WfJliNEliS .,,III,,,IIi' 25~

No. 459 '$~) )(·52'

g12 August 1988

Smash Feds' Vendetta Against Teamsters!•

DC aiD nionsl

The Infamy of America's Concentration ·Camps....6

their throats). And workers in the heartof the "military-industrial" complex­at General Dynamics' Electric Boat yardin Groton-e-defied the Pentagon andhave gone out on strike.

But it will take "more than an upsurgeof union militancy to turn things aroundin this country. The disastrous decadefor labor is not simply a result of pres­idential union-busting. unrestrainedcorporate greed and sellout bureau­crats. The capitalists have run this coun­try's economy into the ground. Theaverage age of an.American industrialplant is now 17 years (compared to ~

ten years in Japan). Over 13 millionworkers were thrown into the streets byplant closures. while overall twomillionindustrial jobs have disappeared in thelast decade. Basic industries like steeland auto have been gutted, turningmuch of the Midwest into a rust belt.The U.S. is being turned into a "serviceeconomy" with WallStl'eet<yuppiesearning $100,000 at one end and blackghetto youth slaving for subminimumwages at the other. Moreover. a recentgovernment survey reports that 45 per­cent of the working-age population in

continued on page 10.

members. In the past few months mem­bers of several large unions have an­grily rejected contracts negotiated bytheir officers. The resulting turmoilhas threatened to unseat several un­ion leaders and caused confusion foremployers."

At General Electric (the company whichlaunched Reagan's political career)local union officials recommended re­jecting the new contract. Rubber work­ers at Goodyear sent their officials backto the bargaining table. Over 60 percentof truck drivers voted down the latestnational contract (which didn't preventthe bureaucrats from shoving it down

Bury Reagan Reaction-Screw the Democrats!Fight for a Workers Party!

AP UPIPATCO leaders in chains as Reagan crushes 1981 air controllers strike. Right: Philadelphia Teamsters in supportof hard-fought 1983.ATU strike against Greyhound.

technocrat Dukakis or Ivy League wimpBush wins in November, workers won'tbe facing a "strong" president in theWhiteHouse. Under these conditionsworking-class discontent is beginning tomake itself felt in the unions. A fightinglabor leadership isdesperately needed totranslate this opening into some realvictories.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reportsof the death of the American labormovement are greatly exaggerated. AsBusiness Week (I8 July) notes: .

"Everyone knows that labor has lost itsclout at the bargaining table. Every­one, that is. but rank-and-file union

Racism, Anti-S.ovietism and Atomic Holocaust....7

Union leaders in chains like blackslaves in the Old South. So opened the1980s. Reagan's crushing o(thePATCO

.air controllers strike, just a few monthsafter becoming president, set the tonefor a decade of union-busting. Grey­hound, Horrnel, Massey Coal-hardstrikes ending in bitter defeat. Picketsrun over and killed by scabs. Minersmilitants sentenced to 45 years in prison.The largest union in the country, theTeamsters, targeted by a governmenttakeover. The giveback contract and"union-free environment" became thehallmarks of the '80s, where the new"growth industry" is in union-bustingoutfits. Membership in major. unionshas declined by over a third since the'70s, from 10 million to 6.5 million.

The massive assault on the unionmovement has gone hand in hand with aracist offensive against black people,rolling back the minimal and tokengains of the civil rights movement. Hos­pitals are closed, public education is acruel farce-and increasingly segre­gated. Philadelphia cops and blackDemocratic mayor Wilson Goode, incahoots with Reagan and Meese, fire­bombed the MOVE commune. Unem­ployment among black youth has beenover 30 percent for the past 15 years.

The American ruling class and itsmouthpieces are proclaiming the deathof the labor movement. "U.S. Labor'sLost Clout" headlines a recent piece inthe New York Times. Writing in Busi­ness Week, liberal economist GaryBecker tells American workers to scraptheir existing unions and replace themwith Japanese-style company unions.Collaboration between labor and cap­ital is preached as the only salvation forthe American economy with its massiveforeign debt and a shrinking industrialplant.

But American working people havenot embraced the cult of corporategreed. There is real class hatred for theWall Street operator flaunting hisBMW and his 65 credit cards. This wascaptured in the popular film WallStreet, which pits the sleazeball cor­porate raider Gekko against the uprightleader of a local airline mechanicsunion. (Typically, though, the honestunion man aims only to negotiate a lessgiveback contract with a less sleazyraider.)

The spectacular discrediting andunraveling of the rabidly right-wingReagan regime with the IranjContra­gate scandal created an opening forworkers and the black and Hispanicpoor to strike back at the misrulers of'this country. And whether the yuppie

basic democratic rights. Pakistan itselfwas founded as a "Muslim state," arti­ficially carved out in the bloody forcedpartition of India in 1947, and today isan unstable mosaic of different tribesand peoples, from the Baluchis in thewest to the northwestern Pashtoontribes.

The most popular opposition politi­cian in Pakistan, BenazirBhutto, thedaughter of former prime minister AliBhutto (who was arrested and laterkilled by Zia in 1979), has carefullystayed away from "women's issues,"according to Pakistani women's groups.Though she has reportedly criticized theIslamization program, nonetheless herfather's Pakistan People's Party baseditself on "Islamic socialism," and she tooas a bourgeois politician 'seeks dealswith the forces of ultra-reaction inPakistan.

According to the New York Times(14 June), Bhutto "recently concludedan informal understanding with themost powerful of Pakistan's funda­mentalist religious parties, the IslamicParty, which used to be more or lessallied with General Zia." Bhutto evenundertook an arranged marriage toappease the reactionary ulema. Iron­ically, she joked then that the surest jvayto get Zia to call new elections would befor her to become pregnant, since thiswould presumably prevent her fromcampaigning. Zia dissolved the govern­ment only four days after her familyannounced she was pregnant!

Zia, to maintain his power, is quiteprepared to condemn the women ofPakistan to the pre-feudal conditionsfaced by women in Afghanistan prior tothe Soviet Army's occupation in 1979.Gorbachev's pullout today is a bitterbetrayal of the liberation of thosewomen. As one of our TLD comrades'signs at the June 30 West Berlin demon­stration demanded: "Afghanistan: NoWithdrawal, Red Army Must Win!" Wenoted .last year:

"General Zia's Pakistan is highly un­stable: Baluchi and Pashtoon peoplesseparated by an imperialist border fromtheir tribal brothers to the north alreadyare attracted by overtures from Kabul,and there are reportedly thousands ofPakistani oppositionists in exile inthe Afghan capital. And smashing theAfghan Islamic fanatics could reviverevolutionary agitation among theworking class in neighboring Iran, nowsuffering under the theocratic, clerical­feudalist regime of Khomeini's ayatol­lahs no less than it did under the hatedShah."

-WV No. 420,23 January 1987

The current unrest and new assaultson women in Pakistan show that thefight for women's liberation is a greatmotor .force for social revolution,.which must be led by the proletariat.Pakistani women's fate, and that ofthe entire working class, is bound upwith that of the powerful proletariat ofthe Indian subcontinent. For women'sliberation through socialist revolution!For a socialist fedetation of the Indiansubcontinent! •

West Berlin,June 30­. German

Trotskyists Inunited-front

demonstrationagainst

Zla's terror.Signs say:

"Afghanistan:No Wlthdrawal­

Red Army MustWin!" and

"Down with theVeil! Down

with IslamicReaction!"

Following his abruptdismissal orthe­tame government in late May, thefanat­ical dictator announcedonJune IS thatIslamic law' ('~Sharia").must prevail.Islamic fundamentalists especially wantto overturnthe 1961 Family Laws Ordi­nam:e,Whi~hfixes a minimum age ofmarriage (to abolish the practice ofchildbrides), gives the right of divorce to

'women, undercuts divorce by repudia­tion (men could previously divorce theirwives simply by saying "I divorce you"three times), as well as providing somerights regarding custody ofchildren andinheritance for women. Already theIslamic religious leaders, the ulema,

. have begun censoring television ads,banning any that show women wearing

'makeup or even. walking (l), whilewomen are to be allowed on stage only ifcovered in thick chadors (veils).

The women protesters are drawnfrom largely urban and professionalupper-class layers. As in Iran before the(all of the bloody, CIA-backed dicta­torship of the Shah; bourgeois and.petty-bourgeois women in Pakistanhave had some freedoms such as beingallowed to go to university and enterprofessions, and the rightto vote (whenthe 'dictatership-allows elections). Butthe fragility of such secular, modernpractices was demonstrated by the com­ing to power of Khomeini's.religioustheocracy in Iran in 1979., The inability of the weak.native bour-'geoisies of countries such. as Iran orPakistan to undertake thoroughgoingmodernization, to carry out land reformor guarantee simple legal equality forwomen, proves the burning need forworkers revolution to achieve the most

12 August 1988

IndependentPakistani women march through Lahore protesting Islamic law, whichenslaves them to the veil.

of adultery. He also proclaimed theHadood Ordinance, which equatesadultery and rape, denies women theright to testify in these matters andrequires proof of four male witnesses forboth. Now, after eight years of servingas a conduit (and taking his own cut) ofmassive U.S. aid to the reactionaryAfghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet­backed Kabul regime, Zia is trying tosteal the fundamentalists' thunder toprop himself up.

No. 459

!!l!!l..'!!y'!~!!'!..~'!!.~DIRECTOR OF PARTY PUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon

EDITOR: Jan NordenPRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner

CIRCULATION MANAGER: Jon LawrenceEDiTORIAL BOARD: George Foster, Liz Gordon, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan,Len Meyers, Jan Norden, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour,Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg, Noah Wilner (Closing editor)

Workers Vanguard (USPS 098-770) published biweekly, except 2nd issue August and with 3-week interval December,by the Spartacist Publishing Co., 41 WarrenStreel. New York, NY 10007.Telephone: 732-7862 (Editorial), 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Domestic subscriptions: $7.00/24issues. second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Workers Vanguard,Box 1377. GPO, New York, NY 10116. .'

Opinions expressed in signed articles or let/ellS do fJ.ot necessarily express the editorial Viewpoint.

Imperialist War Crime'Against Japanese Americans

/ The incarceration of Japanese Ameri­cans in concentration camps at the out­break of World War II flowed from thesame mixture of racism and capitalistgreed as the A-bombing ofHiroshima andNagasaki at .the end of that imperialistwar. While the Stalinists supported boththese war crimes of U.S. imperialism, the

TROTSKY then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party LENINdefended the Japanese Americans and exposed the hypocrisy of America's "warfor democracy ."

S"aon after the shooting stage of the war with Japan began; these citizens, inflagrant violation of their civil rights, were yanked from their farms and homes andwere herded into virtual concentration camps, known officially by the polite name ofrelocation centers. This illegal repression. was carried out by the law-enforcementagencies after a campaign by the-capitalist press to whip up racial prejudice under theguise of national patriotism.... . ,

The Japanese people are intelligent and alert, and beneath their external racialcharacteristics they are indistinguishable from any other human, be he white orblack. The working class in Japan is economically enslaved ana driven to war by .Japan's four ruling industrial families, whose lust for profits and power is the sam~ asthat of America's sixty and Britain's thirteen richest families.

The Japanese-American workers are not only our comrades in the world classstruggle for socialist liberation, but they are also our brothers through oppression inthis capitalist "democracy." . ".

Let us not fail to rally to their side and fight back against the attacks of the com­mon enemy!

-"Plight of Japanese-Americans," Militant (10 March 1945)

Pakistani Women MarchAgainst Zia's .Islamic Terror

Women's organizations in Pakistanare marching in protest-against militarydictator'Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's re­cent move to impose full "Islamiza­tion:' In Karachi and Lahore in lateJune, police tried to block women'smarches with barbed-wire barricades,attacking the protesters with steel­tipped batons, kicking and beatingmany of the women. But several hun­dred courageously marched again thenext week in Lahore, chanting angryslogans against the "Sharia Ordi­nance," General Zia's latest effort to putPakistan under Islamic law,

In West Berlin, the TrotzkistischeLiga Deutschlands, German section ofthe international Spartacist tendency,joined Pakistani demonstrators in aunited-front protest on June 30 againstZia's crackdown. The TLD's· signsincluded: "Down with the Veil! Downwith Islamic Reaction!" and "For aSocialist Federation of the Indian Sub­continent!" Opposing racist attacks onimmigrants-in West Germany, the TLDalso demanded: "Smash Fascist, Anti­Semitic Terror! For Worker/Immi­grant Mobilizations!"

