,.A Spartaci'st Pamphlet $1 Black Hislory and Ihe Class. Siruggle --~~ /0-' No. 17 ...... -.----......

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I ,I Ili!ilJIII the Black Freedom Struggle •.. 26 ",' 11 I 0 I 74470 8 1 032 2 II !', I

""------,-~~--- 2 Table of Contents Introduction

Oakland Labor-Centered Mobilization This issue of our pamphlet series Black cratic Party and the racist capitalist order. Defies "National Unity" History and the Class Struggle appears Our Revolutionary Internationalist Con­ Defend Immigrantsl as the U.S. capitalist rulers continue to tingents in the antiwar protests stressed Defend the Unions! ...... 3 wage an open-ended "war on terror." For the integral link between the defense of the Bush administration, the criminal Iraq (and Afghanistan earlier) against attack on the World Trade Center nearly U.S. imperialism and defense of the "Black Rights, Immigrant Rights two years ago was a "gift from god." In a working masses here against increasing Go Forward Hand In Hand" ...... 5 Spartacist League/U.S. statement issued exploitation and oppression. It is only the day after the attack (Workers Van­ struggle against the system of capital­ Down With Colonial Occupation of Iraq! guard No. 764, 14 September 2(01), we ist exploitation that can make inroads U.S. Bloodbath in Baghdad declared: "The ruling parties-Demo­ against its depredations and only the All U.S. Troops Out of the crats and Republicans-are all too eager overthrow of that system through social­ Near East Now! ...... 7 to be able to wield the bodies of those ist revolution that can put an end to racist who were killed and wounded in order to oppression and war. This cannot be accomplished without breaking the ties of South Chicago: Snapshots of reinforce capitalist class rule. It's an Latino and Black Life ...... 12 opportunity for the exploiters to peddle the working class and black people to the 'one nation indivisible' patriotism to try Democratic Party and forging a revolu­ to direct the burgeoning anger at the bot­ tionary workers party. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Nowl . .... 13 tom of this society away from them­ In seeking to mobilize the multiracial selves and toward an indefinable foreign labor movement in defense of the rights of 'enemy,' as weU as immigrants in the immigrants and aU the oppressed, the New York City: Protest U.S., and to reinforce their arsenal of Spartacist League and the Labor Black Cop Killing of Alberta Spruill! .... 15 domestic state repression against aU the Leagues fraternally a11ied with the SL working people." have fought to tear through the strait­ Join the Labor Black Leaguesl ... 16 The very right-wing Bush administra­ jacket of "national unity" promoted by tion, with the Democratic Party firmly in the capitalist rulers, the black Democrats tow, has seized on the chance to reassert and the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy. Save Amina Lawai! the "right" of U.S. imperialism to run Our aim was exemplified by the labor­ Nigeria: Woman Sentenced roughshod over the world while pushing centered united-front mobilization initi­ to Death by Stoning ...... 17 through a series of laws and dictates here ated by the Partisan Defense Committee that mark a qualitative diminution in dem­ and the Labor Black League for Social In Honor of Stephen Jay Gould ocratic'rights. While taking aim first and Defense in Oakland, California on 9 Feb­ Science and the Battle Against foremost at Near Eastern, South Asian ruary 2002 to protest the anti-immigrant Racism and Obscurantism ...... 20 and Muslim immigrants, the domestic witch hunt, the USA-Patriot Act and the "war on terror" has also meant wholesale Maritime Security Act. On a small scale, assaults on the rights of labor and the that mobilization illustrated how a revolu­ The Russian Revolution and gutting of civil liberties. It has meant in­ tionary workers party would combat in the Black Freedom Struggle ..... 26 creased cop terror in the ghettos, like the action the chauvinism and racial divisions NYPD killing in May of 57-year-old fostered by the ruling class, divisions Black Struggle and the Vietnam War black union member Alberta Spruill and which are candidly addressed both in our All: A Review ...... 32 the police-state siege of overwhelmingly coverage of the protest and in the article black Benton Harbor, Michigan the fol­ "South Chicago: Snapshots of Latino and lowing month after the town's population Black Life." New York Times Smears Courageous Harlem Communist erupted in protest against killings of black Other articles in this issue of Black In Memory of Bill Epton ...... 37 youth by the police. History address earlier paraUels with the But as we have stressed for the past "war on terror" which were unleashed two years, what America's capitalist rul­ in an attempt to suppress working-class Mass Jailing of Blacks in Tulia ers can get away with will be determined militancy and black resistance. "The Rus­ "War on Drugs" Texas Style ...... 40 by the level of class struggle. As the arti­ sian Revolution and the Black Freedom cle "U.S. Bloodbath in Baghdad" notes, Struggle" deals with the period of radi­ calization ushered in by the Bolshevik­ Central Park Jogger.Case there has been widespread opposition to the colonial invasion and occupation of led October Revolution of 1917, when NYC: Racist Frame-Up of the U.S. government led a witchhunt Black, Latino Youth ...... 42 Iraq among black people. But liberal black Democrats like California Con­ against immigrants, blacks, communists gresswoman Barbara Lee and New York and other opponents of the racist capitalist Affirmative Action Under Fire City'S Al Sharpton, who were embraced order. The turbulent decade of the 1960s For Free, Quality, Integrated by the reformist "socialist" organizers of is depicted in our memorial to the coura­ Education for All! ...... 45 the large antiwar protests, strive to keep geous Bill Epton, an avowed communist the black masses chained to the Demo- continued on page 6

Spartacist Publishing Co. Front cover: Longshoremen were at core of mobilization in defense of immi­ Box 1377 GPO grant rights in Oakland, 9 February 2002 (top). Thousands of Iranian Ameri­ New York, NY 10116 July 2003 cans in Los Angeles protested anti-immigrant roundups, 18 December 2002. 3 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 775, 22 February 2002

Defend Immigrants! Defend the Unions!

9 February 2002 Oakland demonstration was first labor-centered protest in defense of Immigrants against "war on terror."

OAKLAND-For the first time any­ fight to defend all the oppressed against Local 444; National Parks and Public where, on February 9 organized labor their common capitalist class enemy. Employees, Laborers International Local was mobilized here to flex its muscle in In initiating and building this united­ 1141 and the Spartacist League joined defense of its immigrant brothers and sis­ front protest, the Bay Area Labor Black those of the PDC and LBL on the march. ters targeted under the U.S. rulers' "war League for Social Defense and the Par­ For many black longshoremen, acting on terrorism." Some 300 unionists, immi­ tisan Defense Committee sought above all in defense of immigrants-including the grants, blacks and youth rallied in down­ to win workers to the need to tear through unorganized port truckers-represented a town Oakland in opposition to the USA­ the straitjacket of "national unity" pro­ conscious break with widespread senti­ Patriot Act, the Maritime Security Act and moted by the U.S. capitalist rulers and ment that immigrants and blacks are com­ the anti-immigrant witchhunt. At the core break down the poisonous racial and petitors, not aUies-a lie cultivated by the of this demonstration were over 30 dock ethnic divisions among the oppressed capitalist rulers and their labor lieuten­ workers from International Longshore that they promote. Marching through ants in the trade-union bureaucracy. At and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, downtown Oakland, past the headquar­ the rally, they joined forces with the Fili­ including members of the drill team. They ters of the shipping employers' Pacific pino Workers Association and with the joined transit workers from Bay Area Maritime Association and the Federal largely Latino immigrant workers of the SF Rapid Transit, water utility workers from Building housing the government enforc­ Day Labor Program, whose spokesman the East Bay Municipal Utility District, ers of the capitalist attacks, the multi­ Eduardo Palomo declared: "We are here printers, federal park workers from San racial, working-class protesters chanted: to resist the Patriot Act, the law that is Francisco's Presidio, day laborers, Asian "National unity is a lie-Bosses profit, going to harm all the workers of this and Near Eastern immigrants, college and workers die!" and "Immigrant rights, nation .... We want all the workers in all high school students, and the revolution­ black rights: Same struggle, same fight­ parts of this nation to come out to protest ary Marxists of the Spartacist League to Workers of the world unite!" Banners of this law." In mobilizing for the rally, declare that the U.S. working class will the SF Day Labor Program; AFSCME Workers Vanguard supporters sought to 4 win workers to the understanding that in black people and all the oppressed requires ner in the "national security" war, includ­ defending immigrants, they were defend­ a conscious struggle against the million ing against other sections of dock workers ing the whole working class; and one ways the capitalist exploiters, who are heavily immigrant. The Team­ This was no abstraction but flesh and aided and abetted by their labor lackeys, sters and East Coast International Long­ blood reality to longshoremen threatened foster the racial and ethnic antagonisms shore Association tops likewise refused to with losing their hard-won union jobs that divide the proletariat and undermine oppose the MSA. It was the ILWU tops under the background checks mandated its fighting strength. At bottom this is a who pointed to the port truckers to be tar­ by the Maritime Security Act, a law pend­ question of program and perspective. The geted by the bill. As the call for the dem­ ing in Congress aimed at purging the worldview of the labor tops-even those of onstration pointed out: "It is not the job of waterfront of blacks, Latinos and other the most "progressive" stamp-is defined the workers to enforce the laws, 'security' immigrants and at undermining union by what is possible or "practical" under J or otherwise, that will be used against power. The political impact of this mobil­ capitalism, a system which is predicated on them: cops and security guards have no ization spread far beyond those who came the exploitation of labor. We communists place in the union movement!" to the rally, raising the class conscious­ pursue another road, one based not only on In Local 10, however, with its heav­ ness also of the hundreds who took stacks improving present conditions but fighting ily black membership, there was a lot of leaflets to distribute, and the thousands to do away with the entire system of capi­ of pressure from the ranks to do some­ reached through discussion, leaflets and talist wage slavery. thing to oppose this attack. Secretary­ copies of Workers Vanguard. This rally was held during Black His­ Treasurer Clarence Thomas helped build The protest was built in distributions tory Month to underscore both the com­ and spoke at the rally. Also present were to key workforces: longshore dispatch, mon interests of black and immigrant both business agents, Trent Willis and port truckers, bus barns and BART workers and the need for the labor move­ Jack Heyman, who put the motion at a yards, postal facilities, municipal util­ ment to take up the fight against racial Local 10 meeting that the union endorse ities, industries with heavily immigrant oppression. In a speech for the Labor the mobilization. In his speech, Thomas workforces organized by ILWU Local 6 Black League that was translated into noted, "There are people here today that and the Hotel Employees and Restau­ Spanish, Adwoa Oni declared: don't necessari ly share the same politi­ rant Employees union, in Chinatown and "The frenzied anti-Arab and anti­ cal views" but "we're all here (0. stand other immigrant neighborhoods, cam­ immigrant witchhunt is a deadly danger together against the issue of the USA­ to all racial and ethnic minorities. This is puses and high schools. The campaign especially true for the black population, Patriot Act and the Port Maritime Secu­ intersected struggles from Santa Clara­ whose forcible segregation at the bottom rity Act." All those at the rally were able where the husband of Alia Atawneh, a of this society is rooted in the history of to compare openly Thomas' views with Palestinian woman fired in an act of anti­ chattel slavery and the defeat of Radical those of the Spartacist League speak­ immigrant persecution by Macy's, en­ Reconstruction. Black oppression is the er, Brian Manning, as they presented very foundation of this racist capitalist dorsed the rally-to Salt Lake City, system-but also its Achilles' heel. It's two different perspectives on which way where hundreds of immigrant airport time to finish the Civil War! Forward to a forward for the working class-class col­ workers were fired. Solidarity greetings workers state!" laboration vs. class independence from from one of the lawyers representing Death row political prisoner, MOVE the capitalists and their state. these workers were read to the protest. supporter and former Black Panther Thomas upheld as a model the "legacy The seriousness of longshoremen at Mumia Abu-Jamal sent his endorsement, of Harry Bridges," under which in the the rally, which Local 10 endorsed, was and a statement of support was read out at 1930s "longshoremen refused to load and underscored by the fact that a number of the rally. Speaking for the PDC, the legal unload cargo in the form of scrap iron that lower-seniority B-men had foregone a and social defense organization associated was destined for Japan." Far from an act of trip to L.A. to pick up a weekend's work., with the SL, Steve Bull called for "mass international working-class solidarity, this a real sacrifice during a slow month at the protests centered on the social power of boycott was rather very much in line with Port of Oakland. At the end of the protest, the labor movement to demand Jamal's U.S. imperialism's battle with their Japa­ several longshoremen made a point of immediate release." Also endorsing was nese capitalist competitors over which of taking home the mobilization placards Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), the former Black these gangs of robbers would dominate the on which they had written the name of Panther who spent 27 years in prison on a Pacific. The pre-World War II longshore their union. Discussions afterward at a similar government frame-up before mass action is an example of the same poison c.elebration in a local bar and restaurant protest brought about his release. Speak- . promoted today by the labor tops that grappled with key questions: which way ing at the rally, former Panther Kiilu pits workers of different countries against forward for workers, why we need a rev­ Nyasha brought attention to the plight each other. This protectionism, premised olutionary workers party to get rid of cap­ of Haitian immigrants as well as that of on defending American capitalism, is part italism and how to build it, why unions in Hugo Pinell and Ruchell Cinque Magee, and parcel of the union bureaucracy's sup­ themselves are not enough. One youth political prisoners who have spent well port for the capitalist Democratic Party. joined the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club over three decades in the prisons of the In contrast was the powerful example at the party, and a number of workers U.S. capitalist system of racist injustice. of Japanese dock workers described in expressed interest in joining the LBL. This united-front action intersected con­ greetings read to the rally from the Sparta­ Many longshoremen take a great deal of tradictions within the labor bureaucracy cist Group of Japan: "To protest Japanese pride in their union, particularly in the and exposed how this conservative layer imperialism's cooperation in the U.S.-led gains that were won for black workers. resting atop the workers organizations acts war in Afghanistan, dock workers near At the same time, several longshoremen as the key internal obstacle to mobilizing Nagasaki showed some of their potential asked us why it took communists to fight workers power. From the time the new power by refusing to load Japanese war­ to mobilize the social power of labor in "anti-terror" legislation was introduced in ships bound for the Indian Ocean." ILWU defense of immigrant rights and in defense September, ILWU International officials, members also greatly appreciated meeting of. the unions. To mobilize the multira­ instead of opposing the MSA, proposed a young German worker who read greet­ cial proletariat in defense of immigrants, that the capitalists make the ILWU a part- ings to the rally from the Spartakist- 5 "Black Rights, Immigrant Rights Go Forward Hand in Hand"

We print below in edited form a racist white ruling class promotes the speech by Adwoa Oni representing the revolting lie among black people that Bay Area Labor Black League for Social poor immigrants are the, reason why Defense from the February 9 rally. blacks continue to be forcibly segregated The Labor Black League for Social at the bottom of this society. This lie is Defense stands for mobilizing the multi­ aided and abetted by black demagogues racial working class, leading all the like Louis Farrakhan. He denounces the oppressed, in a united struggle against small Arab and Asian ghetto shopkeep­ the brutal system of racist oppression ers as "bloodsuckers," thereby diverting that is capitalist America. Fraternally black people away from a united struggle allied to the Spartacist League, a multi­ with immigrants for equality. Adwoa Onl racial revolutionary Marxist organiza­ At the same time immigrants are taught tion, the Labor Black League is part of to despise black people by swallowing political action by the working class is the revolutionary movement of the work­ wholesale the racist filth spread by the political loyalty to the Democratic Party. ers against the bosses and for socialism. ruling class that the black masses remain So black Bay Area Congresswoman Bar­ To line up the population behind their at the bottom because they lack a "work bara Lee cast the sole vote against giving war-crazed ambitions abroad, both cap­ ethic." Immigrant workers must grasp Bush a blank check for war powers. But italist parties, the twin parties of capi­ that the fight against black oppression is her vote also served to foster the illusion tal, the Democrats and· Republicans, are central to any struggle to defend demo­ that the racist Democratic Party, the fanning the flames of patriotic bigotry cratic rights in America. Black rights, party of Jim Crow, the party of massive throughjingoistic"united we stand" anti­ immigrant rights go forward hand in hand prison construction and wholesale wel­ immigrant campaigns. They are fostering and our struggles advance the cause of fare destruction, can be "pressured" to the false notion that the ruling class has emancipation of the whole working class. serve the interests of workers, blacks and common interests with the workers even Our program of revolutionary integra­ immigrants. Black Democrats like Lee as living standards plunge and the ranks tionism means, as Karl Marx put it, are positioning themselves to contain of the unemployed grow. This racist lie "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the and head off increasing discontent as means accepting second-class status for white skin where in the black it is economic recession and racist repression black people and denial of citizenship branded." This emancipation is only pos­ devastate the working class. But as Mal­ rights for the foreign born. This assault sible in a socialist egalitarian society colm X once said, a vote for the Demo­ has particularly targeted immigrants of based on the fullest integration of black crats is a vote for the Dixiecrats . Near Eastern origin. The racial profiling . people. We, the workers-black, white, The Labor Black League stands for of Arabs and Muslims is promoted by Hispanic and Asian-create the wealth the building of a revolutionary workers Attorney General John Ashcroft, a lover of society. Those who labor must rule! party that champions the cause of all the of the Confederate flag, the bloody flag American workers must rise up from oppressed. It is time to fight or starve! of slavery and racist terror. their knees, fight for their own interests For a world without racial oppression, Many black people buy into the capi­ with no regard to the interests or prop­ without imperialist war, join the Labor talist rulers' campaign to pit American­ erty rights of the capitalist exploiters. Black League for Social Defense and born workers against immigrants. The The main obstacle to such independent fight for a socialist future! •

