Street Battles with Cops Chile: Massive Student, Miner Strikes Need Red Anti-Nationalist Ideas

CHILE — Showing the fighting spirit of the working class, students and workers have united in a massive reform struggle for access to education and better wages. They organized a strike against the right-wing president Sebastian Pinera. Well over a half a million workers and students took to the streets and fought pitched battles with the cops, who killed one young teen.

Sick of the fact that education is becoming increasingly privatized and priced out of reach, many young people have been protesting for months to have access to education. The mass number of student struggles entered a new stage as it merged with the currrent miners’ struggle. This unity has worried the Chilean ruling class.  

The students and workers in Chile are an inspiration to the international working class. Their spirit is a necessary ingredient in the struggle to lift us from the hell of capitalism. Unfortunately, a key ingredient — revolutionary communist leadership — is missing. The reformism and revisionism (fake leftists) that currently dominate place absolute limits on the struggle. Hundreds of thousands of workers and students chanting, “The people united will never be defeated” is a testament to how politically misled the movement is. There are fewer more bankrupt and dangerously misleading phrases than “the people” (including the bosses) as it hides class content and make one wonder, which people? Communist leadership will transform this chant into “The workers united will never be defeated.”

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Need to Shut Down U. of Maryland Workers, Students, Profs Unite vs. Bosses’ Abuse

COLLEGE PARK, MD., September 3 — Workers and students at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) continue to push their demands to end the abuses against campus facilities workers.  The Black Faculty and Staff Association, along with the union and students, held a press conference on August 18th to promote solidarity and expose the Administration’s treatment of workers. 

Workers spoke out about supervisors denying them leave to visit dying parents or take care of sick children, prohibiting Latina housekeepers from speaking Spanish on the job, isolating workers who speak out, and refusing to allow computer training to enhance promotions.  A worker reported years of sexual abuse and harassment, including physical contact and “flashing” by a student in front of a housekeeper.  No supervisor received disciplinary actions.  While the Chancellor makes $700,000 a year, the housekeepers earn $27,000.  Managers receive pay increases while they furlough workers in all departments.

This struggle is part of a wider movement of workers around the globe.  At the same time, 45,000 Verizon workers were striking, students were demonstrating in Chile and Haiti for educational reforms,  Washington, D.C. unemployed residents were demanding jobs, and thousands of people in Egypt and Syria were fighting to end dictatorships.   They all share a common goal of creating a better life for workers and students.  Yet they also share a common mistake.

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Workers, Students Invade LA Supermarket to Back Potential Strikers

EAST LOS ANGELES, September 2 — Recently a group of workers and students marched through a supermarket here to support workers fighting company demands to pay for healthcare costs by cutting wages. Nearly 90% of workers voting rejected the latest contract offered by three supermarkets: Ralphs (Kroger), Albertsons (SuperValu) and Vons (Safeway). For the second time in the last six months, workers authorized the union, the United Food Service Workers (UFCW), to strike.

Over the last six weeks, PLP members, working with friends who participate in Community Education for Social Action (CESA) have “adopted” a supermarket here. They’ve built relationships with workers and members of the surrounding community, including students from the nearby Cal State Los Angeles University and East LA community college. We’re aiming to build revolutionary class-consciousness among workers and community residents, as well as among students participating in these actions.

Last Friday, a delegation of 20 students, workers, and community residents entered the store with picket signs and chants, calling for an end to spending on imperialist war instead of on healthcare and jobs, and encouraging worker-student solidarity in the struggle against the supermarkets.

We wanted to disrupt the store’s regular operation, to call customers’ attention to the supermarket workers’ struggle and to show how we’re organizing support for their fight. Delegates brought signed petitions from the Cal State LA campus and CESA to present to the store manager.

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Links Marxism to Action Supporting Store Strike

LOS ANGELES, August 27  — We are a group of students, educators, workers, and union members who meet weekly to study Marxism and put it into practice by building working-class solidarity with Southern California supermarket workers.

