Zimbabwe: Mugabe, ZANU-PF Hands 0ff Street Vendors!

 

Hands 0ff the Street Vendors!

The Mugabe ZANU-PF regime has threatened so-called illegal street vendors in Harare and Bulawayo with police and perhaps also army repression beginning Monday, June 8th, 2015. The Mugabe regime is under pressure from local and foreign capitalists to deal with the vendors, hence the crackdown. The Mugabe “revolution” has not secured national independence and has taken and survives due to its role of imposing the will of foreign capital on the masses with total disregard for their needs. This is the popular front trapping the masses in misery. Around 5 million people are involved in street vending and their unions have vowed to resist the action.

The RWG calls for strike actions across the country to foil this attack on masses of the urban poor! In Zimbabwe, anyone is liable to become a small vendor who is not part of the labor aristocracy.

The ZANU-PF liberators of 1980 become the quasi-colonial regime of today just as the Chinese degenerate workers state of those days who backed them has become Chinese imperialism, the main prop of the Zimbabwe regime today. This regime has failed to bring about national liberation on every imaginable score, with a real unemployment rate of 90% or thereabouts among the urban and even the rural working class. Thus an attack on the street vendors amounts to an attack on the national domestic economy itself. It is not a question of finding a proper “place” for our “mothers” to sell their “goodies” (ZANU-PF Political Commissar Kasukuwere.)

The mere fact that the Joint Operations Command (JOC) spokesperson local Government Minister Chombo could suggest that the army could be employed in tandem with the police to herd the vendors off the streets suggests the real dimensions of the crisis both of the economy and the regime. It is interesting to note that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the opposition grouping favored by Anglo-American imperialism, points to the failure of the ZANU-PF to deliver the 2.3 million jobs it promised when it stood in the last elections. Of course the MDC has no program for generating these jobs, nor even a desire to do so, because full employment of the Zimbabwe working class would immediately change the relationship of class forces to the disadvantage of their Western imperialist sponsors.

 

Fighting Action Program

• Jobs for all! For a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours Pay! We demand a sliding scale of wages and prices and employment for all who can work; working conditions should improve for all workers! For guaranteed employment for all who are able, a guaranteed income for all!
• We demand the introduction of state projects to employ all the unemployed! Workers! Force the government to stop the attack on the vendors!
• Land must be distributed to all poor peasants together with a state bank to provide cheap credit to all small farmers!
• Workers form action committees to lead the resistance to the growing attacks on the wages and working conditions of the poor and the livelihood of the majority poor! 
• We call on the workers and the oppressed groups to convene a congress of delegates from the working people, peasants, urban poor, youth and soldiers to come up with a constitution that guarantees a good life for all!
• Workers break with the MDC and ZANU-PF and form a workers’ party that truly champions the interests of the workers and the poor masses, form rank and file unions to lead action in all unions and break with the reformist trade union leadership!
• No to US and Chinese imperialism!
• No to reformism and fake Trotskyism, build a fighting socialist party!
• For workers councils and for a workers state based upon them that defends workers and peasants against the local and foreign capitalists! For a workers and peasants’ government on the basis of the armed people to implement decisions that benefit the workers and the poor.
• For an African socialist revolution as part of the international revolution that alone can guarantee a better life for all!
• For a new world party of socialist revolution based on the Transitional Program of 1938 to lead the revolution to end capitalism and open the road to socialism!

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (RWG-ZIM)

Email: rwg.zimbabwe@gmail.com

Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com

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USA: Fighting the Cuts in Education

FROM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TO THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL:

ONLY WORKERS’ ACTIONS CAN SAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION!



For control of our public universities by faculty, staff, and students; abolish the Board of Regents!

For parent-teacher-staff control of public schools; down with school boards and state trustees!

Stop the Democratic Party/CTA drive to privatize through charter schools!

For mass actions by students, parents, teachers, and workers,

up to a prolonged general strike, to defeat all attacks on public education and public workers!



Richmond, California, located in the West Contra Costa Unified School District and sitting in the shadow of Chevron, is Ground Zero in the attack on public education. Chevron draws down $14 billion in annual profits and enjoys tax breaks via Proposition 13 and the corporate tax deals cut in Sacramento to pass the budget this year. All the while, schools are bulldozed; teachers and staff are fired; classes are overcrowded; and public education in California has become the laughing stock of the educated world. Youth in this district are more likely to go to prison or war than to get a good education and a decent job. Even now few can afford the University of California. Yet they plan to increase fees to over $10,000!

The swells and overstuffed suits on the Board of Regents, the school boards, the legislative and executive bodies (from the State Capitol to the White House), and their paymasters on Wall Street, led by JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs etc., blather endlessly about their commitment to cutting costs. Meanwhile, their wealth and profits soar, in contrast to homeless encampments which bloom outside our cities. WHO WILL STAND UP TO THIS INJUSTICE? WHO WILL FIGHT FOR OUR KIDS EDUCATION?

