Letters of July 2

Seattle Minimum Wage Hike Headed Downward
The Seattle city council voted to be the second city in the U.S., behind SeaTac, to adopt a $15-per-hour minimum wage. Mayor Ed Murray praised the resolution as a “model for the rest of the nation to follow” after it passed unanimously (Seattle Times, 6/2).
This however was all a show. Murray has spent the last six months trying to undermine the push for a minimum wage hike. All of the city council members save one, Kshama Sawant, has been fighting this raise tooth and nail since a mass movement forced it into the political arena a year ago. It was workers in the street participating in fast food strikes and showing up by the thousands over the last two May Day marches demanding $15 now that has forced the hand of the political establishment. Were they not to pass their watered-down minimum wage resolution now, a referendum would have been on the next ballot for an immediate wage hike that has 68% support in the city (The Stranger, 2/12).
And this resolution is heavily watered down. The wage hike will be incremental, taking eight years before it is in effect for all workers. Larger employers will have from 3-4 years to comply and “small businesses” — hilariously defined as any company with less than 500 workers — have 5-7 years to reach the $15 target. Further the process of ratcheting up the minimum wage has been pushed back from January to April. All of this is to ensure the maximum possible depreciation caused by inflation. If we assume the same inflation rate over the last eight years the $15 minimum wage will depreciate by 15 percent effectively making it $12.76-per-hour when it finally takes effect in 2021. And this doesn’t even get into the “training wage” that it allows for teenagers (allowing for hyper-exploitation of child labor) and disabled workers.
While being the face of capitalism in Seattle, Ed Murray, praised the bill through gritted teeth, the business community has already begun to undermine the measure. A business front group called Forward Seattle plans to put its own referendum on the next ballot that would create a Charter Amendment — which would supersede the current resolution and is harder to repeal — that incrementally raises the wage to $12.50 by 2020 (about $11.35 in 2014 dollars). The International Franchise Association has vowed to sue over the wage hike, a tactic that worked to undermine the SeaTac measure earlier this year. And Tim Eyman — a David Koch of sorts for state politics — plans to put an initiative in front of the state legislature that prohibits cities and counties from adopting their own minimum wage standards (The Stranger, 6/4).
But the biggest obstacle to $15-per-hour is the refusal of government agencies to enforce any measure seen as protecting workers against their boss’s total control. An anti-wage theft ordinance was passed last year, but city officials have refused to enforce it. Mandatory sick leave was passed in the city, but not a single employer has been sanctioned, despite 40 percent of companies refusing to comply with the ordinance. The capitalist class is always happy to promise pay that they will never give out.
It took workers in the street demanding a wage hike to get this resolution passed. It will take workers in the street to force the capitalist class to abide by this new resolution. Still, even if we forced Seattle’s capitalists to make good on $15-per-hour they would simply lie in wait picking at the edges until they undermined the reform. Ultimately workers need to ditch this exploitative system altogether. Fighting for a higher minimum wage helps to expose the exploitation of the system, but only revolutionary politics will get rid of the indignities of capitalism once and for all.
Red Beard
GPCR: Inequality, Selfishness Not Part of Human Nature
The fourth entry of the series on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in CHALLENGE from 4/23/14 to 6/4/14 tells of the disintegration of not only the GPCR in the late 1960s, but of the entire revolution that had taken China from the dark ages of colonial exploitation to a socialist society in 1949, one that inaccurately called itself “communist.”  The gains even under socialism made by hundreds of millions of Chinese workers and peasants, not least in the rural areas, were among the greatest and fastest improvements in conditions for the vast majority in the history of the world. Only the Soviet Union in its first few decades matched this record. Illiteracy was eliminated, health care was guaranteed for all, universal education reigned, and poverty, homelessness, and hunger were abolished, all through collectivity.
That article was very instructive in showing how the  reintroduction of private property degrades collective and cooperative social relationships that benefit all. It is much easier to see when actual conditions run from collectivity to individualism, rather than our having to imagine their running in the opposite direction. In distributing previously collectively owned means of production and giving it to various individuals, the by-then corrupt and capitalist-minded Chinese leadership created a small number of increasingly rich at the expense of a vast number of increasingly poor.
In the world’s capitalist societies, it is clear that a very large majority of the working class can barely sustain ourselves and many of us continually teeter on the brink of utter destruction in the form of hunger, homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, maiming and death in the military — and underlying all these and hindering us from fighting back — racist and sexist discrimination and super-exploitation. The existence of such inequality is always said by the capitalists to be the fault of that majority. Their propagandists get away with this lie through the fiction of “human nature,” in which people are said to be incapable of change and some are simply said to be born more capable than others. Added to which everyone is said to be constitutionally selfish and is always trying to better their own position at the expense of others.
But China is a society that degraded itself in the late 1960s, starting from a position of hard-won collectivity and cooperation in which all workers benefited. Losers, if any, were few and far between. Then with the defeat of the GPCR the corrupt leadership forced conditions to deteriorate back to capitalist competition and individualism (selfishness). This earthshaking experience in China makes it much clearer that the inequality of the revived capitalism there has nothing to do with selfishness and varying degrees of competence, since those did not exist before. Rather it has everything to do with the traitorous actions of the leading party that has the gall to still call itself “communist.”  They do so to attempt to fool the workers of the world.
