racist Fight Against MinuteMen

LOS ANGELES — "Look, here’s $20. Next week I’ll give more," said a garment worker when she heard about supporting the anti-racists arrested while protesting the racist Minutemen May 25 rally in Orange Grove. (see page 1) Others who gave donations said, "Next time we’ll all go [to the protest]." Other workers, students and teachers reacted similarly.

The bosses and their lackeys like the Minutemen, "Save Our State," "VCT" and others are intensifying their attacks on immigrants as a smokescreen behind which to attack all workers. And the liberals are attacking too. An example is the Real ID (a plan for a national ID card) which would apply to everyone, immigrants and citizens, and help the bosses tighten fascist control of all workers and youth.

Many can see more clearly that the cuts in public services, the war for oil in the Middle East, and growing racism are all part of capitalism’s need to attack the working class. That’s why we need to fight for communism.

a name="PLP May Day Marchers: All Mexico’s Bosses Are Rotten">">"LP May Day Marchers: All Mexico’s Bosses Are Rotten

MEXICO CITY — PLP members brought our communist politics to the thousands of workers at the union hacks’ May Day march in the Zócalo plaza here. We distributed 1,500 leaflets and 1,000 copies of DESAFIO-CHALLENGE.

Some industrial workers attended the official rally forced by the CTM (official trade union federation). Others participated in a march organized by those who call themselves "the progressives" — the National Workers’ Union and other nationalist groupings.

Several days before May Day, the liberal bosses manipulated thousands of oppressed workers into supporting Mexico City’s Mayor Lopez Obrador, who had lost his privileges in Mexico’s Congress. This is part of the continuing fight for power among the bosses, mainly for control of the oil riches.

Powerful capitalists like Carlos Slim and Isaac Saba have invested millions backing the Mexico City government, while other capitalists led by the Mexican Bosses’ Confederation hate Lopez Obrador’s policy of state capitalism.

Some workers have the dangerous illusion that Lopez Obrador’s government can solve their problems. The bosses’ ideological and political control over the working class won’t disappear easily but only through patient, persistent daily work by communists working with their fellow workers.

The working class can’t win anything by supporting any sector of the ruling class, whether it’s pro-state capitalism or neoliberal. The rulers behind Lopez Obrador intend to free capitalism from the most obvious neo-liberals but they’re still neo-liberals, like Brazil’s Lula da Silva or Venezuela’s Chavez.(See Red Eye, p. 7)

The working class and the rest of the exploited population need to destroy all forms of capitalism, fighting for and building a worker-run society. That was our message on May Day, which was well-received.

a name="Capitalism ‘Creates Jobs’ Through Lies"></">Ca"italism ‘Creates Jobs’ Through Lies

According to business columnist John Crudele (NY Post, 6/7), "It is time for the employment charade to end. The Labor Department padded its May employment figure with an extraordinary 207,000 positions that probably don’t exist….

"These mystery jobs are calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] in something called the Current Employment Statistics Net Birth/Death Model….

"This calculation for the birth and death of companies [is] wholly speculative on the part of the Labor Department….

"The total May growth of just 78,000 jobs means that the true number of positions available probably shrunk by about 129,000, thanks in large part to layoffs, mergers and weakening business conditions….

"The worst part of this game is that Washington is making dangerous assumptions that disguise…what is really going on with the economy….

"Business conditions today are easily worse than they were in 2004. And all of the guesstimates for this year have topped 2004 levels….

"The only conclusion can be that the real economy — outside the government’s guesstimates for companies it hopes and prays are being created — is beginning to sour."

As CHALLENGE has consistently reported, government unemployment statistics are as phony as a three dollar bill. The real jobless figures are at least double (and triple for black and Latin workers who bear the brunt of the rulers’ racism) over those issued by the BLS.

The rosy picture usually drawn by the Bush administration (and never challenged by the Democrats) covers up the suffering of the millions of unemployed who remain non-existent to the bosses, in a society that cannot exist without this "army of unemployed." Only elimination of the profit system can do away with unemployment. Under communism, everyone will work and will reap the benefits for the good of our entire class.

a name="PL’ers Bring Red Ideas Into CUNY Anti-War Actions">">"L’ers Bring Red Ideas Into CUNY Anti-War Actions

NEW YORK CITY, May 31 — Recently, a series of anti-war events shook the City University of New York (CUNY). PLP members at CUNY played a key role organizing these events and showed how to spread revolutionary ideas within reform organizations.

One activity involved an out-door campus poetry slam and anti-war speak-out attended by 40-50 people, organized by a newly-formed group of student activists. An invited poet and two anti-war veterans advocated fighting imperialism and resisting the draft. Students shared thoughts and poetry about racism, sexism, police brutality and political apathy. Some talked about overthrowing capitalism.

A militant campus rally — with anti-imperialist, anti-racist and class-conscious chants — ended up marching to a nearby military recruiting station located in a dense urban shopping center. Students and faculty picketed and chanted there while distributing PLP literature to the mostly Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic workers on their way home from work.

Until recently our campus had no organized student anti-war group. To develop students’ political consciousness, a permanent organization — led mainly by students — had to be built.

CUNY students are facing massive tuition hikes and are preyed upon by military recruiters promising money for tuition. Meanwhile, faculty work without contracts under the fascist Taylor Law that bars city employees from legally striking. To link funding for imperialism and the attack on working-class students and faculty, Party members active on campus emphasized and practiced a class-conscious worker-student-soldier alliance within the generally reformist "books-not-bombs" line. This produced a multi-racial core of students and some faculty, further consolidated by our organizing around the "Educators to Stop the War Conference."

We struggled to intensify student militancy, introducing communist ideas in conversations and at organizational meetings, raising the deadly role of the liberal Democrats, the emergence of fascism, and the need to smash racism and capitalism in order to end all wars. This won some to militantly fight campus military recruiters, while enraging many about the "poverty draft" that forces so many black, Latin, and white working-class youth to fight and die in the bosses’ profit wars "in exchange for" college tuition. This struggle led to the anti-war poetry slam and speak-out, the militant campus rally and the march to an off-campus recruitment station.

Maintaining a strong worker-student alliance, we convinced the group to ally with the anti-war wing of the local faculty union, who enthusiastically supported the students and provided signs for the event that read "Money for Education Not for War." With full student participation, we prepared militant, class-conscious chants for the rally, emphasizing international workers’ and soldiers’ unity, and the need to fight back, including: "Workers of the World are Under Attack; Cops out of the Hood, Troops out of Iraq!" and "Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, Resist the Imperialist War Machine!"

At the poetry slam, students welcomed the anti-war poet and soldier speakers. Many spoke at the open mic and eagerly joined the prepared chants during the campus rally. This militant spirit sparked student demands to march on the recruiter station, displaying a fiery worker-student-soldier solidarity as teachers and students picketed and chanted, encouraging soldiers to rebel.

Now, student morale is very high. The group promises to grow substantially over the next semester. Evidence of our success can be found in the group’s recently-published mission statement, which expresses the need to fight racism, sexism, exploitation and imperialism and to build principled alliances with other student groups, faculty and soldiers.

With some students already reading CHALLENGE and attending study groups, we hope that the latter as well as PLP’s summer activities will have shown the clear difference between reform and revolutionary political work. This will help all of us become more committed revolutionary communist leaders and will prepare us for another semester of fighting imperialist war recruiters and campus fascism.

Red Army Offensive Saved U.S.-U.K.

(Part III, series on 60th anniversary of end of World War 2.)

The "No" vote in France and the Netherlands on the European Union Constitution is impelling the big European bosses to look for "Plan B" to create a powerful European imperialist bloc — led by Germany and France — to compete with their U.S. imperialist rivals. The last time Europe was "united" was under German imperialism’s Third Reich.

The Nazi army brought the continent under its control, its blitzkrieg easily defeating the armies of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, etc. Britain’s forces were driven into the sea at Dunkirk.

On June 22, 1941, when the Nazis’ Operation Barbarrosa sent a four-million-strong army — with all of Europe’s industries and manpower at their disposal — to "crush Bolshevik Russia, " Western pundits predicted it would be like "a hot knife cutting through butter."

Initially the Nazis did advance, destroying everything in their path. Then, in August 1942 Winston Churchill went to Moscow alarmed over the German offensive against Stalingrad. This could have led to Nazi control of the oil in the Caucasus, but Churchill still said the U.S.-UK forces were not ready to open a second front in the West. Stalin accused the Western Allies of not wanting to fight and lose lives — the Red Army was losing over 6,000 soldiers a day. But he realized the Red Army couldn’t wait for the Second Front and had to carry on the bulk of the fight. (http://www.redvoltaire.net/article5558.html).

Stalin told Churchill, "We’ll stop them in the mountains." Few believed him. On Nov. 7, 1942, celebrating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution inside a Moscow Metro station since the Nazi airforce controlled the skies, Stalin said, "Soon we’ll be celebrating in the streets." Eleven days later came the incredible news: the Soviets had launched a massive offensive that was to completely surround the Nazi army in Stalingrad later that month. Hitler retreated from plans to capture the Caucuses’ oil fields and sent help to his forces in Stalingrad, but it was too late. In February 1943, Marshall Von Paulus surrendered the entire Nazi 6th army. It was the turning point of World War II.

Meanwhile, Churchill and Roosevelt did everything possible to delay opening a second front in Western Europe, which could speed the collapse of the Nazi regime. Many said they wanted to see the Soviets and the Nazis bleed each other to death and then come in for the kill. But when it was obvious the Red Army would defeat the Nazis single-handedly, Operation Neptune-Overlord — "D-Day" — began on June 6, 1944 in Normandy, France. While the U.S. and Britain faced a much weaker Nazi military in Western Europe, because the bulk of Hitler’s forces were fighting — and losing — in the East, the invading U.S-UK forces were almost defeated twice by the Nazis. First they encountered such heavy resistance when trying to take Cannes, Churchill had to ask for Stalin’s help, to intensify the offensive in Eastern Europe. Then in the Ardennes area — "The Battle of the Bulge" — U.S. forces were surrounded by the Nazi’s Panzers (tanks). It turned out that the Red Army helped the Western Allies more than the Second Front helped the Soviets.

Despite all the lies and slanders against the Red Army, the course of World War II would have been far different without the Soviet Union and its leadership.

a name="Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: ‘Dark Side’ or Red Side?"></">St"r Wars: Revenge of the Sith: ‘Dark Side’ or Red Side?

"Star Wars, Revenge Of The Sith", while telling the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall and the subsequent birth of Darth Vader, is the most overtly political of all the Star Wars movies. The concept of the fall of light into darkness is as old as writing. The fall of the Biblical Lucifer, the most beautiful of all the angels, into Satan, the lord of evil, and of Macbeth, the hero, into Macbeth the evil usurper and murderer, are two examples of this concept.

Communists understand that nothing is spontaneous. The seeds of destruction, the dark side, were already in these "heroes" before they "fell" into evil. Greed, selfishness, and the lust for unbridled power were the seeds that grew into the virus that ate the very soul of Anakin Skywalker. He wanted to be the best, most powerful Jedi knight.

At first, the Jedi support the Democratic government, but then realize the Democracy has been usurped by a Sith Lord. The Sith represent the "Dark Side" of the force. The Sith are those who embrace the path of power and destruction in the hopes of being the supreme ruler in the galaxy, and the Jedi order has been their bitter enemy for thousands of years.

The Jedi order has chosen sides in a war in which both sides are manipulated by a Sith Lord. (How many times has the communist movement chosen sides with a lesser-evil boss in a war, only to be betrayed by the bourgeoisie when it no longer needs our help?)