When Zia first seized power in a mili­tary coup in 1977, he introduced bar-:baric laws including such "Islamicpunishments" as public whipping, cut­ting off the hands of convicted thievesand stoning to death women convicted

2 WORKERS VANGUARD

--·Over the BeriinWall-------....cEscape from the "fret'World"

Reuters200 West German youth, escaping brutal cop attack, scale Wall intoEast Berlin.

WEST BERLIN-It was a "worldturned upside down,", according to theDeutsche Presse Agentur, West Ger­many's principal news agency. In theearly morning of July 1 they werepresented with the spectacle of around200 West Berlin youth clambering overthe Berlin Wall into East Berlin inorder to escape a brutal assault by thecops of the "free West." Using policebarriers as makeshift ladders to get tothe top of the Wall, the youth wavedthe East German flag in defiance ofthe cops below. Those arch-villains ofCold War propaganda, the East Ger­man border guards, then took the 200"refugees" off for free coffee, break­fast and cigarettes before escortingthem to the exits back to West Berlin.

As one youth said, "If the Amis[Americans] see all this jumping theWall on television today, then they canjust forget the whole crap about theWall. It throws everything out the win­dow for them." Indeed it was a mostentertaining blow to the anti-Sovietpropaganda machines of the West Ber­lin Senate, West German governmentand Washington.

How did all this come about? InMay about 40 "Green" activists andanarchist types occupied a small pieceof overgrown land on the West side ofthe Wall, which the West Berlin Sen­ate had bought from East Germany

last year in order to build a four-lanehighway through the city. When someyouths wanted to save the shrubs, theycame up against the full power of thecapitalist state,

The Ed Meese of West Berlin, right-

wing Christian .Democrat InteriorSenator Kewenig, considering the areaa "lawless zone," decided to make itsafe for the "free world." Using as apretext that one of the occupiers wasplaying around with a toy' gun,

Kewenig's cops declared, the campdangerously armed and sealed off thewhole area with barricades. On June20, for two and a half hours the copslaunehed.a barrage of tear gas againstthe camp, only interrupted by the fir­ing of-water cannons at the occupiers.Three were seriously injured and hadto be hospitalized':' Small wonder theprotesters climbed over the Wall toEast 'Berlin, fleeing further policeassaults. . . .

For more than 25 years the BerlinWall has been the Western imperial­ists' favorite Cold War symbol. At thissite in 1963 John F. Kennedy declared,"Ich bin ein Berliner." And Reaganwent to the Wall in 1987in his first visitto West Germany since saluting theNazi killer elite at Bitburg two yearsearlier. To prevent West Berlin youth'from protesting the anti-Communistwarmonger from Washington, 10,000police occupied the city as Reagan,surrounded by barbed wire and bullet­proof glass, spoke on the "free world"side of the Brandenburg Gate.

The imperialists hate the Berlin Wallbecause it was erected as a barrier tothe capitalist reunification of Ger­many. The Wall was a measure, albeita bureaucratic one, to defend the col­lectivized economy against imperial­ist pressure, specifically the massivehemorrhaging of state-trained EastGerman professionals and skilledworkersto the West in the early '60s.But today thousands of East Germanemigres are returning from the West,disillusioned by the impossibility offinding jobs in the "free world." Andnow West German youth scale the

. Wall to find refuge from the club­swinging cops unleashed by their own"free world" bourgeoisie.

Smash the Racist Witchhunt-Drop the Charges!

FBI "Terrorist" Scare Targets ArabsOn July 20, the FBI rounded up eight

people in the D.C. area, Denver andAnn Arbor, dragged them into court inchains and ordered them held withoutbail. The gutter rags howled, "Plot toKill Ollie North Foiled" (New YorkPost, 21 July). An FBI agent.testifiedthat Libyan agents were gathering per­sonal information about a highly.placedgovernment official in order "to kill thisgovernment official." A governmentspokesman "revealed" a lurid made-in­Libya conspiracy to avenge the 1986bombing of Tripoli, complete with "hitlists" naming over a thousand U.S. fed­eral employees, including former Lt.Col. Oliver North of Contragate fame.

When North appeared before theCongressional Contragate committee,he played for sympathy by claiming the

.shadowy"Abu Nidal" was out to ice himfor his "anti-terrorist" efforts. Now withNorth facing indictment, his pals pointthe finger at a Jordanian-born Ameri­can, Mousa Hawamda, who runs aWashington travel agency! Even aJustice Department official sneered, "Ifwe have information that shows this guywas plotting to kill North, we shouldcharge him with it. We haven't" (NewYork Times, 23 July). The only chargethe government has come up with is thatthe eight allegedly violated the U.S.trade embargo against Libya by usingfunds intended for support of Libyansstudying here to finance demonstra­tions, pro-Qaddafi T-shirts and travelby American radicals to Libya. Yet bailfor Hawamda was set at an extortionate$250,000! The six Libyans indicted have­now been released on bail.

This is an obscene farce straight out ofthe Reaganauts' looking-glass world.

12 AUGUST 1988

Oliver North is a terrorist, whose crimesinclude masterminding the bombingraid aimed at assassinating Libyanleader Muammar Qaddafi. And Northhad more than a couple of grenade­toting commandos at his disposal. Hedispatched a squadron of supersonic ,F-Ilibombers. from Britain and theSixth Fleet to blow away a hundred Lib­yan civilians including Qaddafi's babydaughter. Now they're targeting any­body who solidarized with Reagan{North's victims: within days, the fedshad extended their net to include-blackand American Indian activistswho-hadtraveled to Libya or demonstratedopposition to the U.S. terror bombing;Smash this vile racist witchhunt! Dropthe charges now!

The arrests capped a yearlong FlU."Operation Friendly Skies," ordered byReagan's recently departed. top coplcrook, Ed Meese (whose crony, HenryHudson, is the prosecuting attorney).Hawamda himself has been subjected togovernment persecution for over threeyears, subpoenaed by an earlier grandjury investigating Libyan' "terrorism"from which no charges resulted.According. to Hawamda, his only con­nection to Libya was in the sale of air­line tickets to the regime for Libyan­sponsored students studying here. Nowthe-FBI says he cooked the books to fun­nel the funds into trips by Americanactivists to Tripoli. In the meantime, thegovernment is dredging up claims ofunpaid back taxes and student loans(Hawamdacame here in 1974 as a stu­dent, getting a PhD iii nuclear physicsfrom Georgetown University). Some"terrorist conspiracy"!

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination

Committee (ADC) president AbdeenM. Jabara blasted the witchhunters forattempting "to smear the reputation ofinnocent individuals and (he entire Arab 'population." The ADC reports that ithas received "a rash of calls" from peo­ple who have been "visited" and intimi­dated by the FBI. As Jabara's state-­ment noted, Arab people in this countryhave been the repeated target of racist"anti-terrorist" campaigns by the ter­rorists in the White House, including theFBI's "Operation Boulder" in the '70sand the "Libyan Hit- Squad" scare in

. the early '80s. In 1984, following theBeirut fiasco, Reagan even blocked theentrance to the White House withsand-filled dump trucks and let it beknown that the presidential guardwas' equipped with Stinger surface-to­air missiles! The government's racist."terrorism't-baiting campaign has ledstraight to hideous anti-Arab terrorismby sinister ultrarightist forces, includ­ing the October 1985 assassination ofAlex Odeh, West Coast ADC head.

In March 1987, Dr.M.T. Mehdisec­retary general of the .National Councilof Islamic Affairs, was stripped of hisU.S. passport and had his papers andnotes seized by immigration officialsafter "violating" a ban on travel toLebanon-where he had gone to nego­tiate for release of American hostages!Seven Palestinians and a Kenyan-s-sup­porters of the Palestinian -nationalistPFLP-were arrested and dragged into.court in Los Angeles last year, chargedunder the. McCarthyite McCarran­,WaIter- Ac.t.. fur "advocating Commu­nisnr;" And now, on August 5' anAppeals Court ruling has upheld Rea­gan's unconstitutional 1987 closing of a

PLO information office in Washing­'ton, D.C.

On August 2, 50 people gathered out­side the U.S. Court House in Alexan­dria, Virginia to protest the witchhunt­ing grand jury, which had subpoenaedAll-African Peoples Revolutionary Par­ty activist Bob Brown and American

'Indian Movement leaders Bill Meansand Vernon Bellecourt fer traveling toTripoli. For refusing to appear beforethis star chamber, the three have beenthreatened with jail on contemptcharges to be heard August 17. Browntold the protesters, "We proudly trav- 'eled to condemn this government's bar­barous act and to confirm our FirstAmendment right to free association."Bill Means added that they were "repre­senting all Americans who feel they havea right to 'travel, feel it's illegal andimmoral to bomb innocent women andchildren."

In March 1986, the AAPRP called anemergency united-front protest againstthe Sixth Fleet attack on Libya in theGulf of Sidra. This was followed by asecond protest at Howard Universityfollowing the murderous bombing raidon Tripoli, which was one of the onlycampus protests against Reagan's atroc­ity. The Spartacist League (which,immediately after the U.S. attack, sent ajournalistic team to Libya in solidarity)participated in both those protests, as'well as agitating within the labor move­ment for action protesting Reagan'smurder missions. That fall several mem­bers of the Howard student govern­ment traveled to Libya and reportedback on their trip to Howard students.Now the government is trying to launcha vendetta,' against black and otherminority activists for daring to opposeU.S. racism abroad and at horne..

The lame-duck gang in. the WhiteHouse is pretty zany, but U.S. imperi­alism'sglobal terrorism is bipartisanpolicy. This bizarre witchhunt.targets allopponents-of America's war on tlien.eo­ples of the world. Hands off pro",1;Jo.yaactivists! Drop all charges now~ Smashthe witchhunt! •

3

Bitter Legacy of Reutherism

GM/Toyota, .U;AW TopsTeam· Up ·Ag~inst Workers

Democrats and Givebacks

hall across the street to the labor rela­tions office, where Local 2244 officialsshare desk space with the hated com­pany labor reps! During the recent localunion elections it was reported that theincumbents had won only ten griev­ances in three years. That came as a sur­prise to many NUMMI workers, whodidn't thinkthey had won a single one.

Racism has reared its ugly head again.In the predominately white stampingdepartment (management's showcase),a black inspection worker was harassedby threatening racist notes. The com­pany tried to fire the victim, claimingincredibly that he wrote these notes, tohimself! With the union off the shop­floor, KKK types have begun to crawlout from under their rocks, prompt­ing some black workers to refer tothe stamping department as "Klans­ville." The stamping department wasexempted from rehiring provisions thatbrought back black production work­ers from the Oakland area.

How did the union which seized GM'splants and brought the auto giant to itsknees in the Flint sitdown of 1937become such craven enforcers of labordiscipline at plants like NUMMI? Foryears, Walter Reuther's "Treaty ofDetroit" gave auto workers their annual3 percent increase, while the union.bureaucracy guaranteed the capitalistsfree rein on the shopfloor, labor peaceand support for U.S. imperialism. TheUAW tops stood behind GM bossCharles Wilson's slogan, "What's goodfor General Motors is good for thecountry"-as long as they got their"piece of the pie." To maintain classpeace in the late 1960s and early 1970sReuther and his lieutenants crushed arevolt in the auto plants led by radical-ized black workers. .

In the late 1970s, after raping theindustry of its value for decades, theauto companies turned to Reuther's

'apprentice, Doug Fraser, for the give­backs that would 'destroy decades ofunion gains-and the livelihood of hun­dreds of thousands. The smashing ofPATCO and union-busting conces­sions are now synonymous with theReagan years. But it was the givebacksextracted by Chrysler and the VAWtops at Chrysler in 1979 which began awholesale assault on industrial union­ism in this country. And like the plans tocrush the air controllers union, conces­sions began under the Democratic Partyof Jimmy Carter.

