Capitalism Still Reigns in Algeria: Gas Workers Battle for Stolen Wages

HASSI R’MEL, ALGERIA, November 1 — The Arab Spring that overturned three neighboring dictatorships has been meaningless for natural gas workers in Algeria, who still suffer from the capitalists dominating the country. They’ve been fighting for back pay and are demanding a 30% wage hike.

On October 27, about 400 workers sat in at the Sonatrach regional headquarters here, the site of Africa’s biggest natural gas field, and attempted a second one two days later. On October 30, the movement spread to workers in the Amont division, who staged a protest outside company headquarters in Algiers.

Multinational Sonatrach is Africa’s biggest oil-and-gas company and the 12th biggest in the world. It has 22 subsidiaries and employed 48,062 workers in 2010.

Rank-and-file workers say they will radicalize their movement if management does not meet their demands. In particular, they’re threatening to repudiate their newly elected union representatives for failing to back their demands, which also include an end to the job promotions freeze.

The movement began in the summer, after management failed to pay the wage hikes obtained in the April 2011 union contract. In June, the workers upped their demands to a 25% across-the-board wage hike (now 30%) instead of the previous contract’s 8% to 25%, depending on one’s work category.

Since then, the workers have held numerous meetings and general assemblies and have drawn up a 15-point platform of demands.

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Only Revolution, Not Voting, Can End Capitalism’s Racism, War and Unemployment

NEW YORK CITY, October 17 — Occupy Wall Street (OWS), spreading across the U.S. and worldwide, holds both promise and danger for the working class. It’s now clear that large numbers are seeking an end to the profit system’s misery and injustice. At the same time, Obama and union misleaders are embracing this protest for their own reasons. For the capitalists, OWS represents yet another ruling class effort to funnel workers’ anger down the dead-end road of reforming capitalism, especially through electoral politics (see page 2). 

The good news is that many in the movement’s growing ranks reject the patriotic goals of the “one-percenters.” On a subway headed to Wall Street, a rider asked, “Are you going to the protest? I’m with you. Your banner says ‘Fight for communism’? I’m not so sure about that, but it sure is true the current system is failing. Stronger regulation of capitalism won’t work. We need to learn from the mistakes of past communist movements because a revolution is what’s needed. Okay, I’ll read this paper.”

When this kind of political discussion breaks out between strangers on a train, it’s a sign that things are changing. The growth of OWS is driven by a profound frustration with capitalism’s inability to provide a decent future for the broad masses of workers. In the face of repeated police repression, brave demonstrators have taken to the streets of New York. More important, many are open to communist ideas and to having the Progressive Labor Party participate in their movement.

On the October 15-16 weekend, as PL members chanted some slogans — “It’s not just Wall Street, it’s capitalism”; “The 99% needs revolution, not reform”; “The 99% need communism” — they were met with near-universal agreement. More than 500 PL leaflets were distributed among protesters and others who came to Zucotti Park to check things out. Friends of PL have been critical in helping spread the communist message, an important step forward toward real change.

U.S. Flag A Banner for Imperialist War

Previously, a larger group of PL’ers, including several youth, had met with a similarly positive response, but they also encountered the dangerous patriotic ideology — the bosses’ ideology — that has infiltrated the movement. A protester holding high a large U.S. flag took issue with a Party banner that read, “Fight for Communism, Join PLP.” A lively exchange ensued in which we attacked his flag and defended our banner as being more in tune with the future that protesters were demanding and deserved. Others gravitated to the debate, and several political discussions spun off.

Attacking the U.S. flag as the flag of imperialist war, the most hated banner in the world, brought out pointed disagreement. Attacking the U.S. Constitution as a slave-owners’ document provoked other sharp exchanges. But through it all, a friendly tone of struggle won most people, some of them initially hostile, to weigh our message against their assumptions. We will continue participating in even larger numbers.

