LOS ANGELES, August 27 — We are a group of students, educators, workers, and union members who meet weekly to study Marxism and put it into practice by building working-class solidarity with Southern California supermarket workers.
For several months, we have been committed to reading works such as Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Through these readings, we understand how the economic collapse of 2008 and subsequent recession and high rate of unemployment are not accidents, but examples of the repeating cycle of boom and bust that characterize capitalism. This system relies on unemployed workers as a reserve army of labor for the ruling class. We also discussed how these crises are exaggerated by the need for growing profits for bankers and big corporations, as well as the need for imperialist powers to initiate wars of aggression.
We committed ourselves to supporting workers of Ralphs, Albertsons, and Vons supermarkets in Southern California. They may be going on strike against a proposed contract that aims to remove affordable health care and pension plans.
We hosted a Forum/Action Planning group. We discussed how each crisis means more give-backs and cutbacks for the working class in order to sustain the bosses’ profits. The presentation incorporated many ideas from Marx and Lenin to help put the current situation in the context of the workings of capitalism.
In particular, we focused on the austerity measures recently proposed by the U.S. federal government. These cuts are part of a larger attack on workers that aim to further destroy the strength of unions. They are a tool of the ruling class to make the working class pay for the financial criminality of banks and businesses.
After that, we discussed how we would use this understanding of capitalism to help the community fight back against the bosses’ attacks. We will be more involved with the supermarket workers. There was a good discussion on whether or not our goal was to win a strike, or to win the workers and community closer to communist ideas. All benefits won through reforms by previous generations of workers are eventually taken back from future generations. PLP fights for communism, which runs on workers’ needs, and is the lasting solution to capitalism, which is based on bosses’ profits.
We will continue to have these discussions openly with our comrades and friends to develop more cohesive ideas when we go to the picket lines. We plan on doing house visits and weekly community meetings to discuss how the attack on the grocery workers is part of a bigger attack against the working class as a whole.
As a result of these recent events, we developed our political understanding and created more solidarity among different types of workers here. Many grocery workers and others reacted positively to our efforts to support them. They had been feeling disempowered due to constant attacks from the bosses and the misleadership of the union. But as a result of PLP’s leadership, many workers have shown more militancy and enthusiasm to collectively struggle against their bosses. We will struggle with all working people to envision what a communist world will be like.