The bosses were in trouble and theworkers were going to pay through thenose to restore "profitability." TheAFL-CIO, and especially the V AW mis­leaders, ran point for the capitalist aus­terity program, whipping up poisonousanti-Japanese protectionism. With sa­ber rattling in the interest of the bour­geoisie's trade wars, they forked overbillions in givebacks, while arrogantauto bosses like Lee Iacocca raked inmillions in bonuses and stock options.The UAW tops, led by Fraser, becameoutright cops for the capitalists, joiningthe Chrysler board of directors. Whatauto workers got was a job massa­cre: VAW membership dropped from720,000 in 1979 to 527,000 in 1984;black Detroit was decimated.

The latest contracts with the BigThree threw a few bucks into autoworkers' paychecks, but most of thiswas lump-sum "bonus" payments thatwill cost VAW members millions inovertime premiums and shift differ­ential payments. And the job slashingcontinues. While VAW chief OwenBieber's PR reps churn out lying pressreleases about "job security," the com­panies are streamlining their opera­tions using the same ."job security" pro­visions to axjobs. Current contracts saythat layoffs can "only" occur if sales sag!That's about as useful as the Dem­ocrats' bill for workersto get 60 daysnotice before being thrown on the street.

The bogus' "plant closing morato­..WORKERS VANGUARD

Caucus, the usual collection of out­bureaucrats. Both caucuses support-the"teams," the trashing of seniority rights;and one of the worst contracts in theUAW's history.

At NUMMI the team system hasreduced all job categories to essentially

one-whatever the boss tells you to do,that day. Relief workers are gone-c-it'sback to pre-union days of workerspissing in their pants -on the line. Off­the-line jobs for older workers have dis­appeared, contracted out for lessmoneyto a workforce of predominantly non­English-speaking Hispanic women. Thecafeteria workers are' organized into aseparate UAW local for a: lot lessmoney. Gone is the old CIO principle ofone union under one roof.

The present union leadership.of the"reconstituted" Local 2244 at GM IToy­

<Ota was hired before the plant opened sothey could screen new applicants andweed out former union militants, left­ists and workers with medical prob­lems. For production workers it's worklike hell, and when the line slows downworkers are pulled off to maintain thehellish pace. Skilled classifications havebeen eliminated, and,there is backbreak­ing overtime. Safety went out the win­dow on day one. Production workersare doing burning and welding jobs afterseeing a 30-minute video! Through bru­tal speedup and job combinations GMhas slashed the labor necessary toassemble a car at NUMMI from 22 to14 hours.

All this has happened because theunion has given the company a freehand. "Team leaders" (who are in theunion) are groomed for management,and the company simply threw outseniority in the selection procedure sothey could hand-pick their favoritestooges. Teams don't make decisions­the team leader is called in, told what todo; and that's it! Area committeemenare rarely seen on the floor, and localunion affairs have been moved from the

Pete Beltran,former shopchairn,an atGM's Van Nuysplant, firedlast May foropposingspeedUp.

Margaret MoultonGMlToyota's fremont NUMMI plant: "Showcase" for speedup and companyunionism.

microphones were set up, so there wasno discussion. Workers were given ahastily written three-page summarysheet and expected to vote in 30minutes. Ballots were passed out likeleaflets-a boss' son was seen with five!One worker, irate over the abomina­tion that was being carried out, shout­ed, "If you're not going to use the unionhall why don't you sell it!" The OaklandTribune described this farce as an"informational" meeting. It certainlywasn't a union meeting, arid to no one'ssurprise the contract passed.

Local elections, which preceded thecontract expiration, were held onJune 1. The Administrative Caucus,the hand-picked traitors who run thelocal, were challenged by the People's

freezes the next two, the NUMMI con­tract doesn't fork over the 3 percentuntil the third year, continuing until1990 the wage freeze at Fremont whichstarted in 1985'. The ratification "vote"was, held on company property in fullview of, management observers. No

4

OAKLAND, California-At GM/Toy­ota's joint New United Motors Man­ufacturing Inc.." plant in Fremont,members of United Auto WorkersLocal 2244 say that "NUMMI" reallymeans "No Union Militant MembersIncluded." This is the "showcase" ofthe"team concept" of production. It's notdone with high-tech robots and Japa­nese management techniques, but plainold union-busting and speedup, wherethe "production teams" are used tomake workers enforce their own ex­ploitationNlfMMI workers got anoth­er dose of it when the UAW topsrammed through a rotten contract lastmonth.

The "team concept" at NUMMI isbeing replicated throughout the GMempire, as local is pitted against local ina desperate scramble for jobs. At GM'sVan Nuys plant in Los Angeles, twoyears ago workers narrowly accepted,.under threat of a plant closure, themassive job combination and speedupengineered by this company unionism.Last winter GM, with the aid of the Sol­idarity House tops, tore up seniority atVan Nuys during a layoff, rather thanbreak 'Up the "teams." In May, bothUAW Local 645 shop chairman PeteBeltran and vice president MichaelVelasquez were fired in a transparentmove by GM and the UAW tops to getrid of critics of their speedup schemes.

The "team concept" is being bally­hooed as some exotic Japanese devicewhich will rescue the decaying U.S. autoindustry by eradicating "antagonism"between labor and capital. Bullshit! Theonly difference between the "team con­cept" and the company unionism of 60years ago is that this time it is being soldby the traitors in "Sacrifice House," whoare more protectionist than their cap­italist bosses, bashing Toyotas in unionparking lots and not a peep on the racistmurder of Vincent Chin. The fightagainst the GM/Solidarity House teamrequires the construction of a-militant,internationalist leadership which canunite workers -in class struggle, fromDetroit to Mexico to Japan.

"If You're Not Goingto Use the Union HallWhy Don't You Sell It!"

While the Big Three contracts grant amiserly 3 percent wage increase the firstyear, and lump-sum bonuses and wage

"': . -, '.

French Printers Roll Back Union-Busterprovided that the Massy plant would goback to work on August 1, with the rein­statement of all but the two workersfired for fighting, and a reference tothe "permanence" of the plant (whichDidier had threatened to close).. Didier's defeat is a clear victory

against outright union-busting. But theCGT tops acted carefully to keep thestruggle within well-defined bound­aries. Typically CGT leader RogerLancry denounced Didier's privatearmy not primarily as strikebreakingthugs, but on the grounds that it wascomposed of foreigners: "It isn't nor­mal that French workers are preventedfrom working by armed foreign goons."In a country where immigrant workershave become an integral part of the pro­letariat, while suffering acute socialpersecution, the PCF and CGT haverepeatedly appealed to racist and chau­vinist sentiments with the slogan "pro­duce French" and the 1981 bulldozerattack by a PCF mayor on a dormitoryhousing African workers in Vitry.

As was also shown by the militantmonth-long rail strike in defense ofworking conditions which rocked thecountry at the start of 1987, the Frenchworking class remains ready to fight toprotect its gains-many of which, suchas' paid vacations, originated with theJune 1936general strike. In Gardannes,in the south of France, miners have beenwaging a hard-fought strike over wagessince April.

What is needed is a leadership com­mitted to the independent mobilizationof the workers in defense of their classinterests against the capitalist rulers.The PCF/CGT leaders seek a deal withthe popular front in power, toward anew "Union of the Left" includingthe PCF. With Le Pen's fascists anever-present danger and the capitalistsand their "Socialist" lackeys intent ondriving down the living standards ofthe workers, the Ligue Trotskyste deFrance, section of the internationalSpartacist tendency, points the way for­ward for workers and immigrants-thefight for a revolutionary party. As theLTF's candidate in the recent parlia­mentary elections, Gilles Cazin, a mil­itant CGT auto worker, said duringthe campaign:

"There is a revolutionary alternative,the extra-parliamentary mobilization ofthe workers, in the factories, in thestreets, fighting for their own classpower: a workers government. That iswhat the workers of the Paris Com­mune did in 1871, for a short instant.That's also what the Russian workersdid in 1917,this time victoriously, underthe leadership of the Bolshevik Party ofLenin and TrotSky.".

government's efforts at an "opening tothe right" to strike a decisive blowagainst the only CGT stronghold in hisempire. But he miscalculated.

The industrial power of organizedlabor expressed in militant tactics wasnot the only factor in the printers' vic­tory. Despite his appeals to the rightistbourgeois parties, Mitterrand still needsCommunist Party (PCF) support. TheSocialist Party failed to get a clear par­liamentary majority in the June elec­tions following Mitterrand's victory andthe PCF got a somewhat higher votethan expected (though still the lowesttotals since the 1920s). The PCFannounced it would support the gov­ernment on a case-by-case basis. For thegovernment, it was cheap to stand off toone side and let the CQT win a small vic-tory if it could. .

After the .CGT had reoccupied theplant, the government appointed JeanMiot, a key figure in Hersant and pres­ident of the Employers' Association ofthe Parisian Press, as mediator. ThisHersant representative had no love forthe upstart Didier. Miot's "settlement"

500 Unionists Occupy Plant

intervene in the fighting. Only afterDidier and his mini-army had retreatedto his rooftop office did the CRS showup to negotiate their release and evacu­ation from the plant through two rowsof CGT militants.

Didier has built his small but grow­ing press empire through moderniza­tion and virulent anti-unionism. Hisconfrontationist taetics against the CGTand his declared aspiration to becomeNo.1 in the industry do not endear himto the giant Hersant empire or the otherFrench press magnates. The CGT con­trols what amounts, to a closed shop-ararity in France-s-in the daily papers;but is much weaker in the rest .of theprinting industry. In fact, Massy is theonly one of Didier's plants that is signif­icantly unionized.

In 1984, with the blessing of the Mit­terrand government, Didier bailed outthe Massy plant's former owners,slashed the workforce almost by half,cut wages by as much as 30 percent andincreased each shift from six to eighthours. Now Didier no doubt thought hecould take advantage of the Mitterrand

Langerinl ygma

CGT printers and union officials -occupy Massy plant after driving off bossDidier's goons.

In one of the first significant labor·.struggles since Cold War "Socialist"Francois Mitterrand was elected to asecond term last May, French printersrolled back a major union-busting prov­ocation in the Parisian suburb of Massyin late July. Print boss Jean Didier, .known as the "Rambo" of the industry,boasted at the height of the struggle thatthe name "rneans that I do what nobodydares do: take on the CGT." But the pro­Communist CGT union took Didieron-and won! By occupying the plant,the CGT printers local at Massy forceda notorious anti-union employer toback down, demonstrating again thatseven years of popular-front betrayalshave not succeeded in sapping thecombativity of the organized Frenchproletariat.

The action started on June 13, whenDidier fired two workers (with 38 yearsseniority between them), allegedly forfighting. In response to protests and 'work stoppages Didier escalated theattack directly against the union, firing19 elected union officials (whose jobswere supposed to be "protected" by thecontract) and three other CGT mil­itants. When toe union occupied the fac­tory, he cut off water and electricity andsucceeded in locking out the workers.

At the end of July, after six weeks oflockout, Mitterrand's minister of laborcalled on Didier to reopen the plant"without preconditions"-Le., withoutinsisting on firing the 24 workers. Didierwas recalcitrant, vowing that he wouldrefuse to obey any government orders orcourt injunctions and would rather closethe plant than cave in to the CGT. Hav­ing announced that work would beginagain on Monday, July 25 (without thefired workers), he barricaded himselfinside the plant over the weekend,together with some 60 "security guards"(hired from a Paris agency that special­izes in bodyguards) ostensibly to en­force "order" when production began.At this point, the CGT decided to takedecisive action.

