Workers Vanguard No 830 - 06 August 2004

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No. 830 ® E t ~ 4 9 0 M

Bush, e.rry

Push"Anti-Terror"Hysteria

This summer's cynical media circuses;the Democratic and Republican national

presidential conventions, have a sinisteroverlay, as the Homeland Security department decreed both "special securityevents." These red-white-and-blue capital-is t spectaeles-whose platfQqu,ue . . . . . "-

binding, whose delegates decide nothing,and whose nominees, John Kerry andGeorge Bush, are predetermined-aresurrounded by massive state surveillance.Inside the Democratic National Convention (DNC), it looked a lot like a Republican rally, as after the liberals pushed the"anybody but Bush" line all year, whatthey got was a candidate trying to outBush Bush in flag-waving tough-coprhetoric. John Kerry promptly embracedthe 9/11 Commission Report, with itsappalling bipartisan proposals to ratchet

up state repression, stating on July 27, "Iwill and I can wage a more effective waron terror than George Bush."

As U.S. forces continue their cruel andruthless occupation of Iraq, the Democrats call only for more domestic repres

sion and a stronger military. They are no"lesser evil," but the partner party of theRepublicans in administering capitalism,only with a facade of being "uniters" of allAmericans. They just lie" through theirteeth about caring for blacks, women andworking people, then they stick the knifeinto them. We working-class socialistssay: U.S. out of Iraq now! Break with theDemocrats! Build a workers party to fightfor socialist revolution!

being shunted to the shade ess and barren West Side Highway, ordered to stayoff the grass in Central Park. Sheepishly,United for Peace and Justice leaders arenot fighting this, not even going to court,though the right to free speech and political protest in Manhattan's largest public

park is a basic First Amendment right.Repeatedly pumping the fear factor of

another terrorist attack, as the Bushadministration does every time it feels a

political threat, the Homeland Securitydepartment even toyed with postponingthe entire election! Newsweek (19 July) -exposed Homeland Security head TomRidge's crass ploy, reporting that heasked the Justice Department's Office of

Legal Counsel (the same crew advisingBush he could torture at will) to look into

shutting down the elections in case of aterrorist attack. A strange new agency, the"U.S. Election Assistance Commission,"asked Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering Homeland Security to postpone the election inorder to "secure the election" in thewords of a Homeland spokesman-like"burning the village in order to save it"during the Vietnam War.

As for the Democrats, their nationalconvention was an orgy of flag-wavingpatriotism showcasing veterans of pastU.S. wars, with Kerry's Vietnam combatrole being played to the max. His subsequent involvement in antiwar protestswas carefully obscured. "We are a nationat war," Kerry said in his address, prom-

ising, "I will build a stronger Americanmilitary." Watching Kerry's publicity filmwith its mawkish sentimentality, mesmerizing Spielberg Hollywood touches, andthe glittering river wake of Kerry's patrolboat, you'd have thought the MekongDelta was in the "American heartland."

We say that it was a very good thing forthe workers of the world that the U.S. wasdefeated in its dirty imperialist war inVietnam by the heroic Vietnamese work

ers and peasants! Today we defend Vietnam, as well as Cuba, North Korea andChina, against U.S. imperialist threats, asworkers states ripped out of the handsof capitalism, despite their bureaucraticdeformations.

The "anybody but Bush" sentimentpushed by liberals, and pandered to by thereformist left, means that working peopleand young activists opposed to the warand occupation of Iraq and the diminutionof democratic rights carried out in thename of the "war on terror" are being toldto vote for Kerry. The Bush administration has seized on the September 11

attacks to ratchet up repression at homeand abroad. But in this they are not in anyway challenged by the Democrats, who

are merely trying to sell themselves to thebourgeoisie as more effective implementers of Bush's policies. The only road forward for working people is the struggle tobuild a workers party to get what theyneed, a workers government.

The mass media as well as Republicans depict the DNC's militarist theme

6 August 2004

DeCrow/Newsday

New York City cop from the heavilyarmed Hercules "anti-terrorism" unit

stakes out Wall Street.

as so much electoral rhetoric. But thenotion that KelTY is actually a sheep whohas temporarily donned wolf's clothing-a view pushed by both DemocraticParty liberals and Republican rightistsis profoundly wrong. As a representativeof the American capitalist class, Kerry issincere in maintaining that he coulddirect the U.S. armed forces more effectively than his Republican rival. Kerrycalls for upping total U.S. troop strengthby 40,000 men, and not just because hethinks saying that will help win the election. Significant elements of the American ruling class (including within thePentagon) now view the takeover of Iraq

as a very costly mistake for which theyblame Bush. Their problem is that to justpull out would be seen as a humiliatingdefeat for the self-proclaimed "world'sonly superpower."

Down With the Neocolonial,Occupation of Iraq!

On July 9, the Senate IntelligenceCommittee released a Sll-page "Reporton the U.S. Intelligence Community'SPrewar Intelligence Assessments onIraq." Even with some 20 percent blackedout by censors, the report thoroughlyrefutes the shoddy, outrageous officialrationales given for the Iraq invasion andoccupation, which have slaughtered anestimated 13,000 Iraqis in an already devastated land. The U.S. death toll has risento over 900. The bipartisan report confirmed once again what has been well

known: Saddam Hussein was not animminent threat, Iraq did not have chem,ical and biological weapons, Iraq was

continued on page 12

For the DNC in Boston, armed Coast

Guard boats patrolled the harbor and 40miles of road were shut down, while aMad Max Beyond Thunderdome razorwire steel cage outside the Fleet Center-the "free speech zone"-was sensiblyignored by most protesters. In New YorkCity, elderly residents near MadisonSquare Garden are being warned to stayindoors and stock up on supplies for theduration of the Republican invasion,while organizers of the main protest are How Ihe Liberals and Reformisls Derailed Ihe Slruggle' for lale.ralion

7 25274 81030

For Black LiberationThrough Socialist Revolution! ...4



Letters

Philippines: "KIL-L- EVERY ON E O V E R T E N , "

Racist American ImperialismForged through Blood and Torture

3 June 2004Dear Editor,

were burned down. Men, women and .children were herded into concentrationcamps where many perished of hunger

and disease. Women and girls were systematically raped. General Jacob Smith,butcher of the Native Americans massacred at Wounded Knee, ordered his troopsto turn the island of Samar into a "howling wilderness." "I want no prisoners. Iwish you to kill and burn, the moreyou kill and burn the better you pleaseme." Colonel Arthur Lockwood cited thebible as a justification for extermination:

While George Bush feigns shock and

sheds crocodile tears over the torture ofprisoners in Abu Ghraib, deeming it an"abhorrent" and an "un-American" deedof a few "rogue" soldiers, the fact is thattorture and other atrocities inflicted onnations worldwide, to better subjugatethem, are inherent traits of Americanimperialism since its emergence as a contender for world domination toward theend of the 19th century. In its swift andeasy victory in the Spanish-AmericanWar in 1898 the U.S. seized Cuba, PuertoRico and the Philippines, ushering inmore than a century of imperialist plunder

"The Almighty destroyed Sodom," hedeclared, "notwithstanding the fact thatthere were a few just people in that community." A correspondent covering thewar wrote that American soldiers killed"men, women, children, prisoners andcaptives, active insurgents and suspectedpeople, from lads of ten and up ..an idea

prevailing that the Filipino was littlebetter than a dog" who belonged on "therubbish heap." Torture of captives wasrampant. The most infamous torture technique was the so-called "water cure." Vastquantities of seawater were forced down

and freebooting. ,The conquest of the Philippines was

not as rapid as the defeat of the Spanishforces. I t took a three-year war of ruthless

and racist extermination by 126,000 U.S.troops to crush the Filipino nationalistfighters led by Emilio Aguinaldo. Up toa million people were massacred in aheroic uprising that fueled anti-colonialsentiments in the region. Whole villages

Capitalism and the Conceptof Race

A materialist approach to the question of

racial oppression begins with the under-standing that race is a socially determinedcategory with no basis in science. Writing inthe early 1950s, veteran Trotskyist RichardFraser underlined how racial oppression isan inherent feature of u.s. capitalism, inher-ited from the system of chattel slavery. The

forced segregation of black people at thebottom ofAmerican capitalist society can be

TROTSKY ended only through a workers revolution that LENINestablishes an egalitarian, socialist society.

The revolutions in Britain, America and France stripped away the veil of religionfrom knowledge and initiated the age of science and rationalism. Social relations couldno longer be explained by reference to. God. So a fake "scientific" explanation of thesocial relations of slavery grew up to justify them. This is the actual foundation of thescience of physical anthropology. .

Slavery itself was overthrown in the Civil War and Reconstruction. But the needs of

the American capitalists for compulsory agricultural labor in the South remained. Anew semi-capitalistic mode of agriculture grew up in which the semi-slave condition of

the freed Negroes was made permanent by the re-establishment of the social relationsof slavery: color discrimination buttressed by segregation and race prejudice.

Race thus became a fetish of American capitalism, a system of special exploitationbased upon the social relations and customs of a previous mode of production, whichhad itself been an abomination to society. Stripped of scientific justification, what then

remains of race? Race is a relation between people based upon the needs of capitalistexploitation. The race concept in anthropology grew out of the social relations of slavery. It was congealed by the adaptation of these obsolete social relations to the needs of

capitalist production. .The concept of race has now been overthrown in biological science. But race as the

keystone of exploitation remains. Race is a social relation and has only a social reality.

-Richard Fraser, "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution"(November 1953), reprinted in Prometheus Research Series No.3,

2

"In Memoriam Richard S. Fraser" (1990)

! ~ ! ! ! ! ! ! . . . ' / ! f ! ! ~ ~ ! . IRECTOR OF PARTY PUBLICATIONS: Alison Spencer

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Worl(ers Vanguard (ISSN 0276·0746) published biweekly, except skipping three alternate Issues in June, July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second , "ue In June) and with a 3-week Interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732·7862 (Editorial), (212) 732·7861(BUSiness). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:[email protected] .Domestic 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.

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The closing date for news in this issue is 3 August.

No. 830 6 August 2004

Drawing conveysbarbarism and

savagery of U.S.

occupationforces in the

Philippinesfollowing 1898

SpanishAmerican War.

the throat of a prisoner. His stomach wasthen stepped on so that water shot outthree feet in the air. Most victims did notlive long afterwards. This and other brutal techniques would later be applied byWashington's death squad regimes inLatin America, passed on at the notoriousSchool of the Americas-more aptlyknown as the School of theAssassins-in

Fort Benning, Georgia.In the southern islands of the Philip

pines the colonial army was met by afierce resistance from the Moro Muslims.In 1906 U.S. troops carried out whatcame to be known as the Moro Massacre,where at least nine hundred Filipinos,including women and children, weretrapped in a volcanic crater on the islandof Jolo and shot at and bombarded fordays. Viewing a widely distributed photothat showed U.S. soldiers overlookingpiles of Filipino dead in the crater,W.E.B. Du Bois declared in a letter toMoorfield Storey, president of the AntiImperialist League (and later first president of the NAACP), that it was "the mostilluminating thing I have ever seen. I wantespecially to have it framed and put uponthe walls of my recitation room to

impress upon the students what wars andespecially Wars of Conquest . reallymean." Commending Leonard Wood, thegeneral who had carried out the massacre,Theodore Roosevelt wrote him, "I congratulate you and the officers and men ofyour command upon the brilliant feat ofarms wherein you and they so well upheldthe honor of the American flag."

It was in reference to the Philippinesthat Rudyard Kipling coined the racistimperialist catchword of the "white man'sburden." The U.S. imperial tramplingover the dark-skinned peoples of thePacific was justified with an. outpouringof vile racist trash. The Nation railed in1899 that the annexation of the Philippines, Hawaii and Guam brought under

U.S. jurisdiction a "varied assortment ofinferior races which, of course, couldnot be allowed to vote." Military commanders incited their troops for theslaughter with lynch mob tirades againstthe "n-----s." Racism was rampant withinthe army as Jim Crow laws, codifiedby the Supreme Court with the Plessydecision two years before the war, wereenforced. Four black regiments stationed .in the Philippines were segregated andblack soldiers· were barred from "whitesonly" restaurants, barbershops and brothels. Not surprisingly many black soldierssolidarized with the embattled Filipinonationalist fighters. William Simms, ablack soldier, recalled how he wasreproached by a young Filipino boy who

challenged him: ·'Why don't you fightthose people in America who burnNegroes, that make a beast of you?" A

NOTICEWorkers Vanguard skipsalternate issues in June,

July and August.

Our next issue willbe dated September 3,

NY Public Ubrary

large number of black soldiers deserted.Many went over to join the Filipino side.Famous among them was private DavidFagen, who for two years wreaked havocupon the occupying American army.

The reconquest of the Philippines during World War II was a bloody affair inwhich whole cities were razed to theground and tens of thousands of civiliansdied. As soon as Japan had been dislodged from the islands, the U.S. occu

piers disarmed and crushed the Stalinistled Hukbalahap guerrillas who were amajor force in the fight against Japan.

The Philippines was granted formalindependence in 1946. Despite more thana hal f century of nominal independence,the archipelago remains an impoverishedsemicolonial vassal of the U.S.

Addressing the Philippines Congress inOctober 2003, George Bush, in an ominous warning to the peoples of Iraq,invoked the Philippines as a model of

U.S.-sponsored "democracy." True to hiswords, Bush appointed John Negroponteas the new sheriff of Baghdad as of June30, sending a clear message on how heintends to run the country. From his daysas a political officer (code name for CIA

agent) in the American embassy in Saigon: itttb.eearly 19608 to the early 19808

in Honduras, Negroponte left a trail 'ofblood, assassinations, kidnappings, tortures and disappearances. "In HondurasNegroponte exercised U.S. power in waysthat still reverberate throughout that smallcountry," wrote Stephen Kinzer. "Mostpeople who lived or worked in Hondurasduring the 1980s saw a nation spiralinginto violence and infested by paramilitarygangs that kidnapped and killed withimpunity" (New York Review of Books,20 September 2001). Negroponte wasappointed by the Reagan administrationto turn Honduras into a staging area forthe contra war and a platform for American military maneuvers, to preside over

CIA operations in the region and to shoreup the military dictatorship of generalGustavo Martinez. In a 1995 four-partseries the Baltimore Sun detailed theactivities of the notorious CIA-trainedand -supported army unit, Battalion 316,that kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of citizens. Its victims include students, union leaders, journalists and college professors. Shock and suffocationdevices were used in interrogation. "Prisoners often were kept naked and, whenno longer useful, killed and buried inunmarked graves."

Comradely,Salah Shami

CORRECTIONThe Chicago Labor Black

Struggle League leaflet, "ProtestChicago Cop Killing of ActivistMay Molina!", reprinted in WV

No. 828 (11 June), mistakenlystated that Aaron Paterson "spent17 years on death row." Patersonwas actually imprisoned for nearly17 years, and he spent more than13 years on death row.

WORKERS VANGUARD



Farouk Abdel-Muhti: 1947-2004On July 21, Palestinian actIvIst Farouk Abdel

Muhti died of a heart attack. Detained for nearly twoyears as a result of his political activities, duringwhich time he was beaten and denied essential medication, Farouk had many years, if not decades, stolenfrom his life by the U.S. government. Abdel-Muhtiwas speaking at a panel discussion entitled "Detentions and Torture: Building Resistance" at the Philadelphia Ethical Society. His speech was part of a

nationwide tour highlighting his torturous detention,which ended only months before on April 12. Abdel

Muhti thanked his supporters for standing by himthroughout his ordeal and advocated continued resistance to imperialism as a clear enemy of humanity.After he finished, he slumped over until his head

touched the table. He never regained consciousness.He was three weeks shy of his 57th birthday.

Fred Askew

November 2003, the brutal prison thugs also seized hisprescription medicine for hypertension, arthritis and athyroid condition. There can be no doubt that thesehellish conditions criminally undermined FaroukAbdel-Muhti's health.

Our first response to the news of Farouk's death wasshock and grief. We first met Farouk in July of 1999,when we joined forces to demand the freeing of Kurdish Workers Party leader Abdullah bc alan. Despite ourpolitical differences, we respected Farouk as a man of

principle and integrity. We were honored when, in themonths prior to his long-overdue release, Farouk

agreed to become a recipient of the Partisan DefenseCommittee's class-war prisoner defense fund. Our

condolences go out to Farouk's fiancee and companion, Sharin Chiorazzo, his son, Tariq Abdel-Muhti, andhis close supporters and comrades.

Born in the Ramallah district of Palestine in 1947and forced into the role of refugee, Farouk arrived inthe Western Hemisphere in the early 1960s, living atvarious times in the U.S. and several Latin Americancountries, including Honduras. In the early 1970s hesettled in the New York City area, where he lived untilhis abduction by a task force of INSINYPD maraud

ers inApriI2002-the

beginningof

his brutally nightmarish detention. Abdel-Muhti had come to the attention of racist immigration authorities in 1975 and1995, but they were unable to deport him, since, as astateless Palestinian, there was no government thatwould accept him.

