As the UAW strike against Ford, GM and Stellantis enters its third week, it has “expanded” to 20 percent of the membership on the picket lines and 80 percent still working, including at the most profitable truck plants that produce the Dodge Ram, Ford F-150, and Chevy Silverado. The 38 Parts Distribution Centers that got called out on strike only service the dealerships and have no effect on production. They also added only about 6,000 workers to the total on strike.

Trying to give cover to the UAW leadership and bolster his sagging presidential campaign, Joe Biden spent about two minutes on a GM picket line while his labor secretary is assigned to Michigan to make sure the strike doesn’t spread. But PLP has been out to the picket lines, too, talking with Ford truck and assembly workers in Michigan and Chicago and to Stellantis parts depot workers in New York, offering support, international solidarity, and talking about the need for communist revolution.

Biden calls himself “the most pro-union president ever,” yet he was one of the architects of the 2008 bailout that saw the auto bosses make $250 billion in profits over the past decade while auto workers saw their real wages drop by 20 percent. Biden recently forced a national contract on railroad workers that they had overwhelmingly rejected and is trying to ensure a loyal industrial workforce as the rulers escalate their proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and prepare for a possible conflict with China.

While the UAW leadership and corporate media have the workers focused on wages and restoring past concessions, all of which are important, the main underlying issue is the transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs), which is already underway, and where U.S. bosses find themselves trailing behind Tesla and China, the #1 producer of EVs in the world. A Hyundai EV factory will soon be operating in Georgia.

The UAW already represents less than half of the US auto industry. The transition from gasoline engines to EVs will cost thousands of jobs as current facilities that produce engines, mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components will be retooled or shut down. Many workers will not be around to see the benefits of whatever wage hike is ultimately settled on. One of the main goals of the UAW is to get the auto bosses to agree to have the new battery and EV factories, many of them joint ventures with smaller companies, covered by the national labor contract. If they don’t get it, they will ultimately represent a smaller and smaller share of the industry.  

Scientific and technological changes in production are nothing new, especially in the auto industry. Many Detroit workers and families remember in the 1990s, when GM built the Hamtramck Assembly plant and Chrysler built the new Jefferson Assembly and together they closed more than 13 factories as automation and robotics cost tens of thousands of jobs and reshaped the industry. Similar struggles are underway about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The problem isn’t science or technology, it’s who controls it and who runs society. These advances can serve the profits of the billionaires or the needs of all workers. Once we eliminate the bosses and their system with communist revolution, science and technology can serve the masses. We need a lot more than a wage hike. We need to abolish wage slavery!

In Part One of this five-part series, we looked at impacts of climate change over the past year.  CHALLENGE considered the September 17 climate march and analyzed its weaknesses. Part Two considers how the continued use of fossil fuels under capitalism puts the survival of humanity at risk.
The amount of carbon dioxide (the main gas generated by the burning of fossil fuels or wood) has been rising since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s. Over the past 70 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen steadily each decade (see graph). Small changes in the average global temperature can have major impacts.

Despite pledges by the world’s capitalists to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the summer of  2023  was the hottest on record. In 2015, capitalist bosses from nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement, which targeted a limit for global warming by 2100 of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, and the latest climate models project that we’ll pass 1.5 degrees by the mid-2030s (new.stanford.edu, 1/30). Even if all the big-emitting nations (led by China and the U.S.) fulfilled their short-term emissions cut commitments, temperatures will rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius (climateactiontracker.org). The consequences? A “new normal” of devastating weather events, from mega-hurricanes and killer floods to raging wildfires and drought.  As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutterres said, “We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing” (theguardian.com, 11/7/22). More recently he added, “Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet”(theguardian.com, 9/7).

Workers protest, bosses burn more oil
A wave of mass demonstrations is demanding an end to the expansion of fossil fuel and a phase-out of existing gas, oil, and coal installations.  At present, however, financing of fossil fuel exploration, development, and use continues to rise. In the United States, consumption of energy derived from fossil fuels increased by more than 2 percent in 2022. Britain has reopened coal mines in the name of “energy security” after the war in Ukraine disrupted energy markets. On September 27, it approved an enormous oil and gas project in the North Sea, “ignoring warnings from scientists and the United Nations that countries must stop developing new fossil fuel resources if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change” (Associated Press, 9/27).  After U.S. President Joe Biden promised to block further oil exploration in Alaska during his 2020 campaign, his administration approved the massive Willow oil project.

