Killer Kops, Kourts Wanted For Murder

Chicago May Day Dinner Unites Axle Strikers, Miss. Shipbuilders

Big Bosses, Obama Pull Plug on Wright

• Wright’s Religious Dissent Once Aided Rulers

Pushing Police State, Obama O.K.S Cops Who Gunned Down Sean Bell

Racist Profiling Sky-High

NYC Students Walk Out Over Killer Kops, Racist Budget Cuts

a href="#Howard U. Students Invade Pol’s Office, Back Katrina Victims">"oward U. Students Invade Pol’s Office, Back Katrina Victims

a href="#May Day Sees PL’s Ideas Growing in Spain">"ay Day Sees PL’s Ideas Growing in Spain

a href="#PLP’ers Make Mark At Colombia May Day">"LP’ers Make Mark At Colombia May Day

Celebrating May Day Coast to Coast

a href="#The State of the World….">"he State of the World….

a href="#Life Teaches the Reason for — and History of — PLP">Li"e Teaches the Reason for — and History of — PLP

Stay Tuned for Communist Revolution!

Los Angeles; Detroit

S.F. Bay Area: PLP’s May Day Activities Cover the Waterfront

Mexico May Day Inspires Re-commitment to PLP

May Day Spirit Spurs Seattle Summer Project

a href="#PL-led Action Hits Mexico University’s Oppressive Rules">"L-led Action Hits Mexico University’s Oppressive Rules

LETTERS

Ira Gollobin Advised Draftees Too

a href="#Don’t Let The Fascists Tell Us Who The Heroes Are">"on’t Let The Fascists Tell Us Who The Heroes Are

a href="#Shed Illusions About Imperialism’s Allies">"hed Illusions About Imperialism’s Allies

Striking Immigrant Workers Head Up Paris May Day

Anti-Fascists Battle German Neo-Nazis, Cops on May Day

REDEYE

• US racism has Obama on leash
• Gitmo liars: Brass, not inmates
• Elections: The fix is always in
• Zimbabwe, Tibet: Imperialist guilt

Marching On May Day!!

Los Angeles; El Salvador; Washington D.C.; Chicago

---

Killer Kops, Kourts Wanted For Murder

On the morning of April 26, the racist court system fired the final shot in the execution of Sean Bell, acquitting the three cops who murdered him on his wedding day. The killer cops walk free to kill again, after firing 50 rounds at three unarmed young black men. These events, plus the $2 billion-a-week bloodbath in Iraq, reflect what the bosses have in store for us, and why we need a revolutionary movement to smash them.

The racist judge disliked the "demeanor" of the two witnesses — the other two shooting victims, who survived the assassination — who testified against the kkkiller cops. He also didn’t like the fact that the two witnesses had prior criminal records! Yet the courts use people with records as witnesses every day. But more to the point, in this racist society, with the world’s highest prison population, overwhelmingly black and Latino, it’s becoming much more common for a young black male to be in the criminal justice system than in college.

From the time the shooting occurred, racist mayor Bloomberg and the police department were orchestrating a plan to prepare the other klansmen in blue to be ready for mass outrage. The racist mayor met with black and Latino "community leaders" and criticized the police conduct. Meanwhile, the misleaders of NYC’s workers bought into his garbage, conveniently forgetting this is the same mayor who slashed the school budget by over $100 million in one night, affecting mainly black and Latino students.

One of the main henchmen in this plot is the "former" FBI informer Al Sharpton, who told people immediately after the verdict they should respond with "non-violence." He went so far as moving any demonstration away from the Queens site of the murder and the surrounding angry community. The aim of Sharpton and other politicians is to divert people into demanding an "independent investigation" of the NYPD. Mayor Bloomberg called the original killing "deplorable," taking the liberal road, in contrast to former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s more Nazi-like tactics. This is the same Bloomberg who says he can’t pay municipal workers enough to keep food on their table (30% must resort to food pantries and food stamps).

But history shows that essentially nothing will be done to punish the killers. "It is extraordinarily hard to criminally prosecute officers who were on duty," said CUNY Professor of Police Science Eugene O’Donnell (NY Daily News, 11/29/2006).

Cops will continue to be racist goons because that’s the role they serve for the bosses. The entire judicial system is racist to the core. Over two million people are imprisoned in the U.S., 70% of them black and Latino workers, two-thirds for non-violent crimes. Ironically, the black and Latino youth who are victims of these murders are the very same people who the racist rulers want to recruit to fight and die in Iraq, killing other workers who the oil bosses exploit for billions in profits.

On the day of the verdict there were two protests, one in the morning where PLP’ers organized a picket line and led chants of "Racist cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!" Another rally in the afternoon sparked a spontaneous march through Queens’ streets to the murder site and the surrounding housing projects. As the marchers passed by, workers on buses, at their windows and in shops came out and chanted, in solidarity and anger over the verdict.

PLP played a small but important role in the events leading up to and following the Sean Bell verdict. We brought the message that workers can never get justice in the bosses’ racist court system and that a communist revolution is needed to destroy this capitalist system.

Chicago May Day Dinner Unites Axle Strikers, Miss. Shipbuilders

CHICAGO, IL, May 3 –– "And now I’m going to do for you what these people [PLP] did for us last year," said a returning black worker from Mississippi and one of the 7,000 strikers against Northrop Grumman and U.S. navy last year. We passed the hat and this worker returned to the stage and presented the 2 striking American Axle workers with over $1,000 we had just collected. It was a stirring show of communist-led working class solidarity and brought many to their feet. This was one of the many high points of our May Day dinner.

Our dinner tonight was attended by more than 150 workers and youth –– with a lot of new young faces. The crowd reflected the revolutionary movement we are building across all the bosses’ artificial borders. There were auto and transit workers, battle tested health care workers and professionals, college and high school teachers and students, immigrant and community activists, black, Latin and white, women and men, young and old. The program was planned and carried out by newer and younger cadre who are beginning to take the reins of leadership.

There were many other high points as well.

• A taped interview was played from two PLP Iraqi war veterans who could not be here.

• A veteran Party leader told how a PLP summer project among farm workers had changed her life and urged everyone to either attend or support the upcoming summer projects in Los Angeles and Seattle around aerospace workers and the military.

• A worker who has been through a two-year struggle against racist health cuts spoke about the need for communist revolution. "This system can’t be fixed. It must be torn down," she said.

• A teacher told how an 18-year old Chicago State University student was murdered by these racist cutbacks, when she was sent home from the ER instead of being properly examined. Instead of a "keynote address," another comrade stirred the crowd with an original revolutionary poem.

• A comedy skit skewered Clinton, Obama and McCain, and the evening ended with everyone on their feet, fists raised, singing the Internationale.

This May Day showed that despite overwhelming odds, we can build the revolutionary communist PLP. In the face of massive attacks on all fronts, from war, racist terror and mass poverty, workers and youth are seeking answers and can be won to PLP. The road to revolution will be long and difficult, but like the song says, "a better world’s in birth."

Big Bosses, Obama Pull Plug on Wright

Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a creature of the ruling class, bankrolled by the bosses with deep pockets. He began his religious career as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. From 1970 to 1975, the Rockefeller family paid Wright’s way through the Fund for Theological Education they had established in the 1950s. Elite universities like Duke, Yale and Princeton have invited Wright to preach. The Rockefellers’ own Riverside Church in New York opened its pulpit to him in 1997.

With his broad popular base, Wright helped Barack Obama enter the U.S. Senate. But the White House hopeful had to dump his old mentor last month. Wright’s black liberation theology, long useful to the rulers in misdirecting working-class anger, now clashes with their imperialist war agenda. While Wright offers twisted critiques of U.S. foreign policy, Obama seeks to muster support and troops for U.S. rulers’ widening wars. He vows to add 92,000 soldiers once in office. Meanwhile, Obama minimizes racism — "We’re 90% there [equality]," he tells black voters — and calls Wright:

"Divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems — two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all."

Thus, Obama not only lumps workers and bosses into one group ("us all") rather than defining them as opposing classes; he also, in effect, denies the racism directed against black, Latino and Asian workers by equalizing the "problems that confront all of us," ignoring the double unemployment rates, lower incomes and second-class schools and housing afflicting these groups brought on by the rulers’ racism.

At odds only over tactics, however, Obama and Wright serve the same war-making capitalist class. While Obama may have slipped slightly in the polls, he is feeding quite well at the contributions trough. "Through the first three months of the year, employees [that is, executives, who can afford big payoffs, Ed.] of nine major industries — from communications and defense to transportation and Wall Street — gave the majority of their donations to the Illinois senator over rival Hillary Clinton." (Wall Street Journal, 5/3/08)

Wright’s Religious Dissent Once Aided Rulers

Wright’s nationalist religious movement served U.S. rulers well near the end of, and after, the Vietnam War. By pushing electoral politics, it provided a safety valve to black workers disgusted with genocide, subjected disproportionately to casualties in the war and to imprisonment at home, and hardest hit by a permanent slide in manufacturing jobs and wages. Wright helped lead spirited rallies and demonstrations decrying racism but demanding the election of black politicians as the solution. Scores of black mayors, who, in fact, helped perpetuate the rulers’ racism, won office in major cities aided by activists like Wright.

The first official act of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, backed by Wright, was to lay off 3,000 city workers, the majority black. New York’s David Dinkins, also that city’s first black mayor, cut the budget of all vital services, especially affecting black and Latino workers while increasing only one department — the cops, the very ones responsible for a series of racist murders.

Obama, however, had higher ambitions than Wright. Though an outsider fresh from Harvard Law School and the New York business world, he gained a ready-made, mobilized base by joining Wright’s 12,000-strong Trinity congregation in Chicago before he started running for the Illinois state senate in 1996. At the time, Obama’s Project Vote effort to register black youth dovetailed with Wright’s phony militancy.

Pushing Police State, Obama O.K.S Cops Who Gunned Down Sean Bell

But, as their Iraq oil war threatens to spread to Iran and go global with China, U.S. rulers’ needs have changed. Until they can bring back the draft (and even after) they require willing recruits for their armed forces of every so-called "race." Furthermore, organized opposition, however harmless to imperialism and racist atrocities, no longer suits U.S. capitalists, who want a domestic police state. So Rockefeller protégé Wright’s usefulness has dwindled.

Freed of Wright’s baggage, Obama waves the bosses’ war-and-fascism banner openly. His immediate racist, pro-cop, pro-capitalist, anti-militant response to the clearing of the NYPD cops who murdered Sean Bell with a 50-bullet onslaught tells all. "We’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down," says Obama, later adding, "Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive." Obama stood even to the right of outright warmonger Hillary Clinton, who suggested the feds "look into" the Bell case.

Obama faces racist criticism from presidential opponents hoping to make Jeremiah Wright the next Willie Horton. [In 1988, Bush, Sr.’s campaign ran ceaseless TV ads depicting Horton, a black Massachusetts man convicted of raping a white woman (a charge he denied) of being put back on the streets by Democratic candidate Dukakis after being paroled in a Dukakis-sponsored program.] Obama also is being warned by backers like the New York Times, who say the "loony" pastor hurts Obama’s election chances.

But Obama’s plight deserves no sympathy from the working class. He, just as much as Clinton and McCain, and perhaps more effectively, serves capitalists who need to expand their war-making and crack down severely on domestic dissent. Voting for any of the candidates won’t change a thing. Neither will praying or demonstrating with pampered frauds like Wright.

The profit system that ceaselessly creates war needs to be destroyed and replaced with workers’ rule. That is the ultimate goal of our revolutionary, communist Progressive Labor Party.

Racist Profiling Sky-High

The number of people subject to police stop-and-frisk actions in the first quarter of 2008 rose by more than 35,000 compared to the previous quarter, to a total of 145,098, the largest ever seen in one 3-month period. In both quarters 82% were black or Latino. And the number of bullets fired by the cops increased between 2001 and 2006.

Police stopped releasing data on the "race," gender or age of shooting human victims around the same time they begun reporting on the breed of dogs shot by cops each year. (Information from NY Sun, 5/6.)

NYC Students Walk Out Over Killer Kops, Racist Budget Cuts

NEW YORK CITY, May 3 — Students at several high schools walked out on May 1 to protest the acquittal of the kkkops who assassinated Sean Bell and against the racist budget cuts hitting NYC schools. Scores of students joined the rally at Union Square to show solidarity with the immigrant-rights May Day rallies.

A city-wide walkout was called for at a budget-cuts conference weeks earlier where scores of students gathered to plan upping the ante against Mayor Bloomberg’s recent racist attacks on NYC students. Those who’ve been meeting with PLP became the walkout’s leadership. They met with others from different schools to organize a plan; struggled with their classmates over the importance of fighting back as a class; distributed leaflets this morning at train stations most students use; and led students out school doors.

Despite intimidation by the administration and the dozen police cars and fire truck stationed at the school, most students overcame their fears and walked out.

Students displayed real solidarity and leadership, belying the stereotype that youth care only about themselves. When one assistant principal ordered teachers to lock students inside classrooms, students avoided classes the period they were planning to walk out, and instead spread the word to go to classrooms of teachers who supported the walkout.

One student overheard a dean calling students "idiots and stupid" for planning a walkout and ordering safety agents to lock them in. That student and her friends struggled with safety agents to refuse, leading most of the safety agents to support the students, even encouraging them to leave.

When the students finally reached Union Square, they heroically marched behind a banner proclaiming, "Asian, Latin, black and white, smash police terror with communist revolution," chanting, "The workers, united, will never be defeated!" They then chanted in solidarity with marching workers and gave speeches on why they walked out and why the budget cuts were racist. PLP students who led the walkout and demonstration explained the need for a communist revolution to smash capitalism. All the students cheered and helped distribute our literature.

Earlier, most students spent the entire day with the Party contingent preparing for the immigrant-rights march. During that time, the students encountered a black party who tried to tell the predominantly black group of students they needed to think about "themselves" as black people first, before anyone else. After a heated debate the discussion ended with the students chanting in their faces, "Asian, Latin, black and white, workers of the world unite!"

When the march began, many more students had joined our growing contingent and were eager to spread our communist message through city streets. As the marchers passed by, we gave out the last of 10,000 leaflets and 900 CHALLENGES and then joined them, chanting along the way.

The following day (Friday) PL students invited all those who had attended the Union Square rally to our Saturday May Day march and dinner. Now we must maintain the momentum in the school and recruit those students who have grown close to the Party. We also must organize the other students who understood the importance of taking action against racism and spreading communist ideas at the Union Square rally to read CHALLENGE regularly, join a study group and eventually join the Party.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. –– Twenty students from Howard University marched from campus to the office of Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana) who has been complicit in the gentrification process of New Orleans by blocking a moderate bill that would have supposedly guaranteed one-for-one replacement of demolished affordable housing. Vitter was "unavailable," so the students sat-in, demanding action. A dozen cops were called to intimidate the students, to no avail. The students presented a petition signed by 400 students to Vitter’s aide demanding that Vitter stop blocking the bill, and the students vowed to return to his office in solidarity with public housing residents in New Orleans, while several students will also return this summer to continue the struggle in New Orleans itself. Several of these bold students joined the May Day march in New York City and brought their message of struggle against fascism to the May Day dinner.

These actions were a result of Howard University Political Education and Action Committee spending spring break in New Orleans working with "C3/Hands Off Iberville," a coalition of New Orleans activists and public housing residents fighting against the demolition of their public housing homes. Major real estate developers, with support from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the New Orleans City Council, are using the lie that Hurricane Katrina made public housing uninhabitable to demolish affordable housing and replace it with high-end condos. They already did this—before the storm!—by demolishing St. Thomas public housing and creating River Garden, with only 200 affordable of the 700 that had been promised to the community.

New Orleans gives us an early look at fascism USA. Bulldozers and police brutalize people and their homes, while the ruling class tests out strategies of social control while letting their buddies make huge profits from the "recovery." All the more reason to fight for revolution!

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Spain, May 1st — "I knew the PLP in the United States," said a Spanish youth when he got a PLP leaflet. He was happy to find out that communist political work is a lot bigger throughout the world than he thought. "Long Live May Day! Long live the working class!," we chanted today. Here and in all parts of the world, the work of the Progressive Labor Party is clear: spread the true ideas of communism far and wide.

The Workers’ Commissions unions Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and the General Union of Workers (UGI in Spanish) in Spain organized a May Day march for workers from all over, but in reality workers know that these reformists and revisionists are part of the capitalist system and that the only thing they’re good for is to try to pacify the masses. We won’t rest. We’ll keep working hard to bring the workers the real revolutionary struggle, not like these sellouts.

It was a real celebration. There were workers from all parts of the world, and we passed out many communist leaflets in the march. I believe that with a lot of concentration, our work will grow a lot. We have made ties with workers and have vowed to bring them CHALLENGE and other material to be able to build the fight to destroy this capitalist system that kills the working class and finally to implant the only solution for the international working class: THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM!J

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BOGOTA, COLOMBIA, May 1 — A 100-strong contingent led by PLP participated in the May Day march here. Amid pro-capitalist reformist ideas pushed by union hacks and fake leftists as the "solution" to the pro-war policies of President Uribe’s death-squad government, U.S. rulers’ most loyal ally in the region, PLP’s internationalist communist politics stood out. Our revolutionary chants, distribution of 3,000 communist leaflets and hundreds of DESAFIOS brought many workers and youth around our contingent and joined our chants. (More next issue.)

Celebrating May Day Coast to Coast

NEW YORK CITY, May 3 — Over 800 workers, students and soldiers from the East Coast kicked off PLP May Day here with a bang. Activities spread across the city.

"The Workers, United, Will Never be Defeated" chanted nearly 200 members and friends of PLP marching through Brooklyn streets carrying red flags and banners calling for unity of the international working class and the need to smash police terror with a communist revolution. Anger over the acquittal of Sean Bell’s NYPD execution squad and billionaire Mayor Bloomberg’s racist budget cuts spurred several high schools walkouts on May 1 (see page 3) and lent an extra urgency to this year’s May Day. Passing cars responded enthusiastically to our signs, "Honk if you hate racist police murder." Over 2,600 CHALLENGES were distributed.

a name="The State of the World….">">"he State of the World….

All the events heard state-of-the-world talks, one showing why capitalism only offers a future of more war and fascism regardless of who wins the 2008 election and inspired renewed optimism by connecting the growth represented on May Day with the necessity and ability of the working class to create a communist future, without minimizing the hard reality of the difficulties in building such a movement.

At another dinner the two keynote speeches were written and delivered by young female comrades who showed polished political analysis, poise and righteous anger over the capitalist system that wages war against the working class for bosses’ profit. The speeches emphasized class struggle and the unity of female and male workers worldwide, as well as a call to combat a capitalist society mired in crisis and marked by endless wars.

And a third dinner’s speech stressed that despite what cynics say, workers can be won to fight capitalism. But these ideas don’t fall from the sky. Workers need communist leadership and need to become communist leaders themselves.

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A highlight at one celebration was hearing why comrades from three generations joined the Party: One who met a PL’er in his church was physically confronted by cops on horseback at an anti-war march, sparking the realization that democracy does not work. Everything learned over time from the PL’er then clicked; he now knew the real solution was to fight for communism.