Jugend, youth group of the Spartakist union in Buenos Aires, declared that in the The Oakland demonstration repudiated Workers Party of Germany, section of the "profound political and economic crisis" in action the equation of the working International Communist League. of that country, "the social disciplinarians class in the U.S. with the racist, imperial­ This joint action by immigrant, black of today are basically two: unemployment ist U.S. state-an equation pushed both and white workers here in the U.S. against on one side and judicial prosecution of by the U.S. ruling class and those who the bloodthirsty U.S. imperialist rulers social struggles on the other." killed thousands of working people in the struck a chord internationaiIy. Reflect­ Other messages of support came from attack on the'World Trade Center, as well ing the international character of the the National Federation of Undocu­ as nationalists of all stripes, and widely world market and common interests of the mented Workers of France (Coordination believed by people throughout the world. working class of all nations, greetings to Nationale des Sans-Papiers de France), The statement by the Grupo Espartaquista the rally brought attention to the strug­ Australia Asia Worker Links and the de Mexico in particular had a strong gles of. immigrant workers from Zim­ Brescia branch of the Italian FlOM (Fed­ impact when read out near the end of babweans, Mozambicans and Basothans eration of Metal Workers and Employ­ the demonstration. Noting that Mexican in South Africa to North Africans, Turks ees), which has been very actively immigrant workers in the U.S. create "a and Kurds in Europe, from Koreans in involved in defense of Pakistani, North broad human bridge between the working Japan to Asian and Middle Eastern immi­ African and Senegalese immigrants in class of the two countries," it went on: grants in Australia. A solidarity state­ Italy. Statements were sent by sections "It is of great importance for workers ment to the rally by Pedro Wasiejko, sec­ of the ICL not only in Japan but Mexico, and the oppressed in Mexico to see Ameri­ can workers, blacks, immigrants and youth retary of international relations for the South Africa, France, Britain, Ireland, fighting against the repressive and racist Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos Germany, Italy, Canada and Australia. measures of the U.S. imperialist rulers. ------.. _------

6

Down with the lie of national unity! rulers of the U.S. and put an end to ing with the liberal Democratic wing "A fundamental part of our fight to racism, exploitation and war. Students of the class enemy. The International forge a revolutionary and internationalist who drove up from the University of Socialist Organization flatly refused to workers party in Mexico is to expose the California at Santa Cruz were joinec,l by a endorse the protest, falsely counter­ lie of nationalism, an ideology that seeks contingent of high school students from posing a rally at the San Francisco Marri­ to deceive the workers, tying them to their own exploiters .... The true allies of San Francisco's School of the Arts; ott for largely immigrant hotel workers. the Mexican workers are not their brutal among others were students from Berke­ The Bolshevik Tendency attended but exploiters. Their true allies are you: the ley High, DC Berkeley, San Francisco would not endorse the demonstration; the American workers fighting for their State and Oakland's Laney College. Socialist Workers Organization and Free­ rights and those of all the oppressed. For In contrast to other recent protest dom Socialist Party endorsed but did not joint class struggle against capitalist rul· demonstrations, this rally was a mobi­ attend. ers in Mexico and the U.S.!" lization of the working class and the This demonstration illustrated on a While the demonstration helped work­ oppressed independent of the capital­ small scale what a revolutionary workers ers to concretely see the need for and be ists, their parties and their state. It was party would do. The task ahead of us is part of joint struggle with immigrant built despite the boycott by most of to forge such a party, in political struggle workers, radical-minded students who the rest of the left, who claim to fight against the pro-capitalist misleaders of came from as far away as Santa Cruz and for an end to war and for solidarity with the working class, which will mobilize Los Angeles were impressed to see the immigrants but who will not breach all the oppressed in a united struggle for presence of workers who represent the the bourgeoisie's "national unity" cam­ workers power. Those who labor must only force that can defeat the imperialist paign, instead placing their hopes in ally- rule. Join us! •

mark the qualitative point at which the the liberal and reformist proponents of Introduction ... bureaucratic caste seized political power affirmative action. The racist rollback (continued from page 2) from the working class-from then on, has been accompanied by an ideological the people who ruled the USSR, the way crusade aimed at justifying black oppres­ in Harlem, and in our review of the movie the USSR was ruled and the purposes for sion, which is built into the very founda­ about Muhammad Ali, whose defiant which it was ruled all changed. But the tions of the American capitalist system. opposition to the U.S. imperialist war in struggle did not end there. It took a series "In Honor of Stephen Jay Gould: Sci­ Vietnam spoke for a generation of young of bloody purges through the 1930s for ence and the Battle Against Racism and black militants. the Stalin clique to consolidate its rule. Obscurantism" pays homage to the noted As well, we continue our ongoing Throughout, Trotsky's Left Opposition evolutionary biologist and science writer coverage of the fight to free former Black continued the fight for authentic Bolshe­ who powerfully fought against pseudo­ Panther Party spokesman, MOVE sup­ vism and in defense of October. scientific justifications for racism. porter and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, The final undoing of the October Finally, our article "Save Amina Lawai!" who was sentenced to death in 1982 and Revolution through capitalist counterrev­ points to another manifestation of the remains on death row despite overwhelm­ olution in 1991-92 plunged the working religious obscurantism and oppression ing evidence of his innocence. The frame­ people of the former USSR into immis­ that have been intensified internationally up of Jamal is a continuation of the FBI's eration and pogromist fratricide while since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as murderous COINTELPRO terror opera­ emboldening the U.S. imperialists in their seen in the growth of Islamic fundamen­ tion of the 1960s, which resulted in the attacks on the masses of the semicolo­ talism in Nigeria and other areas in Africa assassination of dozens of Black Panther nial world and on working people and and Asia. As we go to press, Amina Lawal activists and the imprisonment of hun­ minorities in the U.S. The ground for awaits a final appeal against her sentence dreds more. As the "Central Park Jogger today's war against the oppressed was of death by stoning. Case" makes clear, the racist frame­ well prepared by the previous eight years For us, the study of black history, up system is wielded with full force of the Democratic Clinton administra­ which is a key part of the history of the against the ghetto masses as a whole. In tion, which vastly expanded the racist class struggle in the U.S., is not a pas­ '''War on Drugs' Texas Style," we point death penalty, anti-immigrant measures sive endeavor: we seek to understand the to a particularly grotesque example of and other repressive powers of the state world in order to change it. We tell the this war on minorities and the poor, which and carried out imperialist terror bomb­ truth to the exploited and oppressed: that has led to a massive increase in black ing against Serbia and Iraq. black freedom and social equality will not and Latino imprisonment over the past As we note in "Affirmative Action be achieved short of an American edition two decades. Under Fire: For Free, Quality, Inte­ of the October Revolution. The Spartacist The Bolshevik Revolution put the grated Education for All!", even the most League and the Labor Black Leagues multinational working class in power and minimal remaining gains of the civil fight to mobilize the working class on provided a beacon for the workers and rights movement are today on the chop­ the program of revolutionary integration­ oppressed of the world. The subsequent ping block. In late June, the Supreme ism-the full integration of black people degeneration of the Soviet workers state Court upheld the notion of "diversity" in an egalitarian socialist order in which under the misrule of a nationalist Stalin­ in the case of the University of Michigan those who labor rule. As part of a Lenin­ ist bureaucracy is addressed in "The Rus­ Law _School while ruling unconstitu­ ist vanguard party, black workers will sian Revolution and the Black Freedom tional an affirmative action point sys­ play a powerful vanguard role in the Struggle," though in a telescoped manner tem for minority applicants to the under­ struggle to abolish the monstrous, class­ implying that Stalinist rule was fully con­ graduate school. That this was widely divided, segregated capitalist system in summated with the defeat of the emerging painted as a major victory for the rights the U.S. and to establish workers rule Left Opposition in January 1924. That did of minorities speaks to the bankruptcy of across the planet. • 7 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 801, 11 April 2003

u.s. Bloodbath in Baghdad APRIL 8-As u.s. forces tight­ resources to the poised colonial en their stranglehold around the invaders of American imperial­ Iraqi capital of Baghdad, they ism. Today, Iraq can barely are leaving behind a trail of sav­ maintain a stable army on the age death and destruction. The battlefield. It has been denied morgues are filled with the bod­ any ability to manufacture weap­ jes of dead Iraqi soldiers and ons or to resupply its armed civilians; the hospitals are over­ forces. In short, Iraq was and is flowing with men, women and a society on the ropes, now children who have been bombed besieged by the greatest military by American jets, shot by Amer­ power that has ever existed. That ican tanks, or who have lost the Iraqi people, confronted with arms and legs to American clus­ such overwhelming odds and ter bombs. After U.S. tanks saddled with a bloody regime rolled through residential and installed by U.S. imperialism in industrial areas on the outskirts the first place, have been able to of Baghdad, firing for three mount any resistance is a meas­ hours at anything that moved, ure of their hatred of the colonial one American soldier recalled, invaders. "People lying all over the side of To this inhumane onslaught, the road-I can't even count the Bush administration has how many." added a propaganda barrage, the The Pentagon boasted of lying hypocrisy and racist over­ 3,000 Iraqis killed just in those tones of which seem a hybrid of few hours-far more than even the efforts of Joseph Goebbels U.S. commanders in the field and Pat Robertson. Not a day claim. There is no way to know passes without another Bush ser­ how many have really been mas­ mon on good and evil or another Imperialist devastation and slaughter: Iraqi worker sacred. The International Red being rescued from telecommunications facility hit by paean to America's "war of lib­ Cross reports that the casualty U.S. missile. eration"-this while his admin- rate in Baghdad is so high that istration moves to erase such lib­ hospitals have stopped counting erties and freedoms that are still the number of wounded. Last night, under Pentagon's budget for this war alone is available to U.S. citizens. Not. a day the guise of targeting Saddam Hussein twice Iraq's total national income. Iraq has passes without a cover-up of U.S. respon­ and his sons, the U.S. dropped four been bled white by 12 years of United sibility for civilian deaths and without a 2,OOO-pound "bunker buster" bombs on Nations sanctions, which have resulted in fabrication of Iraqi "war crimes." In the a residential neighborhood of Baghdad, the slow deaths by malnutrition and inad­ service of sustaining the pretense of the killing at least 14 people. equate medical care of over 1.5 million invincibility and righteousness of Ameri­ The Pentagon and its kept media brag of its citizens. That same· blockade has can imperialism's military forces, efforts about their victories in Iraq. This is not a deprived it of the realization of its wealth were made to silence newsman Peter , war but a one-sided slaughter. In just over in oil. As a result, Iraq's infrastructure is in Arnett for simply reporting on Iraqi TV two weeks, the U.S. and Britain have car­ shambles and its armed forces, starved that military resistance to the invasion had ried out over 30,000 air missions, includ­ of resources and subjected to incessant not been anticipated by the White House. ing 12,000 military strikes. One BBC cor­ bombing, has been reduced to a third of its As U.S. imperialism rides roughshod respondent likened American bombing size at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. . over the people of Iraq, the Bush adminis­ raids against Iraqi troops to "shooting fish Leading up to the invasion, obliging tration is making it amply clear that not in a barrel." UN inspectors in search of the still undis­ only Iraqis but working people allover Despite heroic acts of resistance, Iraq covered "weapons of mass destruc­ the world will pay for the American vic­ barely has any means to defend itself. The tion" revealed Iraq's remaining military tory. At home, this can be seen in the 8

north was bombed. When an American A-IO pilot opened fire on a British convoy on March 28, killing a British soldier and also shooting dead one 12-year-old Iraqi, another British soldier complained of the pilot: "He had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy." In a ·piece in the London Independent (6 April), British correspondent John Pilger wrote: "We now glimpse the forbidden truths of the invasion of Iraq. A man cuddles the body of his infant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in black pur­ sues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family are dead. An Ameri­ can Marine murders a woman because she happens to be standing next to a man in uniform. 'I'm sorry,' he says, 'but the chick got in the way'." These atrocities are not just the result of u.s. soldiers terrorize unarmed Iraqi. trigger-happy soldiers. As Pilger goes on to write: attack by Oakland cops, firing wooden being perpetrated in Iraq underlines the "These Anglo-American invasions of bullets and concussion grenades, on anti­ urgency of forging a revolutionary work­ weak and largely defenceless nations are war protesters and longshoremen yester­ ers party committed to the defeat of U.S. meant to demonstrate the kind of world day. Abroad, it will mean a bloody colo­ imperialism through socialist revolution. the US is planning to dominate by force, with its procession of worthy and unwor­ nial occupation of Iraq and the unleashing thy victims and the establishment of Amer­ of the American war machine against U.S. Imperialism ican bases at the gateways of all the main other countries. Emboldened by the rape Menaces the World sources of fossil fuels. There is a list of Iraq, former CIA chief James Woolsey It is the intention of America's imperi­ now. If Israel has its way, Iran will be alist rulers to perpetuate and extend their next; and Cuba, Libya, Syria and even raved that this was the onset of a "Fourth China had better watch out. North Korea World War" (the third being the Cold domination of the world, now possible as may not be an immediate American tar­ War). He went on to declare: "As we move a result of the capitalist counterrevolution get, because its threat of nuclear war has toward a new Middle East over the years in the USS R in 1991-92. But the way this been effective. Ironically, had Iraq kept and, I think, over the decades to come ... war is being waged is very much the its nuclear weapons [sic: Iraq never had nuclear weapons), this invasion probably we will make a lot of p,eople very ner­ product of an arrogant, reactionary, insu­ would not have taken plilce. That is the vous. Our response should be, 'Good! We lar and simple-minded administration lesson for all governments at odds with want you nervous. We want you to real­ that actually seems to believe that the Bush and Blair: nuclear-arm yourself ize now, for the fourth time in 100 years, world's peoples eagerly seek its "liberat­ quickly." this country and its allies are on the ing" interventions. These god-like illu­ Washington is well into the planning march'." sions quickly encountered reality in Iraq. for a postwar Iraq. Current proposals are From the outset of the drive to war we It is not hyperbole to call heroic the to divide the country into three adminis­ have forthrightly stood for the military actions of those Iraqis who attack tanks trative regions, similar to when it was part defense of Iraq against U.S. attack with­ and Bradley vehicles in pickup trucks of the Ottoman Empire, before the British out giving any political support to the armed, at best, with .sO-calibre machine imperialists forcibly amalgamated the Saddam Hussein regime. In contrast, the guns. Or the actions of those who directly Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish areas into an reformist organizers of antiwar protests, confront Marine units with only rifles artificial entity that became Iraq. While bleating "No to war" alongside the hand­ in hand, or even of those who exter­ hundreds of CIA-sponsored Iraqi "free­ ful of Democratic Party politicians they minate themselves to kill the invaders. dom fighters" are being parachuted into have pursued, have, served to mask the fact Iraqi Shi'ites resident in Jordan, no lov­ the country to act as an auxiliary to the that it is in the interest of workers and the ers of Saddam, have returned in bus­ American occupation, the U.S. has al­ oppressed, especially in the U.S., to take loads to the hell that is home to fight the ready made it clear that the country will a clear stand against U.S. imperialism. American/British colonialists. be under direct military rule for at least In a 19 March Spartacist League/U.S. In the aftermath of a suicide attack that six months. The quality of the "native" statement, issued· the night the bombing killed four U.S. soldiers, a Pentagon offi­ stooges can be assessed by a current lead­ began, we wrote: "Every victory for the cial declared, "Everyone is now seen as a ing candidate, one Ahmed Chalabi, an U.S. imperialists can only encourage fur­ combatant until proven otherwise." What Iraqi-born financier (who has not seen ther military adventures. In turn, every this meant was seen in the killing of at Baghdad in over 45 years) touted by Vice humiliation, every setback, every defeat least seven women and children, as an President Cheney and who, in recent they suffer will serve to assist the strug­ American soldier shot up the van they years, was convicted of hank fraud in Jor­ gles of working people and the oppressed were traveling in. Three British soldiers dan. His projected administrative area is, around the globe." Our call for class were sent home in custody for complain­ of course, finance. The Iraqi "opposition" struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers ing about unwarranted civilian deaths has dutifully pledged to denationalize the is premised on the understanding that caused by trigger-happy U.S. troops. state monopoly on oil to enable a take­ there can be no unity between the exploit­ Since then, a convoy of Russian diplo­ over by American oil companies. ers and exploited in the fight against mats on their way to Syria was attacked "Cronies Set to Make a Killing," de­ imperialism and war. The bloodbath and a convoy of U.S.-allied Kurds in the clared a headline in the London Observer

