Algeria: Dairy Wildcatters Defy Bosses’ System

ALGIERS, March 4 – Wildcatting dairy workers have taken on four enemies in one fell swoop: union misleaders, company bosses, the courts and the government.
Workers at the largest dairy supplying the capital are continuing their February 28 wildcat against the official trade union and its corrupt general secretary, Khelifi Ali. The strike has shut the public-sector Colaital dairy company in Birkhadem, six miles south of here.
The workers have defied a court ruling the wildcat as illegal. The general director of the government’s National Milk Office (ONIL), Fethi Messar, is ordering in police as strike-breakers. The ONIL is also increasing production at 11 other dairies in order to help break the strike. Meanwhile, Messar said he’s willing to “mediate” the conflict.

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Bosses’ ‘Education Reform’ A Lesson Plan for War

The Progressive Labor Party has repeatedly warned workers of coming wars leading to a major war to decide which imperialist(s) will control the world. We’ve said that the U.S. ruling class will use its state power to prepare and try to mobilize the population for war.
On March 20, 2012, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) Independent Task Force (ITF) on U.S. Education Reform and National Security issued its 96-page report. The CFR is the key U.S. ruling-class think tank directing U.S. imperialism’s foreign policy and influencing government officials who are instrumental in their plans. It’s significant that it appointed a Task Force headed by Condoleezza Rice, former George W. Bush’s Secretary of State (a key figure in both Iraq wars), and Joel Klein, ex-chancellor of New York City’s schools.

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Tel-Aviv: Red Flags Fly on IWD

Tel-Aviv, Israel-Palestine, March 8 — Over 100 working women and men marched in central Tel-Aviv to mark International Women’s Day. Two PL’ers joined the march and distributed CHALLENGEs in Hebrew and English.
This march was dotted with red flags and represented multi-ethnic unity of working women. While small, the march was very sharp, politically speaking, with the red flags and energetic chants of “The Answer to Racism is Revolution” and “The Answer to Sexism is Revolution”.
We in Progressive Labor Party welcome the demand for revolution. Indeed, while we do disagree with the organizers of the march on many subjects, to have International Women’s Day marked with red flags and chants calling for revolution was a very welcome change from the liberal feminist slogans and commercialization seen on this day.
As our Party continues to grow we will have our own contingent marching on International Women’s Day under our own flags and with our own chants, not merely calling for a revolution, but for a communist revolution.

Communists Link Class Struggle to Fight vs. Sexism

HAITI, March 13 — Communists must fight against the capitalists and their ideas everywhere. A small group of communists in a provincial city in Haiti waged an ideological struggle for communism on the weekend of International Women's Day. Several young women university students of proletarian background wanted to organize an event. We presented phrases of famous women to show the history of women’s participation in the struggle. They called it a plea for fighting sexism in all aspects of society. 
We began discussing our plan over several meetings, trying to give a more revolutionary and working-class  character to this initiative. We discussed women revolutionaries such as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, among others. Current struggles for equality need to become more class-conscious: to make it a struggle of working-class women and men against the ruling class. We are discussing the importance of communism in women's struggle against capitalist exploitation for our class’s liberation. Today millions of women are striking against this exploitation worldwide. Capitalism uses sexism as a basis of the exploitation and oppression of women is the social division of labor.
With the support of communist comrades, these young women posed some revolutionary acts. They saw that in the bourgeois feminist movement, women bosses defend their class interests. Because our relationship is only beginning with these young women, they found it sufficient to carry out their activities by asserting certain rights of women, without entering into class struggle.

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France: 200,000 March vs. Job Cuts Sarkozy, Socialists: ‘Same Hot Air’

PARIS, March 5 — Tens of thousands of workers demonstrated here today against the fraudulent agreement on “secure employment.” Nationwide, 200,000 joined 174 protest marches.
The loudest contingent in the Paris march comprised 250 Peugeot auto workers from nearby Aulnay, who chanted “Forbid layoffs, no factory closures!” and “We’re here today, we’ll continue tomorrow!” One worker, Mohamed, declared, “I didn’t vote for [Socialist president] François Hollande because I knew it was the same thing, the same hot air.”
“There has been no break with the previous [Sarkozy] government,” said Jean-Pierre, who marched here. At 66, having just retired, he fears retirement pensions will “not be guaranteed.”