Another joined after several hard experiences in community organizations led to the conclusion that reform doesn’t work. Although initially disagreeing with some things, after years of struggle he realized that they were necessary. Being in PLP and building a base in the working class simply became the right thing to do.

The third joined at age 12 to "be part of a group," but after two years of study groups, club meetings, summer projects and ideological struggle, fighting for communism and being a member of PLP took on a whole new meaning.

A brief history of PLP was viewed through the lens of one member’s life experience as a teacher. When NYC parents fought for more control of their children’s schools in the 1960’s, thousands of teachers followed their racist union leadership to strike against a mostly black and Latino community. This member was part of a PLP-led fight to physically open the schools as well as launch "freedom schools." One member recalled being called a racist epithet at five years old for crossing the racist picket line.

Stay Tuned for Communist Revolution!

Young people were front and center throughout the evening, from the planning to the speeches to the cultural performances, showing the Party’s growing vitality and attention to developing new leadership. A poignant skit created by a group of twenty young people highlighted youth leadership as it exposed military recruitment as a scam to win youth to fight and die in imperialist wars to defend the profit system. The skits and an open mic showcased the drive and enthusiasm youth have to grasp revolutionary ideas and make them their own.

Several veterans of PLP’s military work emphasized the importance of youth enlisting to build PLP. Many ideas were also presented on how to win veterans who return home disillusioned from receiving nothing of what they were promised and scarred by U.S. imperialist atrocities. A young female industrial worker did a great job explaining to the young people present just how powerful the workers can be when won to communist ideas.

The crowd was inspired by an outpouring of original communist music, poetry and visual art by three generations of comrades and friends of the Party. Individual comrades took the floor to give detailed answers to key questions, such as, "How will communism fight to destroy racism, sexism, and nationalism?" and "How can joining the Party change the world?"

All in all, these workers, soldiers and students assembled on a highly-charged day that both celebrated past achievements and pointed toward a challenging but ultimately victorious future on the road to a communist society. "Stay tuned!"

Los Angeles

April 26 — "The bosses can’t carry on their wars without workers producing for these wars," declared a woman industrial worker at a May Day Dinner. "We are those industrial workers! The factories are the heart of the society and they need to be the heart of the revolution. That’s why it’s so important that we organize in the factories using CHALLENGE networks….I’m an industrial worker and CHALLENGE opened my eyes to the reality of capitalism, oppression and discrimination at work….It’s very important to expand the readership of CHALLENGE so that our fellow workers can understand the racism, sexism and exploitation which we are forced to live with and can join with us in the PLP. Long live Communism!"

Another comrade explained that "Revolutions only happen if there’s a communist party with the correct ideas and a political base among workers and others, especially industrial workers." The speaker cited "the Bolsheviks [who] didn’t retreat….under fascist repression, concentrating in the factories and the armed forces…. [With] unbreakable confidence in the working class and in turn the workers’ great confidence in them, they achieved the ‘impossible’ in 1917 when the workers took power."

One speaker reported on the struggles in the colleges against cutbacks and on the Summer Project to bring communist politics to workers. Speakers highlighted the key role of soldiers in fighting to end imperialist war with revolution. At one event a high school student presented the historic importance of May Day, followed by a comrade who linked the legacy of May Day to the 1968 worker-student uprising in France, citing the decisive role of workers, the need for the worker-student alliance and the political leadership of a truly communist party like PLP. A moving poem captured outrage at the effects of capitalism as well as the desire to fight for communism.

About 300 people participated in these activities, enjoying songs and delicious international food and camaraderie. They reflected intense political struggle throughout the year to bring communist politics to workplaces, schools and friends. We concluded with enthusiastic preparations for the distribution of CHALLENGE, leaflets and flags for the May Day immigrant-rights march. J

Detroit

April 26 — Today PLP re-established its May Day tradition in Detroit with a dinner of over two dozen workers, teachers and youth, including special guests from the American Axle picket lines.

A young community college teacher gave a brief history of May Day, how the PLP re-established May Day in the U.S., and how he looks forward to marching each year to advance international communist revolution. A couple from American Axle spoke about the difficulties of the strike and how the UAW leadership was in bed with the AAM bosses and GM to cut their wages.

A third speaker talked about the acquittal of the killer cops who murdered an unarmed black man Sean Bell in NYC on his wedding day. He said that the bosses need racist police terror to enforce a future of wage cuts, poverty and war, and that the Sean bell case and the American Axle strike were two very good reasons to join PLP and build a revolutionary movement to smash the racist rulers.

This may be a small step in the big picture, but it can be an important event for the future of PLP and the class struggle in Detroit. J

S.F. Bay Area: PLP’s May Day Activities Cover the Waterfront

BAY AREA, Calif. — PLP members and friends celebrated May Day in activities throughout Northern California, providing many opportunities to advance our communist politics. Despite the limitations of liberal-led marches and rallies, workers were open to our revolutionary message. The ongoing struggle to develop newer Party members and recruit new ones remains the main limitation of our potential. Despite this we spread our communist ideas throughout all the May Day events.

In the inland port city of Stockton, Party members made contacts with longshoremen who had struck for eight hours to protest the war in Iraq. In San Francisco, by selling CHALLENGE and distributing leaflets to the dockers, significantly we brought a communist revolutionary analysis to this otherwise liberal-led march and rally. Previously, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU) had struck against the World Trade Organization in Seattle; for the framed Mumia Abu Jamal; and an "unofficial" one-day protest of an on-the-job death of one of their comrades.

These actions refute the lie that workers won’t fight around "political issues." But they’re all framed to appeal to the capitalist electoral system. This ties into those capitalists who trace the Iraq war to the Bush administration attempt to run the Iraq war "on the cheap," while undermining the overall U.S. world position. This is a far cry from the workers taking the bosses’ war head on. (See box.) Our challenge is to push beyond these limits and bring revolutionary politics to the forefront.

We also attended a rally and March in Dolores Park where a PL teacher met with former students who helped distribute our literature there.

In Oakland, PLP members joined the immigrant rights march. Those around us picked up our chants, focused on internationalism, working-class unity and revolutionary ideas. The march grew larger as it progressed and was the most multi-racial in recent years. Four student friends of the Party from a local university marched with us. Several Party members have already followed up contacts made there.

Elsewhere in the inland Bay Area, a young teacher comrade participated in a march organized by teachers against the budget cuts at their school. We hope to continue to develop this class struggle.

Transit workers, teachers and college students attended a May Day dinner this weekend. Old friends enjoyed good food, great speeches, and an afternoon of communist celebration. A conversation with an old friend revealed how the reality of life can be used to show workers that capitalism is the root of our problems. Our challenge is to present communist revolution as the answer. Overall, this May Day helped build the influence of the Bay Area Party.

Mexico May Day Inspires Re-commitment to PLP

Mexico CITY, May 1st— A group of members and friends of PLP participated in the mass May Day March in Mexico City where hundreds of thousands of workers come to show their anger against the capitalist system and its government. We distributed 15,000 leaflets and 300 CHALLENGES in which we exposed the capitalist system including the privatization of oil and the need for a communist revolution in order to build a society that meets the needs of the working class.

Our contingent marched with banners and chanted slogans like , "LONG LIVE COMMUNISM! DEATH TO CAPITALISM!’’ AND "ONE CLASS ONE PARTY, WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!" We also sang songs like "Bandera Roja" and "Bella Chao" and of course the INTERNATIONAL. We were a small militant group but we captured the attention of many marchers.

After the march we had a gathering where we talked about the day’s activities. One of the things that inspired many comrades was that many new youth participated with us who hadn’t before. One of them said that he’d participated in other organizations and that none of them had convinced him as PLP had. That’s why he asked that we keep inviting him to future meetings. We decided to have a meeting this same week to plan some activities and to maintain constant communication.

Another thing that inspired many was the participation of someone who had been inactive in the last few years. At the end of the march, this friend gave a small speech in which he talked about why it’s important to celebrate May Day and the need to continue organizing the working class, thus announcing his recommitment to the Party. Some suggested that he help organize a cadre school about political economy and help in continuing to deepen the political understanding of more comrades.

We hope that next year we’ll have a bigger contingent with more political leadership.J

May Day Spirit Spurs Seattle Summer Project

SEATTLE, WA., May 3 — "The world needs communist politics now more than ever," declared a young Party worker, our keynote speaker, at tonight’s May Day Dinner. He followed an Iraq veteran who urged all to continue fighting U.S. imperialism’s Mid-East occupation at the upcoming "Winter Soldier" events. Finally, a student leader invited the multi-racial group of students, educators, campus workers, military veterans, active-duty soldiers, Boeing workers and families to join our July Summer Project.

The keynote speaker outlined the brutal attacks from U.S. bosses preparing for wider wars, eventually World War III, how they need to attack workers at home in order to attack workers abroad. Fascist intimidations cited included 2.4 million now languishing in prisons, neglected Katrina survivors, the assassination of Sean Bell, the brutal exploitation of Latino immigrants in war factories and government immigration raids.

"Ultimately," our speaker said, "this racism is used to divide us and hide the fact that wage slavery is the curse of all workers regardless of ‘race’ and gender." Just ask the striking American Axel workers how the wage system "serves" them!

Many volunteered for our July Summer Project as we fight for "the hearts and minds" of Boeing workers whose contract expires this fall, and of soldiers at nearby Ft. Lewis (one in attendance) and McChord Air Force base.

One friend brought her husband, who "loves to talk politics." He was not disappointed. Between mouthfuls of food, we discussed how communist society could and should function, how to make communist politics primary, and how to have confidence that our Party and the working class can lead society.

Between the dinner and Thursday’s May Day immigration march we distributed EVERY CHALLENGE in the city to readers and sellers. A thousand leaflets about the communist international spirit of May Day and another about Sean Bell circulated among marchers, in Boeing shops and other workplaces, homes and classes. Friends gave generously as we passed the hat to help pay for all the literature.

A Boeing retiree we’ve known for over 30 years made a special contribution and then took extra literature for a mosque and a mostly black church. "I’m glad to see you passing the hat," he said. "This good stuff costs plenty."

On weekends prior to May Day, a team visited Boeing readers and sellers at their homes to discuss the ideas our friends were already reading in CHALLENGE over coffee (a Seattle obsession!). This helped make our dinner a modest success.

Class struggle and agitation are crucial, but without these personal ties, we will remain stuck in neutral.

We’ll expand these team visits between now and the Summer Project to bring the communist class-consciousness expressed by our young keynote speaker to many more in the area.

"Today on May Day," he concluded, "we remember that it’s the working class who built this world; we planted every field and laid every brick. All the wealth of the world was created through the labor of the working class. This world is not for us to slave in, but to master and to own. We have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to win."

a name="PL-led Action Hits Mexico University’s Oppressive Rules">">"L-led Action Hits Mexico University’s Oppressive Rules

MEXICO, April 16 — PLP organized a protest at a school in UNAM (Autonomous University of Mexico) against the Rules of Inscription reproduced on April 7th, in an edition of the "Rights and Obligations of the Universities" by the Administration’s Committee in " Defense of the University Students."

These rules require that only students who have finished their Bachelor’s degree in three years and with an average grade of nine (barely 10% of the students achieve this) are allowed to choose a major and their preferred school. This same rule excludes from UNAM those who finish their bachelor’s degree in more than 4 years. And for the faculty, to achieve permanent status, a professor would have to work 5 times longer (505% more) than the current plan.

The UNAM student strike of 1999-2000 demanded the repeal of this same rule. In the face of the mass and prolonged protest against the police intervention to smash the strike, the Rector declared that this rule would be suspended until it was discussed in the University Congress (that they could never organize). However, since the protests got smaller, now the government in using the Administration’s Committee in the Defense "of the university students" to remind us of their regulation. The majority of students are against this.

The PLP quickly called for a protest inside one of the schools where we demanded that the Director take the message of our anger against this ruling to his superiors. We also demanded a cafeteria for the students, improvements in the showers in the sports area, and permanent status for the "interim" professors, some of whom have been in this interim situation for 10 years, and other demands.

About 60 students came to the protest and hundreds watched it, including teachers and workers who’ve shown their support and agreement. We brought red banners of PLP and we talked abut the need to build a new type of proletarian party that fights directly for Communism.

We recognize that even though we’ve been timid in putting forward the ideas of the liberation of the working class, we’ve taken steps that have also led to the math professors demanding the same things of the school administration. We’ve also carried out a campaign to distribute copies of PLP’s Road to Revolution IV. Several professors have shown us their support and encouragement to continue fighting actively for revolution.

Greetings to all the comrades!

LETTERS

Ira Gollobin Advised Draftees Too

I was saddened to learn of the death of Ira Gollobin, a long-time fighter for the legal, political and ideological interests of the working class [see CHALLENGE, 5/7]. A personal incident can give some idea of the service he rendered to working people.

In the 1950’s, immediately after the cease-fire in the Korean War, I received a draft notice. (Military conscription still existed.) Being a member then of the old Communist Party (CP), I took the notice to my CP section organizer (local leader) and asked her what to do. She said that, as of that moment, I was dropped from membership and that no one would talk to me.

This was a period of intense government attacks on communist activists, and understandably, I felt somewhat confused at this news. I spoke to some leaders in the old movement, and, indeed, no one would talk to me. Finally, after approaching numerous people about my predicament, a friend told me of a lawyer who operated out of a storefront office on the Lower East Side, and advised political activists who were being drafted. This lawyer turned out to be Ira Gollobin.

He gave me extremely sound advice which, after entering the Army, enabled me to fend off pressures by military intelligence and other officers to become a political informer. In fact, Ira’s advice permitted me to participate in a legal and political struggle that ultimately ended the Army’s practice of giving bad discharges based on a draftee’s political activity prior to military service.

Incidentally, the section organizer who told me I was dropped from membership gave up on the working class and became a Democratic Party state committee-person. So much for the commitment of that "leadership."

Experiences like these eventually led me to help organize in Progressive Labor, an organization that has never turned its back on the working class.

An Old Red

a name="Don’t Let The Fascists Tell Us Who The Heroes Are">">"on’t Let The Fascists Tell Us Who The Heroes Are

Recently, the liberal media and people like political comedian Bill Maher on his HBO show, were telling us constantly that Valerie Plame was a hero we should all admire. She was the CIA agent outed by a right-wing politician-newsman —there’s absolutely no loyalty among these thieves.

On the Maher show, she was cheered, and when Maher asked if she had been involved in killing operations, she said yes. After all, that’s what these bloody hired killers do for a "living." They strongly front for U.S. aggression and murders worldwide, back since the end of World War II, when the CIA was formed.

Anti-communist CIA-trained mercenaries invaded Cuba at Playa Girón (the Bay of Pigs) to try to topple the Castro regime and resurrect a pro-U.S. regime similar to former dictator Batista who had enslaved the population for decades. But the invaders’ dream of local support turned into its opposite, and the population helped the Castro army defeat them quickly. (Interestingly, Havana traded the captured mercenaries for badly-needed medical supplies, and the Kennedy administration sent diet products! That’s about how far you can trust these fascists to keep their word.)

Currently there’s a growing opposition worldwide. You should examine these people who the press extols as the latest hero or spokesperson, for example the documentary film-maker Michael Moore and Barack "Archer-Daniels-Midland-Ethanol" Obama.

And the Progressive Labor Party should continue exposing these vermin.

Up-North Reader

a name="Shed Illusions About Imperialism’s Allies">">"hed Illusions About Imperialism’s Allies

I was confused by the CHALLENGE article (4/9) about the 20th anniversary of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, celebrated on March 25th in Cuba.

It described Angola’s MPLA government backed by Soviet imperialism and its satellite Cuba pitted against the U.S./South African-backed UNITA "rebels." Both were rotten, pro-capitalist nationalist organizations.

Raul Castro and the government representatives from Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa have good reason to celebrate — this victory enabled them to rule over and exploit the working class for a long time.

The article said the battle marked the beginning of the end of the hated South African apartheid regime and the myth of its army’s invincibility. But the Cuban army was not a red army like the Soviet Red Army that drove the Nazis from Stalingrad all the way to Berlin. During the 1970’s, Castro sent 13,000 Cuban soldiers to Ethiopia to support the fascist military Junta (Dergue), a Soviet puppet, helping it maintain power and murder workers.

The current rulers of South Africa, Angola and Namibia, who were the leaders of those "liberation" movements, were in bed with the imperialists then and still are. Now Cuba (where Fidel replaced U.S.-style capitalism with Soviet-type state capitalism) is turning to China because its former imperialist master, the Soviet Union, is gone.

It was South Africa’s heroic students and workers, not the Russian imperialists or their puppets, who fought apartheid with the goal of liberating the working class. But the African National Congress (ANC) reformist leadership and the revisionist (phony leftist) South African Communist Party dashed their aspirations. Capitalism and racism are alive and well in South Africa today. Under the current ANC leaders, the country’s workers are still oppressed and exploited.

The following editorial is from CHALLENGE 4/6/1988:

"Angola and Namibia are other scenes of capitalist carnage. In Angola, over 215,000 have died since 1975. The Cuban/Soviet-backed Angolan government is fighting the U.S./South African-backed UNITA ‘rebels.’ Each side is rotten to the core. The Angolan people will be oppressed no matter who ‘wins.’ In Namibia, over 5,000 have been killed in a war between the South Africans and the Namibian nationalists. This war is closely linked to the war in Angola….The record of imperialism is clear!.... Capitalism, imperialism, or nationalism breeds death and destruction. To…end these evils…you must destroy capitalism."

We can’t have illusions in any nationalist/ capitalist allies of imperialism, whether U.S., Russian or Chinese. We must win the world’s workers to fight for our own class interests: communism.

An African immigrant

Striking Immigrant Workers Head Up Paris May Day

PARIS, May 1 — It’s in the street that it happens / When something happens / A ballot in a ballot box / Doesn’t change much!

Sound trucks in May Day demonstrations across France blasted out the new song by the radical Jolie Môme theater company. Over 200,000 marched in 150 cities, demanding more buying power and condemning the government "reform" requiring 41 years’ work (instead of 40) for a full retirement pension. The demands reflected the reformism of the trade unions that organize May Day here.

Nevertheless, in Paris (30,000 marchers), pride of place was given to undocumented immigrants who’ve been striking since April 15, demanding legalization. In Marseilles, 30,000 marched behind a banner reading "May ’68, May 2008: the struggle continues." In Nantes, a student union contingent chanted their banner’s slogan: "The struggle is ... class against class!"

Today’s demonstrations kick off a month of struggle, including a coming teachers’ and government workers’ strike and nation-wide protests opposing retirement "reform." The government is cutting 11,200 education jobs.

But without revolutionary communist leadership, the May actions will likely be sold out. An April 10 agreement with the bosses on union representation will prevent small unions from blocking sweetheart contracts, making the CGT the key union player. It will use this position to sell out workers the way it sold out last November’s rail strike (see CHALLENGE 12/12/07). The right-wing French parliament will certainly ratify the agreement.

A recent poll shows unfortunately that 64% of the workers here still trust the union hacks to defend their interests. It’s up to communists to turn the disappointment that these labor fakers will inevitably generate into revolutionary anger and organizing.

