The strike - the first of this magnitude since the 1930s - is part of a broader development in world politics today. The GM strike and other labor battles highlight the growing determination by working people around the world to fight the bosses' assaults on their unions and the capitalist governments' demands for austerity.
The half-million workers who joined the strike to oppose the pro-statehood administration selling the state-owned Puerto Rico Telephone Company expressed indignation at the U.S. bosses' and other capitalist investors' attempts to steal their country's most profitable assets. The strike also reflected the obstacle the Puerto Rican government faces in trying to impose the will of its imperial masters in Washington.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony, a fact that U.S. capitalist politicians and the big-business media try to evade. It is a country ruled by the U.S. government, which tramples on the rights of Puerto Rican citizens and uses the island as a launching pad for military aggression abroad. The Puerto Rican colonial government has no rights to make its own laws, decide its own foreign relations, or control its own economic affairs.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the struggle against Yankee domination, when Washington seized this Caribbean island after uprisings from peasants and slaves severely weakened the Spanish colonial forces.
On July 25 Puerto Rican fighters are planning an event in Guánica, Puerto Rico, marking the site where the invading U.S. forces landed 100 years ago. Independence fighters note that this is the first time in years activists have organized a single pro-independence action on this historic date.
In the United States, supporters of the fight for Puerto Rican independence should go all out to build the July 25 actions taking place in New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. to call for independence and demand Washington release 15 independentistas held in U.S. jails whose only crime was opposition to being under the boot of U.S. colonial domination. It is especially important to build these actions among workers involved in strikes and other labor battles. The fight against the sale of the phone company underscores the fact that the fight for self- determination in Puerto Rican is intertwined with the struggle of the working class against the same enemy class that workers confront in the United States.
We should demand:
Free the Puerto Rican political prisoners!
Independence for Puerto Rico!