Opportunistic Democratic politicians and their union boss allies are striving to subvert OWS into re-electing war-maker Obama. “[A] consensus is emerging among Democrats that the ‘Occupy’ movement is worth tapping into, even helping along and joining with in some instances” (ABC News, 10/10/11). “I support the message to the establishment,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on ABC’s “This Week” (10/9/11). “Change has to happen.” Labor hacks from the AFL-CIO to AFSCME to the SEIU are lending huge financial support. SEIU boss Mary Kay Healy found “incredible inspiration” in OWS (“The Hill,” 10/15/11).

But meanwhile, these union sellouts do absolutely nothing to fight the layoffs of 660 NYC school aides and other low-paid workers, the 99 per-center victims of the one per-centers’ crisis. Goldman Sachs’ brokers stole $15 billion in bonuses while billionaire NYC Mayor Bloomberg can’t find the money to keep these  $14-an-hour school staffers on the job. As leaders from the United Federation of Teachers spout their lip-service support for OWS, they make not a peep as workers are thrown out of their classrooms and their jobs. Why this seeming contradiction? These union leaders are in the hip pockets of the one percent.

Rulers’ Shill Jesse Jackson Tells OWS’ers, ‘Don’t Fight’

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Protest Nazi Killing Machine at Chicago Hospital

CHICAGO, October 13 — Students, hospital workers, and patients’ family members gathered in the rain in front of Stroger Hospital of Cook County this morning to denounce the institutionalized murder of ventilator-dependent patients. “Does a system that kills its weak to save money deserve to exist? No, it does not,” one speaker said.

As public hospitals like Oak Forest Hospital (OFH) are being shut down here, the bosses have trained their sights on the last remaining patients — those too sick and dependent to escape on their own — transferring these patients to poorly-staffed, for-profit nursing homes.

In early September, Michael Yanul, a 58-year-old ventilator patient with muscular dystrophy, who had lived at OFH for 17 years, was forced tomove. At a nursing home called Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, Michael only survived three weeks before succumbing to pneumonia.

According to the national ratings Web site nursinghomerating.org, this 143-bed facility has an overall rating of one out of five stars. They have “widespread administrative deficiencies” and show a “pattern of quality-care deficiencies.” Among short-stay residents at that nursing home, 34% have bedsores and fewer than half received flu vaccine.

Another one of the long-term ventilator patients from OFH, David Moreno, 34, is particularly concerned about what happened to his former friend. Michael lived down the hall from David on the OFH vent unit. David suffered paralysis from a spinal cord injury 12 years ago and, like Michael, cannot breathe without a machine.

After OFH closed on September 2, he was moved to the Coronary ICU at Stroger Hospital until a long-term placement could be arranged. His social worker told him that the hospital administration plans to move him to Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, where Michael died last month. “I’m scared of going to that place,” he said in a recent interview.

By attacking the most vulnerable patients first, the bosses expect to desensitize workers and prepare the way for more murderous attacks. The Nazi Holocaust began as coordinated, hospital-based murders of physically and mentally handicapped patients (see box).

We distributed CHALLENGE and passed out flyers to patients and workers arriving for the morning shift, exposing the hospital administration’s plans to kill off the few remaining ventilator-dependent patients through deliberate decisions that result in completely predictable deaths.

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Expose ‘Dream Act’ Nightmare Anti-Racists Blast Fascists At Liberal NPR ‘Forum’

Recently, “liberal” National Public Radio’s “Fronteras” program staged a “town hall” in Texas to discuss the DREAM Act, a proposed law to allow immigrant youth without papers to stay in the U.S. and go to college or join the military. The composition of the panel and the conduct of the event showed that the purpose was to promote racism and fascism. Anti-racist students from local colleges came to confront this panel.  

In preparation, we passed out a leaflet on our campus and at the town hall that criticized the DREAM Act as a tool to force immigrant youth into the military. It exposed the composition of the panel: Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, who had approved the torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and is now running as a Democratic candidate for the Senate; a member of the racist, vigilante Minutemen/Border Watch; George Rodriguez, the head of a regional “Tea Party” organization; as well as an immigrant student and an immigration lawyer.

We called on students, teachers and workers to unite as one working class to “smash all borders and the capitalist profit system.” On the day of the event, we brought signs with slogans like “Workers’  Struggles Know No Borders.”   