Anti-Fascists Battle German Neo-Nazis, Cops on May Day

HAMBURG, GERMANY, May 1 — Large anti-fascist May Day demonstrations opposed neo-Nazi marches here and in Nuremberg. Over 4,000 people attended the kick-off rally here, and 10,000 marched. Burning barricades were erected on commuter train tracks and in streets to stop the 1,100 neo-Nazis from marching around Barmbek, the Hamburg neighborhood that was the center of the 1923 communist uprising.

The cops used water cannon to protect the neo-Nazis, whose buses were nevertheless stoned. Some were punched when the anti-fascists were able to get near them. A police car was overturned.

In Nuremberg, 4,000 protestors marched north from the city center towards the planned neo-Nazi demonstration. Some 3,000 helmeted, club-swinging cops cracked heads in trying to protect the neo-Nazis from the anti-fascist demonstrators. The cops also attacked the anti-fascists with pepper spray and water cannons. The Nuremberg mayor exhorted people to ignore the neo-Nazis.

Only 200 anti-capitalist demonstrators attended a May Day rally in Hanover, most having gone to the protests in nearby Hamburg. The Hanover rally speaker said: "It is right to demand better working conditions and higher wages, but it is wrong not to make demands that go further. We are so bold as to ask: Wherefore work? Wherefore wages? And we demand the abolition of wage labor!"

On April 30, a dozen neo-Nazi thugs attacked five immigrants in Dortmund. German anti-fascists who happened to be nearby rushed up and together with the immigrant and native-born workers routed the neo-Nazis.

In Tübingen, 600 people marched on May Day.

Heribert Prantl, writing in the conservative Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said German unions’ failure to protect workers from the consequences of the Harz IV "reforms," which notably ended benefits for the long-term unemployed, has made workers here realize they must fight, which has breathed new life into May Day.

REDEYE

US racism has Obama on leash

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert complains that the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. is harming Barack Obama’s campaign by "roaming the country with the press corps in tow, happily promoting the one issue Mr Obama has tried to avoid: race."

How can anyone — Mr. Wright or anyone else — be faulted for forcing a black candidate to address the issue of race? It’s absurd. If America will elect a black man as president only if he avoids the issue of race, then the fault lies with… American racism…(NYT, 5/1)

Gitmo liars: Brass, not inmates

A… powerful new book about Guantánamo, by an American lawyer named Steven Wax, is summed up by its title: "Kafka Comes to America."

The new material suggests two essential truths about Guantánamo:

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash awards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

Second, torture was routine, especially early on. That’s why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Irag and Guantánamo….

When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth…. But over time — and it’s painful to write this — I’ve found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.(NYT, 5/4)

Elections: The fix is always in

Serious presidential candidates:….what makes them "serious" is their understanding that American politics is settled, a done deal. The deal is this: While real Republicans can drift, unchecked, to the dark side of empire and neofascism, Democrats are supposed to campaign and govern as moderate, "responsible" Republicans.

We live, in other words, in a corporate state, the basic terms of which are no longer open to debate….

All hail the (invisible) corporate state and its sacred fetishes: God, guns, flag. All hail the McWorkers of the new economy, who roll up their sleeves and vote for one smiling liar or another on their way to their second job. All hail the dearth of health care, the children left behind, the endless billions for war and most of all the fact that these matters are not — I repeat, NOT — open for discussion in this presidential election year or… the next one or the next.(Robert Koehler)(GW, 4/25)

Zimbabwe, Tibet: Imperialist guilt

Zimbabwe… was not just a British colony, but where Britain refused to act against a white racist coup, triggering a bloody 15-year liberation war, and then imposed racial parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land reform at independance. The subsequent failure by Britain and the US to finance land buyouts as expected, along with the impact of IMF programmes, aided the current impasse.

As for Tibet… the CIA… bankrolled the Dalai Lama’s operations for many years. Such arrangements have in recent years passed to other US agencies and western NGOs…. For a US administration that has designated China as the main threat to its global dominance its minorities are still a stick that can be used to poke the dragon.(GW, 4/25)

Marching On May Day!!

Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, May 1 — The red banners of communism waved high on Broadway in downtown LA, while PLP’ers distributed 8,000 communist leaflets and 3,600 CHALLENGES during the immigrant-rights march here. Our literature exposed the hypocrisy of the bosses and their politicians — both the liberal and conservative racists — their plans for wider imperialist war and the role of the pro-immigrant "leaders" who support deadly patriotic loyalty to the ruling class and the Democratic Party.

Fascism emerged early. Police and School District agents stopped some students from boarding a bus to go to the march, claiming "parental permission is not enough — you need permission from the District." Nonetheless, many of these students came, even more determined. Our multi-racial contingent had a strong, visible impact with our red shirts and flags, but most importantly with our chants calling for working-class unity and communist revolution.

The police, business leaders, march organizers and LAPD are congratulating themselves for their "good job." This march was smaller than last year’s, partly because the leaders are pushing voting over marching, and partly from fear instilled in workers by last year’s racist police attack in MacArthur Park and the constant propaganda about the police preparing to "handle provocateurs." In response we chanted, "Sean Bell’s killer cops mean…FIGHT BACK!"; and, "LAPD you can’t hide… We charge you with genocide!"

Street speeches, followed by slogans celebrating May Day as International Workers’ Day resonated throughout the march like: "The magic of our hands, that from nothing make everything. From the clothes, to the buildings to the cars to the airplanes. And even then, the bosses call us ignorant. We workers make everything of value in this society, that’s why we raise our fist and chant, "See this fist; Workers to Power!"

"Today millions of workers around the world march as one class against this rotten capitalist system, source of hunger, murders and wars…"

Some workers asked for and contributed money for our red flags. Others bought red shirts that call for workers’ unity and communism. The red flags contrasted sharply with the U.S. bosses’ flag march organizers imposed on workers. From the few years we’ve had contingents in the "immigrant-rights" marches, we have a presence many workers and youth now expect.

From these May Day activities, several people joined PLP. Others have become CHALLENGE distributors. The Party was strengthened and is preparing for our coming Summer Project. We will be bolder in taking CHALLENGE to our friends to help build the Project. These activities will provide communist political leadership to the working class which needs it more than ever, facing growing fascism and imperialist war. J

El Salvador

A PLP leaflet provoked anger of leaders of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) during the May Day march of more than 75,000 workers through San Salvador, the capital. Workers demanded rice, beans, and some proclaimed support for the FMLN Presidential candidate, Mauricio Funes. A group of high school and university students painted on the walls "Proletarians of the World, Unite!" and chanted the slogan "Capitalists watch out—here come the communists!"

As usual CHALLENGE is anticipated by the working class every May Day. The PLP distributed 530 CHALLENGES and 3,800 communist leaflets. The moment the leaflets and CHALLENGES began to be distributed, many workers came to get them. This caused a big impact because it attacked the electoral parties.

FMLN leaders in the sound trucks read a part of our leaflet and alerted workers to destroy the leaflets. This made people read the leaflet on the spot. The FMLN security said they wouldn’t allow any propaganda that was not from them, following the same repressive practices as the right-wing ruling party, pro-U.S., Arena government.

Carlos Ruiz, Mayor of Soyapango and former leader of the extinct Salvadoran Communist Party and now the FMLN, stopped a comrade and questioned him about the leadership of PLP in El Salvador. A worker responded to him "Now, we don’t only have the oppressors of the government but we also have you." An ex-combatant of the FMLN reacted angrily and told him, "I fought so that these things would no longer happen and now you are the police."

Confronted by this reaction, those from the FMLN retreated and the distribution of the paper and the leaflets continued. However, the comrades were followed and at one point a small part of their material (200 leaflets and 20 CHALLENGES) were taken. "This has to be shown to the leader of the FMLN," said a servile follower of the electoral front.

Funes stated in the closing speech "Those who have damaged private property [referring to the graffiti] are social movements." They have nothing to do with the FMLN as a political party." He, along with other FMLN leaders, also expressed his gratitude for the presence of more than 600 uniformed police during the march and promised to raise their wages.

"Today ends the romance of some comrades who held some illusions about the FMLN," said a comrade. Once more it’s been shown that the working class can’t trust these electoral parties, which are part of the capitalist system. The PLP’ers and friends activities felt stronger and with more confidence in the working class. Now our goal is to consolidate and recruit more comrades to PLP, as a step toward the communist revolution that will end the murderous capitalist system.J

Washington D.C.

May 1 — PLP members here distributed over 100 CHALLENGES and hundreds of leaflets to the 200 people that attended this year’s immigration justice rally. The rally was smaller than last year, but more than half the marchers took home a copy of our communist newspaper! Many wore t-shirts and carried banners emphasizing unity among workers regardless of country or race.

Other organizations participating in the rally focused on reforming the system with new immigration laws, better housing policies, statehood for DC, and electoral politics in El Salvador. We spoke to rally-goers instead about the working class taking power through a revolutionary struggle.

One man from Central America agreed with our analysis that elections in the US or Latin America would not serve the working class. He was thrilled to learn that there was a party that rejected nationalism and organized one party for all workers everywhere, and intends to work with us.J

Chicago, Il

May 1st – Our PLP contingent, an integrated and international group of around 50 people, raised the red flag and marched behind the banner, "Long Live Communism." We led militant chants, distributed 1,000 CHALLENGES and DESAFIOS and 2,000 PLP May Day leaflets. We handed out 500 posters that read, "Smash All Borders/Destruir Todos Fronteras," with the Party’s name and logo. A small but spirited health care contingent marched from Stroger (County) Hospital. Other Party members marched with their community and student organizations and an Iraq veterans group.

In just two years, the May Day March for Immigrant Rights has gone from over 500,000 in 2006 to maybe 15,000 in 2008. Unlike the previous two years, the bosses were not united behind the march, factories were not closed and workers were not given the day off to march. This shows that when you march under the bosses’ leadership, without a mass communist movement to challenge them, they can turn the movement off and on at will.

Other reasons for the poor turnout were increased fear and intimidation due to continuous immigration raids and deportations. Organizers warned marchers that the police attacks in L.A. last year were due to "other groups with different agendas." Mayor Daley, whose cops are murdering young black and Latino men in record numbers, shared the stage with nationalists and revisionists, rappers and folk singers.

This march underlined the need to build the Party in the bosses’ mass organizations in this period of war and developing fascism. As the Presidential electoral circus moves millions to the ballot box, we must be patiently struggling to break them away from the racist rulers. J

1. May Day: Fight Bosses' Wars and Racist Terror Workers of the World, Unite
2. Pope Heils Anti-U.S. Europe-China Bloc
   1. RULERS AIM SCANDAL AT CHURCH FOES OF U.S. BOSSES
   2. VATICAN COZYING TO CHINESE RULERS
3. THE NEW YORK TIMES: All the News They 'Forgot' to Print
4. Will Cops Go Free for Sean Bell's Murder?
5. Marine Vet: U.S. Imperialists Are War Criminals
6. Fight Racist Destruction of Harlem
7. NYC YOUTH VOW MAY 1ST WALKOUT
8. Ex-Marine Links U.S. Racism, Katrina and Iraq War
9. Building for May Day Young and Old, Across All Borders
   1. New Jersey
   2. New York
   3. Spain: PL'ers Defend Immigrant, Organize for May Day
10. EL SALVADOR: Workers Won't Win Liberation No Matter Which Presidential Candidate Win
11. Axle Strikers Holding Fast Despite UAW Sabotage
12. Calif. Teachers Fight Budget Cuts, Tax Hikes, Union Fakers
13. PLP Growth in Pakistan New Hope for Working Class
14. LETTERS
    1. Fight-Back in Mexico and on Axle Picket Line
    2. When It Comes to Racism, There's No Debate
    3. Rutgers Coalition Walks Out Against the War
    4. How Red-Led Mass Actions Stopped Foreclosures in the Great Depression
    5. 1968: How 10 Million Workers Shut Down France
15. Ira Gollobin: A Communist for All Seasons
16. REDEYEONTHE NEWS
    1. US workers losing wage battle
    2. US ally slaughters unionists
    3. People know who really runs US

---

May Day: Fight Bosses' Wars and Racist Terror Workers of the World, Unite

On this May Day, International Workers' Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of global war beat louder and slaughter millions. World capitalism pushes its economic crisis onto workers' backs with mass racist unemployment, wage-cuts, soaring food prices and resulting starvation. Yet masses of workers are fighting back, with general strikes and food rebellions from Greece to Egypt to Haiti to Russian Ford and Romanian Renault auto workers to Detroit's Axle strikers.

This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a communist world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class. On this May Day, international workers' solidarity must meet the bosses' assault head-on, especially as they use the attacks on the world's 200 million immigrants to attack ALL workers.

Capitalism has spawned this migration across all borders. We say smash all boss-created borders. We are one class, internationally.

Capitalism created the working class, a class with nothing but its labor power to sell in order to survive. Early on, the capitalists moved millions of Africans as slaves from that continent to wherever they could produce the most profit. With capitalism's global expansion, immigration is now a worldwide phenomenon.

Capitalism's unrelenting drive for maximum profits uproots hundreds of millions of workers, forcing them into the squalor of sprawling mega slums, from Brazil to Nigeria to China, where 80 million Chinese-born migrant workers are branded as illegal. Many die crossing deserts and oceans from Africa to Latin America trying to reach jobs in the U.S. and Europe, as well as from starvation, malnutrition and curable diseases. Ten thousand died trying to cross into Spain from Africa in the last five years.

Those migrating to the more industrialized countries are not only super-exploited but are used as scapegoats, blamed for capitalism-created problems, and paid slave wages to lower the wages of all workers.

In the past, immigrant workers were on the front lines of class struggle. With global capitalism, the bosses -- by forcing this mass migration -- have internationalized the working class even more, providing the opportunity for a communist-led working class to forge the unity necessary for communist revolution. Immigrant workers are now positioned geographically and socially to help lead this fight worldwide.

Their role will become even more crucial as the imperialists' rivalry for world domination intensifies, particularly in the U.S., a declining power fighting desperately to hold its position as top imperialist while it gears up for wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually world war versus the rising powers in China, Russia and the European Union.

The U.S. rulers' fight over immigration reform concerns the tactics and strategies on how and when to wage these wars. One sector thinks these wars can be waged cheaply with a small, technologically superior military. These bosses opposing immigration reform just want to terrorize immigrant workers with deportations to continue super-exploiting them.

The liberal imperialist sector, however, needs an immigration reform that builds patriotism among immigrants through a 12-year-long path to citizenship. This is in exchange for recruiting millions of soldiers as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars and to maintain a workforce of millions of super-exploited workers for their war industries.

That's why their liberal politicians attack Homeland Security's "scattershot workplace raids" as bad economic policy. And their newspapers like the LA Times and NY Times criticize Congress and the Bush administration for endangering the ability of the bosses to achieve these aims.

These liberal rulers also use their state power to rein in their opponents like California's Orange County Sheriff Carona -- indicted for some of his many crimes in the county where the racist Minutemen were born -- and Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona's Maricopa County, Arizona, who terrorizes day laborers.

But the vitriolic anti-immigrant stance of their opponents also serves the liberal bosses, creating the terror and despair that drives immigrant workers into the arms of their liberal politicians -- and their leaders in the pro-immigrant organizations, churches, unions and community groups -- with their pacifism and dead-end electoral politics. The main organizing slogan of the pro-immigrant organizations is, "Today we march, tomorrow we vote!"

Their leaflet announcing the Los Angeles May 1st March praises the bosses' immigration reform and DREAM Act, aimed at forcing undocumented youth into the military under the farce of "helping them go to college," which they can't afford. This "Green Card army" will eventually become the army of all, via the draft or some militaristic "national service" scheme. The slave-like conditions and low wages of indentured immigrant workers will be extended to all workers.

With Democrats Obama and Clinton, and Republican McCain, supporting their comprehensive immigration reform bill and the DREAM Act, the liberal bosses will win no matter who becomes president. But their needs are forcing them to bring together two of the most oppressed, potentially militant and rebellious sectors of the working class: black workers and youth, crucial in industry and the military -- possessing a rich history of fighting the U.S. bosses' racism -- and immigrant workers with a long history of fighting U.S. imperialism.

With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students -- black, Latino, white, Asian and Arab, immigrant and citizen, men and women -- we can fight the bosses' racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world's workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.

The fire of May Day burns brightly in a vibrant and growing internationalist PLP! Workers of the World Unite! Fight to end racism and wars for profit. Smash all bosses' borders! Spread CHALLENGE, the internationalist, revolutionary communist newspaper! Fight for communism! Join us!

Pope Heils Anti-U.S. Europe-China Bloc

Obama got it wrong. Embittered workers don't "cling" to religion by choice. The ruling class he serves shoves it down their throats, as the media's non-stop coverage of the pope's visit reveals. The Catholic passivity Benedict preaches is -- like all faiths -- so useful to capitalists in stifling working-class anger that they made his every utterance and gesture front-page, prime-time "historic events." But nevertheless, the pope's visit is a mixed blessing for U.S. rulers. While they benefit from his spreading religious ideology among workers, they must also win mass political support for their widening wars. And, just as he did as a Hitler Youth in pre-World War II Germany, Benedict represents European bosses increasingly at odds with U.S. imperialism.

RULERS AIM SCANDAL AT CHURCH FOES OF U.S. BOSSES

His predecessor John Paul II mildly criticized the 1991 invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition that included large European contingents. At the time, Catholic bishops in the U.S. cooked up a theological justification for that war. Europe's oil majors, like Total of France and Eni of Italy, scored big deals with "rescued" Kuwait. But by the 2003 invasion, when it became clear the U.S. would not share Iraq's oil spoils with European firms, the prelates defied the Pentagon. Late in 2002, the National Council of Catholic Bishops declared, "We...find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq....[W]e fear that resort to war, under present circumstances...would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force."

U.S. rulers punished the Catholic leaders severely for their heresy. Starting with the Boston Globe that year, the bosses' media let loose a flood of exposés detailing sexual abuse of children by priests, pointedly blaming bishops for enabling and protecting pedophiles. Hardly breaking news -- sex abuse has been rampant in the church for centuries. But imperialist U.S. rulers played it up to rob pro-European clergy of all credibility. Referring overtly to the abuse scandal but implicitly to geopolitics, a New York Times editorial (4/17/08) reminded pope-struck readers of "stunning failures of the overwhelming majority of U.S. bishops."

VATICAN COZYING TO CHINESE RULERS

Now, as its European backers cement ties with China's rulers, the church is following suit, increasing the likelihood of an armed U.S.-China clash over U.S. protectorate Taiwan. The London Sunday Times (2/17/08) reports, "Tempted by the prize of a historic visit to China by Pope Benedict XVI, the nation's leaders have authorised a renewed effort...to heal their rift and inaugurate diplomatic ties....
[T]he Vatican is prepared as part of an eventual settlement to move its embassy from Taipei to Beijing." The Times quoted a senior Vatican official, "There is no problem with breaking relations with Taiwan....we have a duty to spread the values of the gospel." Those "values," no doubt, embrace China's recent purchase of a $2.8-billion stake in French oil giant Total.