•• 9

(6 April), reporting on how the "recon­ interesting to remember that the Ameri­ have not, in all cases, heen led by Muslim struction" of Iraq is being doled out to can Revolution was essentially won by religious reactionaries, especially in Egypt Bechtel and other corporations with close those who, dressed in rags and animal where just resentment against national tics to the Bush administration. The dock­ pelts, ambushed the British forces and oppression has, in part. been led by left ing facilities at the port town of Umm then melted back into the swamps, the nationalists who hark baek to the days of Qasr have been given to the anti-union forests and the hills. A prime example of Gam,t! Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and Stevedoring Services of America, which this was South Carolina'.s Francis Mar­ '60s. Referring to the current Egyptian is a lavish contributor to the Republican ion, known as the "Swamp Fox." Arter his president, many of the protesters chanted, Party and which headed last autumn's regular army regiment was defeated by "Mubarak leave'" Bush's current consul­ lockout of West Coast longshoremen, The the British, he organit:ed a band of guer­ tants for mopping lip urban resistance are corporate greed that has led to j ob losscs, rillas that staged bold raids over swampy British (with recent experience in North­ wage-slashing and the disappearance of terrain, often defeating larger bodies of ern Ireland) and Israeli "experts," past pensions over the last decade in this coun­ British troops. By demonit:ing Iraqi resis­ and, in the case of israel, present masters try will be magnified 100 times through tance as "terror," the U.S. imperialists in turning whole cities into concentration the lens of U.S. colonial occupation. have reduced thc Amcrican Revolution to camps. At base, the driving j~)rce of out­ While America's overwhelming mili­ a terrorist enterprise' rage in the Near East is the hideous and tary preponderance all but assured quick Predictably, to follow in the wake of potentially genoeilialnational oppression victory in the invasion, the Iraqi military the inva~ion of Iraq arc the Christian mis­ of Pale~tinians by Israel. resistance portends what is likely to be a sionaries to "civilit:e the savages"-in But history and current experience long, bloody and uncertain occupation. other words, religious bigots who have show that neither the left nationalism of a The 1898 Spanish-American War was also been in the forefront of support for the Nasser nor its current right-wing variant an easy win for the U.S., but the subse­ Bush administration, in this case not­ in Iraq can providc an answer to impe­ quent decades-long colonial occupation ably the Southern Baptist Convention rialist domination. That can only be of the Philippines was met with a series of and Samaritan's Purse, led hy Frank­ accomplished by a proletarian revolution insurgencies, including one in which up lin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy in the area that inspires class overturns to a half million Filipinos were slaugh­ Graham. The leaders of the former throughout the region, including Israel, tered between 1899 and 1902. recently characterized Muhammad as a where currently a nationwide general The current spec tal' Ie of the lesser great "pedophile" and "terrorist" while Graham strike against government-sponsored powers-France, Germany, Russia-that has been satisfied 10 lahel Islam as cutbacks is posed. What is needed to led UN "opposition" to the war now "wicked" and "violent." It i., accurate, but achieve self-determination for all the demanding their place at the trough of not enough, to say that the forerunners of region's national minorities and to throw Iraqi oil would be humorous did it not these t:ealots were steeped in unwashed off the yoke of imperialist domination is augur the rape of that country once it has ignorance lItltilthose under Islam's sway a series of workers revolutions to sweep fallen. National security adviser Condo­ recivili/.ed Europe. It is more to the point away all the capitalist regimes of the leezza Rice stated bluntly, as the Ncll' that their minions arc a reservoir of racist region anel create a socialist federation of York Timcs (5 April) put it, that "the reaction who, not infrequently, find reli­ the Ncar East. American-led alliance had shed 'life and gious adherence cumpatible with mem­ The conquest of power hy the proletar­ blood' in the Iraq war and would reserve ber ship in or sympathy lor the KKK. iat does not complete the socialist revolu­ for itself-and not the United Nations­ Iraqi resistance to the colonial invasion tion, but only opens it, by changing the the lead role in creating a new Iraqi gov­ ha~ fueled incre;J,ingly mililant, mass direction of social development. Short ernment." This is a statement to the Euro­ demonstrations against American imperi­ of the extension of the revolution inter­ pean powers to expect not a penny from alism throughout the Near Ea.st. These nationally, particularly to the advanced, the postwar "reconstruction" bonanza.

Down With Racist Get Your ,Copy of,CbASS-STRUGGLE DEFENSE NOTES! Colonialist Conquest! Echoing the typical complaints of all li~-=- ••;.;.i-.;.'-.-;- ••• ·,.·.. !It·· imperialist colonizers, native resisters to I '•• f., .:o...... i .....· such depredations are seen by Bush & W3-!.(}*ii;iI,tJa~j-·]§-33:~1jf(·J!o!!2 Co. as bloodthirsty cowards only capable "","" " 'Defend Immigrants! - The Right to Protest Under Attack of attacking from ambush and then scur­ Defend the Unions! Down With the "War on Terror!" rying away to hide among the populace Anll' i:trnttu~ b,*,~ \\'It:if:4tKt 6lutt. U~­ w", til< VSA-F,\,,,, Ac' ",Hi>' Mlrll ... s.''''.f~1 Defend Immigrant Rights! (perhaps because they, unlike the invad­ '" .... Ihwr.. \.Y,1h "'•• Im"".,ra", ers, are part of the populace). Such insid­ ious elements then, in the eyes of the imperialists, become responsible for the mass executions of innocents forced on the "decent" conquerors. And no world power-save, perhaps, Nazi Germany­ has massacred more innocents under these racist premises than the U.S., which in Korea and Vietnam alone slaughtered six million people. No. 29, Spring 2002 No. 30, Spring 2003 U.S. imperialism is waging war against 50¢ (24 pages) 50¢ (16 pages) the weak, and the weak have no other way ------Order from/make checks payable to ------­ to fight back than from ambush. It is Partisan Defense Committee, PO. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013-0099 10

industriali/ed imperialist centers, that excuse to continue to savage such mea­ maintain is the "democracy" that con­ social development will be arrested ger social henefits as are availahle in this signs millions of hlack children to ahject and ultimately reversed, as happened country. poverty and malnutrition. One in eight in the case of the Soviet Union. This Just as importantly, most hlaek people young black men is currently in prison underscores the need to forge Leninist­ understand that Bush is president only as and more than one in four young hlaek Trotskyist parties of socialist revolution the result of a swindle. Indeed, it is likely men can expect to he imprisoned at some as part of a working-class communist that had not Bush's hrother, Jeh, organ­ point in their lives. In fact, some hlack international to lead the proletariat in ized to exclude hlack people from vot­ people identify, as the Nell' York Times struggle against all forms of oppression, ing in Florida, Al Gore would have won (27 March) put it, "with poor Iraqis, exploitation and injustice. the election. It was under the Clinton/ whom they saw simply as people of color Gore administration that welfare and many heing attacked hy a rich, and largely The War at Home other social services were axed while the white, American government." With the start of com hat in Iraq, there prison population, which today numhers The development of American imperi­ has heen an increase in patriotic senti­ over two million, soared. And it was alism began shortly after the Civil War ment and support for the war in the U.S. under Clinton/Gore that the starvation and emerged on the world arena with the and Britain. accompanied hy increasing and devastation of Iraq continued apace. 1898 Spanish-American War, launched as government moves to quash protest. That In 1996, Clinton's secretary of state, a mission to "civilize savages," a racist this patriotic upswing has heen relatively Madeleine Alhright, was asked what she battle cry that Bush now echoes. It is no modest gives testimony hoth to continu­ thought ahout the half million Iraqi chil­ accident that that development was ac­ ing reservations ahout the justice of this dren who had died as a result of the companied hy the entrenchment of Jim colonial venture and to the fact that hlockade. She replied, "We think the Crow legislation and lynch law "justice;' working people in hoth countries remain price is worth it." Two years later, Clinton including racist moh riots against hlaek primarily concerned ahout more mun­ signed into law the "Iraq Liheration Act," people. The plight of the hlack population dane matters, like the ahility to remain which sailed through the Senate with is rooted in the race/caste oppression that employed and survive from day to day unanimous approval. That same year, Clin­ is the cornerstone of the American impe­ in the hleak economic circumstances ton launched a massive homhing cam­ rialist order. they face. Among hlack people in the paign against Baghdad, the biggest of a Imperialism is, at hase, husiness, the U.S., however, opposition to the war numher of air assaults against Iraq under expression of the desire hy a nation's remains strong and unchanged. A recent his administration. Most recently, the capitalist rulers to extend their capacity WashillRlO1l Post/ABC News poll indi­ $RO hillion war appropriations hill passed to reap profits. As Lenin put it, politics is cates that opposition to the war stands with the support of every Democrat in the concentrated economics. The imperi al­ at 61 percent of the hlack popUlation as Senate and the opposition of fewer than ists will not sacrifice their guns for the contrasted to 20 percent of whites. a dozen Democrats in the House. benefit of the people any more than a A hlack academic told the WashinRtol1 Speaking at a rally in defense of af­ boss would sacrifice profits to provide Post (25 March), "Black Americans arc firmative action in Washington, D.C. on joh security and a decent living for work­ routincly told that there's not enough April I, the president of the Detroit ers. It is only struggle against the system money for housing, medicine, education NAACP declared of the Iraq war, "If we of capitalist exploitation that can make and l"Chuilding the inner city. hut. .. con­ can huild democracy there, we must also inroads against its depredations and only siderahle ';LII1IS can he raised for war." It maintain democracy over here." The the overthrow hy socialist revolution of is true that war costs will he used as an "democracy" that this liheral wants to that system that can end, for all time, exploitation and war. This social overturn cannot he accom­ plished without hreaking the ties of the working class and hlack people to the Democratic Party and forging a party of proletarian revolution. This is no small task. While the Republicans offer only thinly disguised contempt for working people, and are openly racist, the Demo­ crats offer false promises and words of support for racial equality as they carry out the dictates of the capitalist order. In this regard, the liberal hlaek Democrats are invaluahle to the capitalist rulers in maintaining the adherence of hlack people to this system. While, for the most part, white contenders for the Democratic nom­ ination for the presidency have dropped any criticism of the war, hlaek Democrats like Al Sharpton have continued their qualified opposition to the war, now tem­ pered by calls for support of "our hoys." For these hlaek politicians, support for "our troops" is a statement of allegiance to the American imperialist order. But for British troops enter Baghdad, March 1917. the hlaek masses, in many cases, the troops 11 literally are their sons and daughters. As one black New Yorker told the New York Times (27 March), "We're going to be in the front lines-blacks and minorities." The fact is that blacks compose some 29 ~~I~ :\ ." percent of the active enlisted ranks of the WEWILlNOTr~f U.S. Army and over 20 percent of the SAMESrRoctLE RACHfLC~!E Navy, 18 percent of the Air Force and 16 percent of the Marines-i.e., well above SAMEAGIDl their demographic weight. It is difficult to find a black person who docs not have a close relative in the armed services. Many poor, minority and working-class youth are induced to join the military in search of financial, educational and employment benefits. As a result, the military is a concentrated expression of the seething racial and class contradictions in U.S. civil society. As communist revolutionaries, we are not for meaningless deaths whether, in this context, American or Iraqi. It is 010 America's rulers who bear all the respon­ 5 April 2003: Spartacist/Labor Black League contingent at Harlem antiwar sibility for sending young working-class protest. and minority men and women to kill and be killed in order to extend the power and Leslie Cagan of United for Peace says, war movement of today. Despite the occa­ profits of U.S. imperialism. The Iraqi sol­ "Our opposition to the war doesn't mean sional lip service to socialism in their diers and others who are resisting the that we're oppo~ed to the troops. We want newspapers, in their antiwar coalitions on imperialist invasion are simply defending to support them by bringing them home." the ground Workers World, the ISO and their homes and country. It must be rec­ Win Without War's Medea Benjamin, the various other fake-socialist organiza­ ognized that support for "our boys" nec­ director of Glohal Exchange. recently tions push anything and everything but essarily entails support for what they are explained that their aim is to work "with socialist revolution as the way to end doing, i.e., for a particular manifestation the progressive wing of the Democratic imperialist war. of U.S. imperialism's drive to subjugate party. We want to reclaim the right to Real opposition to imperialist war is all nations to its mandates. portray the flag. For all those who want impossible without opposition to the sys­ to show their sense of patriotism and tem that breeds it, an opposition that The "Left" at War-The Price oppose the war, we want to create a space must, in the final analysis, he based on the of Class Collaboration for that" (London Guardian, I April). mohilization of the working class, the Predictably, most of the left, some of Like the antiwar Dcmocrats invited onto only force capable of challenging and whom would describe themselves as ANSWER platforms, these types are overturning hourgeois rule. In the course socialist but whose real aspiration is to unabashed defenders of the interests of sharp class struggle and through the achieve sufficient weight to influence of U.S. imperialism, but propose other instrumentality of a revolutionary party bourgeois policy, have capitulated to the means than war to suhjugate Iraq. that patiently educates the working class -less than virulent-increase in patri­ "Bringing the boys home" did not end in the understanding not only of its social otic fervor. From the beginning, the the Vietnam War. which continued for power but of its historic interests, the ersatz socialist builders of protest against some years after U.S. troops were with­ workers will become conscious of them­ the war, primarily Workers World Party drawn. The war cnded only when the selves as a class fighting for itself and for (through its International ANSWER coali­ North Vietnamese Army and the south­ all the oppressed against the entire capi­ tion) and the International Socialist Organ­ ern National Liberation Front rolled over talist system and its government. ization (ISO), have argued that the larg­ the remaining forces of U.S. imperial­ The representatives of the ruling class, est possible and, therefore, most elj'ective ism's puppet forces in the South. The Republican and Democrat, will do every­ movement can only be built on the basis military defeat of U.S. imperialism at the thing in their power to forestall and op­ of slogans palatable to all-"No to war" hands of Vietnam's workers and peasants pose any independent mobilization of the or, in the case of the upcoming April 12 was a victory for working people and the working class. From the heginnings of ANSWER protest in D.C., "Bring the oppressed the world over, not least in the this war drive, the Spartacist League has troops home now." What this has meant U.S. What the liberal Vietnam antiwar opposed class collaborationism and called and could only mean is building a coali­ movement did succeed in doing was to for class struggle against American impe­ tion with the soft wing of the bourgeoisie, derlect many of the millions of youth rialism's rulers. What the reformists are, i.e., with liberal Democrats. radicalized hy that war and the civil in reality, promoting is faith in the reform­ The essence of such politics is most rights movement hack into the arms of ability of blood-drenched U.S. imperial­ clearly expressed by the more right-wing the Del110cratic Party, therehy undercut­ ism. Our commitment is to building an antiwar coalitions that have come to the ting a significant opportunity for the international revolutionary working-class fore as the war drew closer, like Win development of a revolutionary workers party to lead the proletariat to power, con­ Without War and United for Peace and party in this country. signing this whole system of exploitation, Justice, which sponsored the mammoth These are the same treacherous politics racial oppression and imperialist war to February 15 demonstration in New York. that arc heing pushed hy the liberal anti- the dusthin of history. _ 12 reprinted from Workers Val1Kuard No. 786, 6 Septemher 2002