Early on the morning of July 25, asthree busloads of elite CRS riot policestood by, about 500 CGTers, mainlyunion officials, converged on the plant.Inside were Didier and his mercenar­ies-armed with air rifles, rubber bul­lets, buckshot, tear gas grenades, steelbars encased in rubber, numchaku,bulletproof vests and more. The unionforces, armed only with iron bars,axhandles and slingshots, gradually drovethe "security guards" upward throughthe plant. In the middle of all this, theminister of the interior announcedin aradio interview that the.Ck.S'would not

rium" contract clauses also have refor­mists like the Communist Party and thesocial-democratic In These Times sing­ing the UAW bureaucracy's praises. TheBig Three allegedly "promise'inot toclose any plants during the life of thecontract except those previously an­nounced as slated to close. Ford andChrysler had already closed 40 plants,so this "gain" is a bit late. But forGM, which is still operating with over­capacity, they are getting around thiscontract provision. with a new twist.GM's Framingham', Massachusetts andKansas City Leeds Assembly plants areshutting down, but management is call­ing this a plant "idling" and keepingon a skeleton maintenance crew. Inkon paper won't save a job-only classstruggle can!

the Vail Nuysplant.. offering to pro- there is no opposition within the unionduce the same cars $200 million cheaper. capable of leading a class-struggle offen-At Van Nuys, GM and the UAW sive to smash the unholy alliance of theInternational reps used the Norwood auto bosses and their company cops"threat" to tighten the screws and pass within the union. The New Directionsthe speedup plan in May 1986. GM Movement, a clot of house dissidentschained the gates at Norwood last year, brain-trusted by Victor Reuther, sup-throwing 4,300 workers on the street. port the same pro-capitalist program as

General Motors vice president Alfred Bieber & Co. Jerry Tucker; an Interna-Warren gloated to Business Week (24' tiona1rep in Region 5 (St. Louis) for 14August 1987), "if I have to put a new .years, tried to pull a palace coup, lost,product somewhere, I'm going to put it got fired ... and ran to the bosses' courtswhere the attitude is most cooperative." and the Labor Department. So the NewGM then used the wedge to attack Directions Movement is allied with theseniority at Van Nuys, rotatinglayoffs same union-busters from Meese's sleazyby shift in order to preserve the newly gang at "Justice" who are trying tocreated "teams." The membership voted break the Teamsters..down this dangerous erosion of senior-ity. The International reps and their Along with' the New Directions out-flunkeys then forced a revote, and in fit, liberal and social-democratic critics

of the UAW International have found aFebruary it-finally pa-ssed. A 29-yearGM and the UAW International have veteran at Van Nuys said" "What hap- "safe" opposition in a group of local

already imposed the "team concept"~t pens if we don't vote for it this time?.. officials and hangers-on at Van Nuys15 out of the 36 G!"1 assembly plants m Will we have to go four out of seven like Local 645, led by Pete Beltran and Ericthe U.S. tIntemational I.:abor Report~, the World Series?"JLosAng~l~sTim,~~o Mann. Mann- is currently touring the

~::'~::i~i~~~~a~~~~:~:;w~:);·~~St;.=:·3erJa)[tmrYX\7. '.,""- z:»: ' .. _. -.' ~- ~;,:~~p~:~~:g(~~:~e~k'f~~i~~~locals that don't go for the teams are ~ Auto Workers Need a . Research and Education, 1987), inthreatened with closure. The Norwood, Class-Struggle Leadership which he recalls how he opposedOhio local was pushed into a bidding The auto ranks have been screwed by sentiment for a plant occupation aswar against their brothers and sisters at the "Sacrifice House" gang because "inappropriate." Instead .Mann and

Beltran led a campaign to pressure GMto keep Van Nuys open with talk of aconsumer boycott (trotting out CesarChavez who argues that strikes areoutdated) and appeals to DemocraticParty politicians.

Mann jumps on the protectionistbandwagon, while trying to dissociatehimself from the more virulently racistanti-Japanese poison spread by theUAW bureaucracy. In an interviewwith Against the Current (November/December 1987) Mann points to low­wage Korean workers and lectures that"insurgents" in the UAW will "have to atleast come to terms with the pressures ofinternational competition." Mann joins

continued on page 9

_. -

NOTICE.Workers Vanguard

.skips.an- issuein August.·

Our next issue wilt bedated September 9.

5I

this barbaric atrocity against JapaneseAmericans at home. And it concludedwith the criminal atom bombing of

. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyingthese ancient cities andmassacring theircivilian populations (including tens ofthousands of Korean forced laborers) ina racist slaughter.

Among the very few who stood up forthe Japanese Americans at the time werethe Trotskyists of the Socialist WorkersParty, themselves jailed and persecutedfor. their revolutionary opposition toimperialist war. In stark contrast; theAmerican Communist Party, in theservice of Stalinist class collaboration,dropped its Japanese American mem­bers and did nothing as they were takento the camps, while the' Daily Workerslandered Japanese Americans as "en­emy alien Fifth Columnists" (see "The.Agony of Japanese Americans in U.S.Concentration Camps," WV No. 139,7 January 1977).The CP also hailed theatom bombing of Hiroshima and Naga­saki-even though this atrocity was alsoa thteat to the Soviet Union that U.S.imperialism intended to dominate theworld!

It did happen here, and it can again­look at the protectionist Japan-bashingand race-hatred beingwhipped up byU.S. capitalists who've run this nation'sindustry into the ground, leading to themurder of Vincent Chin in Detroit by anex-Chrysler foreman and his stepsonbecause Chin "looked Japanese." Todayit's cheap for Congress to shed tears ofremorse over the "mistake" and makesome token compensation, even asdecaying American capitalism is beat­ing the drums of war once again. Inthe tradition of the Trotskyists duringWorld War II, today the SpartacistLeague fights against the growing anti­Japanese protectionist poison beingsold to the U.S. working class. We fightfor defense of the Soviet Union, and forworkers revolution to put an end to suchracist savagery forever.js

San Franciscofamily roundedup under FORIEarl Warrenevacuationorder (above);barrack.s atManzanar prisoncamp (left).

"EIi'sofon/Life

,.,S

. . . Wayne M. Collinsecurlty pollee raid barracks at Tule Lake concentration camp.

to return to. Further, the desperate massrenunciation of citizenship many intern­ees had been forced into during their lastmonths in the camps became the focusof lengthy battles as families sought toavoid deportation to Japan. The sear­ing tragedy of smashed lives and hopeshas dragged on for almost half a cen­tury after the "deactivation" of theconcentration camps.

Many American blacks realized thatthe violent racism and police-staterepression which sent the JapaneseAmericans to concentration campscould easily be directed against them.Black writer Chester Himes has the pro­tagonist of his 1945 novel If He HollersLet Him Go, a black shipyard worker,exclaim: .

" ... maybe it wasn't until I'd seen themsend the Japanese away that I'd noticedit. Little Riki Oyanasinging 'God BlessAmerica' and going to Santa Anita[concentration carnpj.with his parentsthe next day. It was taking a man up bythe roots and locking him up without achance. Without a trial. Without acharge .... It was thinking about if theyever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs.Jones's dark son, that started me to get­ting scared."

This infamy was not "a democracy'smistake," as the media would haveit. Itwas conditioned by decades of U.S. cap­italist racism: the war years starklyexposed the truly bloodthirsty andvicious character of American imperi­alism. The U.S. provoked Japan intoWorld War II by protectionist barriersagainst their imports and embargoingoil and steel shipments necessary to theJapanese economy. Following PearlHarbor the U.S. entered the war with

New YorkBox 444, Canal St. Sta.New York, NY 10013(212) 267-1025

NorfolkBox 1972, Main PONorfolk, VA 23501

OaklandBox 32552Oakland, CA 94604(415) 839-0851

San FranciscoBox 5712San Francisco, CA 94101(415) 863-6963

Washington, D.C.Box 75073Washington, D.C. 20013(202) 636-3537

TorontoBox 7198. Station AToronto, Ontario M5W 1X8(416) 593-4138

The mass internment of JapaneseAmericans provided a vent for chau­vinist frustration after the stunningattack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December1941, and also intersected decades ofsavage anti-Asian racism on the WestCoast. White businessmen bitter at thegrowing economic success of JapaneseAmerican farmers saw an opportunityto .crush their competition-banks frozethe Japanese Americans' accounts,liquor licenses were revoked under"trading with the enemy" laws, and thelicenses of "alien" professionals wererescinded. Homes and farms were"repossessed" and loans were extendedto white businessmen to seize whatJapanese American farmers had sopainfully built up by decades of hardwork. The Japanese American prison­ers were used by the U.S. government asslave labor to harvest crops in the West,and given token wages they were for­bidden to spend in the towns they passedthrough on the grounds they would"subvert" the countryside!

At the war's end, the Japanese Amer­.icans were unceremoniously dumpedout of the camps and told to "gohome"-though most had nothing left

IthacaBox 6767Ithaca, NY 14850

Los AngelesBox 29574, Los Feliz Sta.Los Angeles, CA 90029(213) 380-8239

MadisonBox 2074Madison, WI 53701(608)251-6431

DetroitBox 441794Detroit, MI 48244

National Office:Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

(212) 732-7860 .

TROTSKYIST LEAGUEOf CANADA ~

SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY

AtlantaBox 4012Atlanta, GA 30302

BostonBox 840, Central Sta.Cambridge, MA 02139(617) 492-3928

ChicagoBox 6441, Main POChicago, IL 60680(312) 663-0715

ClevelandBox 91037Cleveland, OH 44101(216) 881-3700

120,000 Jauanese Americans Interned in wwnThe Infamy of America'sConcentration Camps

Inoneof the most wanton acts ofU .s. . 'imperialism in World War II, 120,000'Japanese Americans were rounded up in1942 and imprisoned behind barbedwire for the duration of the war. TheseAmerican concentration camps wererun by the U.S. Army under the orders

. of the Roosevelt administration. Be­cause this unprecedented. act of war­time racism was carried out at thehighest levels of government, and by"New Deal" liberal Democrats to boot,it was a taboo subject for decades after­ward. Now, some 46 years later, at leastpart of the U.S. government appearsprepared to offer a formal apology tothose so savagely wronged.

On August 4 the House of Represen­tatives approved a bill worked out withthe Senate to give an apology and$20,000 to. each of the over 60',000surviving internees (and lesser paymentsto some 450 Aleut Indians who weresent to detention camps by the U.S.Army). The White House demanded"modifications" to limit payments andstretch them out over another decade­so presumably even more survivors willdie without any compensation-andReagan has finally agreed to sign it.However, there is a bitter hook em­bedded in these reparations: any formerinternee who accepts the money mustgive up any other claims against thegovernment. Aiko Yoshinaga, who wasmarried and bore her first daughterinside the barbed wire of the Manzanarprison camp, explained, "I will not beable to accept reparations.... Becauseno matter how nice money is, it cannotpay you for the loss of your liberty"(Washington Post, 4 August). She andothers are continuing a class-action suitto force the U.S. Supreme Court toreverse its .1944 decision upholding thelegality of the government's wartimeprison camps.

The minimal decency of a formalapology comes too late for thousands ofmen and women who have gone to theirgraves still feeling the ignominy of beingimprisoned and branded untrustwor­thy. The bill's main advocates in Con­gress were .themselves victims of WW IIracist hysteria. "My father was not ableto talk about this for 40 years," saidCalifornia Democratic RepresentativeRobert T. Matsui during last summer'sHouse debate.

6 WORKERS VANGUARD

Behind the Bombing of Hiroshima

Der Spiegel

A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. Three days later Nagasaki was bombed into irradiated rubble (right).

Racism, Anti-Sovietism andAtomic Holocaust

April 1945 that the war could be endedby September or October without aninvasion. U.S. forces already had fullcontrol of the air and sea around Japanin midyear. As early as May 1945 Wil­liam Donovan, director of the Office ofStrategic Services (precursor of theCIA), reported to Truman that Japanwas sending out peace feelers, and byJuly the Japanese emperor's personalenvoy was talking with the Russians inMoscow. As General Dwight Eisen­hower, Supreme Allied Commander,later noted, "Japan was, at that verymoment, seeking some way to surren­der with a minimum loss, of 'face'"(quoted in Gar Alperovitz' landmark1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiro­shima and Potsdam, updated andexpanded in 1985).

