Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid

Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution

In mobilizing the October 17 Harper’s Ferry march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid and to finish the job, two keys to revolutionary change stand out: revolutionary violence and multi-racial unity.

Revolutionary Violence

The government of a capitalist society enforces the exploitative and racist oppression of the working class by any means necessary, including violence by the cops at home and the military abroad. The capitalist state asserts a monopoly on the right to use violence, and uses it whenever workers and rebels threaten the bosses’ rule — on picket lines, in community rebellions against racism or in insurrections threatening bosses’ investments worldwide. The working class has no choice but to meet this capitalist violence with organized mass violence of its own. Failure to do so guarantees defeat.

Consider the Garrisonian abolitionists in the 1830s and ‘40s. They felt that with “moral suasion” slave-owners would eventually surrender their slaves. But “morality” will never trump the economic advantage of exploitation by elite classes, be they slaveholders or capitalists. The battle in Kansas (see CHALLENGE, 9/30) and the raid on Harper’s Ferry brought home that truth, and the ensuing Civil War demonstrated most certainly that only great violence could end the exploitation of chattel slavery.

Slavery was violence. The capture in Africa, the leg irons and imprisonment of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic on slave ships, the whip of the overseers to enforce interminable backbreaking work, and the master’s branding iron, jail cell and noose maintained slavery. The federal government guaranteed the legitimacy of this daily violence in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution and supporting laws, and used its armed might against both Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and the 1859 Harper’s Ferry Raid.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 restated the Constitution’s provision making it illegal to aid escaped slaves but now required citizens of Northern states to actively assist their recapture whenever asked by private slave-catchers and/or federal marshals. Refusing to help could mean six months in prison or a $1,000 fine, even if the person seized had never been a slave at all! No trial by jury was allowed in such cases, since Northern juries would not generally convict someone who opposed slavery. No supposedly escaped slave could ever testify.

The 1857 Dred Scott Decision deepened this tyranny. The Supreme Court ruled that no black person, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen and had no right to bring a case to court. This essentially legalized slavery nation-wide and officially endorsed racist doctrine.

Racist Laws Still Exist

Similar practices continue today! The U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staffs checkpoints on roads leading north from Mexico (sometimes hundreds of miles above the border), randomly stopping and searching vehicles, particularly those containing people who “look Latino.” Those who cannot prove their citizenship or produce documents showing they’re legally in the country are jailed and deported. ICE has employed similar tactics in raids on factories, movie theaters and wherever Latino workers are concentrated.

Similarly, the police beat and kill African American and Latino workers with impunity across the country.  No jury trial for them, just cops acting as judge, jury and executioner!  Killer cops are rarely indicted and virtually never convicted. Such state terrorism is designed to keep workers docile, divided and intimidated, echoing chattel slavery.

And so our class faces a violent, mighty foe. We must not shrink from what must be done today, organizing in factories, in the military and on campuses, not merely to resist but to turn the guns around on the world’s most violent ruling class. But such violence must be based in the masses.

Consider John Brown’s trip east after the January 1859 battle in Kansas. During this journey, his band of 15 helped 11 slaves escape and confronted and defeated 60 government soldiers trying to capture them. He fought and moved about with confidence since thousands of anti-slavery activists backed him wherever he went. In fact, when the Kansas governor demanded, via telegraph, that the U.S. Marshal at Springdale “capture John Brown, dead or alive,” the marshal responded with great irony, “If I try to capture John Brown, it’ll be dead, and I’ll be the one…dead!”

Similarly, Brown boldly declared that since President Buchanan had offered $250 for his capture, Brown would give $2.50 for the safe delivery of James Buchanan’s body.

A massive, militant anti-slavery movement existed, powerful enough to markedly limit federal government action. It had grown from the thousands who escaped from slavery and from their supporters. John Brown did not march on Harper’s Ferry to create a movement, but to put that movement on the offensive, just as he’d done in Kansas.

The Progressive Labor Party has mobilized against hundreds of demonstrations and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and Minutemen. Only the presence of hundreds of cops prevented the fascists from being torn apart by anti-racist fighters led by PLP. Similarly, it was only the power of the federal government to enforce laws that protected the slave-owners from being crushed by enslaved workers and their allies.

As the communist movement grows once again, we must prepare to defeat ruling-class violence with mass, working-class violence that sweeps away all capitalist institutions and bosses. Nothing short of this will enable us to rebuild a society based on equality, collectivity and sensible management of the planet’s resources for the needs of the working class, now and in the future. J

(Next issue: The Importance of
Multi-Racial Unity

Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System

Every September, parents send their children back to school in the hopes that they will learn, grow and prepare for bright futures. But the capitalists who run the public school systems have their own racist plans for our children. As the economic crisis deepens and inter-imperialist rivalry over the worlds’ resources expands, the capitalist bosses become more and more entrenched in their own problems. Desperate to bail out their crumbling financial system and to prepare for more military conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the U.S. bosses spend billions. Shamelessly they continue to steal from the working class to save themselves and their system.

The current budget crises affecting U.S. school systems is a clear statement of capitalist priorities. These cuts are strangling a school system that was already failing our class’s children. In big cities where the majority of students are black and Latino, and families are already disproportionately suffering from unemployment and low wages, the cuts will be the worst.

In Los Angeles, classes will average 42 students. In NYC the school budget has been slashed by billions. This is forcing larger class sizes and cutting anything the Dept. of Education considers non-essential: art music, foreign language, sports, and after-school programs. In Chicago, where Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan honed his skills at cutting services to black and Latino students, many reading coaches, after-school and tutoring programs were eliminated. In San Antonio, schools full of black and Latino students are being shut down.

Washington, D.C, with a nearly all-black public school system, has been in the forefront of the bosses’ reform experiments, even as students continue to suffer. There, cuts are leading to layoffs of teachers as well as less money for vouchers and charter schools. While the schools are slashed, not a dime has been cut from the billions of dollars in interest going from the education budgets to the banks.