Before the Sith betray and massacre the Jedi, they realize they must take direct control of the Senate. They conclude that you cannot passively guide society to a better social development (as many phony leftists and liberals think), but that the best solution is to revolt for direct acquisition of the state and means of production. If the Jedi order had taken direct control of the Senate and started steering the galaxy towards a selfless society based on Jedi principles, how long would it have been before the liberal separatists, and future Rebel Alliance, attacked and murdered them?

Jedi idealism was rooted in the belief that they could steer and guide society from their holy temple. The Jedi’s absolute belief in their own indestructibility led to their own grave. They didn’t actively seek to transform all of society, but only sought out the special few who were deserving of the Jedi training. This concept, that only a few "select special people" can ever hope to control society, is also a rotten form of bourgeois idealism that leads to selfishness and an eventual betrayal of a revolutionary movement.

The Jedi also say that fear, anger and attachment lead to the Dark Side. Communists know that unfocused anger, attachment to greed, selfishness and fear are ruling-class tools. Revolutionary anger and a selfless desire to serve the working class are necessary for a Communist to actively drive society to Communist Revolution. The Jedi never actively serve anybody but the ruling class. They support the liberal democratic rulers ("I am for the Republic and democracy" as Obi-Wan told Anakin as they fought each other) and act as police to protect what they perceive as "order," but this order in the galaxy is based on crime lords and slavery (Anakin was actually once a slave, and his mother was sold into marriage on the planet Tatooine).

All that Anakin lived for was turning to ash when he believed that he couldn’t control everything around him, like the death of his mother or the death of his wife Padme. As he embraced the greed and selfishness inside of him, quantity moved to quality within him. The positive was negated, and he became evil. He rationalized his betrayals, his murders and his fall. Anakin’s cries of anguish and loss were music to The Emperor’s ears. The bosses absolutely love to buy the souls of revolutionaries, so we must guard against the "dark side," capitalist selfish ideology, the bosses’ most dangerous weapon.

a name="The Welfare Poets Sing Songs of Workers’ Struggles">">"he Welfare Poets Sing Songs of Workers’ Struggles

It’s difficult to find pro-working class music. But The Welfare Poets, a New York-based band, has 15 years experience making proletarian music. In solidarity with working people’s struggles, one member performed at our May Day. One of the group’s sharpest lyrics from their song "Resistance" says:

Stop wasting your energies on sectarian schisms/ we have the same enemy, it’s capitalism/ a system which exploits workers work, wealth, worth

The song is from their latest album "Rhymes for Treason" which they premiered at an album release party in lower Manhattan, featuring performances by Immortal Technique and Dead Prez. One of The Welfare Poets called it the best anti-capitalist event on Wall Street in a long time.

Their songs are a mix of hip hop influenced by jazz and blues, bomba, plena, guanguanco, and Cuban cha, cha, cha. The lead vocals are mainly poetry but others include reggae and jazz styles. All their music is original and many songs will have you dancing and singing along. Their music is multi-lingual with lyrics in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.

Politically the group’s songs feature workers’ struggles throughout the Caribbean, U.S., Iraq, and around the world. One song attacks the media’s role in serving the bosses and winning workers to the bosses’ ideas, called. "Rhymes for Reason," it criticizes apolitical hip hop and calls on emcees to speak the truth and educate instead of just performing fantasies, lulling audiences and "entertaining." "Sak Pasé (What’s up/Burning)," led by a wailing trumpet solo, tells about the CIA’s role in ousting Haitian president Aristide. Other songs rhyme against police brutality and U.S. presence in Puerto Rico and Vieques.

An idea framing many songs in the album is that workers are largely won to the bosses’ ideas and capitalists are momentarily powerful. The track "Original Hip Hop" answers the situation this way:

Have intensive sessions where we’re pensive/ cover extensive lessons/come to the conclusion that even with their expensive weapons/ the only solution to improve our situation is revolution

While The Welfare Poets are decidedly on the workers’ side, they still cling to some capitalist ideas. At their album release party, in a nationalist vein not based on a class analysis, they cried "Vive Cuba!" and called "Free Puerto Rico, Free Vieques, Free Haiti." Most of their songs promote some form of "resistance" but they’re removed from an actual revolutionary movement to organize workers to overthrow capitalism and establish workers’ power. Some songs imply that reforms lead to revolution. In these ways the politics are not aligned with PLP’s but their music is great to listen to and to spark conversations. One weakness that the Welfare poets exhibit is not enough emphasis on fighting sexism. The issue is barely mentioned on any of the tracks. This is an issue that PLP struggles with, based on a class analysis of its roots in capitalism.

Like many of us in and around PLP, the band is fighting to sharpen its politics and despite their weaknesses, their music still tries to produce working-class culture. We can learn a lot from them in our efforts to produce culture based on revolutionary communism.

Information on The Welfare Poets can be found at www.welfarepoets.com

UNDER COMMUNISM:

How Would Schooling Be Better?

(This column continues a new CHALLENGE series on how life under communism would differ from life under capitalism; how it will represent the interests of the international working class and our allies. We invite all readers to contribute both questions and answers to this column for discussion, relying on either history, examples from our own lives, or hope and imagination.)

In capitalist schools the everyday lack of respect of teachers and administrators for students is so pervasive that even parents can fail to recognize it. I once accompanied a friend R. — a PLP member — to pick up his son at junior high after school. When R. asked a teacher at the school entrance for the location of a certain room, the teacher was curt and treated R. as though he were trespassing without a hall pass.

On the way out, the teacher spoke to R.’s son in accusatory tones, even in the presence of his father. R. said nothing. I later commented on the teacher’s rudeness, and said he had no business talking that way to either a student or a parent. R. said he didn’t think the teacher had been that rude. This type of disrespect by school personnel is so much a part of our environment that even a communist failed to notice it.

Rudeness is not as great an assault as the racism that especially affects the black, Latin and Asian students, cops in the schools, metal detectors, regarding all kids as guilty of something, falling ceilings, non-functional toilets, bad food, lack of heat or air conditioning, etc. However, this horrible disrespect is both a result and a cause of the more oppressive and dangerous aspects.

Why are schools this way, and how can the education of children be organized under communism to change this situation? The working class will have to forge many aspects of this in practice, after the capitalists have been forcibly thrown from power. For example, will classes even be organized with a number of students and one teacher who lectures? Will children spend 7 to 8 hours, 5 days a week, inside one building? These details remain to be worked out over time, using a significant amount of experimentation with a variety of forms of organization. But there are some basic things we can figure out now.

The purpose of education under communism will not have to deal with a small class of rich and powerful racist exploiters using students as future sources of profits (which is also the basis for racism). Rather, the purpose will be to enrich the lives of each individual student so that they, in turn, can enrich the lives of everyone around them — the entire working class. When students are not merely a means to someone else’s end (profit-makers), but part of the end itself, then respect for them will follow. And as any teacher knows who already respects her or his students, respect by students for such teachers also follows. Many (hopefully all) teachers who are PLP members and others already show that kind of respect for their students and the parents of students. They are often, if not always, regarded as among the best teachers in the school.

Teachers and students can then be friends, sharing a common goal. No rudeness from a teacher to a student will be tolerated. Without fear of punishment, students will feel free to criticize a teacher who’s rude to a fellow student (perhaps because of a stressful day). The teachers will be there to serve the needs of the students, and the needs of the working class as a whole through the students. We’ll worry later about class sizes and hours.

LETTERS

Rock & Roll Against Minutemen

While checking out some stuff from the company tool room, I mentioned that the Minutemen had been spreading hate down in Orange County a couple of nights before. Several hundred people demonstrated against these racists. "Yeah," said a worker named Salvador. "I read about it in the paper. They’re scum."

I told him I’d heard the Minutemen and another anti-immigrant group were planning a "patriotic" rally on June 25 in Baldwin Park. "They were already there three weeks ago, I noted. "They’re trying to go on a roll."

"Hey! I got people in that town going back to my grandfather," said Salvador. "The old man laid half the streets in that town."

"Well, we’re going to be out there against them again," I said. "The governor loves them because they blame Latino immigrants instead of the bosses for bankrupting California: the old divide-and-conquer, you know."

"Tell me what the plan is and I’ll get half the guys in this shop to go out there with me," Salvador said as we walked back to his station.

I’m taking his anti-racist sentiments seriously. He’s friends with a lot of our co-workers. The next day I gave him a CHALLENGE with the article about the protest against these creeps. At our informal weekly shop meeting, I announced that next week Salvador would talk to us about Baldwin Park and the 25th of June. I think we might be getting a little anti-racist rock and roll ourselves.

SoCal Red

Robeson, Communists Inspired Belafonte

Recently Harry Belafonte spoke about his social activism at Howard University in Washington, D.C. while here to accept the Paul Robeson "Here I Stand" award from Paul Robeson, Jr. I went to the event with a good friend, her daughter, and her daughter’s friend. Only a few hundred people attended this explicitly political event. Outside, a worker from SEIU Local 82 leafleted about their fight for a living wage on campus.

Belafonte was inspiring. It was refreshing to hear him talk openly and lovingly of his friendship with African Americans Paul Robeson and Ben Davis, members of the Communist Party, USA. Belafonte noted his working-class background. His mother first raised her children’s political consciousness through exposure to Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist who spoke on Harlem street corners. Belafonte then touched on his learning disabilities, his dropping out of school and his stint in the military.

While working as a janitor’s assistant, he received a tip in the form of tickets to the Negro Theatre in NYC. This changed his life. There he met Paul Robeson and communist activists who were supporting arts initiatives by African Americans. With Robeson as his mentor, Belafonte participated in many of the same anti-racist, international struggles as Robeson.

The speech, with its pro-communist aspects, sparked a vigorous discussion next week at lunch. My friend M. from work said Martin Luther King, Jr. originally had communists in his circle of advisors, but kicked them out because he feared black workers wouldn’t join the civil rights movement alongside communists. I explained how communists had always been involved in the civil rights struggle, as part of their commitment to smashing racism. Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks had taken courses at a communist-led organizing school in Tennessee.

M. then said blacks in Alabama didn’t like communism, but I told her that black sharecroppers and steelworkers in Alabama had been very supportive of the Communist Party (see "Hammer and Hoe," by Robin Kelley). I also explained how the International Labor Defense (ILD) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) — both organized by the Communist Party — preceded King’s civil rights movement and organized a mass movement to help free the framed Scottsboro boys, taking the struggle outside narrow legal channels. It was far more effective in that effort than the NAACP. The ILD and CRC had vastly different political outlooks than the NAACP. M. agreed, saying no one listens to the NAACP anymore because it just sucks up to politicians and tries to get ahead within the capitalist system — quite a contrast with the ILD and CRC outlook, that workers could be won to direct action, multi-racial unity and militancy!

M. is still unsure of her old Alabama friends’ openness to communism, but now has a lot more to think about, knowing a bit more history — and future possibilities with the PLP — inspired by Belafonte’s impressive talk.

D.C. Comrade

CHALLENGE comments: The old Communist Party did play a major role in fighting racism, for multi-racial unity and equality for black workers in the U.S. The Scottsboro Boys struggle was just one of many they led. But it should also be noted that because the CP abandoned the fight for communist revolution, and in fact even dissolved itself in 1944, the party was wiped out in the South, especially among black workers. Even though it reconstituted itself, it advocated the "peaceful road to Socialism," and supported the liberal Democrats as the way to "push the country to the left," rather than taking direct action against the entire ruling class to smash racism and other capitalist evils.

Religion Helps Mask Immorality

A CHALLENGE article (6/8) on "Politics, Morality and Murder" correctly pointed out that morality does not come from religion, but rather from politics. My own experience bears that out.

A co-worker (in a health care field) asked me if I believed in god. When I said I didn’t, she asked, "Then what is the source of your spiritual health and morality?" I replied, "My relationships with people." She shook her head and shrugged, as if to say I was doomed.