The reason the A-bomb was usedcould not be military, it was political. Aswe wrote eight years ago: "With racistcalculation the already defeated Japa­nese were chosen as the human test­ing ground to prove to American im­perialism's opponents-s-especially theUSSR~that the USA will stop atnothing .to maintain world dominion"("Hiroshima Day: To Remember Is NotEnough!" WV No. 263, 5 September1980). The letter from WVreader DirnirZ. printed on page 8 expands on thispoint. But there is even more. '

Secretary of War Henry Stimson firstbriefed Truman at length on 25 April1945 about what he anticipated wouldbe "the most terrible weapon everknown in human history." Considera- "tion of how to use the'bomb was left to aso-called Interim Committee, includingTruman's personal representative Sec­retary of State James Byrnes. Therewas also a Scientific Panel of the com­mittee which included scientists whoactually built the bomb. An immenseliterature has documented the struggleof some of these scientists, Leo Szilard

continued on page 8

ning "for vice president on a ticket withAlabama's segregationist Democratic.governor George Wallace, Le May re­vived his genocidalthreat.vowing to dothe same' to the Vietnamese.) The sub­sequent A-bombing of Hiroshima and

'Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945slaughtered 140,000 and 70,000 respec­tively. The use of atomic weapons isrightly regarded as a' quantum leap insavagery, not only because of theirimmense destructive powerbut also due'to the 'deadly radiation, which con­tinues to kill the survivors even todayand presents untold dangers to futuregenerations.

And the argument that dropping thebombs "saved millions of lives" was aflat lie. It was recognized at the time bytop U.S. leaders that the new weaponwas not needed to end the war. Evenbloodthirsty General Le May felt in

encapsulated popular opinion in thematter, formed by years of war prop­aganda, from endless movies of theJapanese "sneak attack" on Pearl Har­bor to footage of Hitler's vicious bomb­ing of civilian London, which weresupposed to contrast with the Allies'"civilized" restraint. In reality the "dem­ocratic" imperialist Allies chalked upquite a record of criminal atrocities,notably the firebombings of Hamburg,Dresden and Tokyo which created dev­astation comparable to that of a nuclearweapon.

Indeed, the incendiary bombing ofTokyo alone on the single' night of9-10 March 1945 killed some 100,000civilians-v'scorched and boiled and

"baked to death," in the words of Gen­eral Curtis Le May, who bragged hewould bomb the enemy "back to thestone age." (Twenty years later, run-

UPIPotsdam conference, July 1945: Truman (center) delayed meeting with

, 'Churchill and Stalin so he could use A-bomb as a threat against Russia.

"People in the open air were turnedinto charcoal.... Some of themwere burnt to death as [they] keptstanding with good balance be­cause the heat waves caught theminstantly like lighting a f1ash­bulb.... I could see a procession ofpeople fleeing from the directionof the hypocenter. ... The skin onfaces of people, who had been fac­ing the light, hung from the tip ofthe jaws like putting a mask off."-from the testimony of a Japanese

hibakusha, or nuclear bomb victim,Yasu Tsuchida, who survived theatom bombing of Hiroshima, in apamphlet distributed at the "qis­armament" march June II in ­New York

President Harry Truman was aboardthe cruiser Augusta in the Atlantic whenhe received word that a U.S. Air Forceplane had dropped the atomic bomb onHiroshima on the morning of 6 August1945. "VISIBLE EFFECTS GREAT­ER THAN IN ANY TEST' the mes­sage read in part. Truman exulted, "Thisis the greatest thing in history!" Threedays later the U.S. dropped anotherA-bomb on Nagasaki. When a reporterquestioned the propriety of the celebra­tion surrounding the bombings, Tru­man snapped back unapologetically,"When you have to deal with a beast Y9Uhave to treat him as a beast." Thus theatomic mushroom cloud, which hascome to symbolize one possible fate formankind, was brought into the world ina fit of racist slaughter by a liberal Dem­ocratic White House.

Years later, when the horror of whathappened at Hiroshima and Nagasakihad become known around the world,Truman offered a supposedly more"humanitarian" defense of the bomb­ing by claiming that "the dropping of thebombs stopped the war" and thereby"saved millions of lives" by avoiding the ~

alleged necessity of a U.S. invasion ofJapan (Truman Speaks [1960]). This

12 AUGUST 1988 7

H. MelzianU.S. government poster, 1942.

TH/S/9THi

•Am~rica's RacistWar Propaganda

oughly evil, sadistic torturers. One ofthe American aviators on trial sums upthe American attitude by telling thecourt that American bombers will"blacken your skies and burn your cit­ies to the ground.... [The war] won't befinished until your dirty little empire iswiped off the face of the earth!"

Following racist stereotypes, the me­dia often pictured the Japanese as ape­like creatures in cartoons printed in"respectable" papers. Dower traces the"evolution" of this cartoon figure: fromsilly little monkeys hanging from trees (a1941 cartoon, before Pearl Harbor) toapes crushing little people in their hands

• (an illustration in the New York TimesMagazine in mid-1943). Whether theywere pictured as subhuman or superhu­'man, Dower notes, the main point was"the Japanese were rarely perceived asbeinghuman beings." Ernie Pyle, the G Ireporter who described the war at thefront to Americans at home, reflectedthe racist attitude when he transferredfrom Europe to the Pacific in 1945: "In

bureaucratic inertia-a desire to showoff the fruits of a two-billion-dollarinvestment-involving "no discussion"among top military and political lead­ers. (Similar explanations of every­thing from the B-1 bomber to Reagan's"Star Wars" blame everything on the"military-industrial complex," an aptterm coined by Eisenhower which hassince become the hobbyhorse of Stalin­ist and liberal peace . lobbyists.) Thismight explain the decision to proceedwith the bomb program in the spring of1945. But it is insufficient to explain thesudden, conscious rush to test the bombin July and drop it in August. This was adecision from the top, which can only beexplained by two other factors: first, anespecial racist hatred for the Japanese(don't forget FOR sent Japanese Amer­icans to concentration 'camps, and notGerman Americans); and second, thedesire to threaten the Soviet Union,

Racism and the Bomb

Breaking a longstanding taboo, in his1986 study War Without Mercy, JohnW. Dower documents the racist men­tality which permeated the Americanwar in the Pacific. There was, first of all,the "responsible" bourgeois press: Timemagazine after Pearl Harbor describedthe American response as, "Why, theyellow bastards!" The New York Times

" said the Bataan incident revealed theenemy as "a beast which sometimesstands erect." Life magazine published afull-page photo ofan attractive blondeposing with a "Jap" skull sent to herby her boyfriend. One Hearst papereditorialized that whereas the war inEurope against the Nazis was only "afamily fight" between "white nations,"the war against Japan was against anenemy of "unexampled ferocity."

And, of course, Hollywood joined inthe anti-Japanese propaganda cam­paign. In The Purple Heart (1944),based on the Japanese trial of theDoolittle raiders who bombed Tokyo in­1943, the Japanese emerge as thor-

blooded calculations was finding a tar­get which had not yet been bombed, soas to be able to accurately measure theA-bomb's effects.sand Hiroshima fit thebill.) Historian Gabriel Kolko explainsthe refusal to question the bomb's use asfollows:

"From the moment work began on theconstruction of the atomic bomb in1941 until the Americans droppjl,d1t.onHiroshima on August 6, 1945','lj~e ofthe American leaders involved ever~ad

any doubt that they were bP'ild.ing~~:bomb to be used. This assumpwn wasax.iomatic at the time, and itw.!tionlylater revulsion that led to the artificialinvestigation of the relatively unimpor-

, tant spring 1945 debate on the moralproblems of using the bomb."

-The Politics of War (1968)

A number of historians, like AndreFontaine (History of the Cold War'[1968]), try to alibi the A-bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki as the result of

AtomicHolocaust...

Takeo Ishikawa'

Firebombings of Tokyo in early 1945 killed over 100,000 civilians.

(continued from page 7)among others, to prevent the use ofthe A-bomb. But the Interim Commit­tee's main discussion revolved aroundthe selection of targets which wouldcause "a tremendous shock" to theJapanese, in Stimson's words.

With this' in mind, Stimson consid­ered the best target to be a "war plantemploying a large number of workers

. closely surrounded by workers' houses,"according to Alperovitz; this guidelinewas-formally proposed to the commit­tee by Byrnes and adopted, with theadded proviso that. the bomb be used"as soon as possible and without warn­ing." (Another factor in these cold-

Letter on Atom Bombing of Japan well have stood behind the V.S. atombombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:the need to deliver ablow that woulddictate an immediate surrender byJapan over the objections of its fanat­ical militarists who, even as the second

'bomb exploded over Nagasaki, wereplotting a military coup to depose the"weak-willed" Emperor and fight on toa Nipponese Gotterdammerung (afterall, Goebbels had proclaimed the Japa­nese to be "honorary Aryans")-a strug­gle that would have torn apart the Japa­nese state and left the way open forproletarian revolt. (For an account ofthese last-ditch machinations see thebook Japan's Longest Day; compiled byThe Pacific War Research Society[Tokyo, 1980].)

As it was, the Japanese bureaucracywas able, in the interval between the sur­render declaration and the Americanlanding, to destroy incriminating rec­ords, imprison leftists and transfer gov­ernment funds to the zaibatsu as a basefor future economic growth. The Em­peror was preserved as the ideologicallinchpin of class rule, while the V.S.avoided having to create a new bour­geois state ex nihilo (as with the WestGerman rump state), with the furtheradvantage of having available all themanifold organs of repression and con­trol staffed by the old Japanese centraland prefectural bureaucracy, throughwhich the "Allied" (i.e., V.S.) occupa­tion worked. " . And the Russkies wouldbe properly intimidated to boot (or sothe U.S. thought). For all this, Ameri­ca's imperialist rulers figured, theimmolation of a few hundred thousandinnocent civilians was a small price topay.

, Comradely,DimirZ.

organizations posed to imposition in itszone of bureaucratic rule via theirimported "V lbricht Group."

Thus, as the Pacific Wardrew towardits inevitable close, the ruling classes ofJapan and the VSA tended to be drawn

. together by their fundamental aim ofpreserving capitalist rule in a defeatedJapan. Indeed. there had always been.those in top V.S. government circleswho, like former ambassador to JapanJoseph Grew, had favored preservingthe Japanese imperial state as a futurereliable (but properly subordinate) ally,with, as a sop to "public opinion," apurge of the most overt militariststhrough show trials of a few "warcriminals."

So it seems that a subordinate (putequally anti-communist) motive may

APGeneral MacArthur with Japanese emperor Hirohito, 1945. Americanoccupation maintained Japanese ruling class against Communist-ledworkers movement. .

and head] is the communist revolutionwhich may accompany defeat."

-cited in Joe Moore,Japanese Workers and theStruggle for Power, 1945-1947(Madison, 1983)

For this reason the Memorial urged anearly surrender as the best means ofkeeping the Japanese state (and in par­ticular its repressive apparatus) relative­ly intact.

Such worries could only have inten­sified in the course of 1945, as bothJapanese and Americans saw the spon­taneous creation of factory councils andworkers soviets throughout Germanythat followed hard on the defeat of theNazis. These workers councils were thensuppressed by' all four powers, theSoviet V nion in particular fearing thechallenge such independent proletarian

November II, 1987

The EditorWorkers Vanguard

I would like to add a footnote regard­ing the V.S. atom bombing of Japanmentioned in the two-part series "JapanInc. vs. Wall Street" (WV Nos. 424 and425,20 March and 3 April 1987)jind inthe. recent article "The Crash of '87"(WV No. 439, 30 October 1987).

We have regularly pointed out thatthe V.S. atom bombing of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki was militarily superflu­ous, carried out less to bring aboutJapanese surrender-Japan had beenblockaded at this time for oyer a year, itseconomy was in a shambles and morefar-sighted elements among the rulingclass had been putting out peace feelersvia the Russians and the Swiss-than asa threat to the victorious Soviet Unionnot to stand in the way of war aims ofV.S. imperialism.