The attacks on working-class students are driven by the current crisis of the capitalists. In the 1950’s, the U.S. had emerged victorious from World War II and was launching the Cold War. U.S. bosses had the money to build huge factories that produced steel, autos, airplanes  and factory equipment. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the U.S. bosses drove to invest in education for the “Space Race.” Now the U.S. is a power in decline. Those higher-paying industrial jobs are almost all gone. And the school systems with working-class students, always the poorest, are being gutted.

Capitalists view our children only as fodder for the bosses’ system. To the extent the bosses do care about educating working-class youth it is to have a politically loyal, skilled workforce to exploit. Technical education and patriotism are being pushed for black and Latino students. The advocacy for technical education reflects the growing need the ruling class has for skilled workers like engineers, drill press operators, and machinists, jobs needed for war production. Developing curriculum for the schools to create a workforce prepared for war is often masked by rhetoric saying the U.S. “needs to compete” with international rivals.

President Obama’s speech to school children on September 8 urged them to “set high goals, knuckle down in their studies and persevere through failure.” (NYT 9/9/09)  Many parents embrace hard work and perseverance for our children but the subtext of the speech is that if children don’t succeed in life, it must be their own fault because they did not work hard enough. This idea ignores the reality of the capitalist world. No matter how hard school children work, they will not be allowed to all become doctors or lawyers. They will not even all have jobs. Capitalism relies on a pool of unemployed workers to keep wages low. In the current crises, unemployment is even higher; teaching workers to blame themselves prevents them from blaming the true cause of unemployment — capitalism.

Capitalist schools spend much time dividing students into different groups. Tests are designed to magnify differences and assign arbitrary cut-offs, so children get sorted into different programs from gifted and advanced placement to prison-like dumping schools. Capitalist schools prepare a select few to steer towards the elite professions. The majority of students are left to fight for low-paying jobs or join the military (see letter, p. 6).

“Tough Choices, Tough Times,” the report of the rulers’ New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, proposes that capitalism’s divisions be further entrenched in the schools by forcing students into a defined path after the tenth grade, either college-bound or vocational. Obama wants school children to knuckle down in their studies and persevere through a system that is failing and that fails to offer them the future they deserve.

This latest economic crisis and the quagmire of constant war have left the rulers in a political bind. Individualism is a cornerstone of capitalism and since the anti-war and anti-racist rebellions of the 60’s the U.S. bosses have championed the politics, the art, the music and the philosophy of “me-first.” Schools collaborated with a curriculum rich in the stories of individual success and national progress as the result of individual “can-do” spirit or single-minded pursuit of individual success in the face of great odds.

The fact that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviet communists has been written out of history books. The bosses rewrote the truth of racism in the United States as the fiction of enlightened individuals struggling to champion the ideals of individual freedom. Slavery became an unfortunate “mistake” rather than the conscious policy of 250 years of racist rule codified in colonial law and the Constitution and enforced with ruthless violence that continues to define U.S. society today.

Obama tried to shift the message of individual success when he told students, “Don’t give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.” National service has been a part of the Obama campaign since the beginning and now Obama is calling on schools to teach children to serve their country and to be inspired to sacrifice for the good of the nation. But it’s not “their” country, it’s the bosses’.

Obama and the rest of the ruling class know that the schools have been failing our children for a long time. They cynically use their own failure to meet workers’ needs as a rallying cry for reforms. Many of these reforms have won the support of parents and teachers who hope that they will improve education; but none of these reforms will change the fundamental problems of a system that doesn’t care about working-class children.  After years and years of education reform plans, 39% of children in the U.S. live in families earning less then the amount needed to meet their basic needs. (Center for Children in Poverty) Capitalism cannot educate the majority of children, and for the bosses it is not a principle whether students learn to accept inequality in a large school or a small one.

Reading CHALLENGE in the last few years, one can see many examples of fighting against anti-working-class attacks in the schools: from high school students protesting budget cuts and walking out against police brutality, to college students demonstrating against a pro-torture professor  and developing a Freedom School when summer session is cancelled. The Progressive Labor Party is not training students to calmly accept the life capitalism has in store for them. We want students to learn real history and real skills, to learn to organize, to learn to fight back and to learn to serve our class by building the fight for communist revolution.

No Reform Can Fix Capitalist Healthcare

U.S. bosses and their politician-servants are arguing over how best to dole out health care to the working class. One side of this battle, mainly Republicans and the so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats, wants to protect the profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies at all costs. The other side, mainly liberal Democrats, sees the current health-care situation as a threat to U.S. bosses’ ability to maintain their position against imperialist rivals. As far as the working class is concerned, the likenesses between these sides are more important than their differences.

Neither faction has offered the real solution for all workers: Free and readily accessible health care, as was the situation after the revolutions in the Soviet Union and China. Clinics were widespread and masses of health-care workers were sent into rural areas to serve peasants and farmers.

PLP believes this history shows that workers in power can provide a healthy environment, just as we’ve learned from what happened when these revolutions were reversed and capitalism restored. In the former Soviet republics, workers’ life expectancy, which dramatically increased in the 30 years after the revolution, has decreased since the late 1960s. In China, schistosomiasis, a disease caused by a parasitic worm that ravaged rural areas, was widely controlled due to planned social action initiated after the revolution; it has reemerged.

The results of socialism were a return to capitalism and renewed attacks on the health of the working class. This is why PLP advocates fighting directly for communism and for a society where all aspects of workers’ health will be primary.

Improving workers’ health is not on the top of the agenda for the ruling class, but the faction that now controls the White House and Congress is focused on maintaining U.S. dominance in the world and therefore has two main goals for health-care reform: 1) force the U.S. working class to accept across-the-board low-quality health care as a fact of life; and 2) discipline the sections of the ruling class which are only interested in short-term profits and threaten to undermine the U.S.’s ability to oppose its rivals. Both of these goals represent a move towards greater fascist control.

Here are the bosses’ plans and a communist analysis:

*Require everyone to have health insurance or else pay a penalty.

