contact: <rail@mim.org> R.A.I.L. P.O. Box 29670 Los Angeles, CA 90029-0670 USA

The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League calls upon all progressive and justice-loving people and activists to join the struggle of the proletariat in the garment industry in Los Angeles who are waging a prolonged campaign for back wages and economic justice.

The campaign for back wages, overtime pay, and decent working conditions has accelerated during the Fall and early Winter months of 2001-2002. The main target of the campaign is the Forever 21/Fashion 21 chain of retail clothing stores. The owner of the store has refused to pay workers thousands of dollars of overtime and regular time wages.

Led by Sweatshop Watch, the mostly immigrant Southern California workers and their allies in Southern California picketed various Forever 21 stores during the Christmas holiday shopping season. The workers have also held solidarity actions with workers from UNITE! who have picketed locations of the GAP, which are also produced under sweatshop-labor conditions.

The actions against the Forever 21/Fashion 21 chain has served as an educational and organizational purpose. People in the Highland Park and Glendale, California cities have received thousands of leaflets explaining the realities facing the immigrant proletariat: low wages, work with minimum breaks, threats by garment factory owners against garment workers, etc. These realities are exacerbated by the fact that the typical garment worker is an immigrant from Mexico, Central America, South America, or Asia.

MIM and RAIL hold that the immigrant Third World proletariat in the USA and internationally is the vanguard of the movement for national liberation and socialism internationally. Reformist struggles such as the struggle against Foprever21/Fashion 21 give the proletariat experience in the day-to-day struggle against their class oppressor. From these struggles the proletariat gains valuable insight as to who are their real friends, allies, and enemies.

These struggles give the vanguard workers, such as members of MIM and RAIL the opportunity to engage in joint work with the proletariat, to learn from them, and, at the same time, give the proletariat the chance to learn from and bond with the proletarian vanguard forces. Chairman Mao Zedong emphasized this in all of his writings, especially the important work, Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?

Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. It is man's social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world.

Chairman Mao also challenged the advanced workers to engage in social practice with the masses and the common workers, so that the practice of the vanguard would be in step with the masses. In the essay, On Practice, Chairman Mao stressed:

Leaving aside their genius, the reason why Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin could work out their theories was mainly that they personally took part in the practice of the class struggle and the scientific experimentation of their time; lacking this condition, no genius could have succeed...If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.

One of the realities that that workers have learned in their struggle against Forever 21/Fashion 21 is that the store owner has allies in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). During the many weeks that activists have picked the Highland Park-branch of Forever 21/Fahion 21, LAPD has kept a close eye on the demonstrators. To the credit of the movement, representatives of the National Lawyer’s Guild have been present to provide legal security. Managers of the store have come out and have cursed and shouted vulgarities at the workers while the cops watched.

RAIL and the MIM have faith in the workers and in the oppressed people. We support this struggle for reforms, and call upon the workers to join with MIM in the international class struggle for socialism and communism. RAIL and MIM can be contacted in LA at P.O. Box 29670 Los Angeles, CA 90029-0670 USA, and by e-mail: rail@mim.org