Despite the clamor of the media pundits, who last week celebrated a jump in the Dow, the current crisis shows no let up for the working class, the unemployed, or our students. CEOs and public administrators see only one way to balance their books, via wholesale attacks on the living standards of working people. One in seven people internationally live in poverty. 40 million in the US join the 2 billion worldwide surviving in poverty, alongside a billion who live on less than $1.00 a day. We are now told to expect a jobless “recovery” while the economy shreds a quarter million jobs monthly, and the stock market skyrockets as profits return to the financial capitalists. The bailout is working – but only for Wall Street – and at our expense!

Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and their ilk have hoarded billions to pay obscene bonuses to their best thieves this Christmas. The treacherous leaders in the union bureaucracies, the union supported politicians, and the reformists posing as socialists only give cover to these accepting furloughs, lower wages, cuts in pensions, and increased health care costs, and to stand by as immigrants are scapegoated and deported. While Wall Street and the military receive billions of dollars from Washington, we are told: “Don’t fight back; you can’t win, because there is no money for education and social services.”

Most of all, we are told: “This is simply a crisis of the financial sector, caused by foolish people who let themselves get talked into mortgages they couldn’t afford.” They don’t want us to see the big picture. The truth is that the entire edifice of the capitalist economic system is rotten to the core. The present economic crisis is not a matter of bad mortgages transformed by Wall Street machinations into “toxic assets.” Rather, it is a classic crisis of overproduction, caused by inter-imperialist rivalry lowering workers’ standard of living in order to boost profits, until the workers can no longer afford to buy the goods they produce. This inherent structural weakness in capitalism means that for the bosses and their profits to survive, Wall Street needs you to take the hit – you, your kids, your grandkids, and your descendants ad infinitum!

Instead of explaining this truth, the fake socialists join the chorus of liberals and progressives who create the illusion that simply putting pressure on Obama will stop the cuts and save our education. One fake socialist group, the LIT-FI, creates and perpetuates illusions in capitalism’s ability to deliver by calling for an elected Board of Regents instead of fighting for student/worker/teaching faculty control of the university system.. Their faith in reform is made apparent in a banner headline in their press, La VOZ de los Trabajadores, asking: “OBAMA ARE YOU LISTENING? WE’RE FIGHTING BACK!” As if, this “bought and paid for,” pretty boy of Wall Street, whose job it is to impose the cuts, will turn his back on big capital and put the interests of the working class first.

What fake socialists, liberals, and progressives won’t say is that for us to win quality education, affordable health care, jobs for all, a clean environment, and an end to war, capitalism must die. We must replace this entire system – the economic foundation, the political structures, and the armed power of the state – with workers’ democratic self-management, all the way from the points of production and distribution to the highest levels of decision making and enforcement. What we need is a Workers’ Government run by workers’ power.


Rallies, teach-ins, forums, and one-day work stoppages alone will not end the attack on education. To win, we need prolonged general strike action across the state against the rule of the capitalists, in all the workplaces in both the public and private sectors, in the schools the universities and in the streets. We must fight for transitional demands that can break the grip of the capitalist media and world view on the masses of workers. Our program must include:

1) No layoffs, furloughs, or speed-ups; no fee increases or cuts in programs or classes in the schools or in higher education; no cuts in social services and benefits for the poor, seniors, children, or the disabled.

2) Abolish the Regents! No to fake democratization of the Regents through general election! Down with the drive to privatize public education! Only a university system democratically administered by teaching faculty, staff, students, and the working class community can provide education that serves the interest of the working class, not the corporate elite. FOR STUDENT, FACULTY, STAFF, AND WORKERS’ COMMUNITY CONTROL of the UC, Cal State, and Community College systems and all public schools! Down with the political appointees, elected officials, and state-imposed trustees who strangle our colleges and school districts!

3) FOR OPEN ADMISSIONS! FOR AN END TO FEES (NO TUITION)! STIPENDS BASED ON NEED! From pre-school to graduate school, provide free, high quality education and enough classes for everyone. The existing system is not designed to educate the working class. From grade school though university, it tracks students by socioeconomic class, separating the privileged from those destined for low paying dead end jobs, the military, or prison. In a socialist economy the highest education achievable by an individual would be valued and promoted. But in this era of capitalist decay, higher education and socioeconomic advancement are no longer valued by the denizens of Wall Street and their corporate shills on the UC Board of Regents. DOWN WITH ARNIE DUNCAN’S CHARTER SHOOL DRIVE!

