Bosses Fiddle While Planet Burns, and… Big Oil Laughs All the Way to the Bank

South Africa hosted a two-week United Nations conference on climate change in early December, attended by delegates from more than 190 countries.  Called for the nominal purpose of ending greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming, it was one of a long series of failures.   

GHGs threaten all workers

GHGs come from the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. By trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, they have already warmed the earth by more than one degree; under capitalist business-as-usual, they threaten to warm it even more. Global warming shifts evaporation and precipitation patterns, leading to more frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe winter snows.  The melting of the big glaciers and ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica, could ultimately threaten to drown small island nations and coastal cities that contain more than 10 percent of the world’s population, including 80 percent of the people living in California.  (See the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST magazine “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org.)

Bosses battle each other rather than global warming

As usual, the competition inherent in capitalism has prevented any meaningful agreement among various nations’ ruling classes.  The lines are drawn most sharply between the ruling classes of the industrialized nations and those of the developing nations. The European Union recently demanded that all countries share equally in limiting GHG emissions, even though the industrialized countries have produced the lion’s share of GHGs to date. The U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are using this issue in an attempt to stem the rapid Chinese economic development that is pushing the two rivals toward war for control over fuel sources.  The ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan concern oil and natural gas.  All imperialists, whether from industrialized or developing nations, will fight to the last worker’s death to retain such control.

The conference ended with yet another worthless pledge to meet again later to come to agreement.  The world continues to warm and the poorest among us continue to suffer the major burden of climate changes.  That industrialized nations promised to throw in a few pennies to help the developing nations cope with the expenses of cutting fossil fuel emissions only serves to cover this reality, and their culpability.

The only established alternative to fossil fuels, which now provide about 85 percent of the world’s energy, is nuclear energy. Other sources are far less developed and reliable: wind, solar, hydro (dams), and geothermal (tapping underground hot magma). The extreme profitability in fossil fuels means that those corporations and their financial backers will continue to fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in their use.

Given the competition that is a mainstay of capitalism and imperialism, climate change conferences will inevitably disappoint the world’s working class.  Only when workers everywhere take state power will we be able to halt and perhaps reverse global warming. That will require a communist-led global revolution, which is PLP’s goal. Join us.

Keystone Oil Pipeline A Disaster for the Working Class

The U.S. bosses are determined to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Texas to increase their profits at the expense of workers’ lives and livelihoods.  Recent months have seen mass demonstrations, including encirclement of the White House, to protest this project.  Pipelines inevitably leak, the more so as they corrode with age, and can contaminate entire water supplies.  While the oil projected to flow through the Keystone XL will be extracted with difficulty from tar sands in northeast Alberta, the project has become relatively profitable because of the rising international price of oil. 

Regardless of when Obama decides to permit this cross-border pipeline (most likely after the November election), the working class in both Canada and the U.S. will be the loser. Unchecked, the continued burning of fossil fuels will bring the world closer to the tipping point where global temperatures could rise beyond reversible levels.  (See THE COMMUNIST, Winter 2010, “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org).   Only after state power is seized through communist revolution will the world’s workers be able to guarantee a safe environment for themselves and their descendants.

The Keystone issue

Tar sands oil is known as “sour” crude.  It contains far more corrosive elements than the “sweet” crude derived from large underground oil lakes, like those in the Middle East and under the oceans.  Sweet crude is also more easily extracted, but it is being depleted faster than new discoveries can replace it. Sooner or later, it will likely run out. 

For the time being, Obama has

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DC Occupiers Prepare for Park Cops’ Attack

WASHINGTON, DC, January 31 — After prodding from the richest man in Congress, Darrell Issa of California, who heads the colonial committee overseeing the District of Columbia, the U.S. Park Police are moving against Occupy DC at McPherson Square. Several people have been arrested, including one who was unjustifiably tasered by the cops and a PL’er who is falsely charged with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. Occupiers have erected a giant tent over the statue of General McPherson (a Civil War hero) and are preparing for an attack by Park Police. Stay tuned!

