Workers Vanguard No 683 - 30 January 1998

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 683 - 30 January 1998

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WfJliKEIiS ".fifJ'RIJ OtNo. 683 ~ ) ( ~ 2 3 30 January 1998

As Clinton Militarizes Border with Mexico

Der Spiegel Palmer/U.S. News & World ReportImmigrants face terror, exploitation from U.S. capitalist rulers: troops erect steel wall at Mexican border near Sail Diego, children toil for starvation wages inManhattan garment sweatshop.Government StarvesAs the capitalist rulers rub theirhands in glee over the sharp declinein welfare rolls across the country,millions more people grow gauntfrom hunger. Since Democratic president Clinton signed the bipartisanmeasure ending "welfare as we knowit" in August 1996, already overburdened soup kitchens and food pantries have been besieged by peopledesperately trying to feed themselvesand their c h i l d r e n ~ In denouncing thisvindictive law, we wrote: "The vast increase in human misery resulting fromthe new anti-welfare act is still uncharted,but there is no doubt that many thousandswill starve and die-from hunger, fromuntreated contagious diseases, from exposure, from homelessness-as a directresult" (WV No. 650, 30 August 1996).While Democratic and Republican politicians alike cynically have prated aboutmoving people "from welfare to work,"the deadly effects of this assault on thepoor are so evident this wi'nter that eventhe capitalist press has had to concedethat millions are being pushed to thebrink of starvation. The attack on welfarewas promoted by a racist campaign vilifying "illegal" immigrants and especiallythe black ghetto poor, particularly womenand children for whom Aid to Familieswith Dependent Children (AFDC) provided a slim lifeline. In fact, nearly onemillion "legal" immigrants were cut offfrom food stamps and other benefits."Denied Food Stamps, Many ImmigrantsScrape for Meals," headlined an articlein the New York Times (8 December1997), while a similar piece in the LosAngeles Times (27 December 1997) wastitled, "New Face in Line at Soup Kitchen: Working Poor."In New York City alone, over 70,000people are being turned away from foodpantries each month as supplies run out.The New York Times article noted: "Asthe months pass and kitchen cupboards

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ImmigrantsLabor Must Champion Immigrant Rights!grow barer, immigrants who earn onaverage about $10,000 a year find themselves giving up fresh meat, spendingrent money on groceries, lining up atfood pantries and hunting for work in acity where the unemployment rate standsat 9.1 percent, nearly double the nationalaverage." The situation has grown so direthat even Republican NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani has launched a lawsuit toforce the federal government to restorefood stamps for immigrant families,arguing that the cuts imposed "extremehardship, hunger and malnutrition." Butthis racist pig has hardly become achampion of the poor: Giuliani just appointed as the city's new "welfare czar"the author of the Wisconsin plan whichserved as the model for the federal antiwelfare law.Virtually every major city has experienced increased demand for emergency food aid, with two out of five applicants currently employed. The savageryof this onslaught, even as the capitalistsare wallowing in record profits, is boundless: "illegal" immigrants suffering fromAIDS-who had been granted temporaryresidency in cities like New York-arenow having their Medicaid benefits (andlife-prolonging drugs) taken away, g ~ \ ' -ing them the "choice" of dying a crueldeath here or back in their impoverishedhomelands.In pushing the war on welfare, "thecapitalist rulers seek to pit the whiteworking class against both blacks andimmigrants by portraying them as a drainon the tax dollars of 'hard-working whitefolks' ," we wrote in the introduction toour January 1997 Black History and theCllSS Struggle pamphlet ("Capitalist Rulers Wage War on Blacks, Immigrants").We continued:

"In racist America, where the words'welfare queen',have long served as codewords for the black ghetto poor, the rul-ing class thinks it can get away withshredding welfare by playing the racecard. Leaving aside the fact that themajority of those on welfare are white,the 'welfare reform' bill is aimed at driv-ing down the wages and further immiserating the entire working class. This factis being brought home with a vengeancein the implementation of 'workfare' pro-grams aimed at busting the unions byforcing welfare recipients to work thesejobs at starvation wages." .What is happening in the U.S. is farfrom unique. With the heating up of interimperialist rivalries in the wake of thedestruction of the Soviet Union, the bourgeoisies have escalated their attacks onwages, working conditions and social programs across the board in order to increase their competitive edge against rivalcapitalists. Particularly in West Europe,immigrants and ethnic minorities havebeen the principal targets of this drive,which is aimed against the whole of theproletariat. This is. evident in the U.S., asreal wages have fallen by one-fifth over

the past two decades. And the elimination of relatively inexpensive programs like AFDC is only the preludeto a full-scale assault on Social Security and Medicare.Racist Repressionon the Border

Along with driving immigrantfamilies to starvation, the Clintongovernment has drastically beefed upits arsenal of repression along the borders. Under codenames like "OperationGatekeeper" in California and "OperationRio Grqnde" in Texas, border guards havebeen equipped with advanced weaponryand increasingly reinforced with military units. Numerous border cities havebeen closed off with mammoth steelwalls, including one in Nogales, Arizonawhich the racist yuppie Clinton administration grotesquely touts as being designed to appear "friendly" to Mexico byallowing "light and a feeling of openness"! Deportations are at a record high-over 110,000 last year-a 62 percentincrease from the year before.According to conservative estimatesby the University of Houston's Centerfor Immigration, nearly 1,200 peopledied trying to cross from Mexico between 1993 and 1996, the vast majorityof them drowning victims, while otherswere shot down by U.S. troops or cops.A 1997 law gave Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents sweeping

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Arafat Museum Visit Canceledby Vile Zionist OutcryWhen the State Department organizeda tour of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for visitingPalestinian Authority president YasirArafat . it provoked a vile chauvinist fren

zy byAmerican Zionists and Israeli primeminister Benjamin Netanyahu's rulingright-wing Likud party. The Zionists pronounced the Palestinian leader verbotenat the federally funded museum, screaming that he was "Hitler incarnate." Onlyafter this reactionary outcry had succeeded in canceling Arafat's visit did theZionists back off and say he was welcomeafter all.

Semitic types have been welcomed atthe Holocaust Museum. One of the foreign dignitaries who was feted at themuseum's dedication in April 1993 wasnone other than fascistic Croatian strongman Franjo Tudjman, an open apologistfor the Nazi-allied Ustasha which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews andSerbs during World War II. Two yearsbefore that, the museum site was visitedby Lech Walesa, then president of Poland,whose fascist-infested Solidarnosc upholds the anti-Semitic Pilsudskiite dictatorship of the 1920s and'30s. To this day,Walesa's chief "spiritual advisor" is anotoriously anti-Semitic priest namedHenryk Jankowski.The furor over Arafat's proposed visitwas not only thoroughly racist but immensely hypocritical. In pursuit of Zionist Realpolitik, some truly sinister anti- It takes phenomenal chutzpah for theZionists, whose Israeli stormtroopers have

Honor Lenin, Liebknecht,Luxemburg!In upholding the revolutionary traditions

of the early Communist movement, thismonth the International Communist Leaguecommemorates the "Three Ls" Lenin, Lieb-knecht and Luxemburg. Karl Liebknecht wasimprisoned during World War I for his oppo-sition to the imperialist war, expressed in hiscall, "The main enemy is at home!" AlongTROTSKY with Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish LENINCommunist of Jewish origin, was a leader ofthe revolutionary wing of the German Social Democracy and a founder of the Spar-takusbund and its successor, the German Communist Party. They were murdered on19 January 1919 by military reactionaries as the Social Democratic government ofEbert and Scheidemann crushed the Spartakist workers uprising in blood. V.I. Lenin,leader of he Russian October Revolution of 1917, died on 21 January 1924. We publishbelow Lenin's remarks on hearing of the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, writ-ten as a postscript to his "Letter to the Workers of Europe and America."

The foregoing lines were written before the brutal and dastardly murder of KarlLiebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the Ebert and Scheidemann government. Thosebutchers, in their servility to the bourgeoisie, allowed the German whiteguards, thewatchdogs of sacred capitalist property, to lynch Rosa Luxemburg, to murder KarlLiebknecht by shooting him in the back on the patently false plea that he "attempted toescape." .. Evidently, history has chosen a path on which the role of "labour lieutenantsof the c a p i ~ l i s t class" must be played to the "last degree" of brutality, baseness andmeaness. Let those simpletons, the Kautskyites, talk in their newspaper Freiheit abouta "court" of representatives of "all" "socialist" parties (those servile souls insist that theScheidemann executioners are socialists)! Those heroes of philistine stupidity andpetty-bourgeois cowardice even fail to understand that the courts are organs of statepower, and that the issue in the struggle and civil war now being waged in Germany isprecisely one of who is to hold this power-the bourgeoisie, "served" by the Scheidemanns as executioners and instigators of pogroms, and by the Kautskys as glorifiers of"pure democracy," or the proletariat, which will overthrow the capitalist exploiters andcrush their resistance.The blood of the best representatives of the world proletarian International, of theunforgettable leaders of the world socialist revolution, will steel ever new masses ofworkers for the life-and-death Struggle. And this struggle will lead to victory. We inRussia, in the summer of 1917, lived thrQugh the "July days," when the Russian Scheidemanns, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, also provided "state" protection for the "victory" of the whiteguards over the Bolsheviks, a n ~ when Cossacks shotthe worker Voinov in the streets of Petrograd for distributing Bolshevik leaflets. Weknow from experience how quickly such "victories" of the bourgeoisie and theirhenchmen cure the people of their illusions about bourgeois democracy, "universal suffrage," and so forth.