4) JOBS FOR ALL! From an individual’s entry into the working world until retirement, everyone must be guaranteed the opportunity to perform meaningful creative work that serves humanity and pays enough to support a family. To end unemployment and the squeeze on workers’ wages, we demand a sliding scale of wages and working hours: 30 hours’ work for 40 hours’ pay! Share available work! Reclaim advances in productivity from the expropriators!

5) When banks and corporations plead poverty in the face of workers’ reasonable demands for jobs, fair pay, and full benefits, we must fight for the nationalization of failing enterprises under democratic workers’ control, without compensation to the stockholders!

6) ABOLISH CALIFORNIA’S INDUSTRIAL PRISON SYSTEM! The decline in spending on education since the passage of Proposition 13 is closely correlated with the rise of the prison population in California. Each prisoner is a consequence of this system’s failures in education and employment! The system is the crime; the prisoners are only the symptom. Abolish the capitalist system and the symptom will disappear. Prisoners cost $47,000 a year and incarcerated youth cost a quarter million dollars a year – while our public schools operate on $7,000 per student!

7) FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE from cradle to grave. The only thing preventing universal, free, high quality health care is the profit system, which extracts profit from every illness or death. For our families to have health care, the profit system must be driven out of medicine!

8) Stop the two-tier system of contracting out permanent positions.. Offer contract workers permanent union university employment, offer integration into CALPERS with credits for time served. Organize the unorganized!

9) Drive Military & CIA/NSA recruiters out of the universities! Down with all intellectual work that serves the exploitative and military ends of the imperialists. Down with Lawrence Livermore, home of US nuclear weapon research! Rather we need a university that teaches the critique of political economy and the theoretical contributions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky—not the deceptive system of exploitation and wars! Education withers during imperialist war drives! Defeat US, NATO and Allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan!

10) For a fighting Workers’ Party. To achieve the above demands, workers and students must break with the Democratic and all capitalist parties (Greens, Republicans, American Independent, and Libertarian) and build a Workers’ Party based in the trade unions, alongside unorganized workers, the unemployed, and their allies in the communities of color and the LGBT community. Only a Fighting Workers’ Party committed to defeating capitalism by revolutionary means and founding a workers’ government can establish a rational socialist plan to win these demands.

HUMANIST WORKERS FOR REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM

Working with the FLTI to refound the Fourth International

www.HumanistsForRevolutionarySocialism.org

e-mail: hw4rs@yahoo.com

October 2009 Labor Donated

USA: For a Fighting Action Program

We reprint a proposal submitted by the Humanists for Socialist Revolution to be considered and voted on by the Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign WERC at their teach-in held in San Francisco on Saturday May 9. The main organizer behind WERC is Socialist Organizer the US branch of the Lambertists.

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The formation of WERC could become a step in the right direction in the massive fight against the biggest attacks on the working class since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, however, WERC’s platform, as currently formulated, has some serious shortcomings. It is a list of generally supportable demands, but along with the demands there are built-in limitations seemingly designed to keep this campaign palatable to capitalist “friends of labor,” such as the Greens and the Progressive Democrats, who have signed on as endorsers of WERC.

The current gaggle of “liberal/progressive” Democratic politicians, as well as the bloated and entrenched labor bureaucracy, have come together to negotiate away our jobs, our social programs, and our benefit packages. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect a further watering down of the Employee Free Choice Act; a total inability to provide a plan for affordable, quality universal health care; layoffs and/or furloughs of thousands of public workers and teachers; school closures; tuition rises and restrictions on student registration at public colleges; and the commensurate ever-increasing expansion of prisons and the military-industrial complex.

To counter the current attacks against the unions and all working people, we need massive united labor actions from coast to coast. Factory occupations, such as the one at Republic Windows and Doors, are necessary to stop massive layoffs and closures of factories and workplaces. Unified strikes of public workers, teachers, and students are the only tactic that can save social programs, education, and the social safety net. But the current labor leadership, entrenched in its love affair with the Democratic Party, is incapable of launching the type of struggle that can win against the current attacks.

WERC’s current platform and program are not adequate as a fight-back strategy. For example, WERC calls for nationalizing the banks and the automobile industry. But reformist social democratic governments have nationalized banks during this crisis and before. They keep the banks and the financial institutions going for the benefit of the bankers and the capitalists, and then they de-nationalize them when it is safe to do so, returning the bank’s assets and operating capital to private hands once the risk of failure has been averted with the aid of public resources. Therefore, in contrast to pro-capitalist nationalization schemes, we must call for the nationalization of banks, financial institutions, and basic industries under workers’ control and without compensation.

Similarly, WERC’s action plan is limited to measures such as writing letters to President Obama begging him to turn against his benefactors. WERC’s program suggests that labor activists conduct a cross-class campaign of educational forums, devoid of any concrete preparation for the type of militant struggles labor must engage in if we are to turn the current class war around. Of course educational forums are needed to supplement the education we get from the bosses’ frontal attacks every day. But what we really need from labor activists are strategies and tactics for turning our unions back into truly democratic fighting organizations that act in the interest of the entire working class, rather than in their own narrow interests or that of the labor aristocracy.