The following contrihution, dated July der patrol agents and vigilantes. Undocu­ much hetter oil than their immigrant 3, was suhmitted hy Comrade Seneca of mented immigrant workers arc very counterparts. Rather than seeking to organ­ our Chicago hranch. attuned to the fact that the Amcrican ize to fight for the same entitlements for * * * hourgeois injustice system docs not olTer immigrants, orten this perception trans­ Shame, shame, .l'hall1e. them a legal leg to stand on in any fight. lates into a sour-grapes attitude of "well, I dOll 't wailfUl go to M ('.rico 110 more, These points I mention just to provide we immigrants want to work, we don't 111 0 re, more. a hackdrop to the reality we arc dealing want any handouts." There '.I' a hig, ./il/ I)o/iccman at Ill\' dOIlf; with when we talk ahout the question of In the workplace, many Mexicans hold dO()f; dool'. Latino immigrants in America. This is a perception that hlacks have a had work Hc made me pa\' (/ dol/III; important to consider when dealing with ethic. Upon prohing them to define what He lIlade 11/1' go to jail, the question of class struggle in America they mean, I have found that their concep­ I dOll '/ WWll1a go /0 M ('xico no more. and specilically the wedge that the racist tion of a "had" work ethic amounts to more, /1/01'1'. white ruling class seeks to drive hetween wanting to have hetter wages, a shorter This was the clapping game the neigh­ the hlack and Latino immigrant working and Icss intensive workday, and hetter hor's young girls were singing in my class. And, together with the help of hlack and safer conditions at the workplace! kitchen just the other day. Incidentally, and Latino petty-hourgeois misleaders, Mexican workcrs could stand a wholc lot the father of these two immigrant girls the hourgeoisie has heen to a large extent to gain hy adopting thc very "work ethic" came home ahout a month ago after serv­ successful in driving this wedge. that many now dcspise! Once I overheard ing six years in jail as a "convicted drug South Chicago has historically heen, a supervisor (who, incidentally, is a hlack trafficker" (i.e., peddling a few grams of and continues to he, an entry port for Latina woman from Belize) say to her cocaine). He may he facing deportation working-class Hispanic immigrants. It Mexican employee that shc prefers to hire soon, which will most likely mean yet is also one of the neighhorhoods where Latinos hecause hlach "don't like to another perilous trip across the river to the displaced hlack ghetto masses have work." And this cmployec. heaming with come right hack to where he was deported moved, increasingly more so since the pride, just ate up every word she said. I from. For the Mexican immigrant chil­ demolition of housing projects. While latcr found out that In-hour nonstop dren of South Chicago-a neighhorhood they live side hy side, the two commu­ shifts arc frequcnt occurrences for him. located on Chicago's Southeast Side in nities interact as little as possihle. Many The "work ethic" qucstion is closely the shadow of the old South Works steel Mexicans say they arc afraid of hlacks, tied into the "Amnesty Campaign," which plant-words like "/(/ lIligra" and "social and they attrihute criminality and vio­ is a nationwide campaign to legalize security numhers" have a place in their lence in the neighhorhood to hlack people. undocumented immigrants through puhlic everyday vocahulary. Resentment is often expressed hy Mex­ marches and lohhying politicians. In the For Latino working-class immigrants, ican immigrant women ahout the mis­ precarious cirClllllstances they live in, the fight for immigrant rights is central to treatment and humiliation that they arc undocumentcd Latino immigrants tend to the fight for lahor rights. And this is a life subjected to hy some of the hlack and take comfort in the illusion that, if they just or death question in many ways. Oeca­ even Chicano staff in the area's puhlic prove to the hourgeois rulers that they are sion,d news investigations oller a glimpse clinic. Many complain of heing greeted cssential to American capitalist society­ into the very real danger of the Mexican with comments like, "You're hack again'II" hy doing grueling work for pitiful wagcs horder crossing which many make after and "Speak English' You're in America'" in dangerous conditions and paying taxes each time they get deported; and they and heing sellt home from the Emergency faithfully while asking nothing in return in do make it hecau~e. for many Mexicans, Room with nothing hut a hottle of aspirin the way or henefits-then the capitalist "home" oilers them little or no means to show for it. This reflects a conversa­ rulers will somehow he convinced to grant for survival. Immigrants without a social tion I had with a comrade from the Bay them rull citi/.enship rights. security numher in Chicago cannot open Area. His sister is a nurse in a school and On the other side of the issue. many an account with the electric or gas she said to him that, as had as the hlack hlack workers t"cel resentment toward companies, and this means suffering suh­ children arc treated, the Mexican children Latinos. Many see yet another immigrant zero temperatures without heat in their arc treated even worse. group which, in a generation or two, homes. There were two cases in Chi­ One also perceives a strong sense of manages to climh the ladder and "pass cago of immigrant chi Idren who needed resentment around the question of puhlic over" them, so to ,peak, while they remain organ transplanh and could not get them aiel (i.e .. food stamps, vouchers. work­ at thc bottom. It is important to recognil.e hecause they were undocumented and the man's comp. etc.). Many Mexican immi­ that there is a lot of truth in this statement: families couldn't pay cash for the trans­ grants I have spoken with perceive Amer­ hl'ing a while Hi'panic and a U.S. citizen plant procedure. This is to say nothing of ica', "sat"cty net" for workers and the opens lip a lot of po.s~ihilities that their life-threatening dangers of state repres­ poor, or rather what is let"! of it, as some immigrant parents, as well as hlacks

1,1> 13 tain hostility toward "illep:al" immigrant.,. would he a fool to think their experi­ land would give up their Saturdays (when I would like to make a side note here of ences in America will he the same just they can make $1,000 in one day if they the considerahle antagonisms I have seen hecause they arc all "Latino." My point drive down to the L.A. ports) to come out hetween Latino citi/.ens "with papers" and is, within two or three generations, as the to a lahor-centered mobilization in de­ the undocumented immigrants. Where I language falls away, "Latinos" in Amer­ fense of immigrants! It is not a moral live, the term "Chicano" or "Chicana" has ica arc essentially assimilated into one of issue; it is a question of survival and of hecome a derisive term that Mexican two categories: hlack or not hlack. lahor defense, I told them. Our Febru­ immigrants usc in reference to privileged, The central issue here is the vital inter­ ary LJ Oakland mohili/ation against the petty-hourgeois Mexican American" who est of hlack and immigrant workers to Maritime Security Act and in defense of refuse to speak Spanish and usc their posi­ unite in eOlllmon struggle. It is necessary immigrant rights has indeed made an tion of power to humiliate immigrants or to com hat the false consciousness that the impact on workers I have spoken with. otherwise not solidari/e with them 111 hlack and Latino petty-hourgeois mis­ Racial tensions between hlack people any way. leadership peddle: that the other worker and Hispanics is a nationwide issue, and I know a young hoy \v hose fat her is is the enemy: that blacks will never right this must he understood and fought Puerto Rican and mother is Mexican for immigrant rights: that immigrants are against as we seck to forge a multi­ American. He is dark-skinned with Euro­ nothing but scahs who want to steal black racial vanguard party. The fight against pean features, and he can speak a little workers' johs. black oppression, which is a cornerstone Spanish, which he learned at the insis­ Comhatting such false consciousness of American capitalism, must he posed tence of his grandmother. lie has two is the task of a revolutionary workers pointhlank with any and all potential Lat­ cousins on either side of the family: one party: this is what I sought to explain to ino contacts as part of the fight to raise the is a hlond-haired white hoy and the other incredulous Mexican immigrant workers consciousness of the Latino working class is hlaek. All three arc '"Latino" since all in S()uth Chicago who couldn't under­ to understand that hlack liberation is inte­ six of their parents arc "Latino," But you stand why black longshoremen in Oak- grally linked to their own liberation .•

reprintedfrom Workers VOl/guord No. 7~7, 20 Septemher 2002 New Court Papers Filed Free Mumia

Abu-Jamal Now! WV Photo On August 27, attorncys for political viet ion, condemning Mumia to life in Saho, known as the "king of death row," an prisoner Mumia Ahu-Jamal filed an prison. Appeals fi led hy hoth the state and overwhelmingly white jury, a prosecutor's appeal with the Pcnnsylvania Supreille Mumia's attorneys arc on hold pending ol1ice that concealed evidence and a parade Court seeking to reverse the order of the outcume of this latest PCRA petition. of witnesses who were coerced hy the Judge Pamela Demhe harring thc (onks­ Jama!"s appeal papers constitute a dev­ notorious Phi ladelphia police into giving sion of Arnold Beverly and re.iecting astating indictment of the machinations lying testimony against MUlllia. Jamal's second application to rL'\crsc his used not only hy the courts and prosecu­ Judge Dembe barred the Beverly con­ conviction under Pcnnsylvania's Pllst­ tors hut also Jamal's former attorneys, Leo­ fession and other evidence of Jamal's Conviction RelidAct (PCRA). In his lat­ nard Weinglass and Daniel Williams, to innocence on the pretext that Jamal had est papers, Jamal is also seeking a <;peeial suppress the evidence proving that Mumia failed to comply with the filing deadlines hearing hefore the state's highest court to is an innocent man. They paint as well a mandated hy a 19LJS state law enacted present Beverly'.s testimony. scaring portrait of the racism that pervades to drastically cut off death row appeals. One and a half years after .I,u11al's the Pennsylvania courts and the judiciary's But the statute provides an exception current attorneys fi led Beverly's sworn uttcr indilTcrence to even the appearance of to the filing deadline where "interference affidavit that he, not Jamal. shot and a fair trial for a black radical like Mumia. hy government officials" is responsihle killed Philadelphia pulice officer Dan­ The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a text­ for the failure to previously raise a iel Faulkner un l) Decem her 19X I. state huok example of a racist frame-up. A Black claim. As the new legal papers explain, and federal courts have rclused tu eYl'n Panther Party spokesman at the age of 15, in actively working to suppress Bev­ consider his testilllony, leaving Jamal an award-winning journalist and a sup­ erly's confession and other evidence of under the shadow Dr death in PCllnS) I\a­ porter of the Philadelphia MOVE organinl­ Jamal's innocence, Weinglass and Wil­ nia's Greene County prison. Last Dcccm­ tion . .Iamal was saddled at trial with a liams "acted in function, if not in fact. ber. a kderal court overtul"Ill'd Jama!"s lav. yer he didn't want-and one who did as agents of government officials insofar death scntl'nCl' while ;tllil"llling till' COIl- not want MUlllia's case-aiudge, Alhert as their actions served the interests not of , ~,r~ """'.,'''''IiIt11IIi'''~'''''''''1i --,.-----r----~_._,1", rr" ,,- -~ .• "-rr'" ., .. ~. "."

14

petitioner, but of the District Attorney." fighting to keep this conclusive evidence of Mumia's attorneys also pointed out that Using information contained in the afti­ Mumia's innocence out of court. "in ruling that Mumia Abu-Jamal had no davit of one of Jamal's former attorneys, In a letter to Jamal last year, Weinglass right to an impartial judge, Judge Demhe Rachel Wolkenstein (reprinted in the Sep­ acknowledged that Williams' hook was to implicitly ruled that Petitioner Jamal had tember 200 I Partisan Defense Committee he a "pre-emptive strike" against use of no right to a fair trihunal. But since heing pamphlet "Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Inno­ the Beverly confession, should it later tried before an unfair tribunal is no dif­ cent Man !"), the new papers detail how emerge. Jamal's new legal papers sum­ ferent from being 'tried' by a lynch moh, "for nine whole years, attorney Weinglass marize, "Among the unsavory motives the 'right' to he tried before an unfair tri­ and attorney Williams did more than any that Messrs. Weinglass and Williams had bunal is no right at all." prosecutor could ever do to send Peti­ in publishing the book was that of ruth­ Among those on the Pennsylvania tioner Jamal to his death. They strangled at lessly covering up the manner in which Supreme Court is former D.A. Ronald birth the evidence which shows that their own cowardice and mishandling of Castille. Castille was District Attorney he did not kill Police Officer Faulkner Petitioner's case over the previous nine at the time when his subordinate Jack and, in the process, jettisoned numerous years, capped off by their suppression of McMahon made an infamous videotape other decisive claims for rclief." Wol­ Arnold Beverly's confession and the evi­ instructing members of the D.A.'s oflice on kenstein, who is counsel for the PDC, dence which corroborated it. had under­ how to exclude blacks from juries. The resigned from the legal team in 1999 pre­ mined and sabotaged Petitioner's defense video bears not only Castille's name hut cisely over the suppression of the Beverly at the very same time that they had also the logo of DATV Productions, the confession. As she explained in her affi­ built their careers on cynically and hypo­ video production department of the Phila­ davit, Weinglass' refusal to proceed with critically posing to the world as his delphia D.A.'s office. A critical issue in Beverly's confession and other evidence courageous and self-saerificing radical everyone of Mumia's appeals has been the "was also my final realization that Attor­ lawyers, fighting a heroic battle against unconstitutional exclusion of hlack men ney Weinglass would not carry out the 'the system'." and women as jurors. Castille was the D.A. defense demanded by our innocent client." Their radical veneer notwithstanding, opposing Jamal's first appeal. and was later That Weinglass and Williams played the Weinglass and Williams' outlook is prem­ one of the members of the Supreme Court role of prosecutor was set forth for the ised on absolute faith in the inherent jus­ who turned down Jamal's appeal of Sabo's world to see in the publication last year of tice of the capitalist courts. But as Jamal's denial of his PCRA in 1997. A numher of Williams' false "inside account" of Jamal's new papers point out, his treatment by the defendants have had their convictions over­ ease, Eteclltillg Justice, published shortly courts is reminiscent of the infamous turned on the hasis of this racist jury­ before Beverly's confession was submitted Supreme Court decision in the case of rigging-but not Mumia. Jamal's attorneys to court. Jamal's latest papers point out, fugitive slave Dred Scott in 1857. demonstrate how as a Supreme Court jus­ "Williams falsely and malevolently sug­ In turning down Jamal's PCRA applica­ tice Castille has hlocked every effort by gests in his introduction to Executing Jus­ tion last year, Judge Dembe dismissed the Jamal to determine his role in the produc­ tice, subtitled 'The Problem ofAmhiguity,' sworn account of court stenographer Ten'i tion of the McMahon video. that Petitioner Jamal is guilty. This ambi­ Maurer-Carter of a conversation she over­ In turning down Jamal's appeal, Dembe guity, which is the central theme of Execut­ heard in the courthouse where Mumia was sneered, "It is hornbook [text] law that ing Justice, is something which attorneys tried: "Judge Sabo was discussing the case witnesses ... who mysteriously appear long Weinglass and Williams implanted into of Mumia Ahu-Jamal. In the course of that after trial are regarded with suspicion by Petitioner Jamal's case hy suppressing" conversation, I heard Judge Sabo say: the courts." In the past three years, dozens evidence that someone else shot of1icer 'Yeah, and 1'm going to help them fry the of death row inmates have been spared Faulkner. Williams' declaration that Bev­ n----r'." According to Demhe, such a bla­ execution by evidence of their innocence erly's confession was "lunacy" was the tant statement of racist bias was insignifi­ only discovered years later. Arter serving core argument used hy prosecutors in cant-sinee .lamal had a jury trial, he had 13 years of his life sentence on a false no right to an impartial judge! murder conviction, Lamont Branch was - As Jamal's legal papers state: finally released from a New York prison G.-:: .~.... U§dn .h~fe ••~ ... "Judge Saba's vile racist comment. .. £o.undtt.~e .... last week, six months after his hrother meant that. in Judge Sabo's courtroom, Lorenzo confessed to the murder. Mr. Jamal, like Dred Scott before him, was not a citizen with rights guaranteed Jamal's legal filing illustrates that for ·····MllllfaAbuLJa•• j'i··; to him hy the Constitution, but rather an a deliant and outspoken opponent of this inferior being with 'no rights which the racist system like Jamal, there is no justice Is an Innocent Man' white man was bound to respect'." in the capitalist courts. As the introduction to the PDC pamphlet "Mumia Ahu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!" explained: ''The $$$ URGENTLY NEEDED long hidden and suppressed evidence of for Mumia's legal defense. Checks Mumia's innocence is the truth. But in this made payable to "SEE Mumia capitalist system of injustice, the truth is Free" should be sent to: Social insuflieient to secure Jamal's freedom. 7 What we need is not just more truth hut 22 and Environmental Entrepre­ 23 Ot;lclaratlons of William Cook more social power. It is elementary that 24 neurs, 20178 Rockport Way, AffidaVit 01 Donald HerSIn Malibu, CA 90265. if lahor's power is to be hrought to hear If you wish to correspond in a mighty hlow on Jamal's behalf, it $.50 (32 pages) must be mohilized independently of the Order from/pay to: with Jamal, you can write to: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM8335, SCI very forces of the capitalist state that have Partisan Defense Committee worked for years to frame up and kill PO. Box 99, Canal Street Station Greene, 175 Progress Drive, this innocent man." Mobilize now to free New York, NY 10013 Waynesburg, PA 15370. Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!.