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- V. I. Lenin, "Letter to the Workers of Europe and America" (January 1919)

! ~ ~ ' ! ! I ! ! o r . . ~ ! ! ' ! . ~ ! ! . ! . EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob ZornPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Mindy SandersEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Helene Brosius, George Foster,Liz Gordon, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist).Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly, except skipping three alternate issues in June, July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861(Business). Address ali correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:[email protected] subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is January 26.No. 683 30 January 1998

Editorial Notescarried out one genocidal massacre afteranother against the Palestinian people, todenounce Arafat as a Hitler. In fact, thePalestinian nationalist leader is a toady ofthe Israeli Zionist state and U.S. imperialism. The Holocaust Museum visit was intended to help revive the U.S.-sponsored"peace process"-which has effectivelybeen scuttled by the Netanyahu regimethrough which Arafat became an Israelilieutenant in the national subjugation ofthe Palestinian masses. As proletarianinternationalists, we fight for a socialistfederation of the Near East, in which allthe toilers of the region will achieve socialand nationalemancipation.

Gamma/Studio XAn earlier visitor to Holocaust Mu-seum: Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, apol-ogist for Ustashi fascists.

The Mendacity of AnarchyA reader recently brought to our attention an article by one "Max Anger" in theSpring-Summer 1997 issue of Anarchy:A Journal of Desire Armed (!) headlined"The Spartacist School of Falsification."The article purports to expose our supposed lies about anarchist idol NestorMakhnlOl, a Ukrainian peasant leader at

the time of the 1917 Russian Revolutionand the ensuing Civil War. What thistypically mendacious (i.e., deceitful, prevaricating, false) anarchist anti-Marxistdrivel "omits" to mention is that, monthsearlier, our Young Spartacus pages hadrun both the relevant portions of Anger's"contribution" and a lengthy reply demolishing his numerous lies and distortions ("An Exchange on Nestor Makhno:Peasant 'Anarchism,' Pogroms and theRussian Revolution," WV No. 656, 22November 1996).Anger's ire was aroused by the sevenpart Young Spartacus series, "Marxismvs. Anarchism: From 1848 to the Bolshevik Revolution," which noted:"The most significant counterrevolutionary force under the banner of anarchismwas the Ukrainian peasant-based armyof Nestor Makhno, which carried outpogroms against Jewish communitiesand collaborated with White armiesagainst the Bolsheviks."- WV No. 650 (30 August 1996)

When Anger leapt in to defend Makhno'shonor, we published our exchange withhim in order to educate those left ist youthmistakenly attracted to anarchism. We

cited, among other things, eyewitnessdocumentation in Yiddish and Russianheld by the YIVO Institute for JewishResearch in New York City-attesting toanti-Semitic pogroms by Makhno's bands.Evidently unable to challenge our facts,Anger peddled his lying wares in moresympathetic quarters.Anarchist diatribes against Bolshevism/Trotskyism are nothing new. As wenoted in our series, the anarchists alsoraised a hue and cry about Makhno-andthe Bolsheviks' suppression of the counterrevolutionary 1921 Kronstadt uprising-in the 1930s, when Trotsky wasexposing and denouncing the treachery

of the Spanish anarchists, who joined theStalinists and social democrats in a capitalist government which suppressed aworkers revolution. Today, the anarchistsrush to embrace the imperialists' "deathof communism" lie. The current issue ofAnarchy (Fall-Winter 1997-98) promotesa treatise titled Anarchism After Leftism,which argues: "Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy-anarchism minus Marxism-will be free to get better at beingwhat it is." Indeed, petty-bourgeois hostility to Marxism and the proletariat is"what it is," pure and simple. As wecommented in our reply on Makhno: "Max Anger's raving defense ofMakhno's peasant bandits provides ameasure of the dementia that can beinduced by bourgeois anti-Communismin the U.S.".

Tailing Mexican Nationalism,IG "Disappears" the PROFor some months now, the Internationalist Group (IG)-a small coterie ofdefectors from the International Communist League (ICL) in the U.S. and Mex

ico--has been fulminating against oursupposed revisionism on the nature ofCuauhtemoc Cardenas' Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in Mexico.Where we say clearly that the PRD is abourgeois-nationalist party and counterpose the need to break the Mexican proletariat from nationalism and forge a revolutionary workers party, the IG insiststhat there is some vaguely defined "Cardenista popular front," echoing variousMexican reformists and centrists in thePRD's shadow.The whole purpose of a popular front-a class-collaborationist coalition of reformist workers parties and bourgeois part ies-is to subordinate the workers organizations to their class enemy. Writing onthe Spanish Civil War in the 1930s,Trotsky noted that this purpose could beserved even by including only "theshadow of the bourgeoisie." But now theIG has conjured up a "popula r front" withno workers party! Instead, the IG isreduced to pointing to the tiny reformistand centrist groups which tail Cardenas,a handful of "dissident" union officialswho speak at his rallies, or other amor-

phous "rebellious sectors" in the PRD'stow, like the peasant-based Zapatistas. Aswe noted in correcting our own earlierdesignation of this formation as a popularfront: "In the process of seeking to defendits characterization of the Cardenistas asa popular front, the IG in effect liquidate sany distinction between the proletariatwhich Marxists understand is the onlyclass with the social power and consistentclass interest to lead the fight against capitalist class rule-and petty-bourgeoisforces" ("Mexico: For Workers Revolution!" WV No. 672, 8 August 1997).After Cardenas was elected mayor ofMexico City last July, the IG's Interna-tionalist (September-October 1997) pontificated: "This is precisely the momentwhen Trotskyists should be dispellingillusions among Mexican workers andyouth .... Yet at this very moment, theICL leaders abandon the struggle againstthe popular front just where it is the hottest." Behind the IG's cynical diatribes isits refusal to challenge illusions in PRD"left" bourgeois nationalism. This wasevident at a January 12 protest in NewYork City against the massacre of 45Chiapas peasants by death squads linkedto the ruling Institutional RevolutionaryParty. One of the signs carried by theSpartacist League contingent read, "No

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Mexican Massacre in Acteal:How Many More?In a vicious a ttack that lasted up to four hours at

least 45 of Mexico's indigenous people (men, womenand children) were massacred in the county of SanPedro de Chenalh6, in Chiapas State, several daysbefore Christmas, 1997. New accounts were generallysketchy, and rarely tried to make sense of the evil,savage event.The names of over two score dead were not worthyof reporting, and the fleeting references to the Zapatista Rebel Army (EZLN) only left many in a ball ofconfusion.One hears of this long, drawn-out, premeditatedmassacre, and wonders: Why? If the reader is at alllike the writer, s/he saw or heard nothing at all like anexplanation for this planned explosion of death. Thewriter had to turn to the informative alternative to theestablishment press, which, in this instance, meantthe Nuevo Amanecer Press, which offered what theestablishment media could not-context.N.A.P. noted, in a communique issued weeks beforethe massacre by the Zapatista Central Command, thatthe indigenous people have been suffering for monthsat the hands of paramilitary bands and state police,under the auspices and protection of the InstitutionalRevolutionary Party (PRI). Indeed, the area of themassacre, San Pedro de Chenalh6, was a place where

thousands of Indians were congregated, poor, ragged,hungry and ill, refugees from villages in the Chiapanhighlands, under PRI guns. In a December 12th, 1997communique, Zapatista Subcommander Marcos wroteof the repression waged against the indigenous people, especially local (Chenalh6) Zapatista activists:

"The state and federal governments and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, far from stopping theirwave of aggressions, are trying to avoid solving themain problem of Chenalh6, which is the eradication oftheir paramilitary groups and the return of the displaced people to their communities. While it pretendsto establish a dialogue, Chiapanecan PRI followers areundertaking the plunder and destruction of the evicted's property. Coffee, cattle, clothes, and domesticutensils are being distributed among the paramilitaryas the bounty of a war which, up until now, has onlyseen shooting coming from one of the sides, that is thegovernment and its political party."(NAP: [email protected] 12116/97)These paramilitary groups, whose war'cry was "an

end to theZapatista seed," have waged an insidiouscampaign against Indian communities in the southeast, of theft, robbery, brutality, rape, arson, murdersand then, mass murders.Subcommander Marcos' warning (of Dec. 12th, '97)was all but ignored, and ten days later (on Dec. 22nd,1997) Chiapas was marked by an unholy massacre.

Memphis

According to Subcom. Marcos, "The direct responsibility for these bloody events falls upon ErnestoZedillo Ponce de Leon and the Justice Ministry, who,two days ago, gave a green light to the counterinsurgency project presented by the Federal Army." (NC forDM: [email protected] 12/25/97)Nine men, 21 women and IS children-these people, nameless, invisible, and dead, could very well bealive if the warnings had been heeded. But they wereIndians. Indigenous people. Indigenes.What if 45 whites were killed in a four hour-longparamilitary massacre? Their faces, their names, theirlives, and their loves would be the daily fare of newspapers, magazines and television.But they weren't white. They were red. And just asthe Zapatista warnings were ignored the brutal livesand deaths at the hands of the PRIistas are fast on theway of being forgotten.Until next time.31 December 1997

1997 by Mumia Abu-Jamal

To join the fight to free Mumia and for the latestupdates on his case, contact the Partisan DefenseCommittee, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station,New York, NY 10013-0099; phone (212) 406-4252.E-mail: [email protected]. Urgentlyneeded contributions for Mumia's defense, whichare tax-deductible, should be made payable to theBill of Rights Foundation, earmarked "MumiaAbu-Jamal Legal Defense," and sent to the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, 163 AmsterdamAvenue, No. 115, New York, NY 10023-5001. I f youwish to correspond with Jamal, you can write to:Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM8335, SCI Greene, 1040 E.Roy Furman Hwy., Waynesburg, PA 15370.