WBAI, the local Pacifica radio station.

Our second response, of course, is extreme bitterness toward his ruling-class jailers who targeted thiscourageous man in their bipartisan, ongoing andnever-ending "war on terror." In a letter from prisonto the PDC on 12 January 2004, Farouk said, "Con

tinue with that policy of support to freedom forMumia Abu-Jamal and all of us prisoners, victims of

the dirty racist conspiracy that the U.S. government iscarrying out, using a brutal police machinery, adoptingthe same methods and tactics as the Nazis" (our translation from the Spanish).

Our final response is one of homage and respect.

The actual reason for his detention was his antiimperialist activism, especially his history of advo

cacy for the national cause of the Palestinians and hisopposition to U.S. depredations in El Salvador andNicaragua. In October of 1999 he had participated in alabor/black mobilization, initiated by the PartisanDefense Committee, that drove the Ku Klux Klan outof New York. In the immediate month before hisabduction, Farouk had been instrumental in gettingthe voices of besieged Palestinians on the airwaves of

Farouk's detention was 718 days of ghoulish torture.·In an interview with Workers Vanguard after hisrelease, he described the nine different cockroach- andrat-infested facilities he was shunted to and from, oneof which was nicknamed "the doghouse" for its unsanitary conditions. He talked about the openly fascisticprison administrators and sadistic guards who beat himwhile his hands and legs were pinned to a wall. He wasbeaten twice, thrown into solitary confinement for overeight months and, in January 2003, felt compelled toparticipate in a hunger strike calling attention to theonerous conditions in the Passaic County Jail in NewJersey. When his leftist literature (including the PDC'sbrief in defense of Jose Padilla) was confiscated in

Farouk Abdel-Muhti's struggle forced a federal judgeto agree to his release, calling his situation "Kafkaesque." This has made it a little harder for the Bureauof Immigration and Customs Enforcement to indefinitely detain immigrants. Farouk never lost sight thathis struggle was tied to the fate of all the detainees.And his last breaths were spent urging renewed struggle against imperialism, the scourge of workers andthe oppressed worldwide. While we mourn his death,we honor the life of Farouk Abdel-Muhti. Free all thedetainees!

On the Indian ElectionsMay 21, 2004

To Workers Vanguard:

The victory of the Congress Party lastweek has been widely seen within India asa "second independence" for the count ry-a defeat for the forces of communalist hate and economic liberalization.The ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its NDA (National

Democratic Alliance) coalition partnerswere decisively trounced, especially inthe states of Andhra and Tamilnadu. ButCongress prepared the way for the rise of

the fascists and now promises to continuetheir policies "with a human face."

education. Founded out of the fanaticalmovement to demolish the Babri mosquein 1992, the BJP's career has been onelong incitement to murder and rape.Two thousand Muslims were massacredby Hindu gangs between December 1992and January 1993 in the aftermath of

the Babri mosque demolition. Again inMarch 2002 more than 2000 Muslims

were killed in state-organized pogromsin Gujarat. In 1998 alone, twenty-fivepriests, pastors, and nups were murdered, twenty-five nuns raped, and elevenchurches or chapels destroyed by theBhajarang Dal in their campaign of terror

against Christians (Frontline magazine,

January 1999). In 1999 they locked theChristian missionary Graham Stein andhis two young sons in their jeep and setfire to it, roasting them alive in broad daylight. In 2002, in the name of the BJP'santi-untouchable and anti-Muslim "cowprotection" campaign, a Hindu moblynched five untouchables in the presenceof police for skinning a dead cow scav

enged from the roadside. And in Kashmirthe BJP carried on the Indian government's policy of atrocities against theMuslim popUlation: last year alone morethan 2500 Kashmiris were killed byIndian security forces. In 1998 the BJP

government provoked Pakistan by con-

Letters

ducting nuclear tests, declaring, "Indianow has the Hindu bomb."

Until 1991 India relied on aid from theSoviet Union to maintain a large publicsector. This is why some people thoughtof India as socialist. In truth there was asmuch socialism in Nehru and his Congress as there is butter in butternutsquash. Since the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, the Indian bourgeoisie has been forced to open the coun

try to all-out imperialist exploitation.In the forefront of the drive to privatize

the Indian economy has been N. ChandraBabu Naidu, who until last week waschief minister of the state of AndhraPradesh (although he preferred to becalled its "CEO"). Naidu, an importantcoalition partner of the BJP, assiduously

continued on page 13he BJP is the political wing of theHindu fascist fraternity called the SanghaParivar (Family of Organizations), whichincludes, besides the BJP, Bhajarang Dal(the military wing), Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangh (RSS, the ideological wing),Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, the cultural wing), and Akhila Bharatiya VidyarthiParishad (ABVP, the student wing). TheSangha Parivar openly preaches hatredof non-Hindus. In practice it targets Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and tribals, but

never the Jains or the Parsees who, alongwith the Hindu merchant caste of Marwaris, make up a large percentage of

the Indian big bourgeoisie. And the Christians it goes after are untouchables andtribals who converted in the hope of escaping caste oppression, not the wealthy Syrian Christians of Kerala who are supposed to have been brahmins before theytook Christianity.

Workers Hated Ronald Reagan

The Hindu fascists seek to artificiallycohere a national Hindu identity fromIndia's prison-house of nations. In powerthey pushed Hindu patriotism as they soldoff the country's state-owned industry toforeign corporations, busted unions, dismantled what meager government-runhealthcare there had been, and privatized

6 AUGUST 2004

8 July 2004

Dear Workers Vanguard,

I am writing a short letter on thenational hoopla over Reagan's death.

On June 10, the day before Reagan

was interred after the orgy of mourning,I attended a shop gate meeting at mywork location. Most of my workmatesattended the meeting. An announcementwas read about a day of mourning forReagan on the following day, Friday,June 11. Workmates were given a compensatory day which they can take upuntil April 30, 2005. In my department, which is essential and gearedtowards serving the public, most workerswent to work on the day Reagan wasinterred. " •

The union shop chairman asked forquestions and I raised my hand. I saidthat many workmates remember that Reagan was no hero of the working class.

He was a union-buster. A white old-timer

yelled "PATCO!" I continued that it wasReagan who "changed welfare as weknow it" and that it was the Demo

crat Clinton who signed these changesinto law. A female worker yelled,

"That's right, brother!" I continued thatReagan was an enemy of working peoplearound the world and talked about theinvasion by American forces into tinyGrenada. Lastly I mentioned that it tookReagan seven and one half years intohis pre sidency· to mention the word

AIDS after so much cruel devastation inthe community.

After the meeting one worker askedme if I was opposed to the Reagan holiday. My initial impulse was to go to workon "Reagan Day" as an act of defiance.After consideration, I realized that thiswas wrong. I replied "Absolutely not! Asa matter of fact, we need more holidays!"

Several others approached me to talkabout the invasion of Grenada, the ruin

and suicides of farmers because of Reagan's policies on agriculture. A workmate talked about Reagan's racist codewords, for example "states' rights" andabout the federal government saying to

the racist reactionaries that they can rideroughshod over blacks.

A female worker mentioned that thewelfare changes wreaked havoc in theinner cities, putting many single mothersand their children among the homeless population. She also contrasted thecompany's quick approval of the Reaganday as a holiday with their intransi

gence regarding MLK Day. The discussions after the meeting also revolvedaround the anti-Sovietism of Reagan, theCold War, the Iran-Contra scandal and thecolonial occupation of Iraq.

All of the conversations showed thepalpable disdain that workers had forReagan and his policies.

A Transit Worker

3



For Black LiberationThrOugh

Socialist Revolution!We print below a forum. slightly

edited for publication. given by com

rade Don Alexander of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committeeat a regional educational in New

York City on April 3.

PART ONE

I had to take a little time off in preparing this talk to keep from gettingtoo involved in it, and comradeKaren and I went to hear a Southernliberal academic, who had written a

book on the history of intermarriagein the U.S., particularly the strikingdown of the laws on the books thatculminated in the 1967 Loving case.It was a quite interesting talk, a lot ofanecdotes. In listening to his presentation, I noticed that the words "slavery," "segregation," "racism" weren'tmentioned once. That's a pretty talltask in America, especially whenyou're talking about black-whiteintermarriage, because it's really thequestion of the persistence of caste.They can't deal with it. It really goesto the heart of this racist capitalistsystem. He was a rather charminggentleman, as they say.

AP

Spartacist banner at rally in support of busing and school integration, BostonCommon, 1974.

There is a lot of talk today about

multiculturalism, diversity, whiteness and"racialized subjects" and other liberal jargon that essentially attempts to 'erase thecentrality of anti-black racism and blackoppression in racist capitalist America.Recently, in preparing this talk, I readsomething professor Barbara Fields of

Columbia University wrote. She was oneof the few professors who endorsed ourrally at Columbia against the Conservative Club's anti-affirmative action "bakesale." She made the point that all ofthese academic types are talking about"whiteness" and all this stuff-how theIrish became white-but they never talkabout how "African and African-Caribbeanimmigrants became black." I thought thatwas a very interesting comment.

The Spartacist League has consistently,over the years, fought for a class-struggleprogram for black liberation as an inseparable part of the fight for the emancipation of labor from capitalist exploitation.Our program flows from a Marxist understanding or the nature o f class society, ofthe role of class struggle as a motor forceof history and the necessity of workingclass rule. Capitalists like to dress up

their rule in terms of general abstract slogans, pretending that they represent the"general will," the "people" and the like.But in fact, they have an executive committee that runs their affairs to perpetuatetheir brutal class rule, and that's calledthe state. This hideously oppressive andunequal society has perfected the machin-

have leveled the playing field. I know thatif I keep on going in this vein you'll runme out of here, because it does make yourblood boil.

I f you read our publications, WorkersVanguard, Black History, Women and

Revolution (which continues to be incorporated in Workers Vanguard and Sparta-

How the Liberals andReformists Derailed theStru"ggle for Integration

ery of deception and repression. There'sa huge mountain of lies claiming thatthe U.S. is an "open society," a shiningbeacon of democracy where there are noclasses and everybody is ,either in themiddle class or becoming:-JIliddle class,and where racism has largely been eliminated through civil rights laws, which

In Memoriam

Richard S. Fraser

•• """title, ad Sliectill01l1li .....

L PaoMETHEUS RESEAIlCH LlBlW!.Y ~ - ~ ~

cist) you'll see that we apply a revolutionary program to fight against national,sexual, racial and all oppression becausethat is part of our fight for world socialist

• revolution. In particular, when we raisethe slogan for black liberation throughsocialist revolution, it sums up our strategic tasks. It encapsulates our fight for athird American revolution, a workers revolution that wiH put an end to this verybrutal, decadent and violent ruling class.The realization of the age-long dream of

black freedom, that is, the completesmashing of the color bar, can only occurthrough the revolutionary overthrow of

capitalism. This means confronting the

unfinished business of the Civil War

finishing the Civil War, which was asocial revolution that destroyed slavery;but the social relations of anti-black racism were incorporated into the capitalistmode of production.

$1.50 (72 pages) $7.00 (108 pages • includes p o s t a g ~ )

I want to cite part of what the veteranTrotskyist Richard Fraser wrote, in particular in his lectures of November 1953,"The Negro Struggle and the ProletarianRevolution." We had a comment aboutcomrade Fraser.when we put out the bulletin, "In Memoriam Richard S. Fraser"(Prometheus Research Series No: 3 [1990]).

Make checks payable/man to: Spartacist Pub. Cb • SQx1371 GPO. New York. NY 10:116

4

We wrote that"Although he was hampered by littleformal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broadexperience in militant struggles withblack workers sharpened his insightinto the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a programfor black liberation, it is necessaryto study the social forces thatcreated the American institution ofracial oppression ... To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was noarmchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration

into struggle."And that's really a very appropriateintroduction to what I have to say.We often quote Karl Marx's state

ment that "Labor cannot emancipateitself in the white skin where in theblack it is branded." Fraser arguedagainst the prevailing liberal ideology of his day that "prejudice" is theroot of black oppression. He said:

"The racial division of society wasborn with capitalism and will dieonly with the death of this last system of exploitation. Before capitalism there was no race concept.There was no skin color exploita-tion, there was no race prejudice,there was no idea of superiority andinferiority based upon physicalcharacteristics.

"It was the adventof

Negro chattel slavery in the western hemisphere which firstdivided society into races. In a measurethe whole supremacy of western capitalism is founded upon this modern chattelslavery. The primary accumulation of

capital which was the foundation of theindustrial revolution was accrued largelyfrom the slave trade."

This was written in 1953 and is a powerful scientific, materialist analysis thathas stood the test of time. It is particularly important because we hear this newfangled stuff about how race is somehowa "socially constructed category." Fraseralso talked about how race was "sociallyconstructed" and noted that as a biological category, race doesn't exist. But heemphasized the unique racial oppressionof the American black population, thestigmatization of skin color, which was aproduct of the system of chattel slaveryand was grafted onto the subsequent capitalist system.

Black Oppression andCapitalist Society

What are we fighting for? You have tolook at the situation in this country wherethere is not a class-conscious proletariattoday. The proletariat has yet to declareits political independence from the partiesof the capitalist ruling class, thanks tothe multiple betrayals of the reformists inthis country, the petty-bourgeois liberalspokesmen for the black masses and,especially, the pro-capitalist trade-unionbureaucracy, which works overtime to

derail any serious struggle.It was over one hundred years after

the Civil War that black people got theright to vote, and today black formerprisoners have to fall on their kneesbefore Florida governor Jeb Bush to begfor their rights back. This is a reflectionof the fact that under capitalism, democratic rights are reversible and that everystep of the way we have to fight.

The class divisions in this society areincreasingly sharp and hard to paper over.Therefore, the lies become more brazenand the repression more severe. The U.S.

WORKERS VANGUARD



WV Photo

imperialists say that those who are resisting the imperialist occupation of Iraqsimply don't want to see that freedomhas taken root. If you're standing in anemployment line here with no prospectsfor a job in sight-which is the fate ofmillions-this will sound pretty hollowbecause these sweet-sounding words of"freedom," "equality" and "democracy"

are coming out of mouths of the parasiticruling class of the most brutal imperialistmurderers in history. No, what they meanby "freedom" is the right to starve and tohave their boots ground into your face.

We hear a lot today about how opportunities are there if you just have the pluckand the patience to grasp them instead ofwhining for a handout. You hear a kinder,

gentler version of this coming from blackcapitalist politicians and their mouth

pieces, who complain that black peopledon't stick together like other races,they engage in "self-sabotage," and theyhold each other back. You also hear theN-word, which lends legitimacy to this lieof black inferiority and is a reflection ofits internalization. This scapegoating ofthe oppressed black masses in the nameof "black power" or "black pride" is areflection of petty-bourgeois contempt

for the poor and oppressed. It is also anexpression of the fact that today the blackpopulation, no less than the white population, is increasingly class-divided-infact, even more so in terms of income

and other inequalities within the blackpopulation.

Spartacist supporter tore down Confederate flag of slavery and Klan terror at San Francisco Civic Center, 1984.Right: Up to 50,000 demonstrators turned out in January 2000 to demand removal of Confederate flag frolJ'l Columbia,South Carolina statehouse. .

Recently, I read a comment made by aHoward University black student whoattended the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his"I Have a Dream" speech-an event thatMalcolm X correctly dubbed the "farceon Washington." What she had to saywas, perhaps, typical of a certain train of

thought: "We are tired of the struggle for

equality and we are tiredof

the strugglefor integration ... I f the response is positive, we must organize. If the response isnegative, we must organize."

This despairing tone is a product of theutter absence of arty militant black leadership today and the failure of liberalintegrationist programs. It is understandable, but it must be combatted. Considerwho spoke at the rally, and you canunderstand this. Among others, there wasthe quintessential political hustler, blackDemocrat Al Sharpton. He railed againstthe Bush administration, saying that thechecks sent to black America havebounced and are coming back marked"insufficient funds." You also had Martin Luther King III preaching a "revolution at the ballot box" in 2004-in

other words, vote Democrat. These procapitalist hustlers have time and againled anti-racist struggles into the pigsty ofbourgeois electoralism and lesser-evilismprecisely at the moment when record

numbers of black and Latino youth are injail-when, as one writer describes it, theghetto and the prisons are on a continuum. In sharp counterposition, we fight to

mobilize the power of the multiracialworking class-the only class in societywhich, because of its unique, strategicrole in production, can smash this racist capitalist system and establish inits place a collectivized, planned socialist economy that produces for humanneed and not for profit. This will take afight to forge a revolutionary leadershipof the working class that stands at thehead of the struggles of all the oppressedand exploited.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,in the post-Civil War post-Reconstructionperiod, you had a certain conservativeblack leader, Booker T. Washington, whocame out openly for segregation, abandoning the fight for social equality. His

rise to national prominence came in September 1895 when he delivered a speechat Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition. Basically, his speechtold black people to. stay "in their place."Here is what Washington asserted thatblack people are:

"The most patient, faithful, law-abiding,and unresentful people that the world hasseen ... In all things that are purely socialwe can be as separate as the fingers, yetone as the hand in all things essentialto mutual progress ... The wisest amongmy race understand that the agitationof questions of social equality is theextremest folly ..."