I .... 15 reprintedfrom Workers Vanguard No. 804, 23 Ma.}' 2003 Protest Cop Killing of Alberta Spruill!

ing happened on the exact same day that Mayor Michael Bloomberg rammed New York City through layoffs of at least 2.000 munici­ pal workers. We reprinf he/ow (/ 1 <) May {e((tlef We in the New York Labor Black issued br the New York i~(/h(),. Black League for Social Defense condemn this i.eague filr Socia/ Defel1se. atrocity and calIon all of the integrated Alberta Spruill was brutally killed on labor movement to mobilize and protest the morning of May 16 under the pretense against this racist police killing. On of fighting "the war on drugs." A concus­ the day of Alberta Spruill's funeral. all of sion grenade was thrown into her apart­ city labor should come out to commem­ ment by NYC police under cover of a orate their fallen union sister. No business "no-knock" search warrant. A dozen heav­ as usual! This would give an organized ily armed thugs in blue stormed into the political expression and social power to 57-year-old hlack woman's apartment on the just outrage of the inner city against West 143rd Street in the very heart of cop terror, which has been rampant this Harlem as she was preparing for work at year with execution-style shootings of NY Dally News 6 a.m. This was more like a gestapo-style blacks and Latinos. capitalist rolice system can he reformed. raid, Bush's "shock and awe" brought This cop terror is the domestic reflec­ The Labor Black League champions the home and into the hlack working-class tion of U.S. imperialism's war and cause of all the oppressed. The "war on neighborhoods of the U.S. Alberta Spruill present colonial occupation of Iraq and drugs" is a war on hlack people. minorities had a history of heart trouhle and later the bipartisan war drive against work­ and the roor: we call for the decriminal­ died as a direct result of this sadistic act ers, blacks, minorities and immigrants. ization of all drugs. Along with the Parti­ in which she was terrorized. handcutTed As we wrote in our leaflet issued follow­ san DeICnse COll1mittee. we havc organ­ and forced to endure the horrendous ex­ ing the February 2000 acquittal of the ized militant. integrated labor-centered plosion of this weapon. cops who killed Amadou Diallo, "There mobilizations in defense of black, immi­ Alberta Spruill was a proud union will be no end to police brutality short of grant and union rights and successfully memher of DC 37 Local 1549. a 29-year the destruction of the system of capitalist stopred the race-terrorist~ of the Ku Klux city worker with the Division of Citywide exploitation and racist oppression which Klan from holding rccruitment rallies here Administrative Services. And this kill- the cops serve as armed guard dogs." It in New York in October 1999 and other is the multiracial American working class major citie\. We'w also rarticipated along that has the power to shalter the bloody with the Srartacisl League and the Spar­ rule of the most violent ruling class in tactlS Youth Cluh in citywide protests PROMETHEm; RESIlARCH SERIES 3 history. Those who labor must rule! against cop tcrror and helped huild Revo­ There is, however. a roadblock on the lutionary Intcrnationalist Contingents in way to this fight for workers power. The defensc of Iraq in the recent mass antiwar existing pro-capitalist union bureaueracy's demonstrat ion s. In Memoriam role has been to maintain exploitation Ourjoh is to finish thc unfinished busi­ and oppression by the ruling class. which ness of the American Civil War! For black Richard S. fraser controls the wealth of this society that liberation through socialist revolution' is produced by the blood and sweat The killing of Alberta Spruill and othcr An Appreciation and Selection of the working masses. Thus the union victims of cor terror is not an aberration of His Work -~.~~~ --~---~ misleadership seeks to divert any strug­ but standard opcrating procedure for the gle and outrage against the current and thugs in blue: concussion grenades simi­ previous rounds of layoffs. cutbacks and lar to those that killed Alherta were also tax increases. What the TWU's [Trans­ used against antiwar protesters and long­ Prometheus port Workers Unionl Roger Toussaint. shoremen on the Oakland docks a few Research Series No.3 the UFT's [United Federation of Teach­ weeks ago. The cops' sole purpose is to ers] Randi Weingarten. DC 37's Lillian terrorize minorities and working people A memorial to comrade Richard S. Roherts and other labor bureaucrats all and increase the repressive powers of the Fraser (1913-1988), who pioneered have in store are more calls for "reform­ capitalist state. Working people need a the Trotskyist understanding of black oppression in the United ing" the racist NYPD and pleas to vote party that is based on a program of class States, fighting for the perspective Democrats into office in the next elec­ struggle--thc understanding that the of Revolutionary Integration. tions. This is echoed by black politicians interests of thc working class are irrecon­ like AI Sharpton. who. when the city cilably counterposed to those of the cap­ $7 (includes postage) 108 pages seethed with anger over the cop killing italist class exploiters and their political Make checks payable/mail to: of Amadou Diallo in 1999, rushed to parties, be the) Democrats or Republi­ Spartacist Pub. Co. divert this justified anger into building cans. Build a workers party to fight for a Box 13"77 GPO, New York, NY 10116 illusions that this inherently opprcssive workers government!. 16

The first Labor Black Leagues were formed as a result of the Spartacist League-initiated, 5,OOO-strong labor/ black mobilization that stopped the Ku Klux Klan from marching in Washing­ ton, D.C. in November 1982. We stand for mobilizing the masses of minority and working people in militant inte­ grated struggle against the brutal system of racist oppression that is cap­ italist America. 1nitiated by and frater­ nally allied with the Spartacist League, a multiracial revolutionary Marxist organization, the Labor Black Leagues are part of the revolutionary movement of the workers and oppressed against the bosses and for socialism.

If You Stand For- 8 Unconditional opposition to every attempt to aholish welfare! Down with slave-Iahor, union-husting "workfare" schemes! Full riahts for black people and for everyone else in jobs, 1 b ._ • Fight any and every attempt of the government to take away or housing and schools! Defeat the racist assault on altJrmatlve cut hack evell more social programs such as Social Security, action' For union-run minority job renuitment and training pro­ Medicare, Medicaid, puhlic health and aid to education and grams! For union hiring halls! Open up the univcrsities to a\l­ housing! For a massive program of puhlic works-high-quality for open admissions, free tuition and a full living stipend for alt integrated housing, schools, lihraries, hospitals for the working students. Frce, quality, integrated public education for all! people and the poor! 2 A fighting labor movcment-picket lines mean don't cross! 9 Down with the chauvinist poison of protectionism! For inter­ Defeat police scabherding and strikebreaking through mass national working-class solidarity' Support revolutionary strug­ pickets and union defense guards! For sit-down strikes against gles of working people ahroad! Defend the deformed workers mass layoffs! Fight union-husting; keep the capitalist courts out states-Cuba. Vietnam, China and North Korea-against cap­ of the unions! Organize the unorganized, unionize the South! italist restoration and imperialist attack! For rroletarian political Johs for all-for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay with full revolution to oust their Stalinist hureaucracies' For labor action cost-of-living escalator clause! Cops, prison guards and security against U.S. imperialist war moves and military adventures! For guards out of the unions! the right of independence for Puerto Rico! U.S. troops out of 3 Fight for women's rights! Defend ahortion clinics! Free ahor­ Puerto Rico and the Cari bbean' tion on demand; free, quality 24-hour childcare' Equal pay for 10 Down with the Democrats and Republicans' For a revolu­ equal work! For free, quality health care for all' tionary workers party that champions the cause of all the 4 Full citizenship rights for all immigrants; everyone who oppressed! Finish the Civil War! Those who lahor must rule! made it into this country has the right to stay and live decently' For a worker~ government to take industry away from its racist, Stop deportations! No to racist "English only" laws' Down with incompetent and corrupt owners! Rebuild America on a socialist anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic. anti-Arab and anti-Asian bigotry' planned economy! 5 Defend the separation of church and state' Down with anti­ gay laws! Full demonatic rights for homosexuals' Government -Join the Labor Black Leagues! out of the bedroom' Memhership pledge is $3/year unemployed; $1 O/year employed. For more information, contact: 6 Mass labor/black/Hispanic mobilil.ations drawing on the power of the unions against the racist terrorists. Stop the Nazis! CHICAGO (312) 563-0441 Stop the KKK! Labor Black Struggle League, Box 693R, Chicago, IL 60680 7 Aholish the racist death penalty! Free Mumia Ahu-Jamal' Free all victims of racist capitalist repression' No faith in the NEW YORK (212) 267-1025 capitalist courts! No to gun control' Defend victims of cop terror Lahor Black League for Social Dcfense and racist police frame-up! No illusions in civilian review Box 2502, Church St. Station, New York, NY 1000R boards or community control of the police! Down with the racist and anti-labor "war on drugs"! For decriminalization of OAKLAND (510) R39-0R51 drugs' For class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and ~ocial defense; Lahor Black League for Social Defense support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee' Box 29497, Oakland, CA 94604 17 reprintedfinm the WiJfnen and Revolution pages (dWorkers Vanguard No. 787. 20 Septemher 2002 Nigeria: Woman Sentenced to Death by Stoning

On August 19, an Islamic on Safiya Hussaini, a Niger­ high court in Nigeria's north­ ian woman whose death sen­ ern Katsina state rejected an tence was reversed earlier this appeal by Amina LawaI. a 30- year. As Oscar Wilde put it, year-old single mother, and "Hypocrisy is the homage upheld her sentence of death vice pays to virtue." Indeed, by stoning for having sex barbaric practices oppressive outside marriage. LawaI was to women arc not confined to first sentenced in March by Nigeria or the Islamic world. a lower Islamic court. She is I n all societies based on scheduled to be executed in private property, various forms January 2004, as soon as of oppression have been she finishes hreast-feeding her meted out by all religions to bahy. The workers movement buttress women's subjugation. throughout the world must In medieval Europe, women mobilize in protest action to were burned at the stake stop this hideous execution! for purported witchcraft and Amina LawaI was not the forced to wear the chastity first woman to incur the wrath belt. The "adulteresses" of of Islamic fundamentalists in 17th-century New England Nigeria. Safiya Hussaini, a were forced to patch the scar­ divorced mother, was sen­ let letter to their breasts. Foot tenced to die hy stoning last binding was prevalent in year. An appeals court over­ pre-revolutionary China. In turned her sentence this past Ireland, unmarried pregnant March. A third woman's case women were declared mad is on hold until she is healthy and forced to slave in con­ enough to appear in court. vents for decades. To this day, Since sharia, the Islamic set of social harisl1l. Nigeria is one of the few sub­ suttee (widow-burning) is rampant in and penal codes, was introduced in a dozen Saharan countries that have no laws pro­ India. of the predominantly Muslim northern hihiting the practice. In all thcse class societies. the central states of Nigeria two years ago, women Largely illiterate, the chattel of their source of women's oppression is the insti­ have heen forced to wear the veil and fathers and husbands, women in Nigeria tution of the family, a vehicle through mixed schools have heen turned into arc forced into marriages, overworked, which property is transmitted from one single-sex establishments, if girls arc malnourished and, in times of the cthnic generation to the next and the mechanism schooled at all. A teenage girl was given bloodlettings that constantly plague the for raising new generations of workers. In 100 lashes for having premarital sex. country, suhjected to rape and killing. The Orifiin or the Family. Private Prop­ Women are han ned from riding in the same Polygamy, based on the suhordination of erty and Ihe Slate, written in the late 19th buses or taxis as men. The sale of alcohol women. is widespread. With little control century, Friedrich Engels explained that is han ned and men caught drinking have over their reproductive lives, women arc thc monogamous patrilineal family arose been caned in puhlic. A vigilante force was under enormous social and economic '·to make the man supreme in the family. estahlished to enforce the new eode~. pressures: infertility is a stigma and male and to propagate, as the future heirs to his The implementation of sharia in the children are the only potential support in wealth. chi Idren indisputably his own." northern states is a lethal addition to an old age. The exponential spread of AIDS The family is used to regiment society to already worsening situation for women in the country. with over four million thc powers that be. instilling subscrvience in Nigeria. Ahortion is illegal in the people infected with the HIY virus. and for authority and reinforcing religious country. The hride price is prevalent in the attendant ostracism and stigmatiza­ obscurantism. both Christian and Muslim communities. tion are used to reinforce hack ward anti­ The struggle for the full liberation of The horrific and dangerous practice of woman ideologies. Because it is a sexu­ women is tied to the struggle to overthrow female genital mutilation, performed on ally transmitted disease, AIDS is used to capitalism. But to unleash the tremendous young girls to "curh their sexuality" and intensify the repressive taboos, guilt and revolutionary potential of the fight for ensure chastity, is rampant across ethnic shame over sex that suhjugate women. women's liberation requires the leader­ and religious groups, with millions of On September 9, the mayor of Rome, ship of a genuinely communist party Nigerian women suhjected to this har- Italy conferred "honorary citizenship" armed with the broad vision of a social 18

Nigerian women shut down ChevronTexaco oil facilities in July 2002, protesting desperate living conditions and demanding employment for their families.