As the event opened, the moderator, who had selected the panelists, gave each a few minutes to speak. None of the liberals took a critical approach to the Dream Act. In defending youth who were “illegal through no fault of their own” and who could “contribute” to U.S. society, they demonized undocumented parents as “law-breakers.”

When pressed by a college student, General Sanchez reluctantly admitted that the DREAM Act would force people into the military since “dreamer” students would not be allowed federal financial aid for college or work permits. But, he continued, this was good for the military since immigrant soldiers were more likely than citizens to complete their service “honorably.”

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Mexico: Marchers Honor Historic 1968 Anti-Government Struggle

MEXICO CITY, October 2 — Thousands of students, teachers, and workers participated in massive marches to honor the memory and struggles of the 1968 anti-government protests. The Party participated in the marches in Mexico City and in Oaxaca, distributing hundreds of flyers and putting forward its communist politics.

The marches were marked by the strong presence of youth and it was heartening to see that women led the groups coming from rural schools. We face the great challenge of helping those young people abandon the reform struggles to join the fight for an egalitarian society, communism. The massive police presence indicated that the repression experienced in ‘68 will remain a threat as long as the same oppressive class is in power.

Students, organized in the National Strike Council, mobilized close to a million and a half people. One of their essential demands was to abolish the repressive state apparatus and the laws that supported it.

On October 2, 1968, a peaceful demonstration of several thousand students and workers were violently repressed. The business and financial oligarchy, represented by President Diaz Ordaz and the Governing Secretary Luis Echeverría, ordered the military, the police, and paramilitary groups to murder hundreds of protesters. When the demonstrators realized there wasn’t a legislative way to achieve the reforms they sought, many of those youth joined the guerrilla struggles of the 1970s.

By and large, the media distorted the truth about the movement, making it evident that they were just tools of the ruling class. Print media and television promote, to this day, the criminal idea that one should not protest, because “nothing ever changes.” But the historical struggles of ‘68 demonstrate that workers’ aspirations for freedom can only be accomplished if we change the social and economic system in which we live. That was one of its more important contributions.

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Need to Occupy Plants, Union Halls GM, Ford, Union Hacks Agree On Low Wages, Big Profits

DETROIT, MI., October 19 — While the International UAW leadership was drumming up support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, they were also signing new four-year agreements with GM, Ford and Chrysler, the first since the federal bailout and bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009. These new contracts show that the “progressive” union leaders share the rulers’ vision of a low-wage, highly productive workforce that will keep the profits flowing from the GM Building to Wall St.

GM made more than $1 billion in profit last year and Ford about $4 billion. The new contracts continue the wage freeze of senior workers that began in 2005. Instead, there is a series of signing bonuses and lump-sum payments (as high as $16,000 to senior Ford workers, at least 50 percent less at GM and Chrysler) that do not go into our base pay or begin to make up the concessions taken from us. For new second-tier workers, base pay could rise by $4/hr. over the life of the Ford contract, but there is no bridge from the second tier to the first.  There is no increase in the pension and the retirees’ Christmas bonus has been ended.

‘Improve Competitiveness’ on Workers’ Backs

John Fleming, Ford’s head of global manufacturing and labor affairs, said the new deal “will continue to improve our competitiveness...” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the union tried to win bonuses and new jobs without creating additional costs.

In fact, overall labor costs could go down. GM and Ford are reopening a few plants and bringing more work to some others, promising as many as 12-15,000 new jobs, all at the lower-wage second tier. At the same time they are starting a new round of buyouts of senior workers. Now, second-tier workers are about 5% of the total workforce. By 2015 they could be as much as 20%. And in the industry as a whole, including the transnational assembly plants and the hundreds of supplier plants, probably two-thirds of the industry is at or below the GM, Ford and Chrysler second tier.

The UAW’s efforts to keep the Detroit Big Three “more competitive” has turned the U.S. into one of the low-wage, non-union centers of the international auto industry. And any promise of new jobs at any wage assumes the economy doesn’t crash again, taking the auto industry with it.