Now, the black nationalists today arecut out of the same cloth. Their bankrupt,petty-bourgeois program of "self-help"and black capitalism is pushed to linetheir own pockets and defend their ownclass interests against the ghetto poor. It

tells the masses to accept tile racist statusquo, a product of centuries of racistoppression, and to stay in their so-called

place. The Million Man March, organizedin 1995 by the black-separatist, antiwoman, anti-Semitic bigot Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, stood in

WV Photo

Norfolk, Virginia longshoremen march against segregation, fo r school busingin 1983. Labor movement must champion black rights.

6 AUGUST 2004

this retrograde tradition. No wonder thatmarch met with favor fro)ll Bill Clinton'sWhite House. It was an appeasement ofthe capitalist exploiters. Meanwhile, thejails are filled with American capitalism'svictims, the so-called "surplus population" of black and Latino youth. In NewYork City alone, nearly one out of twoblack men is unemployed. In the entirecountry, 40 percent of black children livein poverty. Black women are the fastestgrowing victims of the AIDS epidemic.This is a society characterized by unprecedented, truly monstrous class divisions.This is the reality of color-caste oppres-

Tallahassee,Florida:

Black votersprotest

disenfranchisement

in 2000presidential

election.

sion. It is not negated by the partial reconfiguration of this caste with the growth ofa black middle class, which finds out very

quickly that there is an invisible, but veryreal, glass ceiling.

It is sickening to hear Colin Powell andother representatives of the U.S. imperialist military, which is soaked from headto foot in the blood of the oppressed

around the world, talk about how integrated their killing machine is. This wasone of the themes of General WesleyClark on the campaign trail-especiallyin front of black audiences. Clark evenhad the nerve to say that the U.S. Armyintegrated the Little Rock, Arkansas highschool in the bloody battle there in 1957.The truth is otherwise. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president at the time, hadopposed the desegregation of the armedforces in 1948. His whole attitude toward

the Brown decision was to never publiclysupport it. He made some really grosscomments about overgrown black malessitting alongside white girls. He sent thetroops into Little Rock to prevent theblack masses from fighting back againstthe rampaging white racist mobs.

Right now, it is this same supposedly

integrated imperialist army that hasinvaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Its racist,colonial occupation has spilled the bloodof thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, alongwith increasing numbers of Haitians. Wedemand that the imperialist troops getout-and that the UN stay out. Theworking class and oppressed here have avery direct stake in opposing this colonialist occupation which can only further

embolden world history'S most monstrous imperialist power.

The Class-Struggle Roadto Black Freedom

Under capitalism-the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which the workers have only theirlabor power to sell as a commodity-a

handful of capitalists are the dominanteconomic class. So it's futile to appeal tothe nonexistent conscience and moralityof the ruling class. It is not now and neverhas been in their interests to have a society based upon genuine peace, plenty and

equality. Theirs is a system of productionfor profit and of anarchy resulting ininevitably recurring economic crises-a

boom-bust cycle of overproduction ofcommodities giving rise to cyclical andstructural unemployment and generalizedimpoverishment. Ending this requires afight for the abolition of U.S. and world

capitalism through international proletarian revolution., Our interests lie in common, integrated

class struggle against the racist capitalistrulers. The Spartacist League stands inthe tradition of the early CommunistInternational, the Comintern, under Leninand Trotsky. Through insistent prodding,they reoriented the American CommunistParty by uprooting the colorblindnesscharacteristic of the early socialist movement. That movement had said that ithad "nothing special" to offer to blacks

and that their oppression was an economic problem. The Bolshevik Party

under Lenin and Trotsky fought tooth andnail against this position, and actually

continued on page 6

BOSTON

The Bolshevik Revolution:How the Working Class Took Power

Tuesday, August 10, 6:30 p.m.Harvard University

Loker Common (Basement of Memorial Hall)

Information and readings: (617) 666-9453or e-mail: [email protected]

5



Black

Liberation ...

IF T N E ~ 15 Atli a.oooSPILLED IN mE STItEEIS.

LET IT BE fJVR BLOOD.

(continued from page 5)

laid the basis for the American Communist Party to lead an aggressive fight forblack equality in the late 1920s and early1930s. James P. Cannon-a founder of

the Communist Party and early leader of

American Trotskyi sm-wro te his seminalessay "The Russian Revolution and theAmerican Negro Movement" in 1959,five years after the Supreme Court Browndecision, as that movement was unfolding. He pointed out:

"It is customary to attribute the progressof the Negro movement, and the shift ofpublic opinion in favor of its claims, tothe changes brought about by the FirstWorld War. But the biggest thing thatcame out of the First World War, theevent that changed everything, includingthe prospects of the American Negro,was the Russian Revolution. The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as itlater was by Stalin, and then filteredthrough the activities of the CommunistParty in the United States, contributedmore than any other influence from anysource to the recognition, and m o r ~ orless general acceptance, of the Negroquestion as a special problem of American society-a problem which cannotsimply be subsumed under the general

heading of the conflict between capitaland labor, as it was in the pre-Communistradical movement."

- The First Ten Years ofAmericanCommunism (1962)

The Spartacist League's several decadesof efforts and principled struggle to mobilize the working class in the fight forblack freedom and in the liberation of theworking class as a whole stands in thistradition and is unique.

As a consequence of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union,which was a gigantic defeat for workersand oppressed around the world, thecapitalists have been emboldened tointensify their attacks against hard-wongains. It is no mere coincidence that,beginning in 1991, they have more energetically pushed for the resegregation of

the school system-not that they beganthen, but they stepped on the pedal. Thereis no Soviet Union today to embarrassU.S. imperialism about the endemicracism which is inherent to this system.

Because of the counterrevolution in theSoviet Union, consciousness has beenthrown back. And this has been in themaking for a while. In 1983, Jesse Jackson, a former leader in King's SouthernChristian Leadership Conference, helpedknife protests in defense of busing inNorfolk, Virginia. Coleman Young denounced busing in Detroit when he wasthe black Democratic mayor there in1974, agreeing with the Supreme Courtdecision that struck down cross-districtbusing of black schoolchildren from theinner city to the white suburbs. In 1997,

the historically integrationist NAACPheld a debate that called into questionintegration.

Furthermore, this retrogression in consciousness has also affected the so-called"progressive," radical black intellectualssuch as Robin Kelley and bell hooks,along with outright pro-Democratic Partyhip-hop capitalists such as Russell Simmons. Simmons, who slams integrationand also pushes black capitalism, helped

organize a massive rally at City Hall inJune 2003 (some of us sold Workers Van

guard at it) which was joined by Democrat Andrew Cuomo to call for not ending, but reducing the sentences of thedraconian Rockefeller-era anti-drug laws.This is the same Cuomo who in the Clinton administration, in the Department ofHousing, actually used the money thatwas supposed to go to building new housing to build prisons in upstate New York.So they were down there at City Hall supposedly trying to reform these drug laws.We say: Down with the racist war ondrugs! We are for the decriminalization of

drugs. The so-called New Democrat Clinton escalated the bourgeoisie's attacks onthe ghettos and barrios "to end welfare as

we knoW it," expanding the racist deathpenalty, and putting about 100,000 morecops on the streets.

In a recent interview, Simmons spelledout his program. He said his program is 40acres and a Bentley. His undisguised hostility to integration is quite understandable in that light. This is what he said:

"Economically, some families in ourcommunity had more financial stabilityduring segregation. We had the blackdentist, the black lawyer, the blackteacher. We had jobs. We had things wehad to do for our community and services to provide. Integration tore that down.It damaged our economic stability in ourlittle communities ... They took all of ourbusiness."

- Henry Louis Gates, AmericaBehind the Color Line (2004)

Well, first, what jobs? Ghettos areimpoverished hell holes, and in periods of

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Cartoon captures Martin Luther King's cringing pacifism that

supported brutal repression of 1960s ghetto explosions. Right:Malcolm X, June 1963.

labor shortage, they used to be some kindof reserve army of the unemployed-and

I stress used to be. These people arepushing black capitalism, which is reallyabout feathering their own nests and flipping a bone to the rest of us.

The so-called "left" black feminist,bell hooks, harking back to a mythicalgolden era of cross-class black unity,argued:

"That sense of solidarity was altered by

a c l a s s ~ b a s e d civil rights struggle whoseultimate goal was to acquire more freedom for those black folks who alreadyhad a degree of class privilege howeverrelative. By the late 1960s class-basedracial integration disrupted the racialsolidarity that often held black folkstogether despite class difference. Pressured to assimilate into mainstreamwhite culture to increase their classpower and status, privileged black individuals began to leave the underprivileged behind, moving into predominantlywhite neighborhoods, taking their moneyand their industry out of the segregatedblack world."- - Where We Stand: Class Matters

(2000)

Well, this is an utterly fantasticdescription of what actually happened.Some of what she points out, such as

who benefited from the civil rights movement, is true. But the notion that therewas ever in the past, or that there everwill be in the future, a significant blackcapitalist class along the lines of the Carnegies, the Mellons and the Rockefellersis utterly fantastic and utopian. Moreover,there is no such thing as "separate butequal." And that's the point: they havecapitulated to that.

Now, there's the very voluble leftnationalist academic Robin Kelley. He rhetorically asks, "Integration: What's Left?"(Nation, 14 December 1998). He deliberately conflates the struggle for racial integration with liberal integrationism andsubmission to white liberal gradualism:

"Although black civil rights activists had

always emphasized 'desegregation'-theremoval of all barriers that kept blackpeople from enjoying full access to public facilities, decent housing, educationand so on-in most white liberal circlesracial integration came to mean solvingthe 'Negro problem' by bringing blackpeople into formerly all-white institutions ... The goal was to produce fullyassimilated black people devoted to theAmerican dream. Sharing power wasrarely part of the equation."

And what is his program?"Rather than a new integrationist movement under a left-wing banner, I wouldlike to see a new, revitalized left launching a full-scale assault on white privilege-a new divestment campaign inwhich white people refuse the benefits ofa racist society."

In particular, what Kelley is saying tothe mass of white workers, which of

course happens to be the most numerousclass in this society, is: Prove your com

mitment for the poor and the oppressedby voluntarily impoverishing yourself.This can only reinforce the hold of thewhite ruling class upon white workers.Moreover, if he took that to any picketline they'd run him out on a rail.

The League of Revolutionary BlackWorkers, which was a radical-nationalistorganization in Detroit in the '70s, hadthe opportunity to actually make common cause with white workers. Theyrefused to pass out their leaflets tothem. Their program was for more blackforemen, for blacks on the board of

General Motors and the like. Our program of revolutionary integration, of

class struggle, cuts across these kinds of

divisive schemes. Our program is to get

rid of class exploitation and the brutalracial oppression that props it up, notto pit sections of the oppressed andexploited against each other so that bothcan be conquered. The depth of the political bankruptcy is astounding, but notsurprising.

From our inception in the early 1960sinside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)as the Revolutionary Tendency, a leftwing opposition that fought against thatparty's abandonment of a revolutionaryworking-class program, we have emphasized common class struggle against acommon class enemy. We say that thereis an alternative to liberal integrationism-which favors the gradual absorption of "deserving blacks," one by one,

into this system-and pro-DemocraticParty capitalist politics. And that's theprogram of revolutionary integrationism,the struggle for black liberation throughoverturning this racist capitalist systemby linking the struggles of the ghettos tothe organized labor movement under aclass-struggle leadership.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

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We print below the translation of aleaflet issued July 8 by the SpartakistJugend, youth group of the SpartakistWorkers Party (SpAD), German section

of the International Communist League(Fourth Internationalist), against the

anti-immigrant provocation threatenedby the sinister so-called "anti-Germans. "

On July 10, the leaflet was distributed among the over 200 counterdemon

strators who mobilized in defense of

the minority and immigrant residents of

Berlin's Neukolln and Kreuzberg districts, outnumbering the pro-Israel, antiimmigrant "anti-Germans. "

Under the slogan "Against the anti

Zionist consensus," the so-called "antiGermans" intend to carry out a racist provocation on July 10 in Hermannplatz, inthe center of Berlin's Neukolln immigrantdistrict. Led by the openly pro-imperialistracists of the "Bahamas Editorial Board,"they aim to deliver ammunition to theracist German capitalist state and SPD[Social Democratic Party] bloodhound[Interior Minister] Schily for the antiimmigrant "war on terror." The BahamasInternet call, signed among others bythe misnamed "Antifa [anti-fascist] Northeast Berlin," employs every racist codeword conceivable. The talk there is of"hate preachers" [Hassprediger], a termstraight out of the new so-called "immigration law" [Zuwanderungsgesetz] spon

sored by the "Red"/Green [SPD/GreenParty coalition government] and the CDU[Christian Democrats], under which nonGermans can be deported based on verbal statements. They fantasize about. a"district militia" in NeukOlln and Kreuzberg, which is supposed to have cleared"Zionist-free zones"-a vile equationof immigrant neighborhoods with the"nationally liberated zones," that is, areasin which no leftist or immigrant sets footout of fear of Nazi terror.

Neukolln and Kreuzberg are the areasin Berlin that are labeled so-called "problem districts" by the capitalist SPDIPDS[Party of Democratic Socialism] Senate[local government] because that's wheremany Turks, Kurds, Arabs and other eth

nic minorities live who are especiallyhard hit by massive unemployment andsocial cuts. They are precisely the targetof the "anti-Germans," who advise thecops how to spot Palestinians, for example. Arab immigrants in particular werealso the victims of the racist Rasteifahndung [profiling of immigrants] after September 11, 2001 carried out by the BerlinSenate. To stop such walking police trapsas the Bahamas march on July 10, what isnecessary is an integrated mobilizationof trade unionists and immigrants. Thewhole point of this march is to mobilizea much greater threat to the immigrantcommunity of Berlin than the "antiGermans" themse lves -the racist Germanstate. The "anti-Germans" carry out these

provocations precisely in the hope ofinciting justified anger from immigrantsand leftists, and thus giving the copsanother pretext to beat and jail them.

It was just this method that resulted inone of the incidents that Bahamas givesas a reason for their march. We did notwitness the incident and must thereforerely on the statements of those involved.At the Carnival of Cultures on May 30,the Action. Coalition for Mumia AbuJamal, which is supported by the Revolutionary Communists (RK), took part witha float. A young man of immigrant background was walking next to this floatwearing a T-shirt with a Palestinian flagand red flag, and the words "Anti-ZionistAction," an adaptation of the symbol of

6 AUGUST 2004

July 10, Berlin: "Anti-Germans" stage racist provocation in Neukolln immigrant district, carrying Israeli and American flags.

the German Communist Party's "antifascist action" from the early 1930s. Forthis, he was heckled and physicallyattacked as an "anti-Semite" by several"anti-Germans" from the group "Kritik &Praxis" [K&P].

"Outnumbering him, they attacked thewearer of said T-shirt first verbally andthen bodily. After he had repeatedlydemanded that they refrain, and theyhowever continued the attack, he called

for support. At which point four to fivepeople, all of non-German background,rushed to his aid and successfully fendedoff the attack."

- Statement of the personsaffected by the reactionary!Zionist assault at the Carnivalof Cultures, June 2004

The "anti-Germans" did what they do bestand called the cops. The victim (!) of theattack was brutally arrested-he wasbeaten and choked. "After many hours,the arrested man was released from policecustody with a court proceeding for dangerous bodily harm" (ibid.). Down withthe charges! Self-defense is no crime!

With their charges of anti-Semitism,the "anti-Germans" seek to portray allcritics of the Zionist Israeli state as tend

ing toward fascism, in order to provokefurther assaults on them. It wasn't thefirst time that the T-shirt w ~ a r e r has beenin the cross hairs of the "anti-Germans."At the Day X student demo against theIraq war last year, he had half a toothknocked out, and at an anti-fascistdemo in Kopenick on March 13 hewas harassed and threatened by a mob of

some 20 "anti-Germans" because of thesame T-shirt, as reported on Indymedia(14 March): "Go back to Kreuzberg,where you come from!" Now K&P complains that this time their victim didn'twait for them to knock the rest of his teethout, but called for help!

