Woody Guthrie Novel: The Struggle to Survive under Capitalism

One year. And what is a year? A year is something that can be added on, but can never be taken away… A year is that nervous craving to do your good job and to draw down your good pay, and to join your good union… And a year of work is three hundred and sixty-four, or –five, or –six days of the run, the hurry, the walking, the bouncing, and the jumping up and down, the arguments, fights, the liquor brawls, hangovers, headaches, and all.

Such is the beautifully evocative earthy prose of House of Earth, Woody Guthrie’s only novel.

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Rulers’ Spy Uproar Pushes Police State for Waging War

The vast homeland spying schemes by the National Security Agency (NSA) have little or nothing to do with protecting the U.S. against terrorists. Their real purpose is to help U.S. bosses build a domestic police state to wage wider imperialist wars. The idea that spying on telephone calls or e-mails in the U.S. is “for our own good” is linked to the idea of supporting wars and interventions for “humanitarian” reasons. It’s a mask for the imperialist drive for maximum profit, which requires the control of energy supplies and cheap labor.
The primary aim of the bosses’ spying is to get people accustomed to accepting terror in their daily lives, from racist stop-and-frisk policies and murders by the police to the mass incarceration of mostly black and Latino prisoners. The militarization of public schools — in the name of protecting us against another Newtown slaughter — is in the same vein.

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One Year Later—Fight Against KKKiller Cops Continues

BROOKLYN, NY, June 15 — “If you hate these racist killer cops, put your fist in the air!”  Scores of fists were raised in response to this chant from a motorcade led by family members of Shantel Davis and Kimani Grey through the Flatbush neighborhood.  It has been one year since racist murderer Detective Philip Atkins shot and killed 23-year-old Shantel Davis in her car. The resolve of her family, the Shantel Davis Committee for Justice and Beyond, and members of Progressive Labor Party to continue the fight is as strong as ever. 
Only nine months after Shantel was murdered, police from Atkins’ precinct gunned down a 16-year-old young man, Kimani Gray, less than a mile from where Shantel was murdered.  As Shantel’s sister put it again during a Friday night vigil, where Constance Malcolm, the mother of another murder victim, Ramarley Graham, spoke, the NYPD is creating a new family of fighters determined to keep the memory of their loved ones alive and the fight against racist police murder strong. 
The women from these families boldly defy the bosses’ laws by taking over the streets in demonstrations to seek justice. They are living proof that through struggle, women can and will break through the passivity that the bosses push on working-class females in particular.  The women of the Graham, Davis and Gray families point the way toward a future where the capitalists and their sexist, racist system will be smashed once and for all.

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PL Transit Workers Ally with Riders, Lead Fight vs. Racist Bosses

WASHINGTON, DC, June 17 — The DC Metro transit bosses continue their racist attacks on the working class, both in the community and on the job.  They continue to push for service cuts and for privatization, which will hurt both the Metro workforce and workers throughout the region.
The Progressive Labor Party’s immediate strategy is to hit back on two fronts. In the short term, we are building an alliance among the riding public, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689, and other unions for jobs, lower fares, better service, and a single wage-and-benefit package for all transit workers. We are also fighting against DC Metro’s racist background checks. This alliance has the potential to push back these attacks and shut the region down. Our longer-term strategy is to win workers to a communist understanding of the need for revolution to destroy the entire capitalist system.

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LA May Day Inspires Youth to Join PL

LOS ANGELES, June 12 — The PLP high school club here has been very active recently, both before and after May Day. One student declared: “As a high-school senior, I was willing to engage more in my school. When my teacher asked me to be a part of the May Day dinner, I was willing to experience something new. I knew it was about communism but had no idea what that was. Being there helped me to understand that communism means joining people as one and providing equality and fairness among all the people. I developed a new outlook.

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Union Hacks say ‘Vote’ — Workers Need Mass Struggle

NEW YORK CITY, June 12 — Thousands of angry teachers, transit, fire, sanitation and other workers rallied today demanding new contracts. All city unions have been without new contracts, some for over two years. But instead of staging a city-wide general strike, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the NY Central Labor Council used this as a Democratic Party election rally for the upcoming mayoral election. Some went so far as to say they had come to City Hall to “evict” billionaire Bloomberg, even though he is leaving on his own, term-limited out, after 12 devastating years. The UFT gave out a sea of blue t-shirts that read, “Workers Count and Workers Vote.” That was also one of the main chants from the stage.