U.S. Bosses’ New Jim Crow Slavery

When slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished in the mid-1800s as a result of the Civil War, the problems of formerly enslaved Africans did not end. Capitalist-inspired racist ideology helped enable the bosses to exploit black labor to a higher degree than it did white labor. Prison chain gangs were fed by arbitrary arrests and convictions, injustices cloaked by Jim Crow laws. The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution that purported to end slavery contains the following loophole:  “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States….[Emphasis added — ed.]

“Crimes” used to justify imprisonment and enslavement after the formal end to slavery included vagrancy (essentially unemployment), which was so vaguely defined that any black man could be convicted of it.  Much the same happens today with arrests and convictions for drug “crimes.”  One key aspect to this sham of justice, then and now, was that state legislatures and Congress define many offenses as crimes without victims — no victims, that is, other than the person arrested. Among victimless crimes, possession of drugs is the contemporary equivalent to vagrancy.

With the skyrocketing of the U.S. prison population in recent decades, beginning with the political manipulation of “crime in the streets” by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and escalating with the “War on Drugs” under Ronald Reagan, a huge proportion of black workers — mainly men — have been re-enslaved.  In Chicago, for example, 55 percent of adult black men have felony records.  Overall, black men in the U.S. are incarcerated more than six times the rate for white men. They have a one-in-four chance of being jailed during their lifetimes; and one in fourteen are in jail or prison at any one time (see PLP pamphlet “Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style”). 

The U.S. prison population, the largest in the world, is 70 percent black and Latino in a country where black and Latino people represent only 29 percent of the population. Latino workers are

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Jobs, Not Jails! Protest Wells Fargo’s Investments in Racist Private Prisons

WASHINGTON, DC, January  25 — For more than two months, the Criminal Injustice Committee (CIC) of the Occupy DC movement has been battling the Wells Fargo bank to stop its support of the racist private prison system. In mid-December, more than 100 occupiers protested at the Wells Fargo branch in the mainly black Shaw neighborhood. Every Friday afternoon since then, a team of occupiers has leafleted there to urge its customers to close their accounts. Recently the CIC has expanded its boycott activities to a second branch office in Columbia Heights, where many black and Latino workers live.

On January 24, a second demonstration was held there in solidarity with protests at the Florida meeting of financiers involved with the GEO private prison company. The CIC also marched in the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade on January 22. The black working-class onlookers gave a rousing cheer to our “Jobs not jails!” chant, and quickly took all of our leaflets and CHALLENGEs.  

The capitalist system requires and reinforces racist institutions in order to maintain social control and maximize its profits (see “Smash Racism: A Fighter’s Manual” at www.plp.org). Capitalism systematically ensures the super-exploitation of African American workers by criminalizing and marginalizing them in what has been called the New Jim Crow (see adjoining article).

More than 60,000 DC residents have criminal records, mostly due to the bogus, racist “war on drugs.” The majority are jailed not for new crimes but for parole violations that are almost impossible to avoid. Half of those with criminal records are unemployed because it is lawful to discriminate against individuals for prior convictions. Wages and working conditions are driven down for these workers, and ultimately for all workers, as a result of this massive branding of black workers.

A similar institutional process is apparent for Latino immigrants,

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Minnesota: March in Solidarity with Occupiers Worldwide

MINNEAPOLIS, January 28 — In international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters of Tahir Square and our fellow anti-capitalists in Athens, London, Paris and Rome, the Minnesota Occupiers held Occupy Space Day in Minneapolis. It was thrilling!

A contingent of 70 demonstrators marched through the Steven Square and Eliot Park downtown neighborhoods protesting income inequality and housing evictions. Minneapolis has one of the Midwest’s highest eviction rates, after Chicago. Our demonstrators were men and women, black, white and bi-racial, union activists, workers and college students. While many were reformist in outlook, many others were anti-capitalists.

The kkkops harassed us initially but left before the march’s main event. In Eliot Park where the march ended there was an anti-capitalist speech declaring international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters in Egypt and with other global protestors against racist, imperialist capitalism.

The speech was in front of an abandoned church that Hennepin County declared county property. An unused church could be used as a workers’ cultural community center. However, the county bosses want to hold onto it rather than give it to workers, so we took it!