This requirement is a direct attack on workers who, because of falling wages, find it more and more difficult to divvy up what they have between food, rent/mortgages, heat, clothing, etc. This racist attack will especially affect black and Latin workers who generally suffer from lower wages and higher rates of unemployment.

* Require small businesses to provide insurance that meets “minimum standards.”

These “minimum standards” will attempt to ensure a working class that is only healthy enough to exploit for profit and fight in their oil wars. This means that health care will be rationed and health care for workers who are not “productive” (in the capitalist sense, meaning they don’t produce profits), namely the elderly and seriously ill, will be limited.

* Expand Medicaid to cover the uninsured who can’t afford to buy their own health insurance.

Medicaid fails to provide decent health care now and would have to be expanded just to adequately cover those who already use its services. The financial crisis has swelled the number of unemployed (and thus added to the nearly 50 million uninsured), with black and Latin workers disproportionately affected, meaning more and more workers will come to rely on Medicaid. Their ability to force us to accept these racist conditions is a measure of their ability to prepare us for future attacks

* Tighter regulation of health insurance companies.

This attempt to increase regulation reflects the split in the ruling class discussed above and indicates that Obama & Co. are attempting to discipline those capitalists who care only about their short-term profit-making. It remains to be seen whether health-insurance bosses will submit to this disciplining, but the working class has no stake in the outcome of this battle, because no matter which group of capitalists are running the show, our health will always take a back seat to profits. Of course it’s gratifying to see CEOs get “punished” in public, but it will not mean that Obama and the Democrats actually care about our health.

* Taxing generous insurance plans.

As a legacy of the militant union reforms of the 1930s and ‘40s, there is a section of the working class which has decent health care insurance, primarily industrial and government workers. Not content with helping to wipe out many of these benefits that went along with unionized auto industry jobs, Obama has called for a tax on the remaining decent health care plans.

This plan to tax those few workers who have somehow managed to retain decent health benefits reveals the essence of the entire reform effort: The heavy taxes on the premium plans will drive them out of existence (for workers) and help to create a single, low-quality level of health care for the working class, one that allows for greater government control and discipline, e.g., fascism.

Getting behind either of the factions is a mistake for the working class. Neither side has our interests at heart, a fact clearly indicated when we consider that there has been no mention of a particular super-exploited section of the working class that has a key role to play in this debate: healthcare workers. Mainly women and often immigrants, these workers suffer racist double-exploitation. Their working conditions are awful, especially for home-health providers (who get paid very low wages and have to buy their own gas to get to their patients) and nursing-home attendants (low wages, long hours, too many patients). Improving the health of the working class should begin with improving the health of those who take care of the rest of us.

When we are told of the deaths of workers from disease we often hear “Our mother died of tuberculosis,” or “My sister died from AIDS,” or “My son died from cholera.” These things, the tuberculosis or cholera bacteria or HIV, are only the specific reason for an individual’s demise. The essential point is that capitalism creates the conditions in which these particular pathogens actually kill people.  Clean water and adequate sewage treatment, which is the biggest healthcare improvement that’s available, is denied to hundreds of millions of workers in poorer countries (and millions in imperialism’s heartland).

Whatever it is that makes us sick, from treatable infections to imperialist war, from racist police brutality to stress from having to work two jobs (or from being unemployed), it is capitalism that is the real disease. Fortunately there is a cure: communist revolution and a workers’ society.

Obama’s Big Beginning:

Wider War, Billion$ to Banks, Jobs Down, Rising Racism, Foreclosures – All in 100 Days!

Millions of workers supported Obama, wanting real change: jobs, an end to the imperialist wars, and, importantly, a victory against racism. However, Obama’s first 100 days hasn’t been the “change” from the Bush administration workers expected.

The day Obama was inaugurated, home foreclosures and racist unemployment were at their highest pace since the 1930s. Defenders of Obama claimed that he ‘inherited’ these crises from the Bush administration. Throughout the Bush years, CHALLENGE argued that the real problem “isn’t Bush, it’s capitalism.” It doesn’t matter which president is in office; the ruling class sets the agenda.

Instead of bailing out the working class, Obama gutted the auto workers’ contract, gave billions to his ruling-class buddies and called on workers to sacrifice for the “good of the country.” On April 27, Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in the presence of Senator Kennedy and former President Clinton. This will triple the number of U.S. youth volunteering for AmeriCorps, create four new national service corps (three focused on youth) and turn September 11 into a National Day of Service. The building of this volunteer corps takes people’s desire to serve the working class and directs it into service for the needs of the bosses. It will create a free army that can be mobilized as the wars waged by the rulers expand. It is a partial realization of the Hart-Rudman Commission’s report that outline the ruling-class’s plans for confronting rising imperialist rivals like Russia and China, and securing long-term global military superiority.

Obama’s true class loyalties were foreshadowed by his reaction to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. During Bush’s last months, Obama was more than willing to accuse Bush of “mishandling” the economy, and yet didn’t say a word about the thousands of men, women, and children being killed and maimed. His only remark was “we only have one president at a time.” Even Ben Cohen, liberal columnist and staunch Obama supporter, commented that Obama’s “silence was deafening” (Huffington Post, 12/29). When Israel destroyed a U.N. school and murdered at least 40 Palestinian refugees, Obama turned a blind eye.

Millions of workers expected and hoped that the Obama administration would improve workers’ lives. Obama staffed his administration with bank executives, former Clinton advisors like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and known torturers like General McChrystal, now in charge in Afghanistan. The Obama-led government passed a $787 billion “stimulus” package, secured a bank bailout and nationalized the auto industry. Obama’s priority has been saving the capitalists. He has no intention of stopping the foreclosures that are leaving thousands of families homeless with each passing week nor of fixing the racist unemployment that grows with each passing month.