order of equality and rreedol1l and draw­ northern elites. He openly supported the the hundreds or other smallcr ethnic ing in wOl1len as part or its leadership. introduction of sharia in the north, say­ groupings. The Hausa, who dominatc the Even the most hasic needs of the vast ing that "sharia is not a new thing and north, are mostly Muslims; the Iho in the mass or women in Nigeria~an end to it's not a thing to he arraid of...the fed­ east are mostly Christian; the Yoruha in seclusion and the veil; an end to forced eral government would not dispute the the southwest are divided hetween Mus­ marriages, polygamy and the hride price; rights of states to use it" (London Guar­ lims and Christians. Kcpt dividcd and freedom from poverty and legal suh­ dian, 20 August). further suhdividcd along ethnic and relig­ jugation; the right to rree quality educa­ An outcry of protests filled the impe­ ious fault lines, these groups arc thrown tion and decent health care, including the rialist press following the sentencing of into unrelenting communal hloodletting right to ahortion and contraceptives­ Amina LawaI. The European Union, the fomented hy the country's rulers, who demand an attack on the foundations of U.S. State Department and the Canadian rule on the hehalf or thc imperialists and the imperialist-dominated capitalist social government all joined in condemning the international oi I magnates. As journalist order and pose nothing less than social­ "gross violation of human rights." Noth­ Norimitsu Onishi writes, "Thcse hatreds ist revolution. Ultimately, overcoming ing could. he more cynical coming from and divisions arc staggeringly complex, the hideous impoverishment and cultural the imperialist powers, who in their own fueled hy the misrule and corruption that hackwardness of suh-Saharan Africa re­ countries promote attacks on women's have left most residents of one of the quires an internationally planned socialist rights, most graphically shown hy the world's top oil pruducers in poverty. economy hased on proletarian revolutions attacks on ahortion rights and the axing What is more, these ri fts have oeen in the advanced capitalist countries or of wclrare in the U.S. On Septemher encouraged and exploited hy thc coun­ North America, West Europe and Japan. 9, Regina Norman Danson, a Ghanaian try's rulers, from the British to the mili­ For women's liberation through socialist woman seeking asylum in the U.S. to tary governments to the European and revolution! cscape genital mutilation in her country, American oi I companies that pump crude was arrested and now faces loss of her in thc Niger delta, an area largely ahan­ Imperialist Hypocrisy over passport and deportation on the hogus doned hy the fedcral government" (New Women's Rights claim that she fahricated her story. York Times, 26 March 2(00). The implemcntation or .I!wriil in north­ The imperialists have never had the A report puhlished on August 26 hy ern Nigeria triggered a violent relig­ least concern for women in the countries the World Organization Against Torture ious and ethnic conflagration hetween they sought to dominate and exploit. For documents the role of Ohasanjo's regime the majority Muslim Hausa and the centuries, thesc powers enslaved hlack in the killing of over 10,000 people since minority Christian Iho tribes. As thou­ Africans and plundered the continent. 1999: sands were killed on hoth sides and Most recently, it was these powers that "Security agents, acting in most cases on countless churches, mosques and houses "liherated" Kahul in Afghanistan, install­ direct orders of the government. have hcen responsihle lill' many of the deaths were destroyed, hundreds of thousands ing the rcgime of the Northern Alliance as well as accompanying rapes, maiming of Iho fled to the east, where they are cutthroats, which has kept all the harharic and torture of thousands of women. the the ethnic majority. A similar exodus or sharia laws of the Talihan, only slightly aged, children and other def"cnsckss Hausa headed north, fleeing the revenge "modified." A leading Afghan judge civilians .... killings. The ethnic killings recalled the declared that those convicted of "adul­ "The local and international media coverage of thesc incidenh portrays events leading up to the Biafra war in the tery" would still he stoned to death ... hut them as ethno-religious in nature. How­ late 1960s. At that time, following mas­ with smaller stones. ever, our invcstigations show that this sacres of the Iho in the north, that ethnic euphemism has helped in ohscuring the group tried to secede rrom the rest or For Permanent Revolution! visihle roles of the state and its security agencies in the perpetuation of these the country. The war that rollowed. with Nigcria, with over 300 ethnic groups egregious violations, therehy shielding close to two million killed, was one or cohhled together into an amalgam of a the government from fuJI respon,ihility the most hrutal conflicts in Arrica's post­ nation, is a creation of British colonialists for their occurrence and recurrence." independence history. following the carve-up of the continent at Earlier this month, Obasanjo admittcd President Olusegun Ohasanjo, a mili­ the conference of Berlin in 1884. The responsihility for ordering the massacres, tary ruler during the '70s, was hrought main ethnic groups are the Hausa, the grotesquely claiming that hc acted to hack to power in I t)t)t) with the hacking Iho and the Yoruha, who form ahout 70 "save lives and propcrty." of the military and the support or the percent of the population and lord it over Ruled hy a succession of generals for

'" --. 19 all but 12 years after its independence in both the manifest dead end of nationalism While the industrial proletariat exists 1960, Nigeria became a synonym for cor­ and the absence of a communist alterna­ only in marginal and isolated pockets in ruption, terror, brutality and neglect. With tive. As put by a leading Nigerian Islam­ much of Africa, oil workers in Nigeria nearly 70 percent of its estimated 125 ist, "It is the failure of every system we and Angola, dock and rail workcrs in million people living below subsistence have known. We had colonialism, which Kenya and miners in Zambia and the levels, the degree of social misery in the was exploitative. We had a brief period of Congo, for example, represent a strategic sixth-largest oil-exporting country defies happiness after independence, then the industrial workforce. It is the challenge description. The per capita income of less military came in, and everything has been of an internationalist revolutionary work­ than $300 remains unchanged since the going downward since then. But before ers party to transform these layers into a pre-oil days. Most of the mass of city all this, we had a system that worked. human link to the industrial proletariat of populations live in overcrowded slums We had Shariah. We are Muslims. Why South Africa and the workers movement with electricity seldom on. Thousands are don't we return to ourselves?" (New York in the Ncar East, which are key to a revo­ homeless. The telephone system works Times, I November 200 I). lutionary perspective on the African con­ intermittently at best, and often not at all. In a world economy dominated by tinent. To mobilize against its capitalist Factories are idle. Schools are without imperialism, the neocolonial African exploiters, the proletariat must launch a books, hospitals are without drugs and countries have no chance of achieving struggle against all oppression, crucially public transport has collapsed. In the significant economic development. With the oppression of women. vast countryside, the peasant population, scant industrial production, the bourgeoi­ The struggle for democracy and social mired in grinding poverty, ekes out a bare sie consists mainly of generals, govern­ progress on the African continent neces­ subsistence. Particularly since the coun­ ment ministers, government contractors sarily requires proletarian revolution. It is terrevolutionary collapse of the Soviet and merchants. Such a ruling class cannot a given that the imperialists will seek to Union in 1991-92, the imperialist blood­ achieve genuine national emancipation crush such a revolution. The struggle for sucking of Nigeria has greatly intensi­ from imperialism. The key to social and proletarian power in sub-Saharan Africa fied. The IMF and World Bank are now economic progress in these countries is must be linked to the fight for workers demanding payment on money they had provided by the Trotskyist program of rule in the advanced capitalist countries. previously given as a sop to such Afri­ permanent revolution. As Leon Trotsky The hundreds of thousands of immigrant can countries during the Cold War with explained, in economically backward African workers who are a key compo­ the USSR. countries the weak national bourgeoi­ nent of the strategic unionized sectors of Despite the constant repression, Nige­ sie-tied by a thousand strings to imperi­ the proletariat in Europe will provide the ria has seen continued labor and social alism and fearful of its "own" working necessary bridge for the critical extension struggles in recent years. Following a class-is incapable of realizing the goals of the revolution. government-ordered increase in the price of classical bourgeois revolutions such as To this end the working class of gasoline and diesel fuel, the country was the 1789 French Revolution. He wrote must forge a revolutionary leadership, shut down by a general strike in June 2000 that "the complete and genuine solution Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties, as called by the Nigeria Labor Congress. The of their tasks of achieving democracy part of a reforged Fourth International. tive-day general strike and massive dem­ and national emancipation is conceivable The International Communist League onstrations forced the government to only through the dictatorship of the pro­ seeks to build such parties to lead the scale back a 50 percent fuel price increase. letariat as the leader of the subjugated struggle against imperialism and its In January of this year, another gen­ nation, above all of its peasant masses" neo-colonial surrogate regimes. Stop the eral strike forced the regime to reduce (The Permanent Revolution, 1930). execution of Amina Lawai!. another hike in fuel prices. In July, hun­ dreds of women courageously occupied four ChevronTexaco pumping stations in ;' the Niger delta demanding jobs, electric­ i j ity, clean water, schools and health facili­ ties. These arc precisely the issues facing all of those within Nigeria's borders, and S,lV ~"" s it is the task of a fighting workers move­ 71l j Mr ment to tight for these demands. The mass impoverishment and degra­ dation in the country, as elsewhere in the semicolonial world, arc the direct prod­ uct of the depredations of imperialist domination enforced by the local lack­ eys. From Iran to Algeria and Egypt to Nigeria, plebeian frustration over the desperate conditions has provided fertile ground for the spread of Islamic funda­ mentalism. With the expectations born out of independence struggles shattered, the dispossessed masses and the unem­ ployed urban youth find solace in relig­ ion. They tlock by the thousands into the ranks of the Islamic fundamentalists. The rise of political Islam as a mass Lagos: Union-organized rally protests government plans to increase fuel movement is the reactionary reflection of prices, March 2001. 20 reprintedfrom Workers Vanguard No. 7<)7, 14 Feimwr.v 2003 Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism It is hardly news that racism is alive and well in America. This was amply demonstrated hy the pro-segregationist accolades heaped upon the not-yet-late Strom Thurmond hy former Senate Re­ puhlican leader Trent Loll (see "Undead Racist Zomhies or Mississippi (And Beyond)," WV No. 7lJ4, 3 January). And it's not just the racist ravings or hourgeois politicians. Racial oppression today can be seen in the dai Iy life or hlack people~ rrom racist cop terror to unemployment and more. In the 18th and IlJth centuries, white­ Renowned supremacist ideology, with the patina of paleontologist and religious sanction, was used by the slave­ author Gould owners to justi fy black challcl slavery. powerfully exposed Today, black oppression is the legacy of pseudo-scientific the unfinished business of the Civil War, justifications for the Second American Revolution which racism. abolished slavery. The Civil War was fol­ lowed by Radical Reconstruction, which promised full equality for hlack people. But as codified ill the Compromise of 1877, the promises of Radical Rcconstruc­ tion were cast aside by the Northern bour­ geoisie~the magnates of industry, trans­ port and banking who derived their profits from the exploitation or "free labor"~in its deal with the Southern landholders. The racist ideology or the Old South was carried over to justi fy the new condi­ tions of exploitation of the black freed­ men, most of whom became sharecrop­ pers on the fonner plantations. With the withdrawal of Northern troops after 1877, racial oppression was literally the law under the political structure of Jim Crow segregation, enforced hy the offieial "savages" of the world. Today, the lan­ opprcs~ion of hlack pcople is rooted in the police and the extralegal terror or the guage may be a bit less crude but thc Aml"l"ican capitalist system. Fraser argued KKK. It wasn't until the struggles of the same pretext is used, a~ evidenccd by that Aillcrican hlacks arc an oppressed civil rights movemcnt of the IlJSOs and U.S. imperialislll's cOllling hloody war to racc-color castc. forcihly segregated at the '60s that the legal institutions of Jim "Iiherate" Iraq. hollOIll of capitalist society. But that hot­ Crow were overturned in the South. The fight against black oppression is a tOIll laYl"l" includes a substantial numher The ideology of racism also played a strategic question of the American work­ of hlad, workers organizcd in powerful key role for the United States as it l"I"S rcvolution. Our program of rcvolu­ union~. from the auto industry to trans­ emerged as an imperialist power around tionary integrationislll is hased on the port: i.c .. hlack people arc not just victims the turn of the last century. American pioncering work of Richard Fraser in the or racial oppression hut. a~ a strategic military interventions abroad~such as then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party sector or the Illultiracial working class. the invasion of the Philippines in the in the IlJSOs. Revolutionary integration­ hay c rcal sDcial power. 18lJ8 Spanish-American War~were jus­ ism is counterposed to the liberal notion The ruling class will alway~ use racial. tified on the basis of the "white man's that black people can achicve real social ctlinic. sexual, n:ligious and other divi­ burden," i.e., that white America had a cquality under capitalism. Rathl"l". it is sion.s within thc working class to prevent mission to "civilize" the dark-skinned based on the understanding that the racial the proletariat from uniting agaimt its 21 common cnemy, the hourgeoisie. Over­ "intelligence" to ohtain a single quantifi­ point to a specific disordn of their hrain coming the poisonous racism that divides ahle numher-an "intelligence quotient" while the corruption and violence of some congre;,smen and presidents pro­ the working class is a critical task of the or IQ-was used to reinforce racist and vokes no ;,imilar theory" ... Shall wc con­ multiracial vanguard party which will anti-immigrant governmental policies, centrate upon an unfounded speculation lead the U.S. proletariat in a social revo­ particularly the imposition of quotas for the violence of some-one that fol­ lution to aholish the capitalist system. against immigrants from Eastern and lows the determinist philosophy oj" hlam­ ing the victim-or shall we try to elimi­ The fight for hlack freedom in America Southern Europe. From the turn of the nate the oppression that builds ghettos is thus strategic for the emancipation of century through the 1920s, the eugenics and saps the spirit of their unemployed all of lahor and the oppressed. Only the Illovement dominated the American hio­ in the first place"" seizure of power hy the workers will logical scientific mainstream, with its In 1996 Gould re-issued an expand­ open the road to the construction of an fear of the "Nordic" American stock ed version of MisIIIC({SLlre after Richard egalitarian socialist society. And only heing hred out through inundation hy Herrnstein and Charles Murray, longtime then will racial oppression and the myr­ (and interhreeding with) immigrants from purveyors of pseudo-science in the ser­ iad other ahominations of capitalism he italy, Poland, etc. As Jonathan Marks vice of racism, puhlished The Bell Cun'e, cast into the ruhhish hin of history. notes in his fascinating hook HUll/ali Bio­ a hook which rehashed timeworn theories diversity: GClles. Race. and History ( 1(95): of the genetic inferiority of hlack people Debunking "Scientific" Racism: "We sec in the eunenics movement how and resurrected long-discredited "data" in Gould vs. Biological Determinism any ;,tully or hUI~lan hiology encodes social values, a situation that the ;,woy or order to holster the stripping away of all The same ideology used to justify anti­ clam hiology or fly hiology docs not social services for hlacks and the poor. hlack racism in the 19th century was used have to face. We sec how scienti;,,, Gould added a new chapter making the to justify the anti-imilligrant hysteria of expounded on subject;, they knew lillie point that the popularity of The Bell abou\, derived resu Its we can now sec as Curve had less to do with any novelty of the early 20th century. And this was given thoroughly unju;,tiricd. and validated full hacking by the scientific estahli"h­ their own social prejudices with the yet another set of racist arguments and men!. It is therefore appropriate to honor 'objectivity' or science." more to do with the political climate in the contrihutions of a man who through­ There is ahsolutely no scientific hasis which the ruling class required ideologi­ out his life conscientiously opposed the for racial divisions within the human cal affirmation of social inequalities. We "scientific" racist theories of hiologieal species; "race" is nothing hut a social wrote in "The' Bell Curve' and Genocide determinism. That man was Stephen Jay construct. Any "scientific" idea that there U.S.A.": (WV No, 611, 25 Novemher Gould, renowned paleontologist and au­ arc hiologically "inferior" and "superior" 1(94): "Thus The Bell Curvc ... was an thor who died of cancer on 20 May 2002. races merely reflects a social consensus, instant phenomenon; the 'science' for a Gould was a rare hreed. Ignoring the hacked hy the force of ruling-class ideol­ ruling class which promises to comhat the disdain of assorted snohhish memhers of ogy. This logically leads to the notion that prohlems of the ghettos with boot camps, academia, he, like the late Carl Sagan, the "superior" race should he encouraged prisons, capital punishment, and hy gut­ helieved that a serious scientist could to reproduce, and the "inferior" should he ting social services." and also should communicate his ideas eliminated. This was cast into law hy Human Origins: Contingent to a hroad audience. Despite an earlier Congress in the restrictive immigration Equality vs. Separate Races bout with cancer and the overwhelming hill passed in 1924, which sought to pro­ demands on his time for research and tect the "purity" of America 's racial stock The scientists of the 19th century who teaching, Gould produced finished copy against the dark-skinned peoples of the claimed that race had any hiological from his manual typewriter for his essay world. Gould noted in Mislllc{/sl/re, refer­ significance had little to go on except column "This View or Life" in the mag­ ring to the American government's refus­ measurements of hrain size, skull dimen­ azine Nutllral History-every issue for al to allow Jewish refugees rIeeing the sions and the like. Gould demolished 25 years! Holocaust entry into the U.S.: "We know those "studies" in MisIllC({Slirc. But the For us Marxists, Gould's greatest polit­ what happened to many who wished to 19th century also saw the development of ical work was The MislllcaSlIre of Mill/, leave hut had nowhere to go. The paths to paleontology-the study of the fossi I originally puhlished in 19R I. This hook is destruction arc often indirect, hut ideas record-as a science. The first Neander­ a magnificent gift to anyone interested in can he agents as sure as guns and homhs." thal hones were found in Europe in the fighting inequality. In it, Gould exposes Indeed, the decline of the eugenics move­ mid I ROOs. With Raymond Dart's discov­ the various historical proofs of "scien­ ment in the U.S. just prior to World War ery of a much older hominid fossil, the tific" racism hased on consciously-or II was largely caused hy the emharrass­ "Taung Bahy," in 1924 in Africa, there worse, unconsciously-twisted data that ment of Nazi Germany carrying out its was a great hunt for yet earlier hominid have heen used to justify existing racial conclusions in gruesome practice. fossils tracing human evolution, espe­ prejudices and the lording of one class, But the hoary notions of hiologieal cially outside of Africa. Roy Chapman race and sex over another. On the title determinism have never heen far from the Andrews' famoLls expedition to Mongolia page, Gould quotes Charles Darwin: "If surface. When in the 1960s the hlack in the 1920s-which discovered the first the misery of our poor he caused not hy ghettos exploded across the North, ex­ dinosaur eggs and illuminated the evolu­ the laws of nature, hut by our institutions, pressing the anger and frustration horn of tion of the Cerotopsian dinosaurs-was great is our sin." the unmet prol11 ises of the civi I rights actually meant to find hominid fossils in As Gould shows, the history of the IQ movement, no less an authority than the Asia. The idea of an African origin for test is particularly revealing hecause Journal ot'lhe Amcric([11 Medical I\.ssoci­ modern humans (accepted hy Darwin as Alfred Binet, its French inventor, devel­ (llioll asked: "Is there something peculiar well) was something of an anathema for oped the test for henevolent reasons: to ahout the violent slum dweller that differ­ the white European/North American rul­ identify children who needed extra atten­ entiates him from his peaceful neigh­ ing classes. But the existing fossil record tion. Transplanted to the U.S. at the turn hOl".<'" In Mi.llI1e{/sl/fc, Gould responds: strongly supported Africa as the source. of the 20th century, amid the rise of "But whv should the violent hehavior of Suhsequent fossil discoveries and the American imperialism, the testing of sOllle de~perate and discouraged people analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 22