Left to the capitalists, the odds of shutting down the carbon economy in time–and sustaining a liveable planet–are slim and none. In the U.S., Biden and the liberal Democrats–representing the Big Fascists of finance capital–are controlled by the “supermajor” energy companies and the multinational banks that finance them and reap huge profits in return. Meanwhile, the Small Fascists fronting the Republican Party are bought and paid for by domestic energy companies, notably Koch Industries and coal-mining giant Peabody Energy. In schools, children are taught the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide but are assured that we can stop it by recycling or buying electric vehicles or installing solar panels and heat pumps for our homes. The underlying message is to blame individual workers for climate change and to hide the truth: that global warming is the product of the anarchy of capitalism and its drive for maximum short-term profit. Only a communist society run by and for the international working class can balance workers’ need for energy with the need to preserve a healthy and habitable world.

Workers want change, bosses want profits
One recent example of the capitalist bosses’ bad faith is their decision to hold the next United Nations climate summit this December in Dubai, in the oil-soaked United Arab Emirates. The conference president will be Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, which is committed to exploit fossil fuels through the year 2100 and most likely beyond.

The October 4 CHALLENGE noted that the Climate Week demonstration drew more than 75,000 marchers, including significant numbers of Black and Latin workers and youth  and members of labor unions. Some welcomed the demand of  “System Change, Not Climate Change.” The march was bracketed by sit-ins at banks and museums that take money from fossil fuel companies, as courageous workers put their bodies in entryways to draw attention to the catastrophe now unfolding before our eyes. This year alone,  devastating wildfires have consumed forests from Canada and the U.S. to Spain and Brazil. The fires poison the air hundreds, even thousands of miles away. As forests dry out and rain patterns shift, climate change has increased the likelihood of these fires by 50 percent.

Millions of workers and students are fighting back against climate change and Big Oil. Fridays for Future is a youth-led international organization in 7,500 cities across the globe, from Sweden and Belgium to  Peru, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone. Extinction Rebellion, based in Britain, calls for civil disobedience to push governments to act. While many participants in these liberal-led reform groups sincerely want to see ”system change,” most do not yet approach the crisis from a class perspective.

The only climate solution is communist revolution
We must win workers to the understanding that the only climate solution is communist revolution, and that only a revolutionary communist party–Progressive Labor Party–can smash capitalism and its rotten, climate-poisoning ideas. It’s not enough to appeal to governments for stricter environmental regulations or to pressure banks to stop financing fossil fuel companies. Communists challenge the basic premises of capitalism: the need for money, the exploitation of labor, the extraction of commodities in the interests of inter-imperialist rivalry.

Many of the participants at the September 17 march would be receptive to this message if given a chance. It’s up to us to share it with them, to develop personal ties and build a base within these mass organizations.

PLP aims to lead the international working class to smash capitalism and replace it with a worker-run society. In future articles in this series, we will challenge the notion that solar and wind power alone can replace fossil fuels and consider the possibilities to advance the clean energy transition with nuclear energy while also limiting growth.

BROOKLYN, October 1—Progressive Labor Party and friends of a local community organization decried liberal fascist Mayor Erick Adams’s new ordinance to evict migrant families.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, after a rainstorm paralyzed the whole city of NYC (see page 4), we marched the streets of Bushwick near a shelter, chanting slogans both in English and Spanish in this integrated neighborhood.

We chanted slogans such as, “workers united will never be defeated” and “immigrants yes and evictions no.”
Our communist politics were well received by workers, and many took both the CHALLENGE and leaflets, and some young people briefly joined the march and chanted with us. This shows that no matter the condition, no matter the location, there are antiracists everywhere.

Once at the shelter, we gave speeches and chanted in front of the shelter, calling out the savage capitalist system as the cause, which needs to be destroyed and replaced by communism.
We got harassed by security. Some of the migrants were a little scared to show their faces on the window because of the harassment they go through by the cops.

We had also learned that a big portion of the migrants had already been evicted the night before and had been kicked out in the streets in the pouring rain that Governor Kathy Hohcul called “life-threatening.” Mayor Adams has been seeking to suspend the “right to shelter” law at a time when the City has the most needs to house people. These politicians’ decisions—Republicans and Democrats—are driven by profit needs, not workers’ needs.

This putrid racism displayed today is what capitalism has to offer to families already terrorized by the profit system (see page 2). A system that literally puts families into the streets in the middle of storms and floods deserve to be drowned. Smash all borders! See more next issue!

As refugees from Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean swell in number at the U.S.-Mexico border, President Joe Biden agreed to grant 472,000 work permits exclusively for those coming from Venezuela.  Seen as a kind gesture by some, the U.S. bosses are creating a racist divide as they fumble to address a disaster they themselves created. Workers without permits will be deported, and those who stay will be super-exploited, just as the Black working class has been for centuries.