As a presidential candidate, Obama promised to bring all combat troops back from Iraq by May 20, 2010. This gave him an edge among workers over Clinton or McCain, who admitted U.S. involvement in the Middle East may stretch a century or more. On February 27, President Obama changed his promise. By December, he plans to remove only two of the fourteen brigades, leaving a so-called residual force of around 50,000 troops. Those remaining beyond the Bush-brokered “Status of Forces Agreement” with the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi government will be merely renamed “advisory training brigades.”

Meanwhile, Obama continues authorizing the massive bombing campaign over Afghanistan and missile strikes onto villages in Pakistan. The makers of these weapons, arms industry giants such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have a strong voice in the Obama administration through William J. Lynn III, former Raytheon lobbyist and Obama’s new Undersecretary of Defense, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, one of their favorite campaign contribution recipients. The arms industry is intertwined with the very megabanks like J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup whose former executives now advise Obama’s administration.

Obama, just like Bush before him, has shown his willingness to serve the bankers and bosses at the expense of the working class. No matter how much we hope for change, the capitalists will never allow a president who isn’t loyal to them to occupy the White House. Voting will never bring about a society that truly serves the needs of the workers of the world. Only communist revolution can do that.

Obama’s Plan ‘Stimulates’ Bosses’ Attack on Workers

Barack Obama recently lectured workers, not on capitalism’s systemic inability to avoid crisis and depression, but to “look beyond our own short-term interests to the wider set of obligations we have to each other…That’s when we succeed. That’s when we prosper. And that’s what’s needed right now.” The working class, not the bosses, will take the losses, that’s the meaning behind Obama’s stimulus package.
The international working class must brace for this “stimulus” as an outright attack, foreshadowing even greater misery. One former economist of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Worsley, openly pondered the bosses need for war, saying to Bloomberg news recently, “Can we spend enough with peacetime spending to get us out [of the crisis?]”

In addition to the major banks, many states are on the verge of bankruptcy; their failure would trigger a catastrophe. Only $54 billion has been allocated to states while 43 face a combined deficit of at least $200 billion for this year alone. “This is a band-aid” said Michael Bird, of the federal affairs counsel at the National Conference of State Legislatures (U.S. News & World Report, 2/25/09).
Between mounting job and home losses, decades of gutting federal social programs, and deep cutbacks made after the previous recession of 2001, the crises facing workers, especially in states like California, New York, Florida, and Michigan, are set to intensify.

While Obama stated that this crisis was years in the making, Marx predicted crises like these in the mid 19th century. Workers in the U.S., especially blacks and Latinos, the biggest holders of sub-prime mortgages, are being crushed under mountains of debt which threaten to amplify the crisis as millions are tossed out onto the streets, unable to make their payments.
As for solutions, the bosses can’t seem to print money fast enough. The billions of dollars in cash “injections” triggered unease amongst the Chinese ruling class, which holds several trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury Bills made worthless by the influx of dollars. The Chinese imperialists, flexing their new muscles internationally, recently called for a replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The Path Towards Wider War Among Imperialist Rivals

Obama’s plan to “tax the wealthiest” is a sham, since the upper echelons of the ruling class have all sorts of loopholes to avoid paying taxes. Since the U.S. bosses can’t sell off their own assets to rival imperialists without losing their position as top imperialist dog; their only option is to look to squeeze profits from workers currently being exploited by their imperialist rivals. This is a path towards war.
At the end of WW II the U.S. rulers were in a position to penetrate Latin America, Asia, and Africa unopposed by other capitalists. Times have changed. There is not a single part of the globe that hasn’t been penetrated by one or more rivals to the U.S., namely China, Russia, and Germany. The era of unchallenged U.S. dominance is over.
It’s unclear whether or not the financial wizards can cook up even a short-term solution to this crisis; the best they can hope for is to postpone this crisis for a larger one down the road. Rising competition in the face of worldwide crisis will ultimately lead to war between the biggest powers. The U.S. rulers will be forced to directly confront one or more of their rivals in wars of a scale that will dwarf the so-called “brushfires” around the globe now.

As the crisis deepens, millions of workers in the U.S. have been and will be laid off, and bankruptcies will only mount. The U.S. bosses will intensify exploitation here, and make us pay for their losses. As Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put so eloquently to the Wall Street Journal (11/21/09), “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

The Revolutionary Path Workers Must Take

As May Day approaches, PLP’ers and friends must step up our efforts to win workers and their allies to our Party to fight for a path for workers out of this hell: the fight for communism. Our fight is to organize as large a section of the international working class as possible to oppose these cuts and “make the bosses take the losses.” Everywhere we must support and build unity between employed and unemployed workers, and sharpen the struggle against racism in our schools, workplaces, and barracks. Workers worldwide must see that this crisis is capitalism’s “business-as-usual,” and that this system can only oppress us, bankrupt us, and send our children to kill and die to save one or another bosses’ empire, while sticking us with the bill!

‘Renewable Energy’ Subsidy for Profiteers?

Attempting to ride the growing wave of genuine concern many workers share over the health of the environment, the handouts given to “renewable energy” programs are supposed to reduce dependency on foreign oil but most of the petroleum consumed in the U.S. comes from either Mexico or Canada, and a large share is produced domestically. The U.S. rulers’ main interest in Mid-East oil is about controlling the other imperialists’ access to it. The popular slogan to “reduce dependency on foreign oil” is nothing but a hollow lie, but that won’t stop Obama’s ruling-class allies from paying their friends and business cronies at the expense of workers’ taxes!

Bosses’ Stimulus Plan: $4 Billion for More Racist Cops

To help keep a lid on the New Depression’s growing millions of angry, jobless workers (now 26 million unemployed and under-employed), Barack Obama is giving new life to racist community policing. Obama earmarked $4 billion of his $827-billion stimulus package for Community Oriented Policing Services and “other law enforcement needs.” (New York Times, 2/6).

The Clinton regime, in a glaring example of fascism disguised as liberal “progress,” had put 100,000 new cops on the street in the name of “community policing.” Now Obama wants to double that to 200,000.