For several months, we have been committed to reading works such as Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism.  Through these readings, we understand how the economic collapse of 2008 and subsequent recession and high rate of unemployment are not accidents, but examples of the repeating cycle of boom and bust that characterize capitalism. This system relies on unemployed workers as a reserve army of labor for the ruling class. We also discussed how these crises are exaggerated by the need for growing profits for bankers and big corporations, as well as the need for imperialist powers to initiate wars of aggression.

We committed ourselves to supporting workers of Ralphs, Albertsons, and Vons supermarkets in Southern California. They may be going on strike against a proposed contract that aims to remove affordable health care and pension plans.

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Wanted for Murder: Cook County Hospital Bosses

OAK FOREST, ILLINOIS, August 12 — Thirty-five workers, students, patients and PLP members protested Cook County’s plans to close Oak Forest Hospital.  Oak Forest is the public hospital that serves the south suburbs of Chicago, an area home to many working-class, unemployed, and black residents.  It is a lifeline for people with no insurance who will not receive adequate services from the private hospitals in the area. 

Our protest started out on the campus of Oak Forest in front of the long-term patient ward where many in-house patients have already been moved and subsequently died. We then moved to the emergency room where Cook County police stopped us and demanded that we move off campus.  In high spirits, we relocated to the busy intersection at the hospital entrance, where we passed out hundreds of fliers and copies of CHALLENGE and were met with many honks of support.

The government of Cook County, led by Toni Preckwinkle, want to close the hospital and have uninsured patients travel to Stroger Hospital at least 45 minutes away.  This plan will ensure the death of many sick patients who need to travel that far to be stabilized. Our protest called out Preckwinkle for what she is — a murderer.

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PLP’s International Summer Projects: MEXICO: PLP Hits Home with Industrial Workers

MEXICO CITY, August 7 — “We don’t want crumbs, we want the whole cake!” With these words at a communist school attended by nearly 30 workers and their relatives alongside members of Progressive Labor Party, a comrade from Mexico summed up the class struggle at the heart of the PL Summer Project here.

The school covered political economy, the rise of fascism, the line of PL, and the necessity of a single international communist party. It followed a week of activity in an industrial area near Mexico City, an impoverished, drug-infested community of mostly factory workers. As we visited the Party’s base in many houses and several workplaces, and then met with workers in the evening at a comrade’s home, it was obvious how capitalism had failed to meet the community’s most basic needs. Of every ten students who begin primary school, only one will graduate from high school. In many houses, water and electricity are sporadic.  Some neighborhoods have none at all. 

One worker we visited, Roberto, is a brickmaker.  His neighborhood has no paved streets, no school. The bricks he makes go elsewhere; his own home is made of wood, plastic sheets, corrugated metal, and cardboard, with a dirt floor.  For nearly two hours, Roberto talked about all the things his community lacked, from public transportation to sports facilities. He said that the three major parties’ local politicians buy votes with pre-election pizza parties, but deliver nothing of substance to the workers.  Roberto is a regular CHALLENGE reader and agreed to take several papers to distribute.

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Haiti: Freedom School A Lesson Plan for Communist Education

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, July 29 — The last day of the PLP Summer Project’s freedom school marked a big advance in organizing around the anti-racist, anti-sexist ideas urgently needed by workers in Haiti. After an inspirational class, much of it student-led, teachers and students broke through the cement-block walls of their tilekol (“little school,” in Kreyol). They marched to the State University Hospital of Haiti, where they showed militant support for workers in the fourth week of a strike for lost wages and decent patient care.

The day capped a week of critical, participatory, political education that involved teams of Haitian and visiting teachers and about 50 eager young people. As opposed to traditional, top-down schooling under capitalism, which imposes conformity with the bosses’ reactionary ideology and out-and-out lies, the tilekol aimed to equip its students to grapple with reality and change the world.

