The BART strike is over, if the workers vote this Friday to accept the contract. Regardless of the outcome, however, these workers' simmering anger will continue to boil and eventually explode in rebellious strikes.
US rulers are plotting to avoid this scenario. They fear industrial workers' strikes because they cut into their profits, and in transit, they create chaos, affecting the lives of millions.
But what they fear the most is these strikes' potential of becoming political strikes against capitalism. They know that with communist leadership these strikes can put forward the vision of communism, a system based on human needs, not money. This could inspire millions of workers, students and soldiers to fight for a better world.
Trade unionism's role is to prevent our class from reaching this potential. The BART strike, however, exposed the union officials' inability to control their restless members who forced them to call strikes twice this year, despite a no-strike clause in their contract.
Even if these traitors may impose the negotiated contract, their treachery is blatant. The rulers know they can't count on them to do their dirty work forever.
Now, forced to take things into their own hands, the California rulers are exposing their state apparatus as an arm of the US capitalists to oppress workers. They plan to pass laws to ban strikes by Bay Area and Los Angeles transit workers.
State Democratic Senator Mark DeSaulnier, chairman of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, said in July that he was looking into a state law to ban transit strikes, as Oregon and New York have done. (San Jose Mercury News, 10/20/13).
The Republican leaders of the Senate and the Assembly in a joint press release concerning the BART strike said, "We will soon announce a new proposal to ban transit strikes in California. Local residents should not have to suffer through another public transportation strike again." (10/22/13)

The US bosses openly declare war on us
Their system's insatiable appetite for maximum profits forces the bosses to lower our living standards. The bosses, their union officials and every pillar of capitalist society act as if life were cheap.
In Alameda County, where BART is headquartered, murder is the leading cause of youth death! Yet, the politicians, the media, and the Unions are completely indifferent to this. Racist mass murder is the new norm of a capitalist system in crisis, desperately needing fascism and war to keep afloat.
Such extreme racism cheapens the lives of all workers. In the US, while 19,000 are murdered every year in communities, a record 56,000 are killed at work. Under capitalism life is cheap. It's built into the way the system operates.
Life is cheap because capitalists make their profits off our labor power. None of us has a job unless it profits some capitalist. As the press revealed when BART was shut down this summer, the wage work of BART workers generates about $73 million a day, or $1.2 billion a month. That's not just money. It's capital. It's social power, which enables them to control everything in capitalist society— the politicians, the media, etc. But that wealth or social power also has to beat back the social power of other capitalists.
Because of this competition, the capitalists always need more and more wealth. They get it by cutting costs: our wages, benefits, and safety. Under capitalism, life is cheap. Safety is expensive and profits are sacred.
When no longer able to beat their competitors by "peaceful" means, they resort to war. Capitalist competition inevitably leads to local, regional and world wars: mass murder of the international working class.

We need a system where life is sacred and profits are abolished
If you agree with this, you are already thinking like a communist. You should start reading or distributing Red Flag, the newspaper of the International Communist Workers' Party, and seriously consider joining us to organize a communist revolution to end capitalism, its racism, sexism, profits, competition and wars. We don't fight for the socialism of Russia or China which tried to modify profits by making them public or State owned. We are fighting for a communist system without money or wages, where our work will only produce socially useful things – a society where nothing is bought or sold, where communist cooperation and collectivity will be our guiding principles, not capitalism's individualism and its dog-eat-dog competition.

Let's answer the bosses' war on us with class war for communism
Next year, LA transit workers will be facing this samevcapitalist beast with its media, politicians, courts, cops and treacherous union officials. Let's declare class war on the bosses, organizing a political strike against capitalism and for communism. Let's forge our class into the army necessary to vanquish the bosses forever, and build a communist world where our humanity will be society's main concern.