Community policing began in earnest in Boston during the early 1990s. The Boston Police Department (BPD) then formed the Ten Point Coalition with pastors in the city’s mainly black Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan sections. The cop-loving clergy created a network of stoolpigeons. Tips about “criminal activity” — usually minor offenses like drug use or vandalism — poured in from pastors, principals and merchants. Arrests soared.

Under this scheme, cops expand their ability to terrorize black and Latino neighborhoods by finding allies among church, school and other local leaders. Pretending to combat gang violence, community policing in fact targets rebellion. That’s why it hits the most oppressed — unemployed black and Latino young people — the hardest and why Obama needs it desperately in today’s collapsing economy.

The cops had won the ministers to consider “all youth as their responsibility regardless of the parish the youth lived in or the youth’s denominational affiliation” and to “spend time on the streets at night, getting to know the kids.” (Encyclopedia of Police Science, 2006) In effect, the notoriously racist BPD succeeded in creating a new version of the Nazi’s World War II-era Judenrat. The Judenrat were Jewish “community leaders” who, collaborating with the Nazis, betrayed their neighbors to the gas chambers.

Boston’s top cop in the early 1990s was Bill Bratton, the rulers’ leading apostle for community policing. Bratton has since brought the liberal rulers’ racist gospel, with varying success, to New York and Los Angeles.

Liberals have a long vicious history. It was the liberals (anti-communist Social Democrats) who ushered in Hitler in Germany. And his party adopted the name “National Socialist” (NAZI in German) because a majority of German workers had voted for socialism so the Nazis figured they could use the liberal fig-leaf of “socialist” to win the working class to fascism.

That’s why it would be wrong to think that the beleaguered U.S. bosses need to assert police power only in inner cities. They need to control all of society and Bratton-style policies help immensely. In mostly white, suburban, middle-class Topsfield, Mass., “Police are arresting twice as many people and writing twice as many citations as they were just two years ago [after the police chief]  adopted several community policing strategies.” (Salem News, 1/22)

With the whole working class — black, Latino and millions of whites — being hit by the bosses’ Depression, the rulers fear working-class rebellions like the ones in the 1930s, when they had to order out the National Guard every week in 1937. With Guard troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ll need those 200,000 extra cops here, while pushing patriotism among white youth as well to get them to join the Army.

WHITE HOUSE MILITARIZATION INTENSIFIES, DESPITE CLUMSY COVER-UP

Intensifying militarization — again masquerading in liberal guise — accompanies Obama’s burgeoning police state. Facing armed conflict now in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and eventually with Iran, China or Russia, Obama seeks to avoid imperialist predecessor Kennedy’s disastrous choice of advisors.

Obama has put four-star officers in key war-planning posts. General James Jones is National Security Advisor and Admiral Dennis Blair directs national intelligence. In launching the U.S. genocide in Vietnam, Kennedy relied on academic Ivy League experts like McGeorge Bundy, who had read all the books but hadn’t a clue about the technicalities of waging war.

“Anti-war” Obama’s preference for war-bloodied brass has become so obvious that he backed off on appointing General Anthony Zinni as ambassador to Iraq, whom he had already promised the job. “Late last week, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former top military commander in Afghanistan, was named as the next ambassador to Kabul. That made it unlikely that the White House would name another general to a high-profile diplomatic post, and fuel criticism that it was militarizing American foreign policy.” (NYT, 2/6) Phony peacemaker Obama then made the obvious move of replacing Zinni with Peace Corps alumnus Christopher Hill.

Obama’s coziness with the cops and generals destroys his credibility as an agent of pro-working-class change. His choice of Paul Volcker to head a panel on economic restructuring proves Obama serves only the highest, imperialist echelons of the U.S. capitalist class. Volcker was once top economist at Chase Manhattan Bank when David Rockefeller ran it. In the early 1980s, as Federal Reserve chief, Volcker threw millions out of work by jacking up interest rates for the bankers’ benefit. Now he and Obama preside over an effort to restore U.S. rulers’ profits through misery and war.

In these hard times, workers can rely only on our own class. And the only purely working-class political organization is the Progressive Labor Party. We encourage the rebellions Obama and his bosses dread. It is our long-term goal to crush their top-down oppression with bottom-up base-building in the working class for a communist revolution.

OBAMA: SAVE RACIST SYSTEM OVER WORKERS’ DEAD BODIES

WASHINGTON, DC, January 20 — The only apparent opposition at the inauguration of the new Obama regime came from a multiracial group of PLP communists and friends. A bullhorn rally was held at Gallery Place, a major Metro stop just outside the “security zone” for the Obama inauguration parade. Speakers at the rally called on the crowd heading to the parade to join PLP in the struggle against capitalism and racism instead of supporting Obama.

In a demonstration of the fascism of this system, 25,000 civilian and military police locked down the city. The day’s events were used to practice methods for the ruler’s need to control the working class.

The two million or so people that came to the inauguration, among them a sizeable number of black and Latino workers, believed what they were witnessing represented an historic victory against racism. In reality, they witnessed the latest in the succession of representatives of the U.S. ruling class, the most racist and murderous group of thieves in history.

Obama made it clear that for the working class, things will get worse, and the workers will be the ones paying for the latest crisis. Obama didn’t blame this racist system for the crisis, one that has enslaved millions and waged genocidal wars for the past 400 years, but instead blamed “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

The desperate conditions of millions of workers were glossed over as Obama paid only lip service to the swathes of racist foreclosures. Up to 10,000 homes per week have been claimed. Millions of black, Latino and other workers were unable to keep up payments on houses they were encouraged to buy at high prices and at eventual exorbitant interest rates. Similarly dismissed was the prison-like conditions of our schools, stating simply that “homes have been lost…our schools fail too many.”

He immediately followed that saying, “no less profound is…the nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable.” “America’s decline” is indeed the “profound fear” of the Rockefeller-led wing of the U.S. ruling class, the banks and companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Exxon Mobil, who have trillions of dollars invested in U.S. imperialism and have cast a nervous eye on their growing imperialist rivals in Russia, China, and the European Union.

