Campus Workers Invade Bosses’ Office

LOS ANGELES, CA, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party joined together with workers from a university campus here to rally and march into the office of the assistant vice chancellor. These workers have been fighting for four years in order to be hired by the university itself — not by an outsourcing company that had fired workers on a whim and forced the remaining workers to do twice the work. Recently, the workers won that battle, but the fight continues. 

In the last three months about 30 workers, almost a third of the staff, have received “counseling memos.” This is a fancy way of saying they were written up. Many of these write-ups were based on the fact that the supervisors didn’t understand what was necessary in order to get the work done. For example, one worker was written up for being “out of area.”  The worker wasn’t working in the building they were supposed to be because the workload they had been given in another building was too much and they could not finish on time. Three workers have been fired recently because of these attacks.

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Mexico: Building International Unity and Communist Solidarity

Fifty members and friends of Progressive Labor Party from around the U.S. and Mexico, across borders, are participating in a Summer Project in Mexico. The PLP has planted the seeds of communism in Mexico, the U.S., and many other areas worldwide. We’re cultivating these seeds, a long-term process with many ups and downs, which will prepare the international working class for its role in making communist revolution.

This process involves many inter-connected elements, all of which are evident at the Project in Mexico:

The working class requires international unity, which we put into practice by building ties between comrades and friends across borders and by supporting workers’ and students’ struggles in all areas of the world. In building an international Party, we are overcoming capitalist divisions caused by racism, nationalism and sexism, as well as obstacles like different languages and cultural backgrounds.

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Tel-Aviv Workers: Burn Down Capitalism, Not Yourselves!

TELL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 20 — Moshe Silman, died from his wounds after setting himself on fire during last week’s rally against the government’s economic policy. This act of desperation served as an example to several other workers, pushed to the brink of suicide by the inhuman capitalist system, who began setting themselves on fire to protest their poverty.

One hundred sixy years ago, Marx and Engels wrote how the capitalist system, in its dog-eat-dog competition between businesses, drives many petit-bourgeois (the self-employed and the small businessmen) into the proletariat (working class). Silman’s tale is a clear example of this. At one time he owned a tiny transport company with four trucks, but due to debts to the National Insurance (Israel’s “Social Security”), one of his trucks was repossessed, starting a downward spiral for him.

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Profit Wars, Racism Drive U.S. Troops’ Suicide

Local working-class people in Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly civilians, have bore the brunt of suffering in the U.S. imperialist wars, with casualties, both deaths and injuries, numbering in the millions. This carnage has also damaged working-class U.S. troops — who’ve survived physically uninjured — by what they’ve seen and done. For every U.S. soldier killed in the war zone, about 25 vets die by suicide.

The racist lies the Pentagon uses to direct U.S. working-class troops’ anger towards local workers, especially anger over a battle buddy’s death, underlie  these skyrocketing suicide rates. These racist lies lead many troops to kill, beat or harass innocent local workers or at least passively support those troops that do.

Since the U.S. military defines the troops’ mission as only to “carry out good intentions,” it’s easy for troops to get angry at civilians who refuse to turn in insurgents and view these civilians as “ungrateful savages.”

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Pakistan: Slaying of Woman Fighter Fuels Farmers’ Anger

Landless farmers are facing horrible exploitation in Pakistan. They are absolutely dependent upon the rule of big landowners, even in their private life. They’re constantly abused, physically, verbally and sexually, and may be kept imprisoned while they have no work.

When laboring in the fields, they are treated as slaves. From dusk to dawn, they either endure the scorching heat or shiver in the cold. Their legs are chained, and are even denied access to food. These parasitic bosses are becoming richer and richer off the blood of the poor workers and are gaining increasing control of the state.

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Israel-Palestine Bedouin Workers Fight Racist Land Grab

AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 27 — Hundreds of workers, both Bedouin-Arabs and Jews, marched against the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) attempt to evict the Bedouin village of al-Arakib from its ancestral lands. In the last two years, this village has been demolished no less than 40 times. Yet the villagers, impoverished workers and peasants, still cling to their land and rebuild again and again, bravely defying the will of the racist Israeli regime.

Workers from all parts of Israel-Palestine stand in solidarity with this struggle, encouraging the villagers of al-Arakib in their fight for a piece of land to call their home. But what is this struggle really about? For this, we must look at the history of the Bedouins in Palestine.

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Red Bread: A Woman’s Fight for Soviet Collective Farms

Red Bread, by Maurice Hindus, was written in 1931 about the collectivization of the farms in the Soviet Union (USSR). Hindus was a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in a small village in the USSR and was visiting his home and writing about the people there.

In one chapter, a “New Girl,” Vera was introduced to Hindus by her superior on the collective farm (kolhoz) as a real daughter of the revolution. Her formal job title was as a milk maid — charged with milking eight cows, three times a day. 

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Dark Knight Rises: Batman Spews Anti-Communism to Save Capitalism

Three thousand police march like Nazi storm troopers through a downtown metropolis to do battle with hundreds of rebels on the steps of city hall. Sounds like NYPD’s response to the Occupy Wall Street protests or the response of the Anaheim police to the anger at their latest racist killings? Try the latest movie in the Batman trilogy, Dark Knight Rises. In this film, the Dark Knight (Batman) must “rise” to the challenge of greater threats to the capitalist system as he leads thousands of Gotham police to fight armed rebels who have occupied the city. 

While previous villains like the Joker wanted to watch the world burn for fun, Batman’s newest foe, Bane, is committed to destroying Gotham because of a strict political ideology. For Bane, the decadent rich, corrupt kkkops and politicians have ruined the city and the only thing left to do is to blow it all up and start over.

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U.S. War Machine Tops All Atrocities

Capitalist individualism and its culture of violence fueled the recent massacre in Aurora, Colorado. James Holmes, a loner entranced by movie mayhem, shot 70 people, fatally wounding 12 — a deranged and despicable act.  

As the bosses’ media focused attention on his carnage, Holmes became the nation’s most notorious criminal. But there are far more lethal threats facing our class — from the capitalists themselves. Holmes’ mass murder, as horrific as it was, pales in comparison to the atrocities the U.S. ruling class routinely commits against its own workers. It is put in the shade by the U.S. war machine that mows down workers in the Middle East to secure the imperialists’ profits. 

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Anaheim: Defying Cops’ Racist Terror; WORKERS, YOUTH REBEL!

ANAHEIM, CA, July 27 — The chants began with “Let Us In! Let Us In!” but quickly changed to “Police Say Get Back, We Say Fight Back” and “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police!” as more and more people pressed into the small lobby outside the Anaheim City Council chambers on July 24. As a hearing on recent police killings was starting, PLP and members of the community joined relatives grieving for Manuel Díaz and Joel Acevedo. Both were murdered by the Anaheim police over the previous weekend. 

On Saturday, July 21, immediately after Díaz was shot twice from behind, neighborhood friends and families confronted the police. The kkkops attacked the militant crowd — including entire families with children and babies in strollers — using rubber bullets and police dogs.

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