OWS Slogan Hides Class Nature of Profit System

The main weakness of Occupy Wall Street is its implication that only a tiny minority, mainly bank presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs, benefit from the gross inequalities of capitalism, and the rest of us need to unite to make things fairer.This idea hides the class nature of the capitalist profit system and all the agents it uses to enforce the exploitation of the working class. The Occupy slogan, We Are the 99%, distorts people’s understanding of the ranks of our class enemies.

Have you ever been directly supervised by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Koch, or any other billionaire? Hardly. In fact, many corporate vice presidents, human resources directors, managers, administrators and supervisors are links in the chain that binds us to the capitalist system.

Bosses’ Flunkies Not On Our Side

For example, an assembly-line worker has a foreman, the foreman’s supervisor, a plant manager, and so on up the line. All of these people are responsible for extracting surplus value (the source of all profits) from our labor. None of them are on our side. Similarly, a schoolteacher must answer to various assistant principals, a principal, a district superintendent, and the people elected or appointed to the board of education. All of these flunkies are on the bosses’ side, unless and until they demonstrate otherwise by such actions as supporting a strike or joining Progressive Labor Party.

One Percenters Have Millions of Agents

Other tools of the capitalist class include politicians (Democratic and Republican); political appointees (judges, district attorneys, commissioners, regulators); high-paid lawyers, money managers and other professionals; media hacks; entertainment performers and executives; religious leaders; and professors and think tank fellows, both liberal and conservative, who are charged with churning out capitalist ideology and strategy. And don’t forget highly paid national and local union leaders, whose job is to work together with the bosses to get workers to submit to layoffs and cuts in wages, working conditions, health benefits and pensions.

Click to read more ...

Russian, Chinese, U.S. Rulers Vie for Control of Syria

The current struggle in Syria is between a U.S. empire in decline and rapidly rising Russia and China.  Inter-imperialist rivalry is being played out as the hypocritical Obama and his Arab League lackeys condemn the “butcher” Al-Assad regime for cracking down on his protestors.  The rulers’ press shows how the U.S. empire and allies want to use the Libyan blueprint of a no–fly zone enforced by massive bombing raids to foment regime change in Syria. But what is missing is exactly why the U.S. is desperate to place their own puppet on the Syrian throne.

Syria and Libya have parallels in the U.S. desperation to invade and control.   In Libya, though, the U.S. mainly is concerned with the threat of Chinese and Russian economic investment in Libyan oil. In Syria the U.S. wants to try to solidify its military and economic control over the entire Middle East by weakening Russia, Iran and China who use the Al-Assad fascists as their proxy. Russia has a fundamental strategic interest to preserve its military base in Syria and is in the process of sending warships to Syria as part of a drive to revive itself as an imperialist empire.

Iran Emerges Winner of Iraq War

Iran was a real winner of the U.S. war in Iraq. It still maintains its ability to arm and fund its proxy forces like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and has now developed the ability to influence Iraq’s government to a great extent.  It is Iran, to the U.S.’s chagrin, that has facilitated Iraq making an agreement with pseudo-state “Kurdistan” (see CHALLENGE 11/30/11) that challenged Exxon/Mobil’s outright conquest of an Iraqi oil field.  Iran supports Syria against the Free Syrian Army (FSA) — the Sunni-based puppet force of Syrian Army deserters that is seeking protection from Turkey and Saudi Arabia in order to topple the Assad’s primarily Alawite, Christian, and Druze regime.   

Sellout remnants of the old communist movement in the Middle East try to play up Assad’s Nasserite roots of a pseudo-socialistic outright fascist state as standing up to imperialism.  To them, allying with “lesser-evil”  bosses includes getting into bed with dictators who espouse and arm religious fundamentalists to carry out sexist and racist massacres against working class-women, men, and children.

All Bosses Are Workers’ Enemies

PLP in the Middle East consistently struggles with our friends to understand that while the U.S. continually brutalizes and murders the working class in order to advance U.S. Imperialism (all the while condemning Syria), Russian Imperialism and Iranian hegemony are not alternatives that can serve our needs.