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China: ‘Red Capitalists’ Erasing Revolutionary History

Western guidebooks and the slickest of upscale marketing do their best to erode the history of communist-led revolution in China. The plain two-story building, where the Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded, is totally out of place, surrounded by upscale shops and overpriced restaurants catering to the international tourist trade.

Today, the little historic site, being a tiny island of workers’ history, has a quiet power. Yet it is in a rising sea of Chinese yuppie culture, next to giant photos of sexist models wearing the latest fashions from Paris and New York. The morning I went to Xingye Road there was a steady stream of visitors, including 20 young men in China Air Force uniforms. I also saw small groups of older men and women with weathered, solemn faces and callused hands and a group of younger adults who stood in front of the large hammer and sickle display and repeated some sort of oath with their hands over their hearts.

China’s Bosses Steal Fruits of Revolution’s Advances

Chinese capitalism is everywhere I visited in the huge country. But the historical facts persist. The option to become the dominant capitalist economic power in Asia, and soon in the world, was only available to the current Chinese ruling class because communists of Mao’s generation ended a 2,000-year-old a system of exploitation. Pre-Revolution, 95% of the Chinese people were poor, ignorant and powerless. In the years after the 1949 socialist revolution the working people built a new country with schools, hospitals, factories and farms that existed to serve the people. Over the first 25 years of the People’s Republic there was the greatest increase in literacy and life expectancy ever recorded in a large impoverished country.

How was it possible for the “red capitalists” of the CPC — still calling themselves communists — to become fabulously rich by the restoration of a capitalist market system in the 1980s?  They simply took advantage of the foundation of economic infrastructure and human power (a generation of workers raised with access to food, health services and education) to start making profit. They used, and still use, the prestige of the CPC to maintain their rule.

The “Communist” Party’s prestige comes from their former revolutionary leadership that ended semi-feudal exploitation and drove out the occupying forces of Japan and the Western imperial powers in 1949. They took advantage of their positions in the CPC and made themselves CEOs. In the process many Chinese have experienced the rising level of material possessions associated with rapid industrialization, but hundreds of millions are being brutally exploited in sweatshops and have no voice in the current China. “Serve the People,” the slogan of the1950s and 1960s is dead. “To Get Rich is Glorious” is the new order.

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Italy’s Communist Party From Brave Anti-Fascists to Electoral Swamp

In early 2011, Antonio Gramsci Jr., the grandson of a founder of the Italian Communist Party, gave a concert of Renaissance music in Rome on the last day of an impressive exhibition, “Avanti popolo: Il PCI nella storia d’Italia,” commemorating the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), founded in 1921.

Twenty years ago, in 1991, the Italian CP was disbanded after seventy years of struggle. ¹ At that time it was the largest “communist” party in Western Europe, and the second largest party in the Italian parliament, winning approximately 30% of the votes. CHALLENGE articles often state that communist revolution, not reform, is the only road to working-class victory over capitalism. Looking at the history of the Italian CP helps us to see why.

Shortly after its founding, the Party and workers of Italy faced a dangerous enemy, as Mussolini’s Fascists marched on Rome in 1922. The king appointed Mussolini to be his prime minister and soon after Gramsci and other founders were in prison. Gramsci never left prison, where he died in1937, leaving behind his famous Prison Notebooks. Nonetheless, during World War II, communists and other anti-fascist forces fought bravely. After the liberation of Italy Mussolini was captured as he tried to escape and his body, along with 14 other fascist leaders, was hung upside down from lampposts in Milan’s central square.

Despite this apparent victory, Palmiro Togliatti, the new leader of the Italian Communist Party, returned from the USSR to find a country occupied by the British and American armies and devastated by Allied bombings, civil war and severe food shortages. At this critical juncture, Togliatti and the Italian communists made a grave mistake by accepting the logic of the Popular Front, an alliance of anti-fascist forces, including communists, anarchists, socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie. They began supporting “democratic” reform measures and abandoned the philosophy of armed struggle to bring about communism.