A statement issued shortly afterwardby the "anti-Germans" on the events at

the Carnival began a campaign to isolatethe RK, smearing them as "violent antiSemites" and calling to drive them out of"left structures." There have already beenattempts to exclude the RK from leftdemos on the basis of this "anti-German"smear sheet. The defenders of the T-shirtwearer have issued a statement denouncing this as lies and distortion, and making clear it was their comrade who wasattacked. Now Bahamas gives the eventsat the Carnival as pretext for their July 10provocation. They grossly lumph together with a recent, actual, anti-Semiticassault on an Israeli Jew-equating antiSemitism with anti-Zionism, just as [Foreign Minister] Joschka Fischer does, inthis way whitewashing the bourgeoisie

of Auschwitz in the eyes of "democratic" public opinion! (On anti-Semitismand Zionism, see "Holocaust, 'CollectiveGuilt' and German imperialism," Spartacist [German-language edition] No. 20,Summer 1998.)

K&P has provided Bahamas with the"through ball" [like in soccer] for the July10 march, even if they're not officiallyendorsing the call. In the same way, K&P

and Bahamas worked together in a provocation against an antifa demo in Hamburg on January 31 (see Spartakist No.154). The Bahamas statement is furthermarked by a racist tIrade against MumiaAbu-Jamal, whom they slander as an"anti-Semite" who calls for the "murderof Jews." This attack on Mumia, a blackjournalist who remains framed up ondeath row in the U.S., makes disgustinglyclear that the "anti-Germans" like Bahamas have nothing to do with the left. It isthe sort of garbage you'd expect from theFraternal Order of Police, the racist copbrotherhood in Pennsylvania that wantsto see Mumia dead! Bahamas' hatred forMumia reflects the hatred of the Americanbourgeoisie toward the black population

of the U.S.The "anti-German" campaign against

the RK and Mumia's supporters finds disturbing acceptance and support (implicitand explicit) among sections of the Autonomes, including those who reject theopen racism and pro-imperialism ofBahamas. In a disgusting capitulation beforethe racist campaign, the (ex-?) antifa clubKopi canceled a solidarity concert forMumia on June 11 because the ActionCoalition for Mumia refused to distance itself from the "Anti-Zionist Action"T-shirt. In a statement on the cancellation, Kopi goes so far as to justify the"anti-German" assault, saying "Whoeverwears such a symbol, simply risks gettinga beating!"

That leftists would sabotage the defense and solidarity efforts for Mumia isindeed despicable. He is a courageousand outspoken opponent of racist andimperialist oppression. We Spartacistshave actively fought for some 15 years tomake his case known internationally,above all to mobilize the power of theworking class to demand his freedom. Forbackground information, see Mumia AbuJamal Is an Innocent Man! (September2001), which documents his innocence.Free Mumia! Down with the racist deathpenalty!

Other Autonome groups support thewitchhunt against the RK through helpingexclude the RK from antifa and othercoalitions, adding their signatures to

the "anti-German" statement, or simplythrough shamefaced silence. In particular,the Autonomes and leftists who capitulatebefore the "anti-German" campaign arein hysterics over the "anti-German" portrayal of the RK as violent "anti-Semites"and "knifers." This is because they stillsee the "anti-Germans" as part of theanti fa left, and not as what they are-

violent racists in the service of the bourgeoisie ofAuschwitz. The "anti-German"campaign is a perfidiously crafted appealto racist prejudices. Like the state and the[right-wing] Springer P r e ~ s , the "antiGermans" rail against Arab" and Turkish"street gangs." We have only contempt

for those who spinelessly capitulate tosuch racist demagogy!

As already noted, we don't know allthe details of the events at the Carnival ofCultures. But we don't need to knowevery detail to know what the "antiGermans" are, and what their history is!The "anti-Germans" are no leftists; theyare supporters of the U.S.-led colonialoccupation of Iraq and of Israeli stateterror against the Palestinians. They areracist handmaidens for the "war on terror" against the Muslim minority and allimmigrants pursued by the SPD/Greengovernment. As we exposed in Spartakist,"anti-German" groups rake in the cashfrom the German capitalist state ('''Antinationalsl Anti-Germans': Goons for the

SPD/Green Government," Spartakist No.152, Fall 2003). They have repeatedlyattacked leftist opponents of Zionist stateterror. We ourselves were the target ofphysical attacks, as "anti-German" goonsattacked two of our events at HumboldtUniversity a year ago and slandered us as"anti-Semites." The Zionists claim thatdefending the Palestinians against Israelistate terror is "anti-Semitic." What theyparticularly hate about us is that our internationalist position destroys this lie: wefight for the perspective of Arab-Hebrewworkers revolution against Israel's capitalist rulers. In the framework of capitalism, there is no just solution when twonations, as in Israel/Palestine, lay claimto one and the same territory. Either the

Zionist bourgoisie oppresses the Palestinians, or the terms of oppression reverse.On 3 July 2003 we had to interrupt andmove our event because they ignited asmoke bomb and called the cops. Inresponse, we campaigned for our selfdefense and for the defense of the left,

,appealing to other leftists to oppose suchattacks, and we aggressively exposed thetrue character of the "anti-Germans" topolitically isolate them.

As Trotskyists, we have principledpolitical differences with the Maoist!Guevarist RK, but we stand for the principle of non-sectarian defense within theleft and labor movement. An injury to oneis an injury to all! The "anti-Germans"are a real threat to leftists and immi

grants, and we stand for the right of theRK and others to defend themselvesagainst attacks by the "anti-Germans." Ascan be seen by their pogrom-style call forthe July 10 rally, every time the "antiGermans" are successful in pulling off aprovocation, the scope of their targetsbroadens: along with immigrants and leftists in Neukolln and Kreuzberg, they alsodirect their attacks against the reformistdaily junge Welt and the liberal GreenMP Strobele. Down with "anti-German"attacks against leftists and immigrants!Stop the witchhunt against RK and supporters of Mumia! Down with the racist"war on terror"! Full citizenship rightsfor all who live here! De fend the Palestinians against Israeli state terror!.

7



YODng SparlaeDS

ONe Protests Tai/oied lor DemocratsThe Democratic National Convention

(DNC) served as a publicity blitz andparty for party functionaries, withscripted-to-the-minute speeches delivered to scripted applause over the strainsof lite-rock, with intermissions for cocktails and hobnobbing with Hollywoodstars. For the Democrats, one of the twocentral ruling parties of American capitalism, the convention authorized theircandidate of choice to command thebloody U.S. state for the next four years.For various unsavory and reactionarygroups, from the Scientologists to FalunGong to crazed anti-abortionists, it wasan opportunity to present their cause to

the media zoo. But for those intrepidleftist protesters who came to Boston,there were random bag checks, Military

Police manning subway stations, police

clad in riot gear swarming thick as beetles and a barbed-wire-ringed police penmasquerading as a "free speech zone"

all under the guise of "public safety" anda manufactured "terror" hysteria.

The liberal arid reformist outfits behindthe DNC protests tried to organize therelatively small "actions" so as to poseno real challenge to or break fromthe Democrats in keeping with the "Anybody but Bush" sentiment. In fact,the protests were largely designed asattempts to channel outrage at the repressive imperialist policies of American capitalism into lowest-common-denominatorpro-Democratic Party politics.

Democratic Party CongresswomanMaxine Waters was scheduled to speak to

Sunday's ANSWER rally against the U.S.occupation of Iraq. On Tuesday, the second day of the convention, "Billionairesfor Bush" led a march to the Republican headquarters. Dennis Kucinich, whohad endorsed Kerry the previous week,appeared back outside the convention torally against the destruction of civilliberties on Wednesday. By Thursday, Waters

and Kucinich were slated to be in themidst of cheering crowds at the FleetCenter as John Kerry invoked his militarypast and promised the recruitment of

40,000 more U.S. troops.

Nader to the SocialistMovement: Drop Dead

The Friday before the DNC, Spartacist

League and Spartacus Youth Club comrades swung by a Ralph Nader campaignstop at Harvard University. In a haltingintroduction to Nader, a Socialist Alternative (SAlt) member expressed greathope in a "movement" surrounding thiscapitalist.,politician and almost apologetically managed to tack on a briefaddendum that, in his, y'know, personal

8

opinion, he'd like to see a movementagainst capitalism emerge from the campaign. Fat chance! Behind typical "wethe people" rhetoric, Nader has courted"disaffected" Republicans and selectedstockbroker (and onetime cadre of thereformist Socialist Workers Party) PeterCamejo as a running mate-a choicemaking Nader's candidacy more palat

able to leftist groups like the Inter-

oppressed peoples of the region.Nader mostly gave me a straight

answer, too. He said he is for small-scalecapitalism, governed by producers andconsumers alike, and argued that socialism won't work because people don't

want to take enough responsibility fortheir own lives. Furthermore, he assuredme that the "Iraqi people" wanted tokeep the U.S. troops in place. But when it

July 29: Boston police push back demonstrators who moved out of theofficial "protest zone" toward the DNC site.

national Socialist Organization (ISO).Nader made absolutely clear that his candidacy was intended to pull the Democrats toward the left and away from "cor

porate" influence. He was so proud of

this image that he repeatedly mimedpulling a rope.

I got up and told him straight out that Iwasn't voting for Bush, Kerry or him. Iraised his unwavering commitment tocapitalism; his anti-immigration positions, which he expressed in an interviewwith Pat Buchanan by saying, "I don't

like the idea of legalization because thenthe question is how do you prevent thenext wave and the next?" (AmericanConservative, 21 June); and his opposition to an immediate, unconditional.withdrawal of troops from Iraq. For us,the withdrawal of troops from Iraq is the

first step to opening the way to revolu- •tionary class struggle by the working and

SL/SYC table at

the July 25ANSWER demo.Throughout theweek, we raisedthe call fo r abreak with the

DemocraticParty of warand racism.

came to the issue of immigration, hetold me to "go ask Peter Camejo," beforesnapping that socialists can't think forthemselves. Later in the discussion, hetold a supporter of American Indianactivist and political prisoner LeonardPeltier that he wasn't for freedom orclemency but only a "new trial."

OrganiC Lawns andDemocratic Pawns

Across town, thousands of liberalsocial activists gathered at the University

of Massachusetts at Boston for the weekend to attend the Boston Social Forum(BSF)-purposefully organized beforebut not during the DNC so as not to rilepro-Democrat feathers. Despite its overwhelmingly liberal politics, the BSF gaveus an opportunity to present our revolutionary program to a range of socialactivists and engage in debate with otherleftist organizations.

SAlt spent their "Is a Socialist WorldPossible?" wGrkshop explaining that theydidn't want to' be seen as "groupies forNader." But it is this role that SAlt has

played for months (see "Ralph Nader,ISO and Socialist Alternative: Unsavoryat Any Speed," WV No. 827, 28 May),

including at the Harvard rally. SAlt was

in a hurry to leave their workshop forNader's Harvard appearance particularlyafter we put to them questions about thetrack record of the Committee for aWorkers' International (CWI), to whichSAlt is affiliated. Among other issues, wespoke to the London-based CWI' s failureto make the elementary call for British troops out of Northern Ireland andits shady dealings with fascist elementsin Russia (see "Taaffeite CWI: FromYeltsin's Barricades to the Augean Stables," WVNo. 828, 11 June).

At the BSF we had numerous discussions with youthful supporters of the ISO

who considered a vote to Nader to be a

step toward breaking from the Democratic Party. When presented withNader's actual positions, which differonly slightly from Kerry's on issues likethe occupation of Iraq, some ISOerswould revert to defending the merits ofNader's vision of small-scale as against"big" capitalism. But there is absolutelynothing progressive about "small" capitalism-the goal of socialists is to vastlyexpand production through a proletarianrevolution that expropriates the rulingclass and abolishes private ownership andthe market economy so as to eliminatematerial scarcity on a global scale. As wepointed out to ISO supporters, the ISO'shostility to the perspective of independentproletarian struggle to rip industry out of

the hands of the capitalists is integrally

linked to its refusal to defend against U.S.imperialism the gains of those revolutionsthat succeeded in this task, above all theformer USSR, product of the Bolshevikled 1917 Russian Revolution.

Searching through workshops on "Organic Care of Lawns and Lawnscapes" and"Psychodynamics of Empire," the BSFbegan to feel a bit like cable television-

500 channels with nothing on. But ourcomrades found more events to attend. Theworkshop by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism(CoC) on "The Domestic Effects ofCorporate Globalization," featuring among others Angela Davis and Manning Marable.was one of the more well-attended BSFevents.

This workshop made clear how"Anybody but Bush" means "Anythingbut Revolution." Davis and Marableaddressed some of the conditions of blackoppression, describing the massive number of unemployed, incarcerated and disenfranchised black people in the U.S. Butblack "radicals" like Davis and Marablecynically use their authority as civil rights

movement veterans and ostensible socialists to head off any challenge to racistAmerican capitalism. Our interventionbroke through the unity-mongering,resign-yourself-to-the-Democrats consensus of tp,e speakers. It unmaskedthe reformists' classless rhetoric, whichis meant to obscure how it is going totake a socialist revolution to achieve

black liberation.In response, Davis and Marable werecompelled to defend their reformist politics. According to Marable, one of thegoals of the broad democratic "movement" is to find methods to reach people,and they're not going to be socialists, so if

it gets them out to the polls, if it gets themto recognize that actions must be taken ...In other words, all "the people" can understand is to vote for the Democrats, whichfits with Marable's overall do-nothing,

dead-end strategy.Our own workshop at the BSF, calling

to "Unchain Labor/Black Power" and"Break with the Democratic Party of Warand Racism" to build a fighting workers

party, stuck out like a bright red thumb.

Our comrade's presentation put the current elections in some historic perspective and tore through the myth of thegood old Democratic Party that has been"lost." From "pacifist" Woodrow Wilson's entry into the bloody WWI toFDR's crushing of labor under the WWIIwage freeze to the story of how the radical wing of the civil rights movementbroke free from Martin Luther King's

liberal pacifism, the presentation laid outthe history of social progress in Americaas one of struggle against both rulingparties. At each step, the Democrats


WORKERS VANGUARD



Really, REALLY Authoritarian "Anti-Authoritarians"

Boston SL/SYC Statement: Protest BI(A)ckTea Society Anti-Communist Exclusion!

We reprint below a Boston SpartacistLeague/Spartacus Youth Club leaflet from

July 22 protesting the anarchist Bl(A)ck

Tea Society's plan to exclude usfrom their

"Really, REALLY Democratic Bazaar"on July 27. We distributed the leafletwidely at the Boston Social Forum and at

protests against the Democratic National

Convention before the ."Bazaar." In theend we were not excluded from the event,

where we set up a literature table.

The self-proclaimed "anti-authoritarian"

Bl(A)ck Tea Society (BTS) has bannedthe revolutionary communist SpartacistLeague from having a booth at its "Really,REALLY Democratic Bazaar." The BTSadvertised the bazaar, held in conjunctionwith the Democratic National Conventionprotests, as an event where "Everyone isinvited and encouraged to come set up a'booth' at the Bazaar that expresses theirvisions and practices of a better world"(BTS Web site, undated). Not quite. Afeatured speaker at the BTS bazaar isGreen-Rainbow Party activist Dan "TheBagel Man" Kontoff, who ran for CityCouncil last year and supports such capitalist politicians as Felix "friend of theDemocrats" Arroyo (former policy advisor to Kerry, no less) and Chuck Turner.

Along with Kontoff and his ilk, Buddhistsand advocates of running a diesel car onwaste vegetable oil are more than welcome; revolutionary communists howeverare banned in BTS-land .

We learned of this from the BTS July 8organizing meeting minutes on its Website, which read in part: "If a group ororganization with a history of creatingdiruptions (sic) at events would like tosign up, or if a group holds principlesand intentions that are not respectful orcompatable (sic) with the bazaar andwant to sign up, they will be contactedand told why they are not welcome.This applies to folks like the SPARTS,World Church of the Creator and so on."To cover for its allegiance to "lesser

evil" capitalist politics, the BTS has borrowed from garden variety liberal anticommunism here, outrageously lumping

communists with a fascist outfit. Unfortunately for the BTS, this particular slander

flies in the face of such facts as the 200-strong united-front demonstration initiated by our comrades in Chicago that

Spartacist Pamphlet$2 (56 pages)

Make checks payable/mail to:Spartacist Publishing Co.

Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

6 AUGUST 2004

Indymedia

Anarchist-organized "Really, REALLY Democrat ic Bazaar," July 27. Threatenedexclusion of Sl/SYC exposes undemocratic core of "anti-authoritarian" ideology.

women who refused to wear a veil. Sundry anarchists, "anti-authoritarians" and

run-of-the-mill liberals, hostile to theSoviet Union, sided with the imperialistbacked forces in Afghanistan. We unconditionally militarily defended the SovietUnion against imperialism and internalcounterrevolution and hailed the unquestionably progressive intervention intoAfghanistan. The Soviet withdra:val.fromAfghanistan-a treacherous capitulationto U.S. imperialism-was the prelude to

the counterrevolutionary destruction ofthe USSR in 1991-92. That defeat hasmeant uhtold misery for the peoplesof the former Soviet Union, for thewomen of Afghanistan and the world'sworkers and oppressed. The mujahedin

victory ultimately led U.S. imperialism's Frankenstein's monster-reaction

ary Islamic fundamentalism a a Osamabin Laden-to turn against its master.That in turn was an opportunity forthe U.S. rulers-now unfettered by theUSSR, the industrial-military powerhouse of the non-capitalist world-to

unleash their endless "war on terror" athome and abroad, slaughtering untold

thousands in Iraq.

drove the head World Church fascist,Matthew Hale, off Northwestern University campus. As comrade Trotsky noted,even slander should make some sense!