Defend Anti-Klan Protesters!The following protest letter was sentby the Partisan Defense Committee toWilliam L. Gibbons, attorney general inMemphis, Tennessee, on January 23.The Partisan Defense Committee condemns the vicious police attack on themen, women ana children who came outto protest a march by the hooded-androbed lynchers of the Ku Klux Klan inMemphis on January 17. Now your office

i-s persecuting 26 anti-Klan protesterswho were arrested by the cops, cynicallybranding them as "gang members." Wedemand that all charges against these protesters be dropped immediately!

there to defend blacks, Jews, Hispanics,gays, leftists, trade unionists and othersthe Klan has lined up in its cross hairs.Throughout the day, the police protected the Klan while lobbing potentiallydeadly tear gas and pepper spray canisters against the protesters, who includedchildren and elderly people. The copsthemselves admitted to planting at least50 undercover agents in the protest.These agents began assaulting the antiKlan demonstrators when they protestedagainst provocateurs distributing racistwhite-supremacist literature among them.While the Klan was allowed to spewits racist filth and program for genocide,the anti-Klan protesters were attackedand arrested by the cops for the "crime"of exercising their right to protest againstKlan terror. Drop all the charges againstthe Memphis anti-Klan protesters!

The Klan's racist provocation againstMartin Luther King Day-in the citywhere King was assassinated 30 yearsago-was a threat challenging not onlythe right of black people to a place inAmerican society but to their very rightto live. The multiracial crowd of hundreds who poured out in protest were Richard Genova for thePartisan Defense Committee

Riggs/NY TimesMemphis, January 17: Demonstrators protest racist Klan provocation againstMLK Day.

Support to the Capitalist PRD-Build aRevolutionary Workers Party of the Bolshevik Type!" Yet after spilling pagesof ink on the "crucial," "urgent," "vital"necessity of fighting a supposed PRD"popular front"-at this very momentwhen illusions in the PRD as an agencyfor "justice" were heightened-the IGturned up with placards that made nomention of the PRD!When confronted on this by our comrades, the IG finally hauled out a placardreading, "Romper con EI Frente Popular!Forjar un Partido Obrero Revolucionario!" (Break with the Popular Front!Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!).Why no specific reference to the PRD?"The people" would understand that'swhat they meant, huffed IG numero dosNegrete. In fact, "the people" the IG ispandering to have deepgoing illusions inthe PRD-in its core, petty (and not sopetty) bourgeois nationalists-which isfalsely seen as an advocate for the poor30 JANUARY 1998

and an opponent of the escalating imperialist subjugation of Mexico. Writing thePRD out of its placards, the IG demonstrates that its insistence on a ''Cardenista popular front" is simply the vehiclefor adapting to bourgeois nationalism.Nationalism has historically been themain instrument for tying the proletariatand dispossessed masses of Mexico totheir exploiters. Caught in the grip ofimperialism, Mexico is a volatile ,society seething with social grievances: Thereformist-nationalist perspective of an"anti-imperialist united front" with thethoroughly corrupt and slavishly dependent semicolonial bourgeoisie is a recipefor bloody defeat. The road to socialemancipation for the Mexican toilerslies in the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution-the seizure of powerb)' the proletariat at the head of all theoppressed, linked to the fight for social--ist revolution in the U.S. imperialistheartland

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Enlightenment Rationalism andthe Origins of M a r ~ s m In resuming publication of this series,we begin the second of two presenta-tions given by Spartacist League CentralCommittee member Joseph Seymour lastsummer as part of a series of internalSL classes on the origins of Marxism.The first three parts, which covered com-rade Seymour's first presentation, werepublished in WV Nos. 673, 674 and 675(5 September, 19 September and 3 Octo-

ber 1997).PART FOURI n early 1841, shortly before his 23rdbirthday, Karl Marx completed andsubmitted his doctoral dissertationin philosophy, entitled "Difference Between the Democritean and EpicureanPhilosophy of Nature." His ambition andintent was to become a professor of philosophy at a German university, that is,a respectable bourgeois intellectual. Hisclose friends and colleagues were teachers or students of philosophy of the Hegelian school. His writings were directed toward-and only intelligible t o -

intellectuals thor0ughly familiar withGerman philosophy, its various tendencies and disputes.Six years later, Marx joined and became a principal leader of an underground communist organization, largelycomposed of workingmen, dedicated tothe overthrow of every government inEurope, first and foremost the Kingdomof Prussia. The nature of his new comrades can be gauged by the political biography of Karl Schapper, the organization'sleading figure before Marx joined it.In the early 19th century, the stormingof the Bastille in Paris in 1789 was forleftist youth what the storming of theWinter Palace in Petro grad in 1917 wasfor leftist youth during much of the 20thcentury. They all dreamed of ,stormingtheir own Bastille and igniting a great,world-shaking revolution. In the mid-1830s, about 50 revolutionary "hotheads"in central Germany-among them KarlSchapper, a 21-year-old student of forestry-decided the time for dreaming wasover and they should just do it. So theytook over a police station in Frankfurt.Needless to say, this adventure was easilyand quickly suppressed by the authorities.Schapper managed to escape arrestand made his way to southern France,where he joined a ragtag army led byItalian radical democrat and nationalistGiuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini's army ofnational liberation, numbering about 300men, promptly irivaded the Kingdom ofSavoy-the strongest absolutist state inItaly-whose forces easily repelled therevolutionary invaders.But once more Schapper was unscathed and this time he made his way toParis, the political and spiritual center ofthe European revolutionary movement.There he joined the newly formed Leagueof the Just, a secret communist society largely composed of emigre Germanworkers. The League had close ties tosimilar French secret societies led by theredoubtable Auguste Blanqui. One finespring day in 1839, Blanqui assembledabout a thousand of his armed follow-4

ers-mainly Frenchmen, with, a contingent of Germans-in central Paris, wherethey set up barricades and declared theirintent to overthrow the government ofLouis Philippe, the so-called bankers'king. This time Schapper and his Germancomrades were arrested, along with Blanqui and the other leaders.However, there was considerable popular sympathy for the insurgents, so LouisPhilippe decided simply to expel Schapper and the other German communists,who then went to London. I would liketo recount that two months after arrivingin England, Schapper and 2,000 other

,Mansell Collection

Storming of Bastillein July 1789 inspiredfighters againsttyranny around theworld. Overthrowand arrest ofRobespierre (left)five years latersignified triumphof Thermidorianreaction.

guys tried to storm Windsor Palace aiming to overthrow Queen Victoria. But thistime he decided to change his strategyand tactics. I'll discuss this a little later.What I want to emphasize here is howradical a change Marx underwent between 1841 and 1847. It was not simplyhis ideas about the world that changed,but every significant aspect of his publiclife and to a large extent his private life aswell. How and why did this young academic philosopher become a leader of aworking-class-based, communist movement aiming at the revolutionary overthrow of the existing European social and

political order? What was the relationship-positive or negative-between thephilosophical ideas of Hegel and whatwas later called scientific socialism?Two Paths from theFrench Revolution

To answer these questions one has togo back to the French Revolution. Forboth the political movements with whichthe young Marx was successively involved-the Young Hegelians and theCommunist League-had their origins inthe French Revolution and its 'extension to Germany through the Napoleonicempire. The youthful Hegel enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution,and as a mature and respected bourgeoisintellectual he became an ardent supporter of Napoleon, whom he dubbed"the world-soul on horseback." Here it'simportant to point out that Napoleon wasan ex-Jacobin and onetime protege ofRobespierre, whose memory he alwaysheld in high regard. For its part, the German League of the Just was rooted in thetheoretical, political and organizationaltradition begun by Gracchus Babeuf'sConspiracy of Equals of 1796, Babeufhimself having earlier been a Jacobinmilitant.In a sense, there were two paths leadingfrom the French Revolution to Marxism:a rightward path from Napoleon throughHegel to the Young Hegelians; and a leftward path leading from Babeuf andPhilippe Buonarroti through Blanqui tothe German League of the Just. These twopaths converged in 1847 when the formerYoung Hegelian intellectuals Marx andEngels effected a revolutionary regroupment with erstwhile German Babouvistmilitants to form the Communist League,whose doctrine and program was codifiedin the Communist Manifesto.Both Hegel and Babeuf were membersof that generation of young intellectualswho believed that with the French Revolution the principles of the Enlightenment were being transformed into reality.Decades later, when in his fifties, Hegelrecounted in a lecture to his students(published in The Philosophy of History[1956]) the apocalyptic atmosphere ushered in by the storming of the Bastilleand the Declaration of the Rights of Manand Citizen:

"The conception, the idea of Rightasserted its authority all at once, and theold framework of injustice could offer noresistance to its onslaught. A constitution, therefore, was established in harmony with the conception of Right, andon this foundation all future legislationwas to be based ... This was accordinglya glorious mental dawn. All thinkingbeings shared in the jubilation of thisepoch. Emotions of a lofty characterstirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through theworld, as if the reconciliation hetweenthe Divine and the Secular was now tirstaccomplished."