But U.S. rulers tolerated and even welcomed Benedict because religion hinders a rational analysis of the world's two opposing classes and prevents workers from fighting back accordingly. "Pie-in-the-sky" promises of heavenly rewards and meaningless, mystical concepts of "good" and "evil" devoid of class content can help lead workers into militaristic patriotism. Parochial schools preaching "Church and Country" furnished millions of recruits for the U.S. war machine in the last century.

Grossly underpaid teachers in one New York Catholic school union have the right response to papal pandemonium -- strike. Our Party's goal is to organize working-class militancy like this into a mass communist party that will eliminate the warmakers and their religious apologists.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: All the News They 'Forgot' to Print

The New York Times, U.S. rulers' vaunted "newspaper of record," ran an outraged three-page-plus article on April 20 exposing unethical ties between the Pentagon and retired officers working for TV networks as "military analyst" talking heads. The Times complained that, in return for deals with military contractors and other payoffs, these experts have given a favorable spin to the war in Iraq, which the Times now claims to oppose.

What hypocrites! The Times itself was one the loudest proponents of the war, with editorials backing star reporter Judith Miller's tales of immense caches of "weapons of mass destruction." The Times bosses' main gripe with the Pentagon is the latter's failure to secure for Exxon Mobil and Big Oil the six million barrels a day of Iraqi crude (about 2 mbd now trickle out) that U.S. strategists foresaw.

Will Cops Go Free for Sean Bell's Murder?

While the liberal bosses prance around and pat themselves on the back for "making change" and proclaiming the end of racism in the U.S., three cops might very well be set free for the murder of Sean Bell in November 2006. Seems like the cops and the courts never got the memo.

Bell and two friends were shot at by plainclothes kkkops after leaving a bachelor party at a bar in Queens, NY. The cops claim that Bell and his friends first tried to run them over and that one of the men inside the car appeared to be grabbing for a gun in his waist. The cops then wasted no time shooting 50 BULLETS into the car, killing Bell and injuring his friends.

The bosses enlisted the ex-FBI informer and pacifier of black workers' anger, Al Sharpton. Our class should not be led by this bosses' agent who pervasively sells the snake oil of justice under capitalism. He's done it before with Amadou Diallo who was shot 41 times by the fascist police, and Patrick Dorismond in Manhattan and countless others. The cops' main role is to protect and serve the bosses' private property and terrorize workers, especially black and Latino youth, so that they do not turn their anger into rebellion.

With the coming elections the bosses need to win black, and all workers, to U.S. imperialism to stay ahead of their rivals like China, Russia and Europe. Barack Obama and the bosses need to give them hope that the system can work for them in the face of years of slavery, Jim Crow racism, segregation, police terror, poverty like in New Orleans and after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Workers and students should organize their friends and co-workers to expose the cops' role in the racist system of capitalism. No court will guarantee workers justice.

Marine Vet: U.S. Imperialists Are War Criminals

SOUTHWESTERN CAMPUS, April 3 -- "War crimes? Heck, the whole war is a crime!" exclaimed a student and Marine veteran of the Iraq war, summing up his contempt for the U.S. imperialist agenda.

Over 175 students, teachers and campus staff applauded enthusiastically. Foregoing classes, many stayed over three hours to hear testimonials from four members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and one from Military Families Speak Out (MFSO).

One army veteran/student quoted from Nazi butcher Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trials, exposing how all the rulers think: "Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in England, nor America, nor in Germany....But...it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along....Tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

He should have said, "any capitalist country" because Soviet workers were won to fight the Nazis in their own class interests. This vet said Göring's statement brought a "chilling familiarity to our experience since 9/11."

This vet quoted Marine General Smedley Butler: "War is just a racket....It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."

Urging soldiers to abandon blind pride, the vet noted the growth of anti-imperialist war activism, citing "the growing number of active-duty IVAW chapters."

Vets revealed their painful understanding of war crimes and the contradictions that soldiers fighting an imperialist war face daily. One ex-Marine in charge of detainees explained how he attempted to protect them from casual abuse by other soldiers. Another witnessed a whole town storm his platoon's position.

Current reports of corruption and of Iraqi recruits refusing to fight and turning over their weapons to Shiite insurgents mirrored one Marine's description of outright corruption of Sunni commanders who sold weapons to insurgents. This Marine was disgusted with the "dog and pony show" of the Iraqi military, which is clearly not motivated to defend U.S. imperialism. These experiences provoked him to ask, "What the hell am I doing here [in Iraq]."

The MFSO parent noted how his son couldn't make a decent living after high school and thus enlisted. This anti-racist MFSO member expressed dismay that after boot camp his son was trained to "hate people he never met." He said 85% of those killed in Iraq are civilians. His son suffers from PTSD after one tour in Iraq where, on burial detail, he had to collect body parts of deceased soldiers with whom he had trained. This parent stressed the need for everyone to actively oppose the war by reaching out to active-duty soldiers.

The Q and A session revealed the uneven development among these vets. One panelist opposed the war in Iraq but not Afghanistan. Asked about the draft, one vet answered, "Draft all college-age Republicans," which drew a laugh. Several vets supported a draft as a "wake-up call." That position is based more on frustration than a real commitment to national service of any kind that's promoted by the current presidential candidates. A few vets attacked imperialism as a system and opposed any wider wars or military call-up.

The potential for a revolutionary worker/soldier/student alliance was evident during these three brief hours. The panelists are part of the movement against imperialist war, which will ultimately require the fight for a world devoid of profiteers and exploitation. Such forums for political struggle are steps toward that goal.

Fight Racist Destruction of Harlem

NEW YORK CITY, April 12 -- Hundreds of Harlem residents and their supporters formed a human chain across several long cross-town blocks and then marched on the NY State Office Building, battling the gentrification of East, Central, and West Harlem, which will displace thousands of working-class residents and many small businesses. The cops tried to pen the demonstrators into a small area on the street, but they immediately broke through the barricades and took over the sidewalk. Almost all the passing motorists honked in support.

Having recently approved the take-over of West Harlem by Columbia University, the City Council's zoning subcommittee has now voted to rezone Harlem's main thoroughfare, 125th Street, and two surrounding blocks all the way across Manhattan, for luxury housing and businesses. Central Harlem is home to mostly low-income and working-class African-Americans, averaging below $25,000 annually. It's also a cultural center, home to generations of black writers, performers and artists. East Harlem (El Barrio) is a mainly Latino neighborhood, also providing housing for mainly low-income workers. This demonstration marked the first time in recent history that groups from all these areas have marched together.

For two decades, gentrification has been underway, with the renovation of old brownstones and houses, attracting African-American professionals and a growing white population. As local property values rise, Harlem can be totally gentrified within the next decade. Tenant activists estimate that half of all Harlem residents may be forced to move.

Although this show of militancy and unity was heartening, a weakness of the movement has been its looking for "good "politicians to turn things around. Some hope the new black governor, David Patterson (who replaced Eliot Spitzer), will protect their interests. But Patterson is closely tied to the other prominent black NY politicians, ex-mayor David Dinkins and Rep. Charles Rangel, who are deeply embedded with developers. Some hope City Council members will carry their banner, but the Harlem representatives have long supported gentrification. A few involved fighters are nationalist, and see this attack as only against "their own group." Most have welcomed the support of all.

Several comrades have been active in a Harlem church and community groups. We've pointed out how only a movement of rank-and-file workers and students can be relied upon to have our interests at heart, and that all politicians can only survive by doing the bidding of capitalist profiteers.

This attack on all of Harlem is based on racism of the foulest sort, hoping that not only will all NYC workers not back Harlem's struggle, but will even welcome "racial cleansing." We emphasize the role that racism plays and the necessity of multi-racial unity.

Most importantly, we must win our friends to see that gentrification, like the housing and financial crisis, the growing income gap and widening war and fascism are all part of capitalism, and therefore all our efforts should be linked to the fight against this racist system. We will continue to distribute CHALLENGE and bring some new friends to May Day. J

NYC YOUTH VOW MAY 1ST WALKOUT

BROOKLYN, NY April 16 -- More than 70 students from six different high schools in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Lower East Side joined together and held an after-school conference about billionaire Bloom
berg's promised budget cuts and how to oppose them. Six young black and Latino women representing a school's student government led the conference and electrified its closing moments unifying walkout proposals from across the room into a call for a city-wide walkout at noon on May 1st!

Students showed up ready to organize against not only the budget cuts but the increased police presence and criminalization of students that has run rampant in NYC schools. An opening talk set the political tone of the event by reminding us that the capitalist system is based on theft of the value workers produce on the job every single day. Most participants in the conference took CHALLENGE and everyone got a copy of the PL leaflet describing how debt service means that billionaires always get paid whether schools face cuts or not.

"These cuts are racist! Eighty percent of NYC school children are black and Latino, can't nobody tell me these cuts aren't racist!" one student shouted. "Bloomberg has 16 billion dollars; if he wanted to he could fix the schools' budget problems," one student stated in her speech. "The government is trying to put us down before we even get up," another student shouted. One student talked about being arrested and verbally abused by cops just for having her head outside of the window while watching a crime scene. We live in a period of growing fascism.

After breaking up into groups, students made lists of ways they can fight back against the cuts. Writing a petition, having rallies, getting the word out to more schools, letters to Bloomberg and having student walkouts were prominent on most lists. The plan is to link up with the immigrants' rights march in Union Square on May 1st.

Some students made the connection that the money that is being taken out of the schools' budgets is being used to fund the bosses' imperialist wars and burgeoning police state. PLP students spoke of learning about communism in the classroom and thinking it is a good idea. Communist politics helped defeat the all-too-common liberal error of blaming these cuts on the war alone.

Students left the room with the message that capitalism itself is to blame and that communism remains a real alternative worth fighting for. The task now is to mobilize these same young people to be organizers for PLP's May Day events this year on May 3rd and, over time, as another generation of young fighters for a communist future. J

Ex-Marine Links U.S. Racism, Katrina and Iraq War

BOSTON, April 14 -- Students, faculty and staff at Roxbury Community College (RCC), a mainly black and immigrant working-class school here, showed considerable interest in an anti-war event marking the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war. It highlighted the recent Winter Soldier testimony that publicized veterans' criticisms of the war. (See CHALLENGE 3/12)

Thirty-five in attendance heard the stirring remarks of two veterans and a speech explaining that U.S. rulers went to war to control Mid-East oil. One ex-Marine said Hurricane Katrina exposed the true nature of U.S. imperialism, which allowed mostly black workers to die in New Orleans while it was killing working people in Iraq. As a black man of Haitian descent, he declared that the racism of Katrina punctured his belief in U.S. patriotism and his willingness to "serve my country."

We watched some of the recorded testimony of other veterans who described the atrocities the U.S. committed in Iraq. It was inspiring to see how Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is helping to transform soldiers -- damaged by their experiences -- into anti-war organizers. However, although IVAW is introducing veterans to anti-war politics, the organization is also injecting patriotic content into those politics, undermining an understanding of imperialism, the real cause of the Middle-East wars. This builds a movement which the capitalist class can easily manipulate as they plan wider war to protect their strategic interests in the region.

Because PLP understands the crucial role of soldiers and students in the growth of a revolutionary communist movement, we played a pivotal role in this function. Some students who had attended our May Day dinner a week earlier helped to organize the event, distributing leaflets on campus.

The speech that presented a class analysis about the war helped people make more sense of the veterans' testimony by putting their personal tragedies into a political context. Soldiers are being forced to kill and maim Iraqis in a genocidal war so that U.S. capitalism can maintain its control over oil.

This analysis inspired one veteran to expound on his previous talk. "It's RCC students and Bunker Hill Community College students who are fighting this war,' he said, "not students from Harvard and Milton Academy." Then, he called for students and soldiers to "revolutionize" themselves as a necessary step in fighting back.

By understanding the class character of the war, working-class students can see the many ways imperialism is attacking them and their loved ones, and their role in organizing resistance. This event made it clear that PLP needs to sell CHALLENGE more consistently and expose students to a communist analysis about both world events and their own reality at RCC.

Building for May Day Young and Old, Across All Borders

New Jersey

We had a very international May Day dinner in New Jersey to raise funds for the Party's big events to celebrate this working-class holiday. Twenty-six of us came -- some immigrants from 11 different countries: Jamaica, Peru, Italy, Hungary, Ecuador, the Philippines, Macedonia, Guatemala, Israel, Korea, Honduras and from Africa. There was fabulous Ethiopian and Guatemalan cooking, black-eyed pea fritters, with desserts of apple pie and brownies.

We heard stories of immigration, of untold expense and deadly injuries. Many undocumented immigrant pay smugglers (coyotes) $7,000 to $10,000 to come from Central America. There is no guarantee the immigrant will arrive safely to his/her destination and many have died either abandoned by the smugglers, crossing the desert, the river, or even
asphyxiated piled up in cargo train cars, trucks, etc.

The Río Grande is cold and deep. Many don't survive the swim. One man loaded his three children into an inflatable raft and swam with one arm, pushing the raft with the other. Another woman spent one night with two other adults in the trunk of a car, almost dying of dehydration and suffocation. Each had a story of having to leave individuals in the desert who could not walk or be carried. Two people related how Mexican workers often carried other people, children or adults, to the border who would never have survived the journey without their help.

The message was stated throughout that an international Party, the PLP, is essential to get rid of borders forever. With each horrific tale, it became more obvious that borders mean only separation of families, lowering wages, starvation and death for working people. The clear communist solution has to include doing away with wage slavery, profits and the entire capitalist class of parasites who suck the blood from workers trapped by borders. The working-class immigrants have already demonstrated the fortitude and courage necessary to win! J

NJ Red

New York

A collective of young and veteran members of Progressive Labor Party is coordinating efforts for a large gathering to celebrate May Day in New York City. We're developing both the program and our organizing around a central theme of increasing class struggle to build the Party.

Our program features young comrades, helping to develop their leadership abilities, which is already reflected in the struggle they've spearheaded against NYC's Department of Education. (See CHALLENGE, 04/09/08.) The excitement generated around this struggle has increased CHALLENGE distribution and produced potential new recruits to PLP. The energy of students and teachers and their understanding of the class struggle sharpened during this fight, which should help make our celebration an exciting one.

We will also acknowledge the contributions of long-standing members as we build for the future. A veteran of many on-the-job struggles will stress the importance of communist organizing at the workplace, linking his experiences with a call for participation in a Summer Project at some of PLP's industrial concentrations.

Finally, we plan to ask the audience four questions about communism that our friends frequently ask. We hope the May Day celebrators will participate via their answers.

May Day marks a review of the strength of our communist organizing. The efforts of comrades, young and old, will ensure it will be inspiring and successful. 

NYC May Day Collective

Spain: PL'ers Defend Immigrant, Organize for May Day

SPAIN -- We are celebrating May Day, the international working-class holiday, including distributing a leaflet outside Metro (subway) stations in a major city here. This occurs amid growing attacks by the regular and immigration cops.

A friend from Brazil was arrested at his job just for the "crime" of being an undocumented immigrant. From the U.S. to Spain, capitalism, to survive, needs repression and racism against workers by forcing immigrant workers to work for less and produce super-profits for the bosses.

A group of us went to the police station to support our fellow worker. He was lucky not to be beaten by the cops. We celebrated a small victory because he wasn't deported, just given a letter of expulsion.

Communist ideas are being spread among workers in this and other struggles. Our May Day leaflet will bring these ideas to other workers who don't know about PLP. Anarchist ideas are widespread here and there's a fear about communism because anti-communist ideas are rampant. But now PLP'ers are working in many areas of the world with the aim of winning workers to understand what's best for our class: communism. Long live May Day and the workers of the world!

EL SALVADOR: Workers Won't Win Liberation No Matter Which Presidential Candidate Win

On May 1, 1886, May Day was born in the historic struggle of Chicago's workers for the 8-hour day, in a general strike that involved 350,000 workers throughout the U.S. On May Day workers worldwide march for their common demands, projecting the solidarity and unity of the international working class.

This May Day, thousands of workers, students and farmworkers will be marching, seeking a real alternative to the hell of capitalism. The potential power of masses of workers will be there. As they have in past years, many will be fervently looking for CHALLENGE and PLP's leaflets with a communist analysis. Others will come to support the FMLN's presidential candidates. In general, the great majority hates capitalism, but still don't see how to end it and build a new society based on meeting the needs of the working class. This is our challenge.

The situation in El Salvador worsens daily. Inflation is higher than in a decade. The cost of a family's basic needs has skyrocketed, out of reach for the working class. There are more street vendors than ever. All this is caused by the capitalist system of exploitation, which is in deepening crisis. And the international environment is not favorable for the ARENA party. The recession in the U.S. economy, the increase in oil prices and of many agricultural products, and the devaluation of the dollar compared to the euro, are factors that could help the FMLN win the country's presidency for the first time.

Every five years here the people go to vote for one or another of the candidates selected by the leadership bodies of the FMLN or ARENA. These electoral parties develop programs designed to maintain the capitalist system and to try to win workers' loyalty to them and their system. In reality, workers elect the hangman who will attack and starve us.

The electoral campaign has flooded us of promises and proposals to try to sway the electorate about the advantages of voting for Mauricio Funes of the pro-capitalist FMLN or the death-squad member and ex-police chief and FBI agent Rodrigo Avila of ARENA, who owns a private security company with thousands of repressive guards.

Funes and Avila each say they will better administer the capitalist system of exploitation, whether for the local bosses and their U.S. imperialist allies who support the ARENA candidate or the rising European and Chinese imperialists, who, through Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, support the FMLN.

As bad as Avila is, Funes, a willing servant of capitalism, stands to mis-lead more workers into thinking capitalism can serve workers' needs. In reality, these rival imperialists and local bosses are only fighting to gain the upper hand so they can rob the value the workers produce.

We can't take the wrong road; there is no easy way. The working class does not need capitalist and rising pro-imperialist presidents, nor do we need to continue sustaining the fascist police. We need a whole new system, a communist system, where the priority will be the lives of the workers and their families, not the profits of any murderous bosses.

It's urgent that the workers organize for a new alternative. That's why, on this May Day 2008, we should sharpen the struggle for a Party that represents the unity of the international working class. The organization with one flag, one Party, for one class must be our slogan. Join the internationalist communist Progressive Labor Party, vanguard of the working class, that fights to unite the workers of the world.

Axle Strikers Holding Fast Despite UAW Sabotage

DETROIT, MI, April 18 -- Workers and students from Chicago drove here to picket in solidarity with the American Axle (AAM) strikers. Originally we planned to join a giant solidarity rally, but the UAW leadership cancelled it, angering the workers. But when we said we'd come to meet the strikers anyway, the workers made us feel right at home.

On strike for seven weeks, the 3,600 workers are fighting company demands to cut wages from an average $25/hr to $14/hr, convert company pensions into 401(K)s and eliminate 1,000 jobs. The strike has mainly affected production of GM pick-up trucks and SUVs. One worker told us, "AAM has diversified and we supply other car giants like Toyota." But scabbing supervisors have maintained some level of production of Toyota axles. Chrysler is unaffected since their parts come from Saltillo, Mexico, where workers make 70 cents an hour!