The BTS' anti-communist exclusion ismotivated by its deeply ingrained hostil

ity to revolutionary, proletarian politics.For our part, we fight for a communistegalitarian society of material abundance,achieved through the victory of socialistrevolutions across the planet. Our modelis the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky that led the Russian workers to powerin October 1917 and established theSoviet Union, the first workers state, as abeacon for the struggles of workers andoppressed internationally. The BTS follows in the worst of the anarchist tradition, from Prince Kropotkin who preferred the hapless bourgeois politicianKerensky to the Bolsheviks, to the counterrevolutionary exploits of Makhno andothers who sided with the imperialistallied White Guards against the Soviet

workers state. At bottom, there isn't muchto distinguish the BTS from social democrats and liberals who have and will resortto any means to smear communists as"authoritarian," denouncing the "extrem

ism" of right and left, giving oh-so"democratic" aid and comfort to theforces of bourgeois repression.

For all its "direct action" posturing,when last seen the BTS was, according toa report on Boston Indymedia (19 May)-a report not refuted by the BTS-an

early member of the Boston Democratic

National Convention Coalition, alongwith city councilors and pro-capitalistliberals such as the American FriendsService Committee and United for Justicewith Peace. We say clearly: the Demo

cratic Party, like the Republicans, represents the class interests of the capitalistsand therefore carries out imperialist warabroad, metes out racist oppression andexecutes other repressive measures athome, all in order to further the exploitation of labor in the interest of profit. Itcannot be pressured to act in the interestsof the workers and oppressed. The working class needs its own party to leadthe fight for the revolutionary overthrowof the capitalist system and the establishment of workers rule. While the B T ~ •

whines about "corporate parties," we posea proletarian perspective-class against

class-and a political struggle against thereformist misleaders of the liberal "anybody but Bush" crowd.

Activists coming to Boston who werearrested at the RNC and DNC in 2000or at last year's FTAA protests in Miamiwill be interested to learn that the BTSrecently joined picket lines organized bythe Boston police. The BTS announced

this at its July 13 meeting at Lucy ParsonsBookstore. As communists, we know thatthe cops are not part of the working class,but are an integral part of the repressiveapparatus of the racist ruling class, i.e., ofthe bourgeois state. The BTS received itsown object lesson in this fact when thecops kicked BTSers off the picket linesafter they found out who they were. Asopposed to opportunist "anarchists" whosolidarize with striking police whosedemands are for better compensation forand means to break strikes, terrorizeblack people and repress all those whowould protest the racist, capitalist statusquo, revolutionaries fight within theworking class to bring to it the understanding that cops are not part of the

working class but rather its armed enemy.The BTS also made clear at its July

13 meeting that its political differenceswith our Trotskyist politics motivated itsexclusion of the Spartacists from the woe

fully misnamed bazaar. Thus, in responseto our protest of this exclusion at thatmeeting, the BTS responded that it washorrified that we hailed the Soviet RedArmy intervention into Afghanistan in1979 against the CIA-backed mujahedin

reactionaries. Indeed we did! The onlyforce to defend the rights of women inAfghanistan was the Red Army, while on

the other side were Islamic fundamentalists who shot teachers for teaching girlsto read, who threw acid in the faces of

No doubt the BTS is just as horrified

by our unconditional military defense ofthe Chinese, Cuban, North Korean andVietnamese deformed workers statesagainst imperialist attack and internalcounterrevolution and our call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies. Such revolutionaryproletarian politics could, after all, disturb the BTS' media-friendly bazaar celebrating "our diversity and our autonomy,our love and our freedom."

In spite of the BTS' wretched politics,we defended them against the MITadministration's attempts to censor themin May, and we will continue to defendthem against such attempts and staterepression, because we are consistentdefenders of workers democracy. As the

Wobblies (Industrial Workers of theWorld) put it:· an injury to one is aninjury to all! We call on all those withinthe left and workers movement to protestthe BTS exclusion of the Spartacist

League from the "Really, REALLY Democratic Bazaar." And if you are interestedin building a revolutionary workers partythat fights for all the oppressed, that aimsto ·get rid of the capitalist system and itsstate (cops, courts, prisons, military)through socialist revolution, then subscribe to Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League, and find outwhat the BI(A)ck Tea Society doesn'twant you to know. As Marx said, ignorance never did anybody any good! •

r - - - - - Spartacist/Spartacus Youth Club Forum

We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

-Report Back from ONe Protests

Thursday, August 12, 7:30 p.m.322 w. 48th St., 1st Floor

(take E or C train to 50th St. stop, between 8th and 9th Avenues)For more information: (212) 267-1025

or e-mail [email protected]

NEW YORK CITY

9



Anti-Abortion Bigot Driven Out;Fascist Provocation SpikedBoston

Some 2,000 demonstrators turned outon the Boston Common on Sunday, July25 for a rally and "National Marchon the Democratic Convention/Bring theTroops Home Now!" called by theWorkers World Party-initiated ANSWERcoalition. Notwithstanding some lip service to opposing the twin parties of capitalism, the ANSWER demo's demandswere directed at pressuring the capitalist Democratic Party, whose nationalconvention began the next day inBoston. Thus, one of the featuredinvited speakers was prominent Democratic Party pol Maxine Waters-a noshow on the day. Comrades of the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth

Clubs intervened in the ANSWER demonstration with sales of our revolutionary Marxist newspaper aBd pamphlets,seeking to win youth and others to the

DNC...(continued from page 8)

were not the friends of the oppressed butthe primary ideological and politicalobstacle to their liberation. In contrast,we want a workers party based in classand social struggle, fighting for the interests of all the oppressed and stoppingshort at nothing but socialist revolution.

How "Communist" ProgressiveLabor Caves In to Bosses

Standing to the left with its "communist" rhetoric and "It's Not Just BushIt's Capitalism" buttons was ProgressiveLabor (PL). But, as has been the casewith PL for decades, its calls to "Shootthe Profit System Down" stood in flatcontrast to its own rotten positions. Forexample, PL refuses to militarily defendthe Iraqi and Palestinian populationsagainst the U.S. imperialist behemoth andZionist state repression, under the "logic"of denouncing both sides in the respectiveconflicts as equally reactionary.

When it mattered during the U.S.imperialist Cold War II onslaught of

the 1980s, the Stalinist PL programmatically sided with its own b o u r g e o i s i ~ andrefused to defend the remaining gains ofthe Russian Revolution, having longbefore proclaimed the Soviet Union "capitalist." PLers at the BSF were unable toexplain what happened to the USSR in1991-92, when counterrevolution openedthe door to the return of capitalist miseryto the homeland of October. Today,defense of China and the fight for proletarian political revolution there to oust itstreacherous Stalinist bureaucratic misleaders is posed for all serious revolutionaries. But PL again puts itself on thesame side as its imperialist masters byvituperating against "fascist" China.Meanwhile, PL has tried to cover its

tracks by publishing an updated version ofthe old Stalinist hack job titled "WhyTrotskyism Is Reactionary" in the Spring2004 issue of its magazine Communist.(For more on Trotskyism vs. Stalinism,see the SYL pamphlet "The Stalin Schoolof Falsification Revisited," 1985).

Young PLers also had a big problemdealing with PL's position on gay oppression, where it buys into the backwardconsciousness of bourgeois society. Atone worksnop, an SL comrade read aquote from their article "Lynching of GayStudent Reveals Two Sides of Rulers'Fascist Coin" (Challenge, 4 November

10

perspective of working-class oppositionto both parties of capitalism and thefight for the construction of a revolu

tionary workers party. At our literaturetable, a Spartacist banner read: "Breakwith the Democrats! Build a WorkersParty to Fight for Socialist Revolution!"

As protesters converged on theBoston Common, a viciously bigotedopponent of abortion rights and rightsfor homosexuals· raised a provocativesign with a graphic photo of a fetuson one side and an anti-gay sloganon the other. This individual, oneLeonard Gendron, is a pastor based inLawrence, Massachusetts and a prominent reactionary opponent of gay marriage. According to the Village VoiceWeb site (26 July) .Gendron "favorsan American theocracy." The antiabortion, anti-gay bigot staged his

provocation near our literature table.Comrades from the Spartacist Leagueapproached other leftists at the demonstration and joined with them to con-

1998) that stated: "The torture-murder ofMatthew Shepard, an openly homosexualWyoming student, has thrown a spotlighton two apparently opposing movements-gaybashing and gay rights. Both movements are growing with the encouragement and support of conflicting sectionsof the U.S. capitalist class. And bothmovements are dangerous to the workingclass." PLers asserted their own individual support for gay rights, but none could

show us where the line of th.at article wasdisavowed in print. Its bigoted positionon gays, a betrayal of the liberating goalsof communism, is derived from the Stalinist glorification o f the family as a fighting·unit for socialism.

At Sunday's ANSWER demonstration,Spartacist comrades took the lead inorganizing opposition to an anti-gay provocateur who turned out to have fascist buddies (see "Anti-Abortion BigotDriven Out; Fascist Provocation Spiked,"above). Would PL see both the anti-gayprovocateur and the outraged crowd whochanted, "Full democratic rights forgays!" as "two sides of the same fascistcoin"? Using the incident that had justoccurred, Spartacist comrades explained

to the late-arriving PL contingent that, asLenin taught us, real communists need tofight for the rights of all the oppressed.

New "Socialist" Parties,Same Reformist ANSWER

Aside from the drama with the provocateurs early on, the ANSWER rally to"Bring the Troops Home Now" proved tobe an uneventful peace crawl of 2,000dominated by signs proclaiming "PeaceIs Patriotic." It was seen by many there asa venue at which to beg the Democrats tostrike at least an antiwar pose. This timidity didn't stop the police from sweepingin and detaining one "Mid-Eastern looking" marcher, later released, for "lookingaround," sparking the crowd to chant,

"This is racial profiling!" (Boston Indymedia, 25 July).

Protesters of all stripes, from liberals toanarchists, told us they'd be holding theirnose and voting Kerry. Many told me theysaw the last remaining difference betweenthe Republicans and Democrats as arespect for civil liberties. But a Democratic city administration built thebarbed-wire-enclosed "free speech zone"at the DNC, and a vast majority of Democrats in Congress voted for the PatriotAct. One woman organizing "swingstate" campaigning said she opposed theDemocrats, but went on to argue that if

front Gendron, expose him and drivehim away from the demonstration site.Our chants of "Free abortion on

demand!" and "Full democratic rightsfor gays!" were picked up by many as acrowd of protesters surrounded thebigot. A fascist skinhead, earlier seenlurking in the vicinity, rushed to Gendron's defense. While the anti-gaybigot was escorted from the area byANSWER marshals, the fascist skinhead received a torn T-shirt and wascorrectly repelled.

Fascists are deadly enemies of blackpeople, the left, the workers movement,gays and all minorities, a physicalthreat from which the demonstrationhad to be defended. In Boston, as elsewhere, these scum have a symbioticrelationship with the crazed religiousright who seek to deny women and

homosexuals basic rights, who haveengaged in the murder of abortionclinic workers and doctors, who havewhipped up a climate wherein gay peo-

Bush was re-elected it might be the lastelection America has. Her view, shared bymany liberals, was that civil liberties arerights "granted" by the capitalist state. Infact, civil liberties are won and defendedin the course of social struggle.

Even as they organized liberals tobeg the Democrats for peace, leadingANSWER organizers in the reformistWorkers World Party (WWP) paid lipservice to the ideas of socialism andw O . t ~ J ~ ' , PQUPcaJ iQ4ependence, . ideasbelied by the WWP's constant courtingof bourgeois politicians. Also in Bostonwas the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a recent split from the WWP.PSLers told us they have no political differences with the WWP. The PSL'sfounding statement in Socialism and Lib-

eration Magazine (August 2004), whichwe picked up there, argues:

"Pacifist appeals to the ruling class for a'peaceful' or 'kinder, gentler' foreignpolicy is the worst kind of deceit offeredup by social democrats and opportunists.Working to elect a new leader to presideover the affairs of the warfare state willhave zero impact in reducing the threatof war. As Lenin wrote in 1916, underthe system of imperialism peace ismerely a prelude to the next war."

This shows real chutzpah. The PSL isnot only associated with ANSWER butalso proudly hails ANSWER's work during the antiwar protests. The entire strategy of ANSWER in the antiwar movement (led by those now in both the

'WWP and the PSL) was to play a keyrole in maintaining and breeding illusions in the Democratic Party. While various reformists crowed over the "success" of the antiwar movement, manyyouth we spoke to were rather depressedby the realization that mass protestsalone could not and did not stop thebipartisan drive to war against Iraq.

Black America Betrayed byDemocratic Party Misleaders

On Monday, the Socialist Party (SP)held the only rally during the DNC actually against the Deinocrats. One of ourcomrades spoke at it, underlining ourrevolutionary integrationist program:

"America is not and has not been the landof the free. It's built on exploitation,it's built on oppression, and structurallyfounded on the special oppression ofblack people at the bottom of societyfrom slavery to Jim Crow to what peo-ple call the 'Prison-Industrial Complex'today. And this. city itself is built on racialoppression. This city is the city wherebusing was defeated in the streets."

Our comrade referred to the infamous

pIe have been brutally murdered . Gendron's repulsive provocation was metappropriately with protest and exposure. However, outright race-terrorists,i.e., fascists, are not only race-hatingideologues, but are organized for actionagainst the entire workers movement

and must be dealt with as such.

The fact that skinhead fascists inBoston feel emboldened to openlyemerge from their rat holes to stage

provocations at largely leftist demonstrations is ominous. This is due in nosmall part to the fact that at past eventssponsored by ANSWER, most recentlyat demonstrations in support of gaymarriage rights, fascist scum have beenlargely ignored by the demo organizers.Urgently necessary are united-frontactions by the integrated workers movement and all of the fascists' intendedvictims to defend leftist, workers andminority meetings and protests from thefascists' provocations and attacks. Thepolitical obstacles to such mobilizationsare pro-Democratic Party liberals andtrade-union misleaders, as well as theirreformist hangers-on, who preach relianceon the capitalist state to keep the fascists

at bay. The left and workers movementcan and must rely on its own strength tostop these provocations and send thefascists packing!

1976 attack on a black lawyer by flagwielding racist white youths and continued that this is "the same American flagthat the Democrats are rallying behindtoday and rallying under in their convention. The same American flag that RalphNader says he wants to cleanse."

The much-vaunted wave of "hip-hopactivism" played out as crass commercialhustling at Russell Simmons' Hip-HopSummit that same day. We were planning

to attend until we discovered that gettingin meant joining Simmons' "Hip-HopTeam Vote." Which is to say, for the privilege of hearing the penetrating socialinsights of Ma$e and the Ying Yang Twinsand "special discounts on the latest newclothing, shoe wear & gear," we too couldhave signed on to line up earnest andpolitical minority youth to be voting cattle for the Democrats. No thanks.

On Tuesday, speaking at the convention, Democratic Party politico Al Sharpton claimed that black voters, havingfailed to procure 40 acres and a mulefrom the Republicans following the CivilWar, "decided we'd ride this donkey asfar as it would take us." But that donkey'sbeen walking all over black people for

years. Black oppression, the bedrock ofAmerican capitalism, can only be eliminated through the victorious conquest ofpower by the U.S. proletariat. Just look athow mainstream Democrats treated evenformer FBI fink Sharpton for bringing upissues like racist cop murders in his presidential campaign and for going outsidethe script at the DNC (see "AI Sharpton:Political Hustler for Hire," WV No. 822,19 March)! There will be no social revolution here without the united struggle ofblack and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard.

Bizarre Behavior

The nominally more militant and leftist Northeastern Federation of Anarcho

Communists (NEFAC), in a concessionto "Anybody but Bush" sentiment, madea "commitment" to participate in protests against the Republican National Convention in New York, where they haveone "collective," but not the DNC inBoston, where they have five (Strike!,JunelJuly 2004). This left the "antiauthoritarian" organizing banner to theaction-factionistas of the Bl(A)ck TeaSociety (BTS), who basked in the medialimelight but delivered very little in theway of actual protest.

Throughout the week, we distributedour flier on how their one serious public

WORKERS VANGUARD





Bush, Kerry...(continued from page 1)

no t developing nuclear arms, and there

was not a link between Hussein and

Osama bin Laden. As the New York Times(10 July) editorialized, "Put simply, the

Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books."