Turns out that, with all her "spiritual health and morality," she was constantly knifing me in the back. We were supposed to be sharing the work equally, but others told me I was doing three times what she did. Whenever she had a complaint about me, she would tell our supervisor, saying nothing to me. In contrast, whenever I had a complaint about her, I spoke to her directly.

When I ran for department chief to help run it better for the benefit of the patients and doctors, rather than telling me whether or not she’d vote for me, she convinced another worker favoring me to vote against me. Later she was appointed service chief. After a few years she instigated my firing.

Her idea of "morality and spiritual health" is my idea of immorality and spiritual infirmity. Religion helps to mask immorality and make it more acceptable. When politicians flaunt it, like George W. Bushit, run for cover.

Cactus Red

Multiculturism: Help or Hinder Anti-Racist Unity?

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, racial fights erupted at high schools in South LA and Santa Monica. One National Public Radio station program called "Which Way LA?" featured an African American spokesperson from Community Access, and a Latino from "Surf’s Up." Interestingly, both agreed multiculturalism bred "racial pride". Emphasizing differences over common characteristics among students of different "races" and nationalities caused the student fights.

For many years, PLP and the International Committee Against Racism demonstrated that multiculturalism was divisive, emphasizing cultural differences. The class concept of multiracial unity concentrates on the similarities between groups, bringing them together despite the bosses’ efforts to divide us by "race." Dialectically, we believe workers are more alike than different. This should be reflected in everything we do.

When my children and those of my friend were in middle school, we helped students, teachers and parents organize an International Dinner. Working together, students in World History or Social Studies made maps of the countries. Food tables were set up by continent. We encouraged student participation in all the different songs and dances represented there: rap, native dances from Latin America, Africa or Asia. We had a map in the lobby where people put pins showing which country they or their ancestors came from. Many students and their families participated. It was the best program all year, and emphasized the commonality of working-class people while appreciating minor differences in food and culture.

In the recent racial fights in LA and Santa Monica schools, the system’s response was to add more security. But several parents of different cultures told the news media that teaching our children not to be racist was the priority, not heavier security. Acting on that consciousness could move us towards firmer class unity.

D.C. Red

Truth Emerging About U.S. Torture

When a usually reliable senior Pentagon official and former detainees say some hoodlum in uniform flushed the Koran down a toilet to "rattle" Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay prison, why shouldn’t we believe it? No report in the bosses’ media has taken the prisoners who experienced these abuses seriously. Similar reports of a Koran being desecrated are a year old yet nobody took notice until demonstrators in Afghanistan took to the streets.

From a working-class perspective, the prisoners are far more credible witnesses than any Pentagon official. They were snatched from their homelands and forced to endure psychological and physical torture. Even Pentagon officials are admitting abuse at Guantanamo, but Amnesty International made it clear this has been occurring all along.

Does anyone (communist or not) reading this have a hard time believing that the holier-than-thou USA would treat prisoners this way? Just last year we learned of terrible tortures at the Abu Ghraib prison. Who are they trying to fool? These capitalists have slaughtered more than 100,000 Iraqis in this dirty war! The bosses’ own "respected medical journals" have acknowledged this.

The written word has shown its power and the whole world’s workers have seen what happens when truth emerges. The fact that a small report in a magazine could cause spontaneous riots across the globe is astounding. Those exploited masses in Afghanistan are mad as hell and are protesting conditions being imposed on them by a bunch of racist gangsters as well as standing in solidarity against anti-Arab bigotry at Guantanamo Bay. The truth, like the working class, has no borders.

Red truth teller

New Column is Inspiring

I really like your new column "Life Under Communism." When we have concrete examples, it’s really helpful and inspiring. Keep up the good work.

Bay Area reader

Our Vision of the Future

Workers need a vision of the future! Almost every Sunday morning I bring CHALLENGE and PLP’s vision to my friends in San Francisco. After pizza and coffee with this one family, we attend his church where more discussions ensue with his "brothers and sisters."

These idealistic church members’ vision is a future of heaven and salvation based on faith in Jesus, or a burning eternity in hell. Our communist outlook is modeled on materialist/scientific observations which inspire us to struggle against capitalism — racism, fascism, nationalism and war — in order to establish a sharing, communist workers’ society.

Fifteen years ago my wife and I traveled to the Soviet Union and China. Although they were moving towards capitalism, we got a glimpse of what a world based on communist sharing could be. Outside Shanghai, China, we visited a collective farm where 60,000 workers lived, with schools, hospitals and machinery which met all their needs. Sharing was the order of the day!

Yes, unfortunately, today these societies have reverted back to capitalism, but we saw a glimmer of what a workers’ society could be like.

Another example: one comrade who lived in Mexico said his village, was virtually a money-less society, where the exchange of services and sharing was front and center. In our own lives, we’ve a great need to learn and practice collectivity. Yes, we’ve had glimpses of what a hopeful and worthwhile future can be.

West Coast comrade

French Bosses Scheme After the Non-Vote

It’s necessary to separate the reasons why the French people voted against the proposed European Union Constitution from the way the bosses intend to use this "no" vote. The main section of the French bosses wanted a "yes" vote but they were unable to control the "no" vote. The "parties of government" — the "respectable" bourgeois parties, the UMP and the Socialist Party — advocated a "yes" vote.

Their media campaign was somewhat similar to the U.S. build-up for the war on Iraq (as outlined in "Fahrenheit 9/11"). The "no" vote was a temporary setback for the bosses. Unable to control the vote, they’re trying to control the consequences.

Everyone is trying to put their own spin on "what the vote means." In this case, it’s possible for the French bosses to use the "no" vote as an argument for all kinds of things [such as strengthening a German/French-led European bloc to oppose the U.S. and other imperialist rivals]. Similarly, they’re using the "no" vote to say "people want radical change" and then they pursue radical right-wing change.

President Jacques Chirac emerged from the "yes" campaign way down in public opinion polls, especially among the members of his own UMP party. This means the UMP’s moderate forces have been weakened and the reactionary forces, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, have been strengthened. The French government will probably be much more reactionary in domestic politics.

Everything bad that’s happening is being blamed on the "no" vote. Apparently the bosses want to "teach the voters a lesson": if you don’t vote our way, awful things happen — for example, the weakening of the euro against the dollar. I don’t really know the foreign policy position of the new Prime Minister Sarkozy & Co., or if there’s any difference between their position and Chirac’s.

A Friend in France

CHALLENGE Comment: Thanks for the letter. Future articles will explore "Plan B," how the French and German imperialists must accelerate their military-economic-political program to confront other imperialists, and the role of Russia, China and the new German Pope in this global imperialist dogfight.

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Muslim innocents suffer from US tactics

….The voice of dissent among Muslims [has] grown more audible — as a result of a series of criminal cases that have raised questions about the methods used by authorities in their fight against terrorism.

The government focus on undercover sting operations and the recruitment of a network of Muslim informants has provoked sharp criticism….

But, of late, perhaps no case has caused more ire than that of two teenage Muslim girls who were detained on immigration violations in March after the F.B.I. became concerned that they might be planning to become suicide bombers. After six weeks in detention the girls were quietly released and officials have declined to comment on the case….

"It’s nerve-wracking that every time you hear there was a sting operation you start praying it won’t be an Arab…" (NYT, 6/4)

Iraq stress hits 12,000 GI’s; 90 suicides

Some military experts say they believed the surreptitious threat from suicide bombers and snipers in Iraq is even more stressful than open combat. Through the end of April, 1,118 Army men and women had been evacuated from Iraq for psychiatric reasons, according to official statistics.

Through February, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs, 12,020 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan had been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. (NYT, 6/3)

Drug co. profiteers cover up health risks

When the drug industry came under fire last summer for failing to disclose poor results from studies of antidepressants, major drug makers promised to provide more information about their research on new medicines. But nearly a year later, crucial facts about many clinical trials remain hidden, scientists independent of the company say,

Within the drug industry, companies are sharply divided….

But…Merck and Pfizer release less information and reluctant to add more, citing competitive pressures.

As a result, doctors and patients lack critical information about important drugs, academic researchers say, and the companies can hide negative trial results by refusing to publish studies, or by cherry-picking and highlighting the most favorable data from studies they co publish….

…Giaxo had hidden results from trials showing that its antidepressant Paxil might increase suicidal thought in children and teenagers….

Merck and Pfizer have been criticized for failing to disclose…clinical trial results that indicated that cox-2 pain-killers like Vioxx might be dangerous to the heart. (NYT, 5/21)

Chavez’s job: stall off real revolution

Chavez offers a cultural as well as a political alternative to the prevailing US-inspired model that dominates Latin America.

So, what does his Bolivarian revolution consist of? He is friendly with Castro yet he is no out-of-fashion state socialist. Capitalism is alive and well in Venezuela — and secure. Chavez seeks to cure the excesses of what he terms "savage neoliberalism…."

…If it fails, the people will…demand something different. And…more radical. (GW, 6/9)

Rich liberals keep blood-sucking system going

The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000….

The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy — seizing most of the income gains of the past decades — and then ruthlessly exploiting its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class….

The denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed….They objectively serve the right [anti-left]…. (NYT, 5/29)

‘Pro-life’ US doesn’t fight genocide

"‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide," Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history….reveals that throughout the 20th century, whenever genocide occurred, whether the victims were Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds or Tutsis, the American government stood by and did nothing. Worse, in some instances, it sided with the murderers…. (NYT, 6/5)

Capitalist China: Warm ties with butchers

Less than two weeks after Uzbek troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody crackdown on political protests, the country’s president, Islam Karimov, was welcomed in Beijing with the red carpet treatment and a 21-gun salute….

China…boasted its willingness to step up imports of oil, gas and other minerals, support Uzbekistan’s bid to join the World Trade Organization and cooperate more closely in the fight against terrorism….

International condemnation of Sudan, Iran and Zimbabwe has produced a similar outcome….Beijing is now Sudan’s biggest trading partner….

In Zimbabwe the same….increased trade….

Iran is a similar story….

Beijing is not the head of an ideological bloc. Quite the opposite. China will deal with anyone, anywhere, no questions asked. (GW, 6/9)

1. The Unfriendly Skies
   United Bosses Take Off with Workers' Pensions
2. Politicians' Dog-fights Undermine Rulers' Plans for War and Fascism
3. GI's Must FIght Racist U.S. Rulers' Attacks on Iraqis
4. Profit System Sacrifices Wichita Boeing Workers
   1. Ruling-Class Unity: Screw the Workers
   2. Onex: `A U.S. Company That Happens To Be Based In Canada'
5. 500 Multi-Racial Protesters Counter 20 Anti-immigrant Racists
6. May Day A Beacon Amid Philly's Corruption And Death
7. `The journey to revolution is a life-long struggle...'
8. When is a sweatshop not a sweatshop?
   When you're paid $45 a month!
9. `Best thing about May Day:
   Unity of the Working Class'
10. Strikers Battle Utility Bosses; PLP'ers Warmly Received
11. Transforming `People standing around'
    Into A Political Force vs. Recruiters
12. Villaraigosa -- Fascist Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
13. Outsourcing Imperialist War
14. Heroic Red Army Saved World's Workers From Nazi Beasts
15. Under Cimmunism,
    How Would Health Care Be Better ?
16. Politics, Morality and Murder
17. LETTERS
    1. CHALLENGE Friend from Italy
    2. Trust in Collective Overcomes Fear
    3. Joins PLP to make `Dream' Come True
    4. Tuskegee-type Racism Still Going On
    5. Airport Workers Fight Pro-Boss Hacks
    6. Lauds LA May Day Internationalism
    7. PLP Big Influence In Immigrant March
    8. One-sided view of Punk
18. RED EYE ON THE NEWS
    1. Liberals say US should stay in Iraq
    2. Black youth and all US youth: grim future
    3. Red Cross confirms U.S. abuse of Koran
    4. On nukes, US slaps Iran, winks at Israel
    5. Sounds like workers need a real revolution
    6. Dominican Republic and 40 years of US invasions

---

The Unfriendly Skies
United Bosses Take Off with Workers' Pensions

Just a week after Congressional Democrats and Republicans passed a law making it impossible for workers to get out from under mountains of debt -- caused by rising prices, falling wages, and credit card interest rates that would embarrass Mafia loan sharks -- a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that United Airlines could terminate its four employee pension plans covering about 140,000 workers. The billionaires cannot meet the needs of our class, and all of their promises and "guarantees" are worthless. And they've got their labor lieutenants in lock-step right behind them. Just one more reason why capitalism must be destroyed and replaced by a society that serves the interests of the working class: Communism

Wages and benefits for United workers had been cut twice prior to this action, along with 40,000 jobs, since 2000. Then the following day, United was back in court trying to impose permanent pay and benefit cuts on its machinists and mechanics as part of a $700 million concessions package. Ironically, United workers "owned" a majority of the company's stock until the airline filed for bankruptcy protection. So much for workers' "stock ownership" running "their" company.