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Black Women Lead Fight vs. Hospital Closings

BROOKLYN, NY, June 16 — “Healthcare Yes! Wall Street No! Racist [governor] Cuomo’s got to go!” This chant, started by members and friends of Progressive Labor Party and taken up eagerly by hundreds of mainly women hospital workers, rang out for the entire march fighting against closing of Downstate Hospital. Many union leaders and politicians looked decidedly uncomfortable. The speeches were more militant in response to the mood of the workers.Brookdale Hospital workers and Occupy rally to oust the racist administration Mdysis and fight their healthcare cuts in November 2011.
For a year, hospital workers and residents of the neighborhoods served by us have been fighting against the downsizing and/or closings of both Downstate Hospital and Long Island College Hospital (LICH).  Downstate, comprising 8,000 workers and nearly 2,000 medical students, is the fourth largest business in Brooklyn.
The hospital and NY State bosses have been waffling on their plans, partly in response to this fightback. In the current economic environment, Governor Cuomo and Sate University chancellors want to cut our wages and benefits; their plan has no good solutions for hospitals that serve a large percentage of Medicaid and uninsured patients. The Public Benefit Corporation experiment proposed in Downstate bosses’ “Sustainability Plan,” will referee the imposition of more and deeper cutbacks.
This is a despicable sexist, racist attack on the working class here. Both politicians and union leaders fear that our struggles will progress into more militant actions than just petitions. Hundreds of CHALLENGEs sold at the hospital were welcomed by workers.
At the frontline of this fight are women workers, most of whom are black and immigrant. Considering the sexist fact women bear most of, if not the sole, responsibility of raising children and taking care of their parents, we are at the forefront of the struggle for healthcare for our families. Those of us who may lose jobs at these hospitals are major, if not primary, wage-earners for our households. In spite of the unpaid labor in the house and the exploited wage labor in the hospitals, women workers are getting involved and taking leadership, often for the first time.
PLP has been deeply involved in organizing these hospital struggles. We were there when Brookdale Hospital workers took on the criminal hospital administration, Medisys. We were part of organizing the first demonstration last June at Downstate with Occupy Wall Street.  We have tried to help mobilize the neighborhood Red Hook residents (survivors of Superstorm Sandy) to fight for workers and patients at LICH. Throughout we have warned that this crisis in healthcare is caused by the capitalist need to move resources out of social services into its efforts to maintain control over its world empire.
Workers in all hospitals must stick together and enlist the support of our patients. We cannot rely on voting and politicians. Mass, rank-and-file, militant struggle is our only chance to push back these attacks. Finally we have always said that a system based on profits can never provide decent health care for the working class. That is why we fight to build a mass communist movement in this antisexist struggle.

Combat Sexist Attacks on Workers

The company I work for is located in the northern part of the State of Mexico, one of the poorest areas of the state. The company pays $600 MXN a week to women and $650 MXN to men (one U.S. dollar is equivalent to 12.78 Mexican pesos); these are starvation wages, miserable and also humiliating. This company is one of many that exploit workers, taking advantage of conditions in the area, because this is one of the most deprived regions. The majority here doesn’t own the lots where they reside, living precariously in brick and mud houses covered by cardboard or aluminum roofs, and out of necessity are forced to accept dangerous jobs for very low wages. Most never even finished elementary school.

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Expose Fascist ‘Deporter in Chief’

Los Angeles, June 7 — When President Obama showed up here today to give a fund-raising speech to the people he really represents — the wealthy of this city and the fat-cat donors of the Democratic Party — he was met by 150-200 protesters, mostly young Latino college students. Many came to the U.S. with parents and relatives in search of a way out of the desperate poverty in Central America and Mexico. A group of us PLP members joined our friends from immigrant rights groups at the rally, to protest an administration that is working 24/7 to detain (jail) and deport an all time high number of immigrants, 1.7 million, in the last four years.

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Boston Bombing Prompts Racist Terror

In response to the CHALLENGE article on the Boston Marathon bombings 4/21), about the tragedy that killed three people, it has been useful for Boston comrades in discussing and agreeing with our friends that capitalism is at the root of terrorism (explained well in the article). The bosses’ pursuit of creating a police state is currently strong evidence of an increasing fascist hold over the masses. Some of us have gathered reactions of students and workers at one urban community college here.
After the bombing some students without “legal” immigrant status feared coming to school. There was a heightened awareness at the college of the police “out there looking for the perpetrators” endangering many students who immigrated here. They were wary of appearing publically. This fear is legitimate and those comrades who were born here must become sensitive to, and respectful of, such reactions. We must find ways to work with them and enable them to trust us and feel safe to express themselves about PLP’s politics.
With the media praising the police and “first responders,” and using this tragedy to build U.S. patriotism, the general public appears very tolerant of this new police state. As anti-Muslim terrorism runs rampant in Boston, a Muslim woman from Malden was beaten and a woman from Newton, a wealthy Boston suburb was forced out of her car by the police while they searched her vehicle and questioned her. One Muslim professor who works at the college lives in an apartment complex in Newton among a small community of Muslims described their fear of leaving the house. Since the Marathon, some of her non-Muslim neighbors have snubbed her, which shocked and hurt her and her husband. There’s a police car parked outside the complex which was never there before during the day.

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