The strike has caused layoffs of 25,000 GM workers and thousands more in the parts-supplier plants. One worker told a story about the bosses bringing charts to a meeting to show workers who they were competing against. Of the nine names listed, seven were AAM-owned factories in other countries. He left the meeting saying, "We're in competition with ourselves!" AAM is a global corporation with plants from Mexico to China. This worldwide battle among the bosses for markets, resources and cheap labor (imperialism) is behind the AAM strike.

While talking to the workers, distributing water and CHALLENGE, every car driving by honked their horns in support of the picketing black, Latin and white workers. They're not hopeful of any agreement coming soon. Many said they would vote against any concession contract. "We've already been out here this long, there's no point in caving in now," said one.

Meanwhile, the UAW international leadership has taken the negotiations away from the local, attempting to force the same sell-out contract they've signed with the entire auto industry.

With Detroit facing decades of racist cutbacks and decay caused by the retreating U.S. auto bosses, it's easy to see the source of the anger in the eyes of these workers. They speculate about how big a buy-out will be offered and how management will try to eliminate the most senior, highest-paid workers.

Several years ago AAM tried to implement a 2-tier wage system. Detroit workers rejected it but the contract passed after the company threatened to close the Buffalo, NY plant if they didn't approve it. When they voted "yes" the plant was closed anyway. Some of the laid-off Buffalo workers ended up at the Detroit plant and are now standing among the strikers as living reminders of how AAM lied.

When we asked workers whether they'd take the buy-out, some immediately said, "No." Some were undecided. Younger workers said they'd take it, and either look for work, open a business or go back to school.

Now that GM's supply of unsold cars is dwindling, there may be pressure on AAM to settle, but GM wants this wage-cut as much as AAM. The major assemblers have been pressuring the parts suppliers to slash wages and cut costs so they can buy cheaper parts. That's why they created this system of outsourcing decades ago.

All the workers thanked us for our solidarity. We invited them to May Day and obtained contact information.

The struggle against wage slavery lasts many lifetimes. The system cannot be fixed. As one worker said, "You cannot reform evil!"

Workers, and work itself, should not be a commodity with a price tag. We should contribute what we can and receive what we need. But it will take communist revolution to build that world. Let the AAM strike remind us why we fight for communism, and strengthen our will to fight!

Calif. Teachers Fight Budget Cuts, Tax Hikes, Union Fakers

California's educational system has been under attack from a combination of racism and the drive to maximize profits. Now the capitalist crisis is making it much worse, with a state budget deficit expected to top $8 billion. Republicans want to balance the budget by cutting education, health care, and other services. Democrats want "a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts." This is a no-win situation for California workers, but liberal union leaders want workers to pay.

"If state lawmakers want to go for tax increases, they should focus on education," reported the San Francisco Chronicle, citing James Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, which includes 245 of the region's largest employers (including banks, oil companies, and war contractors). "It's a good way to get the public to acquiesce to paying more." (4/12/08)

That same day, a workshop at the Oakland convention of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) discussed "How to Talk About Taxes." "We must ... increase taxes. This workshop will analyze obstacles to convincing the public this is necessary."

This "public" is overwhelmingly the working class. From 1975 to 1998, the income of the bottom fifth of Californians declined nearly 25% while that of the top fifth increased by 66%.

So why is a labor union doing the dirty work for Wunderman and his fellow bosses?

There's a world of difference between the trade-unionist view of "labor" and "management" as bargaining partners and potential political allies versus the communist understanding that workers and capitalists are locked in a deadly class struggle.

The CFT convention gave lip service to the fight for "progressive taxation" but the truth emerged around a resolution to "support or sponsor legislation that would require the State of California to generate and allocate sufficient funds to education." An amendment was proposed, seconded and supported to add the words, "without raising taxes on working-class families."

Leading CFT'ers jumped up to object, claiming "taxes are the price of civilization" and "it's hard to separate the working class from the middle class so this wouldn't let us raise taxes on enough people." Some delegates asked why workers should pay for a government that serves the bosses and a crisis created by their drive for maximum profits. The amendment was defeated, but the sharp struggle -- which the leaders neither expected nor wanted -- was itself a victory.

At a demonstration against the cuts in L.A. a few days later, when teachers eagerly took PL leaflets, one teacher said, "All of this could be solved by taxing the oil companies." This is unlikely since Exxon-Mobil and the big coporations run the system. A revolution will eliminate the profit-hungry bosses who run these and all companies.

Most CFT delegates sincerely care about students, oppose the Iraq war, and want to promote "labor solidarity." But without a communist leadership, they are being led into the hands of our enemies. For example, a video about the 1946 Oakland General Strike (which was smashed by the AFL Central Labor Council) claimed as a "victory" the formation of a coalition of labor and community organizations that channeled energy into the electoral politics of the emerging "cold war." A presentation on the greatness of Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded with the idea that we should enthusiastically support the Democratic Party.

Delegates were urged to get 1% of their local membership to walk precincts for the November 2008 elections. We should aim to win 100% to become CHALLENGE readers! In contrast to the liberalism of unions like the CFT, the Progressive Labor Party today is working to win workers and students to fight cutbacks with the goal of turning the bosses' attacks and wars for profit into a revolutionary war for communism. We invited teachers and students and parents to celebrate May Day with us and join our Summer Project!J

PLP Growth in Pakistan New Hope for Working Class

PAKISTAN, April 15 -- New elections have changed the face of the ruling class, now a coalition of landowning capitalists (PPP), industrialists and financiers (PMLN), nationalists (ANP and BNP), racists (MQM) and fundamentalists (JUIF). They claim to be forming a government of national consensus. Their one major goal in common: exploit the working class more effectively. The pioneer of this consensus is the husband of slain Benazir Bhutto, famous for his corruption, money laundering and kickbacks.

Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani has a landowner, spiritual background and uses God to justify exploiting workers. He spent five years in jail on corruption charges. After taking office, he announced a wage increase for laborers as a ploy to earn their support; restored the right to form unions; and made many other promises which cannot be realized under capitalism. They are attempts to ward off any potential unrest.

Asif ali Zardari (chairperson of the ruling coalition) claims they are "changing the system," but his "change" would substitute a civil regime for the current military regime to better serve imperialism. The alliance of these various parties cannot last long -- their internal rivalries will destabilize Pakistan.

PPP is helping President Musharaf by continuing his policies regarding the "war on terror" and relations with the U.S. Presently U.S. officials are actively seeking support from the new government for the war on terrorism, but workers know the CIA engineered this terrorism against Afghanistan's workers and farmers in the name of the war against "communists."

Back then U.S. imperialism protected the Muslims in a "sacred" war to make Afghanistan an Islamic country. They trained Muslim youth from throughout the world for terrorism, equipped them with the latest weapons, new cars and funds and provided them full protection for an illegitimate war against the Afghan people in order to counteract the Soviet Union. Osama bin Laden was on the CIA payroll in the training sites established in northwest Pakistan.

The capitalists' thirst for profit and resources to run their war machines drives this terrorism. It helps maintain the super-exploitation of the working class. Strategically northwest Pakistan is very important for carrying out imperialist wars, so the U.S. has created, or curries favor with, these fundamentalist factions to establish its influence.

Workers need communist leadership to fight the poverty and exploitation that are vital to capitalism. Poor workers here cannot afford their daily bread. Young children pick small pieces of food from garbage. They have little clothing, no shelter, no medication if they fall ill and no job opportunities. They are living to enrich the capitalists.

Fake leftists are playing imperialism's game, using the word "socialism," but PLP's ideas give hope to the working class that this murderous system can be destroyed. PLP is growing despite our limited resources. We don't advocate socialism, nationalism, "national democracy" or "people's democracy." We are true to the working class, trying to move workers towards communist revolution in exposing inter-capitalist rivalry.

Poverty, racism, inequality, unemployment and homelessness are all inevitable products of this murderous system. We must intensify the class struggle towards the goal of eliminating the cause of these evils. We in PLP have a rich history of fighting capitalism, equipped with revolutionary communist ideas. We must win workers to join us and wage an international struggle for communist revolution.

LETTERS

Fight-Back in Mexico and on Axle Picket Line

Several of us from a NYC organization attended the Labor Notes conference in Dearborn, Michigan on April 11-13, among some 1,000 delegates from the U.S. and overseas. There was one ugly incident: instead of fighting the war-making, racist, budget-cutting bosses, SEIU and California Nurses Association hacks physically fought each other over raiding members. Otherwise we had some very useful experiences.

In a workshop about unions and community groups we emphasized the fight for immigrant rights, particularly undocumented workers who suffer from the bosses' savage exploitation and discrimination.

We also heard from a San Luis Potosí, México union leader representing more than 300 workers fired from a glass plant that makes bottles for Corona and Modelo Extra Beer, very popular now in the U.S. After a long struggle, these workers organized a union independent of the pro-boss national union, and won a 19% wage hike plus other benefits. The boss retaliated, using the excuse of the U.S. recession, closing one plant and firing militant workers, so 250 lost their jobs. The boss hired new workers and forced them to sign blank papers, used later to make them members of the pro-company national union (very common in Mexico).

The fired workers are fighting back. They brought their protest to Anheuser-Busch (A-B) in the U.S., which controls 50% of the Modelo company. A-B's workers are represented by the Teamsters. One big Anheuser-Busch shareholder is married to the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

One great experience was to be one of 200 volunteers who picketed in support of the Axle workers, on strike for two months (see page 5). They're on the line 24-hours-a-day rain, snow or shine, keeping warm by burning wood in tanks. Workers from a nearby union local brought them food. They thanked us and offered to share their food. We chanted along with the pickets for two hours and raised some money for their struggle. Most gratifying, I distributed 40 CHALLENGES with the front-page article on the Axle strike. The workers thanked me for that.

It was great to share our struggles and views with other workers. I talked to a 22-year-old Mexican construction worker who has been working in New Orleans for two months. He showed lots of leadership at the conference, recounting many experiences in his young life in fighting the exploiting, abusive fascist bosses. I spoke to him about PLP and gave him CHALLENGE to share with other workers. We exchanged phone numbers to stay in contact.

Only a unified international working class, led by PLP, can achieve power through a communist revolution. Only then we will make our dreams as workers a reality.

A Red Fighter

When It Comes to Racism, There's No Debate

I recently attended a NYUDL (New York Urban Debate League) tournament in Bronx, NY. At lunchtime, I was happy to see debaters speaking on a bullhorn about the racist incident at a debate tournament in Newark, NJ, and the importance of fighting racism. Debaters circulated petitions amongst hundreds of students, teachers, parents, and other participants of many colors and ages. The petition called to outwardly oppose racism and to fight back united against racist acts, no matter how big or how small they may seem.

I was very excited to be a part of this tournament. Anti-racist actions like these are necessary to fight back against all of the attacks the bosses perpetrate against our class. Small fight-backs help raise class consciousness and will help set the sparks for the future communist revolution; the only way we can truly have a society without racism or borders. Every time I see fellow debaters with CHALLENGE in their hands, I know that there is hope for our long fight ahead. It's what gives me strength to keep struggling, to keep telling myself that what we do counts.

A Red Debater

Rutgers Coalition Walks Out Against the War

On March 27, 2008, a week after Rutgers students had their spring break, 600 students walked out against the war. The effort was the result of months of planning on the part of local Rutgers activists involving PLP organizers.

The walkout itself, while not directly associated with the Party, provided us with an opportunity to build a base for future support. After the walkout a rally was held at the nearby Voorhees Mall. During the rally several speakers spoke about the various ways in which the war has destroyed their lives.

A mother of a fallen American soldier spoke of her pain, anguish, and anger at the folly of Bush's polices. An Iraqi native spoke of the numerous ways in which the war ravages her country every day. She gave an especially emotional story about the way in which American stray bullets from nearby firefights struck a relative of hers while she was sitting in her classroom. All of their words only affirmed the truth that we know: this war must end.

The walkout was followed by an independent movement of 300 students to march through the Rutgers campus, along the way having two sit-ins. The march went defiantly on the nearby highway, Route 18. It was an inspiring display of the disruptive and commanding force of a unified collective. This move by the students shows the power of the working class and the fact that working-class solidarity is unstoppable. The movement to end the war has undoubtedly grown stronger as a result of the walkout. Smashing the capitalist war machine is the only way to end this war and all wars. Working in movements like these are vital to establishing a network of comrades ready for the next step towards communist revolution.

Scarlet Communist

How Red-Led Mass Actions Stopped Foreclosures in the Great Depression

Over two million workers' families could lose their homes because of the subprime crisis. The bosses' media says basically nothing can be done about the foreclosures, caused by the bankers' thirst for profits. Clinton's and Obama's "solutions" merely postpone the "inevitable," proposing "negotiated compromises" between the banks and homeowners who can't afford mortgage payments. The Federal Reserve bails out failing banks and McCain says "the free market will take care of things."

But 75 years ago during the Great Depression, the working class -- led by communists -- had a better idea, and it wasn't voting.

When the marshals were evicting workers from their homes -- throwing their belongings onto the street -- or family farmers were losing their homesteads, hundreds and thousands of workers would show up on the day of the eviction or foreclosure and literally overwhelm the marshals and the cops and simply carry the furniture back into the workers' homes. A NY Times headline (Feb. 27, 1932) read: "1,500 Fight Police to Aid Rent Strike."

When bankers or realtors at auctions were bidding on foreclosed Iowa homesteads, hundreds of neighbors would show up, surrounding them, and while one farmer -- "fingering a rope" -- would menace the rich bidders, another would bid a penny for the farm. "Sold" cried the auctioneer, and then the "buyer" would return the farm to the foreclosed owner.

When a jobless worker was being denied "home relief" (welfare), 5,000 fellow unemployed would show up to make sure it was granted.

How was all this organized? In the early 1930's, when capitalism had laid off 17 million workers (one of every three workers was unemployed), the Communist Party led the organization of the National Unemployment Councils (NUC). On March 6, 1930, the Councils organized 1,250,000 jobless to take on the streets -- 110,000 packed New York City's Union Square, and were attacked by 25,000 cops whose bosses feared the start of a "revolution"; 100,000 unemployed marched in Detroit, 50,000 in Chicago and Pittsburgh, thousands more in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Cleveland.

These mass Councils stopped thousands of evictions and foreclosures cold. In New York City, 185,794 families got eviction notices in the first six months of 1932. The Unemployment Councils moved over 77,000 back into their homes. On February 1, 1932, the NY Times reported that a "crowd numbering...1,000...stormed the police" to fight the eviction of three Bronx families.

Black workers were the hardest hit and became the most active in the Councils, leading many of the anti-eviction struggles, which fought racism as a number one priority.

By 1938, the NUC had a membership of 800,000. They helped stop scabs as workers struck for unionization and the 8-hour day. There was great unity between the employed and unemployed as all saw it in their class interest to fight their struggles together.

Matthew Woll, an AFL union "leader," labeled this movement a "Kremlin conspiracy," but the NUC, with communists playing a leading role, vehemently rejected this red-baiting.

It was out of this mass ferment that the CIO organized industrial unions. It all forced the Roosevelt-led ruling class to enact unemployment insurance, welfare, Social Security, the 40-hour week and collective bargaining laws. It was workers' violent struggle that won these reforms, not voting for Roosevelt.

Unfortunately, the Communist Party got sucked into the "progressive" Roosevelt coalition instead of fighting for workers' power. The communists did not concentrate on using these reform struggles to win workers to understand that the ruling class still held state power and would use it to reverse these victories. Today, the working class is paying for this reformist error.

The anti-communist liberals and their union lieutenants have helped the bosses water down class consciousness and mass militancy. Today, racism against black, Latin and immigrant workers is rampant, while union-busting and fascist wage-cuts make workers pay for the bosses' crisis and endless imperialist wars. Meanwhile, too many workers and youth see voting for Obama or Hillary as the answer, instead of waging a mass fight-back.

Illusions die hard, but we in PLP are confident that workers and youth won't be taking it on the chin forever. We must build a mass base for our communist politics among workers, exposing the racist bosses as the cause of the problem, and their politicians and union servants as part of it. This May Day is an important step in this long road towards fighting for a communist society where workers' interests, instead of the profits of bankers and bosses, are the only priority.

1968: How 10 Million Workers Shut Down France

Forty years ago this May, a revolt by millions of French workers and students led to a general strike that paralyzed the country for three weeks, caused the government to collapse and electrified the entire world. This struggle's anniversary is noteworthy because "May 68" still has much to teach us.

The upheaval began as a student protest, similar to those occurring on a daily basis during that period throughout Europe and the U.S., although general working-class anger and a 67-day white-collar metal workers' strike in Saint Nazaire in 1967 provided the tinder for the spark that was about to come. That strike affected all the metal workers and won broad solidarity from all the workers in the city, especially from women's protest marches of 3,000 and 4,000.

On March 22 in 1968, about 150 students and others invaded an administration building at Nanterre University outside Paris to demand reforms in the university's budget. The administration called the cops and the students left the building. Protests continued, so on May 2 the administration closed Nanterre.

Four days later, 20,000 students and professors marched to the Sorbonne, Paris's main university. The police rioted, launching tear gas grenades and beating and arresting hundreds of protesters. On May 10, another mass demonstration led to a pitched battle, lasting well into the night. Again, the cops ran amok. Police provocateurs launched Molotov cocktails, providing a convenient excuse for more beatings and arrests.

By now, sympathy for the student protesters and revulsion at police brutality was spreading throughout the working class. The French "Communist" Party -- having long become a pro-ruling class puppet -- and other fake-left organizations attempted to co-opt the growing movement with a call for a one-day strike on May 13. More than a million people marched through Paris that day. The government made minor concessions, but the protests mounted.

Most significantly, they spread throughout the working class. On May 13, workers at the Sud Aviation plant in the western city of Nantes began a sit-down strike. A strike by Renault auto parts workers near the northern city of Rouen spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes in the Seine valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By May 16, workers had occupied 50 factories; by May 17, the number of strikers had swelled to 200,000. A day later, two million were on strike; the following week, 10,000,000 workers, roughly two-thirds of France's work-force, had hit the bricks.

Significantly, these strikes were not led by the organized unions, which did everything in their power to contain and reverse the movement. Police terror having failed, the labor "leadership," including the "Communist" Party, tried bribery, but the workers turned down a significant pay increase and remained on strike.

On May 30, nearly a half-million workers and students marched through Paris chanting "Adieu, De Gaulle" (Farewell De Gaulle), to express their hatred for France's president and his government.

De Gaulle had already flown secretly to Germany to enlist the support of the infamous General Jacques Massu, known for his justification of torture during France's colonial war in Algeria. De Gaulle had appointed Massu commander of French military forces in Germany, and Massu was preparing to send French regiments home to suppress the revolt.

However, the French ruling class didn't need the army. The revolt quickly subsided because of its own internal flaws. Crucial among these was the absence of leadership from a revolutionary communist party with a mass base within the working class. Only such a party could have given strategic and tactical direction to the longing angrily expressed by French workers and students for fundamental change in society. Only such a party could have raised the question of smashing capitalist state power and replacing it with a working-class dictatorship. This is the key lesson for us today, but not the only one.