Click to read more ...

Nationwide Fascist Assault Occupiers Resist Bosses’ Raids

NEW YORK, November 15 — At one o’clock this morning, a thousand cops made a mockery of capitalist “freedoms” by raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment here in Zuccotti Park. The lower Manhattan raid was apparently coordinated with those in more than a dozen other cities, as the bosses used their state power to attempt to squash the Occupy movement nationwide. As Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC, “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation.”

The NYC fascist cops arrested more than 220 protesters, forcibly evicted the rest, and confiscated or destroyed their belongings. Six reporters were also arrested, and other media and legal observers were barred from witnessing the attack. The cops then staged their own occupation of the park, forcing protesters onto the sidewalks around it.

Hours after the cop invasion, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that protesters must obey the “park rules,” even if those rules were concocted after the protests began. This shows how the bosses use the cops and courts to crush any opposition. This is their “democracy,” a dictatorship of the capitalists where the “1%” (the bosses) do whatever they like, while the “99%” (the working class) face police brutality and arrests if they resist. Meanwhile, the hypocritical capitalist media painted the protesters as hooligans who were abusing their “first amendment rights” — a stark contrast to their fawning treatment of the Arab Spring, when the U.S. bosses sought to maintain control of Middle East oil by forging ties with the new rulers there. 

The New York bosses’ aggression, however, has failed to break the fighting spirit of the OWS activists, mostly young workers and students. Hours after their forced eviction, they were back in Zuccotti Park (though without sleeping gear, which was barred by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg), renewing their protest against Wall Street.

Click to read more ...

Oakland Workers Swell the Protests: General Strike Hits Capitalist Horrors

OAKLAND, November 16 — The Occupy movement continues to explode here.  After, the November 2 General Strike briefly closed the Port of Oakland, protests continue and are focused more sharply on the devastation that capitalism brings to the working class. Front and center are the issues of economic inequality, institutional racism, and the need for international unity to link our struggles with those of workers around the world.

The intensification of Occupy Oakland was sparked by the general strike, which was a great step forward from earlier events.  It aimed, if still symbolically, at shutting down the whole capitalist economy. A march that started under a “Death to Capitalism” banner temporarily closed several downtown Oakland banks. Teachers, the most visible group of unionized workers at the strike, brought students to the protest. Some schools also shut down, and hundreds of students marched at Laney Community College to challenge racist inequalities and corporate control of education.

Medical workers, particularly in the California Nurses Association, had already mobilized to support the first-aid needs of the encampment in what is now called Oscar Grant Plaza. The multiracial participants were young and old, students and workers, marching together in social groups of families or friends.  Conspicuously absent from the general strike were contingents organized by unions or mainstream churches and community groups. While the rank and file of these groups turned out, participation by the Alameda Central Labor Council was limited to serving food.

The general strike ended in a march of 15,000 to shut down the Port of Oakland, with the sympathy of many in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a union with militant communist roots, and the trucker sub-contractors who haul the cargo. The ILWU has led job actions against apartheid, and in April it marched in solidarity with state workers in Wisconsin to protest union-busting there. Three years ago, the mostly immigrant and non-unionized truckers helped shut down all California ports on May Day over the issue of immigrant rights. (One trucker took our poster and CHALLENGE during the general strike, and asked why we had not come at 6 a.m. to really shut the Port down.) This collective history was a big reason that Occupy Oakland focused on Oakland’s economic center, the Port.

A Step Toward Waking the Sleeping Giant

Click to read more ...

Imperialist War, Profit-System Poverty Are Worst Forms of Child Abuse

Obama Sheds Fake Tears  Over Penn State…

Hypocrisy drenches Barack Obama’s denunciation of “heartbreaking” child sex abuse at Penn State: “Our number-one priority has to be protecting our kids.” This phony concern comes from the commander of a United States war machine that routinely slaughters children and other civilians abroad, and whose system consigns millions of children in the U.S. to lives of poverty, hunger and premature death (see box).