~ C co::J en u OJ ::l. ~ c rn

Harvard University, 1994: Student protesters denounce The Bell Curve, a "scholarly" rehash of racist theories of black inferiority.

eXIstIng human populations have only is not so remote-the Neanderthals died death row inmates who otherwise would reinforced that conclusion. out a mere 30,000 years ago. The history have been executed. Marks notes: In 1984 Gould gave a series of lectures of life is full of examples of new species "These data, at the most fundamen­ in Johannesburg, South Africa on the radiating off an ancestral line without the tal genetic levels-the presence of one African origins of humans, and the racist extinction of the old stock. For modern nucleotide versus another-reinforce what was established in the 1960s from bias which prevented scientists from humans, it simply didn't happen that way. cruder genetic comparisons based on pro­ acknowledging the overwhelming empir­ There is no scientific basis for divid­ teins: genetic polymorphism in the ical evidence for years. Ironically, he ing humanity into biologically distinct human species is far greater than poly­ spoke at the University of the Witwaters­ "races." In the essay cited above, Gould typism. In other words, most genetic vari­ ations are found in most populations, rand, historically designatcd as a "white pointed to the results from electrophoretic though in varying proportions. The study only" institution by the apartheid regime. analysis of proteins produced in human of human genetic variation, then, is prin­ With Gould's teachings challenging the cells: cipally the study of diversity within pop­ very basis of white-supremacist South "Thus, with electrophoresis we could ulations; to focus on genetic differences Africa, it took some courage to travel finally ask the key question: How much between populations is to define a very narrow and biologically trivial question." there. While in Pretoria, he wrote a pow­ genetic difference exists among human races'! Genetic variation is nature's way of erful essay, "Human Equality Is a Contin­ "The answer, surprising for many peo­ protecting a species from the attack of a gent Fact of History" (reprinted in The ple, soon emerged without amhiguity: new parasite or pathogen, or to adapt Flamingo '.I' Smile 11985]). The essay is damned little. Intense studies for more to new environmental conditions. The an ardent declaration of the basic equal­ than a decade have detected not a single eugenicists' goal of preserving a suppos­ ity of all humans and a denunciation of 'race gene' -that is, a gene present in all edly "pure" Nordic stock would necessar­ the history of biological categorization memhers of one group and none of another. Frequencies vary, often consid­ ily lead to inbreeding and a collapse of of humans into a hierarchy of races--a crahly, among groups, hut all human essential genetic variation. If you want theme he returned to throughout his life. races arc much of a muchness. We can that, just look at the chinless wonders of For Gould, this was not moral exhorta­ measure so Illuch variation among indi­ the British royal family. tion, but simply a statement of biological viduals within any race that we encoun­ tcr very little new variation by adding fact. Human evolution could havc takcn a anothcr race to thc sample. In other words, Gould and Darwin: rather different course: as Gould asks, the great preponderance of human varia­ Upstart or Grandson? what if one or some of the other twigs on tion occurs within groups, not in the dif­ the evolutionary branch containing Homo ferences between them. My colleague Gould was grounded in Darwin and sapiens had survived to the present" Richard Lewontin ... who did much of the paid many tributes to his revolutionary original electrophoretic work on human ideas. Contrary to popular notions, Dar­ Referring to the hominid Alis/mlopifhe­ variation, puts it dramatically: If, God for­ ells rohliStl/S, which died out less than a bid, the holocaust occurs and 'only the win did not "invent" evolution-the idea million years ago, Gould states: Xhosa people of the southern tip of Africa that species may change over time was "It might well have survived and pre­ survived, the human species would still acknowledged by natural scientists who sented us today with all the ethical retain 80 perccnt of its genctic variation'." also believed in divine creation. The rev­ dilemmas of a human species truly and This conclusion is reinforced by more olutionary aspect of Darwin's idea was markedly inferior in intelligence (with its modern molecular genetic analysis, which that the whole evolution of the natural cranial capacity only one-third our own). Would we have huilt zoos, cstahlishcd can detect morc subtle variations invisible world could be explained on a purely rcserws. promoted slavery, committed to electrophoresis. Jonathan Marks, in materialist basis-natural selection­ genocide, or perhaps even practiced Human Biodil'er.litv, points to the results rather than through any supernatural inter­ kindness') Human cquality is a contin­ from a genetic analysis called "restriction vention. The motor force was survival of gent fact of history." fragment length polymorphism" (RFLP) the fittest: all organisms produce more The possibility of co-existence of an­ -the DNA-testing technique that has progeny than can possibly survive within cestors, or cousins, on the branch Homo been used to exonerate quite a number of their ecological niche-the most intense 23

.c competItIon is within a species, whose u S'" members all compete for the same life­ (j) style and food sources. The competition oc between species is important, but on a £l :::J slightly lower level. For example, lions I :0'" like to cat antelopes, and antelopes, natu­ o rally, do not want to be eaten. Faster ante­ o lopes tend to survive, hut they still have to compete among themselves to assure that Dayton, they can mate and produce progeny inher­ Tennessee iting their speed. during Gould and his co-thinker Niles Eldredge 1925 trial of developed their most famous and some­ John Scopes times controversial contrihution to evolu­ for teaching tionary theory: "punctuated equilibrium." evolution in school. Eldredge wrote in The Pattern of Evolu­ tion (1999) an interesting account of how the prohlems of gaps in the fossil record had heen addressed by others, hut that no one had figured out the motor force for provement or the extermination of oth­ door to the belief that supernatural forces. the apparent "ahrupt" changes in evolu­ ers; it follows, that the amount of organic i.e .• god. could likewise intervene. tionary development. Gould and Eldredge change in the fossils of consecutive for­ mations probably serves as a fair meas­ Gould spent a large portion of his life argued for periods of stasis punctuated hy ure of the relative though not actual not only combatting pseudo-scientific rapid leaps (within the scope of geologic lapse of time. A number of species, how­ racist ideas but also Christian hiblical­ time), as Gould put it in Hen '.I' Teeth and ever, keeping in a body might remain for based challenges to teaching evolution in Horse '.I' Toes ( 1(94) "a jerky, or episodic, a long period unchanged, whilst within the schools. Why in the most technologi­ rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of the same period several of these species by migrating into new countries and cally and industrially advanced country change"-a dialectical view which fits the coming into competition with foreign in the world would the teaching of long­ current geological and paleontological associates, might become modified; so time, universally acknowledged scientific evidence. that we must not overrate the accuracy of principles be a contentious issue') Why organic change as a measure of time." Gould and Eldredge proposed that the would Scientific American. one of the apparent gaps were real and that rapid Though Darwin here tends to dismiss the most established science magazines in evolutionary changes were instigated effect of sudden environmental changes. the country, have to puhlish a cover arti­ hy external forces, such as sudden eli­ it is elear that the reading of the fossil cle last year titled: "15 Answers to Crea­ matic changes, volcanic eruptions, or, for record done by Gould and Eldredge was tionist Nonsense'''! example, the asteroid impact at the end thoroughly within the Darwinian tradition. The revival of reactionary attacks on of the Cretaceous period which is gener­ Gould wrote that he. like Darwin, was the teaching of evolutionary science arose ally accepted as the cause for the extinc­ predisposed to certain ideas reflective of as part of a much broader rightist offen­ tion of the dinosaurs some 65 million the philosophies of his own times. In sive aimed at rolling back the gains of years ago. Living things, by their very regard to the development of punctuated the struggles of the 1960s. not least the nature, exhibit very nonlinear behavior; equilibrium, in 1977 he wrote: "It may right to abortion. This came amid a rise in success tends to be exponential. Gould also not he irrelevant to our personal pref­ religious reaction internationally, includ­ wrote a whole book, Wonderful Lile, erences that one of us learned his Marx­ ing as an ideological spearhead for cap­ describing the spectacular profusion of ism, literally, at his daddy's knee." Gould italist counterrevolution in the Soviet body types when the first multicellular was reviled for acknowledging his deht Union and the East European deformed organisms arose in what is known as the to German dialectical philosopher Hegel workers states-e.g .. the Vatican-inspired Cambrian explosion, some 540 million and Engels and Marx, and he had to fend Solidarnosc movement in Poland and the years ago. Many of these truly weird off criticism from the academic estab­ CIA-hacked Islamic fundamentalists in creatures became extinct, but all major lishment for this for the rest of his life. Afghanistan. groups of modern animals inhabiting this In his last book, 711(' Structllre oj' Evo/u­ In 19X5, the state of Louisiana man­ planet today have an ancestor going back tiona!)' Theory (2002). he wrote that he dated that "creation science" (an oxy­ to the Cambrian creatures. was alternately dismissed and attacked moron. as Gould has noted) be taught Gould's punctuated equilibrium has supposedly because, among other rea­ along with evolution. Gould was happy been portrayed by his opponents as an sons, "I advanced punctuated equilibrium to be an expert witness to testify against attack on Darwin himself. Punctuated in order to foster a personal political teaching creationism in the Louisiana equilibrium is solidly within the Darwin­ agenda." Gould's complaint is quite accu­ case. We revolutionary Marxists also had ian tradition. In The Origin ()l Species, rate. While perhaps influenced by Marx's an interest in the outcome of this case. Darwin states: idea of dialectical materialism. Gould and we submitted an ([miclls brief to "As species are produced and extermi­ was never a partisan of Marxist politics. nated by slowly acting and still existing the Supreme Court appeal. We wrote in causes. and not by miraculous acts of Gould vs. Creationism our hrief that allowing the teaching of creation; and as the most important of all the Bible in science classes was a chal­ causes of organic change is one which Gould and Eldredge often expressed lenge to one of the most basic gains of is almost independent of altered and per­ their anger that anti-scientific zealots the American Revolution-the separation haps suddenly altered physical condi­ tions, namely, the mutual relation of would cynically claim that the impact of of church and state: "The current bat­ organism to organism,-the improve­ provahle physical phenomena on the tle poses the defense of the gains of ment of one organism entailing the im- course of evolution somehow opened the the American Revolution. Civil War- 24 and the Enlightenment." We raised the Civil War to lay bare the historical roots of black oppression and to make the poi nt that all-sided social rcaction, from anti­ immigrant chauvinism to anti-abortion bigotry, is always linked to attacks on black people: "Evolution, the science of man's 'descent with modillcation' is the particular ohject of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical 'special' status in nature, and exposes the lack of scicntific hasis for the various religious and other jw,tillca­ lions for helief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in thc ,chools is to enforce the destructive and dangerou, dogma of racial inferiority." That the United States has a secular public education system is largely a heri­ tage of the period of Radical Reconstruc­ tion following the Civil War, when schools were built widely to teach ex-slaves and poor whites. Today, the proliferation of Cristiano Banti school voucher programs, the tax credits Galileo was convicted by the Inquisition for maintaining that the earth goes to subsidize parochial and private schools around the sun. and the privatization of inner-city school districts are all attacks on thc puhlic Novemher 1992). In that article, we of their stated adherence to socialism and school system and the separation of explained that it was not Marxism hut working-class liheration. church and state, undermining the goal its antithesis Stalinism which had failed, of providing quality education for all. It a point predicted hy Leon Trotsky in Rocks of Ages: is no surprise that when thc Louisiana his classic 1936 hook The ReI'oll/tion Gould Returns to God decision was finally held to he unconsti­ Bctraved. Gould's impressionistic pro­ In 1999 Gould compiled an entire tutional, Supreme Court justices Rehn­ nouncement on the failure of Marxism volume devoted to the reconciliation of quist and Scalia dissented~both are arch was less apostasy than a reflection of science and religion, a perfectly logical supporters of the racist death penalty and American Iiheral academic opini()n~ extension of his disillusioned political opponents of abortion rights. Scalia always a weathervanc whipped ahout world outlook. Gould argued that sci­ recently proclaimed in First Things, a hy prevailing ruling-class ideology. As ence and religion did not conflict, and religion journal, that "government. .. Gould himself had explained in The Mis­ he coined a phrase, "non-overlapping derives its moral authority from God." measure O/MWI, science is not at all some magisteria" or "NOMA," to describe this rarified exercise of pure reason; rathcr it relationship. He claimed that science cov­ Gould and the is bound up with the prevailing material ers the empirical realm and religion "Death of Communism" and cultural circumstances of the times in addresses "ultimate meaning and moral Gould, despite what he may have which the scientist lives, particularly when value." Gould may have never claimed to learned at his daddy's knee, was really the subject is human hiology, hehavior he an atheist in his earlier days, but he not more than a left-liheral, one who was and history. never particularly campaigned/or religion comfortahle swimming in the stream of Pseudo-socialists associated with jour­ either. [n his 1999 book Rocks of' Ages, petty-bourgeois academics, ex-New Left­ nals or organizations such as Against the Gould uses his usual witty anecdotal style, ists and social democrats such as those C[(rren!' Socialist Action and the Interna­ hut this time he presents a philosophical around the journal Rethillkillg MarxislJI. tional Socialist Organilation (ISO) wrote justification for religion in general. He In the aftermath of the counterrevolu­ paeans to Gould on the occasion or his goes so far as to present an apologia for the tionary destruction of the Soviet Union death whilc at the same time disappear­ Catholic church's persecution of Galileo. in 1991-92, this crowd was "rethink­ ing his repudiation of Marxism. Why is Galilco's ohservations of the planets (and ing Marxism" indeed~and ahandoned it that') In the case of the ISO, they have particularly the moons of Jupiter) did altogether. For his part, Gould lent his always emhraced "democratic" imperial­ indeed challenge the long-held view of an voice to the wave of hourgeois triumphal­ ism and opposed dct'ense of the gains of earth-centered universe. At one point in ism over the "death of Communism" in a the 1917 Russian Revolution, hailing the book, Gould acknowledges: 1992 essay titled "Life in a Punctuation," the capitalist counterrevolution in Russia. "The hasic facts cannot he gainsaid: Gitl­ ileo wa, cruelly treated (forced to recant where Gould stated that "Marx's econom­ As for Against the CLlrrent and Social­ on his knees, and then placed under the ics has failed spectacularly, at least in the ist Action, they hai led every reaction­ equivalent of house arrest for the remain­ largest and longest experiment ever car­ ary, priest-riddled, nationalist anti-Soviet der of his life), and he was right; his con­ ried out in its name." opposition nurtured hy Western imperi­ flict with the Pope did, to cite the hest We responded with a earct'ully mea,­ alism that arose in East Europe, most modern work on the ,uhject (Galileo, Courtier, hy Mario Biagioli, University ured polemic titled "Punctured Equi­ notahly Polish Solidarnosc. The capitula­ of Chicago Press, 1993), represent 'the lihrium: Stephen Jay Gould and the tion of these rencgades to hourgeois anti­ clash hetwcen two incompatihle world­ Mismeasure of Marx" (WV No. 563, 13 Sovietism was and is a conscious betrayal views,' and I Pope I lirhan did defend the 25