With competition there are guaranteed losers, while with cooperation it is the absence of losers that can be guaranteed, as each helps all. The capitalists worldwide turn the focus away from the ubiquitous losers and pretend either that they don’t exist or that it is our own fault. They focus instead on the small number of winners to try to attract workers to climbing over their neighbors’ backs to achieve similar status. But it is clear, from the experience of the defeat of the GPCR, that selfishness and competition, rather than being fixed characteristics of a mythological “human nature,” is structurally inherent in capitalism. That is why the PLP fights to abolish it. Join us.
Saguaro Rojo
Soviets Outfoxed Imperialists
Whenever the facts surface of how the Soviet (workers’ councils) Red Army defeated the Nazis in World War II, the imperialist-controlled media is quick to say that the Hitler-Soviet non-aggression pact was a betrayal of the British and French (allies) to the Nazis.
Italian and German fascists’ movements were organized in the 1920s and thirties to destroy the worldwide communist movement of workers inspired by the 1917 Soviet revolution against their capitalist bosses. Fascist movements were supported by the big imperialist powers like Britain and France along with the U.S. where regular pro-Nazi radio broadcasts by anti-communist Catholic labor unions and mass fascist rallies in Madison Square Garden occurred. The imperialist allies’ strategy was to appease worldwide German and Italian aggression and encourage it to attack the Soviet Union whose ideas threatened all imperialists.
The Soviets knew that the Nazis were planning to invade the USSR and pleaded with the allies many times to join in a war against Hitler if he continued to invade other countries. The allies refused because they believed their great empires were too strong for Hitler to attack and they really wanted their two enemies, Germany and the Soviets, to destroy each other while they waited out the war.
Stalin understood the imperialists’ strategy and also Hitler’s fear of another two-front (East and West) conflict like World War I that defeated Germany. So Stalin accepted the German offer of a non-aggression pact to turn Hitler’s drive for empire away from the Soviet Union towards the British and French empires whose “great” armies were demolished by the Nazis in a few months.
The short time won by the non-aggression pact allowed the Soviets to move most of their industries beyond the Ural Mountains, out of range of German bombers, where they built the tanks and planes that helped the Red Army destroy the Nazi invasion.
A Comrade
In Memory of Comrade Steve Carl
On May 10 a dear comrade, Steve Carl, died from extensive lung cancer at age 69.  Steve was much too young to die, but he was yet another victim of profit-mad capitalism.  While he had smoked more than 40 years ago — feeding the profits of the killer tobacco industry — he had also worked at Inland Steel around that time.  Like all workers, he had given them far more in back-breaking labor time than he ever received in wages.  He remembered coming home from work every day and coughing up black junk for an hour, until he could breathe a little more easily.  In addition, most of his fellow workers smoked, and second-hand smoke contributed to his cancer.  After leaving Inland he became a teacher in Chicago.
Steve was the embodiment of the communist spirit.  As a social studies teacher, first at King High School and later at Hyde Park Career Academy, two impoverished black schools on Chicago’s South Side, Steve taught the truth about the capitalist system to thousands of students, over the years.  He was highly regarded by his students and their parents, not only because of his teaching, but because of the respect and care he had for each of them.  In the 1980’s, he routinely brought at least a bus full of students to PLP’s May Day marches.
Steve lived modestly. He preferred good times with friends and family to material goods.  He created beautiful paintings from acrylic and nail polish, which were presented at a show in downtown Chicago titled “Dialectical Expressionism.”  The show’s brochure included a brief explanation of dialectical materialism (the Marxist scientific approach to revolution).  He retired from high school teaching when the school administration insisted he teach from a canned curriculum, implemented draconian discipline policies against students, and emphasized test-prep over deep understanding.  That was not what Steve became a teacher to do!
Steve was very active in the Chicago Chapter of a group called the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR).  On the several occasions when he invited one of the co-chairpersons of InCAR to speak to his high school students, Steve always guaranteed a large turnout. He was able to do this because he fought against racism and was very popular with his black students.  In later years the InCAR chairperson would often run into some of Steve’s students who remembered how he brought them under the influence of multiracial unity, enabling them to remain as progressives, capable of relating to political constituents of all colors.
In later years, after he retired, Steve split his time between his house in Dillon, Montana and the house of his partner (Marylou, called Lou) in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.  He joined various community groups and continued to offer communist analyses of events for his friends and neighbors.  Both he and Lou were painters, in very different styles, but occasionally they would paint a canvas together, with Steve providing an abstract overlay to Lou’s landscapes.  They jointly ran an art gallery in Dillon and were joined by other local artists. 
Steve is survived by Lou, as well as his son and two daughters from earlier marriages.  He will be sorely missed by all who knew him, and the working class has been robbed of a staunch defender and fighter.
Chicago Comrades