The belief that heaven was about todescend to earth necessarily led to a dismusionment among the youthful idealistswho had held this vision. Both Babeufand Hegel expressed this disillusionment,, albeit for very different reasons, in verydifferent ways and with yery differentconclusions. Babeuf maintained that theWORKERS VANGUARD


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French Revolution did not go far enough.He therefore inaugurated a movementand tradition defined by communist idealism and revolutionary voluntarism. Hegeldecided that the French Revolution hadgone too far, too fast; that the French people were not spiritually mature enough toachieve heaven on earth. He thus becamean advocate of gradual-very gradualreform from above. In his last years, hewrote in his 1821 work, The Philosophyof Right, that political change should besuch that "the advance from one state ofaffairs to another is tranquil in appearance and unnoticed. In this way a constitution changes over a period of time intosomething quite different from what itwas originally."Marx came to believe in communismand proletarian revolution and, in thatsense, embraced the Babouvist tradition.But he also adhered to Hegel's antiutopian realism. Like Hegel, he maintained that revolutionaries could not simply reconstruct the world at will accordingto their own moral ideals. In Marx's firstwork as a self-considered communist, in1844, he states: "It is not enough forthought to strive for realisation, realitymust itsel f strive towards thought" ("Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Ilitroduction," Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels, Collected Works,Volume 3 [1975]). In other words, mencan change society only insofar as societyitself has changed so as to make possibletheir goals and program.Communism is possible not becauseit is a moral ideal but because its economic preconditions have been createdby industrial capitalism along with asocial class-the proletariat-with avital interest in economic collectivism.Thus he and Engels wrote in their 1846work, The German Ideology:"Communism is for us not a state ofaffairs which is to be established, an idealto which reality [will] have to adjust it-

self. We call communism the real move-ment which abolishes the present state ofthings. The conditions of this movementresult from the now existing premise."Jacobin Idealism

To understand both the Hegelian component of Marxism as well as its Babouvist heritage, we have to take a closer

Gracchus Babeufpublicized earlycommunist ideasin his journal, waslater executed forleading 1796insurrection byConspiracy ofEquals.

look at the French Revolution, especiallyits ideological dimensions during itsmost radical phase, the Jacobin regimeof 1793-94. If the young Hegel, viewingthe upheaval in France from across theRhine, believed that heaven was about todescend on earth, imagine the apocalyptic fervor of the men actually leading therevolution.The Jacobin leader Saint-Just declaredthat happiness was a new idea in Europe. Obviously, he was not talking aboutthe momentary happiness of individuals:long before the French Revolution, menand women were happy when they fell inlove, when they had a healthy infantwhom they wanted, when they got drunkand partied all night (though perhaps theywere not so happy the next morning).Saint-Just was talking about collectivehappiness as a permanent social condition. He meant that the French democraticrepublic was the first state in Europecommitted to the well-being of all its cit-30 JANUARY 1998

BibliothSque Nationale Musee CarnavaletJacobins attempted to replace Christianity with new state religion based on deism, expressed in artworks of the time:"Regenerated Man" triumphant over superstition (left), "Feast of the Supreme Being."izens, to ensuring them liberty, equalityand fraternity.More than a century after the FrenchRevolution, Leon Trotsky called the riseof the Stalinist bureaucracy in the SovietUnion in the 1920s a "Thermidorian reaction." When you think about it, this isan odd term used in no other context. Itdoes not derive from a person (there wasno Joe Thermidor), place or movement.It derives from the month that Robespierre was overthrown by a right-wingJacobin faction. But you might say, thereis no month called Thermidor in French.Not today there isn't. However, in 1792the leaders of the French Revolutiondecided to signify their total break withthe past by scrapping the Gregorian calendar and beginning world history anewwith the year I, written in Roman numerals. They also gave new names to themonths, such as Thermidor, Fructidorand the like.Along similar lines, the Jacobins attempted to establish a new state religion,based on deism, which would replaceChristianity. Robespierre's speech proposing this new civic religion is a goodexpression of the Jacobin world view. Asa true son of the Enlightenment, he begins

by pointing to the enormous progress inscience and technology over the previousfew decades: "Compare the imperfectlanguage of hieroglyphics with the miracles of printing .... Measure the dis tancebetween the astronomical observations ofthe wise men of Asia and the discoveriesof Newton." He then goes on:"All has changed in the physical order;all must change in the moral and politi

cal order. One half of the world revolu-tion is already achieved, the other h,alfhas yet to be accomplished.... '"The French people appear to have out-stripped the rest of the human race bytwo thousand years; one might even betempted to regard them as a distinct spe-cies among the rest. Europe is kneeling tothe shadows of the tyrants whom we arepunishing."In Europe a ploughman or an artisan isan animal trained to do the pleasure of anoble; in France the nobles seek to transform themselves into ploughmen andartisans, and cannot even attain thishonor."Europe cannot conceive of life without

kings and nobles; and we cannot con-ceive of it with them."-reproduced in George Rude,ed" Robespiene (1967)Robespierre concludes by proposing thefollowing legislation:"Article I. The French people recognizesthe existence of the Supreme Being, andthe immortality of the soul."Article II. It recognizes that the bestway of worshipping the Supreme Beingis to do one's duties as a man."Article III. It considers that the mostimportant of these duties are: to detestbad faith and despotism, to punishtyrants and traitors, to assist the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend theoppressed, to do all the good one can toone's neighbor, and to behave with justice towards all men."In other words, the Jacobins believed itwas possible by law to instill in theFrench people unselfish concern for theirfellow man; to use the language of theday, to instill "patriotism" and "virtue"as the dominant principles of social andpolitical life.The Jacobins represented a revolutionary minority of the French bourgeoisie.They did not come to power throughgaining a majority of the votes in elections to the revolutionary parliament, theConvention, which would have requiredsupport from a majority of the peasantry.Rather, they came to power by organizing an insurrection of the Parisian lowerclasses-the so-called sans-culotteswhich overthrew the more moderate bourgeois faction, the Girondins, then governing the country. Consequently, theRobespierre regime had to conciliate theParis artisan proletariat which constitutedits main base of support against its manyenemies, both within and without France.The Jacobin regime was. waging waragainst most of the rest of Europe aswell as civil wars against royalist forcesin key regions of France. These wars inevitably caused enormous economic dislocations and shortages. The combinedpressure of the sans-culottes from belowand the dislocations of war forced therevolutionary government to institute aprimitive version of a controlled economy, for example, setting a maximumprice for basic foodstuffs such as bread.Given its idealistic ideology, the Jacobins did not justify these policies onpragmatic grounds-as temporary emergency measures-but as a manifestationof the fundamental rights of man. ThusRobespierre declared:"Which is the first object of our polity?To guarantee the imprescriptible rightsof man. And which is the first of theserights? That of existence. The first so-cial law is, therefore, that which assuresevery member of society of the means ofexistence; all others are subordinated toit; property has only been founded andprotected to give it greater strength."-RobespierreIf , as Robespierre maintained, the rightto exist permits and even justifies restrictions on private property, it is but a logical extension to maintain that the right of

existence demands the abolition of private property altogether. That extensionwas soon made by ex-Jacobin militants such as Babeuf, Buonarroti, SylvanMarichal and others.But before discussing this I want tosay something about the Jacobin "Terror," since it played a central role in thedevelopment of Hegel's political attitudes and theories. Over 90 percent ofthe people executed under the "Terror"were in the two regions of France besetby full-scale civil war. They were peoplewho were captured arms in hand fightingagainst the revolutionary army. Peoplewere not executed for merely expressingopposition to the Jacobin governmentand its doctrines. Catholic priests werenot killed or imprisoned for giving sacraments to the faithful, or whatever Catholic priests do with the faithful. (Not partof my personal experience, thank god!)Some Catholic priests were killed forinciting peasants to insurrect against therevolutionary government.However, counterrevolutionary propaganda-liberal as well as reactionaryportrayed the Jacobin "Terror" as whatwould later be called "totalitarian thoughtcontrol." The Englishman Edmund Burkedenounced Robespierre and his colleagues for seeking to establish a reign ofvirtue through a reign of terror. This wasa lie, but a lie that was widely accepted,especially outside France, and one whichhas been perpetuated and has remainedwidely accepted ever since.The Babouvist Tradition

During the Jacobin regime, GracchusBabeuf served as a local official administering the food supply in a working-classdistrict in Paris. Thus on the basis of hisown firsthand experience he recognizedthat attempts by the revolutionary government to regulate the capitalist market inthe interests ofthe workers and poor werecontinued on page 6