United, in bankruptcy since December 2002, said it lost $1.1 billion during the first quarter of 2005, more than doubling last year's first quarter loss, and its 19th consecutive quarterly deficit. United's pension was $9.8 billion under-funded, and the company was released from over $16 billion in payments over the next five years. This is the largest default since the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) was created in 1974, and nearly three times greater than the default by Bethlehem Steel in 2002. The PBGC will slash pension payments, many by as much as 50%. The pension board covers only past obligations.

This action follows similar attacks on tens of thousands of steelworkers and US Airways workers, and threatens the rest of the airline industry, autoworkers, and other industries with similar "legacy costs." The president of United's Association of Flight Attendants said, "Today's decision...may have triggered the collapse of the defined benefit pension system nationwide." It also comes as the rulers are trying to destroy Social Security to help cover the costs of their endless "war on terror," the occupation of Iraq, and the racist Homeland Security police state.

Despite overwhelming strike votes by United's 62,000 workers, the same pro-capitalist union leaders that pushed the myth of "employee ownership" have no intention of fighting. "Our goal is to get a deal, not a strike," said a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), which "represents" about 20,000 baggage handlers and ground workers. He would rather negotiate $176 million in wage and benefit cuts than have a federal bankruptcy court judge impose them. Their negotiations have been extended until May 31. Pilots and flight attendants have already approved more cuts, and mechanics are voting on a tentative agreement.

While AFL-CIA President John Sweeny and SEIU President Andy Stern fight each other, neither has anything to say about the United pension rip-off. Their loyalty to U.S. imperialism has only increased since Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers (PATCO) in 1981, setting the stage for decades of assaults on union workers, leaving the "labor movement" on the brink of extinction. This is how fascism is happening.

Every United terminal at every airport should be surrounded and grounded by thousands of workers. But that will not happen now. Today we must alert our co-workers, through newsletters and union resolutions, with articles in local union papers and lunch time discussions, by picketing United ticket counters and reaching out to United workers, about the need for communist leadership and to fight back. By example, we must turn our own contract struggles into battlegrounds to build class consciousness among all workers.

The pro-capitalist union leaders sabotaged the PATCO strikers. They supported the Democrats and Clinton while they wiped out welfare and more than doubled the prison population to over two million, 70% black and Latin workers and youth. They did nothing to stop the fascist round-up of thousands of Arab and Muslim citizens and immigrants in the wake of 9/11. And they will lead youth and retired workers to a future of mass poverty, racist terror and endless war. Our future is in our hands. Join and build a mass Progressive Labor Party.

Politicians' Dog-fights Undermine Rulers' Plans for War and Fascism

U.S. rulers are worried about Congress. Partisan stalemates, like the current Senate confirmation battles, are becoming serious obstacles in their drive towards fascism and militarization for widening foreign wars. Well before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Hart-Rudman Commission proposed a drastic government overhaul that would establish a police state at home and put the U.S. on a permanent war footing worldwide.

Since 9/11, important parts of the Hart-Rudman blueprint, in addition to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have come to pass. The executive branch now has a Department of Homeland Security and a national intelligence czar. In the judicial branch, courts wield a widely expanded power to jail without trial. But although Hart-Rudman warned that "national security in the 21st century...mandates a serious reappraisal of both the individual and collective efforts of Congress and its members," the legislative branch has yet to recast itself as a shaper of wartime policy.

Hart-Rudman had hoped to indoctrinate the entire House and Senate in the military strategy of U.S. imperialism. "The wargaming center at the National Defense University should be expanded so that virtually every member of Congress can participate in one or more war games per two-year cycle. Giving members of Congress a reason to learn about...crisis inter-actions will lead eventually to a more sophisticated Legislative Branch." But the commission foresaw its own failure: "The very nature of power in Congress makes it difficult for legislators to reform their collective institution.... [It] has sustained a structure that undermines rather than strengthens its ability to fulfill its Constitutional obligations in the foreign policy arena."

The structure Hart-Rudman bewails is that senators and representatives win election by courting wealthy individual donors and organizing voter blocs. Republicans largely use religious groups, as Democrats use trade unions. The narrow profit interests of these backers often don't mesh with U.S. imperialism's class-wide needs. Sen. Joe Lieberman, for example, playing to labor hacks, is fighting the planned closing of the Groton navy base. U.S. rulers, however, today requires a far greater naval presence in Europe and Asia than in Connecticut. In the confirmation mess, the London Financial Times (5/16/05) complains that Sen. Bill Frist "may have chosen pleasing the social conservative base of the Republican Party over preserving his ability to serve as an effective leader of the Senate." Four years before the present deadlock over Bolton and the federal judges, Hart-Rudman said "the presidential appointment process now verges on complete collapse."

The electoral nature of Congress cuts both ways for the rulers. On the one hand, it helps them by steering millions of workers away from revolutionary politics down the dead-end road to the ballot box, pushing the lie that every citizen has three voices in the Capitol. But it also favors an ability to garner votes over loyalty to the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists. Partisanship often creates obstructionism. Only one senator in the Republican majority, Lincoln Chafee, belongs by birth to the liberal, imperialist ruling class Establishment. The New York Times and other mouthpieces for the rulers are desperately counting on him to lead a compromise movement to break the appointments logjam and get on with the agenda of fascism and war.

Congress's quagmire has two sides for the working class, too. It shows the rulers' relative disarray, and thus their weakness, in implementing fascism compared, say, with Germany's Nazis. But it also warns that U.S. rulers will sooner or later move from floor debates and filibusters to more effective, violent means for getting their wartime house in order.

While the bosses squabble with each other to impose discipline within their own ranks, workers' class interests demand we organize to destroy the dictatorship of their class and the profit system that serves it. Congress, like the rest of the rulers' state apparatus, is a capitalist tool. Our job is to build the Progressive Labor Party and the long-range fight for a workers' dictatorship where workers rule over the bosses and their ideology and represent the best interests of the international working class.

(Next: The bosses' plan for restructuring their military: "leaner and meaner" now; bigger and meaner later.)

GI's Must FIght Racist U.S. Rulers' Attacks on Iraqis

A struggle exists here in Iraq between two contradictory ideas: (1) officers are super-screwing us, and (2)U.S. soldiers are "superior" to the Iraqis. We're fighting to emphasize the first and defeat the second. The racism of the latter only helps the imperialists.

Imagine driving in your neighborhood through streets you've traveled hundreds of times. Directly behind you is a group of four heavily-armed HUMMV's signaling to clear the road for them to pass. They're protected by 4-inch armor steel, each with at least a mounted 50-Cal weapon, or a 240B machine gun, able to shoot 150 rounds a minute. Each person aboard carries an M-4 or M-l6 rifle. Such heavily-armed patrol units drive around Iraqi towns trying to catch the "rocket man," or at least deter mortar attacks. But they also provide a presence to establish control in a country that can easily explode into civil unrest or resistance to the U.S. occupation.

The Army has fire superiority. U.S. bosses aim to maintain control. By working hand-in-hand with the fledgling Iraqi Army and police, the U.S. has established a state of fascism. It uses systematic interrogation of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and the jailing of whole towns. But real control is achieved simply by the show of fire superiority. The U.S. military leaves much of the dirty work to the Iraqi Army and police.

One word prevalent here is "superiority," which means a lot, especially for soldiers. No wonder many have a superiority complex. They think they're "at the top of the food chain." One trigger squeeze and all fall to the ground. Sadly, I've seen many soldiers disrespect civilians. It's not evident directly, but is a subtle discrimination, when soldiers interact directly with civilians. However, it's more obvious and racist when soldiers interact with each other.

The commonly used label "Haji" casually refers to anyone who may fit the description of a Middle Eastern person, ignoring the fact that there are many ethnic groups among Iraqis. Although the direct meaning of Haji is different, it's been grossly reduced to a derogatory and insulting label. It's common to use it when criticizing Iraqis. I don't use the word, and ask anyone around me not to use it because although the direct meaning may not be insulting, the way it's used is outright racist.

Soldiers are always discussing why we're here. A soldier who considers himself conservative told me there's no other country capable of "helping" the "Haji" as the U.S. is doing. I told him "we shouldn't think of ourselves as saviors." This comes from the dangerous mentality that people aren't able to help themselves. It mistakenly defines us as "superior" to other nations. But we aren't superior to anyone. The U.S. has emerged as the "most powerful" country because of the murderous, imperialist actions it perpetrates worldwide.

"Savior" is not synonymous with oppressor. But that's how the U.S. has become a powerful nation. The existence of a super-power explicitly means there are people "lower" and oppressed, and others at the very "lowest" and most oppressed.

But simultaneously an opposite trend is growing. The longer we're here, the more prevalent the feeling that "we're all workers," that what we go through back home may not be as bad but resembles what the Iraqis experience here. We're really all in the same boat, all victimized by the bosses, the brass and imperialist war for profits. When officers tell us how "proud" they are of us, what a "good job" we're doing defending "our freedom" here, they anger soldiers -- "What does he care?" and "Here we go again"; "Here's another officer trying to make us feel better. What b.s."

Some skip these meetings altogether. Some spend more time cleaning weapons and "preparing" for patrols than actually carrying them out. These are growing signs that morale is worsening and the potential for more revolutionary class consciousness exists. We're not "superior" -- we're all one class. U.S. soldiers and Iraqi workers have the same class interests: to end this imperialism.

Anti-racist GI

Profit System Sacrifices Wichita Boeing Workers

WICHITA, KANSAS -- "In a time when so many jobs and industries are leaving our shores, we're encouraged by Onex's willingness to invest in a showcase U.S. industry," said Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), which represents nearly 6,000 workers in the recently sold Boeing Wichita plant. "IAM Optimistic about Wichita Sale" screamed the front-page headline of the union's March Puget Sound newspaper, pledging to "work closely" with the new Canadian owners. But recently, the union leadership has beat a hasty retreat as it became clear this sale was just another attempt to reorganize the bosses' key industries (for war) on the backs of us industrial workers. Aerospace workers are losing confidence in these flip-floppers, but we have yet to find confidence in the power of our class. Only a long-term communist outlook can provide the answer to this dilemma, giving us the wherewithal to build sharper and broader class fight-back.

"Working closely" with the new bosses meant a two-year wage freeze after a 10% wage cut; possible loss of nearly 2,000 union jobs with management deciding who to rehire without regard to seniority; a phony cost-of-living adjustment that's unlikely to pay a cent during the five-year contract; major work-rule give-backs, including running multiple machines and multi-tasking; and trashing defined-benefit pensions either for present or future employees, depending on which of the three unions negotiating contracts you belong to.