Our school was rooted in the practice of communist educators in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, whose influence later ranged from the Freedom Summer schools in the U.S. civil rights movement to the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian writer who called for “transformative education” to liberate workers’ minds. 

Our first attempts to teach were bogged down by the challenge of translation in up to four languages (English, French, Kreyòl, Spanish), and also by traditional lecturing that was too dominated by the teachers. But by the second and third weeks, we gradually shifted to a more participatory style.

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Palestine: Confirms Anti-Racist Politics

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, August 12 — Fifteen students and workers organized the first ever PLP Summer Project in Palestine/Israel. Throughout the project we met with students and workers who were fighting house demolitions (see CHALLENGE, 8/17/11); daycare workers fighting sexist exploitation (see CHALLENGE, 11/3/10); and participated in rallies and demonstrations protesting declining living standards of Jewish and Arab workers and students. We received a friendly reception when we distributed PLP literature in Hebrew and Arabic.

The Project not only inspired many of us to continue to fight for one international party but also validated our line: racism hurts all workers. Capitalists can divide workers politically as well as maximize profits by exploiting some sections of the working class and super-exploiting others. Here the Israeli ruling class exploits Jewish workers while super-exploiting Arab workers.

Destroy Arab Workers’ Homes and Then Charge Them for the Demolition!

The government confiscates Israeli citizens’ lands, justifying this by claiming that the Arab residents created extensions to the houses “without the proper permits,” making them “unsafe.” Israeli cops then evict the people and demolish their houses. And then they often charge the former residents for the demolition of their own homes!

This has occurred all over Palestine/Israel, from Jaffa to Lod to the West Bank. According to the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, since 1967 the Israeli government has demolished nearly 25,000 homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, besides thousands of other homes in other areas.

Those able to resist demolition are forced to live in miserable conditions, without access to basic food, running water and jobs. In areas where Arabs live near Jewish settlers, the Israeli government is constructing walls to separate the Arab workers from the town centers. Arab workers can only get food and go to work by traveling through a tunnel underground. If there is no Israeli soldier present to unlock the tunnel’s gate, the Arab workers must wait until one gets there (if at all) or else they can’t get to work.

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Israel: Workers, Students Protest Rising Prices Demand ‘All Power to the Workers’

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, August 6 — In a growing resistance to capitalist inequalities, 300,000 workers and students of all religious and ethnic groups held a mass rally against rising prices in central Tel Aviv. This demonstration was the high point, so far, of the “tent movement” that began two weeks earlier, as it went beyond the initial focus on unaffordable housing to more far-reaching demands that challenged the bosses’ dictatorship.

The backdrop for these protests is the rapidly-rising cost of living and rapidly-deteriorating wages in Israel, as the capitalists’ regime, facing crisis after crisis, tries to milk the last ounce of profit out of the working class. Despite a shortage of decent housing, many real estate developers refrain from developing land they’ve purchased to wait for the price to go up and maximize their profits. And, finally, the workers have had enough.

The protestors’ main slogan was “The People Demand Social Justice,” accompanied by “The People Demand a Welfare State.” Many also denounced the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his “pig-like capitalism” (as if there could be capitalism which isn’t “pig-like”).

There were, however, far more militant slogans in parts of the rally, especially the bloc of the Power to the Workers union and a group of workers of all ethnic groups from Jaffa. Their predominant slogans were “All power to the workers!”; “A workers’ state – not a slave state!”; “The answer to cutbacks: revolution!”; a nd “The people will overthrow the regime!” While this group’s leadership actually meant “reforms” when it said “revolution,” many of the rank-and-file truly want significant change in Israeli society. Some would like the working class to be in power. All in all, they are very open to new ideas about how and where to lead this fight.