What the U.S. president really seeks to protect is the far-flung sources of profit for his capitalist masters. Even as he calls for national “soul searching” over Penn State, Obama gives the go-ahead to atrocities against children in the oil-rich Middle East. While Yemen, for one example, is running out of oil, it borders Saudi Arabia’s unmatched reserves and harbors anti-U.S. Islamic movements — enough to make its people a target. As Salon.com reported, “Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be ‘militants’” (11/12/11).

…While U.S. Drones Kill Kids

Naturally, capitalist rulers don’t want us to know how many children they murder in their profit-driven wars. “We may never know how many,” the government-owned British Broadcasting Corporation reported last month in reference to civilian casualties in the U.S.-led Libyan oil grab that ousted dictator Qaddaffi. But some damning figures do emerge. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism at London’s City University “has identified 56 children reported killed in drone strikes during [Obama’s] presidency” (8/11/11). And these were in Pakistan, a U.S.-bankrolled “ally.”

Young people face even more horrific conditions in Obama & Co.’s declared war zones. UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, calculates that Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a child. One in five does not live to see a sixth birthday. (The death rate for young children there is 199 per thousand, as compared to 2.5 in Singapore.) Most of those deaths are from curable childhood diseases and malnutrition, compounded by war, which makes proper health care inaccessible.

Children, so dear to Obama, freeze and starve in Afghan gutters while well-fed U.S. contractors survey pipeline routes and mineral sources. UNICEF regional communications chief Sarah Crowe told CNN last January, “It is very hard to put a hard-and-fast figure to the number of children dying from hypothermia alone on Kabul’s streets.

Click to read more ...

Public Health Workers Turn Up Heat vs. Bosses’ Racist ‘Care’

WASHINGTON,D.C., October 31 — Almost 200 public health workers, Occupy D.C. activists, and District of Columbia workers rallied and marched, attacking capitalism and racism and demanding jobs and health care for everyone now.  After leaving the American Public Health Association (APHA) meeting of more than 12,000 public health members, these workers surged onto the streets of Washington chanting, “Out of our silos, into the streets! Public health workers turn up the heat!”

They marched to the Verizon Center sports arena, where a Verizon worker attacked the company’s attempts to strip retiree health benefits from the contract and lay off thousands of workers as their CEO enjoyed record-breaking pay.  Stopping at the Clark construction site for the new City Center luxury development, a community activist blasted Clark for denying jobs to D.C. workers and called for unity among all workers to oppose capitalism.

This march attracted people out of a bold and growing anger at capitalism among public health workers. Speakers at today’s rally exposed the system’s racism, calling for a health care system that provided quality care for everyone regardless of immigration status. (Undocumented immigrants are not even allowed to buy health insurance from the new health insurance exchanges.)   Speakers attacked capitalism and racism, decrying both Obama and the Republican Party sideshow.  A Progressive Labor Party doctor called for the overthrow of capitalism and urged people to make revolution possible, saying, “You know you want it!”  PLPers distributed over 50 Challenge-Desafios. 

The rally was organized by the Health Disparities Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA), with more than a dozen people planning its messages, speakers, and chants.  The committee called on public health workers to return to their roots of building a social movement to ensure healthy conditions for all.  It urged them to “reject capitalists and their politicians, who use cutbacks and racism to strengthen their profitability and competitive edge.  Build a worker-student-professional movement for change.”

Click to read more ...

Gary: Unmask Profit System’s Inherent Flaws

GARY, INDIANA, October 29 — Today a multi-racial group of nearly 30 demonstrators gathered in downtown Gary, Indiana for the second week in a row to show solidarity with the growing Occupy movements that have been developing all over the world. In a city like Gary, that has suffered racist capitalist oppression and neglect for decades, such a turnout is definitely a step in the right direction.