One speaker declared, “We take this property in the name of the Minneapolis oppressed!” The doors were forced open and we had a party! We held it for one hour before the cops gave us 15 minutes to clear out or be arrested. We all left together, orderly and disciplined.

Despite that outcome it was a small victory because workers are slowly learning we don’t have to take oppression, that we can collectively fight back. Workers took all the CHALLENGES I had. Personally the march and occupation made me think of the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1968 general strike in France.

This is a great time to be alive because the PLP will show millions of workers globally the revolutionary path to communism! 

Minnesota Red

Books vs. Profits: Protest Bosses’ Grab of Gary’s Main Library

GARY, IN, January 21 — For over a month, a small but dedicated group of local activists have been leading a campaign against the Gary Public Library Board’s racist closing of the city’s downtown main library branch. Although the branch stopped its services last December 30th, the group shows no signs of giving up on the struggle.

The roots of the library board’s decision to close the downtown branch date back to last spring, when  the president, Tony Walker, started to unveil plans for a museum/cultural center that would operate for a profit in the current library building. Among other points, Walker stated that the building in its current state was structurally unsound and in drastic need of renovations. In a “public” meeting that hardly represented the voice or interests of the city’s citizens, the board voted to end the library services in the downtown building and forge ahead with the plans for the cultural center.

For those familiar with the political scene in Gary, the corrupt actions by the elected and appointed officials were business as usual. All meetings that are open to input from local residents involve the city council members quickly pushing their anti-working class motions through early on during the session, then opening the floor briefly to public comments, well after the point that the citizens’ opinion on the issue can have any effect!

This joke of a public proceeding is a microcosm of capitalist “democracy”: creating the illusion that the workers

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Rank-&-File Battles NJ School Privatization

NEWARK, NJ, January 26 — Education workers are angry.  The Newark Teachers Union (NTU) has let teachers and support staff go two years without a contract with no end in sight.  Most schools are falling apart and some are hazardous.  Students are forced to suffer through state testing every year only to be told their improvement is still insufficient.  The NTU addresses neither issue with members or the Newark community.

This is hardly surprising given the lack of resistance from NTU leaders against ruling-class unity on education reform.  The recently passed Urban Hope Act is a prime example. It allows private companies to build and manage public schools using public funds. Up to 12 schools in the mainly black and Latino districts of Newark, Camden, and Trenton will be affected. The largest teacher’s union in the state, the New Jersey Educators Association (NJEA), supported this pro-corporate, for-profit legislation.

The NTU leadership did nothing to inform the rank-and-filers about this law, much less organize against it.  Further, liberals and conservatives in the privatization debate want teachers to churn out pro-capitalist ideas to maintain this crisis-ridden system. Under capitalism, education is a private industry for the accumulation of profit.

Workers’ Response

Some education workers in the NTU are responding to the union misleadership by forming a caucus.  To align the caucus with the class nature of Newark, it was named Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus. The NEW Caucus held three steering committee meetings and two general membership meetings. PL’ers participated to push the struggle to the left.

Three main ideological struggles took place. The first was winning workers to understand the importance of

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SCHOOLS, NOT JAILS

BALTIMORE, January 16 — As another strong step in the struggle against Maryland Governor O’Malley’s plan to build a new $100-million youth jail, a bold protest rally was organized by Occupy Baltimore, Schools Not Jails and the Baltimore Algebra Project.

While a sizeable group of supporters erected a huge tent, and as volunteers brought supper for everyone, six people defied state and local police by crossing the fenced perimeter of the would-be construction site. A large truck of pre-fabricated construction material was collectively unloaded. Then pieces of a one-room, red wooden school house were passed, hand to hand, up to and over the fence.

As kkkops decided exactly what to do and when, the six people who had entered the site managed — before being arrested — to finish building the schoolhouse, symbolizing the demand being chanted: “Education, not Incarceration!” One of the six, a teacher, also managed to conduct a brief class, repeated in mic-check Occupy-style by everyone at the support rally, just outside the fence. The class cited anti-racist lessons to be learned from the life of Frederick Douglass.

Meanwhile, all 50 CHALLENGES that were brought were eagerly taken by rally participants. In an electrifying moment, a young comrade, recognizing the need for mass advocacy of Progressive Labor Party’s revolutionary ideas, took the initiative to give a dynamic and well-received speech, explaining the necessity for working-class revolution and communism.