Onex CEO Jerry Schwartz did promise to eventually hire additional workers when he got the "cost structure" in line -- minus, of course, any "troublemakers' or those too old to keep up. He specifically mentioned work from the regional jet-maker Bombardier, which is liberally subsidized by his buddy, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Workers were so furious that not a single union head dared sign on to any of the original offers. "Onex is determined to break up industrial unions," said IAM Wichita local president Steve Ronney, in a complete about-face.

Onex then sweetened the deal with company stock, which employees are forbidden to sell except under carefully prescribed circumstances, similar to the infamous sellout of the United Airlines workers. Boeing commercial CEO Alan Mulally threatened to "take the division apart" if the unions scotched the sale by not agreeing to Onex's terms.

The IAM negotiators flip-flopped again, scheduling a ratification vote for May 24. "If this doesn't go through, Onex goes back to Canada and Boeing...chops it up," warned Ronney.

Ruling-Class Unity: Screw the Workers

Onex and Boeing brought in the Hutchison Group to get the unions to sign on to the deal. Founder and chief executive Cameron Hutchison is an old protégé of Harry Stonecipher, the former discredited Boeing CEO. Hutchison is on the Business Advisory Council to House Majority Leader Tom Delay and received numerous awards from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

As usual, screwing industrial workers is a bi-partisan issue. Former U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt (Dem.) also signed on to sell the contract. Gephardt was the darling of organized labor, consistently winning the IAM's endorsement for U.S. President. When it comes to reorganizing industry to more cheaply produce (for war), the ruling class and its political servants are united.

The union leaders are helpless in this situation. They spread cynicism and defeatism because their ideology prohibits them from thinking outside capitalism's boundaries. In an unguarded moment, the IAM national magazine speculated that only a national strike could reverse the momentum, but the leadership emphatically stated they would never call such a strike. Well, we communists would!

This summer Boeing workers in Seattle -- home to the 1919 general strike -- will get a good dose of the kind of communist class consciousness that would make such action possible, in contrast to the usual pre-contract politicking. We'll follow through by building the revolutionary movement our class needs to rid us of these sales that destroy workers' lives for capitalist profit.

Onex: `A U.S. Company That Happens To Be Based In Canada'

Toronto-based Onex chief Gerry Schwartz, a multi-billion dollar buyout specialist, described his firm as "a U.S. company that happens to be based in Canada." After getting his MBA from Harvard, Schwartz made his name as a dealmaker for old-line New York firms like Bear Stearns and Co. and later Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts Co., which would go on to become architects of the RJR-Nabisco takeover and other debt-financed mega-deals. When Onex went public in 1987, "it benefited enormously from his [Schwartz's] glamorous Wall Street background."

Schwartz is liberal Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's top corporate fundraiser, while expanding his network of friends in U.S. financial markets. In fact, most of Schwartz's deals "come from [his] Wall Street contacts." The federal government approved this sale because it trusts Schwartz to expand domestic industry with money stolen from the declining wages and benefits of industrial workers. He no doubt will be handsomely paid for his services to U.S. capital. (All quotations from "The Unmaking Of a Nationalist," Canadian Business, August 1994)

500 Multi-Racial Protesters Counter 20 Anti-immigrant Racists

BALDWIN PARK, CA, May 14 -- Up to 500 angry protesters countered a small group of about 20 gutter fascists from "Save Our State," a racist anti-immigrant organization, when they rallied against a monument they said was "pro-Mexican." Overtly racist, anti-immigrant signs were fiercely challenged by both nationalist chants like, "Who's Land, Our Land!" and "The people, united, shall never be defeated!" as well as by class conscious chants like, "Black, brown, Asian, white, workers of the world, unite!" At one point, a nationalist tried to grab the bullhorn from a young woman leading the latter chant but was rebuffed by a multi-racial group which defended the message of anti-racism.

A group of factory workers was mobilized to challenge the racists. There were discussions before and after the demonstration about the need to take growing racism head-on as part of the fight for workers' power.

The nationalists and liberal leadership of the counter demonstration included the local mayor. They rallied far away from the racists and opposed confronting them. However, a small but vocal multi-racial group gave leadership to many, with chants and by leading most of the crowd closer to the racists to actually repel them. Someone threw a bottle at the racists. The police had to call in reinforcements to escort them away.

CHALLENGES were sold and leaflets distributed. The struggle for multi-racial unity to defy and stop the racists will continue on campuses, in mass organizations and in the factories.

The racists are planning a demonstration for July 4th and we aim to be more organized to show that workers' power is the way to fight fascism, part of the long-term fight for communist revolution. On the other hand, we applaud those youth who confronted the racists. This trend will grow.

May Day A Beacon Amid Philly's Corruption And Death

PHILADELPHIA, PA, April 30 -- A group of workers and youth, black and white, celebrated May Day with a dinner at a union headquarters building here, proud that we were sharing this day's events with workers worldwide. We reviewed some working class history, especially the origins of May Day and communist revolution. A hospital worker reviewed plans for a union contract fight this summer, explaining the opportunities it presents for building PLP. We listened to the music of the new classic PLP CD while sharing delicious southern cooking. Our shared work and pleasures honored the sacrifices and dedication of millions of working-class men, women and children united in the fight for a communist world.

In Philadelphia, the news is of corruption, joblessness and death in the streets. The city treasurer, two bankers and a businesswoman have been convicted in a "pay-to-play" city contract scam involving many others. The mayor's main fund-raiser and pal, who died recently, was the central figure in the secret deals. The mayor hasn't been caught -- yet. The preceding mayor, now-Governor Rendell, a potential Democrat candidate for President, was up to his eyeballs in the scam while he was mayor. Meanwhile, Rendell is pushing to cut Medicaid payments for the state's poor. It's all "logical" in capitalist society.

Hospital workers and city/regional transport workers are facing threatened cuts in job benefits, and may strike to defend what they have left. Jobs in the Philadelphia area paying more than the minimum are scarce. The population continues to decline despite cheery prophesies from the city. Reports of shootings, some "random" and some drug-related, often of children, appear in the papers daily.

Amid all this capitalist chaos and death, our May Day resolve is to renew and strengthen the Party's fight to destroy the bosses' murderous system. We have a world to win.

`The journey to revolution is a life-long struggle...'

(The following is from a speech given by a black woman worker and mass leader at Stroger Cook County Hospital. The Chicago May Day dinner, attended by 100 integrated and international workers, students and youth, featured international food and a program of revolutionary, anti-racist culture, speeches and skits.)

The road to revolution is a long journey with many detours and struggles of day-to-day life...This May Day dinner is a celebration for the international working class holiday. As a new member to PLP, I wanted to [talk about] the last 11/2 years since I joined the Party after a long campaign battle for new leadership in our local union. We worked long hours, developed close bonds, and mobilized workers at many worksites. We fought for common cause, that workers deserve better...We won the election and my fellow comrade and I were elected to the Executive Board...I have been in Cook County Hospital for 26 years. I knew of PLP...read CHALLENGE often, but never made a commitment.

We came together through a grievance battle. Management docked me 8 hours pay for calling in sick...I was denied at the 1st and 2nd steps, but won at the third. My comrade was very impressed with my determination and will to fight. She's been employed at County for 18 years, but we never crossed paths until this struggle.

We sat down, one on one, to get to know each other and found that we had more in common than we knew. We became very close and I shared my family history, my Dad being born in Cuba, who with his sisters and brothers, eventually fled as stowaways to Jamaica in hopes for a better life. We may be from different parts of the world, but we have a common interest...As we bonded closer, we found our struggles led to the same path.

Then she invited me to dinner at another comrade's house, and I remember...how at home I felt, and how we had more in common than not. On this day I joined the Party. I know this commitment, sitting down getting to know each other, is the only way we can build the Party and mobilize masses of workers to one day tear down the walls of injustice for all humanity, all over the world. This struggle is an ongoing fight and is not easy. The journey is a lifelong struggle...

As I have developed as a Party member, I have come to see how the unions are not the best direction for the working class because the system of wage slavery, built by the rich capitalists, have the workers set for failure before we start. This class system will never allow workers to prove their true value. Longer hours spent working, less quality time with family and friends, which leads to failing health on this never-ending roller coaster ride under capitalism. So I see right now as a good time for the Party to take advantage of the rapid decline of labor and unions, to mobilize workers for the true journey for mass revolution for workers all over the world.

This is our challenge comrades, to sit down with workers and explain why capitalism can never meet our needs; to get workers one by one to join the Party to fight for mass communist revolution. But we must be truthful to workers. This journey is long and hard and it won't get better over night. We have to have patience with each other so we can hear and have different opinions, but still come together for common cause....

We need to encourage our youth and show them they are vital and essential to keep the Party growing...We need to get more young comrades writing articles for CHALLENGE, so we can increase circulation and have more newsworthy articles that reflect the conditions of the day-to-day struggle of workers all over the world...

While the greedy leaders cut programs essential to our survival, cutting Medicare and Medicaid and federal funds for health care to pay for their war, workers work in unsafe conditions, doing the work of two or three workers whose jobs have been eliminated. Patients wait in long grueling lines in the ER, waiting three days for a bed in this never-ending attack under capitalism. The unions are doing less and less...conceding to layoffs, firings and attacks on workers where frankly, there becomes no difference between management and labor except for higher and higher union dues. They point their finger at the rich CEO's at Enron and Wal-Mart, but they start to look just like them and give money to the same politicians who oppress workers all over the world.

In summary, this year has been a good opportunity to talk to workers about how they feel powerless, about a president they don't want, and about working conditions that seem unbearable...It's a good time to build the Party. People don't know where to turn. We must step up to the plate to convince workers to join the revolutionary communist PLP, the only way they can rebuild their dreams and their destiny for the whole working class all over the world.

When is a sweatshop not a sweatshop?
When you're paid $45 a month!

There's been much talk here about U.S. retailers supposedly "searching" for factories that provide "not just...their need for low-cost production but also...their desire to avoid the stigma of exploiting poor laborers in distant sweatshops." Lo and behold, defying capitalism's drive for maximum profits, the New York Times has found this fairyland!

Under the headline "Low Cost and Sweatshop-Free," the ruling class's leading mouthpiece reports that Cambodia's garment industry is this bosses' paradise, and, naturally, backed by the U.S. government. The likes of GAP, Levi-Strauss and Abercrombie & Fitch are touting Cambodia as a place where unions are "strong" and workers earn "a living wage." The Times (5/8) says that the GAP, is "by far the biggest buyer of Cambodian garments." Why?

Cambodia "is still a very cheap place to produce apparel." How cheap? They've just reduced "production costs to $1.10 for each dozen T-shirts." That's 9cents a shirt! How do they do it?

"In a country where $45 [a month] is considered a living wage," the "wages are so low that all these girls can afford after sending home half their paychecks to their family is to crowd into a single room without electricity." Those are the conditions under which U.S. billionaire clothing bosses can "avoid the stigma of exploiting poor laborers in distant sweatshops."

With all the hoopla about "strong unions," "Chea Vichea, the leader of the garment workers' union, was shot to death in January 2004. Four months later, one of his top assistants was killed." Yes, says U.S. ambassador Charles Ray, the unions "are some of the best institutions" in the country....The exploitation of workers cannot be a path to development....Workers have to be treated with respect...."

"Respect"? Earning less than $2 a day, living five to a room, producing T-shirts at a cost to the bosses of 9cents apiece, shirts that sell for anywhere from $15 to $30 each, while their union leaders get shot in the head. This is an industry that the Times and GAP/Levi Strauss/Abercrombie & Fitch certify as "sweatshop free"!

This is the kind of "free market" exploitation and "freedom" that U.S. bosses love to impose on workers in countries like Cambodia, and by invasion in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. And then this is praised by the liberal media, like the New York Times.