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Enlightenment...(continued from page 5)at best inadequate and at worst totallyineffectual. Merchants evaded the pricemaximum by hoarding and selling athigher prices on what we would now callthe black market. After Robespierre wasoverthrown, all economic controls wereabolished, and the conditions of the workers in Paris and other French cities deteriorated'into ever greater wretchedness.Considering these developments during the Thermidorian reaction, Babeufconcluded that the right to existencewas fundamentally incompatible with theright of private property. He thereforedeveloped a crude system of communism.This was a communism of distribution,not production-though Babeuf did advocate agricultural collectivism ratherthan peasant smallholding. In Babeuf'sview, peasants and workers would produce as before but would deliver theirproducts to government warehouses ratherthan sell them on the market. The government would then distribute these goodsequally and in proportion to need, Thosefamilies with more children would receive more food, clothing, etc.The Conspiracy of Equals in 1796 wasan attempt to realize this communist program through an armed insurrectioncentrally based on the artisan proletariat of Paris-against the Thermidorianregime. The movement was suppressedby the authorities before it reached thestage of insurrection and the principalleaders were arrested and tried. WhileBabeuf was sentenced to death, anotherleading figure, Buonarroti, was onlyimprisoned for a time, possibly becausehis mistress had seduced one of thejudges.For the next 40 years of his life, Buonarroti sought to keep alive the principles and program of Jacobin communism,first in the hostile climate of the Napoleonic empire and then under the evenmore reactionary conditions of the postNapoleonic restoration. In 1828, he published in Belgium a history of the Conspiracy of Equals, including many ofits original documents, a book whichbecame known as "the bible of revolutionaries." At one point the young Marxconsidered translating this book intoGerman.In 1830, the ultra-reactionary Bourbonregime in France was overthrown by apopular revolution and replaced by theless repressive monarchical regime ofLouis Philippe. For a time the politicalsituation in France was relatively open.Buonarroti thus returned to the countryof the Revolution and was able to intersect and influence a new generation ofleftist militants, the' outstanding figureamong them being Auguste Blanqui.At that time there was a sizable population of emigre German workers in Paris,and a number of these were won to Jacobin communism and came under the swayof Blanqui's secret societies. Central tothe B1anquist strategy was what might becalled military vanguardism, the belief

Institute for Social History,Amsterdam

Jacobin communistAuguste Blanquiparticipated in July1830 revolution whichbrought down ultrareactionary FrenchBourbon regime.

that the bold action of a small group ofrevolutionary militants could inspire themasses to rise up in revolt against theoppressive monarchical regimes.However, after experiencing defeat inthe streets of Paris in 1839 and beingexpelled from France to England, leading German communists such as KarlSchapper and Joseph Moll reconsideredthe Blanquist strategy. They concludedthat the mass of workers had not heededthe revolutionaries' call to arms becausethey did not understand and therefore didnot support the communist program.Consequently, adherents of the Leagueof the Just-which was centered in London but also existed in Paris and otherEuropean cities-now devoted themselves to propaganda and education, postponing the revolution to an indefinitefuture, Ironically, it was the former leftHegelian intellectuals Marx and Engelswho had to convince the former revolutionary adventurers Schapper and Mollthat popular insurrections in Germanyand France were possible in the historical short term.During the 1970s, I gave a lectureseries under the heading "Marxism andthe Jacobin Communist Tradition," whichwas published and is available in thebound volumes of Young Spartacus. Sowhat I know and think about this subjectis accessible in far greater detail andanalytical elaboration than I can conveyto you today. Therefore I'm going todevote the rest of this talk to Hegel andhis school, the intellectual and politicaldevelopment of the young Marx and certain controversies about this. I'm weighting this educational in this way notbecause I consider the left-Hegelian component more important in understandingMarxism than the Jacobin component-Idon't think that-but rather because the

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H. Roger-Violletleft-Hegelian component is far harder tounderstand and has been subject to muchconfusionism and mystification.Hegel's Political Biography

I think the easiest way to approachHegel-and I said easiest, not easy-is tofirst consider his political biography.Before we descend to the mind-bendingdepths of Hegelian philosophy, we shouldlook at the major historical events whichaffected him and how he responded tothem.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wasborn in 1770 in the principality of Swabia

trampled in the dust, but will themselvestake and appropriate them."-quoted in Shlomo Avineri,Hegel's Theory of heModern State (1972)However, over the next several yearsthis naive democratic idealism and optimism dissipated and were replaced by amoderate liberalism which for Hegel represented a reconciliation with social andpolitical reality as he viewed it. A keyfactor in Hegel's rightward evolution washis extremely negative reaction to the

Jacobin regime in France. In part thisrepresented a reaction to what actuallyhappened in France at this time, and inpart it was based on a common misunderstanding of this crucial historicalepisode.Even when he was a democratic idealist, Hegel opposed social leveling andregarded the right to property as animportant guarantor of individual liberty.Thus he denounced what he termed"sans-culottism" in France. At the sametime, he believed that Robespierre andhis colleagues had resorted to mass terror in order to impose on the French people their own philosophical principles,such as deism, and their concept of revolutionary morality. He later wrote thatthe French Revolution represented"for the first time in human history theprodigious spectacle of the overthrow ofthe constitution of a great actual stateand its complete reconstruction ab initio[from the beginning] on the basis of purethought alone, after the destruction of allexisting and given material. The will ofthe refounders was to give it what theyalleged was a purely rational basis, but itwas only abstractions that were beingused; the Idea was lacking;. and theexperiment ended in the maximum offrightfulness and terror."-Hegel's Philosophy of Right

As a criticism or even understandingof what actually happened during theFrench Revolution, Hegel's view wasprofoundly wrong. But as a criticism ofJacobin ideology, Hegel was in this

Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli, MilanRadical democrat Giuseppe Mazzini strove to unite Italy. A short-lived RomanRepublic was proclaimed in February 1849.in southwestern Germany, a relativelyeconomically advanced region in thatthen-divided country. His father was asenior government bureaucrat involved infinance and trade. Hegel's backgroundwas thus typical of the German bourgeoisie of the Lutheran persuasion. He waseducated in the spirit of the GermanEnlightenment, which was more idealistic, more concerned with individualmorality and spiritual values, so to speak,than the English and French versions ofthe Enlightenment.As previously noted, he enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolutionand believed that the rights of man wereabout to triumph on the German side ofthe Rhine as well. In 1795, he wrote tohis friend and fellow philosopher-intraining, Friedrich Schelling:"I believe that there is no better sign ofthe times than the fact that mankind assuch is being represented with so muchreverence, it is a proof that the halowhich has surrounded the heads of theoppressors and gods of the earth has disappeared. The philosophers demonstratethis dignity [of man]; the people willlearn to feel it and will not merelydemand their rights, which have been

respect on the mark. The Jacobins didbelieve they could sweep away the oldsociety and rebuild the world anewaccording to their ideals-not only interms of social, economic and political institutions but in all fundamentalaspects of popular consciousness. Robespierre, Saint-Just and their comradesbelieved that through an act of will oreven an act of law they could eradicate almost 2,000 years of Christianity,respect for traditional authority and evenindividual egoism. Hegel was right thatno government-even a revolutionarygovernment-possesses absolute freedomto reconstruct society according to itsown principles and ideals. As Marx laterwrote in a very Hegelian passage in his1852 work, The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte:"Men make their own history, but theydo not make it just as they please; theydo not make it under circumstances cho-, sen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given andtransmitted from the past. The traditionof all the dead generations weighs like anightmare on the brain of the living."

lTO BE CONTINUED]WORKERS VANGUARD


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New York Post Squeals asReaganite PigD'Souza's ViewsBlasted at NYUThe following was issued as a leafleton January 21 by the New York Sparta-cus Youth Club.Dinesh D'Souza, a racist ideologue and

former "policy analyst" for Ronald Reagan, was sponsored to speak at New YorkUniversity (NYU) last December by theultraright Young American Foundationand the Intercollegiate Review. But whilehis sponsors had hoped to provide aforum for D'Souza to promote his newbook, Ronald Reagan: How an OrdinaryMan Became an Extraordinary Leader,this mouthpiece for vicious racist reactiongot a suitably hostile reception from amultiracial crowd of some 100 students.D'Souza is most notorious for his earlier book, The End of Racism. Oozingwith a self-righteous appreciation of hisown intellectual prowess, D'Souza derides blacks as "destructive and pathological" and deserving of what he so politely

terms "rational discrimination." Dedicated to his wife Dixie, D'Souza's bookrails against a supposed "resistance toacademic achievement" by Americanblacks. This is really rich coming from a

man whose hero, Ronald Reagan, is aposter child for dimness. Now D'Souza'sracist programs are largely being carriedout by the Clinton White House.At the NYU event, D'S ouza's revoltingalibis for all-sided capitalist reactionfrom the smashing of the air traffic controllers union by Reagan in 1981, to thestarvation of single black welfare mothers and their children, to celebrating theravages of capitalist counterrevolutionnow sweeping East Europe and the former Soviet Union-provoked a raucousdebate. A week later, the editorialists ofthe New York Post weighed in, demanding"punitive measures" against the studentswho protested D'Souza. These hired penswho otherwise spend their time uncovering closet pinkos everywhere from theNew York Times obituary page to JohnSweeney's AFL-CIO bureaucracy to eventhe Clinton White House argued, "I f anysuch thing as school discipline exists anylonger, they should face expulsion." ThePost editorial especially targeted a "substantial group of student radicals-including the local Sparticist [sic] League,the Zulu Nation and assorted socialists."30 JANUARY 1998