Why? The Senate committee politely

evaded that question, postponing investi

gation of the uses the administration madeof the CIA's disinformation until after theelection. Veteran CIA director George

Tenet, who also served under Clinton,resigned to take the heat off, while

"groupthink" mentality at the CIA, rather

than pressure from the White House, was

blamed for the rush to justi fy the impend

ing war. The Butler report in Britain used

the exact same "groupthink" phrase tocover up for British prime minister Tony

Blair's eager and slavish commitment of

British troops to the U.S.'s Iraq war.

The war was launched to reassert U.S.

imperialist domina tion over its rivals, and

over the oil-rich Near East. Democrats

overwhelmingly rallied to support the

Africa. We say: U.S. hands of f Sudan!

Whatever their differences, at bot

tom all bourgeois factions will unite

against their perceived foreign and

domestic opponents, most fundamentally

the American working class, in defense of

their state and its prerogatives. How

many lies have both Democratic and

Republican administrations told in advancing their imperial ambitions? Ask

yourself, how many wars have there

been? "Remember the Maine!" was the

lying slogan launching America's first

imperialist war against Spain in 1898,

aimed at taking over Cuba and the Philip

pines. Democratic president WoodrowWilson lied that World War I was to make

the world "safe for democracy" when in

fact it was a war to redivide up the spoilsof the world. The U.S. entry into World

War II, supposedly a war against fascism,

was intended to establish American dom

ination in Europe and East Asia. The

Democratic Roosevelt administration

provoked the Japanese to attack to justify

an American declaration of war. In 1964,

the Democratic Johnson administration

fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident

as a pretext to massively escalate the

political activists or labor militants, and

indiscriminately round up and detain non

citizens" (WVNo. 767, 26 October 2001).

At the same time, the U.S. invaded andoccupied Afghanistan and, in 2003, Iraq.

Thousands and thousands of victims of

U.S. aggression are dead, dying, muti

late", tortured, imprisoned.If the Bush administration had had its

way, there would have been no 9/11 Com

mission, whose report was an overnightbest seller. However, the families of those

killed in the World Trade Center attack

rightly wanted and demanded answers:Why had their loved ones perished?

Could the government have prevented theterrorist attack? But in the 9/11 Commis

sion Report they got a continued coverup, because the bitter and horrible truth is

that the fanatics whom the governmentcharges with the attack, Osama bin Laden

and his Al Qaeda network, were in fact

the creation of u.s. imperialism itself.The report focuses on bin Laden's career

after he turned on the U.S., claiming that

earlier in Afghanistan "Bin Ladin and his

comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little

or no assistance from the United States."

UPI Friends of Afghanistan Society

Ronald Reagan hosted reactionary Afghan mujahedin in 1983 at White House. During Soviet intervention in 1980s,Afghan militiawomen took up arms against CIA-backed Islamic cutthroats.

invasion at the time. From the get-go, and

in fact, facts were irrelevant. One example: the bizarre tale ofIraq mobile biolog

ical weapons factories, from a source

code-named "Curveball," was used by

Secretary of State Colin Powell-reput

edly the leading "moderate" in the Bushadministration-at the United Nations in

2003. Responding to an analyst who

questioned this fairy tale before thespeech, the deputy director of the CIA'stask force on "weapons of mass destruc

tion" wrote: "Let's keep in mind the fact

that this war's going to happen regardlessof what Curveball said or didn't say,

and the powers that be probably aren't

terribly interested in whether Curveball

knows what he's talking about" (citedin CounterPunch, 13 July). In short,

the U.S. went to war, sending mainly

working-class, black and Latino soldiers

to slaughter thousands ofIraqis for a com

plete pack of lies.

But when.,CIA spies and blue-bloodedrepresentatives of the ruling class like the

vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence

Committee, Democratic Senator John D.

Rockefeller IV, question administrationpolicy, you can be sure it's not in the

interests of the working class. There are

factional differences in bourgeois circles,

especially as the occupation of Iraq isn't

going well, as to how the U.S. can more

effectively pursue American imperialism's interests-i.e., how to fatten their

profit margins by increasing the exploitation and oppression of the world's peo

ples. Some bourgeois ideologues feel the

Iraq adventure was a wasteful diversion

from other U.S. strategic goals, like over

turning the 1949 Chinese Revolution, orcrushing North Korea. Then there are long

term interimperialist rivalries between

the U.S. and its two strongest competi

tors, Japan and Genpany. Now some lib

erals, including many black Democrats

like Jesse Jackson Jr., call for a U.S. "inter

vention" into Sudan; using the horrible

warfare in Darfur as an excuse to insert a

heavy U.S. military presence in northern

12

U.S.'sdirty colonial war against Vietnam'sworkers and peasants.

Covering Up theCIA-Bin Laden Connection

On the warm and clear morning of

September 11, 2001, a massive terrorist

attack was unleashed over the American

northeast, as four commercial airliners

were seized and turned into mammoth

flying bombs by Islamic fundamentalists,

killing some 3,000 people. Two crashed

into the World Trade Center, and today, a

huge and achingly empty concrete pit is

all that remains where the twin towers

once stood in lower Manhattan. One

plane was forced down by the crew and

passengers in Pennsylvania, and one hit

the Pentagon. Unlike the World Trade

Center, the Pentagon is the command and

administrative center of the U.S. imperi

alist military, and being a military instal

lation the possibility of getting hit comeswith the territory. That recognition does

not make the attack an "anti-imperialist"

act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always gets innocent people-in this case, the passengers on the

plane as well as the maintenance workers,

janitors and secretaries at the Pentagon.The next day we of the Spartacist

League issued a s tatement denouncing the

attack on the World Trade Center as an

indefensible act of criminal terror, writ

ing: "Those who perpetrated this horrific

attack (and there is no evidence at all as towho that was) embrace the same mental-ity as the racist rulers ofAmerica-iden

tifying the working masses with theircapitalist exploiters and oppressors!" We

warned that the American ruling class

would respond with repression at homeand imperialist "retaliation" abroad.

The following month Congress passed

the USA-Patriot Act with Kerry and most

Democratic Senators and Congressmen

voting for it. We wrote at the time: "These

measures seek to eliminate many existinglegal restraints on the government's

power to spy on the popUlation, imprison

·Bot facts are facts. Even the New -York

Times (6 June) admits the connection,though coyly, noting the CIA's "clandes

tine role in the 1980's in evicting Soviet

forces from Afghanistan-though that

operation inadvertently laid the ground

work for the rise of Osama bin Laden."

There was nothing inadvertent about it. In

1986, the CIA used Osama bin Laden tohelp build a huge tunnel complex in

Khost, under the mountains near Paki

stan, to create a major arms storage depot

and training facility for the army of

Islamic terrorists the CIA was building to

fight the Soviet forces supporting the secular, modernizing nationalist government

in Afghanistan (Ahmed Rashid, Taliban[2001]). This was by far the biggest

covert CIA operation ever. Tens of bil

lions of dollars went to arm mujahedinfighters in Pakistan and to Pakistan's

huge Inter Service Intelligence, which

sponsored Islamic fundamentalist ter

ror. After the Soviet Union was de-'stroyed through capitalist counterrevolu

tion in 1991-92, Washington cut off thelavish arms and money pipeline to its

reactionary,. woman-hating terrorists inAfghanistan. The blowback hit the World

Trade Center a decade later.

There was nothing secret at the time

about the massive U.S. support to themujahedin in Afghanistan. Quite the con

trary. Yet practically every self-styled leftist group in the world echoed the imperi

alist line. They condemned the Sovietintervention and demanded that Moscow

withdraw its troops. Whatever the motives

of the Kremlin leaders, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was doubly pro

gressive. It represented a necessary mili

tary defense of the USSR-a bureau

cratically degenerated workers sta te

against imperialist encirclement. And itrepresented a defense of the meager forcesof social progress, centrally for women, in

this hideously backward Central Asian

country. Uniquely on the left, we raised

the slogans: Hail Red Army in Afghani

stan! Extend the social gains of the Octo-

ber Revolution to the Afghan peoples!

Besides covering up the CIA-bin

Laden connection, the 9111 Commission

Report proposes a truly outrageous set of

"security" measures. You know it's bad

when a right-wing columnist like former

Nixon speechwriter William Safire (who

is also something of a social libertarian)

denounces "fear-driven new groupthink"and writes: "With great fanfare, the 9111

commission amplified that call for asuper-spymaster. This rush to 'reform' is

stampeding otherwise sensible senators

into writing a czarist bill to combine the

spying techniques of secret surveillance

with the law-enforcement power of theF.B.I., invading the unsuspected citizen's

privacy under the rubric of fighting terrorism" (New York Times, 26 July).

Among the Senate proposals are "bio

metric" identity cards not just for foreign

ers but for all Americans, abolishingrestrictions against CIA and military spy

ing and operations within the U.S., and

establishing a single, unified intelligencelpolicelspying apparatus which can run

unchecked at home and abroad. The

report complains that airport securitydidn't use a list (called TIPOFF), which

the State Department already had before

the September 11 attacks, of some

"known and suspected terrorists" which

comprises 60,000 names! In the name

of "pre-emptive" strikes, what's to stopthe state from rounding up all those

names, even if they haven't actually done

anything? Actually, to qualify for "preemptive" detention, by definition you'd

have to be innocent to be grabbed inadvance of doing anything. This is no

paranoid sci-fi Philip K. Dick fantasy,but the mindset of the American impe

rial police today.

For Class Struggle at Home!

When Kerry says he'd be a better com

mander in chief of the U.S. armed forces

than Bush, he means better for the men

(and a few women) who run Wall Street

and the Fortune 500. Historically, theDemocrats have been the preferred warparty of American imperialism because of

their broader base of support among workers, black people and ethnic minorities.

Precisely because the Democrats are seenas a "friend" of labor and blacks, they canbe a more effective political instrumentfor carrying out the bloody-handed crimesof American imperialism. The key to de

feating the U.S. occupation ofIraq is classstruggle at home, but this is impeded bythe Democratic Party-loyal labor leader

ship, who are opposed to militant struggle

that could break the chains tying workers

to their exploiters in the ruling class.

For all the bourgeoisie's bombast aboutstopping terrorism, in fact the only people

who actually stopped terrorists on Sep

tember 11,2001, were the heroic passen

gers and crew of United Airlines Flight93. They voted to rush the cockpit, divert

ing the plane from its suicide bombing

run and forcing it to crash into a field in

Pennsylvania, killing all aboard. Therewere other heroes, overwhelmingly work

ing men and women. The firefighters atthe World Trade Center gave up hundredsof their own lives to save thousands. And

the air traffic controllers across the country performed brilliantly on a nationwide

coordinated scale, bringing 4,500 com

mercial and general aviation aircraft

safely onto the ground without incident.Ronald Reagap and his class fired the

whole PATCO air traffic controllers unionin the 1980s, expressing their utter con

tempt for working people.I f here is to be an end to this system of

imperialist war, racist oppression and all

sided grinding misery, the multiracialU.S. working class must be won, through

Marxist education and its own experience

in struggle, to the perspective of building

a workers party that fights for a socialist

revolution. The capitalist system must beoverturned and replaced by the rule of the

working class, a workers government that

will seize the means of production and

establish a planned, collectivized econ

omy as part of an egalitarian, socialist

society on an international scale •

WORKERS VANGUARD



India ...

(continued from pa ge 3)

wooed the "three Bills" (Gates, Clinton,dollar). He prided himself as the "architect of the high-tech revolution" that hasmade Andhra a leading exporter of software. He renamed a portion of the capitalcity Hyderabad "Cyberabad" and gave aRs. [rupees] 20,000 government subsidy

to foreign investors for each job createdthere. He set up a 9000-acre, duty-free

commercial enclave called Andhra Pradesh Special Economic Zone (APSEZ)modeled on Shenzhen City in China.When Clinton came to Hyderabad in

March 2000, spending a total of fivehours there, the jails brimmed with beggars and street vendors rounded up for theduration of his visit. Naidu cleared the

streets of stalls, pushcarts, and rickshaws,and had thirty grand old trees from different parts of the city chopped down andpropped up along the route to be taken byClinton's convoy from Air Force One.

The early news of Naidu's defeat in the

recent elections was the first shock for theBJP, whose coalition government reliedon the support of regional parties likeNaidu's TDP (Telugu Desam Party) and

Jayalalitha's AIADMK (All India AnnaDravida Munnetra Kazhagam) in Tamilnadu. The extravagantly corrupt Jayalalitha was notorious for policies leading tothe immiseration of small peasants, driving them to mass suicides. In addition,she was known for putting in placeanti-conversion laws designed to preventuntouchables and tribals from leavingHinduism. Jayalalitha topped her ownnotoriety with her use of the BJP's PoTO(Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance),India's equivalent of the Patriot Act, andher own TESMA (Tamilnadu EssentialServices Maintenance Act). When 1.1

million government employees went onstrike in June last year, her government,armed with PoTO and TESMA, did

something unprecedented in the historyof India. It summarily dismissed 200,000strikers and arrested 2200. Midnightarrests and police raids on union officesand houses of striking workers continuedfor days. Now Jayalalitha is gone too.

Last week's elections results were astartling demonstration of the backlashamong Indian workers and poor peasantsto India's so-called economic reforms.Publicly owned industries, or PSUs (Public Sector Units), in steel, electricity, petrochemicals, communications, railways,and the like are in the process of beingsold off. Government-run healthcare andeducation has been cut. There are nomore subsidies for small farmers, seedsare more and more expensive, and elec

tricity for irrigation is unavailable. Naiduadmitted his agenda was to make it soimpossible for small farmers that theywould voluntarily leave their land and goaway, paving the way for big agribusiness. Since the beginning of reforms 2

million peasants have been displaced andin recent years it's been common to hearof whole peasant families drinking poisonor hanging themselves from trees afterthey lose their land-in part due to theirown feudal, uppercaste pride of land ownership which prevents them from thinkingof seeking any other means of living.

The victory of Congress has been wel-

CLASS-STRUGGLE

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No. 31, Summer 2003

50q; (24 pages)

Order from/make checks payable to:Partisan Defense CommitteeP.O. Box 99Canal Street StationNew York, NY 10013-0099

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6 AUGUST 2004

corned with great enthusiasm and itsleader Sonia Gandhi is seen as a savior of

peasants, workers, and minorities. Congress says it wants to put a "human face"on the economic reforms and it immediately promised free electricity to peasants. Novelist and activist Arundhati Roy(currently a favorite among Americanleft-liberals) spoke for many on theIndian left when, in an article titled "LetUs Hope the Darkness Has Passed," she

wrote, "For many of us who feel estrangedfrom mainstream politics, there are rare,

ephemeral moments of celebration. Todayis one of them" (Guardian, May 14,2004).

the TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive

Activities) Act, which allowed the policeto arrest and detain a person withoutcharge merely for suspicion of havingknowledge of an alleged terrorist group.These suspects were usually killed in"encounters" with police, making the actessentially a license to kill. Son ia's righthand man and new PM Maomohan Singhis known as the architect of the economicreforms that Congress is now promisingthe national and international bourgeoisieto continue (but with a human face).

Congress now has to depend, as didthe BJP, on other parties to form a coali-

AFP

India, 2002: After train carrying Hindu fundamentalists was criminally torchedby Muslim fanatiCS, Hindu mobs burned down homes in the state of Gujarat,killing hundreds in anti-Muslim pogroms.

tion government. Their biggest allies are. the Stalinists-the CPI-M (CommunistParty of India-Marxist), who are now thethird-largest parliamentary party, and theCPI (Communist Party of India).

Historically, the Stalinists in India sup

ported sending Indian troops to fight forBritain during World War Two in the "antifascist people's war," and before 1947 theyrallied workers and poor peasants behind$e bourgeois Congress party, calling it an

"anti-feudal, anti-imperialist, nationalist"formation. Immediately after Independence, major peasant revolts broke outagainst the zamindars (a class of feudallords created by the British to collect taxesfor the raj) and princely states in Andhra,West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura. Eventhough these heroic struggles mobilizedpoor peasants and other oppressed sections in the countryside, including Muslims, untouchables, and tribals, their Stalinist leaders all came from uppercasterich and middle peasantry and served theinterests of that class. The popularity of

these revolts eventually allowed the Stalinists to form bourgeois state governments in all those states except Andhra.