Now the International Labor Office (ILO) reports from Geneva that corporations like Nike and Wal-Mart are "making $32 billion a year by exploiting the forced labor of men, women and children in sweatshops around the world." They pay less than $1,000 a year and "make an average of $13,000 a year" from each exploited worker. Children under 18 comprise 40% to 50% of the total of 12.3 million of these forced laborers, according to the ILO.

What's even more tragic is the fact that the workers and peasants of Cambodia -- as well as those of Vietnam where sweatshops also operate -- kicked out U.S. imperialism 30 years ago, but the nationalist politics of their leaders and the aberrations of the Khmer Rouge created governments which allow the GAP, et al, to super-exploit its workers. (See CHALLENGE, 5/25, for an analysis of why this occurred and why a true communist movement would never permit this.)

`Best thing about May Day:
Unity of the Working Class'

"April 30th was my first time attending the May Day March, International Workers' Day. I felt very welcome. I learned the chants real quick and enjoyed saying them. I loved the way everyone was friendly -- the people with red on their backs, walking up and down the sidewalk. It felt so good marching, having fun and all for a good cause. I hope one day what me and my friends did on April 30 will have an effect not only on the working class here but in the whole world. I enjoyed marching with PLP and plan on doing it again next year."

*****************

"May Day is the working class' international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. I'm a high school student who worries about what's going to happen ten years from now. Would it be worse? Could students attend college? I dislike sitting at home and just watching the news. No, that's not me! I go out there and join the group. I fight for what I think is justified.

A teacher invited me to the march. When we got there I saw a lot of people in red shirts and signs that said `Obreros, Unidos, Jamas seran vencidos.' (Workers, united, will never be defeated.) ' When, I saw people passing out flyers, I decided to pass them out too. I read and analyzed both capitalist and communist papers. Capitalism is a system that only exploits and kill workers. I was mostly interested in communism."

******************

"My day at the May Day march was interesting, fun and a positive thing to do. When we got off the bus I didn't realize we would be that deep. We must have had at least 400 people. I also liked walking past the cops and shouting `LAPD you can't hide; we charge you with genocide.' It felt good shouting in front of them and they couldn't do anything about it.

"I liked mostly everything about the march, especially that we were fighting for our future rights and trying to get a voice and be heard. The best thing was the unity of the working class. All races took part in this march which made me believe one day `we' the working class could take over and make life better for all of us."

****************

"May Day was a wonderful experience for me. It was my first time in a march. Fighting for the rights of people made me feel good about myself. As we marched, you saw other people in the streets joining and supporting us. I believe that what we did on May Day was for the good of all people. It just felt good seeing all of the different people coming together and protesting for the rights of all people. As a girl who thought protesting didn't make a difference, today I saw it did make a difference in many ways."

Strikers Battle Utility Bosses; PLP'ers Warmly Received

BOSTON, May 25 -- Some workers are fighting back against the bosses increased attacks on the working class. About 1,900 utility workers, members of Local 369 of the Utility Workers of America, struck the NStar company here on May 23 over retirement benefits, forced overtime and staffing levels for system maintenance. The local president said the bosses, "Never asked us what did the workers need. They just kept taking and taking and taking."

When PLP'ers joined the picket line and leafleted the workers, we received an overwhelming positive response, with virtually no anti-communism from the strikers, a change from previous walkouts at Greyhound, Eastern Airlines and others.

When the workers lost their health benefits, and a striker went to the media because his daughter needed surgery, the company boss offered to pay for it to avoid public embarrassment. The striker said, "No way, I won't accept money from the CEO unless he restores health care to all 1,900 workers." Then the union covered the surgery cost.

A union rally of several hundred heard endless speeches from union officials and local politicians but there were no chants or speeches from the actual strikers.

For the workers to have any chance of winning their demands, they need mass support and massive picket lines from tens of thousands of workers in the area, a move that the city's labor misleaders will never organize. Breaking the bosses' rules and laws by the rank and file is a first step towards fighting for the workers' class interests.

Transforming `People standing around'
Into A Political Force vs. Recruiters

WORCESTER, MASS, May 21 -- The day after military recruitment centers closed temporarily as penance for exposure of their abusive tactics, 25 workers held a rally here protesting the war and the racism inherent in the ruling class's military-building effort. The rally was organized by a local peace group, but as young comrades we were particularly inspired to see the impressive difference PLP's militant leadership made. A group of people just standing around was transformed into an organized political force with a clear statement.

PLP members provided the majority of signs and presented a strong message about the reasons behind the war. They provoked discussion among the participants and everyone eagerly held them. These signs, our bullhorn and speeches made the rally cohesive and collective, energized attendees and onlookers and helped bring everyone together.

At one point, a Party member escorted a heckler away to prevent him from trying to intimidate us.

Everyone at the rally received a copy of CHALLENGE. It truly seemed the rally's success was due largely to the leadership of two PL comrades. We think the newer participants will join other rallies because PL'ers set an active and encouraging tone. This rally and others like it show a major difference between reform organizations and PL, that PL is ready to step up to the challenge of aggressively fighting against war and racism.

Two new young comrades

Villaraigosa -- Fascist Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

LOS ANGELES, May 23 -- While the L.A. Times trumpets the election of the first Latino mayor in 130 years, it's clear that Antonio Villaraigosa's rise from City Councilman to mayor will not improve the lives of working people here. Quite the opposite. His celebration of the "American Dream" and the idea he's bringing a "new vision of unity" to L.A. is a dangerous illusion for workers and students.

Only one-third of the registered voters went to the polls. Many people saw no difference between Villaraigosa and incumbent Hahn. Villaraigosa was supported by Eli Broad, millionaire insurance tycoon and Democratic Party kingmaker, and by the LA Times. John Kerry and Magic Johnson campaigned for him.

Villaraigosa's first act as mayor-elect was to visit police chief Bratton and embrace him, promising to make the "gang problem" his number one priority. As City Councilman, he put 300 more racist cops on the street. As mayor, he promises 1,000-1,200 more. He's also campaigned for community policing and neighborhood councils. Such measures have little to do with "stopping crime," but rather aim to win LA workers to cooperate with the cops in informing on their neighbors and thereby support a growing fascist police state to prevent workers from rebelling against their exploitation.

Los Angeles is a center of low-wage manufacture in the U.S. Four million workers, mostly of Mexican and Central American origin, concentrated in industrial zones like the Alameda corridor, create $400 billion of wealth for U.S. bosses. Yet, in this deteriorating city of ten million citizen and immigrant workers, over three million have no health insurance and 40% of the population is one paycheck away from being homeless.

Villaraigosa cannot solve these problems, inherent in the capitalist system. That's not his mission. Whether or not he involves himself in the corrupt sweetheart contracts of ex-mayor Jim Hahn, he represents a much more dangerous kind of wheeler-dealer.

Celebrated in the national press as the poster child of "American inclusion" and minority opportunity, Villaraigosa's main job is to win workers, here and nationally, to the patriotic idea that they and their children will now have economic and political doors open to them. The other part of this deal, of course, is that they must take on the responsibilities of "inclusion," which include accepting: cut-backs, longer hours for less pay, further cuts in healthcare, deteriorating schools and -- most importantly -- the responsibility to serve and to teach their children to serve in the U.S. military and be loyal to U.S. imperialism and fascism.

We're living in an imperialist war-driven capitalist economy. The changes Antonio Villaraigosa promises simply cannot be fulfilled -- except for more cops. When every worker's tax dollar is being diverted (whole or in part) to the Iraq War and to the large-scale preparations for fighting challenges to U.S. imperialism's global position, there's no way Villaraigosa will be anything but a dangerous failure for workers won to rely on him.

The battle over the hearts, minds and practice of the working class will sharpen. By exposing this wolf in sheep's clothing and organizing class struggle against the bosses' exploitation, we can win workers to the revolutionary communist politics of PLP. Ultimately workers will shatter their illusions in lesser-evil politicians and will realize that they need to take power and run society in their class interests.

Outsourcing Imperialist War

Private military firms (PMFs) are becoming a major part of the U.S. imperialist war machine. Originally these contractors were to fill a "security gap" after the post-Cold War downsizing of the armed forces. Today they've become a $100 billion-a-year industry. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1994 and 2002 the Defense Department signed some 3,000 contracts worth an estimated $300 billion, and 14 of those top contractors shelled out over $1 million to political candidates over the past decade.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched troop reserves thin, even leading to a "backdoor draft" where rotations are lengthened and soldiers completing their tours have been recalled to active duty. As CHALLENGE has reported, there's been talk of reinstituting the draft, even though it poses big problems -- mass political opposition, unreliable troops and inadequate training (two years isn't enough to train soldiers in modern, high-tech warfare techniques).

The Defense Department is outsourcing many non-military functions -- cleaning, laundry, food service, etc. Asian and other foreign workers perform many of these tasks. This allows the rulers to throw more money at potential enlistees who'll be combat troops.

Seventy percent of aviation training has been outsourced. Private contractors, not Air Force personnel, maintain many of the high-tech planes and helicopters. Private corporations often do intelligence gathering and analyses. During the Iraq invasion, mercenary contractors maintained and loaded many of the most sophisticated weapons systems and even operated the Army's Patriot missile batteries and the Navy's Aegis missile-defense system.

As of a few months ago, some 30,000 private contractors in Iraq were the second largest contingent of Bush's "Coalition." Many receive salaries up to $20,000 a month, nearly ten times the average bottom-rung enlistee. The massive U.S. base at Camp Doha in Kuwait, the launch pad for the invasion, was built, is operated and guarded by a PMF.

In some cases the Pentagon uses contractors to avoid certain restrictive rules. After Congress limited the number of military advisers in Colombia and soldiers in Bosnia, the Defense Department hired private paramilitary units.

Some of these contractors operate as private armies. Loose rules govern them, not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A military court can prosecute them "in a time of war," but there is little precedent for such a trial. At Abu Ghraib prison, private contractors committed 16 of the 44 incidents. Reports have surfaced that DynCorp employees in Bosnia were involved in the sex slave trade.

There may be some efforts to discipline contractors to avoid embarrassing incidents and limit them from inflating costs and ripping off the Pentagon. But it appears that military outsourcing is here to stay -- both the logistical support increasingly carried out by foreign workers and the many "security" functions conducted by the big PMFs.

Many of these contract employees are former Special Forces personnel, highly committed to the aims of U.S. imperialism. Although they may have working-class roots, many have betrayed their class to carry out the Nazi-like operations of a brutal military machine. They have not allied with oppressed workers in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as well as with the low-paid workers doing most of the service jobs in U.S. military installations overseas, or even with rank-and-file U.S. troops who increasingly question their role in carrying out the Pentagon's oil-drenched war plans.u

References:
P.W. Singer, "Outsourcing war," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005, p. 119.
S. Macomber, "You're not in the Army now," American Spectator, Nov. 2004, p. 26.
"Private armies march into a legal vacuum," Financial Times, 2/10/05, p. 4.

Heroic Red Army Saved World's Workers From Nazi Beasts

(Part 2 of the true history of World War II.)

Anti-communists, from Bush to the rulers of Latvia and other Baltic countries, are trying to rewrite the history of World War II, claiming the Red Army was "as bad as the Nazis" it defeated. In Latvia, local members of the Nazi SS killers have even been rehabilitated while the Latvian President has refused to honor the Red Army. These bosses are again copying Goebbels (Hitler's Minister of Propaganda): the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

The truth is just the opposite. Without the Red Army, the Nazis would have turned all of Europe into a vast slave camp for the "Master Race." Hitler's plans for Eastern Europe was to kill most of the population (27 million Soviet citizens died during the war) and leave only 30 millions as slaves for the Third Reich. Their plan also was to kill 12 million Jews, not six million.