Actually Zulu Nation, a multiracialstudent group, was barred by campussecurity from entering the event because they had arrived late. But, in thelingo of tabloid trash, "Zulu" is a highimpact word designed to connote imagesof "lawless" blacks, or in D'Souza'swords, "ignoble savages." We don'tknow where the Post gets its information. But as we pointed out in a letterof protest to the Post (which theyhave refused to print) published below,their incorrect spelling of our organization's name is characteristic of the FBI(see "And 'i ' = FBI," WV No. 340, 21October 1983).As a member of the Spartacus YouthClub argued during the discussion period,D'Souza's "intellectual" apologias forracist reaction go hand in hand with hisadulation of Reagan's Cold War driveaimed at destroying the former workersstates in the Soviet Union and EastEurope. Although bureaucratically deformed, economically mismanaged andultimately strangled by Stalinist bureaucracies who looked for "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism, these states em-

- - 4 1 SocialistWorker. . . . . .__ ..... ftcMay 1988

,Just{i$Sooa!lSIi weIcOffiEiJI1t;defeat 01 the U.S. in Vietnam, wewelcome the defeat of the Russiansit;' Afghanistan. It will give heart oall those insiqglhe.W$$Randih"""Eastern Europe who want to breakthe rule of Stalin's heirs.BuUbLs...OOes

Reagan supporte dcounterrevolutionaryAfghan mujahedin, sodid "socialist" ISO.bodied enormous gains for the workingclass internationally. That is why we asMarxist revolutionaries fought tooth andnail for the defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the East European deformed workers states againstimperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we understood that such a defense mandated a proletarian political revolution to replace theStalinist bureaucracies with a revolutionary internationalist leadership, like that ofLenin and Trotsky'S Bolshevik Partywhich had led the Russian working classto victory in the great October Revolutionof 1917.A large contingent of members of theInternational Socialist Organization (ISO)also came out to protest D'Souza. Itwas notable that while they heckled hisovertly racist remarks, the ISO fell silentwhen D'Souza touted Reagan's antiCommunist war drive. But, then, howcould they protest when they had stood onthe same side of the barricades as the U.S,imperialists-fromsupporting Polish Solidarnosc, the only "union" Ronald Reaganever loved, t o cheering for the CIA-armed

The" Publie Policy Series ofNew York "niversit }'

Distorting D'SouzaScurrilous editorial inRupert Murdoch ragscreams for expulsion ofanti-racist students whoexposed Dinesh D'Souza,apologist for racism andReagan reaction.

Moor York (aod ODd""-Retoou'oGIber liDo, be bad. ". _beeo-...a r L ~ f a r I e IIWIIbon rL__ Bat be . . . . .w i iD--IIJ---"""~ " I b e " " ' t . t : . . " C . . . ~ 16 December 97 which be aItlI


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Workers Power's "United Front".with CounterrevolutionThe following polemic centered on theAustralian Workers Power group-affiliated to the British group of the samename-is reprinted from AustralasianSpartacist No. 162 (Su mmer 1997198),published by our comrades of the Spar-tacist League ofAustralia.

SPASiTACISTThe centrist Workers Power (WP) groupis clearly in turmoil. By their own re-'port (Workers Power, OctoberlDecember1997), the phoney "League for a Revolutionary Communist International" (LRCI)

emerged from their August conferencedeeply divided over the class nature of thestate, the overturn of capitalism in EastEurope and elsewhere after World War IIand the counterrevolutionary restorationof capitalism in the USSR.For Marxists, these are fundamental anddefining questions, at the core of a revolutionary program. But for the LRCIthey are merely academic debates. Thus"changes in analysis" can be safely relegated to a future issue of their international journal, not due for publication untilJanuary 1998. Yet, as a companion articlemarking the 80th anniversary of the 1917Bolshevik Revolution ("The Left and Capitalist Restoration") makes clear, WP stillseeks to justify their sordid history of support to various forces of capitalist counterrevolution, especially Boris Yeltsin's proimperialist countercoup of August 1991.Seizing on the pathetic "coup" attemptby the "gang of eight" Kremlin bureaucrats, Yeltsin's ascendancy, backed by theU.S. and every other imperialist power,subsequently proved to be the key eventin the destruction of the Soviet Union. Inthe absence of mass working-class resistance, the period of open counterrevolution ushered in by Yeltsin culminated inthe creation of a bourgeois state. Capitalist restoration was and is an unparalleledcatastrophe for the working class, notonly in the former Soviet Union but internationally, freeing up the imperialists tounleash attacks on the working masses ofthe advanced industrial countries and thealready savagely oppressed peoples'of thesemicolonial world.In 1991 Workers Power called for a"united front with the Yeltsin forces,"declaiming: "I t was necessary to form acommon front of resistance, a militaryand class struggle bloc with those forcesand with their leaders .... A part of thisunited front call would have been to fightalongside the 'democrats' and the Yel-

8

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tsinites to defend all the centres of resistance to the coup including the RSFSRparliament (the 'White House')" (Work-ers Power [Britain], November 1991).One of their members iiterally stood onYeltsin's White House barricades. Theydid so "no matter what the socially counterrevolutionary nature of Yeltsin's pro-

t i ' _ ~ ~ f ' Hands offLithuania- - ~ - . , " " " . .....

"for blocking with all those forcesopposing the coup makers (CSE)"? "Itwas because the CSE represented themost serious immediate threat to themeagre democratic gains that the workers had wrung from the bureaucracy overthe previous years." Thus in the name ofdefending "democratic gains" WP blocks

Workers Hammer

British Workers Power at 1990 London picket (top) in support of Balticcounterrevolutionaries. Centrist WP joined with anti-Soviet SWP, echOingimperialist chorus for fascist-infested Lithuanian nationalists ( a b o v ~ ) . gramme, no matter how many spivs andracketeers joined the barricades."We Spartacists of the InternationalCommunist League denounced WP andits ilk as "Traitors, not Trotskyists" for. this criminal betrayal. It is no surprise,therefore, that in seeking to "justify"their actions WP aims its polemical firelargely at the Spartacists.

WP adamantly denies that they "'supported Yeltsin' or had 'illusions in bourgeois democracy' as the Spartacists areso fond of claiming." But why was WP

~ S P A R T A C J S T ] u ' ! ' \ @ # ! ! i i f j~ q H @ H " d f i ' @ l i .'''tfjj@ffiMIil1fUID fi ll 'hf'IfOOttttt

How theSovietWorkers StateWas Stranaled

" ' U ' l U ~ t 199] ...... "ciHPub l i .II11 I\ lCO,BOXl371GPO,!i leI lYOrk ,IIYlO1l6 II.

with ... U.S. imperialist chieftain GeorgeBush, who certainly was among "allthose forces opposing the coup makers"!"Democracy" versus "Stalinist totalitarianism" was precisely the counterrevolutionary rallying cry of the capitalists andtheir social-democratic front men.Indeed, WP views Yeltsin's counterrevolution purely through the eyes of aLaborite parliamentarist. Against "thepolitically bankrupt Spartacists [who]argue that Yeltsin coming to power ..wasthe decisive turning point in the restoration of a capitalist state," WP paintsYeltsin's countercoup as "a simple changeof government." To this day they deny thatcapitalism has been restored in the landsof the former Soviet Union. Russia, theysay, is a "moribund workers state," apeculiar, classless formulation inventedby Workers Power to deny that capitalistcounterrevolution has taken place, as acover for their support to the restorationist forces. This position has made WPlook foolish as it obviously flies in theface of reality-so they have begun tomodify it, declaring that most of EastEurope, which they also labelled "moribund workers states," are now capitalist.For Workers Power, the essential feature of a workers state is the degree ofnationalisation. Claiming that the classnature of the state is merely a reflection ofthe economy, WP tries to make an ally ofTrotsky, quoting (more or less) his state-

ment that "the nationalisation of the land,the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with themonopoly of foreign trade constitute thebasis of the Soviet social structure." Stateowned collectivised property, central planning and state monopoly of foreign tradeare indeed the defining features of proletarian property forms-the necessary economic foundations for the development ofa classless, socialist society on an international scale. But widespread nationalisations alone do not equal the destruction ofcapitalism. And in general, in periods ofrevolution or counterrevolution, the economic forms can be, and often are, at variance with the political character of thestate. Trotsky specifically addressed thisquestion in "Not a Workers' and Not aBourgeois State?" (November 1937):"Should a bourgeois counterrevolutionsucceed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would have tobase itself upon the nationalised t!conomy. But what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economyand the state mean? It means a revolu-tion or a counterrevolution. The victoryof one class over another signifies thatit will reconstruct the economy in theinterests of the victors."Even by WP's own false criteria, theyhave a problem, and are obliged to admitthat "The monopoly on foreign financeand trade, the planning ministries andmany state-owned industries have allbeen dismantled." So now they are forcedto fall back on an absurdity: "Difficultiesin constructing and enforcing capitalistcredit mechanisms mean that thousandsof firms continue to operate when thedomination of the law of value would dictate that they should be closed down. In nocapitalist country would loss-makingproduction be tolerated on such a scale."Have they never heard of corporatebailouts?The Russian QuestionPoint Blank