The Italian CP became the largest “communist” party in Western Europe and the second largest party in Italy. Ironically, the larger the party became, the less communist it became. In practice, Italian Communists practiced reformism in the parliament but hypocritically preached revolution at party rallies. ²

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China, U.S. Imperialists On Collision Course

The U.S. is in decline relative to China, the primary emerging imperialist rival. The U.S. ruling class is faced with massive unemployment, a continuing financial mess, a thinly spread and poorly functioning military, and an inability to enforce discipline within their own class. At the same, China displays an increasingly aggressive imperialism, challenging U.S. hegemony. Bosses are rarely hesitant to sacrifice the lives of workers in order to claim their piece of the capitalist pie, and so, as China’s rulers demand a reordering of the world with them on top, imperialist war could lie in the future. Workers of the world have nothing to win from backing one group of capitalists over the other. Transforming this potential future imperialist war into communist revolution is the long-term outlook of PLP.

Industry is the centerpiece of capitalist economy. Industrial workers produce real value, and unlike the financial manipulations that are increasingly at the center of the U.S. economy, China’s industrial might has skyrocketed. The economic crisis has certainly hit China and just as in the U.S., the Chinese bosses are making the working class pay. The net income of 400 million people has stagnated in the last decade and poverty levels have increased. But in the absence of a REAL communist party (unlike the profit-driven fake Chinese Communist Party) aimed at destroying capitalism, the bosses will salvage their system, and it appears that China might be on top of the pile when the dust clears.

Chinese Dominance Grows In Key Industries

Chinese oil companies have exerted their influence across the globe. The China National Petroleum Corporation has contracts in 29 countries around the world, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Burma.

Or consider steel. There is a dispute about how much steel China produced in 2010. The official figure — likely an underestimate — is 627 million tons, 44% of the world output and 50% more than Europe, the U.S., Japan and Russia COMBINED. Even if the lower official numbers are correct, the growth in China’s steel output from 2007 to 2010 exceeded the total U.S. steel output in 2010: China’s output in those three years grew by 131 million tons, whereas U.S. output in 2010 was 81 million tons.

In the auto industry the situation is similar. In 2010, the U.S. produced 7.8 million cars while China made 18.3 million, double the number in 2008 and nine times the number it produced in 2000. Again, the growth in auto production outstrips U.S. production. From 2000 to 2010 China’s auto industry output grew by 16.2 million cars. The U.S. produced 7.8 million cars in 2010. However, a goodly portion of the profits from China’s production goes to international auto companies like Ford, GM, and Nissan.

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Fighting Wall Street is Good Capitalism Must Be Destroyed

NEW YORK CITY, October 26 — Occupied Wall Street (OWS) has spread to more than 20 U.S. cities, from Philadelphia and Dallas to Seattle and Los Angeles. It adds a significant marker to the growing list of places where the working class is fighting back against the horrors of capitalism. In an era commonly defined by the lack of militant class struggle, recent events in the U.S., Greece, Egypt, Spain, England, Syria, Israel/Palestine and Pakistan are to be celebrated.

But as we celebrate we should be clear: The ideas behind these struggles are overwhelmingly reformist. Most of the participants are fighting to maintain capitalism in one form or another, with disastrous results for the workers in these places. (See page 7 for an update on the situation in Egypt and how the promise of the uprising there has turned into a nightmare for workers.) Without communist ideas in the lead, the battles, won or lost, will pave the road back to capitalist oppression.

The ruling class continues to provide opportunities for us to bring communist ideas to the forefront. In New York, the ruling class pulled back the mask of “democracy” yesterday when more than 700 OWS protestors were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. After having been lured onto the bridge by the cops, the protestors were surrounded with netting and taken away on city buses, over the protests of union drivers.

More than two weeks in, OWS has survived nearly a thousand arrests. It has captured the imagination of both workers and students. Watching more than a hundred transit workers march into Zuccotti Park near Wall Street was inspiring. The action exposed the systemic inequality of capitalism.

Still, we must keep two things in mind. First, within the antagonistic struggle against capitalism, the communist alternative will stand out and provide a space for us to build the Party and the communist world we envision. Second, we need to immerse ourselves with the masses and inject communist and revolutionary ideas inside reform struggles. PL’ers everywhere should seize this moment.

Police Action Backfires

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