Denver and San Diego and other cities run by liberals have “welcomed more than they can handle” and are reducing the length of stay for asylum-seekers to 14 days (CBS News Colorado, 10/2).  These “progressives” have joined the open racists from Texas and Florida in busing migrants to Chicago and New York. Migrants trek to the United States for an opportunity to work and live stable lives, yet the reality is something harshly different. Most are met with racist insults from fellow workers and fascist crackdowns from the capitalist bosses. To discourage new arrivals, New York City Mayor Eric Adams began evicting migrants from shelters amid widespread flooding (Politico, 9/22). Fake leftist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has offered nothing but lip service for the refugees’ plight.

The imperialist rulers, set on preparing for world war, will not provide decent lives for the international working class.  Work permits and tent cities won’t fix this appalling situation. Only a communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party can give workers the world they deserve. The global migrant crisis is a symptom of a deeply racist system that must perpetuate inequality, nationalism, and exploitation to exist. We must combat the rise of fascism and fight to destroy capitalist borders that serve only the bosses.

Venezuela: a crisis made by capitalism
For two decades or more, the working class of Venezuela has been stuck in the crosshairs of inter-imperialist competition. President Nicholos Maduro has stayed in power largely with the help of China and Russia, which are paying the bills to keep his regime from collapsing. In recent months they have also deepened military ties with Venezuela, much to the dismay of the U.S., the longtime bully of the Americas (Dialogo Americas, 1/21/22)

In response, to force Maduro’s fake-left leadership into submission, the U.S. and a number of European countries have battered Venezuela with economic sanctions on products entering the country.  Because of the resistance of the bosses behind Maduro (and behind Hugo Chavez before him) to diversify the economy, Venezuela relies heavily on oil exports. As oil prices dropped in recent years, the country’s economy collapsed.
Suffering from one of the highest rates of hyperinflation in the world, workers in Venezuela cannot afford basic necessities. There are shortages of food and medicine and even electricity and clean water. In 2019, as the country teetered on the brink of civil war, the economic crisis was heightened by civil unrest and violence.

Worldwide, as they flee war and extreme poverty, workers and their families are traveling through jungles, deserts, large bodies of water, and territories infested by ruthless militias and gangs. But there are no safe havens for workers in a capitalist world, least of all in a racist stronghold like the U.S.  The current U.S.-Mexico border crisis reflects the desperate conditions for the working class throughout the hemisphere and beyond.
For the imperialist bosses fighting over Latin America’s resources, workers' lives are cheap.

We cannot fall for the divide-and-conquer game of these exploiters, whether they are Trump MAGA racists or liberals who defend the racist Democratic Party. In the current period, with fascism on the rise, the work of communists is especially critical. Where the bosses energize the gutter racists, communists inspire multiracial unity and help organize internationalist workers to be bold and fight back.  

Workers on the move met with fascism
The last decade has seen a mass upheaval in the lives of workers across the globe. At present, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an estimated 117 million people are forcibly displaced by violent civil unrest, political repression, and economic instability (UNHCR.org, 2023). Climate change, another product of capitalism, has led to disastrous forest fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and rising sea levels. In the Global South, livelihoods for millions have grown unsustainable. Hundreds of thousands of workers fleeing Africa are  stranded on the Italian island of Lampedusa, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. They are being held there indefinitely in wretched conditions under the guns of Italian soldiers (NPR, 9/23).

The capitalist-controlled media propagates racist narratives about migrants, provoking fear and division within the working class. Workers get manipulated into perceiving undocumented and asylum-seeking migrant workers as threats to their livelihoods. This strategy serves the bosses’ interests by diverting attention from the true cause of this crisis–capitalism! Disgruntled workers in U.S. cities have organized small but heavily publicized anti-immigrant rallies to stoke fear and nationalism. In Chicago, migrating workers were physically attacked and  police officers were accused of raping and impregnating underage migrants in holding cells (Chicago Tribune, 7/23). Super-liberal Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a multimillion-dollar tent city–essentially a city-run refugee camp–to house migrants (NBC Chicago, 9/23).

Communism will smash all borders
Borders are simply made-up lines created to signify where one boss's profits begin and another’s end. Never have they served the interests of the working class. Borders reinforce racist ideas that “other” workers are dangerous, untrustworthy, and out to steal jobs. Forcing workers to sleep in shelters, police stations, and tent cities is a racist travesty. We must fight back for migrating workers, and for the liberation of our entire class exploited and oppressed by the profit system.

Under communism, there would be no profits to fight over. The means of production would be controlled collectively. The factors that now drive workers to become refugees would cease to exist. Internationalism demands solidarity among workers worldwide. It calls for the dismantling of the structures that perpetuate inequality, beginning with borders.

The struggle for a better world must be a unified one, where workers from Chicago to Latin America to every corner of the globe stand together against the exploitative forces of capitalism. Only by breaking down the barriers that divide us can we hope to build a society where all workers are afforded dignity, freedom, and the opportunity to lead fulfilling lives. Join Progressive Labor Party as we organize to make this world a reality!