WP sneeringly mocks as "one of themost memorable pearls of Spartacist wisdom" our statement that the August 1991events "appear to have been decisive inthe direction of development of the SU,but only those who are under the sway ofc a p i t a l i ~ t ideology would have been hastyto draw this conclusion at the time"(Spartacist No. 47-48, Winter 1992-93).For WP, this means we say "Yeltsin'sAugust coup was decisive but it wouldhave been wrong to have recognised it atthe time!" Only those who forsake theproletariat as incapable of becoming aclass mobilised for itself through theinstrumentof a Leninist party would haveinstantly written off the Soviet degenerated workers state.For WP, Yeltsin's triumph was a foregone conclusion. We, however, stand withAmerican Trotskyist James P. Cannonwho wrote:"We do not examine the Russian revolution and what remains of its great conquests as though it were a bug under aglass. We have an interest! We take partin the fight!"-"Speech on the RussianQuestion," Struggle for aProletarian Party (1943)The ICL distributed tens of thousands ofleaflets proclaiming: "Soviet Workers:Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!"Ours was the first statement widely distributed in the Soviet Union in oppositionto Yeltsin's restorationist drive. We saidthat what was necessary in August 1991was a call on Moscow workers to clean

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out the counterrevolutionary rabble onYeltsin's barricades. Such an independentmobilisation of the workers could haveopened the road to political revolutionthrough a showdown with the imperialistbacked forces of capitalist restoration.While recognising that the state powerhad been effectively fractured, we lookedto spark working-class action in defenceof collectivised property.Unable to conceive of an independentproletarian policy, Workers Power claimsthat if "Yeltsin taking power was decisive in the restoration of capitalism, thensurely the Spartacists made a mistake.They should have blocked with the Stalinists who opposed him." Spicing uptheir polemic with a falsehood, WPclaims we have never explained why wedidn't:This was an all-sided squalid affair inwhich neither side opposed capitalist"market reforms," i.e., counterrevolution.The "coup plotters" only wanted a moregradual, controlled introduction of capitalism, without the democratic trappingsof glasnost (openness). As we said in apolemic against the pseudo-Trotskyistapologists for Yeltsin:"The coup plotters were not only irresolute but didn't want to unleash the forcesthat could have defeated the moreextreme counterrevolutionaries, for thatcould have led to a civil war if the Yel-tsinites really fought back. And in anarmed struggle pitting outright restorationists against recalcitrant elements ofthe bureaucracy, defence of the collectivised economy would have been placedon the agenda whatever the Stalinists'intentions."- "Cheerleaders for Yeltsin'sCounterrevolution,"ASp No.143, Summer 199111992

WP recalls that "after only three dayswe immedIately called for a breaking ofthe united front with the Yeltsin forcesand advocated mobilising opposition totheir 'seizure' of power." They sniff thatthis "falsifies the Spartacist claim that wepolitically supported Yeltsin." Actually, itproves exactly what we said of them: during the most critical moments of August1991, they knowingly supported Yeltsin'sforces of imperialist-backed capitalistcounterrevolution. Now, with boundlesscynicism, they try to claim they politically opposed it.WP's "Solidarity withSolidarnoscCounterrevolution"

WP's road to Yeltsin's barricades waswell prepared. As we have said:"While formally adopting a position ofSoviet defencism in 1980 over Afghanistan, WP condemned the Soviet intervention against imperialist-backed feudalreaction as 'counterrevolutionary' (lateralso denouncing the Soviet withdrawalas 'counterrevolutionary'). In 1981, they'critically' championed Solidarnosc evenwhile admitting that Solidarnosc inpower would mean capitalist restoration.In 1989, while claiming to be againstthe capitalist annexation of the formerDDR by the Fourth Reich of Germanimperialism, Workers Power sided withcounterrevolution at every crucial stage.The following year, they supported theanti-Soviet, fascist-infested nationalistmovement in Lithuania and were caught

30 JANUARY 1998

He Who Pays the PiperCalls the TuneThe following article is translatedfrom Spartakist No. 130 (December1997-January 1998), publication of theSpartakist Workers Party of Germany,section of the International CommunistLeague.:t!,;i f!13 It)For Marxists, who understand thatthe bourgeois state must be smashedthrough socialist revolution, the fight forthe independence of the workers movement is a question of principle. For thatvery reason we accept no financial support from the capitalist state. Not so the"League for a Revolutionary Communist International" (LRCI) and its Austrian section ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt

out collaborating with Russian fascists insponsoring a 'trade union' speaking tourby one Yuri Butchenko."- "Chickens Come Home toRoost Over Balkan Betrayal,"

ASp No. 157, Summer 1995-96Today WP is particularly sensitive onthe question of Polish Solidarnosc. In ananti-Communist lie that could just aseasily have emanated from the "freetrade unions" gang at AS IS [Austra lianSecurity Intelligence Service] or one ofthe CIA's labour fronts, WP says that wewere in "support of the murder of Polish workers by Stalinists in 1981:" ByWP's lights, opposition to this capitalistrestorationist "union" (favoured by theCIA, the pope, Ronald Reagan, MargaretThatcher and then Labor prime ministerBob Hawke) could only be Stalinist.Acknowledging that all the "dominanttendencies" in Solidarnosc sought therestoration of capitalism, WP concludedthat this did "not mean that we do notsolidarise with Solidarnosc."At its 1981 congress it was clear thatSolidarnosc had consolidated around aprogram of clerical reaction and capitalistrestoration. It took up the CIA-inspiredcalls for "free elections" and "free tradeunions." We Spartacists said that thiscompany union for the Vatican, CIA andWestern bankers was now making anopen bid for power based on a programfor capitalist restoration. We said, forthrightly, "I f the Kremlin Stalinists, in theirnecessarily brutal, stupid way, intervenemilitarily .. we will support this. And wetake responsibility in advance for this;whatever the idiocies and atrocities theywill commit, we do not flinch fromdefending the crushing of Solidarity'Scounterrevolution" (WVNo. 289, 25 September 1981).While we stood militarily with the Po-

AP

Yeltsin on barricadesof counterrevolution,August 1991 (left);ICL leaflet proclaimed:"Soviet Workers:Defeat Yeltsin-BushCounterrevolution!"ICL supporters raisedbanner of TrotskyistFourth International atNovember 1991Revolution Day rallyin Moscow.

(ASt-Workers Viewpoint; in Germany,Gruppe Arbeitermacht [GAM-Workers Power Group]). The VienneseAlliance of Alternative Publications released documentation on the Internet which shows that the bimonthlyArbeiterinnenstandpunkt as well as theLRCI's German-language theoreticaljournal, Revolutioniirer Marxismus, arefunded by the Austrian state. When weconfronted a member of ASt at Vienna University during our subscriptiondrive there this year, he proudly confirmed the receipt of state money.In November 1996, the Austriansocial-democratic SPO successfully prevented an attempt by its Christian Democratic OVP coalition partner to overturnthe subsidy of the AStlGAM publicationsand other "left alternative" papers as not

lish government in spiking Solidarnosc'bid for power, we said that the Stalinistcrackdown would only delay the day ofreckoning, for Solidarnosc would have tobe defeated politically within the workingclass. Thus our call to stop Solidarnosccounterrevolution was integrally linked tothe need to forge a Trotskyist party thatcould lead a proletarian political revolution to oust the Polish Stalinist bureaucracy. WP is so warped by the pressuresof bourgeois society that they screambloody murder over our defence of Soviettanks that were never sent to Poland, butthey cheered the Yeltsin counterrevolution which has brought a real living heIIto workers and especially women in theformer Soviet Union and East Europethe dramatic plunge in life expectancy,the rise of pogroms and communal fratricide, the rollback of abortion rights.Centrist Confusionism andCliffite Recidivism

WP originated in Britain in a 1975 splitfrom Tony Cliff's virulently anti-SovietInternational Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party). Born of capitulation tothe imperialists' genocidal war againstNorth Korea, the Cliffites labelled theSoviet Union "state capitalist" to denyany basis for its defence. In 1980, amonth after the Soviet intervention intoAfghanistan, WP rejected "state capitalism" and characterised the USSR as adegenerated workers state, a step to theleft. A classic example of what Trotskycalled the "crystallised confusion" of centrism, WP wrote that "We oppose theinvasion of Afghanistan" while opiningthat it would be "tactically wrong for revolutionaries .. to dema nd the immediatewithdrawal of Soviet troops."After a decade of Cold War anti-

6IOilnereHb CnaptruroallOO I PARTACIST I~ , . . ~

"worthy of support." The SPO has been inthe government in Austria for decades: hewho pays the piper calls the tune. The AStwas scheduled to receive not less than135,000 Austrian Schilling ($11,100) forthe 1996 fiscal year. With the corruptAustrian state as its paymaster, whocould wonder about the current ASt frontpage on the 1998 presidential elections:"Don't back down: SPO must runcandidate!"Two years ago the SPO introducedthe harshest racist immigration lawsin Europe, thereby providing Haidar'sNazi FPO with a mass following. Echoing the SPO, the ASt and GAM whitewash this dangerous fascist fUhrer as"right-populist," just as they did in the1980s when they alibied Nazi warcriminal and former Austrian presidentKurt Waldheim.The dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists is their attitudetoward the bourgeois state. In acceptingmoney from the government, the Austrian LRCI section apes the reformistSocial Democracy, whose program andpractice is to administer the capitaliststate in the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Communism, and especially now in thisperiod of "death of communism" bourgeois triumphalism, WP has moved increasingly to the right. Hailing "an end todecades of Stalinist dictatorship," theirstatement that "All genuine revolutionaries rejoiced at the downfall of thesebureaucratic, totalitarian monstrosities" isof a piece with the SWP's obscene gloating that "Communism has collapsed ... Itis a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing" (Socialist Worker [Britain],31 August 1991).In the spirit of its Cliffite heritage, theLRCI's August congress took up thequestion of "the nature of the state formin the degenerate workers' states" involving "the question of whether the statemachine was smashed, in the Marxistsense of the term, during the postwar overthrow of capitalism in EasternEurope, China, Indochina and Cuba, andthe related question of whether the statemachine had to be smashed to allow capitalism to be restored in the post-1989period." In a word, their answer is, "No."