Serguei Makin, writing in the Russian daily Sovietskaya Rossia (translated into Spanish in Rebelion.org), exposed clearly what the Nazis did. His family retained a paperback book of the series "Red Army Soldier Library" which each Red Army soldier carried during the war, probably written by Ilia Erenburg or other Soviet writers. The books reminded the soldiers about the true nature of the fascists they were fighting, something we should never forget.

The book describes how Soviet children, raised to build a new society without capitalism, became victims of the Nazi beasts. The Nazis were waging war not just against the Red Army but against all Soviet citizens, who they considered "sub-humans," fit only to be killed or to serve the "Master Race."

It reports: "From his plane the German pilot did not see military warehouses, or strategic targets, or moving troops. He didn't care; he just wanted to kill, to create panic and desperation. He saw clearly who was on the stations waiting to board trains. He saw women and children, fleeing from the front....The pilot aimed his machine guns, firing at mothers trying to cover their children. His bombs fell on trains filled with women and children.He aimed at the heads of children, bringing mass deaths. The pilots flew low, seeking...children fleeing from their native villages in the Ukraine, Byelorrusia, Russia -- blown away by bombs.But this was only the beginning of the Nazi blitzkrieg. The worst was yet to come." (Similarities to the "Shock and Awe" waged by the U.S. against civilians in Baghdad and other cities in Iraq are not coincidental. That's the nature of imperialist warmakers).

The book describes the Nazis' attacks on occupied villages in the former Soviet Union. The fascists would kick the people from their peasant homes in the Ukraine, forcing women and children out into below-zero temperatures, without winter clothing or food, ordering them to "get out now!" Otherwise, they'd be shot on the spot.

The Nazis seized the peasants' food and cows while people starved, children died, and lacked the strength to dig a grave in the frozen soil. Throughout the former Soviet Union little mounds of earth contained the remains of children and others buried above-ground.

But the Master Race's 1,000-Year Reich was cut short. The Red Army took the offensive, forcing the Nazis to retreat, at which point they took their revenge upon the local population. In the village of Spas-Pomazkino, the retreating Nazis burned the peasant homes and shot families trying to flee the fire. Children able to leave their dying mothers were also shot by laughing Nazis.

In the town of Ploskoye, the Nazis machine-gunned the family of a collective farmer, shooting his wife while she was holding a little child in her arms. To save a bullet, the Nazi plunged a silver dagger into the baby. The Red Army book reports, "There was no method the Nazis did not use to kill Soviet children."

When Soviet artillery reached the Nazis in Ksty, in the Kaliningrad region, the Nazis executed the entire town. Only one elderly woman, a collective farmer, survived, the Nazis giving her up for dead.

Indeed, all of humanity owes a huge debt to the men and women of the Red Army who finally defeated the Nazis.

Under Cimmunism,
How Would Health Care Be Better ?

(This column introduces a new CHALLENGE series on how ways life under communism would differ from life under capitalism; how it will represent the interests of the international working class and our allies. We invite all readers to contribute both questions and answers to this column for discussion, relying on either history, examples from our own lives, or hope and imagination.)

In a book called "Away With All Pests," Joshua Horn, a British surgeon who lived and worked in China from 1954 to 1969, describes life in a hospital under communism. He shows how doctors were taught to be collective in taking care of patients. They had to change drastically. Their old ways were as know-it-all individualists who believed that nothing a patient, nurse, janitor, orderly, or anyone else could tell them would be relevant to patient care. Everyone in the hospital struggled with doctors to listen to anyone who knew the patient or had any idea about the patient's needs.

Horn tells of a little girl who had been burned in a fire. He kept trying to console her about the loss of her mother and brother, who died in the fire. The girl refused to talk with him. Then the little boy in the next bed pulled him aside and informed Comrade Doctor that his continually talking about her lost relatives was making her too sad to respond to him, that he should try a different approach. He took the boy's advice, and, as the boy predicted, the girl gradually began to respond to him.

He also explains that doctors' technical knowledge is good, but their attitude toward helping the patient is even more important. He tells of an eye doctor, Dr. Chen, who refused to be limited by what the books and medical journals told her was possible. She realized that books only represent what certain people understand at a certain time under certain circumstances and that most new discoveries require unlearning what the books had taught.

A man blinded in the revolutionary war came to Dr. Chen to have his sight restored. She consulted a senior eye doctor, who told her it was hopeless and risky. Refusing to believe it, she operated, and when the bandages were finally removed the man could see. Thinking that the senior eye doctor had been the one who saved his vision, the man hugged and thanked him. But the senior doctor, having opposed the surgery, said, "Don't thank me. I must thank you. I too have been blind for many years but now you and Dr. Chen have lifted the scales from my eyes."

The old ways were for doctors to be arrogant and selfish and to try to hide their mistakes. But the rest of the hospital staff and patients struggled with doctors, first to prevent errors whenever possible, second to admit them and third to learn from them. Horn saw how attitudes that are deeply rooted required years of patient and comradely struggle to change, but just this kind of struggle was fostered by the Chinese Communist Party and it had its effects.

Horn's book is full of examples of how the struggle to build a communist society changed health care for the better for hundreds of millions of urban and rural workers. Future columns will discuss some of these examples.

Politics, Morality and Murder

In our PL study-group discussion of how communism would promote scientific thought instead of religion, some said you couldn't have morality without religion. "Some people wouldn't know how to behave and would end up killing somebody", said one. People raised with religious morals say this a lot. But morality isn't simply religious; it's mainly political.

George Bush is a born-again Christian. He invokes the name of the lord, attends church and asks God for guidance. Presumably he reads the Bible: "Thou shalt not kill." But as the U.S. military's commander-in-chief, he's also responsible for killing over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and over 1,600 U.S. troops. Is this because he lacks morals? No, it's because he's doing what's best for the U.S. ruling class.

Hundreds of thousands of troops don't occupy Iraq because Satan whispered in their ears, "Kill Iraqi people." They do it on Bush's orders. Soldiers don't fly half-way around the world because Satan said, "Come fly with me." They go because they're carrying out orders. Religion may advocate good moral principles but the ruling class sets limits on what goes and doesn't go. Politics, not religion, determines morality.

Likewise, under communism we'll have morality too, but based on the needs of the international working class. With struggle, each will put their collective needs first. That doesn't mean everyone will get along or be friendly like in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. For a long time, murder may continue but the nature of crime will change.

Under capitalism the majority of illegal murders (excluding profit wars, workplace fatalities, police violence and other capitalist-created conditions) are caused by "love," "jealously" or money. Communism will eliminate money, exploitation and competition for wealth. Murder for money will fall drastically, along with the bosses, and as their class is wiped out; so too will murder be. Crimes of "passion" will decline also. As we abolish private property, we'll end possessive attitudes towards our partners. We want to eradicate coercion in personal and social relationships and stop thinking that anybody "owns" someone else. Terminating class exploitation should bring completely voluntary social and personal relationships, as well as the demise of killing for "love."

Some religions teach that we're born with sin. Therefore, without religion we'll just act up and kill somebody. But that's not the material reality of murder or any morals. Our morals are defined by the political-economic system we live in. So under communism, people can have morality -- without religion -- generated by communist politics.

LETTERS

CHALLENGE Friend from Italy

I want to thank you all for your precious existence. My subscription has expired and I want to renew it. Also, I want to get in touch with the great Italian comrade V., the one who brought your party to me.

Without your paper I never would have understood what Trotsky and the Trotskyites mean nor the correct way to look at Stalin. Maybe you're the world's only Party to formulate this honest line. That's the idea that's helped my thinking the most. Now I can correctly analyze why phony "leftists" organize in a sectarian way into smaller and smaller groups instead of concentrating on "what has to be done!"

Never give up. Our class really needs you, worldwide.

A comrade from Italy

Trust in Collective Overcomes Fear

Sixty years after the Red Army liberated Berlin, Boston's fascist cops are still protecting Nazis and attacking communists and anti-racists. On May 8, I attended an anti-nazi rally downtown. Although I'd been to such rallies before, this was my first confrontation. It was also the first time a cop beat me with a club.

Throughout the rally, I was consistently impressed by our solidarity and organization. We were safe because we were tight. As we stood before the cop/nazis screaming, "Death to the fascists! Power to the workers!" a comrade squeezed my hand, and I realized I'd never felt such love for the people fighting alongside me and such anger and hatred towards the fascists. It's this deep love for the working class and for our Party, and this deep hatred towards a system that breeds such horror, that will drive our movement forward.

Only now when I look back on the cops protecting the Nazis and attacking the anti-racists do I feel capitalism is truly as scary as I've always believed. However, I now know that my trust in my comrades will overcome my fear of whatever form of fascism we'll fight in the future.

As the cops arrested a comrade who had just been hit by a Nazi, several of us held onto him, screaming that he'd done nothing wrong, to let him go. They brutally pushed us away and took him; then the mounted pigs stormed the surrounding group of protesters and a cop clubbed me in the arm. I was also half-trampled by a horse. I grabbed the comrades and regrouped with the others.

Afterwards, some of my comrades told me I'd been brave and even heroic, but I don't see it this way. I wasn't scared; I realized I acted naturally when the cops attacked us, out of concern for my comrades. Capitalism teaches us to put ourselves first and to be scared of kkkops, but it can't squash our natural response to fight for the people we love.

I'm on crutches, and my arm is black and blue; next time, I'm only going to fight harder.

Red Youth

Joins PLP to make `Dream' Come True

It was last August, late and, eliminating Starbucks off our list of prospective meeting spots, we went to the overpriced Mexican restaurant next door. Over a $30 pitcher of sangria (we discovered the price after the fact), some friends and I talked politics as we had done before. Half-way through the sangria, two people there said they had something to tell me. They came at me with this WWF tag team approach and said they were both communists and involved with a communist party called the Progressive Labor Party.

To be honest, I was kind of freaked out. I was wining and dining with living, breathing communists! The Hollywood images of what the Party might mean started to flow through my head. All I could see was red and a gigantic octopus with its tentacles reaching out engulfing all of society as the Party subjected all of humanity to its diabolical scheme. Any second I was sure they would make me sign a membership card or make a blood pact or even worse, take me to some secluded location to perform ancient communist cleansing rituals, to cleanse me of any remaining bourgeois ideologies.

Despite what anyone said, I still struggled for weeks trying to think through these stereotypical images that had been implanted in my brain. However, I trusted the people and now realize that at that time I was more afraid of probably having been a communist all along -- and only now began to really consider it -- than I was by the fact that they were communists. I used to dream of a better society. One where my dad didn't have to work at the economy-sized child of Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, because his 20-year loyalty to the corporate sector wasn't good enough. One where my mom could afford to go to the doctor after her body had become a broken-down machine from too much work, much like the machines she hauled around for that auto parts place.

I used to dream of communism, but without really knowing the words. This is why I joined the Party, because I was tired of always dreaming. It was the Party that helped give me the words to speak communism, to make communism. The Party, far from those stereotypical renditions of authoritarian conspiracies bent on subjugating humanity, is the means by which we are able to implement our common cause of human liberation. Now I no longer dream of communism. Now I help build it. Happy May Day!

A member (and loving it)

Tuskegee-type Racism Still Going On

A special lecture about the Tuskegee Experiment sponsored by the Humanities Division of Medicine at the medical school where I work caught my eye. I've studied this racist medical tragedy but I wanted to hear the speaker's view and the audience response to gauge their understanding of scientific racism.

For 90 minutes Dr. James Jones, author of "Bad Blood: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment," unraveled this most notorious racist experiment in U.S. history. In Tuskegee Alabama, a small town with a high incidence of syphilis among black men, the U.S. Public Health Service studied thousands of black men from the 1920's until the 1970's. Even when a cure -- penicillin -- was discovered in World War II, it was intentionally denied these men, to maintain the study. Dr. Jones said this effectively killed hundreds. He noted that many high-ranking medical and government careers were created by these "investigators" using the statistics and "studying" these black men until they died. This was nothing less than murder. He said the Civil Rights struggle put an end to this "experiment" and exposed it as a showcase of U.S. racist murderous "research."