Obama and his administration are the ruling class’s number one investment. They’re counting on him to win U.S. workers to support wider wars, unlike the Bush gang who not only squandered the chance to mobilize the country but provoked the anger of millions of workers worldwide. Key to this effort is the movement for national service, a precursor to support for a larger military as was evident in the references to the, “Brave Americans…who patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. …[and] embody the spirit of service: a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.”

In addition to this thinly veiled call to kill and die for U.S. imperialism was another message extolling workers to sacrifice to save the bosses’ system which Obama called on people to imitate, “the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours” — in effect, a wage-cut. Meanwhile, of the current U.S. prison population of 2.4 million — the largest ever in human history, and now over 1% of the total adult U.S. population — 70% are black and Latino. The inmate population languishing in the prisons of 10 states is expected to increase by 25% or more by 2011.

In the dangers of the ruling class’s efforts to build its movement, there are opportunities. Millions hate racism, imperialism, and sexism, and could be won to dedicate their lives to ending the brutal system that requires these evils.

Obama melodramatically showered us with images of slave-owner George Washington “huddling by dying campfires” and called on us to be “faithful to the ideals of our forbears.” Does he mean the first eight U.S. presidents, all of whom owned slaves? When only white, property-owning men were considered citizens and Native Americans were exterminated by the millions? What “greatness” about the U.S. is he talking about if not genocide and slavery?

The horrifying conditions of, and racism against, immigrant workers, and the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror, continued full steam into the 20th century. The U.S. was just cutting its teeth as a rival imperialist power to the genocidal British and French imperialists.  No, U.S. rulers have never been great at any- thing except mass murder — and now, with about 750 U.S. military bases worldwide, Obama wants to usher in “a new era” of U.S. global dominance.

The international working class’s inspiration is not in the slave-owners’ revolt in the U.S. war of independence from Britain, nor in racist Abraham Lincoln’s “solution” of shipping black slaves back to Africa. It’s in the mass slave rebellions and the actions of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman and John Brown which led to the crushing of slavery.

We fight today with the memory of the brave millions of the Haitian Revolution of 1801, which inspired generations of workers because they taught the world how to fight back. The pride in our history is in the workers at Stalingrad who smashed the Nazis; in the caves of Yenan, China as the communist-led workers regrouped after the Long March to win workers’ power in the most populated country on earth; and in countless other uprisings where our class rose against all odds and dared to struggle for a world free of the capitalist slavery that Obama represents. Real change will come when millions of workers read and distribute CHALLENGE and become steeled in class struggle. Join the Progressive Labor Party and help build a mass international communist movement, learn from our predecessors’ mistakes and victories, and help destroy this system once and for all.

PLP RALLIES AGAINST THE NEW CEO OF RACIST CAPITALISM

WASHINGTON, DC, January 20 — Speakers at our rally alerted the throngs of people that Obama, far from making things better, would lead workers and students into expanded war. He would continue racist oppression from Chicago, where police terror and hospital closings marked his time in leadership, to Gaza, where he gave his stamp of approval to genocide. He will reward the thieving capitalists with bailouts just as he condoned those George Bush had given.
Many agreed that the struggle would have to continue, but thought that Obama would still be an improvement. One person told us that he had just won a 3-year battle against D.C. for police brutality and was interested in joining our campaigns on this issue. Several youth from Baltimore were happy to see us, as they knew us from our work in their city as part of the Algebra Project/Peer-to-Peer (see CHALLENGE 10/15/08). Several other young people agreed that Obama just represented capitalism, just more of the same, and that we had to intensify our fight-back.
There were a few hostile responses, one demanding that we talk about Bush’s crimes. We told him that we’d been doing that for eight years! Another said we shouldn’t “rain on Obama’s parade” and should give him a chance. But we can’t give murderous capitalism a chance. Capitalism always has, and always will, serve the ruling class, not the working class. We are in the midst of a severe economic and military crisis, and the working class must be mobilized to fight racism and capitalism now!
We gained several new contacts for the Party and distributed over 800 flyers and 400 CHALLENGES. We also came away determined to win the millions of workers deceived by the election to a revolutionary struggle against racist capitalism, and not compliance with the increased war and fascism being ushered in by this new CEO of U.S. capitalism.

Obama Blesses Torture, Wider Oil War, Wage-Cuts

Barack Obama, far from making things better, will lead workers and students into expanded war, continue racist oppression and continue to reward the thieving capitalists with bailouts just as George Bush did.

In fact, Obama may well get away with murder for the benefit of U.S. rulers all the more easily because of his huge popular support. The millions who turned out for him in Washington suggest many working-class Obama backers were acting against their own class interests.

Obama’s first speech, in effect, actually called for both bankers’ bailouts and workers’ wage-cuts (work fewer hours to save others’ jobs). He never once asked corporations to take less profits to “save jobs.”

The Sham of ‘Closing’ Guantanamo

As head of the U.S. war machine, Obama immediately abandoned two campaign promises: vowing to close the Guantánamo torture mill and to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq. On Guantánamo, the liberal, imperialist Brookings Institution (website, 1/24/09) assured U.S. capitalists that this move is, on one level, a crowd-pleasing ruse designed to “warm the hearts of human rights activists.” Brookings fellow Benjamin Wittes wrote:
“Obama’s executive order…does a lot less than many people seem to imagine….It does not require any detainee’s release or transfer. It does not require any detainee’s prosecution. It does not preclude the eventual use of military commissions or some other alternative trial venue.

And, critically, it does not preclude the continued non-criminal detention of certain — perhaps many — current Guantánamo detainees….Guantánamo, in short, will close, but Guantánamo detentions may well continue.”

As for torture, Brookings says Obama’s first act in office enables a new Inquisition. “It…contain[s] an important nod to the possibility that the CIA may have legitimate needs for techniques the military does not authorize….The CIA will regain some measure of interrogation flexibility as a result of this.”