Many of these demonstrators clearly see themselves as part of the working class. For decades, the bosses bribed Israeli workers with a few crumbs from their table and convinced them that they were a “middle class” with different interests than those of blue-collar wage slaves. But as these white-collar workers saw their standard of living decline, they came to understand their exploitation by the tiny capitalist class. Now they see their true place in the class system — under the boot of the bosses and their state.

For the first time in many years, masses of Israeli Arabs and Jews marched together against the capitalist government, refusing to let racism divide them. This unity needs to grow even broader. The way forward is to link rising prices to the bosses’ need to expand fascism in the West Bank and Gaza, where racist Israeli settlements get huge government subsidies.

We in the Progressive Labor Party welcome these militant mass protests by the working class. We believe, however, that a reformed “welfare state” cannot bring true social justice. After all, capitalists are constantly driven to maximize profits, and do so by robbing workers and spilling workers’ blood in wars over resources and markets. Our only solution is a communist revolution by the whole working class, which will smash the bosses’ state apparatus and replace it with a new state for the workers, by the workers and of the workers.

U.S.-U.K. Imperialists Expand Fascism and War Black, White, Asian Working-Class Youth Battle Racist Cops

Workers produced every item working-class rebels took from shops in English cities. Workers also produce all the Middle East’s energy supplies. So what constitutes real “looting”? Is it a London youth, who may never find a job, grabbing a pair of sneakers? Or is it racist British capitalists joining racist U.S. bosses to murder millions in seizing Iraqi and Libyan oil and Afghan gas routes?

The recent rebellions take place in a context of declining U.S-U.K. imperialism. For survival, the depleted British Empire became the U.S.’s junior partner during World War II. Now, rising China, resurgent Russia, and regional powerhouse Iran have the U.S. & Co. on the defensive. So both U.S. and U.K. rulers are implementing an agenda of widening wars overseas and police terror to enforce massive economic attacks on workers domestically.

Since racism is fundamental to capitalism and its drive for super-profits, the racist super-exploitation of black and Asian workers has moved these youth — subjected to the system’s mass racist unemployment and poverty — to openly rebel.

Militant anti-cop uprisings in England come as a mainly healthy reaction to fascist policing. London’s working-class Tottenham district erupted after August 4 when cops gunned down Mark Duggan, a black father of four, on “suspicion” that he had a gun. He, in fact, never displayed one. The rebellion quickly spread to other deprived communities across London, and to the northern cities of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.

But although the killing was a source of anger, it was not the primary cause behind the rampage of thousands of black, Asian and white youth that lasted four days before the heavily-reinforced police could clear the streets. The torching of police cars, police stations and public buildings expressed the pent-up frustration and rage of an alienated generation with no opportunities, gripped by poverty, discrimination and joblessness. Many are the second and third generation of their family without jobs. For some African-Caribbean youth unemployment is as high as 50%. A 2007 UNICEF report found that British and U.S youth had the worst quality of life of 21 developed nations.

“We’re sticking it to the police” yelled one  woman, “and to the rich” she added. A Tottenham protestor who appeared on a radio show described the events as, “A war against injustice.”

Their fury against the rich echoed the anger most Britons have against the bankers who paid themselves huge bonuses after taking government bailouts and of the blatant looting by politicians of public funds for their private expenses last year. One of the most notorious cases involved the member of parliament who took £80,000 ($130,000) of tax-payer money to subsidize his second home. This year’s scandal of police officials taking bribes from the Murdoch news organization has only added fuel to the fire.

Even the right-wing Telegraph newspaper (8/8/11) had to admit legitimate grievances, “Tottenham’s unemployment is still among the highest in London. Black people are far more likely to be stopped and searched by the Met [Metropolitan Police] than whites.”

Despite the media focus on burning stores, the so-called riots’ main aspect was black, white and Asian working-class youth uniting in fierce battles against the killer cops. The Independent (London, 8/14/11) quoted one terrified cop, “We could hear time after time on our radios, ‘Officer down,’ ‘Officer injured’ and we knew it was bad.”

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