Tuskegee is near Selma, Alabama, the site of a large Civil Rights march. Before that, a whistle-blowing scientist tried to expose this tragedy but it wasn't covered.

The weakness with Dr. Jones' scenario was his conclusion. He said hospital Ethics Boards now can prevent future racist studies. All study participants must sign "acknowledgment" forms.

I rose to thank him for educating the large number of young people there and for reminding me of my own participation in stopping a similar racist study at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The latter was used as a "laboratory" to study impetigo and nephritis, partly funded by the Army. The "scientists" even flew young, scared Native American boys back to the University of Minnesota for kidney biopsies to get data points. They never offered treatment to the Red Lake population. Careers were also made from these racist studies, including a pediatric building named after the principal "investigator," Louis Wannamaker. The Civil Rights struggle halted this study.

But I also stated that this racist research continues today, citing Johns Hopkins placing black families in apartments being demolished to study lead effects even after they were found to contain high levels of lead. And Columbia University is trying to link "criminal behavior" to blood chemicals found in black families -- they took spinal taps of young boys who had brothers in prison.

Dr. Jones was speechless about these revelations. The moderator said there was some "controversy" about these studies. But if these connections are not made, it's not only counter-productive but very harmful to speak of Tuskegee as "an isolated event."

A Medical Worker

Airport Workers Fight Pro-Boss Hacks

As promised, we're keeping CHALLENGE readers informed about the struggle here. In this fight we have two enemies; the racist bosses and the union misleaders. The workers are still upset with the union leaders for collaborating with the racist bosses and inviting them to our union meeting.

At a meeting, which the bosses unsuccessfully tried to spy on, we collectively wrote a strong and critical letter to the union officers demanding that no bosses be allowed to attend union meetings. We also demanded that the union leadership quit dragging its feet on the racist treatment of immigrant part-time workers. The workers told the union leaders that we expect a response to our demands within a few days, or we'll take our demands to the national leadership.

As PLP and CHALLENGE have pointed out many times, workers should have no illusions about the lousy pro-capitalist union leaders serving our class interests. Their total silence while the courts and the United Airlines bosses stole the pensions of 140,000 United workers is a harsh reminder as to who they serve. They're becoming more like the German unions that served Hitler and the Nazis.

Every struggle, big and small, from the United pension rip-off to the struggle of immigrant part-time workers to keeping bosses out of union meetings, can be turned into "schools for communism," where we can win workers to fight for communist revolution under the leadership of PLP. We'll keep you posted on the airport fight-back.

Airport Red

Lauds LA May Day Internationalism

I just read the May Day article from Los Angeles, and have a few comments. Although I couldn't make the march, I did come downtown for the afternoon rally. I work with many of the immigrant groups who sponsor the annual march, but many times their anti-communist sympathies mar their work in the working-class movement. One such error is their support of liberal politicians' bills in Sacramento as the way forward for immigrant workers' rights. I disagree with this, so it felt good to read your correct criticism in your paper.

At the rally, I searched out the PL newspaper. Most had been sold by the time I arrived, but I obtained one from a PL member. As usual, I enjoyed reading it. After going on-line, I now see the paper is available on the internet. I will read it there often.

One more thing. It really was good to see the large presence of youth of color in your contingent in the LA May Day rally. None of the other left groups there had that presence. In fact, the march usually has only immigrant populations from Latin America, Mexico and Asia, and white U.S. supporters. The make-up of your representatives was a good sign of the type of orientation you have among the working-class communities.

One of our problems, especially in large urban areas, is petty-bourgeois nationalism. This is especially prevalent amongst the youth in the high schools and colleges. (Your article on LA's Cinco de Mayo scare brought this out clearly.) The youth are taught to hate other ethnicities. This poison remains in them as they become adults. Communist theory and practice endorses the unity of all workers and peoples, and gives no significance to the concept of "race." So, to see a rainbow of colors of youth wearing the red tee-shirt of communism and mobilizing for communism -- for me that was the best part of the rally. Thank you for being at the rally.

An avid reader

P.S. I feel PL must be more visible in this movement. Many of the workers who march for the rights of workers in various industries (such as janitorial, hotel, garment) are immigrant workers who are not anti-communist. I have worked for years attending rallies, supporting programs for these workers, but I never see PL. Your LA comrades should consider my constructive criticisms on this, for it is unacceptable that only liberal politics are presented to the militant immigrant workers at their events. Again, please excuse the sharpness of my criticisms. I think that being present at activities on May Day is very important. It's just not enough.

CHALLENGE Comment: Thank you for your criticism. We do try to participate in many as actions as possible involving immigrants and other workers and students. But we can always try harder.

PLP Big Influence In Immigrant March

I participated together with other friends in the [immigrant workers'] May Day March and I saw and felt the great influence the Party can have in the working class. It's true we can't convene a march as big as we'd like, but it was obvious that we had a big influence with our chants and presence in this one. This filled me with happiness.

May Day began 125 years ago, and although the numbers of participants, especially in the U.S., is small, the essence has improved in every aspect. This is due to PLP. The Party began to celebrate May Day in the 1970's, when nobody in the U.S. paid attention to this important day. Only the Party rescued it and put it in the hands of the working class again. We should be proud. We must always be in the vanguard of the political struggle.

We have to improve our work, to grow and to mature in all aspects. Since 1886, when the Chicago workers were massacred, the relations of production continue to be based on the bosses' exploitation of workers. But on a few crucial occasions, there have been attempts to end this exploitation. The Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution have been a source of inspiration for millions of workers worldwide, and a source of lessons for our Party.

Since 1886, there have been more wars, famines, epidemics and calamities in the world that have killed more workers than at any other time in history. Science and technology have advanced, in many cases displacing workers' jobs and leaving the bosses with billions in profits. All this money could have been used to combat the famines in Africa, the effects of natural disasters, like the tsunami, epidemics like AIDS that affect millions of workers in the poorest areas, to improve education. Instead it's used to make more wars, to conquer more markets, killing more workers, and generating more profits for the bosses.

Since 1889 workers have celebrated May Day. For workers it's not a party with dancing like in some countries, where the bosses and revisionists have tried to subvert it. It's a celebration of struggle, and a pledge to continue the fight for communism.

That's why I'm proud of our Party and of the recent march where we showed that the working class can follow, not fear, the correct line, the line of PLP and the fight for communism. Long live Progressive Labor Party! Long live Communism!

A Comrade

One-sided view of Punk

In CHALLENGE (5/11), Southwest youth's letter entitled "Punk and Violence" -- besides containing factual errors (both Rancid and Green Day were from San Francisco, not the SoCal area) -- took a very narrow view of punk rock. The writer said, "A punk show is a place where you can now freely buy and sell narcotics, which were in all likelihood supplied by the police, and drink until you're disgustingly drunk."

All music scenes, whether rock, rap or punk, have reactionary sides, including sexism, racism and drug use, but in many parts of the country Punk music opens the door to political discussion. One "scene" that stayed underground from the 1980's to the present is in Washington, D.C. Its forerunners were Minor Threat and later Fugazi. Both lead a movement of young people to escape the drug culture that infested both rock and punk scenes in the early '80s and get them involved in politics. These bands frequently played benefits for causes like homelessness, spousal abuse, apartheid and anti-racism, simultaneously creating a music that pushed the boundaries of what punk could do, fusing reggae, rock and punk. This is just one example of many.

Punk is soaked in liberal and anarchist tendencies but we need to take a balanced view in analyzing these subcultures. Young workers are drawn to punk because of capitalism's alienation. Many pick up instruments to try to communicate their frustrations with this racist system. We need to reach out and show them that waging class struggle for communist revolution is the ultimate way to get rid of the profit system's horrid conditions. And maybe we'll produce a bunch of songs about it, too.

Cudjoe

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Liberals say US should stay in Iraq

A new Pew Research Center study of those Democratic activists who came to public attention last year as backers of Howard Dean....shows they're not peaceniks....willing to pull out at any price. In fact, Dean supporters are more inclined than other Democrats to say U.S. troops should remain in Iraq until the situation has stabilized. (Washington Post, 4/28)

Black youth and all US youth: grim future

...The employment rate for the nation's teenagers in the first 11 months of 2004 -- just 36.3 percent -- was the lowest it has ever been since the federal government began tracking teenage employment in 1948....

In Chicago, only one of every 10 black teenagers found employment in 2004. In Illinois, fewer than one in every three teenage high school dropouts are working....

"Two-thirds of this generation are not living up to their parents' standard of living,"....

...Workers can't even get a modest increase in the national minimum wage.

Globalization was supposed to be great for everyone. Nafta was supposed to be a boon. Increased productivity was supposed to be the ultimate tool -- the sine qua non --for raising the standard of living for all.

Instead, wealth and power in the United States has become ever more dangerously concentrated,....

A remark by Louis Brandeis comes to mind: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both." (NYT, 5/12)

Red Cross confirms U.S. abuse of Koran

The Internationl Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday that it had given the Pentagon "multiple" reports from detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that American personnel had mishandled the Koran. The committee said the complaints from detainees then ceased.

Its statements...came just days after Newsweek retracted an article...saying military investigators had reported that Americans at Guantánamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet... (NYT, 5/20)

On nukes, US slaps Iran, winks at Israel

The odds are good that if the Pentagon doesn't launch a major missile attack on Iranian facilities in the next year or so, the Israeli government will -- with a wink and nod from President Bush....With a nuclear bomb stockpile now estimated at more than 200 warheads, Israel is fueling the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But, from the White House to Capitol Hill to newsrooms across the United States, the Israeli nuclear arsenal draws scant mention let alone criticism.

....Americans may not notice. But people elsewhere in the world are more likely to reject the double standards. (Norman Solomon, Creators Syndicate 5/8)

Sounds like workers need a real revolution

At a gala dinner in his honor, Tom Delay cited his party's recent achievements: "bankruptcy reform, class-action reform, energy, border, security, repealing the death tax." All of these measures are either irrelevant to or activity hostile to the economic security of working Americans.

Yet as Mr. DeLay boasted, many Democratic members of Congress also voted in support of these measures. In so doing, they undermined their party's ability to claim that it stands for something different.

So where will change come from? (NYT,)

Dominican Republic and 40 years of US invasions

Roughly 40 years ago, on the morning of April 26, 1965, President Johnson spoke with a top State Department official about fast-moving events in the Dominican Republic. A popular rebellion was on the verge of toppling a military junta and restoring the country's democratically elected president, Juan Bosch, to power.

"This Bosch is no good," Johnson said....

Two days after that phone conversation, thousands of U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Santo Domingo...When the president went on television to declare that the military action was necessary to rescue U.S. citizens, he didn't mention that nearly all of them already had been evacuated before the Marines arrived.

...The public explanations for the invasion gradually shifted. On April 30, during a second televised speech, Johnson referred to "signs that people trained outside the Dominican Republic are seeking to gain control."

On May 2, LBJ pulled out the rhetorical stops, telling TV viewers that "what began as a popular democratic revolution, committed to democracy and social justice, very shortly moved and was taken over and really seized and placed into the hands of a band of Communist conspirators." But the evidence for Communist involvement was as flimsy as the claim about needing to save American citizens....

Four decades later the invasion is scarcely remembered in the United States....

The invasion of the Dominican Republic turned out to be the first in a modern series of U.S. military interventions...Santo Domingo was a prototype for the lightning-strike invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s....against Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001....

...We're going to have to really set up that government down there," the president [Johnson] said, "and run it and stabilize it some way or other."

Forty years later, it's easy to imagine similar conversations in the present-day Oval Office. (Baltimore Sun, 4/27)