Vol. 71/No. 48      December 24, 2007

After three years of taking it in the chin, Canadian and U.S. Chrysler workers have won an important victory in their ongoing battle to win a decent, livable wage.

Canadian United Auto Workers (UAW) members ratified a new contract with Chrysler by 90 percent on December 11 and 12, ending their five-week strike. U.S. Chrysler locals vote December 17. Of the 140 UAW local presidents who met in Dearborn, Michigan, December 11, only three thought their members would not ratify it.

After facing enormous pressure from Chrysler and the U.S. and Canadian governments, along with pressure form the top union leadership, the five-week militant struggle forced Chrysler to grant a wage increase it said it could not afford.  
 
December 23, 1957
Dec. 19—The Indonesian Army last week took over control of virtually all Dutch-owned properties in the country. Many of these had been seized by the workers in the course of a campaign against Dutch imperialism that began Dec. 3.

The Army chief of staff, Abdul Haris Nasutoin, has ordered all army commanders throughout the country to place Dutch enterprise under their management. At the same time he has forbidden the workers from carrying through any further seizures.

The Indonesian capitalist class, whose interest the government represents, wants to weaken Dutch imperialism’s hold on the economy and gain a greater share for itself.

But Indonesian capitalists fear the workers carrying through the seizures, because whenever this happened in the past two weeks the workers established control over the Dutch holding. This is a revolutionary step in the direction of eliminating capitalist ownership altogether.  
 
December 31, 1932
The attempt to seize the mule and cow of a Negro share-cropper in Notasulga, Tallapoosa County, Alabama, and the armed conflict between the harassed croppers and the legally armed mob that attacked them, brings to the forefront all the horrors and misery of the Negro throughout the notorious “Black Belt” in the South. As was the case in the Camp Hill, Alabama, affair a year and a half ago, the attack was courageously resisted by the assembled Negroes, who were finally compelled to submit in the presence of an overwhelming hostile force recruited from the entire county for miles around and even outside the county limits.

Ever since the end of the Civil War, the bourgeoisie of the South has put at the very spearhead of its policy the determination to keep the Negro submerged as far as possible, to inculcate in him the spirit of subserviency and non-resistance, to impress him with the absurd, unfounded, reactionary theory of “Negro inferiority.”  
 
 
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