On Iraq “withdrawal,” the Obama regime has no intention of abandoning U.S. rulers’ deadly struggle for oil-rich Iraq. According to a January 21 White House press release, “Under the Obama-Biden plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel.” The Los Angeles Times reported (1/21) that this will involve, “A…force of tens of thousands.”

Obama hopes to secure the six-million-barrel-per-day Iraqi oil production U.S. rulers envisioned on the eve of their 2003 invasion. But before Exxon Mobil and Chevron eventually take decisive possession of Iraq’s oil fields, Obama will have to deploy even more forces in the region to fend off threats from Iran and China that have only grown since 2003.

DEADLIER WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

Other events indicate that Obama, who vows to intensify U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and beyond, will prove an even deadlier war criminal than Bush. The Times of London reported (1/23), “Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W. Bush has not changed….Three children lost their lives.”

Obama’s pursuit of the Afghan war is no better than Israel’s bosses’ Gaza genocide. “The U.S. military said on Saturday that troops, backed by air support, had killed 15 militants in an overnight operation. But Assadullah Wafa, a Karzai [the Afghan president] adviser investigating the deaths, said on Sunday that ‘16 civilians, many of them children and women, were killed’ in the operation” (Reuters, 1/25). “Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated…in Mehtarlam…after [the] American raid.” (NY Times, 1/26)

“American commandos broke down doors and unleashed dogs without warning on January 7…in Masamut…in eastern Afghanistan….typical of many [raids] conducted” in the country. “One of the first to be killed was…a member of the Afghan Border police who was home on leave….His brother…said he was killed as soon as he looked out his front door.” (NYT)

When villagers were carrying a wounded man “on a rope bed down a slope…to get help….a helicopter fired a rocket at them, killing the wounded man and two of the bearers.” (NYT)

All this is typical of the racist attacks that the U.S. military metes out to defenseless civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere to maintain its imperialist profit empire.

The Times indicated that tremendous opposition is developing to this kind of mass murder. And now Obama wants to make Afghanistan into a full-scale war, but according to Andrew Bacevich, international relations professor at Boston U., “It could be that sending 30,000 more troops is throwing money and lives down the rat hole.” (NYT, 1/15)

There is only one viable alternative to Obama’s pro- capitalist, pro-war, anti-worker mass frenzy. It lies in building for a communist revolution that will someday bury the war-makers’ capitalist system, which tortures and kills for profit.

The Crisis of Capitalism: Earthquake for California Workers

Community college administrators and student-government leaders plan to mobilize students to demand “revenue enhancement” (higher taxes) instead of budget cuts with rallies and marches in Pasadena (Feb. 27) and Sacramento (March 16). Members and friends of the communist PLP are organizing students and workers to participate around the theme: Smash budget cuts and racist unemployment! Make the bosses pay! This system — which can’t provide education, housing or health care for all — must be destroyed!

More than 600,000 California workers lost full-time jobs between November 2007 and November 2008.  Close to a million are officially “unemployed;” a million more can find only part-time work or have given up looking. Nearly 200,000 more aren’t counted because they are in jail. In L.A., the real unemployment and underemployment rate is close to 20% and double that for black and Latino workers. Many who still have jobs are forced to take pay cuts, like San Jose teachers and CSULB workers who agreed to a two-day “furlough.”

The California budget deficit is now $42 billion. The bosses plan to increase the sales tax, reduce dependent tax credits, and cut billions from education while increasing tuition 9.3% in the University of California (UC) system, 10% in the California State University (CSU) system, and up to 50% in the community colleges.

As paychecks shrink, as IOUs are threatened in place of state income tax refunds, as financial aid checks shrink, more students and workers seek answers. Using our revolutionary ideas in patient long-term struggle we can build a base for communism.

“I gave a report on capitalism to my English class, but nobody reacted much,” a community college student, who is a Navy vet, told a student activist friend. She urged him to keep it up. “Its good to have a chance to talk about things like this. When they don’t know what they think about something, it doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention.”

Communists Fight Budget Cuts, Racism, Liberal Misleaders, Capitalism

Under capitalism, workers can’t pay for needs, like health care, especially when wages are falling and racist unemployment is skyrocketing. Bosses push the lie that people who use public programs and services are being “selfish” or “greedy” for taking advantage of “entitlement programs” instead of “paying their fair share.” The racist idea of a “culture of poverty” encourages workers to blame other workers instead of the system. This racism justifies cuts in programs like CalWorks which supports many community college students and their children. This same racism aims to pit us against each other.  As communists we fight racism showing that it attacks all workers, building a united working-class movement to fight back.

Our Future Depends on Revolution, Not Reform

Liberal leaders want us to rely on them to fight the cuts, saying the community college system is the “key to California’s economic recovery” since many unemployed people come back for new skills or a new career.

But unemployed workers will now pay more for their classes with no promise of a job when they’re done. Any “economic recovery” for the capitalist bosses will come off the backs of the working class and from wider, deadlier wars.

We can’t rely on liberal capitalist politicians. The deepening crisis is an opportunity to build working-class unity, expose capitalism, sharpen the class struggle against the bosses and build the revolutionary Party that will one day lead workers to take power and build a communist society. We’ll meet the needs of the international working class, eliminating profits and banks.  We plan to expand the readership of CHALLENGE newspaper now and rely on our readers to bring these ideas into the movement against racist unemployment and budget cuts.
In doing so, we educate ourselves. We reveal the class system, our place in it, and our power to eliminate it. In our study groups we learn history, political economy, philosophy, and science so that we can understand what a revolution and an egalitarian communist society would look like. Join us!

OBAMA: NEW CEO FOR U.S. IMPERIALI$M

The expanding “war on terror,” the stock market crash, mass racist unemployment and home foreclosures, police terror, fascist immigration raids and racist budget cuts are all built into the racist profit system. These are the issues that moved millions to respond to Barack Obama’s call for “CHANGE.”