In these three strongholds they introduced limited land reforms, suppressedcommunalism, and expanded free educat ion-in Kerala, as a result, there is now

almost 100 percent literacy. In other statesand in the center, the'Stalinist&,.supported

whichever bourgeois party appeared to bethe lesser evil at the moment. In Andhra,for example, the same Stalinists nowsupporting Congress had previously supported Naidu's TDP-whose leadershiphas a social composition very similar totheir own-against Congress. Their own

leader Pucchalapalli Sundarayya admitted at that time that he couldn't tellhis own party's publication Prajasakthi

(People's Power) from TDP propaganda.There is a widespread hatred amongworkers for the leaders of the CPI-Maffiliated CITU (Center for Indian TradeUnions), which not infrequently boilsover into physical reprisals, In 2001, 200

Dunlop tire factory workers and theirfamilies, feeling betrayed when the factory closed and their long-due wageswere withheld, attacked the president of

the Dunlop unit of CITU and beat him up,

Although the Stalinists have madesome noises that their suppQf1: of Congress will be conditional on its stoppingdisinvestment in the public sector, their

opposition to liberalization is fast dwindling in the heat. The CPI-M declaredthat they "welcome foreign investmentand realize that no country could quarantine itself from globalization" (DailyTimes, May 21, 2004). Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the CM [Chief Minister] of

West Bengal's CPI-M government, isopenly promising foreign investors (witha portrait of Lenin hanging behind him)that he will cut regulations, rein in laborunions, rid Calcutta of the plague of constant strikes, and shut down "sick" staterun industries. Even before the drafting of

the common minimum program for thenew coalition, the CPI-M party spokesman announced that partial disinvestment"could be discussed" (Outlook India,

May 15). The common minimum program itself calls for encouraging foreigninvestment, slowing down-not stopping-privatization, and deeper ties withthe United States.

At most, these Stalinists want a returnto pre-BJP times. But what India needsis a socialist revolution. To make one itwill take a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguardparty that will organize workers acrosscommunal, national, and caste l ines

rallying the poor peasants behind them

and link their struggle to those of workers in the imperialist countries.

Comradely greetings,Sarah .

But Congress, as its history shows, is

no alternative. Though not as openlychauvinist as the BJP, Congress hasalways served the interests of the Hindumajority. Ever since Independence theparty has been led by the despicabledynasty of the high Brahmin NehruGandhi family. M. K. Gandhi (no relationto Indira and Raj v, who descend fromNehru) was recorded by Mahadev Desaias saying that his opposition to separate

electorates for the hideously oppresseduntouchables was based on the fear that'''[u]ntouchable' hooligans will makecommon cause with Muslim hooligansand kill caste-Hindus" (cited in From

Untouchable to Dalit, Eleanor Zelliot,page 167). In no small measure Gandhiand the Congress were responsible for thebloodbath following the India-Pakistanpartition. Before the BJP, it was Congresswho used communal tensions to divideand rule, leading to frequent pogromsagainst Muslims. During the Congressregime in Andhra, there was not a singleyear without communal riots in Hyderabad. Congress has been praised for putting forward a Sikh prime minister, but it

was Indira's Congress who ordered Oper

ation Blue Star in which 600 Sikhs werekilled inside the Golden Temple, and3000 more were massacred after Indirawas assassinated, in retaliation, by herown Sikh bodyguards. In Kashmir theBJP is only carrying on the policy established by Congress. In Sri Lanka RajivGandhi's IPKF (Indian Peace KeepingForce) was so notorious for its atrocitiesagainst ethnic Tamils that it led to his getting blown into very small pieces by asuicide bomber. When it comes to political repression, one has only to rememberthe dark days of the Emergency in themid-1970s. In 1985 Congress introduced

The USee and Solidarnosc1 July 2004

Dear editor,

I appreciated your article on HongKong published in Workers Vanguard No.825 (30 April). You point out the fakeTrotskyists' support to counterrevolutionary mobilizations in Hong Kong under themotto of "self-determination" and "democracy." You then proceed to say: "This is

not surprising given that these groups,October Review and Pioneer, are supporters of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat, which hailed Polish Solidarnose,

the company union of Wall Street and theVatican, as it led the first of the capitalistcounterrevolutions in East Europe."

What are you talking about here, 1981or 1989? This is important because thepseudo Trotskyists sometimes pretendthey were correct to support Solidarnosein the beginning (1981), when accordingto them Solidarnose was still a bonafideworkers organization fighting against Stalinist "totalitarianism," but which degenerated some time in the mid ' 80s, afterwhich the fake Trotskyists stopped supporting them (1989). They try thus towash their hands of their responsibility in

supporting this motor force for counterrevolution in Poland.

The United Secretariat (USec) cer-

tainly hailed Solidarnose in 1981, as itattempted to lead the first of the capitalist counterrevolutions in East Europe (theStalinists effectively spiked the counterrevolutionary coup, although they couldonly arrest the situation, not address itscauses). However, by the time Solidarnose did lead the· counterrevolution inPoland, i.e. in 1989, the USec was far lessvocal in their support to Solidarnose.Indeed, a WVNo. 479 (9 June 1989) arti

cle says that they had by that time foundout a new "vanguard," the PPS-RD. The

PPS-RD, whose founding declarationstated they stood closer to Pope Wojtyla's"social teachings" than to Marxism, wasin a bloc with the arch-anticommunistPilsudskiite KPN and Fighting Solidarnose to oppose the round-table agreements between the Stalinists and Solidarnose. As Workers Vanguard noted,"Moczulski's KPN stands to the right ofWalesa, Kuron & Co. [historic Solidarnose leaders], while 'Fighting Solidarnose' shares Walesa's program for 'freemarket' capitalist exploitation in Poland."So much for the USec's occasional claimsthat they did not support Solidarnose'scounterrevolution in 1989.

Comradely,

A.H.

13



Iraq and Left...(continued from page 16)

U.S. imperialism. Every blow struckagainst the imperialist occupiers is ablow struck against the enemy of work

ers and the oppressed all over the world.But we do not imbue the forces pres

ently organizing guerrilla attacks on U.S.forces with "anti-imperialist" credentialsand warn that in the absence of workingclass struggle in Iraq and internationallyagainst the occupation, the victory of

one or another of the reactionary clerical forces is more likely to come aboutthrough an alliance with U.S. imperialism.We are intransigent opponents of the mur

derous communal violence against otherethnic, religious and national populations

oftentimes carried out by the very sameforces fighting the occupation armies. Andwe condemn the kidnappings and executions of foreign civilian workers in Iraq.

We are external to the situation inside

who smash their unions, drive downwages, destroy health care and education, massacre the workers of Iraq in theinterest of capital. This requires a tenacious struggle to swim against the tide of

reactionary "national unity" which hasbeen cynically whipped up and manipulated by the Bush gang, the Democratsand the AFL-CIO labor tops since September 11, 2001.

This is the perspective that the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubsfought for in the Iraq antiwar movementagainst the reformist pressure politics of

United for Peace and Justice, WorkersWorld Party (WWP)-which recentlyunderwent a split-and its ANSWER coalition, the Revolutionary Communist Partyand its Not In Our Name coalition, andthe International Socialist Organization(ISO) and its various campus coalitions.

While occasionally spouting hometruths about the nature of the profit-drivencapitalist system and its inherent drive towar in the pages of their newspapers,

World endorses the campaign of blackAtlanta Democrat Cynthia McKinney,calling her "Unbossed & Unbought." Asfor the ISO, they're tom over whether tosupport capitalist politician Ralph Nader,as they did in 2000, despite the fact thathe has made it clear that the purpose of

h i s ~ a m p a i g n is to push the DemocraticParty in a more "progressive" direction.

You can't raise political consciousnessand struggle against war while subordi

nated to representatives of the capitalistclass waging the war! Coalitions basedon this kind of class collaboration are anobstacle because they shackle antiwarworkers and youth to their class enemyand promote the illusion that the priorities of the American ruling class can beshifted in the interest of working peoplethrough peace crawls. The truth is thatimperialist war is not merely a policy,but the inexorable product of the drive toconquer new markets for exploitationand export of capital. That's why only aseries of socialist revolutions to over-

WV Photos

Left: Workers World Party's ANSWER coalition at 30 March 2003 protest in L.A. promotes pro-imperialist lie thatAmerican occupation forces are "our troops." Right: AI Sharpton speaking at 26 October 2002 antiwar rally. ANSWERbuilt platforms for capitalist politicians during antiwar movement, serving to bolster illusions in Democratic Party.

Iraq and our task at this point in time istherefore necessarily largely propagandistic, but no less crucial. While makingclear that the main enemy is U.S. imperialism. a revolutionary party with roots

and influence in Iraq today would mobilize against the reimposition of sharia,against communalist sectarian attacks,for organizing the vestiges of the workers movement and the legions of theunemployed on a class basis throughstrikes and workplace occupations againstthe thieving imperialist occupiers andparasitic clerics.

Equitable resolution of the democraticrights of all the peoples of Iraq, andthe Near East more broadly, cannot beachieved under capitalism but only withthe overthrow of bourgeois rule in theregion and the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East. This is theTrotskyist program of permanent revolution. This means combining the struggle

against the occupation with a struggleagainst all manner of bourgeois nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and

poses the urgent need to forge Marxistparties to lead the struggles for the working people to come to power throughoutthe region. lnternational extension of therevolution to the rich centers of imperialism-the United States, Germany, Japan- i s vital, or, as Marx noted, "all the oldcrap" will return.

Revolutionaries vs. Reformistsin the Antiwar Movement

We oppose calls to cloak an Americanimperialist occupation in "humanitarian"United Nations garb. We oppose the liberals and ostensible leftists who argue

that the way out of the Iraq occupationis "regime change" in Washington inNovember. The rape of Iraq was preparedby 14 years of crippling United Nationssanctions and thousands of murderousbombing sorties ordered by Democraticpresident Clinton. John Kerry aims toreclaim the White House for the Democrats this fall by outflanking Bush as awar candidate. A solution to the suffering of the peoples in Iraq depends heavily on cla·ss struggle at home againstU.S. imperialism. We fight to instill inthe American proletariat the consciousness that the same profit-lusting rulers

14

these groups actively limited antiwar protests to the confines of the DemocraticParty and built the rallies as platforms forthe Democrats. Sure, they featured moreleft-talking Democrats like Jesse Jackson

Sr., Al Sharpton and Barbara Lee ratherthan John Kerry or Edwards. But thesepoliticians merely cover the left flank of

the same party of capitalist class rule.Thus, while we forthrightly raised the callto defend Iraq-i.e., that workers andantiwar activists had to take a side againstthe U.S.-the antiwar coalitions refusedto raise such calls, limiting their slogansto pacifist demands like "No to War" or"Stop the War," pandering to the "peace ispatriotic" Democratic Party politicians.

Today, these same reformist groupsespouse a seemingly more left-wing posture of cheering resistance to the occupation. A 5 February Workers World arti

cle headlines, "Mass Resistance HindersNeocolonial Plans," while a 22 July arti

cle enthuses, "The Iraqi resistance is solarge and has so much popular supportamong nationalist Iraqis angered by thepresence of U.S. troops that it cannot bedefeated militarily." Under the headline,"The Right to Resist-Why You ShouldSupport the Opposition to the U.S. Occupation of Iraq" (Socialist Worker, 2 July),the ISO writes, "I f the Iraqi resistancedrives the U.S. out of Iraq, it would be amajor setback for Bush's agenda and theagenda of U.S. imperialism. This wouldbe a tremendous victory for our sidemaking it much more difficult for the

U.S. to choose a new target in the Middle East or elsewhere in trying to imposeits will." I f the U.S. were driven out of

Iraq, this would certainly be a victory.

But why is it that groups that refusedto side with Iraq in the lead-up to andduring the war now cheer on acts of resistance against the occupation? Becauseevery blow against the U.S. in Iraq redounds against Bush in the run-up to theNovember election and plays to theDemocrats' advantage. While the ISO andWWP write· articles denouncing tIle

Democrats, and in the case of WWP arerunning their own candidates for the presidential election, in practice they work forcandidates whose purpose is to refurbishthe tarnished image of the DemocraticParty. Thus a 22 July editorial in Workers

throw capitalist rule can create.a worldplanned economy that will put a stop toimperialist war. This is the only solution,and to achieve it requires a fight for thepolitical independence of the workers

movement and the forging of a workersparty. Break with the Democrats!

Frankenstein's Monster,the Antiwar Movementand the "Resistance"

The imperialist war against and occupation of Iraq are a direct consequence of

the counterrevolutionary destruction of

the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Althoughbureaucratically deformed and degenerated by Stalinist misrule, the SovietUnion was still a workers state with aplanned economy and collectivized property, if not the beacon of liberationcreated by the October 1917 socialist rev-01ution. We fought to defend the SovietUnion-just as we do China, North

Korea, Vietnam and Cuba today-againstany external attack by imperialism, without any a priori conditions, and againstinternal attempts at capitalist restoration.At the same time, we fight to oust theparasitic Stalinist bureaucracies and to

• implant the revolutionary internationalistand socialist program of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks, as we did in the formerUSSR, East Germany and elsewhere.Without the Soviet Union to stay the handof U.S. imperialism, the world has become a more dangerous place of unbridled American military intervention andincreased rivalries among capitalist powers, which threaten wider conflicts, perhaps, and surely, ultimately including withnuclear weapons.

From the beginning of the Cold War,U.S. policy under Democrats and Republicans was to bolster Islamic fundamentalism and murderous, authoritarianregimes (like Hussein in Iraq and theShah in Iran) as bulwarks against "godless communism" in the region and toensure access to petroleum reserves. In1979, the Soviet Red Army intervened inAfghanistan at the request of the modernizing bourgeois-nationalist governmentwhich was besieged by Islamic fundamentalists opposed to elementary democratic rights for women and reforms thatinfringed on the economic and political

fiefdoms of the mullahs. These mujahe-din cutthroats threw acid in the faces of

unveiled wothen and skinned Communistschoolteachers alive for the "crime" of

teaching women how to read. They werearmed, financed and trained by U.S.imperialism. We Trotskyists hailed theRed Army intervention in Afghanistanand called to extend the gains of the Russian Revolution to the Afghan peoples.But the Kremlin criminally withdrew theRed Army from Afghanistan in an effortto appease U.S. imperialism. This markedthe beginning of the end for the SovietUnion, as religious reaction and nationalism fueled anti-Communist rollbackacross East Europe and to the homelandof the October Revolution.

An informative article by Juan Cole,"The Iraqi Shiites-On the History of

America's Would-Be Allies" (BostonReview, October-November 2003), notes,"Once the Soviets had fallen the Sunniradicals abandoned their alliance of convenience with Washington and turnedagainst the United States, which they nowsaw as a bulwark of the secular governments that they were trying to overthrow,in addition to resenting its role in supporting Israeli expansionism. The more radi

cal of these groups coalesced into alQaeda and decided to hit the 'far ' enemy

rather than only the 'near' one."This history is essential in evaluating

the American left and the Iraq occupationtoday. Claiming a "third camp" of neitherWashington nor Moscow, the ISO sidedwith their "own" bourgeoisie by servingas the left cover for "democratic" imperialism against the Soviet Union in everyconflict of the Cold War. The ISO'sSocialist Worker (May 1988) cheered:"We welcome the defeat of the Russiansin Afghanistan. It will give heart toall those inside the USSR and in EastEurope who want to break the ruleof Stalin's heirs." With galloping cynicism, groups like the ISO, which howledagainst "Soviet imperialism" in Afghanistan and supported the counterrevolutionary jihad, now oppose the Iraq war theyhelped bring about in their own small waythrough their craven anti-Communism.

The Myth of the"National Resistance"

Cheerleaders for Third World nationalism, Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athistParty, WWP peddles the myth of an"Iraqi revolution" which they cite as acontinuous process since 1958! A 5 February article by Fred Goldstein states,"The invasion to recolonize Iraq is a newdevelopment in the history of imperialism. It is an attempt to destroy the independence of a people who have alreadycarried out a great anti-imperialist revolution-the revolution of 1958." Laterin the article, Goldstein informs us, "InIraq, because of the nature of the Iraqi

Revolution and what it achieved forthe masses, there was no such counterrevolutionary internal base for the CIAand Pentagon to work with."

This is an outright lie. Saddam Husseinand the Ba'ath Party were the counterrevolutionary oppressors of Iraq's workers,Kurds, Shi'ites and other peoples, and assuch were close allies of U.S. imperialismuntil Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. In1958, there was indeed a revolutionaryupheaval that overthrew the pro-Britishmonarchy. There was also a mass IraqiCommunist Party (ICP) that united Kurds

and Arabs as well as Sunnis, Shi' ites,Jews and Chiistians. It was a party withgood human material but a rotten Stalinist program of class collaboration. The

events of 1958 did not end in victory, buta defeat from which the working class hasyet to recover, because the opportunityfor socialist revolution was sacrificed bythe Kremlin Stalinists and the ICP on thealtar of "peaceful coexistence" withimperialism and alliance with a mythical"progressive" bourgeoisie in Iraq. Whenthe Ba'athists took power in the 1960s,they, in cahoots with the CIA, outlawedand shattered the ICP, killing and imprisoning thousands of Communists andtrade unionists.