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How PLP Defeated FBI-LAPD Attack in 1960s

Capitalism is a dictatorship of the small group of bankers, bosses and billionaires who own and control the means of production, agriculture and transportation; the state apparatus (the government, military, courts and police); the educational system and the media. Despite the pretense of democracy, the capitalist class uses this ownership and control to maintain itself in power and suppress serious challenges to its rule.
In the U.S., the 1960s anti-racist ghetto rebellions and massive anti-imperialist movement against the war in Vietnam rocked the capitalist class to its core. These uprisings forced the rulers to step up their use of their Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In cooperation with local police forces, the FBI, through its Counterintelligence (COINTEL) program, planned or fomented physical and psychological attacks on leading communist and militant anti-racist political forces like PLP, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party.
CHALLENGE (1/16/13) quoted from attorney Brian Glick’s book War at Home. The FBI’s COINTEL tactics included : “[i]nfiltration: … [to] not merely spy on political activists … [but] to discredit and disrupt their activities; [l]egal harassment: … [a]buse the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals … [using] perjured testimony; and
[i]llegal force: … [c]onspire with local police departments … to … commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations …”
These attacks did not stop with the 1976 liberal Church Committee congressional hearings and report which partially exposed COINTEL. The following describes a police attack on PLP in Los Angeles (from a 1982 PLP pamphlet):
    On June 18, 1977, PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR)    held a mass anti-racist demonstration in the Los Angeles garment center. The demonstration was organized to combat the

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"Paradise Alley" Exposes North’s Racism During Civil War

This July marks the 150th anniversary of the infamous NYC draft riots, one of the largest urban insurrection in U.S. history. Tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers, many of them Irish, burned down the city’s draft office and armory, and set fire to police stations and the homes of wealthy Republicans over the course of four days. Union troops had to be diverted from fighting the Confederate Army to suppress the riot.
Normally communists welcome working-class rebellion. Not this time. The main aspect of the NYC draft riots was the ghastly and brutal attacks on black men, women and children, one hundred of whom were murdered in less than a week. Black men were captured, beaten, tortured, strung from lamp posts and set on fire. Black women were stripped naked and beaten. An orphanage for black children was burned to the ground, with the occupants making a daring escape, which is captured in the historical novel Paradise Alley.

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War Looms over U.S.-China-Iraq Battle for Oil

The sharpening rivalry between U.S. imperialism and China threatens armed conflict across the globe. From Iraq to Africa, as profit-seeking bosses go to war over oil, gas, uranium and other natural resources, more masses of workers worldwide will be killed. Millions of others will be driven deeper into poverty by the bosses’ super-exploitation in extracting these resources. For the international working class, the only answer to these horrors is a communist revolution to destroy their source — capitalism.
Late last month, Barack Obama sent 100 U.S. troops to Niger in Western Africa to establish a drone base. Aimed allegedly at al Qaeda, the unmanned assassination tools will menace China’s growing uranium operations there. (Niger is the world’s fourth largest uranium producer.) Meanwhile, Iraqi rulers are pressuring Exxon Mobil to sell its stake in a vast oil field to a Chinese firm. Exxon has countered with deals with the Kurds in northern Iraq, a move that could unleash a civil war.
U.S. Air Force personnel in Niger belong to the Pentagon’s Africa Command. Created in 2007, AFRICOM’s main mission is to combat the Islamic terrorists who pose a real problem for U.S. and allied rulers, as shown by a February attack on a British Petroleum gas plant in Algeria. According to J. Peter Pham, a lecturer at the U.S. Army War College, AFRICOM’s second mission is “protecting access to...strategic resources which Africa has in abundance” and “ensuring that no other interested third parties, including China, India, Japan, and Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential treatment” (World Defense Review, 10/2/08).
While Obama’s Niger move helps France’s efforts to stave off al Qaeda and recolonize neighboring Mali (see box), it also serves the U.S. strategy to dominate China’s energy sources.

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‘Education, Not Racist Experimentation!’

BROOKLYN, February 20 — “Whose schools? Our schools!” “They say cut back, we say fight back!” These were some of the chants coming from about 100 students, parents, and teachers at a high-energy rally outside the Tilden High School campus last week. They were responding to the Department of Education’s (DOE) plan to push a charter elementary school into the building, which already houses three high schools. Following the rally was the DOE’s Public Hearing. Students, teachers, and parents spoke passionately about the negative effects this colocation would have on the education of students throughout the district and about the racism of the education system.

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Haiti: Student Strike Supporters Champion Communist Internationalism

“Everything we do now counts.”  Revolutionaries in the international PLP often say this. We mean that you have to see every act of organizing workers, right now, as one step in the communist movement we are rebuilding one step at a time.  You have to hang on to that belief, especially now, when the working class often loses everyday reform battles, the strikes and protests which CHALLENGE covers. We need a mass communist party which can unify all our struggles, redouble our strength, and raise the idea of taking back from our exploiters all the value which we create as workers and which they steal from us in the form of profits. 
The student support letter from Haiti for the NYC school bus strike (CHALLENGE, 2/27) raised that idea as an international goal, saying workers “from everywhere must unite to fight together under the red flag.”  Their message of support counts because it lifts the strikers’ eyes from a local struggle which they may not win to their broader power, as one international class, to change the game entirely.

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