But Obama isn’t offering anything new, except a liberal face in the White House. His cabinet and top advisors are mostly Clinton and Carter re-treads with decades of loyal service to Chase, Citibank and Exxon-Mobil. His National Security Advisor is mass murderer General James Jones who led the saturation bombing of Yugoslavia, killing thousands.

Every president is a defender of capitalism, a system composed of two classes: the bosses who own everything and profit off the backs of the overwhelming majority, and the working class, who only own our labor power and produce all value, including the profits of the bosses.

The government is run by this ruling class, which makes Obama the new CEO for U.S. imperialism.
The bankers and billionaires comprising the U.S. ruling class will continue spilling rivers of blood to maintain their control of Mid-East oil and their rank as the top imperialist power. While they try to secure a permanent presence in Iraq, they will escalate the war to Afghanistan, Pakistan and, if necessary, Iran.

‘NATIONAL SERVICE’ — A BACK-DOOR DRAFT TO SUPPLY CANNON FODDER FOR THE BOSSES’ OIL WARS

One of Obama’s main goals is winning millions of youth, especially black youth, to wrap themselves in the American flag and fight for U.S. imperialism in these oil wars. Right now, amid this emerging Depression (see page 5), millions of black and Latino workers and youth as well as workers in general are becoming fed up with the effects of a racist profit system gone wild. So Obama’s job is to win them back with his all-class unity — “we all have to pull together and sacrifice” to save the system — which masks his role as the bosses’ servant. The rulers’ National Service scam is designed to get millions, especially youth, to work for low, or no, wages, as volunteers “to support America,” particularly in the military.

Obama, Bush and McCain all fell in line and supported the $700 billion bailout of the bankers and Wall Street parasites while millions swell the unemployment lines. Racist misery is built into the profit system.  Black workers suffer twice the unemployment rate of white workers (four times the rate for black youth). In Detroit, Milwaukee and Buffalo, over 50% of black males, age 16-64, are unemployed. Millions more are either under-employed or have given up looking for work. Twelve million undocumented workers and youth face racist detention camps and deportations just for looking for work.

Obama will now preside over the world’s largest prison population, 2.4 million, 70% black and Latin males. Hardly a black or Latino family in the U.S. doesn’t know someone who’s either in jail, on probation or parole. This result of racist police terror rivals the old South Africa apartheid system.

One of Obama’s mentors, Chicago’s Mayor Daley, rose to power as a State’s Attorney prosecuting black workers and youth who “confessed” to crimes they never committed while being tortured in Chicago police stations. The prison doors will not swing open on Obama’s watch. The victims of racist police terror will not be sent home to their families.

The change we need won’t come from reshuffling capitalist politicians and bureaucrats no matter how “smart” they appear. We need mass actions and a mass movement, not to “fix” capitalism but to smash it. We need to turn every attack into an opportunity to build a mass revolutionary communist PLP that can ultimately lead the working class to power and to a world based on meeting the needs of the international working class.

FIGHT BACK!

• IN THE FACTORIES AND UNIONS. Oppose every plant closing; organize strikes and plant occupations, like the 240 Latino and black workers at Republic Windows did in Chicago last month. Learn from the striking UAW workers at American Axle in Detroit, Seattle’s Boeing workers and Stella D’Oro workers in the Bronx. Show solidarity with rebelling students and workers in Greece, throughout Europe and China who fought fascist conditions this year. Build unemployment committees on our jobs and in our unions to unite laid-off workers with their still-employed brothers and sisters.

• IN THE COMMUNITIES. Organize factory, union and neighborhood committees to fight evictions and immigration raids. Work in community centers and church soup kitchens and food pantries, talking to volunteers and those in need about the racist profit system and the need to destroy it.

• IN THE SCHOOLS. Fight budget cuts, racist testing, militarization and fascist conditions.

• IN THE MILITARY. Bring the fight against imperialist war and racist police terror in all these organizations to show how the only way out of this endless and escalating war on terror is to win soldiers and sailors to rebel against the brass and overthrow the capitalist war-makers.

The more we do, the more we can expand the circulation of CHALLENGE. The more we expand the readership of CHALLENGE, the more we can do in the class struggle.

The nature of the capitalist beast will not change because a liberal face is in the White House. He won’t bring peace, full employment or freedom for immigrant workers or to workers jailed by this criminal INjustice system
Yet, in the absence of a mass revolutionary movement, millions of potential revolutionaries hold out hope. Many illusions must be shattered. We have a big job before us. Let’s engage the enemy everywhere we can, and use every battle to build the revolutionary communist PLP.

IS THIS THE RACISM WE CAN EXPECT FROM OBAMA?

• When Chicago’s Cook County Health Bureau closed half the clinics used by predominantly black and Latino uninsured workers, slashing 2,000 jobs in 2007 — and just destroyed another 500 jobs on January 1 — not a word of protest came from Obama as clinics closed in his South Side neighborhood.
• Obama was directly involved in the destruction of Chicago Housing Authority projects on the West Side, displacing tens of thousands of black working-class tenants. The Boston Globe reported (6/27/08): Chicago’s “Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator…[was] subsidized by the federal government….But it’s not safe to live there….Collapsed roofs and fire damage….Mice….Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks….
• “Thousands of apartments across Chicago…built with [government]…subsidies — including several hundred in Obama’s former district — deteriorated so completely that they were no longer inhabitable.
• “Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters….[who] profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
• “As a state senator…[Obama] co-authored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers….He…campaigned on a promise to create [a]…Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year….
• “Grove Parc…[symbolized] giving public subsidies to private companies…an approach strongly backed by Obama….”
• Obama’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is Shaun Donovan who, as NYC Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), laundered public-housing renovation funds through private not-for-profit social service agencies to evade paying union wages. Donovan used HPD low-income housing funding to bring racist gentrification to Central Harlem, replacing long-time African-American, African immigrant and Latino working-class residents with luxury housing for affluent professionals and business owners. This is the guy Obama has picked to set national housing policy!