Letters of April 8

Transit Workers Need Unity with Riders, Not Cops
The 3/25 CHALLENGE bus driver article exposes the fact that operators are charged for accidents that kill people while cops walk away from racist murders. This is hypocritical because when cops murder working-class youth, such as Akai Gurley in Brooklyn, the bosses label these incidents as accidents.
In 2013, 176 pedestrians were killed in traffic “accidents.” Now the Transport Workers Union (TWU) misleaders are equating bus drivers with cops by demanding that drivers — “just like cops” — should be exempt from charges in pedestrian deaths in traffic “accidents.” But bus operators who drive “often with faulty equipment” are completely different from the cops who murdered Gurley and Eric Garner. Racist cops who kill Black and Latin workers and youth are definitely “doing their jobs,” making their arrest quotas and terrorizing the working class. However, when transit workers are forced to “play by the bosses’ rules,” it means ignoring safety laws in the rulebook, safety that workers fought for and won after many workers and riders were killed.
The bosses’ exemption for cops means not charging them for racist murders. If bus drivers are forced to ignore safety laws in the rulebook leading to traffic “accidents,” it is the bosses who are guilty of these deaths, not the bus drivers.
Transit workers should not be looking for unity with cops — who are not part of the working class — but should be organizing to refuse to operate unsafe vehicles and drive at unsafe speeds in crowded streets just to keep to a schedule. Most transit workers killed and injured on the job were playing the bosses’ cross-cutting game of ignoring the rulebook to prevent being harassed by management. The only time the safety rules are enforced occur during rare rulebook slowdowns used by the sellout union to pressure the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA).
Older transit workers remember conductor Joe Carnegie and the Rank-and-File transit committee and their newsletter which fought for Black and Latin representation in the TWU. The Rank-and-File demanded that the Wall Street bondholders who created the MTA be responsible for all fare increases and to remove that issue from politics. The MTA however pitted the riding public against transit workers.
PLP should be organizing transit workers towards unity with the riding public like opposing the four percent fare hike on 3/22/15 which will increase the 40 percent New York City poverty rate of mostly Black and Latin workers. Demand that billionaire bondholders, real estate and department stores pay for the transit system, without which they wouldn’t make any profit. And PLP should unite with transit workers who resist the bosses and the TWU.
★ ★ ★ ★
CHALLENGE Readers Correct Political Error
I wrote a letter in the 2/11/15 issue of CHALLENGE that contained an important error.  I want to thank the authors of the two responding letters in the 2/25/15 and 3/11/15 issues, who both corrected my error.  I also want to apologize for my carelessness in making that misstatement.  Here is what I said:
First, [an article in the 1/24/15 issue of CHALLENGE] implies that whatever capitalism needs it has the ability to create.  While this is true of many ruling class policies, such as imperialist military efforts or racist and brutal police forces that are uncontrollable by the communities they patrol, unemployment is not a policy [my emphasis].  
With the help of the two responders, I now see that unemployment is indeed a policy of the ruling capitalist class, at least in part.  When unemployment gets too low (i.e., when too many workers have jobs), the Federal Reserve (the Fed), which is a government-appointed institution, is able to increase the unemployment rate deliberately through manipulation of interest rates and/or the money supply (monetary policy).  I missed that point.
However, just to clarify for other readers what has now become clarified for me, there were two independent points in my original letter.  The first point was that there are unintended outcomes of decisions made by individual capitalists, over which they have little or no control and that occur despite their wishes.  This point was affirmed by the two responders.  The second (erroneous) point was that unemployment is one of those unintended outcomes.  While the unemployment rate is still partly the unintended result of individual capitalist decisions, that rate can also be deliberately manipulated to some extent by the Fed, a capitalist institution.
It is vital that all of us understand the first point (i.e., there are outcomes over which the rulers have no control) and not let it get lost in the debate.  It is vital because it underscores the fact that the capitalist ruling class is not all-powerful.  That is, while it controls the state at every level, there are limits to its power.  We need to understand its total control over the state to know what we are up against and to avoid falling into the ruling-class-fostered myth that power lies in the hands of the “people.”  But at the same time we need to understand that there are limits to its control over our class, because if we think that together we are powerless to change this system, we are lost before we begin.  
Marx and Engels first noticed, and made the point a century and a half ago, that the state is wholly the instrument of ruling classes throughout the history of class-divided societies.  The rulers, on the other hand, push the myth that the state is neutral in the face of disputes between bosses and workers in order to hide their (the bosses’) control over it.  But Marx also made the point that, among other outcomes, the capitalists unintentionally create their own grave diggers in the form of the working class. For example, there are things that result from the very workings of capitalism that are against the interests of the capitalists.  Both aspects are vital for us to understand if we are to succeed in ridding ourselves of the most vicious and exploitative system in the history of the world.
Together, once millions are organized under communist leadership, the working class of the world will not only be able to challenge the capitalist classes for power, but we will also be able to ultimately succeed in this challenge.  The Soviet and Chinese revolutions of the 20th century gave a glimpse of this collective power of the working classes, even if inevitable errors led to their reversion to capitalism — for the time being.  Errors, like my own, are inevitable, but we often learn more from our errors than from our successes.
★ ★ ★ ★
Kingsman Secret Service: So Bad
I walked out of the film Kingsman: The Secret Service after 30 minutes, it was so bad.
The film is simply a marketing appendage for a video game. Every scene in the film resembles a scene from a game. At regular intervals there are scenes where the “hero” has to make a choice — evidently places where the player has to push a button.
There are continual in-your-face sequences that are bewildering and aggressive, like something out of the Guantanamo torture camp.
The ideology of the film is thoroughly fascistic, from the opening scenes, where an Afghan prisoner is tortured with death threats, to the scene where the “hero” is interrogated in a bare gray underground interrogation cell. There were other fascist scenes, such as when the “hero”‘s stepfather tortures him. The stepfather threatened to cut his throat with a meat cleaver to obtain information about the secret order, funded by the wealth of bourgeois and aristocratic World War I “martyrs” and dedicated to maintaining British imperialist  “peace and order.”
On top of all this, the “hero” is caught up in an Oedipus complex (“sanitized” by his wanting to kill his stepfather instead of his “martyred” biological father) in order to give the film emotional punch.
★ ★ ★ ★