The revolt occurred at a time when the concept of the working class's role in society and the revolutionary process had come under assault from a gaggle of fake-left "theorists," led by a professor named Herbert Marcuse. The millions who struck France's factories exposed the shallowness of this viewpoint and dramatically showed that the working class alone, which builds and runs everything, has the potential to revolutionize society and bring about meaningful change. This principle is just as valid today.

The events of May 68 also clearly demonstrated the key secondary role of students and intellectuals in the revolutionary process. It's no accident that the struggle began on a college campus before spreading to the factories. Despite several abortive attempts, France's student strikers failed to make a significant alliance with the millions of working-class strikers, but this failure in no way invalidates the strategic necessity for a worker-student alliance. More than anything, it highlights the absence of communist leadership.

A third key lesson is the absolute bankruptcy of reformism. The workers who rejected the salary bribe had an inkling of the right idea here; without a communist party to lead them, they were forced to fight blindfolded, with one hand tied behind their backs.

After the strike ended, De Gaulle quit the presidency, replaced by his henchman, Georges Pompidou. A host of reforms ensued. Forty years later, France remains a capitalist dictatorship. Unemployment for younger workers hovers between 20 and 25 percent and is much higher for immigrant workers. Racism, particularly against black workers from Africa and Arab workers is rampant in the land of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity." France's rulers continue to seek status as junior partners in the bloody scramble among U.S. bosses and others for control of Persian Gulf oil. French capitalism is thus helping grease the skids for the next world war.

Pro-boss cynics say May 68 justifies the lie that class struggle always leads to disappointment. PLP differs. The struggles of workers and students in France two generations ago belong to our class's living history, if we absorb their lessons and interpret them correctly. In the past four decades, capitalism has solved none of the problems that led to this revolt. If anything, the problems have worsened. Therefore, more revolts are only a matter of time. In fact, now there is speculation about workers' reaction to this 40th anniversary and whether current student demonstrations and school occupations could spark another strike wave.

PLP's job remains the same everywhere: to spread our revolutionary ideas and build our revolutionary organization under any and all circumstances, so that when struggle of this magnitude once again erupts, its goal will be working-class dictatorship and its outcome will be a massive spurt in the ranks of communist-minded workers and students.

Ira Gollobin: A Communist for All Seasons

Ira Gollobin, a great friend of PLP who made an enormous contribution in the area of dialectical materialism, died from a staph infection in his blood and lungs on Friday, April 4, in his 97th year. In a lifetime of struggle, Ira was as much at home on the picket line as in the courtroom. He never stopped fighting for nearly an entire century!

In addition to authoring one of the definitive works on Dialectics, Ira had a great influence on PLP. He was present at a December 1961 meeting of a group of about 30 members of the old Communist Party (CP) who had concluded that the CP was dead as a communist organization and that it was necessary to organize a new party. Out of that meeting the Progressive Labor Movement was born six months later, and the Progressive Labor Party three years after that. Ira endorsed that outlook.

For years afterwards, he taught many classes on dialectics to leaders and members of PL and was partly responsible for the crucial emphasis PLP has placed on members studying this subject. This was probably his most important contribution to our Party. In addition, Ira was our lawyer in many government attacks on the Party, as far back as the early 1960s, and then taking the offensive against the witch-hunting House UnAmerican Activities Committee ( HUAC). Ira always agreed with our position to not simply rely on the "legal" front but to organize militant demonstrations and make a political defense (which many other lawyers told us would "hurt" our case).

In his early years as an attorney in New York City, Ira defended many victims of the Great Depression. After he passed the bar in 1935, he left New York to spend a year "seeing the country." He became a migrant worker, picking oranges and walnuts in the fields of the West, "riding the rails" with jobless workers. He said these experiences "sealed my identification with the underdog."

When distributing leaflets during a strike at Presbyterian Hospital in NYC, he met members of the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born and eventually this cause dominated his life as he became the country's leading immigration lawyer and a member of the Committee's General Counsel. He saved the jobs of 1,500 NYC foreign-born transit workers and enabled workers fleeing Nazi Germany and Franco's fascist Spain to be admitted to the U.S. He won a landmark decision before the U.S. Supreme Court for 300 Haitian immigrants who had been refused asylum, the government claiming they were "economic" refugees, but Ira won the case to identify them as political refugees fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship.

Over the years we sent him scores of workers with immigration problems and he successfully defended them against government attacks (money for fees was never an obstacle).

Ira was part of a generation that risked their lives to join the fight against fascism, first in the Spanish Civil War, and then against the Nazis and the Japanese fascists, a fight led by the world communist movement. Ira was more than a lawyer. Being a dialectician, he understood the necessity to practice what he preached.

Serving in the Philippines in the army when World War II ended in 1945, he led a struggle to prevent U.S. rulers from using thousands of GI's to repress the communist-led Filipino guerrilla movement (the "Huks") -- that had been crucial in defeating the Japanese -- and even to ship them to Vietnam to assist the French colonial oppressors in that country. But the GI's, having defeated Japanese fascism, were seeking to return home and wanted no part of this, looking on the "Huks" as comrades-in-arms. So Ira helped organize militant actions opposing the brass, putting 35,000 GI's into the streets of Manila on January 7, 1946. He led a 5-member committee that met with the brass to tell them the GI's would refuse to carry out this mission for U.S. imperialism. They succeeded and the GI's were shipped home over the ensuing months (although Ira and the committee were immediately flown back to the States, the brass not wanting to deal with their leadership). The "Bring the Boys Home" movement soon spread around the world. (For CHALLENGE article, see website: <http://www.plp.org/cd02/cd0313.html>

Ira was a stickler for physical fitness. In his 70's and 80's he was still running six miles a day, six days a week and was working out in the gym three times a week in his 90's. (In going through his belongings in the hospital his daughter found his gym card still in his back pocket.) He spent 20 years writing his monumental work, "Dialectical Materialism, Its Laws, Categories and Practice."

Ira was a supporter of PLP right to the end, generous in his financial donations, giving our Party five cartons of Marxist books from his personal library. The revolutionary communist movement will sorely miss Ira, but his contribution to Marxist theory and practice will live on in our members' study of dialectical materialism and the carrying out of that theory in practice, a cause to which Ira devoted his life. The best way we can honor him is to use those tools to organize a communist revolution and the emancipation of the working class.

REDEYEONTHE NEWS

US workers losing wage battle

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century.... is on its way to extinction....

The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are buying out [over 100,000] employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a "second tier" wage scale that never quite reaches $20.... and with fewer benefits.

The United Auto Workers agreed to this arrangement, accepting management's argument that it must have labor cost relief to rebound and prosper....

The auto workers weren't first. They ratified a practice that had spread... lowering earning power for new hires.

Two tiers is one tactic. Another is filling middle-income jobs with temporary workers earning less. Add outsourcing to the list.... Then there are the manufacturers who close a union plant and shift production to a nonunion one, often in the South but also in the Midwest....

Tens of thousands of workers have accepted wage cuts pressed on them by embattled employers. (NYT, 4/20)

US ally slaughters unionists

More than 2,500 union members in Colombia have been killed since 1985, with fewer than 100 cases resulting in convictions.... President Uribe's former intelligence chief is under investigation for handing over lists to paramilitaries of union leaders and other left-wing figures who were singled out for assassination. (NYT, 4/14)

People know who really runs US

Asked how much the country should be governed according to the will of the people -- on a scale with 0 meaning not at all and 10 completely -- the mean response is 7.9.... But Americans do not think this is what they are getting. Asked how much influence the people do have, the mean response is far lower: on average 4.0.

This may explain, in part, why just 19 percent say they believe the country is run "for the benefit of all the people," while 80 percent say it is "run by a few big interests looking out for themselves."(LAT, 4/4)

 

Axle Strikers Put Brake on Auto Bosses

• a href="#Iraqi Desertions Show Bribes Won’t Win U.S. Oil War">"raqi Desertions Show Bribes Won’t Win U.S. Oil War
• As Iran’s Oil Bosses Gain Clout In Iraq, Scope of U.S. Oil War Widens
• Obama, Clinton and McCain All Want You (or Your Children) for War

March on May Day with Millions of Workers Worldwide

Students Mark War Anniversary with Anti-Imperialist Politics

a href="#Striker Vows: ‘We’ll help spread the Progressive Labor Party’">Stri"er Vows: ‘We’ll help spread the Progressive Labor Party’

Black, Caribbean, White Hospital Workers Fight Racism

Dinners Serve Much Food for Red Thought

a href="#‘Reducating’ Chicago Campuses">‘R"ducating’ Chicago Campuses

Cal Pols Impose Racist Cuts, Liberal LA Mayor Wants More Cops

a href="#LA Mayor’s Plan: Sack Workers, Hire Racist Cops">"A Mayor’s Plan: Sack Workers, Hire Racist Cops

a href="#‘If Communism Was Good, Why Was The USSR Destroyed?’">‘I" Communism Was Good, Why Was The USSR Destroyed?’

Rising Food Prices Trigger Haiti Rebellion

a href="#Ethanol Hoax ‘Sustains’ Bosses’ Profits, Oil Wars">Etha"ol Hoax ‘Sustains’ Bosses’ Profits, Oil Wars

• Focus on China and Ethanol Hides Imperialist Plans in Mid-East
• Top Agri-business and Al Gore Behind Anti-working-class Ethanol Sham

Workers Will Be Stewards of Environment

Who really pollutes the environment?

LETTERS

Minister Praises Capitalism, Church Members Disagree

Racist Education and Racist Professors

a href="#ID Cards Become New Report-to-Gov’t Cards">"D Cards Become New Report-to-Gov’t Cards

Veteran of El Salvador War Joins PLP

a href="#‘Winter Soldier’: Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan">‘W"nter Soldier’: Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan

a href="#Candidates Reap Million$, Workers ‘Reap’ Unemployment">Ca"didates Reap Million$, Workers ‘Reap’ Unemployment

REDEYE ON THE NEWS

• U.S. helped in Croatia war crime
• Wall St. Big For Barack And Hilary
• Workplace, killer for prostitutes
• It’s the free market, stupid...
• The Web makes spying easy

• ---

Axle Strikers Put Brake on Auto Bosses

DETROIT, MI, April 6 — As the strike of 3,600 UAW members against American Axle (AAM) moves through its second month, this main labor struggle in the U.S. is emerging as more than one about money. The highly-profitable AAM, which won a two-tier wage system in the 2004 contract, wants to chop wages in half, cut medical benefits, freeze pensions and replace them with a 401(k). AAM also aims to move work to non-union operations in Oxford, MI. (less than $10-an-hour) and Saltillo, Mexico (70 cents/hr), close two forges covered by the contract and eliminate 1,000 jobs.

As CHALLENGE has reported during the strike, with mass racist unemployment and poverty wages crashing down on cities like Detroit and Buffalo, more and more mouths depend on each auto industry paycheck. That point was underlined when a black woman striker who is six months pregnant told a PLP cultural event (see page 3), "I’m very worried, but I’m going to be strong!"

Over the last two years, there’s been a major restructuring of the domestic U.S. auto industry, wiping out more than 100,000 jobs at GM, Ford, Chrysler and Delphi, and cutting starting wages to about $14/hr. In addition there was a major shakeout of parts suppliers, with Delphi, Tower, Lear and others going bankrupt. The bosses and the UAW leadership carried out these devastating attacks with little organized resistance.

The bosses here are under siege from European and Asian auto billionaires, while more and more production is shifting to China and India, creating even more downward pressure on wages and living conditions for auto workers worldwide.

The endless struggle among the world’s bosses for markets, resources and cheap labor will ultimately be resolved through world war. The bosses bomb their rivals’ factories and kill the workers. The U.S. industrial unions are already beating the anti-China war drums for the bosses. Iraq is a warm-up. Today the bosses eliminate jobs. In the future, as in Iraq, they will eliminate workers.

The strike has put a chokehold on GM, canceling production of 100,000 vehicles and forcing the closing of 30 plants affecting over 20,000 workers. It has also rippled through many parts suppliers, affecting another 5,000 workers. Standard & Poor’s is considering cutting the credit ratings of AAM, GM, Lear and Tenneco because of the strike.

This is the power of the working class. That’s why a mass revolutionary communist PLP leading millions of workers is needed to ultimately put the final chokehold on the whole racist profit system of wage slavery.

The strike exposes the hoax behind the UAW’s strategy of using its "leverage" with GM, Ford and Chrysler to pressure the parts suppliers. In theory, by "partnering" with the major auto bosses, the union could count on them to pressure the suppliers to agree to contracts and/or card checks for organizing.

But GM, the UAW and AAM all agree wages should be cut in half, as negotiated for the major auto makers this past September. Now they’re discussing only how much money to throw at AAM workers in buy-outs and buy-downs (lump-sum payments in return for permanent pay-cuts) to get them to cut their own pay.

As for GM, they have little interest in pressuring AAM. They started March with a 129-day supply of Silverado pick-ups and expect sales to drop 15% from a year ago. So far, they’ve been able to ride it out, without plans to make up the lost production.

With the recent shut-down of the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, the strike will begin affecting passenger-car production. In addition, AAM strikers have inspired other workers. Ten-day strike notification has been given at five GM plants over local contract issues.

PLP members and friends have joined hundreds, even thousands, of other workers picketing with the strikers. Workers from GM and Chrysler, AAM’s main two customers, as well as Ford, Delphi, Detroit teachers, various churches and many more have brought food and money to the strikers. Cars honk in support as they pass the 12 picket lines around the 7-plant complex in Detroit. Visiting workers often bring BBQ pits and cook for the strikers. The very integrated picket lines are staffed 24 hours a day.

Some strikers are reading CHALLENGE and many more will be introduced to it at the big April 18 Solidarity rally. We’ll make our presence felt that day, and follow it with a group of AAM workers at May Day.

a name="Iraqi Desertions Show Bribes Won’t Win U.S. Oil War">">"raqi Desertions Show Bribes Won’t Win U.S. Oil War

"More than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts during the inconclusive assault against Shiite militias in Basra last week." (NY Times, 4/4/08) These included dozens of officers and two senior field commanders.

The mass desertion at Basra, Iraq’s oil hub, shows that U.S. rulers can’t depend on hired colonial armies. Even with unemployment near 60%, military paychecks can’t motivate Iraqis to risk their lives for Exxon Mobil. The Pentagon clearly must deploy more and more U.S. troops to secure the Mid-East and its energy supplies for U.S. capitalists in their fight with their imperialist rivals. The next president’s number one job will be vastly expanding U.S. armed forces, with either a draft or some militaristic "national service" scheme.

In addition to exposing the Iraqi army’s fundamental unreliability, Basra widens the Iranian front in the war. In U.S. rulers’ fight for Iraqi oil — one they can’t afford to lose — they now must confront Teheran head on. Washington’s plan for Basra was to have its puppet prime minister Maliki wage an "historic and decisive" battle against the Iran-influenced anti-U.S. Sadr militias controlling the city. But when Maliki’s men deserted, U.S. and British forces began strafing and shelling, slaughtering 300 people, many civilians.

"When the going got tough, top Iraqi Shiite officials rushed to the holy city of Qom in Iran to get help mediating a Basra cease-fire with Sadr." (Philadelphia Inquirer, (4/6/08) They beseeched the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. "Iran now holds the key to stability in Iraq." (Inquirer article) According to retired Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar:

"What has happened is essentially that Iran has frustrated the joint U.S.-British objective of gaining control of Basra, without which the strategy of establishing control over the fabulous oil fields of southern Iraq will not work. Control of Basra is a pre-requisite before American oil majors make their multi-billion dollar investments to kick start large-scale oil production in Iraq. Iraq’s Southern Oil Company is headquartered in Basra. Highly strategic installations are concentrated in the region, such as pipeline networks, pumping stations, refineries and loading terminals." (Global Research, 4/4/08)

Thus, Iran’s oil barons, cloaked in ayatollahs’ robes, join a host of Iraqi factions preventing Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP from realizing the six-million-barrel a day bonanza for which U.S. rulers invaded in the first place. Current production stagnates around 2,000,000 barrels.

As Iran’s Oil Bosses Gain Clout In Iraq, Scope of U.S. Oil War Widens

Retired general William Odom understands both the ineffectiveness of bribes and U.S. rulers’ need for much broader military action in the Persian Gulf. Speaking of shaky pro-U.S. anti-al Qaeda fighters in western Iraq, Odom said:

Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased....Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. (Harvard University’s Nieman Watchdog, 4/2/08)

As a White House military advisor in 1979, Odom helped formulate the Carter Doctrine, which demanded direct and permanent U.S. military domination of the Mid-East and its oil following the Iranian Revolution. Today he calls for "realignment and reassertion of U.S. forces" in the region (Nieman article).

Obama, Clinton and McCain All Want You (or Your Children) for War

With constantly re-deployed U.S. troops stretched to the breaking point, reasserting U.S. might in the Mid-East requires the bosses to rally masses of young people to their war machine. Worried about mental health, morale, and rebellion (a word they dare not utter) in the armed forces they currently have, U.S. rulers plan to shorten war-zone deployments from 15 to 12 months. (Arch-imperialist liberal senator Jay Rockefeller led this effort.) For the rulers, the current presidential race revolves around who can most effectively win the fresh recruits for their wars. Obama seems the rulers’ favorite, with his lies about "moral obligation" for "humanitarian" action from Darfur to Iraq mobilizing millions of military-age youth to the electoral system and thus to supporting U.S. imperialism. But they could also live with Clinton’s "national service" calls and determination to regulate any maverick Wall Street bankers who challenge the Rockefeller Exxon-Mobil forces or even with McCain’s more traditional flag-waving patriotism. The liberal New York Times ran a front-page story (4/6/08) praising generations of McCain’s selfless, exemplary service to the nation, centered on McCain’s relationship with his son, a Marine veteran of Iraq.

Basra re-teaches the important lesson that material incentives will never inspire a will to fight. As the Mid-East war widens and global conflict looms, we must strive harder to make workers aware of their class interests, to expose the futile electoral system, and prove that revolution for a communist, worker-run society is the only goal worth fighting for.

March on May Day with Millions of Workers Worldwide

May Day (May 1st) is the working class’s international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, a general strike that spread to 350,000 workers across the country. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.

In 1884, the AFL passed a resolution to make eight hours "a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886." Workers were forced to labor "from sun-up to sundown," up to 14 hours a day. The Chicago Central Labor Council then called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to institute the 8-hour day.

On that day, Chicago stood still as "Tens of thousands downed their tools and moved into the streets. No smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills," reported one paper.

On May 3, the cops murdered six strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day thousands marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A police agent threw a bomb, and four workers were killed, seven cops died and 200 workers wounded in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre.

Nine demonstration leaders were framed for "instigating a riot." Four were hung. A mass protest movement forced the Governor to free those still alive when the government admitted the frame-up.

The tens of thousands who won the 8-hour day saw it eroded, so another general strike was called for May 1, 1890. At the July 1889 meeting of the International Workers Association, organized and led by Karl Marx, the U.S. delegate reported on the struggle.

May 1st was adopted as the day when the world’s working class "holds a review of its forces, mobilized for the first time as One army, [under] One flag...[to] make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united."