Despite its political limitations, the Occupy movement has been useful because it allows workers to recognize their collective power. The crowd was multi-racial and included people of all ages. During both demonstrations, there were a number of younger activists involved, several of whom were experiencing their first exposure to working-class struggles. It was also encouraging that activists from other cities in Northwest Indiana attended the Gary rally, because racist stereotypes often keep workers away from Gary.

Click to read more ...

Boston: ‘Occupy the World’

ROXBURY, MA, October 19 — The leaders of the Pizza and Politics student club at Roxbury Community College went down to Occupy Boston and were excited to see that people in the U.S. are waking up to the reality of class oppression. One sign at the encampment said so much: “They call it the american dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”. 

Too many of us have been asleep for too long. The students decided to make the next topic for the club discussion “Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, Occupy the World.” They invited some activists from Occupy Boston to come and speak about the goals of the movement. The activists explained the collective way the encampment is being organized and how it sees itself as building a better world. PL’ers raised the idea that in order for that humane community to flourish and spread all over the world the working class needs to seize state power and make the decisions for the society. 

Otherwise OWS will either be smashed by the police or co-opted, like the rebel movement was in Egypt. The discussion moved from communism to consumerism to the role of education. It reflected the refreshing openness of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where big questions are being discussed and communist ideas are welcomed by many. However, everything changes, and the Occupy movement will either be won to the left or to the right. It will either become a tool of the Democratic Party or it will move the masses into class struggle — supporting strikes, confronting the police, and fighting foreclosures and evictions. By distributing our literature and raising our ideas,  PL’ers and friends of PL are trying to take full advantage of this opportunity to move OWS to the left.

Pakistan: Back Jailed Working-Class Leaders

FAISALABAD, PAKISTAN, November 11 — Workers here are calling for solidarity actions and support for six union leaders who have been sentenced to a total of 490 years in jail. They were arrested in July 2010 during a militant strike of power loom workers, and later charged under anti-terrorist laws. To date 13 union leaders are facing charges of “terrorism.”

The U.S.-backed fascist Pakistani government is increasingly using the threat of “terrorism” to try to silence the working class, hoping to crush the rising workers’ movement. But workers are fighting back, in the factories and fields, in the public and private sector (see CHALLENGE, 9/5).

Power loom workers here struck in 2010 after a break-down in negotiations with the bosses, demanding an increase in the minimum wage already announced in the government’s 2010-2011 budget. When government officials, factory owners, local politicians and the media labeled the strikers “terrorists,” it so angered other workers that they ignored a police ban on public gatherings and joined the picket lines.

Click to read more ...

The Art of Working-Class Struggle: Teamsters Refuse to Buckle Under to Sotheby’s Attack

NEW YORK, November 9 — A deafening roar met the wealthy patrons as they stepped out of their limousines this evening and were escorted by nervous security guards into Sotheby’s, the famed art auction house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Forty-three art handlers — the workers who protect and transport paintings and sculptures worth millions of dollars each — have been locked out by the company since July. Sotheby’s, which made a profit of $774 million last year and pays its CEO $70,000 a day, is demanding contract concessions from the workers. It wants to replace full-time workers with part-timers, reduce pensions and eliminate seniority in firing.

The workers are refusing to buckle. Tonight was the first evening auction of the season, with impressionist and modern art paintings on sale. About 150 workers and supporters stood behind metal barricades on each side of the entrance, with two giant inflatable rats nearby. Multiracial groups of Teamsters from several locals attended. They blew whistles and loudly chanted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting!”; “We Are the 99%” and “Shame, Shame!” at the rich collectors and dealers who scurried into Sotheby’s lobby.

Truthfully, none of the prosperous collectors seemed at all ashamed, only taken aback that people who work for a living might treat them so rudely and attempt to interfere with their evening of lavish spending. A wealthy collector paid $40.4 million tonight for a landscape painting by Gustav Klimt — more money than all the handlers together will earn in a lifetime! Sotheby’s receives a hefty commission for each artwork sold.

Click to read more ...