Letters of October 16

Act to Short-circuit Electric Co. Robbery

In the eastern part of the State of Mexico , thousands of workers are terrified with home foreclosure notices if we do not pay the electrical energy company.
After Felipe Calderon Hinojosa dissolved the company Luz y Fuerza del Centro,  thousands of workers in the Mexican Electricians Union (SME) took to the streets. The cost of the service has increased and worsened. Four years later, SME workers are still struggling to get their jobs back.
Many families were deceived by television and the press, which are subservient to capitalist interests. They believed the lies of the PAN government that the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) will provide better and cheaper service. The media claimed that SME workers were the cause of the poor service, but today we realize that the bosses and their ruler are evil and liars.
Since then, the CFE have been threatening workers, seizing their houses , cutting off the supply or even jailing them, if they do not pay the hiked price. Many working mothers have become sick and some have even been killed.
Some have chosen to hide behind laws, but it was not enough because the laws serve the bosses. The Office of the Defense (CJF) defends bosses and refuses to punish the CFE. The Solicitor is appointed by the president of the PROFECO (Office of the Federal Prosecutor for the Consumer). The president Peña Nieto serves the interests of bosses against workers. Politicians and rulers are not our friends; they are our class enemies. The laws and courts have never ruled in favor of workers; they always protect the boss.
Due to the constant threats that workers suffer, on Wednesday, July 31, more than 200 users, mostly women are organizing against these bosses. We should support them with more militant actions and organization, such as marches and sit-ins in front of the CFE and PROFECO. PLP members and friends attended the meeting and distribute 75 CHALLENGEs.
As CHALLENGE readers , supporters and members of the PLP can strengthen the the struggle to stop the attacks and physical and psychological threats by the CFE. We must point out the root, capitalism, that constantly threatens the lives of all workers. We must unite to destroy the capitalist system. We must fight for a society that truly meets the needs of workers — a communist society of equality.
Mexico Worker

Fast Food Strikers Give Bosses Indigestion

Impressive; that’s the only word I can use to describe a rally that took place at a McDonald’s Restaurant in New York City.  I was very moved by the group of workers, trade unionists, and members of the community who marched to the restaurant chanting slogans and then, in a surprising move, occupied the restaurant where they remained for a while, calling on workers to join the strike.
After a while they left but continued their rally in front of the restaurant, still chanting their slogans, to which they added one that I’ve heard for the first time in this type of struggle: STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE! After a while, the restaurant workers came out and actually called a STRIKE.
I believe this was a small preview of what will happen when the international working class unites under communist leadership to overthrow this brutal capitalist system and its bosses, and then establishes a communist system with workers’ power in our hands.
A Red Fighter