Ever since, with communist leadership, it has symbolized workers’ demands and class interests, united in the fight against capitalism. But by the 1950’s, most "communist" parties had abandoned these principles. Union leaders became lieutenants of the bosses, and either renounced May Day or stripped it of its revolutionary character.

The Progressive Labor Party, formed in the 1960’s, picked up the red banners of May Day in 1971 in the U.S. It has organized May Day marches and activities in many areas of the world for over 35 years, to unite workers around the universal demands of all workers, regardless of capitalist-created borders. These include: against imperialist war, against racism and the special oppression of women, for unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror and for the only solution to all these attacks facing the international working class — communist revolution.

Everything we do now to win more of our class sisters and brothers to our ideas will bear fruit later, when the working class flexes its muscles once again. Imperialism has blanketed the globe and has nowhere left to go, except constant wars to re-divide markets and control super-exploited workers. This is a period of widening war, increasing police-state fascist repression and mounting economic misery. Despite appearances and regardless of obstacles, our class has only its chains to lose.

The long, difficult period ahead must not deter us. Making a commitment to serve the working class for a lifetime of revolutionary struggle remains the best choice one can make this May Day.

Join and build the Progressive Labor Party and help lay the foundation that is putting millions of workers and youth on the road to revolution. In particular this means deepening our influence and bringing communist ideas to the factories, campuses, the military, and the mass movements; sharpening the class struggle and creating a mass base of readers and distributors for CHALLENGE.

How prophetic were the last words of Haymarket martyr August Spies as the hangman’s noose was tied around his neck and he declared, "There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!" Join us on May Day. Fight for Communism!

Students Mark War Anniversary with Anti-Imperialist Politics

LOS ANGELES, March 15 — "The coalition showed we can do a lot when we unite against racism and imperialism," said one student organizer, describing a multi-racial group of campus organizations that planned a week’s events marking the five-year anniversary of the Iraq War.

Many student participants are long-time CHALLENGE readers, agreeing with recent editorials and articles on the presidential elections, seeing that both Republican and Democratic politicians serve the most powerful U.S. bosses. They strongly support PLP’s anti-racist and anti-imperialist internationalist politics. Some now understand how communist revolution can solve the problems facing the international working class. The well-attended events showed that fighting identity politics, patriotism and reformism with PLP’s politics helps build the Party.

The students championed campus events bringing to more students and workers this analysis of capitalism and the war, fighting to expose their imperialist nature. They linked racist cutbacks to the permanent war budget, the electoral fraud and the exploitative role of sexism, nationalism and racism. They also wanted events expressing grassroots worker-student-soldier solidarity — explaining the importance of politicizing soldiers and supporting rebellions within the military — and that advanced multi-racial unity against anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism.

With collective struggle, amid such solidarity, various campus groups organized eight events — forums, teach-ins, documentary screenings, campus speak-outs and an election debate including college Republicans and Democrats. Large crowds turned out, surprisingly capturing the attention of the school newspaper (usually very conservative and tight-lipped about anti-war events). Many students were open to PLP’s analysis and to the events’ more general anti-imperialist politics.

In one panel, Iraq vets related their wartime experiences, noting the growing number of soldiers organizing against the war. Answering a question on how students could help, friends advocated building solidarity between students and soldiers, and supporting soldiers’ rebellions in the military. "Visiting military bases and reaching out to veterans on campus can build this unity," said one panelist.

Agreement about the wars’ imperialist roots was strong overall, but many students still see the Democrats — especially Obama — as a step forward. The debate exposed media lies about Obama and the Democratic Party. The College Democrats’ president agreed with the Republican club on nearly everything but admitted that all politicians have "blood on their hands."

Agreeing, a student warned that politicians only defend ruling-class interests — more wars and racist cutbacks, higher tuition and eventually a "national service" draft. Students were surprised about Obama’s overall pro-war stance, despite his criticisms of Bush and the Iraq War. We must work harder to expose the ruling class’s electoral circus, and to link the communist future the working class will build to the local, concrete anti-imperialist organizing needed to guarantee that future.

Most important, though, was the political leadership taken by PLP’s friends and the confidence they showed in communist ideas. Because of these political struggles, over 15 students joined PL’ers from other campuses at the city-wide anti-war march in Hollywood.

Student groups are now planning campus May Day events, organizing a multi-racial worker-student-alliance contingent to join other workers in the immigrants’ rights march May 1. Liberal groups backing Obama and Clinton, pushing patriotism, loyalty to imperialism and the Dream Act are organizing that demonstration, making it crucial to fight for anti-imperialist and communist politics at the march!

Long-term consistent struggle around these ideas, especially increasing CHALLENGE readers and networks, have created a modest but strong base supporting PLP’s fight for revolution. The battle for such ideas within mass organizations may be slow and difficult, but it’s crucial to developing communist consciousness among students, workers and soldiers.

a name="Striker Vows: ‘We’ll help spread the Progressive Labor Party’"></a>"triker Vows: ‘We’ll help spread the Progressive Labor Party’

CHICAGO, IL, April 5 — "We won’t give up. We can’t. I’m six months pregnant, and I’m worried, very worried about how I‘m going to be able to take care of my baby. Life is very hard in Detroit, you just don’t know," declared one of three striking American Axle workers who attended our evening of international anti-racist culture tonight. "But I’m going to be strong and we’re not going to give up. You all do what you can to support us, and we’ll bring as many people as we can to May Day!"

Her husband followed, inviting the 90 workers and youth to Detroit for an April 18 strike-support rally. "We will help you spread the Progressive Labor Party," he said. We passed the hat for the striking workers and sent them back to the struggle with almost $900!

The crowd was already in the mood, having heard a series of poems and a PLP leader inviting them to march on May Day, take May Day Dinner tickets and join the campaign to increase the circulation of CHALLENGE newspaper. These strikers captured that revolutionary communist, anti-racist mood.

Then came the main event, a performance by Echoes of Southern Africa, a group of singers and dancers from numerous African countries. We met them through a Ford worker who was active in the Jena 6 struggle, sparking his UAW Local 551 to send a delegation and $500 check for that case, while involving hundreds of Ford workers in a plant-gate collection. He told the crowd he was honored to be here with his striking brothers and sisters from Detroit, in a room "full of revolutionary workers."

The singers and dancers performed for over an hour. Their high energy, wonderful voices and graceful movements held the crowd’s attention from beginning to end. Overall it was a successful evening, but should have been much larger. That’s our challenge as we head into May Day. We hope to hold these cultural events every three months. As we become organizers, they will get bigger.

Black, Caribbean, White Hospital Workers Fight Racism

On the surface it looked very ordinary: two hospital custodial workers were cleaning a patient’s room. But the conversation between the two workers was anything but ordinary. "I need to learn more from you about fighting the bosses," said John. "Well," said Bill, "the main guidance I get comes from being a communist." "Tell me again," said John, "what is communism?"

Later, three custodial workers were debating the tactics used in a union fight against a racist boss. Al and Ed believed that some of Bill’s ideas were too incendiary, harsh and confrontational. Al, a union delegate, said that he tries to handle his differences with the bosses in a "professional" manner. Bill, also a union delegate, explained that he was trying to think beyond the fight against the bosses. "We have to energize the union members for the contract fight this summer," argued Bill. "You guys know I’m a communist," Bill continued, "we’re always trying to think about the big picture." But Ed, a newer union member interrupted, "You’re a communist! What exactly does that mean?"

The PLP organizing at this hospital should include more experiences like these. We’ve been active in the union here for quite some time. We’re viewed as part of the union leadership for the entire hospital. We are asked to join, lead, or contribute to a constant flood of reform fights, big and small, as well as assist many workers with personal problems.

At this stage of the game, it’s very easy for us to get into high gear with the union reform activity. But it’s still a constant struggle to shift the communist organizing into high gear at the same time. Too often we still make reform primary over revolution. This error does not mean that communists shouldn’t work in mass organizations like unions. This error does mean that inner Party ideological struggle is crucial.

A number of the workers understand the merry-go-round of reform fights all too well. "It’s corporate America," argued James, a supply worker. "Even if we strike in July and win the fight to protect our pension, in 10 years we’ll be fighting the same fight." PLP’s participation in the union helps introduce us to workers like James. But making communist revolution primary means that we get CHALLENGE to James, follow up with him and invite him to a Party study-action group.

Marie, a worker from the Caribbean, was just suspended. In our union, there are deep divisions between the black workers from the Caribbean and the black workers born in the U.S. Nonetheless, several U.S.-born black workers told Bill, a union delegate, that they wanted to support Marie. "That could be any one of us," they declared. At lunch time a group of black and white workers, including black workers from both the U.S. and the Caribbean, hammered out a petition that blames the bosses for the short-staffing and the dirty patient rooms and demanded that Marie get her money back. A few days later, at a union solidarity event organized by the rank and file to build our contact fight in July, workers from all over the hospital lined up to sign Marie’s petition.

But of all the activity around fighting Marie’s suspension, the most important was the struggle with the workers, and an old Party friend from the Caribbean in particular, to understand that the racism against the Caribbean workers comes from capitalism, not the workers who may express it. We may or may not win the fight against Marie’s suspension, but our main fight is to overthrow capitalism and its racism.

We are struggling with the workers quoted in this article as well as the others in our base to join us on May Day. If we bring more workers, increase our CHALLENGE distribution and recruit to Party study-action groups, then we’ve scored a modest victory to make communist revolution primary over reform.

Dinners Serve Much Food for Red Thought

LOS ANGELES — A number of CHALLENGE dinners, with over 160 people in all took place recently. Industrial workers and youth pledged to raise the readership of the newspaper by taking more to their jobs and schools. At one dinner, with high school and college students we raised over $150 in subscription money. Several people joined the Party from our events.

Each dinner discussed the current state of world capitalism: sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry leading to World War III, increasing attacks on the working class, and the current expensive election campaign to try to win workers, soldiers and youth to loyalty to the ruthless racist U.S. rulers. CHALLENGE shows the source of these attacks is capitalist competition for maximum profit and the solution is fighting to turn the coming imperialist wars into communist revolution.

One dinner was combined with a retirement party for a comrade. A fellow worker and comrade in the same company talked about the good communist leadership the retiring comrade has given. He called on the others to step up to increase the readership of the paper and the revolutionary movement, especially as workers face growing attacks. Then other workers spoke about how much the comrade had helped to build unity among all the workers. One black worker said that our comrade had helped him a lot in confrontations with management. "Then he started bringing me CHALLENGE," he said. "At first I thought it was a little ‘out there’ but CHALLENGE has opened my eyes to how to see the world."

These dinners show there’s great potential to build CHALLENGE networks and PLP. While the collapse of the old communist movement presents our class with serious challenges, PLP squarely faces the errors by calling for fighting directly for communism rather than the "halfway house" of socialism with its concessions to the capitalist system of wage slavery. It’s up to communists today to take those lessons to the heart of the working class. As our class faces crisis, cutbacks, layoffs, foreclosures and war, we’ll increase the circulation of CHALLENGE, reader by reader.

a name="‘Reducating’ Chicago Campuses"></">‘R"ducating’ Chicago Campuses

Campus activity in Chicago is heating up as we build for this year’s May Day activities. In recent weeks, PLP members have organized or participated in four campus forums involving over 150 people. Topics ranged from the elections to Martin Luther King to black-white-Latino relations to the struggle against racist cutbacks in health care. Members and friends put forward communist ideas, pointing out that McCain, Obama and Clinton are supported by many of the same rich corporations. Also we said that budget cutbacks are an inevitable part of capitalist processes and that the working class needs the revolutionary destruction of capitalism to guarantee good health care. Other points included the role of revolutionary violence in the 1960’s, the reality that life for the whole working class, especially black workers, has gotten worse even with the Civil Rights legislation because capitalism, with or without its regular crisis, needs racism to make superprofits. We advocated the need for members of all so-called "racial-ethnic groups" to support our common struggles against all forms of anti-working-class oppression.

Equally important with the comments made at the forums is the fact that these activities were organized by PLP members together with many non-party friends. The discussions, debates and struggles that we have with those who do not agree with us lay the basis for involving many more people in future activities. We are making a strong effort to bring young people to the May 1 immigration march and PLP May Day activities. A few more young people have joined PLP. We live in a very unstable world that is getting more dangerous every day. By working in the class struggle with those who don’t agree with all our ideas and struggling to win them to communist revolution, the possibilities for building a stronger, larger revolutionary communist movement are real and growing.

Chicago comrade

Cal Pols Impose Racist Cuts, Liberal LA Mayor Wants More Cops

LOS ANGELES —The proposed California state budget — with massive education cutbacks — reflects capitalism’s crisis. State revenues have plummeted from the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. Rising unemployment and the decline in workers’ real wages reduces state tax revenues. Federal funds to states shrink as war costs soar.

The bosses are making workers pay for this crisis. Our children are being mis-educated under worse conditions than ever. California businesses, including aerospace subcontracting and health care, can’t find enough workers with the skills they need. They want workers’ taxes to pay for "workforce development" so they can compete effectively and meet the imperialists’ need for war production. Right now, students don’t even get the education the bosses need for them.

Of all 50 states, California ranks third from the bottom in spending per student, 22% less than 40 years ago. The proposed budget cuts another $750 per student, forcing school districts to lay off teachers, librarians and counselors while increasing class size and slashing special programs. Meanwhile, 170,000 people are behind bars — disproportionately black and Latino young men — costing nearly $4 billion annually.

Now they want to increase the highly regressive sales tax and vehicle license fees. The latter could suck $6 billion more from California workers who need cars to get to work.

a name="LA Mayor’s Plan: Sack Workers, Hire Racist Cops">">"A Mayor’s Plan: Sack Workers, Hire Racist Cops

In Los Angeles itself, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Democratic Party darling, ordered layoffs and cutbacks beginning July 1, for all city departments, while hiring more cops (LA Times, 3/13). Amid a budget crisis, he needs more racist cops to repress potential rebellions against these cutbacks.

He also wants to lift a restriction on dismissals for the current fiscal year. It’s been over 15 years since LA laid off and demoted workers because of a budget crisis. Waves of hiring freezes followed that.

Local officials, nearly all Democrats, support the Mayor. They even agreed with his absurd rationale for firing workers in order to hire more cops: it’s "absolutely necessary for LA’s economic development"!

Union leaders are backing the Mayor in two ways. The SEIU and AFSCME leadership — hardcore Democrats — are helping the Mayor’s staff achieve cost savings and new revenue sources, such as unpaid furloughs and a garbage-collection fee to help pay for new cops. Meanwhile, other unions tell their members "not to worry" because Civil Service rules are "too complicated" to implement layoffs. Plus, the City will simply offer a buyout program to older workers to save jobs for new hires.

Obviously City workers need the truth, not trained-dog "leadership." We don’t need more racist anti-worker cops to harass those who fight cutbacks. Meanwhile, conditions in schools and for roads, electricity and water supply deteriorate.

These layoffs are a part of similar layoffs and cutbacks itting counties, school districts, state agencies and other cities.

LA’s budget crunch is not merely a by-product of the real estate slump. It results from enormous tax breaks City, state and federal government have given businesses and investors, plus enormous expenses for California prisons and for the Iraq and Afghan Wars.

California rulers may make the capitalists themselves pay higher corporate property taxes to discipline the ruling class to pay for coming wider wars, which would tie in with politicians’ pleas that "we’re all in this together." We must not ally with our class enemies but rather with students and parents and the growth of a revolutionary movement that will break the chains that tie us to them.

Workers must see that LA Democrats charging ahead with cutbacks to hire more cops are no different than their Washington buddies. The real reason for the police hiring spree is "homeland security," not business promotion. Fifteen years ago LA had one of the country’s largest urban rebellions since the Civil War. It could happen again. With U.S. troops — including the National Guard — spread thin worldwide, the burden of repression will fall to the cops. A militarized economy that gouges wages, benefits, public services and overall living conditions, needs cops to quell rebellions.

California’s workers need CHALLENGE and its communist analysis. They need to fight these cuts, the tip of the iceberg in a system set up to make workers pay for the problems caused by the bankers, speculators and imperialist war-makers. Ultimately, the solution to these attacks lies in the growth of CHALLENGE and of the PLP to build a movement to destroy the profit system, which is increasingly incapable of meeting workers’ needs as it organizes a police state and widening wars for profit.

a name="‘If Communism Was Good, Why Was The USSR Destroyed?’"></">‘I" Communism Was Good, Why Was The USSR Destroyed?’

SPAIN — In a meeting with friends, we took up very important topics including communism, and the capitalist crisis of overproduction, but especially the fight against revisionism (capitalist ideas disguised as communist ideas). A comrade mentioned that, "In Peru you hear communist ideas a lot in the communities (for example, in the city of Ayacucho)." She mentioned that "in years past the group Sendero Luminoso organized university students and farm workers against the exploiters." She had been a member of the group.

But the following question arose, "Why, if communism is good, was the USSR destroyed? Is it because people can’t have higher political understanding?" I answered, "At this time, capitalism has many weapons to divide the working class and to push the lie that communism was a disaster, but that’s not true and we communists in the PLP know it. Socialism failed in the USSR, not communism." I explained that when a group fights for reforms (like Sendero Luminoso, the FMLN, FSLN, and other revisionist groups in Latin America that fight for national liberation and socialism) they’ll never achieve communism because they keep capitalist ideas and practices. So she responded, "but then you want to tell me that in order for there to be communism, we need an armed revolution?" "Exactly," I said.

In the study of dialectical materialism we know that the way to solve a contradiction is to intensify it. "So that water can become steam, the temperature has to rise high enough to a certain point, at which water is converted into something else –– steam," I explained to my friends. "It’s the same with the struggle to destroy capitalism in order to build communism."

I explained that we have to understand the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. I showed them that if we have one pencil, we can break it easily, but that if we put 20 pencils together, it’s much harder to break them. In the same way, we have to build the Party to unite the working class with communist ideas. She said I was right and that we needed to continue the discussion.

Another youth who is influenced by capitalist ideas continued to insist that communism is in the past and was simply a failure. I talked about the many good things that happened in the Soviet Union in education, health care, housing , etc. The workers lived better than they ever did under under capitalism! And they united to defeat Hitler’s fascism.

At the end, my Peruvian friend was very emotional because the discussion cleared up many questions and she wanted to keep talking. The other youth said he didn’t understand how any society could exist without money. I limited my remarks to the fact that a capitalist economy and a communist economy were completely different, opposites, and that to be able to understand this he first had to understand dialectical materialism and put it into practice. All of this was very useful, because we were able to show that we can fight for and build a communist system even though we’re contaminated with all these capitalist ideas.

Now I need more Party material to study and to distribute among friends in this part of the world. Now I see that there are many people interested in the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party and, in addition to the interesting articles in CHALLENGE, I need to give them material to use to study dialectical materialism. We must massively spread these ideas to establish a real communist system in which workers hold the reins of society.

Rising Food Prices Trigger Haiti Rebellion

HAITI, April 8 — Rising food prices worldwide have triggered rebellions in many countries. Southern Haiti is the latest. Five people have been killed and many injured after several days of protests by thousands, including attacks against local cops, businesses and the MINUSTAH (the U.N. multi-national occupation force here led by the Brazilian army). Over the weekend protesters looted the MINUSTAH office in Cayes, taking weapons and other materials.