Testimony to the bourgeois- defeat­ism by then widespread in Japanese rul­ing circles was the February 1945 KonoeMemorial, drafted by leading politi­cians including Shigeru Yoshida, thefuture prime minister, who was, withMacArthur's assistance, to crush theJapanese general strike of I February1947. Central to the Memorial was afear of a revolutionary uprising by thecombative but long-suppressed Japa­nese working class, which these politi­cians saw as a likely concomitant to anAllied invasion:

"More than defeat itself, what we mustbe most concerned about· from the.standpoint of preserving the kokutai[national polity, i.e., the family statewith the emperor as its supreme symbol

8 WORKERS VANGUARDl<:tt.r..; 'r r .~': ;<·i ~ •\ .' _'

Russia. Repeatedly in the postwar yearsthe U.S. used atomic threats against theSoviet Union and others, and was mostarrogant when it knew its opponentshad no nuclear capability. In March1946, for instance, Truman demandedthat the Soviets pull their troops out ofIran within 48 hours or else "we're goingto drop it on you," Truman reportedlytold Soviet-Foreign Minister Gromyko.In the period 1946 to 1980, the U.S..made at least twenty-five such atomicthreats (see Michio Kaku and DanielAxelrod, To Win a NuclearWar-s-ThePentagon's Secret War Plans [1987]).

Only proletarian revolution couldhave prevented the horrible slaughter ofWorld War II which culminated in thefirst atomic holocaust and the subse­quent nuclear saber rattling by the U.S.imperialists. But during the war thestruggle for revolution was thwartedwith the help of the Communist Party,which called on American workers tosupport the capitalist government in thename of the so-called "Grand Anti­Fascist Alliance." By the end of the warthe CP's flag-waving betrayal was sogrotesquely complete that they ap­plauded the A-bombing of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki. In contrast, the then­Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party,while militarily defending the SovietUnion, stood in revolutionary opposi­tion to both capitalist sides in theimperialist war. For courageously ex­posing the lie that this was a "war fordemocracy," 18 SWP and militant un­ion leaders were jailed by FDR.

In a statement published just daysafter the atomic bombing of Japan, theAmerican Trotskyists wrote:

"Let the cat..clysmic horror of Hiro­shima and Nagasaki serve as a clarioncall to the working class! The workersmustwrench the powerfrom the handsof the blood-drenched capitalist crimi­nalsand take their destiny in their ownhands. The fight for socialism is nowmore than a fight to end poverty andinequality, to abolish the exploitationof man by man. Today the fight forsocialism is a fight to prevent the anni­hilation of the human race. Mankindmust now exterminate the capitalistsystem-or be exterminated!"

-s-Militant, 18 August 1945

The title of the SWP's manifestosummed up what was then and remainstoday the only road to preventinganother Hiroshima and Nagasaki:"THERE IS NO PEACE! Only WorldSocialism Can Save Mankind FromAtomic Destruction In Another Imperi­alist War. Workers Of America! YouMust Take Power-Into Your OwnHands!".

.Polish" Romanian, Yugoslavian, andManchurian problems."

Similarly, when A-bomb scientist LeoSzilard had a meeting with Secretary ofState Byrnes in May 1945, he recorded'that Byrnes "did not argue that it wasnecessary to use the bomb against thecities of Japan in order to win thewar.... Mr. Byrnes' view [was] that ourpossessing and demonstrating the bombwould make Russia more manageable in .Europe." Other key scientists corrobo­rated this point: J. Robert Oppenheimer,the mastermind behind the whole Man­hattan Project, noted that "we wereunder incredible pressure to get it donebefore the Potsdam meeting"; andVannevarBush, Stimson's scientificadviser on the bomb, said right out thatthe bomb was "delivered on time so thatthere was no necessity for any conces­sions to Russia at the end of the war."

Hiroshima was bombed on August 6,two days before Russia declared war onJapan, and Nagasaki came the day afterthe Soviet entry into the war in thePacific. The mushroom clouds were anAmerican "message" to the SovietUnion, and a sample of how far imperi­alism would go to hold on to its empire.As soon as Truman had confirmed thatthe A-bomb test worked in July 1945,the Joint Chiefs of Staffbegan drawingup the first of endless plans to "nuke"

Daily WorkerCommunist Party supported American government in WW II as a ''warfor democracy": Daily. Worker, August 1945, hailed Truman's A-bombingof Hiroshima.

would have an extra club behind hisback in his diplomatic dealings withStalin.

Truman deliberately postponed theplannedPotsdam meeting with Stalinand Churchill until July, so he could besure the bomb worked (the Alamogordotest took place on July 16, one daybefore Potsdam). As Gar Alperovitznotes, "top U.S. officials began to real-

. ize [the bomb] could strengthen theirhand diplomatically against the SovietUnion-and they developed their strate­gy on the basis of this calculation, post­poning major negotiations, and thePotsdam meeting itself, until the bombcould be tested." Secretary of WarStimson explicitly recorded in his diarythe reasons he wanted postponement ofa meeting with Stalin on the Far East:

"Overany suchtangled weave of prob­lems, [the atomic-bomb] secret wouldbe dominant, and yet we will not knowuntilafter that timeprobably, untilafterthat meeting, whether this is a weaponin our handsor not. Wethink it willbeshortly afterward, but it seems a terri­blethingto gamblewithsuch bigstakesin diplomacy withouthavingyour mas­ter card in your hand."

At another point in his diary Stimsonsuggested that among the "quid proquos which should be established" withthe Russians, in exchange for takingthem into a "partnership" in atomicmatters, would be "settlement of the

Russia and the American Bomb

Once it was clear to topU.S. officialsin the spring of 1945 that the A-bombingof Japan would go ahead, there was anadded imperialist impetus to drop thebomb right away: stop Russia. After theRed Army had broken the back of theNazi war machine-at the cost of some20 million Soviet dead-the Westerncapitalist powers lost interest in theirreluctant alliance' with Moscow, andwere mainly interested in containing the

.spread of Communism'and salvaging acapitalist world. (At this point the Sovi­ets occupied much of. Eastern Europeand were about to fulfill their promise todeclare war against Japan and invadeManchuria.) Thus there was a rush totest and drop the bomb so that Truman

Europe we felt that our enemies, horri­ble and deadly as they were, were stillpeople," he wrote. "But out here I soongathered that the Japanese were lookedupon as something subhuman and

. repulsive; the way some people feelabout cockroaches or mice."

The racist attitude permeated notonly the media but the scientific­military establishment as well. One ofthe reasons the Japanese attack on PearlHarbor was a "surprise" was that manyWestern military leaders could notbelieve the Japanese were capable ofdesigning and manufacturing such apowerful plane as the Mitsubishi Zero,even though the plane was effectivelyused against the Chinese in 1940. More­over, American "scientists" believed theJapanese as a race suffered .frorn defectsof the tubes of the inner ear and weregenerally myopic, hence they couldnot make good pilots! The curator ofthe Division of Physical Anthropologyat the Smithsonian Institution evenclaimed in a letter to FDR that the Japa­nese were "as bad as they were" becausetheir skulls were "some 2,000 years lessdeveloped .than ours."

This racist claptrap came from thevery top of the political establishment,and led to exterminationist attitudes notunlike the Nazis'. Admiral William F.Halsey, commander of the U.S. SouthPacific Force, was fond of saying thingslike, "the only good Jap is a Jap who'sbeen dead six months" (1944 press con­ference). And Truman noted in his diarythat he decided to go ahead with drop­ping the A-bomb because the Japanesewere "savages, ruthless, merciless, andfanatic." Only exceptional individualswould dare stand up against this tide ofmurderous racism in 1945.

12 AUGUST 1988

GM/Toyota..•(continued/rom page 5)

theproteetionist chorus of reformistsagainst the "export of American cap-.ita I," like the Communist Party, whichsays, "The real problem is that Chrysleris taking our jobs to Mexico" (People'sDaily World, 14 January). Often direct­ed against the growth of "maquiladora"plants in northern Mexico, this racistcrap feeds the UAW tops' "Americafirst" poison and campaign to sellNUMMI-style speedup in the name ofcompetitiveness.

rSpartacist League

Public Offices-MARXIST LlTERATURE­

Bay AreaThurs .. 5:30-8:00 p.rn., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.rn.1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)Oakland, California Phone: (415) 839-0851

ChicagoTues.: 5:00-9:00 p.rn., Sat.: 11:00a.m.-2:00p.m.161 W. Harrison St., 10th FloorChicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715

N~w York Cit,Tues.: 6:00-9:00 p.m.• Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m. ~

(No Tuesday hours in August)

41 Warren St. (one block belowChambers St. near Church St.)New York, N.Y. Phone: (212) 267-1025

In Taking On General Motors Mannbarely mentions that while Van Nuys isopen, its "whipsaw" competitor atNorwood is closed. With his "reason­able" defense of GM's profits Mann hasbecome the darling of-that voice of theout (and not so out) bureaucrats, LaborNotes. Mann's book is fulsome in itspraise of Walter Reuther, whose UAWcontracts Mann calls the "envy ofunions throughout the Western capital­ist world." Parroting Reuther's classcollaboration, Mann tells auto workers:

"As Walter Reuther used to say, ourfighthas beenoverthesizeofthe slice ofthe pie. Now it's necessary for GMworkers to understand that the pie isreally shrinkingand GM maybethe pri­mary casualty."

-Against the Current, .November/December 1987

The classic AFL business unionist Sam­uel Gompers at least demanded "More!"The latter-day Reutherite says "Less!"

Mann seals his endorsement of Reu­ther's class collaboration by uncritically

. quoting Victor Reuther's defense of theReuther machine "as a legitimateweapon in our battle with the commu­nists" (Taking On General Motors).Victor Reuther was International Af­fairs Director of the UAW during theCold War, and used CIA money to splitCommunist Party unions in postwarEurope. .

In the class battles which forged theUAWand the mass CIO unions, theAuto Workers pioneered the sit-down

..

strikes which broke the back of com­pany unionism and the open shop. Butthis class-struggle militancy was throt­tled through the consolidation of apro-eapitalist bureaucracy, the Reu­

'ther machine, which chained the unionto the Democratic Party. As we wrote inour article "How the Reuthers Tamedthe UAW" (WV No. 128, 8 October1976):

"Reuther's keyrolewasas consolidatorof a bureaucracy sufficiently homoge­neous to become an effective guarantorof labor discipline for the capitalists." ... decisive was Reuther's avid liningup with the American bourgeoisie insupport of Cold War policies and thewitchhuntingof reds in the labor move­ment. . .. The elimination of the one­yearcontract, replacement ofshopfloormethods of resolving grievances byarbitration and the virtually unchal­lenged control by management of cru­cialshopfloorconditions likelinespeedeventually followed suit." .

What ties all the sellout artists to­gether, from "Sacrifice House" incum­bent Bieber to "house" dissidents Vic­tor Reuther and Jerry Tucker and thepopular-front Jesse Jackson support­ers like Eric Mann, is their implacablehatred of class struggle and theirallegiance to the American ruling classand the profit system. Victor Reutherpaved the way for the "giveback" war onlabor when he enlisted in the Cold Warto "roll back" Communism.

The militant unions of the CIO werebuilt with the weapons of hard class

struggle-sitdowns, hot cargoing, fly­ing picket squads. And it will take aclass-struggle, internationalist leader­ship to unite the workers of America,Mexico and Japan in common battleagainst their exploiters, and their"team" partners in the labor bureauc­racy. Above all this requires the forgingof a revolutionary workers party to leadthe fight for a workers government.B

CORRECTIONSIn WV No. 456 (I July), in the

article "Mexico: Starvation Elec­tions," we erroneously stated thatthe election platform of the UnidadPopular electoral coalition led bythe PRT (Revolutionary WorkersParty) did not call for a sliding scaleof wages. The UP platform does call"for wage increases in the same pro­portion as prices increase."

In the same issue, the article"Leon Trotsky: Fighter for WorldRevolution," contains a transla­tion error. We quoted the 14 JuneIzvestia report on the rehabilita­tion of Zinoviev and Kamenev assaying, "Everyone knows todaythat Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharinwas another Lenin...:" The phraseactually said that "Bukharin was afriend of Lenin."