To understand what is happening inIraq today, including the communalist

WORKERS VANGUARD



Oakland: Black Union Militant Fired27 July 2004

To the Editor:I and other members of AFSCME

Locals 444 and 2019 in Oakland, California greatly appreciated your coverageof our joint rally last September 17 todefend Charles DuBois, a black Local444 member fired using the pretext ofbogus "workplace violence" policies lastyear by the East Bay Municipal UtilityDistrict (or EBMUD) after 18 years as aunion activist. The company moved tofire him after it succeeded in splitting theunions during contract negotiations, enabling the company to get increasedworker contributions for pensions andhealth care and increased speedup. Hisfiring was an attempt to intimidate allunion members. The recent article I readin Workers Vanguard on the "workplaceviolence" witchhunting of Carlos Blackman, a black union shop chairman inNew York City Transit, makes clear howthese union-busting policies are being

used nationally.Many members of both our locals-thetwo main unions at EBMUD-took upbrother DuBois' defense because weunderstood that· by defending brotherDuBois we were at the same time defending the rights of our unions as a whole.The two unions jointly organized the rallyof over 100 union members and supporters outside company headquarters indowntown Oakland demanding: "DefendUnion Rights! Defend Charles DuBois!An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!"This was the first time the two locals hadjoined in such an independent action, for

violence, you have to understand whatIraq is. Iraq is not a nation, but a patchwork of different peoples and ethnicitiescarved up by the British imperialists outof the old Tl,lrkish .Ottoman Empire at theend of the First World War. There arethree main populations within Iraq's borders: a portion of the Kurdish nation (anation that also spans parts of Iran, Turkey and Syria); an Arab Shi'ite majority; and the historicatty·dominant ArabSunni minority. Absent the working classemerging as an independent politicalforce in a struggle against neocolonialrule, each of these populations can onlycome to power by oppressing the othersand in alliance with U.S. imperialism.What "resistance forces" like Moktada alSadr's Shi 'ite Mahdi Army are after is torule Iraq as the local satraps for imperialism if the U.S. forces would just get out.

The struggle of the Kurdish peopleexplodes the myth of a unitary Iraqination. Their fight for self-determinationis a just struggle, requiring the overthrowof four capitalist states. We call for aSocialist Republic of United Kurdistan!But in Iraq today-and only in Iraq-the

Kurdish question has become decisivelysubordinated to the occupation, in thesense that the Kurdish political partiesand their military forces are an integralpart of the occupation forces. In fact,many Iraqi Kurds mistakenly look withfavor on the American occupation as aguarantor against Arab reconquest. Thestruggle for Kurdish independence canonly go forward through intransigentopposition to the occupation and theKurdish nationalists who collaborate withU.S. imperialism.

The so-called "national resistance" inIraq is a myth promoted by U.S. andWestern imperialism and cynical leftists.When the American military bombed theSunni town of Falluja and simultaneouslywent after Shi'ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr,there were temporary instances of unityagainst the foreign occupier. But resistance forces led by religious clerics are bydefinition sectarian. There isn't a unitary"resistance" force in Iraq but rather disparate groupings organizing guerrillaattacks on U.S. forces-and often against

6 AUGUST 2004

once not aimed at pressuring the politicians on EB.MUD's Board of Directors. Ithought your readers would be interestedin what has happened with this case. I amattaching an article I wrote which waspublished in the June 22 issue of Local444's newsletter, Mainline.

Gregg Best

* * *

Arbitrator RulesAgainst DuBois

On Thursday May 20, the so-calledneutral arbitrator handed down a "binding" ruling against Charles DuBois,upholding every one ofEBMUD's frameup allegations and actions taken againsthim (except one minor issue). Arbitratorsoverwhelmingly rule in favor of management. This ruling against Charles is anattack on our ability to defend our uniodand ourselves.

This is a bitter and infuriating outcomeof the long struggle by members of bothLocal 444 and our sister Local 2019 todefend Charles DuBois and defend ourunions. His case and the issues it raisedresonated broadly with the members of

both locals, fed up with management'sunchecked abuse and speedup. As mostmembers probably know, I was one of themembers of the joint union committee todefend brother DuBois along with thepresident of 2019, three 444 ExecutiveBoard members and about a half dozenmembers from both locals who were thehard core that began the fight to defend

rival groupings and random civilians. Inthe present context, an award for the mostasinine analysis should go to Nat Weinstein's Socialist Viewpoint (a split fromSocialist Action) whose front page inApril cheered, "Iraq: The People UnitedCan Never Be Defeated." ,

Defeat U.S. ImperialismThrough Workers Revolution!

The flip side of the reformist left's pandering to liberal Democrats is the dimand pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric of JanNorden's tiny "Internationalist Group."(For an expose of their three-card-monteorganization, see "IG's Potemkin Village Idiocy Ad Absurdum," WV No. 828,11 June.) The IG ludicrously denouncesWorkers Vanguard for demanding "U.S.

Troops Out of Iraq, Now!" (see the IG's"Sink U.S. Imperialism in the Quicksandsof . the Near East!", Internationalist,

November 2003). Falsely claiming thatour demand for the withdrawal of U.S.troops is addressed to the American rulers and not the workers movement, theIG thunders, "The imperialists must bedriven out of Afghanistan and Iraq. TheZionists mu st be driven out of the WestBank and Gaza" (emphasis in original).What kind of idiots oppose the demandfor the immediate withdrawal of i ~ ~ r i -alist troops? Answer: fraudulent "Marxists" who despair of mobilizing the American proletariat against the capitalistruling class.

Norden's group equates our slogans-

Charles last summer. This committee wascrucial in organizing the joint union rallylast September 17th in his defense, aswell as organizing members to come toCharles' Board of Adjustment and arbitration hearings. So I want to take upwhat I believe are the two main reasonsthat enabled management to fire Charles,namely, the "Workplace Violence" policyand the question of binding arbitration.

To my knowledge, Charles is the second member of Local 444 to be framedup and fired by EBMUD using the antiunion "Workplace Violence" rules. Thefirst was Randy Kim, a well-liked, highseniority, Asian American member andex-officer of Local 444 who was fired in1998. Randy was subject to outrageouscharges, a police invasion of his home,and branded as "violent." The defense of

Randy was undermined by the leadership's support for the "Workplace Vio-lence" clause, allowing management totarget other members.

For union-hating management, Charleshad three strikes against him. First of allhe is black. He is also an outspokenunion militant, former steward and unionofficer. And he has always been an opponent of all instances of injustice againstworking people-like the case of MumiaAbu-Jamal-that he thought the membership needed to know about. Black andother minority workers in particulararen't supposed to be outspoken. We haveto get rid of this "Workplace Violence"policy, which is an all-purpose weaponused by EBMUD management and acrossthe country to target any union member

Iraqi womenprotest last~ a g a i n 8 t decision byWashington'shand-pickedGoverning Councilto replaceHussein-eracivil codesprotecting womenwith Islamicsharia law.

"Down with the colonial occupation of

Iraq! All U.S. troops out now!"-with thereformist American Socialist WorkersParty's "Out Now" slogan during the Vietnam War, which was designed to appeal tobourgeois politicians who wanted to cutU.S. imperialism's losses and get out of

Vietnam. Actually, our position is consistent with the Spartacist revolutionary history on which Norden falselyclaims to stand. We refer readers to Spar-

tacist No.5 (November-December 1965),which reprints the press release "Spartacist Breaks with New York Parade Committee" wherein we state:

"The slogan 'Stop the War in VietnamNow' can mean many things to manypeople. But given the composition of thisCommittee, the fact that it is dominatedby right-wing pacifists and 'liberals,' i.e.

pro-capitalist and pro-LBJ, it is clear thatthe slogan is deliberately ambiguous inorder to avoid facing the duty to advancethe only demand that has any meaning: 'For the Immediate, UnconditionalWithdrawal of Al l U.S. 'IToops fromVietnam!'" (emphasis added)

The IG's polemics against us boil downto this: they say they're for the militarydefeat of the imperialists and lie that weare not. Always prone to impressionismand adventurism, and willing to fight tothe last drop of someone else's blood,Norden & Co. substitute fantasies of revolutionary conflagrations sweeping asideimperialism in the Near East today inthe absence of the struggle to build aLeninist-Trotskyist party to bring revolutionary consciousness to the working

management doesn't like, especiallyunion militants and minority workers.

The second reason Charles (and RandyKim) were fired is because the labor leadership, from the AFL-CIO bureaucrats ondown, have voluntarily given away thecontractual right to strike over grievances!Instead every union contract that I knowof now has a truncated grievance procedure topped off with binding arbitration.The union leaderships think this is theonly way to "bind" management. In reality it is the unions that have been bound.Binding arbitration deliberately takes agrievance out of the hands of the unionmembership. It demobilizes the union.

The strike is the main weapon that aunion has to defend itself and fight forwhat it wants against management, hereor anywhere. There is no law that guarantees workers the right to strike. It has tobe constantly fought for. I f it weren't forthe determination of so many union members, none of the actions we engaged in

to defend Charles would have happened.We cannot rely on binding arbitration. Itgives up the independence of the union.Neither arbitrators nor the governmentare neutral. We must have the ability tomobilize the memberships of both localsin joint action to defend the union and itsmembers. The September 17th joint rallywas a step in that direction and cut acrossEBMUD's divide and rule strategy thatresulted in last year's contract debacle.Despite this setback of Charles's firing,joint union action must become the ruleuntil we have one local.

Oakland, California

class, glorifying social forces hostile to theproletariat. During the first Gulf War in1991, as editor of Workers Vanguard, Norden made crazed projections of Hussein'sarmy inflicting serious damage to the U.S.military. When Norden broke from Trotskyism, one British comrade aptly asked,"Would it have been a capitulation to'smoke and mirrors' imperialist propaganda to wake the workers of the world tothe revolutionary defence of Iraq, to halt,derail, smash by class-struggle means thecrushing one-sided slaughter being pre-pared before our disbelieving eyes?"

In short, occasional phrases to thecontrary notwithstanding, the IG has noperspective of fighting to mobilize theproletariat in the U.S. and other imperialist centers to wage class struggleagainst imperialist war. Indeed, duringthe Afghanistan war in 2001, the IGexplicitly denounced our slogan "ForClass Struggle Against Capitalist Rulersat Home!"-a slogan raised in the immediate aftermath of the September 11

attacks and the government's reactionary'''national unity" drive-writing, "Theemphasis on 'a t home' is counterposed tothe call to defeat the imperialists abroad"(Internationalist, Fall 2001).

Military defeats abroad help sharpenthe class contradictions of a particularcountry. That's the meaning of the Marxist axiom that "war is the mother of

revolution." But it is fundamentally theworking class that has the social power to

accomplish this historic task. We do notraise the call for class struggle at homewith the poUyannish belief that the Iraqoccupation is going to end with the immediate unfolding of socialist revolution inthe U.S. We raise it in order to cut throughthe reactionary "national unity" mongering and "anti-terror" scare of the rulingclass and to bring the working class to theunderstanding that it alone has the powerto defeat the American imperialist systemthrough proletarian socialist revolution.Out of working-class and social struggleand through the intervention revolutionary Marxists, the workers party essential for this successful outcome will beforged. This is the purpose to which theSpartacist League is dedicated. •

15



WI/INE/IS """,/11)•

u.s. Out of Iraq Now!What does Iraq look like since the ballyhooed handover of sovereignty? Exactlylike a country under merciless U.S. imperialist military occupation with handpicked satraps returned from exile andcrowned by Washington as local "democratic" leaders. The new prime minister,Iyad Allawi, is a thug who did wet work;for the American CIA, British MI6 andthe Ba'a th Party's intelligence agency. J\lstdays before becoming prime minister,

Allawi personally shot dead six handcuffedand blindfolded prisoners in the courtyard

of a Baghdad police station (reported byPaul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald,

17 July). The morgue overflows with rotting corpses and as the mercury hits 114

degrees Fahrenheit. "Baghdad is a city thatreeks with the stench of the dead" (Robertfisk, London Independent, 28 July).

Ordinary citizens are blown to bits by

the American military at checkpoints allover Baghdad festooned with signs reading, "Do not enter or you will be shot."Scores more are killed by suicide bomb

ers who make no distinction betweenIraqis lining up for jobs or waiting astheir documents are checked and the foreign invaders or their police lackeys. Theofficial unemployment figure in Iraq isnow 70 percent. Latest estimates of the

number of civilians killed (the Americanoccupiers don't bother to count howmany civilians they kill) range from over11,000 to over 13,000.

Patrick Cockburn's Baghdad "Diary"(London Review of Books, 22 July)reports:

"After the disasters of the past year theAmericans know they cannot occupyIraq, even in the short term, without thesupport of local allies. The problem is

Young Spartacus

Spartacist contingent at March 20 protest in Los Angeles against U.S.occupation of Iraq.

that Ulost Iraqis., would UJw Nlawi an dthe interim government to get rid of thesuicide bombers and kidnappe rs-and ofthe US occupation as well. But the USshows no sign of abandoning its plansto keep Iraq as a client state. It wouldhave a weak army, devoted entirely tocounter-insurgency. It would have notanks, aircraft, missiles or artillery andwould resemble a Latin American stateof the 1960s with an army and securityforces controlled largely by Washington.

Tllis WilS the Ulessage brought by PaulWolfowitz when he turned up in Baghdad in June-accompanied by KevinTebbit, the permanent undersecretary atthe [British] Ministry of Defence-justbefore the supposed handover of power.The US will allow Iraq to rearm, butonly against its own people."

What about areas of Iraq where theU.S. military has retreated and turnedover control to former Ba' athist officers,

S unni Muslim clerics or their Shi' itecounterparts? In Falluja, women havebeen forced back into veils, prohibitedfrom wearing make-up or participatingin public life under the recently imposed Islamic sharia law. A street poster"decree of Allah" threatens, "We willhave no pity for those who oppose Allahby their beauty or mode of dress" (Le

Monde, 30 June), Houses are raidedwhere "sinners" are believed to be drinking alcohol or listening to music other

than Koranic chants. School kids with

"indecent" haircuts are surrounded bymujahedin trucks, hauled off, beaten andshaved bald, dangerously branded asinfidels. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (LondonGuardian, 25 June) writes that it's now"Fal luja versus Falluja." The mayorhanded him two letters. One warns, "Becareful, oh brothers, because the Americans and their traitor allies, the Kurds andthe Shias, are planning to come after yourleaders." The other is addressed to theUN, demanding that Iraq be run by Sunniarmy officers. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to bomb the city with impunity.

As revolutionary Marxists, we have aside in the current situation, against theU.S., its allies and Iraqi lackeys. Ourstarting point is to demand the inunedi

ate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S.troops, and their allies. We defend thepeoples of Iraq against any U.S.-ledattack and repression. Insofar as theforces on the ground in Iraq aim theirblows against the imperialist occupiers(including the-twer20,OOO private mercenaries operating in the country), we

call for their military defense against


Supreme Court Ruling Threatens Mumia Abu-Jamal

16

A June 24 Supreme Court ruling inthe case of Beard v. Banks puts the death

sentence back in court in the case of

MumiaAbu-Jarnai. Jamal was convictedin 1982 on frame-up charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel

Faulkner on 9 December 1981 and sentenced to death. Ruling on Jamal's federal habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and death sentence, in December2001 federal district court judge William Yohn overturned Jamal's sentence.Yohn overturned the death sentence onthe grounds that the jury failed to consider mitigating circumstances (reasonsprescribed bylaw why Jamal should notbe executed) and that only a unanimousvote ·on s\lch lJlitigating circumstancescould spare him the death sentence. This

procedure was explicitly found unconstitutional by the 1988 Supreme Court

ruling in Mills v. Maryland. At the sametime Yohn affirmed the conviction, refusing to even hear the confession of

Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot

and killed Faulkner. The prosecutionappealed, seeking restoration of Jamal' sdeath sentence. Mumia appealed, seeking to overturn the conviction.

In the Beard v. Banks decision inJune, written by Clarence Thomas, theSupreme Court grotesquely ruled thatthe Mills holding could not be used tochallenge cases decided before 1988-

i.e., it could not be applied retroactively. Although the jury procedure thatsent George Banks to death row wasidentical to that found unlawful in the

Mills case, Mills would live whileBanks (and dozens of others) is to die

on the technicality that his case became"final" eight months before the Mills

decision. This is just the latest in a labyrinth of court rules, legal machina

tions and sleight-of-hand used to securethe executions of hundreds of deathrow inmates after evidence of innocence and exposure of gross constitutional violations that put them in theshadow of death in the first place.

In the 1992 Herrera case, theSupreme Court announced that the execution of an innocent person is notunconstitutional. Democratic presidentClinton's 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and a 1995Pennsylvania law adopting draconian

time limitations for "discovering" newevidence to challenge a death sentence,have both been used by federal and statecourts to bar Beverly's confession andother evidence o f Mumia's innocence.

For over two years, Jamal's habeas

corpus appeal has been on hold as hisstate appeal wended its way through the


6 AUGUST 2004

Documents

Workers Vanguard No 830 - 06 August 2004