Fighting Fascism And Building A Base Still Key

Last month New York City cab drivers struck, in part because they did not want Global Positioning System (GPS) mechanisms placed in the car. They knew that the bosses would use this technology to track the cab drivers and push to exploit them more.

More workers need to follow this example and stand up to the bosses’ tactics. In Nazi Germany, workers did not wake up one morning to full-blown fascism, but they had not fought the gradual addition of more racist laws until too late. U.S. bosses are counting on keeping us passive as they add more and more oppressive technologies and laws.

The ruling class needs to continue to win workers to their fascism. They are using rhetoric (their campaign "See Something, Say Something" for instance) about terrorism, immigrants "stealing jobs," and crime prevention to convince workers that all these cameras, metal detectors and phone tapping is for our own good. They want us to accept that workers in other countries or of other "races" are our enemy.

The working class wants technology to make our lives easier. The bosses use technology to make profits, control markets for imperialism and oppress the workers. New technology can speed up production for increased profits and create layoffs, it can improve the bosses’ ability to wage war abroad and it can make life hell for workers. The bosses can use technology to track our every move and they want us to know this, to be afraid and to accept it as a normal part of our lives. Technology is one of the ideological tools they use to win workers into racist movements at home and into the military to wage imperialist wars.

New technologies can be used to the working class’ advantage to distribute information about class struggle, communist politics and Marxist-Leninist ideology more broadly around the world through the Internet. We must not have any romantic liberal notions about it either. It will be shut down when the bosses feel it necessary. The bosses do not want information that can harm them to get out. A perfect example of this was in the current struggle in Myanmar when the rebelling monks were relaying information to journalists and the world at large through the Internet, the generals in the end shut it down (NYTimes, 10/04/07).

For communism and working-class revolution we still need "boots on the ground," to use the military term. A revolutionary movement can’t exist in a "virtual" environment because we need to organize workers at our jobs, in our schools and in the streets. We need active communists sharpening the class struggle, distributing CHALLENGE through many networks and recruiting new members. Only by fighting racism and fascism can we show the working class that the Progressive Labor Party can lead a revolution and a communist society. Then and only then can we use and make technology for the good of all workers and not just to make a profit.