9

•

Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League

Labor must clean its own house!If someone were looking for 'worthy

targets for criminal prosecution, con­sider the Reagan administration'ssupply-side thugs who have "privat­ized" everything from arms for theAyatollah to the Pentagon budget. Andunder former Teamster president JackiePresser, who died last month, it washard to Jell the feds from the mob with­out a scorecard. Presser (FBI alias "AllPro") was a government informer since1974, regularly "clearing" his unionappointments with Washington.

The suit comes with the union in tur­moiL The concessions-laden MasterFreight Agreement negotiated in Aprilwas overwhelmingly rejected by theTeamster ranks. But the IBT topsimposed it anyway, under an anti­democratic, anti-militancy rule requir­ing a two-thirds vote to reject a con­tract. The IBT tops 'then split over theelection of a successor to Presser. NewEngland Joint C~uncil head WilliamMcCarthy (who opposed Presser'scontract) narrowly defeated WeldonMathias, and has moved to demote hisopponents within the union. The unionis threatened with a return to theregional fiefdoms that-characterized theIBT before Hoffa won the first mastercontract.

Before the long-awaited RICO indict­ment was announced, the IBT topshoped that anti-Communist appealscomparing the Teamsters to Reagan'sfavorite "union" Solidarnosc wouldconvince the bourgeoisie to back off.And with an eye to election year con­tributions from the union, a majority ofCongressmen came out against theJustice Department suit. But supportfor Reagan didn't save PATCO, andreliance on capitalist politicians won'tsave the Teamsters.

The feds have inside help in theircampaign to take over the Teamstersunion-help from the union's own fake­radical "opposition." Under the cover of"democracy," the Teamster.s for a Dem­ocratic Union (TDU) has run point forthe government's union-busting. The"TDU Membership Newsletter" (Sum­mer 1988) lauds the feds: "So by callingfor a limited trusteeship and electionsin its RICO suit, the Justice Depart­ment has begun to move toward theTDU stand." Critical of a governmenttrusteeship because it. won't removeenough (!) of the union leadership, theTDU sent the Justice Department attor­neys a plan in April 1987 which calls forthe capitalist government to run Team­ster elections for the next nine years!Even the TDU's call for the "one-man,one-vote" referendum election of na­tional officers is a hoax. This pseudo­democratic "reform" would let incum­bent bureaucrats (and the capitalistpress) manipulate union elections.Instead there should be elected, dele­gated conventions, where a union's lead­ership and program can be debated.

The reformists and bureaucrats in theTDU have made a career out of drag­ging the Teamsters into the bosses'courts, supposedly to "clean up theunion." They try to justify crossing theclass line by pointing to the feds' inter­vention in the United Mine Workers.According to TDU national organizerKen Paff (Philadelphia Inquirer, 27July) the UMWA ranks, saddled withthe corrupt and murderous regime ofTony Boyle:

" ... organized Miners for Democracy,demanded an electionsupervised bytheDepartment of Labor and finallygot it.Boyle was swept out of power in aone-member, one-vote election.... Themembers went on to rewrite theirconstitution to ensure a future of dem­ocratic unionism."

Veteran miners will get a bitter laughfrom the happy ending to this fairy tale.What the UMWA ranks actually gotfrom Nixon's Labor Department-runelection was Arnold Miller as unionpresident. When Miller took office in1972 virtually the entire reformist leftclaimed it was a victory for labor. It wasleft to the Spartacist League to tell thesimple truth: "Labor Department Wins

WORKERS VANGU'ARD

BobbyKennedy'svicious atta~ks

on Teamsterleader JimmyHoffa set up1959 anti-laborLandrum-:GriffinAct. '

c3!

NOTE NEWSUBSCRIPTION

PRICES

.Reagan, to finish the job begun byKennedy, is trying to place the Team­sters union under the direct control ofthe .capitalist state. On June 28 theJustice Department filed a' civil suitagainst the l S-member exec board of theInternational Brotherhood of Team­sters (IBT). Tile 113-page suit, using thesinister RICO (Racketeer Influencedand Corrupt Organizations) Act, claimsIBT officials have entered a "devil'spact" with organized crime. What thesleazy gang in the Reagan administra­tion-the big-time organized crimi­nals-are up to is to break the country'smost powerful union. Chuck Mack,president of Teamsters Joint Council 7(Bay Area), noted, "Attacking theTeamsters has been an Americantradition," and pointed to Minneapolis(where Trotskyists led the strikes andorganizing drives that laid the founda­tion of the Teamsters' power, and werelater jailed by FDR for their revolution­ary opposition to imperialism in WorldWar II):

"Minneapolis Teamster leaders werelater prosecuted by the Rooseveltadministration for alleged subversiveactivities. From these Smith Act prose­cutions to the civil RICO action filedthis June, we have enjoyed a specialstatus with the Department of Justice."

-Oakland Tribune, 3 AugustUnder the RICO law, the union can

be put in "trusteeship" and the entireleadership replaced if the feds can showa "pattern of racketeering activity" byproving any two charges (some of whichare 30 years old), including mail.fraudand moving untaxed cigarettes! One ofthe feds gloated to the Washington Post(4 July), "This is your classic RICO case.Thisis what RICO was designed to do."RICO charges have already been used totake over Jersey City Teamsters Local560, and cases have been filed againstseven other unions. Anti-labor col­umnist Don Feder revealed the feds'real appetite, which has nothing todo with corruption: "With or with­out the squashed-nose set, unions areviolence-prone.... The problem isn'tsimply the Teamsters' criminal asso­ciations, but the coercive nature ofunions themselves" (Boston Herald,11 July). Hands off the Teamsters!

Effective immediately, thenew subscription price of Work­ers Vanguard is $7.00 per year(24 issues). For nearly sevenyears (beginning with WV No.289,25 September 1981) a year'sWV sub has been priced at $5.00.During this period, postage hasgone through the ceiling whileprinting costs have also risensteadily, necessitating this mod­est sub price increase.

o $3/3 issues ofWomen and Revolution

0$2/10 introductory issuesof Workers Vanguard(includes English-langlIageSpartacist)

capitalism. One-of the most sustainedassaults on an American union, the30-year vendetta against the Teamstersunion, was initiated by Democrats-theKennedy brothers. Fearful ofthe truck­ers union's ability to paralyze the coun­try in a national strike; McCarthyitewitchhunter Robert Kennedy jailedunion president Jimmy Hoffa, forcedthe Teamsters' expulsion from the AFL­Cl'O and rammed through the anti­labor law (Landrum-Griffin) which"outlaws" real labor solidarity ("hot­cargoing").

have abandoned any pretense ofdefend­ing workers' rights and have given backwhat it took decades of hard class strug-

.gle to achieve.

Feds: Hands Off the Teamsters!Forty years' ago, C.E. Wilson, the,

head of General Electric and a memberof the Truman administration, said,"The problems of the United States canbe captiously summed up in two words:Russia abroad, Labor at home" (quotedin Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M.Morais, Labor's Untold Story [1955]).Like the war drive against the SovietUnion, union-busting on the home frontis the policy of both partner parties of

0$2/4 issues of Spartacist (ecicion en espafiol)

o $7/24 issues of Workers Vanguard(includes English-language Spartacist)o New 0 Renewal 'International rates:$25/24 issues-Airmail $7/24 issues-Seamail

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10

provoke retaliation against Americanexports and accelerate the industrialrot.'

What's desperately needed is a work­ers government which' will rip theproductive wealth out of the hands ofcorporate moguls and Wall Street raid­ers and rebuild this country on a social­ist basis. Workers need to break with thetwo parties of capitalism and build theirown party, a workers party based on thetrade unions. And they need to oustfrom the leadership of those unions thesellout bureaucrats who in recent years

Name _

Address -=--- _

James arnilton

Former Teamster president and FBI informer Jackie Presser being carriedinto IBT convention in Las Vegas, 1986.

(continued from page 1)

Unchain theUnions...New York City, and even more in othercities such as Detroit, have completelydropped out of the labor market indespair of finding a job.

The nation's productive wealth has. been divertedinto the massive military

buildup. Two-thirds of all research anddevelopment is funded by the Penta­gon. The best scientists and engineersare engaged in "Star Wars" and otherweapons systems to destroy the SovietUnion in the name of "free world" cap­italism. And this is not just "Reagan­omics." The anti-Soviet war drive isbipartisan policy; Dukakis has publiclysupported a nuclear first-strike optionagainst Russia and is campaigning tobeef up conventional U.S. armed forcesand for an array of new nuclear weap­ons from the Stealth bomber to the D-5submarine-launched missile.

While the Democrats blame Reagan­omics for "the decline of our industrial,natural resource and mining base," theironly "solution" is flag-waving protec­tionism and Japan-bashing. Dukakis'running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, is notonly a Dixiecrat racist but a leadingtrade-war hawk in Congress. And JesseJackson, the Democrats' "left face,"peddles a soft-core version, railingat the export of jobs to' "slave la­bor" markets abroad. Far from savingjobs, protectionism will fuel inflation,

Mine Workers' Election" (WVNo._17,March 1973). Miller rammed a selloutcontract down the members' throats in1974 and broke three major wildcatstrikes before betraying the LlO-daynational walkout of 1977-78. the mostimportant American labor struggle in 30years. Miller became so hated in thecourse of that strike that he went intohiding to escape 'the miners' wrath.

Today the UMWA is "led" by attor­ney Richard Trumka who, early thisyear, signed a contract worse than any­thing even Miller ever came up with. In1984, Trurnka rejected the union's tra­dition of an industrywide walkout, infavor of "selective strikes." Militantsfrom Kentucky who fought for theirunion in these strikes were railroaded onfederal "terrorism" and "conspiracy"charges and were sentenced to terms of

..JH.. ,~

.,...... ,...~,.....'y··.···.I...........;l.~£~;

....' ~--"::...._.:} ~.""\ii2\W

APMiners burn Arnold Miller's rottencontract during 1977-78 coal strike.

ContraTerrorists ~ ..(continued/rom page J2)

claiming that the sole responsibility lies .with the Sandinistas and their "new actsof oppression."

The Sandinistas' "new acts ofoppres­sion" amounted to stopping U.S.ambassador Richard Meltorlfromblatantly organizing the internal con­tras in Managua. Melton; who previ­ously worked directlyunderU'S. contrakingpin Elliott Abrams,was made am­bassador in March immediately afterthe Sapoa cease-fire accord engineeredby Wright. While snubbing repre­sentatives of the Nicaraguan govern­ment, Melton attended a June meetingof opposition businessmen at which aplan for a "government of nationalsalvation" was drawn up: On July9 thecontras abruptly walked out' of nego­tiations with the Sandinistas, and aday later Melton was found runningaround with a mob of 2,000 anti­government rioters in Nandaime. The

. Sandinista regime responded by tem­,porarily closing the reopened CIA­

financed newspaper La. Prensa andthe reactionary Catholic radio station.Melton and sevenother U.S. diplomatswere expelled from Nicaragua for "stateterrorism."

Reagan "retaliated" by' expellingeight Nicaraguan diplomats, and theDemocrats saluted by overwhelminglysupporting Congressional resolutionsdenouncing Nicaragua. The Washing­ton Post (15 July) editorialized that the,Managua regime was "now acting verymuch the Communist police state" andurged the Democratic Party to be "vig-

12 AUGUST 1988

35 to 45years. Trumka & Co. have leftthem twisting in the wind. Brokenstrikes and broken lives:. these are thefruits ofgovernment interference in thelabor movement.

Labor's Gotta PlayHardball to Winl

The misleaders who sit at the top ofthe unions in this country have beenloyal "labor statesmen" so long theydon't remember how to win a strike. T(); .them, picket lines belQng to another cen­tury. The union tops crawl before theTaft-Hartley injunctions and courtorders limiting picketing. Instead ofworking-class struggle, there's a wholenew language of defeat: consumerboycott, Corporate Campaign, "InsideGame" (that's where you stay at work

. without a contract). They have "selec­tive strikes," where union locals get cutdown one at a time. And after the scabshave taken your job, you can apply forone of Lane Kirkland's new "AssociateMemberships'? for unionists who don'thave a union (but still pay dues).