We propose that WERC commit to organizing and publicizing regional, inter-union general meetings to organize and coordinate preparatory committees in every local.

The preparatory committees, in turn, can take the lead in preparing, mobilizing, and motivating workers in their own locals to help lay the necessary groundwork for massive actions. WERC’s role should be to serve as a framework around which workers can construct sustained, ongoing, democratically run coalitions of unions, working class communities, and the unemployed, with the goal of building for broad-based, militant direct actions such as massive strikes and occupations of workplaces, schools and universities. Our brothers and sisters in France have shown that such actions are the natural response of the working class. We should start organizing and follow their example.

We propose that the WERC adopt the following program and method of transitional demands, to be implemented by mobilizing the working class for a massive fightback:

1. Full Employment at prevailing union rates for all who are willing and able to work. To assure full employment, thirty hours of work for forty hours’ pay must be implemented to spread the available work to all and to compensate for the increased rate of production over the last 50 years that has been exploited by capital to sustain high unemployment rates and lower real wages. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will assist workers in forging fighting unions capable of winning full employment. To that end we must mobilize demonstrations demanding the right to organize not be impeded and for passage of the EFCA.

2. Failing industries (both financial and industrial) must be taken over (nationalized) under workers’ control without compensation to provide adequate access to credit and to get the wheels of industry rolling again. For example, the Big Three automakers, as well as the domestic plants of foreign auto manufacturers, should be taken over under workers’ control. Only then can the industry be rationally planned to assure that production is retooled to provide, first and foremost, a public transportation and energy infrastructure that obviates the need for excessive auto production and the commensurate waste of petroleum. The production of non-polluting electric cars, for example, must be planned and coordinated under workers’ control as a step toward staving off the environmental disasters threatened by climate change.

3. Stop Layoffs! When the bosses declare layoffs or attempt to close down a workplace, workers should occupy the factories and the workplaces and establish workers’ control. Follow the example of our Argentinean brothers and sisters, and go even further by establishing a massive network of occupied workplaces as democratically run organs of an incipient planned rational economy.

4. Housing is a right! Stop all foreclosures and evictions. Move the homeless and those in overcrowded housing into housing already vacated due to foreclosures and the falling real estate market. Massive public works projects to build adequate housing for all, and put people to work doing socially necessary construction, must be financed by a banking industry nationalized and coordinated under workers’ control.

5. Quality universal public education at no charge from daycare and pre-school through the graduate level. Working people know that without a good education, our children have no future. To confront the current economic and environmental crisis, everyone’s intellectual potential must be cultivated. Through education we can build a rational economy and divest the world of poverty and drudgery. Education should be under the control of teachers, parents, and students old enough to participate. In that way, we will assure quality education and not the miseducation, overtesting, and ruling class propaganda that currently plague our public schools.

6. Quality free universal health care at no charge from prenatal to the grave is long overdue. Each person must be given access to the benefit of medical science and current treatment options. Insurance companies must have no “place at the table”; the only way to provide health care for all is to divest it of the profit motive. To accomplish democratic health care, all medical institutions must be placed under worker (Doctor, Nurses, Staff) control with community/patient participation.

7. End attacks on undocumented workers! End the ICE raids! Full employment rights for all workers! To end capital flight through working class solidarity across borders, we demand: Same work, same contract, same wages and working conditions! Down with the maquiladoras! Open all the borders. For the right of all workers to cross the borders and seek work and establish their homes without restrictions and arrests. Free all detained undocumented workers!

8. US troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the world. Down with imperialist oppression. The defeat of imperialism is a victory for workers and the oppressed in the world.

9. We cannot count on Obama and the capitalists to clean up the environment and prevent catastrophic climate change. For them, profit always comes before the environment and the need of the workers. But the time to stop climate change is running out. The working class must combine its struggle against capitalist exploitation, and against the current economic crisis, with environmental consciousness. We must fight for workers’ control of industry in order to transform the current, outmoded technology of industrial production to totally green and sustainable technology.

10. Break with Democrats. No cross-class coalitions with Democrats and pro-capitalist Green Party politicians. For a struggle to replace the union bureaucracies that give our dues to the capitalist Democratic Party. Fight for the independence of the working class! We need to build a workers’ or labor party based on democratically run unions and organizations of the oppressed and the unemployed.

11. For a workers’ government that can and will implement and defend all the above transitional demands. To accomplish these goals, working people need their own government. If we allow the capitalists to control the state via their government, they will continue to attack and ultimately destroy our social gains. To defend our gains, we need workers’ power.

Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism are based in the US and are a Fraternal Group in discussion with the FLT.

You can find information about them on their website here.