It’s now appears that the governor and the local ruling class may back down on this issue, at least for now, and forego construction of the new jail. Even of more profound importance is the emergence of a new PLP study group, led by young comrades, to help create the next generation of revolutionary leaders.

Dare to struggle, dare to win!

Mark Anniversary of Haiti Quake; International Solidarity from Port-au-Prince to Brooklyn

BROOKLYN, NY, January 12 — In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, students marked the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake with a march between two campuses of UEH, the State University of Haiti, while simultaneously PLP rallied in a Brooklyn neighborhood where many workers from Haiti live.

Our banner here read, in English, Kreyòl, French and Spanish: “International Solidarity with Haitian Workers: The Struggle Will Go On!” We distributed more than 500 Party flyers, along with CHALLENGE, and gathered over 100 signatures on a solidarity petition to be sent to five union and student groups in Haiti, supporting their efforts to defend themselves against the failed system of Haitian local bosses under imperialist control.

Students spoke in Kreyòl and English about the need to abolish capitalism itself, both in the U.S. and in Haiti, and to build a worker-run society, egalitarian communism. Our bullhorn echoed through the busy intersection as thousands of workers hurrying home heard the communist message.

Just as Bill Clinton’s vaunted “reconstruction” has failed in Haiti (his Interim Haiti Recovery Commission folded last October), capitalism itself is failing everywhere. Consider these racist unemployment figures: 80% in Haiti, 70% in Pakistan, 70% among youth in South Africa, 20% in Spain, 17% in France, 21% in the U.S., (50% among black youth).

Capitalism is a system of production for profit but because of overproduction and a credit crisis, its drive to maintain profits has thrown 250 million workers worldwide onto the streets. Meanwhile, U.S. banks sit on $2 trillion of capital they will not release for investment in real production. So workers’ needs simply go unmet.

As Karl Marx showed, these crises inevitably have recurred throughout capitalism’s entire history. The bosses’ solution to mantain profits during crises is to redivide the pie and destroy workers’ lives through gigantic inter-imperialist wars. Haiti too, as an “ally,” will be caught up in the major war brewing between the U.S. imperialists and their rivals.

The bosses’ proclaimed programs of aid to Haiti have gone mostly right back to the bosses themselves, not to workers there. The vast majority of the $4.59 billion in international aid to Haiti went to the donor governments themselves, to major “vulture capitalists” who swoop in to profit from natural disasters, and to the big NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) with their expensive overhead costs.

For example, $600 million of the $1.6 billion the U.S. Congress eventually released went to the U.S. Department of Defense to reimburse it for deploying 20,000 troops to Haiti to guard against post-quake rebellions. (For details see “Haiti: Seven Places Where Earthquake Money Did and Did Not Go,” at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/03-2.) We can never count on any capitalist, only on ourselves as one international working class.

These January 12 actions are small steps in PLP’s strategic effort to revive the proletarian internationalism so necessary for all workers to defend ourselves, defying the bosses’ borders. We see this urgent need as the big imperialists prepare for world war, most menacingly right now in the flash point of the Hormuz Strait near Iran (see CHALLENGE editorial, 1/18).

The mistakes of the old communist movement, as it collapsed because of the abandonment of its principles, dragged the red flag of internationalism into the mud. In 1943, the Soviet leadership, with the agreement of the Chinese and other communist parties, dissolved the Communist International (the Comintern) and lapsed into a loose collection of national parties. This retreat came directly from the parties’ united front with the capitalist “Allies” in the war against fascism. The Soviets and the others saw abolishing the Comintern as necessary to reassure the Allies that they were safe from communist revolution at home — in essence abandoning workers to their own bosses in the Allied countries. 

We need a new version of the Comintern! PLP is organizing as a single international party, a step beyond the Comintern coalition form. This is a gigantic task, but the principle is clear, as we chanted today: “Same Enemy, Same Fight: Workers of the World Unite!”

Workers have no country and want no country: as workers our “country” is the whole world. Workers in Haiti need both solidarity from the entire international working class as well as to contribute to it. From small actions like these simultaneous rallies a great movement will grow.