The bourgeoisie is playing hardball.The militant picket lines of Morenci,Arizona copper strikers and Hormelmeatpackers were broken by the Na­tional Guard. Scabs are taking the jobsof Colt Firearms workers in Hartford,paper workers in Jay, Maine and tug­boat crews in New York harbor. Gun­toting mercenaries were unleashed oncoal miners who struck A.T. Massey,while.judges owned by the coal baronspanded down injunctions to stop pick­eting. Every hard fight by labor todefend itself has confronted the copsand courts of the capitalist state. But atevery point the labor misleaders coun­sel workers to rely on their "friends oflabor" in the Democratic Party, and toplace trust in the bosses' courts.

Labor's gotta play hardball to win.And that requires a class-struggle lead­ership that fights to break the chainsthat tie the labor movement to thebosses' parties and their state. James P.Cannon drew the lessons of the vic­torious Minneapolis Teamsters strikesof 1934, which were led by Trotskyists:

"All modern strikes require politicaldirection .... The old fashioned trade

orous and unequivocal," code words formilitary action. Meanwhile the CIA has'been busily rearranging its contra com­mand: "electing" Enrique Bermudez tothe contras' political directorate, ineffect' as the main contra leader. Bermu­dez, a colonel in Somoza's bloodthirstyNational Guard, dispenses with the"democratic" rhetoric of his predeces­sors and openly boasts the contras'policy is terrorism.

in fact the petty-bourgeois national­ist Sandinistashave bent over-back-.wards, short of committing suicide, -toacquiesce to American dictates. TheNicaraguan government's legal repre- ,sentative in the U.S., Paul S. Reichler,underscored that point in an op-ed piecein the New York Times (4 August): "TheSandinistas have already accepted all ofthe points of the Central Americanpeace plan, and the Reagan Adminis­tration simply refuses to take their yesfor an answer." Reichler noted the San­dinistas say they would help preventCuba and the Soviet Union from estab­lishing a "base" in Nicaragua and would"refrain from supporting guerrillamovements in other countries."

Even after the Democrats. began put­ting together their new aid package,Nicaraguan Foreign Minister: MiguelD'Escoto continued to express theregime's' hopes to cut a deal with theDemocrats: "Dukakis is very important,to us.... A signal is being sent outthat the United, States is thinking ofreturning to the company of law­abiding nations" (London Independ­ent, 25 July). This is an illusion,and adeadly dangerous one for the future ofthe Nicaraguan Revolution. It is onewhich most of the American left pushesas well, clinging to the coattails of JesseJackson while he fronts for the Dem­ocratic Party of war and 'racism.

It's not South Africa, it's the LAPD.

union movement, which used to dealwith the bosses without governmentalinterference, belongs in the museum.The modern labor movement must bepolitically directed because it 'is con­fronted by the government at everyturn .... The policy of the class struggleguided our comrades; they couldn't-bedeceived. and outmaneuvered, as somany strike leaders of that period were,by this mechanism of sabotage anddestruction known as the NationalLabor Board and all its auxiliary set­ups. They putno reliance whatever inRoosevelt's Labor Board; they weren'tfooled by any idea that Roosevelt, theliberal 'friend of labor' president, wasgoing to help the truck drivers in Min­neapolis win a few cents more an hour."

- The History of AmericanTrotskyism, 1944

There will be a lot of "Unite AgainstReagan" (vote Democrat) snake oil soldby the union tops and their flunkeyson the reformist left (most notablythe Communist Party) at Labor Daymarches around the country this year.But it has been' the "liberal" Democratswho have been most effective in impos­ing capitalist austerity (and war) onlabor and minorities. It was Carter/Mondale who invoked the Taft-Hartleyslave labor law against the coal minersin 1978, and later prepared the plan

The last time there was a "Boston­Austin axis" in the White House, JFKimplemented Eisenhower/Nixon's Bayof Pigs invasion while LBJ carriedout Barry Goldwater's warcprogram inVietnam. As we warned several monthsago: ,

"Indeed, the Democratic Party hasalways been the primary party ofimperialist war, succeeding with its'friends of labor' rhetoric in mobilizingthe' population for war where' theRepublicans cannot; The Democratsare no lesscommitted to the imperialistwar driveagainst the Soviet Union thanthe Reaganites: today the Democratstry to bleed the Nicaraguan rnasses drythrough negotiations' and economicsabotage; on the morrow, it may be aDemocratic administration that ordersU.S. troops into Nicaragua."

-WVNo.446, 12 February

There will be no peace in CentralAmerica until imperialism is defeated

.by workers revolution throughout theisthmus, spreading to, the powerfuland combative Mexican proletariatand to the U.S. colossus itself. De­fend, complete, extend the NicaraguanRevolution! •

Iranian Airbus·Massacre...(continued/rom page 12) ,

unsuccessful attempts" to blast theplane earlier, but "human error delayedthe firing of the supersonic missiles"(Washington Post, 4 August)! The bot­tom line is, as one colonel told the NewYork Times (6 August), "It's a lot easierto shoot first and then look."

When the Soviet Union shot down. KAL 007, the U.S. used it to turn the

which Reagan used to smash PATCO.It is the black Democratic Party may­ors on Reagan's plantation who presideover America's cities, with their ghettomisery and racist cop terror. AndJesse Jackson is campaigning to keepblack people chained to the DixiecratDemocrats.

In the Workers Vanguard supple­ment, "Labor's Gotta Play Hardball toWin," which we have distributed onpicket lines across the country for thelast four years, we pointed to theburn­ing need to join labor and bla,*s instruggle:

"In white racist America the fate oforganized labor and the oppressedblack masses is closely bound together.The bureaucracy's accommodation tothe racist status quo set the stage for theunion-busting offensive of the Reaganyears. And there will be no effectivedefense against this union-busting un­less the labor movement becomes apowerful champion of black rights."

Above all, this requires a revolutionaryworkers party that will lead the fight tooust capitalism's labor lieutenants 4norder to unchain the power of labor andblacks. Break with the Democrats!Build a workers party to fight for aworkers govemmentljs

heat up on its anti-Soviet war drive toboiling point. But Soviet jets had triedunsuccessfully for an hour and a half towarn off the Korean plane, whichhadflown deep into Soviet airspace andrefused to acknowledge any commu­nication. The Vincennes shot down IranAir 655, over Iranian airspace, justminutes after it took of!

These .cowardly bullies with theirhigh-tech ·behemoths want to prove theycan barge in and smash anything in theirway anywhere in the world. Vice Pres­ident George Bush still viciously insists,despite all evidence to the contrary, thatit's the civilians' own fault for getting inthe way of aU .S. "combat zone." Duka­kis, too, has defended the massacre.Now both Republicans and Democratsin Congress are balking even at Rea­gan's proposal to give somecompensa­tion to the families of the victims of thisU.S. war crime. The racist arrogance ofthe American rulers is breathtaking.Time magazine (18 July); perhapsmoved by its historically pro-Arab sym­pathies, was rare among bourgeois com-

_ 'mentators in taking exception to theadministration's refusal to even issue anapology, criticizing the government's"dry, formulaic expressions of officialregret, the diplomatic equivalence ofpreprinted condolence cards."

The Spartacist League protested thisinhuman war crime in New York Cityon July 7, demanding: "U.S. Out of thePersian Guln" and putting the blamewhere it lies: "Reagan, Democrats:Blood Is on Your Hands!" From theirair-conditioned bunkers in Vietnamwhere they destroyed whole villages inorder to r'save" them, to the rape ofGrenada to perpetrating this latest mas­sacre, the arrogant, racist policy of thisimperialist state is a danger to the entireglobe.•

11

W'fiNlfil"lIfifJ'fi',. .. ,

i

Democrats Push Aid forContra Terrorists

issue; Bentsen can do the talking. Theyare all united to keep these killers armedand ready if the U.S. decides to invade.Democratic Senator James Sasser ex­plained that the package "is intendedto keep the Contras alive until the nextadministration has come in and decidedhow it wants to deal with the issue,"

continued on page 11

on Communism, and- the Democratswere in some cringing disarray. Housespeaker Jim Wright and Capitol Hill"liberals" like Ted Kennedy continue tosay they oppose outright military aid tothe loser contras-still hoping to win atthe bargaining table what their merce­naries couldn't win on the battlefield.Dukakis has demurely sidestepped the

partisan package." Meanwhile, Repub­lican Senator Robert Dole, hoping tofill the vice presidential slot on GeorgeBush's ticket, continued to keep thesqueeze on the Democrats with an alter­native proposal specifically earmarking$20 million for military supplies.

A few Republican election campaigntaunts about the Democrats being "soft"

Reuters Harrity/U, .News & World ReportCivilian victim of contra terror in northeastern Nicaragua (left). Staunch supporter of contra aid Lloyd Bentsenchosen as running mate by Dukakis.

The last hurrahs in Atlanta hadscarcely died down when Senate Dem­ocrats started pushinga new aid pack­age for the CIA's dirty contra waragainst Nicaragua. Democratic pres- 'idential candidate Michael Dukakis hasbeen going out of his way to demon­strate that he's just-as much a certifiablewarmonger as Reagan, even statingopenly that he's prepared to launch anuclear first strike against the SovietUnion. Sometimes, playing to wide­spread opposition among the Ameri­can people to deeper U.S. militaryinvolvement in Central America, Duka­kis has mumbled that aid to the contrasis "illegal and immoral." But he gave thegreen light for the Democratic contraaid push by picking as his running mateTexas Tory Lloyd Bentsen, one of thestaunchest advocates of contra aid onCapitol Hill.

The Democratic proposal would givethe contra cutthroats $27 million in so­called "humanitarian" aid and allow forthe "filibuster-proof" release of another$16 million in previously approved mil­itary funding later, if the administra­tion were to decide that the Sandinistashad created an "emergency situation."White House spokesman Marlin Fitz­water hailed it as a "very encouragingsign" and Reagan said he looked for­ward to a "strong, meaningful bi-

Iranian Airbus MassacreMade in Washington

The U.S. blew 290 men, women andchildren out of the sky last month, andthen tried to blame the defenseless vic­tims who happened to end up in theirgunsights. Now, after a "special investi­gation," Defense Department spokes­men say the shooting down of Iran AirFlight 655 by the USS Vincennes onJuly 3 was the result of "mistakes" madeunder "stress of combat" by 'inexperi­enced crewmen. But it wasn't "humanerror" that killed those people over thePersian Gulf-it was conscious policymade in the White House and Penta­gon. The new report contradicts everysingle statement put out by Pentagonchief of staff Admiral Crowe on July 3,statements that were revealed daily to belies, as we pointed out in our front-pagestory, "Massacre in the Persian Gulf"(WV No. 457, 15 July). And the storystill stinks!

According to preliminary accounts,the Pentagon now claims its high-techAegis tracking system worked just fine:Aegis locked on to the civilian airlineralmost -, at takeoff, tracked it on itscourse, targeted the plane with its Stan:dard surface-to-air missiles, and blastedit out of the sky. The new line is it wassome sort of "mass hallucination"-

every crewman aboard "saw" an attack­ing F-14 fighter where the computer saidthere was none. The "stress" which sup­posedly caused this involved the sink­ing by this floating fortress of a coupleof JO-foot Iranian boats. The "inex­perienced crewmen," with 18 monthstraining on the Aegis system, had evenundergone a simulation drill in which aninnocent aircraft was mistaken for ahostile plane. But the powers that behave apparently decided to protect theirmultibillion-dollar investment in Aegisby throwing some low-level radar oper­ators to the wolves.

The press continues to ooze lsympa­thy for the Vincennes captain, just likethey weep over the "agony" of cops whoshoot down black youth in the ghettosand then get expensive psychiatric treat­ment for "stress." The captain, theyclaim, tried to warn the aircraft andwaited until the last minute to shoot.But he never tried to contact the BandarAbbas control tower nor did he contactthe pilot on the commercial air chan­nel, which U.S. military ships havedone routinely in sheer harassment.Further, the investigation revealedthat the Vincennes had made "several

, continued on page 11

Conrad/NY Times

APGeorge Bush attacked victims of U.S. war crime for being In the way ofUSS Vincennes. .'

12 12 AUGUST 1988