Today, UN forces shot rubber bullets and tear gas at thousands of workers and university students marching on the national palace in Port-au-Prince, the capital city, backing the rebellion and shouting, "We’re hungry!"

The U.N. occupation, which began after the U.S., France and Canada invaded the country several years ago and sent President Jean Bertrand Aristide into forced exile, has only brought more misery, drug gangs and hunger to the Haitian masses. One of every four children here is malnourished. People have resorted to eating "dirt cookies," made from salt, oil and clay and baked in the sun. A system that has brought billions worldwide to such extremes must be destroyed.

a name="Ethanol Hoax ‘Sustains’ Bosses’ Profits, Oil Wars"></a>"thanol Hoax ‘Sustains’ Bosses’ Profits, Oil Wars

The push for "sustainable energy" and "alternative fuels" is increasing. Politicians and companies appear united in calling for changes in how society is fueled. It appears that the ruling class is concerned about the environment. Communist analysis, however, reveals the essence of this "green" movement. First, the bosses are creating part of the ideology to support a potential future war against their imperialist rivals. Economic and political threats from China, for example, continue to present problems for U.S. rulers. As the rivalry intensifies, they’re caught in a bind. They must seize control of Mid-East energy reserves in order to cut their rivals’ access to it. They must also win the working class to support future wars against these rivals in order to maintain their world position. The promotion of ethanol as an "alternative fuel" is part of this plan.

Secondly, and more importantly, they’re winning workers to think that individuals, not capitalism, causes environmental destruction. They say a better environment can only be achieved by buying "green" products and consuming our way to a healthier world. In reality, only by destroying capitalism and replacing it with communism can the conditions that poison the enviroment be eradicated.

Focus on China and Ethanol Hides Imperialist Plans in Mid-East

Led by liberals like Al Gore, the capitalists are ramping up anti-Chinese rhetoric, namely by pointing to environmental issues such as contaminated products, air pollution and the catastrophe at the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam (where 1.4 million workers were displaced, and environmental destruction is occurring upstream from the dam). They need to convince workers that the Chinese are a direct threat to them and to a healthy Earth.

This is blatant hypocrisy, however, because for hundreds of years U.S. bosses have been killing the very workers they’re trying to win by polluting the places in which we live and work, along with the environment. (See box) Suddenly, when imperialism demands it, they’ve become interested in "protecting workers and ‘our’ environment."

The ethanol campaign is also being used to disguise the absolute necessity for the U.S. ruling class to control Mid-East oil through imperialist war. They say ethanol will "achieve energy security, reduce oil imports, and decrease our dependency on Middle-Eastern oil." Actually, of the top 15 countries from which the U.S. imports oil for consumption, only three, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait are from the Mid-East. Canada is by far the largest exporter of oil to the U.S. (Energy Information Administration, 2/15/08) The oil bosses don’t want control of Mid-East oil to power our SUVs but rather to control their rivals’ access to this life-blood of capitalism. The top oil companies like BP, ExxonMobil-Chevron are even putting hundreds of millions of dollars (a tiny amount compared to their profits) into researching "sustainable energy sources" as a way to mask their deadly designs on Mid-East oil.

Top Agri-business and Al Gore Behind Anti-working-class Ethanol Sham

Because it grows well in many climates, corn is used to make ethanol in the U.S. Currently, the federal government shells out $8 to $10 billion annually to Midwest corn growers. These subsidies are often framed as protecting America’s "ma and pa farmers." In reality, large corporate farmers such as Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill receive about 80% of these subsidies. Also, seed suppliers like Pioneer Hi-Bred (DuPont) and Monsanto are making a killing with the inflated corn markets created by the ethanol craze. Pioneer’s profits increased 13% over the past year. Al Gore, the darling of the liberal environmental movement, has recently joined the board of a venture capitalist firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who have more than $76 million invested in "green" technology. He is also a high-ranking official at Generation Asset Management, which invests in "solutions to climate change."

Meanwhile, the increased demand for corn for ethanol has led to even greater suffering for the working class. Agreements like NAFTA allow subsidized U.S. corn to under-cut local production in Mexico, causing corn tortilla prices there to soar 60%, triggering workers’ protests nation-wide. Workers are starving, yet the same amount of corn needed to fill an SUV tank with ethanol once would feed a worker for an entire year.

Making fuel from corn makes no sense for the environment either. If all the inputs are calculated (the cost, in energy terms, of getting and planting the seed, growing the corn, harvesting it, transporting it to the ethanol plant, etc.), there is a net energy loss! The environmental damage from this capitalist charade is also clear if the increased conversion of forest into farmland and the increased use of fertilizers (which, incidentally, are made from fossil fuels) and pesticides are considered. This is the reality of this "green consciousness" they want to win us to — business as usual under capitalism where profits come before scientific common sense and the well-being of our class and our environment.

Workers Will Be Stewards of Environment

Finally, there’s one truth the capitalists ignore. Workers have always been, and will always be, the best caretakers of the land and environment. Organic farming, where workers understand the land, respond to its needs, and replenish it for the future, was the norm during early communal agricultural societies. Capitalism, which makes food into a commodity to be bought and sold, replaced this mode with food production for profit. Modern communism, in turn, will discard the commodity nature of food, while retaining any technological advances.

As workers, we have no interest in profit-making disguised as "green living," nor in preserving the power of the U.S. ruling class (or any ruling class for that matter) through patriotism and war in the name of environmentalism. Our interests lie in maintaining and preserving the environment because we work its land, we breathe its air, and we enjoy its beauty.

Ultimately, only the working class can create a better and healthier world. With scientific reason, dialectical analysis, and revolutionary ideology, the working class must begin the process of building workers’ power. Communism is the embodiment of that power. Together, as a class, we can counteract the damage of capitalism.

LETTERS

Minister Praises Capitalism, Church Members Disagree

A minister’s recent service bemoaned the Iraq war, saying "we" should focus on what’s happening "at home," that it is "more patriotic" to take care of Americans. This is nationalist selfishness, not anti-imperialism!

The minister admitted to knowing little about economics but went on to say that many are sick of the "old economy," focused on maximizing profit and accumulating stuff. They want a "new economy." That sounded good, until she declared that corporations are "not the problem." She said that "corporate executives are good people, just like us" and to achieve a "new economy" we all just have to be less greedy. She didn’t mention the tens of millions in the U.S., and billions around the world, who don’t even have the basic necessities of life.

Afterward I said to a friend that maximizing profits by exploiting workers was a law of capitalism. She agreed: "It’s like saying that a poisonous snake wouldn’t be dangerous if you could just keep it from biting." This new CHALLENGE reader said, "a lot of the ideas we need are in that paper."

I asked her opinion of the articles about Obama. She is enthusiastically for Obama even though he "has to say things that will get him elected." I reminded her that top advisors of all three candidates are meeting with the Brookings Institute to develop a foreign policy to present to the next president. I summarized the unfolding inter-imperialist rivalries that are leading U.S. capitalists to wider war. I said Obama is the candidate best able to win the U.S. working class to sacrifice our standard of living and our youth to that war. Because she has been reading the paper, she was already familiar with this argument.

"When you put it like that," she said, "it’s really very clear. I wish I hadn’t spoken to you today," she added half-seriously, "because this really upsets me." She doesn’t want her daughter and son to be drafted. I pointed out that CHALLENGE also shows the positive side: how we can win workers and soldiers to a revolutionary movement fighting for a truly new communist economy.

As we left church she said again, "You make it all so clear, like a lens that focuses everything." I replied that the "lens" is the collective insight of our Party. Then she asked when she could stop by to get the new CHALLENGE.

While the minister was preaching, I felt like walking out of church for good, but the conversation afterward reminded me why I stay. It’s not mainly to unite with others in the congregation to go on anti-war marches or fight budget cuts, but to build relationships based on sharp struggle on this ideological "front-line."

Church-going Red

Racist Education and Racist Professors

Recently, fellow students and I went to a "practical-experience" school activity in Southern Mexico to "analyze" how low-income people "can make their projects work and compete in the market to improve their lives." Those of us from small towns and of indigenous background experienced blatant racism.

The professors heading the trip always told others along the way to "excuse them because they’re indigenous students." One professor kept telling those in charge in the places we visited that we "couldn’t communicate or express ourselves correctly because of our ethnic origin." In Oaxaca, some women in our group complained about being bitten by ants. Our own teacher, who claimed she wasn’t racist, later told us not to complain about this since we’re from small towns and "girls from well-to-do families never complain so much about some little ants."

The racism became even worse. Our teachers said, "You should all be grateful for this opportunity to do this high-level research in places you won’t be able to ever visit again — they charge 1,000 pesos (about $100) a day). Only students from the ‘best colleges’ can afford them without scholarships."

These attitudes reflect the racism of the rich bosses who run this capitalist society, reminding us poor working-class people: "You’re poor and don’t even aspire to come back to these fancy places."

PLP members and some students concluded how, in a communist society, there won’t be "different kind of opportunities" since there won’t be class differences. We will all share society’s benefits and responsibilities. Since racism is a universal aspect of capitalism, from Oaxaca to Los Angeles to Madrid, PLP organizes an international party to fight for this communist goal.

A Red Militant Student

a name="ID Cards Become New Report-to-Gov’t Cards">">"D Cards Become New Report-to-Gov’t Cards

My school recently instituted a program in the computer science department that researches how to track people using ID cards. These barcode-like tracking devices are already being used in new U.S. passports. The study uses radio frequency ID patches which are worn on clothing and can be tracked by computers within the computer science building. The program is supposed to study how the government can track people while still protecting their privacy, a seemingly oxymoronic goal. The professors in charge of the research claim that they want to protect people’s privacy, but if this were truly the case, why are they actively perfecting such invasive measures as the ID card tracker?

Such programs as these are not only a sign of fascist control of the working class and an attempt to put a friendly face on it, but academia’s willingness to spread it. In Nazi Germany, it was college professors who were the first to acquiesce to fascism and it was college students who created the Hitler Youth. Universities are no bastion of left politics and to see it as such is idealism at its worst. The university can only be a place of communist politics if we make it so.

We must join mass organizations, as I recently did, and we must build CHALLENGE networks amongst our base in these groups. We must expose the fascist agenda of U.S. imperialism and the universities’ role in it. We must build strong friendships with our base, something I am trying to do now. As communists, we must give our base alternatives to the dead-end liberalism of the university by inviting them to May Day and the summer projects. Through discussion and action we can show them that true leftist politics come from only one place, the working class, and that in order to make real change we must put our faith in the working class and fight for communism.

Red College Student

Veteran of El Salvador War Joins PLP

(This is a letter from a new member of Progressive Labor Party written at a communist school in El Salvador, a sign of the political/ideological development of our members and also the deepening of the internal struggle to fight the reformism taught by the revisionist, the phoney leftist, groups, and the fight for Communist Revolution.)

I want to give you a small fragment of the history of the past revolutionary process in which I participated in the organizations that formed the FMLN in the eastern part of the country, that were called the ERP (Revolutionary Peoples’ Army).

I was 12 years old when the El Salvadoran government’s army carried out one of its bloodiest attacks against the civil population. In all these years there were big operations by the armed forces that left many people massacred. This happened in different places like El Mozote, in the mountains of Morazán, where more than a thousand people were killed. It was here that four members of my family were tortured and killed: my mother, my Grandmother, and my two aunts, leaving me alone at a young age.

Days after this vile massacre by the Salvadoran government against my family, friends and neighbors in the community, and in the face of these huge injustices, thinking that we needed to change everything, I joined the armed struggle. I asked a friend to go with me to walk outside of town with the idea of looking for my father who was already in the guerilla army . As I neared the campsite where he was, I told my friend that I would not return to town.

I spent the whole war fighting against our class enemies, thinking that I was doing the right thing, but 16 years after the peace accords were signed and the FMLN has turned into an electoral party, I see that there weren’t any changes for the Salvadoran working class.

One day a comrade gave me CHALLENGE and since then I have been a reader. Later, they invited me to an international communist school in another country where I learned how we can fight for and build a better world for all workers. This can be accomplished through building the Progressive Labor Party and the direct fight for Communism. For the moment, I have four CHALLENGE readers in a Party club and I hope that we continue growing as well as throughout the whole world.

To all the members and sympathizers of the Progressive Labor Party internationally, to the workers organized in different countries, from El Salvador, also known as the little finger of America, I send revolutionary greetings and at the same time invite you to continue to strengthen the Party’s work even more

New Fighter for Communism

a name="‘Winter Soldier’: Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan"></">‘W"nter Soldier’: Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan

The Winter Soldier Hearings in Maryland were amazing! In preparation, our PLP club showed the original Winter Soldier (see CHALLENGE, 4/9). Friends, including an army reservist, said that although the testimony was depressing and a bit vivid, it was a great learning experience. All felt that many comparisons could be made between the war in Vietnam and those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After attending the Winter Soldier this past week, it was obvious that the same pattern of racism and imperialist domination was being used, only in a different part of the world. Many told stories about how the racist term "hadji" was used, but that it came from the top down, not from the bottom up. This goes to show that racism doesn’t begin with the working class, but is fomented by the ruling class. They use this racism to divide workers and soldiers, as well as the workers in the country to be conquered. One soldier had a particularly sharp analysis of the whole situation. Instead of giving a testimony to the acts he was forced to commit, he spoke of imperialism, racism and how the rich never went to war, only the poor working class.

At the Winter Soldier hearings one really got a great sense of what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although the accounts were heartbreaking, it was refreshing to hear the truth, as opposed to the propaganda we workers are so accustomed to being bombarded with by the ruling-class media. After listening to the testimony I felt even more energized and angry. This energy and anger must be used to work even harder to build the Party and struggle for communism. Hopefully more workers can view and hear the testimony of these brave soldiers.

D.C. Comrade

a name="Candidates Reap Million$, Workers ‘Reap’ Unemployment"></">Ca"didates Reap Million$, Workers ‘Reap’ Unemployment

The two lead stories on the April 5 NY Times front page present a clear picture of capitalism as an exploitative class system. One says, "80,000 JOBS LOST" (in March). Adjoining that is, "Clintons made $109 million In Last 8 Years."

A single Clinton speaking engagement rakes in "upwards of $250,000," (NYT) more than the median family yearly income of five working-class families, in just one "lecture"! Seems talk is not exactly cheap, especially in the top one-hundredth of one percent of U.S. incomes.

Not that Obama or McCain are exactly poor. The Obama family income exceeded one million bucks in just one year (2006). (NYT) And the McCain family assets, including the fact that his wife is "an heiress to a beer distributorship fortune, are worth tens of millions of dollars." (NYT)

These are the millionaire politicians who have never helped workers and who defend and enforce their capitalist system which has launched massive attacks on the working class: wage-cuts, huge layoffs, more racist cops to terrorize workers and youth, big talk about healthcare while the uninsured approach 50 million. And yet the union misleaders and reformers tell us the "solution" is to vote for Obama or Clinton, pouring our dues money into their campaigns. What crap!

PLP has always advocated, "Don’t vote, organize!" to answer these attacks.

Meanwhile, the monthly jobless increase was actually 222,000 since "the government added 142, 000 make-believe jobs to the count" (John Crudele, NYPost, 4-8), the highest in five years, rising for the third consecutive month. It’s across the board, covering both industry and service areas. But, of course — as CHALLENGE has consistently reported — the 5.1% unemployment rate is a fraud. That figure, representing 7.8 million jobless, excludes "discouraged" workers who’ve given up searching for non-existent jobs and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs. That’s another 9.4 million workers, a total unemployment of 17.2 million — a 12.5% jobless rate.

This still doesn’t include people on welfare who can’t find jobs, nor those youth whose joblessness drove them to join the military. Nor the two-thirds of the 2.4 million in prison for non-violent, mostly drug-possession convictions who could ordinarily be at home or in rehab, also seeking non-existent jobs. All told, U.S. unemployment is probably somewhere around 20 million.

Because of racist discrimination, unemployment for black workers is twice that of whites. The "official" figure is black 9%, white 4.5%. But the true figure for black workers is about 25%, double the actual nationwide rate of 12.5%.

The liberal Democrat’s "solution" is to extend unemployment benefits, a goal rarely reached in this one-class-rules-all "two-party" system. And that excludes more than half of U.S. workers who are ineligible for any benefits (including millions of undocumented immigrants), something Obama and Clinton never mention when shedding crocodile tears for jobless workers. McCain’s hair-brained "solution" is more tax cuts for the rich and less regulation of the Wall Street investment houses making out like bandits.

Unemployment is an integral feature of the profit system and always will be as long as capitalism exists, driving for maximum profits by stealing the value that workers create and stuffing it into the pockets of the bankers, oil companies and Big Business. They go to war to protect their fortunes over workers’ dead bodies, much as they war on the working class at home. They will continue to do so until workers destroy their system and enable our class to share all the wealth we create among working people, according to need.

One big step towards that goal is to march on May Day, uniting black, Latino, Asian and white, immigrant and native-born, women and men, building PLP as the party to lead the working class against the ravages of capitalism. J

REDEYE ON THE NEWS

U.S. helped in Croatia war crime

A popular Croatian general who led a brutal operation that drove the Serbs out...went on trial in The Hague on Tuesday for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

[The] crimes included knowingly shelling civilian targets, allowing their forces to go on violent rampages during and after the campaign, terrorizing civilians, and looting and burning Serbian homes.

United States military advisers, among them retired and active personnel, helped plan the operation, and Americans directed drone aircraft over the battle zone to gain real-time intelligence for Croatian forces. (NYT, 3/12)

Wall St. Big For Barack And Hilary

Last week Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary...put it clearly: If Wall Street companies can count on being rescued like banks, then they need to be regulated like banks.

But will that logic prevail politically? So far, neither [campaign] has made a clear commitment...

The securities and investment industry is pouring money into both Mr. Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s coffers. And these donors surely believe that they’re buying something in return. (NYT, 3/24)

Workplace, killer for prostitutes

"Women engaged in prostitution face the most dangerous occupational environment in the United States..."

The American Journal of Epidemiology published a meticulous study finding that the "workplace homicide rate for prostitutes" is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. The average age of death of prostitutes in the study was 34. (NYT, 3/16)

Voters said no, but Dems fund it

Since the Democrats took over both houses of Congress, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the budget committee, boasted... "We have the identical amount in our budget for defense and the war as the president had in his budget –– identical, not a dime of difference."

So there you have it... Whether this allocation of scarce resources is actually in the public interest does not enter into it. (Washington Post, 3/13)

It’s the free market, stupid...

To the Editor:

Re "What Created This Monster?" (March 23), which looked at the run-up to the current financial market mess:

Why should we be surprised that a socio-economic system founded on greed, selfishness and competition, and fueled by Pollyannaism and willful blindness, might be less than optimal?

Perhaps when the smoke clears, Americans will no longer worship at the altar of a mythical "free market" that is inherently unfree, skewed and subject to massive abuse. Perhaps Americans will finally choose to stop living in an economic Wild West and at last reject the boom-and-bust cycle of turbocharged hypercapitalism in favor of a more humane, livable society. (NYT, 3/20)

The Web makes spying easy

It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.

...Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups....

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.