WP recognises that Cuba, China andYugoslavia became workers states. Nevertheless, WP's long-standing position isthat "Castro and co, like Mao and Titobefore them, carried out a counterrevolutionary overthrow of capitalism" (Trotskyist International, Summer 1988). Soimbued is WP with social-democratichorror of their own bourgeoisie's hue andcry about communist "totalitarianism"that they ludicrously claim that everyoverthrow of capitalism since the RussianRevolutiol1 has been "counterrevolutionary." And what could a counterrevolutionary overthrow of capitalism mean-except, perhaps, a return to feudalism?Two years ago, WP's refusal to take a

continued on page 10Spartacist

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Immigrants...(continued from page 1)new powers, allowing them to summarilyexclude visitors and bar them from reentry for up to five years. So tight havethe border restrictions become thateven many Canadian citizens have beendenied entry. Now airports have begunimplementing new computerized procedures to screen for "potential terrorists," clearly targeting travellers from theArab world, Africa and other regionswho fit the government's racist "profile"for "terrorism."Clinton's 1996 "Anti-Terrorism andEffective Death Penalty Act" greatlyexpanded not only the range of federaloffenses punishable by the racist deathpenalty but also those offenses-some asminor as shoplifting-which can getlegal residents deported. The draconiansweep of this law was recently spotlighted by the case of 43-year-old NewYork restaurant manager Jesus Collado,who moved here from the DominicanRepublic when he was a youth. Collado

was seized by the INS last springand threatened with deportation on thegrounds that 23 years earlier he had beensentenced to one year's probation, forhaving had sex with a 15-year-old girlfriend! A victim of both state racismand the reactionary anti-sex witchhunt,Collado was locked up in an INS dungeon for six months before an outcry ofprotest won his release.While the wretchedly chauvinist American labor bureaucracy joins with capitalist politicians in ranting against "foreign"workers stealing "American" jobs, theassault on immigrants has nothing to dowith "saving" jobs. American capitalismhas long relied on undocumented immigrants to provide the labor for physicallydemanding, dangerous jobs that otherswon't touch-an estimated 40 percent ofthe country's two million farm laborersare "illegal a:liens." Indeed, one effect ofmilitarizing the border with Mexico is toallow through only young, physically fitmales who are capable of working ingrinding farm labor, by keeping out women and children who can't cross throughtreacherous, hilly terrain. Moreover, under a 1990 law, rich people can literally

WV PhotoWatsonville, California march in support of strawberry workers' organizingdrive, April 1997. AFL-CIO tops refuse to unleash union power to defend andorganize immigrant workers.

WorkersPower ..(continued from page 9)stand for military defence of the BosnianSerbs under massive NATO bombingblew apart the LRCI as most of theirNew Zealand group and all of their LatinAmerican supporters split away. Revealing a continuing political schism, Workers Power reports that "At the FourthCongress, the former minority positionsecured a narrow majority. The Congressadopted the view tqat the bureaucraticStalinist overturns took place without the

Contents include: Full Citizenship Rightsfor All Immigrants!Immigration andRacist "Fortress Europe" Farrakhan and theSudan Slave Trade Black Churches TorchedAcross the SouthMobilize Labor/Black Powerto Smash Racist Terror! Courageous FighterAgainst Racist TerrorRobert F. Williams, 1925-1996 NYC Transit "Workfare" DealEnslaving the Poor,Busting the Unions

$1 (48 pages)Black History is sentto all Workers Vanguardsubscribers

smashing of the bourgeois form of stateapparatus." Does this mean that capitalism was not really destroyed in EastEurope, Cuba, etc. Ul la Cliff)? Or doesit mean that capitalism can be overthrown without smashing "the bourgeoisform of state," an open repudiation ofLeninism Ca la Karl Kautsky)?Specifically against the German SocialDemocrat Kautsky, who opposed proletarian revolution, Lenin said that "theproletariat cannot simply win state powerin the sense that the old state apparatuspasses into new hands, but must smashthis apparatus, must break it and replaceit by a new one" (The State and Revolu-tion). By asserting that workers states

Order from: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

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buy legal residency by investing $1 million in a business here.Labor Must ChampionImmigrants' Rights!

Campaigns against immigrants serveas an ideological weapon to further dividethe American proletariat along race andnational lines. To defend the jobs, wagesand union rights for all workers, labormust champion the rights of immigrantsand other minorities. Brutally exploited immigrants from Asia and CentralAmerica are forced to toil in garmentsweatshops across the country for subminimum wages. And even many who arein unions and have legal residency workat wage and piece-work rates barelyabove the legal minimum.We call for full citizenship rights forall immigrants and for organizing theunorganized, on both sides of the U.S.Mexico border. But this perspective isanathema to the pro-capitalist AFL-CIObureaucracy headed by John Sweeney,despite their occasional words about "organizing" immigrant workers and "solidarity" with Mexican workers. Far fromdefending undocumented workers againstthe savage repression meted out by lamigra, in 1996 Sweeney's AFL-CIOcalled for "effective control of illegal immigration," including an additional 700border patrol cops. Likewise, UnitedFarm Workers (UFW) president DoloresHuerta and other AFL-CIO officials madea show of launching an organizing drivefor California's brutally exploited, overwhelmingly immigrant strawberry pickers. But far from mobilizing union powerto ensure victory in this struggle, thelabor tops devote their efforts to opposinga Republican bill to bring in 25,000 morefarm "guest workers."The labor bureaucracy sees the worldthrough the same lens as the capitalistsand their government and embraces thegoals of U.S. imperialism, chaining theworkers to the capitalist class enemythrough support to Clinton's Democrats.Indeed, about the only significant difference Sweeney & Co. have with Clinton isover "fast track" trade legislation-andearlier, NAFTA-which these labor lieu-

could come into existence without smashing "the bourgeois form of state apparatus," the latter-day Kautskyites of Workers Power reveal their true programpushing social-democratic parties likethe Australian Labor Party (ALP) or theBritish Labour Party into getting rid ofcapitalism.Indeed, WP's Stalinop,hobic support toevery sort of counterrevolutionary scumin the former Soviet Union and EastEurope is a reflection of, and capitulationto, the pro-imperialist social democracy,which since 1917 sought the destruction

of the October Revolution. From Australia to Europe, wherever the socialdemocratic parties are fronting for thecapitalist offensive, Workers Power canbe found behind them. In Britain, theybacked Tony Blair's Labour Party, whilein the French elections last May theyopenly called for a vote to the classcollaborationist alliance of the SocialistParty, the Communist Party and variousbourgeois formations-a popular front.In Australia, WP shores up the hold of theracist Labor Party on the struggles of theexploited and oppressed, claiming thatworkers' illusions in the ALP can only"be broken by putting Labor to the test ofoffice," i.e., vote ALP, no matter what.At root, the anti-Sovietism of WPexpresses their acceptance of the "democratic credentials" of their "own" bourgeoisie as good coin. Indeed, they havedeeply imbibed the values of the Australian ruling class, not least its profoundanti-woman bigotry. At a large workersdemonstration on 12 November in Melbourne, a Workers Power leader, Lloyd,responded with vile misogynist epithetsto political debate about their position onthe former Soviet Union and their Laborism, twice hurling the word "c--t" at ourcomrades. This illustrates that the leadership of Workers Power will try to use the

Hathcox/USA Today1986 clothing workers' rally: bureaucrats' chauvinist protectionism chainsunions to U.S. capitalists' interests.tenants of the bourgeoisie oppose fromthe standpoint of a protectionist crusade tobolster U.S. industry. In contradistinctionto the chauvinist, job-trusting labor tops,we opposed NAFTA as a "free trade" rapeof Mexico by U.S. imperialism and calledfor international labor solidarity in strug-gle by workers in the U.S. and Canadawith Mexican workers-for example,those battling U.S. corporations for basicunion rights in the maquiladora borderfactories.A real fight to organize immigrantworkers would help reinvigorate theAmerican labor movement, bringing intothe unions workers from Central Americaand elsewhere with a history of bitterclass struggle against U.S. imperialismand its local death squad regimes. Blackand Hispanic workers, including a sizablenumber of immigrants, played a prominent role in last summer's Teamstersstrike against the UPS bosses, the firstsignificant victory for American labor indecades. To unchain labor's power requires above all a political struggle tooust the racist, pro-capitalist bureaucracyand to forge a revolutionary workersparty which champions the cause of allthe oppressed as part of the fight forsocialist revolution.

most grotesque means to draw a bloodline to seal off political discussion. Wewon't fall for i t -we will continue topursue open political debate because it isthrough the clash of opinion and test ofcompeting programs in action that Leninist parties are forged.Workers Power are counterfeit Trotskyists who deny in practice the necessity ofbuilding a revolutionary vanguard party tobring to the working class genuine class

consciousness-the understanding that itis their historic mission to take statepower in their own name. WP fatuouslydenies the deva

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Workers Vanguard No 683 - 30 January 1998