Israeli Rulers Used Arafat to Oppress Palestine

September 13 marked the 20th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, signed as a “Declaration of Principles” at the White House between Israel’s Yizhak Rabin and Palestine’s Yasser Arafat and hailed by U.S. president Bill Clinton as ending the bloodshed between Israel and Palestine. Actuality, backed by the U.S. ruling class, it continued Israeli oppression of, and violence against, the workers and farmers of Palestine.
Fifteen months before the 1993 Oslo Accords, an election coalition led by Rabin’s Labor Party ended the 15-year reign of the right-wing Likud party. The new administration promised to reach an agreement with the Palestinians within nine months and for the first time sought a political alliance with the parliamentary members of the Communist Party-led HADASH — Democratic Front for Peace and Equality — although the latter was excluded from the coalition administration itself.
However, the Shas religious party soon limited its support of Rabin so the latter asked HADASH to support him in a parliamentary Vote of Confidence. HADASH agreed, to ward off return of a Likud administration, and to encourage a turn in the official policy towards Israeli-Palestinian peace, equality for Israel’s Arab population, a struggle against unemployment and respect for the social rights. HADASH followed the old communist movement’s “lesser-evil” politics — that is, preferring Rabin’s neo-liberal economic policy of budget cuts and tax hikes over the Likud party’s more extreme neo-liberal economic policy and resistance to peace with the Palestinians.
Reasons for the Oslo Accords
Israel’s rulers were finding it difficult repressing the First Intifada, a popular uprising of the masses of Palestine. Although Arafat initially rejected this uprising, he was brought back to Palestine because Israel realized it had to replace direct colonialist rule of millions of Palestinians with a neo-colonialist (indirect colonialist) Palestinian Authority led by Arafat. Direct occupation cost Israel millions, and also many soldiers’ lives, and increasingly exposed Israel as a colonialist state. (This, of course, was the same Rabin who had ordered the Israeli military “to break the bones” of the Palestinians in the First Intifada.) He now preferred a Palestinian Authority to repress the masses of Palestinians “with no Supreme Court and no Betselem” (critics of Israel’s policy in the West Bank and Gaza).
A wider geo-political reason for the Oslo Accords was the U.S. bosses’ desire for a “peaceful” Middle-East, allowing it to invest in its local markets and exploit its workforce and natural resources without interruption. The continued conflict between the Zionist movement and the Arab world was a stumbling block for U.S. economic and political interests.
Therefore, the Oslo Accords were accompanied by the Paris Accords, which essentially used the Palestinian Authority to get workers in Palestine off street protests into low-wage sweatshops, many owned by U.S. and European capitalists.
Meanwhile, HADASH’s previous support for Rabin degenerated when, in July 1993, his administration launched a wide-ranging military operation in Lebanon, including a naval blockade and the destruction of 75 villages by Israeli “Defense” Force (IDF) air raids, turning tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians into refugees.
The Rabin administration, representing mainstream Israeli rulers, stuck to the Oslo Accords despite demonstrations by far right-wing Zionists, and even forcibly repressed them. Far-right violence climaxed in Rabin’s assassination in November 1995. Coincidentally, Benjamin Netanyahu, today’s Israeli Prime Minister, rode the wave of anti-Rabin demonstrations to bash the government and pave his way to power.
Problems with the Oslo Accords
In the years following the Oslo Accords, many acts of terrorism killed hundreds of Israeli citizens while Zionist fascists murdered scores of Palestinians in the 1990’s. Meanwhile, the IDF continued its terrorism against civilians in the West Bank. After several years of simmering conflict, in October 2000 the Second Intifada erupted, virtually destroying the Oslo Accords. Workers in Palestine found themselves slaving away for starvation wages in factories owned by U.S., Western European and Israeli, investors (such as in the Erez Industrial Zone). “Peace” brought slavery, not prosperity for the working class. Additionally, Fatah, which became the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, merged with the Palestinian ruling class (the Sulta).
Direct Israeli occupation was replaced in 20 percent of the West Bank by the neo-colonial Palestinian Authority. It forcibly crushed strikes and uprisings and forced workers to bow down to the factory owners of the joint industrial zones, as well as to the capitalist Sulta. In the rest of the West Bank, Israeli occupation continued unhindered, with Palestinian rule of small enclaves within it.
Following the Second Intifada came the proliferation of checkpoints and roadblocks inside the West Bank and the separation of Palestinian workers from their job-sites and families. Israel continued to hold most of the areas containing Israeli settlers, and soon expanded them. Israel controlled most of the West Bank (and, until 2005, part of the Gaza Strip).
The Palestinian Police received small arms from Israel and turned them against Palestinian workers when they dared rise up. Israeli rulers have forcibly erased the possibility of Palestinian Authority “control” of the West Bank and Gaza by erecting and expanding settlements and “Jewish-only” roads between them, deep into the West Bank. Zionist “peace” retains most of the lands grabbed by Zionism since 1948.
Even if an independent Palestinian state were established in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, its workers would continue to suffer from economic oppression. The lands of the deportees of 1948 will be retained by the State of Israel, which stole them initially. There would be no “independence” from U.S., Western European and Israeli investors, who will use these workers as cheap labor.
Israeli workers also continue to suffer, whether under Zionist war or Zionist “peace.” The essence of Zionism is capitalist control (especially U.S. and Western European) over Jewish and Arab workers. The capitalists prepare us for more wars, amid the intensifying conflict between imperialist powers. For the working class there’s no hope in a world dominated by capitalism. We must seize our destiny and replace capitalist oppression with communist liberation and working-class rule from the Jordan River to the Sea as one stepping stone towards a free proletarian world.
Red Housekeeper from Tel-Aviv