traditional geocentric universe as estah­ hourgeois idcologues of the most pow­ ion by providing a materialist explanation lished dogl~a." erful capitalist countries on the planet for the evolution of life on this planet. But on the facing page (page 73), Gould explicitly reject Enlightenment rational­ ism, embracing irrationality as a weapon Gould devoted the better part of his career puts the onus on Galileo' against the proletarian revolution." to defense of Darwin and opposition to "But Galileo moved too fast and too far in In his later years, Gould declared that the creationists whose interpretation of an unnecessarily provocative manner. He "NOMA" is "no more evolution." Carl had lived his life in necessary pursuit of morality and "ultimate meaning" can courtly patronage. hut now he fell from only come rrom religion. Whose moral­ Sagan, Gould's contemporary. also suc­ grace and into a common rolc of his time ity? Concepts like morality and ultimate cumbed to malignant discase, but ncar his and place. In Biagioli's words: 'Galileo's end he never wrote anything so wretched career was propelled and then undone meaning have always heen defined by and served the class interests of those in as Rocks of ARes. Sagan's last book was by ... patronage dynamics'." The Demoll-Haunted World: Sciellce as a Contrast this to the earlier Gould, who power. What is moral for one class may be immoral for another, as each class has Candle ill the Dark. a forthright defense wrote in The Mismelislire orMan: of science against religious supersti­ "Galileo was not shown thc instruments its own interests. Engels writes in the 1888 book Ludwi/( Feuerbach lind the tions. We also appreciate the comments of torture in an ahstract de hate ahout of physicist Steven Weinherg, who can­ lunar motion. He had threatened the End of Classical German Philosophy: Church's conventional argument for so­ "In reality every class, even every pro­ didly stated: cial and doctrinal stahility: the static fession, has its own morality, and even HI am all in favor of a dialogue hetween world order with planets circling about a science and religion, hut not a construc­ central earth, priests subordinate to the this it violates whenever it can do so tive dialogue. One of the great achieve­ Pope and serfs to their lord." with impunity." ments of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligcnt people to be Science and religion are hitter ene­ The ABC of Communism (1919), a primer of basic communist ideology religious, then at least to makc it pos­ mies. Religion arose in the most primitive sible for them to not be religious." based on the program of the Russian times out of ignorancc and helplessness - "A Designer Universe'!" in the face of a world of unknown forces. Communist Party (Bolshevik), states: New York Review of' Books, Lightning, thunder, !'ire and flood-the "Man has been extremely successful in 21 October 1999 the struggle with nature. He influences seemingly implacahle forces of nature nature in his own interests, and controls The full liberation of humanity from were deified. Rituals and sacrifices were natural forces, achieving these conquests, religion and all its attendant backward­ carried out to placate the gods and appeal not thanks to his faith in God and in ness and superstition will never oCcur for succor in the here and now. With the divine assistance, but in spite of this faith. under capitalism, with its grotesque class He achieves his conquests thanks to the invention of agriculture-allowing for the fact that in practical life and in all serious divisions and adulation of religious creation of surplus wealth-and the matters he invariahly conducts himself as mythology. When all the bishops, hankers advent of class society, religion took on a an atheist." and bosses arc swept aside by a victorious social function, legitimi/.ing the rule of Gould never claimed to be a Marxist, proletarian revolution, the material hasis the oppressing class as part of "divine or an atheist for that matter. His accom­ will be laid for a truly liberated humanity. will." Since then, religion has served as modation to religion at the end of his life Then, and only then. will the limits to an ideological mainstay for the oppres­ is not really a negation of his world view each individual man and woman he set hy sion of women, centrally through the but something of a cop-out. We are left their own creative powers, freed at last institution of the family, instilling patriar­ with a bitter taste: Darwin freed the study from the shackles of class divisions, pov­ chal submission and dictating that women of biology from the clasping grip of relig- erty and religion .• be chained to hearth and home. Although the spectacular advances in science in the epoch of capitalism should undermine and narrow the hasis for spir­ This pamphlet reprints presentations Marxism and Religion ituality, the ruling class perpetuates relig­ given by SL Central Committee mem­ ious mystification to ohseure the roots of ber Joseph Seymour on the origins capitalist exploitation and oppression and of Marxism in the French Enlighten­ to reconcile the masses to their "fate." ment and in left Hegelianism. And, as Marx observed at the advent of industrial capitalism. for the dispossessed Also included are "150 Years of and exploited masses. religion serves as the Communist Manifesto" and solace, "the opium of the people." The "Marxism and Religion." faithful may still pray for divine help in case of disease, but all hopes for an end In the retrograde climate of post­ Enlightenment. io the misery of daily life is put off until Soviet reaction, the struggle to death and the supposed at'terlire. How reassert the validity of the program Rationalism very convenient for those that lord it and purpose of revolutionary AND THE over us in this life 1 In the Programmatic Marxism is crucial for our fight for Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S., new October Revolutions. : . Origins we note: "When it was an ascending class, thc /"'of Marxism bourgcoisie cmbraced the Enlightenment $2 (48 pages) in its struggle against the old feudal order and its ideological hulwark, the church. Make checks payable/mail to: Yet soon after the capitalists triumphed, Spartacist Publishing Co. they turned ahout and encouraged organ­ ized religion as onc more. means to Box 1377 GPO prop up their class rule. Today, late New York, NY 10116 in the epoch of imperialist decay, the 26 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 751, 2 Fehruary 2001

Government War on Blacks and Reds in the Early '205 The Russian Revolution and the Black Freedom Struggle "Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow-after the Russian Black poet Claude McKay addresses Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and Fourth Comintern Congress, 1922. equality for all national minorities, all McKay's book Negroes in America (1923) HEfPhl B AMEPHKE subject peoples and all races-for all the was printed in Moscow. despised and rejected of the earth." -James P. Cannon, 'The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement" (International Socialist Review, Summer 1959; reprinted in The First Ten Years (!f American Communism [1962]) These words, describing the revolu­ tionary ideas which inspired a generation of radicals in the early 1920s, were writ­ ten by American Trotskyist leader James p. Cannon as the historic struggle for black freedom and equality in the U.S. entered a new chapter with the civil rights movement. The October Revolution of 1917 was a beacon to the exploited and oppressed throughout the world, the greatest victory ever achieved by the working people. As the multinational working class, led by the Bolshevik Party of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, smashed warned that "the Negro is 'seeing red'." America' That is the kind of justice the the bloody rule of the capitalist masters Many black radicals in the early '20s Jew used to get in capitalist-C;,arist Rus­ sia, until the workers of all race, arose in and erected its own state power, it opened did indeed look to the Russian Revolu­ the portals of liberation to all the many their wrath and ovcrthrew the capitalist­ tion, and a few joined the early American C/,arist cOl11hination and set up Soviets. oppressed peoples of Russia. Communist Party (CP). Among them Now the workers of all races get equal In the U.S., the reverberations of the were leaders of the African Blood Broth­ justice-·in Russia. How long will the Russian Revolution coincided with the erhood (ABB), mainly composed of West Nc~ro in America continue to fall for capitalist hunk" How many more Tulsas great migration of Southern hlack share­ Indian immigrants, which advocated race croppers to the cities of the North and will it take to line up thc Negro where hy pride and armed self-defense against all race interests he hclongs-with the the return of some 400,000 hlack World racist terror. As hlack people took up radical force, of the world that arc work­ War I vets. This combination of events arms in self-defense against a series of ing for the overthrow of capitali"Tl and gave birth to the rise of a new hlack mil­ the dawn of a new day, a new hea\(~n and racist pogroms and lynchings that swept a new earth"" itancy. It also gave hirth to the far-flung American cities from Washington to web of repression that a half century later Tulsa, Oklahoma at the end of World These questions arc posed with no less took the form of the FBI's COINTEL­ War I. the ABB defiantly proclaimed in urgency SO years later. The last great PRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) ter­ an article headlined "The Tulsa Outrage" struggle for hlack equality in the U.S., ror operation. From the time of the slave (Crusader, July 1921): the civil rights JIlovement, resulted in the revolts before the Civil War, the sight of "A, at Washington, D.C., so at Tuba, formal elimination of entrenched Jim black people armed not only with guns Okla. The entire power of the State. all Crow segregation in the South. But it but with "radical" notions of freedom of the l(llTeS of capitalist 'law and order,' did nothing to ameliorate the de facto seg­ and equality has struck fear into Amer­ were turned upon the Negro in the pro­ regation of the hlack masses at the hot­ cess of 'putting down' race riots that tom of ;\plerican society-massive and ica's racist rulers. In a 1919 Senate report, were started and most actively prose­ Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, cuted hy white mohs .... That is the kind chronic unemployment, segregated and author of the infamous 1920 Palmer Raids, of justice the Negro gets in capitalist suhstandard housing and schools. rampant 27 cop terror in the ghettos-rooted in the Panthers dead and hundreds more framed around the world. As a staunch supporter very foundations of this capitalist system. up and imprisoned in America's dun­ of segregation, Wilson was representative Thousands upon thousands of civil rights geons, ultimately including onetime Phil­ of ascending U.S. imperialism, whose activists faced down shotgun-wiclding adelphia Panther spokesman Mumia Abu­ racist wars of conquest abroad. beginning cops and Klan lynchers in white robes. Jamal, who now fights for his life from a with the Spanish-American War of 1898, But the movement was steered away from prison cell on Pennsylvania's death row. were accompanied by the intensification a revolutionary challenge to racist Amer­ Theodore Kornweibel's "Seeing Red": of racist repression at home. ican capitalism by Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Campaigns Against Black Mili­ Based on previously unavailable gov­ and other liberal civil rights leaders, aided tancy 1919-1925 (1998) presents a his­ ernment documents, Kornweibel presents by the long-since reformist Communist tory of the first edition of COINTELPRO. a powerful exposition of how the federal Party, and into the dead end of Demo­ Kornweibel opens: "Modern America's government mobilized its resources­ cratic Party liberalism. political intelligence system-surveil­ from the armed forces to the postal ser­ The Spartacist League was born in lance, investigation, and spying on indi­ vice, from the State Departmcnt to the good part in a tight for a revolutionary viduals because of fear or dislike of their Justice Department-to defend the racist proletarian intervention into the civil beliefs, resulting in harassment, intimida­ capitalist status quo and to crush the new rights movement. The SL originated as tion, or persecution-came of age during movements for black emancipation and the Revolutionary Tendency within the World War I and the Red Scare of 1919 to red revolution. A liberal anti-Communist, Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which 1921." America's entry into World War I, Kornweibel argues that the Peds had had been founded and led for many years the first interimperialist world war, in "reasonable grounds for monitoring" by Cannon, in struggle against the party's 1917 gave impetus to the creation of a far­ black Communists because they suppos­ descent from Trotskyism into centrism in flung domestic espionage apparatus­ edly advocated the violent overthrow of 1961-63. Weakened by years of isolation including the Bureau of Investigation, the the American government and acted during the McCarthyite witchhunt, the Military Intelligence Division (MlD) and as spies for Soviet Russia. He condemns SWP criminally abstained from the strug­ the Office of Naval Intelligence-which the capitalist government only for spying gle to win the thousands of left-wing mil­ grew from a handful of agents to a staff of on large numbers of liberals and non­ itants who rebelled against King's liberal thousands by war's end in November Communist radicals. Kornweibel sneers pacifism, instead adapting to the liberals 1918. At its center was the newly formed that "the Bolsheviks failed to convert and later the black nationalists. Bureau of Investigation-to be recast more than a handful of blacks to commu­ Today, the material conditions of the in 1935 as the FBI amid a new wave nism in the 1920s." mass of the black population are by every of working-class radicalization-and its It is true that as late as 1928, the CP measure worse than they were in the General Intelligence Division (GlD), had only some 50 black members. The 1960s, while even the minimal gains headed by the same J. Edgar Hoover. Palmer Raids and the anti-red witch hunt achieved then have either been rolled back Within months of its formation in had served their purpose. The decade or are under incessant attack. Meanwhile, 1919, the GlD had compiled a list of of the '20s was marked by an ehb tide King's political heirs-Jesse Jackson, AI 55,000 names. Initially aimed at antiwar in labor struggle, as union membership Sharpton, etc.-seek to bind a new gen­ dissidents, left-wing Socialists and IWW shrank to barely I () percent of the work­ eration of black youth to the Democratic members, Hoover's political police went force. Emboldened by the right-wing cli­ Party as a capitalist "lesser evil" and on to pursue the fledgling American mate, the Ku Klux Klan reached a peak to convince them that "communism is Communist movement. As always, black of power and popularity, with several dead." The destruction of the Soviet militants were a particular target. The million members, including in the urban Union, the final undoing of the October federal agencies were assisted by local North. In 1925, the Klan staged a march Revolution, was an enormous defeat. But red squads and private anti-Communist of 40,000 in Washington, D.C. the lessons of the Russian Revolution outfits like the American Defense Initia­ But in the immediate aftermath of the remain no less vital. It will take nothing tive. The Palmer Raids in the first week of Russian Revolution, the hourgeoisie's short of a new October Revolution that January 1920 resulted in the arrest of over fears that the black masses might ·'see sweeps away the U.S. bourgeoisie to 6,000 Communists and the deportation red" were not misplaccd. The black GIs bring about freedom and equality for of thousands of foreign-born anarchists who had been sent to die in the "great war black people and all working people. and other radicals. All of this was carried for democracy" in Europe a 01.1 were out under "progressive" Democratic pres­ now determined to fight for some democ­ The First COINTELPRO ident Woodrow Wilson. racy at home were, in Wilson's eyes, If the class-struggle road to black free­ Foreshadowing the "human rights" the "greatest medium in conveying bol­ dom was first charted in the immediate rhetoric which was later used to justify a shevism to America." As Kornweibel aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, host of imperialist military interventions himself recounts, the Bolshevik Revolu­ it was in this period as well that the Amer­ by the Clinton White House, Wilson pro­ tion was popular among wide layers of ican capitalist state constructed the claimed that the imperialist war for re­ urban blacks and even among moderate deadly apparatus of political repression­ division of colonies and spheres of ex­ black newspapers and organilations. The with its vast army of spies and inform­ ploitation was fought to make the world accomodationism of Booker T. Wash­ ers, local police "red squads," wiretaps "safe for democracy"-even as he pre­ ington, who preached acceptance of Jim and mail interceptions-that was later sided over the brutal subjugation of Amer­ Crow segregation and lectured impover­ deployed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the ican colonies like the Philippines and ished blacks to pull themselves lip ··hy the '60s. COINTELPRO singled out the Puerto Rico and Jim Crow terror against bootstraps," had held sway in thc years Black Panther Party, the best of a layer of black people in the U.S. Wilson's "14 following the elimination of the last radical black militants who spurned the Points," including the right of national remaining gains of Reconstruction in the accommodationism of King & Co., for self-determination, were cynically crafted 1890s, when the downtrodden masses of defiantly asserting the right of armed self­ to counter Bolshevik influence among black sharecroppers in the South enter­ defense. The FBI's war of terror left 38 working people and colonial slaves tained little hope of social struggle. But 28 the end of World War I ushered in a new tude; to assimilate the new theory of the latter hal f of the 1l)30s, hlack workers spirit of militancy, the "New Crowd Negro lJlIest ion as a special lJuest ion of hecame a strategic component of the mul­ Negro," in the words of black social dem­ douhly-exploited second-ci, consciousness i,s quickly leading role in the fight to emancipate workers from the unions but denied that growing. The Negroes do not pose the the black masses and all working people black people suffered from any form of demand of national independence.", hy sweeping away the entire system of "The Comll1unists must not stand aloof oppression other than as workers, going capitalist exploitation. There can be no from the Negro movell1ent whil'il demands socialist revolution in this country without so far as to challenge: "What social dis­ their ,social 'and political equality and at tinction is there between a white and a the Illoillent, at a time of the rapid growth united struggle of black and white work­ black deckhand on a Mississippi steam­ of racial consciousne;..;... is spreading rap­ crs led by a multiracial vanguard party, boat?" (Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Debs Speaks idly among the Negroes, The Communists and there is nothing other than a workers must use thi,s moveillent tn expose the lie revolution, smashing the capitalist state [19701). This Debsian outlook was mani­ of bourgeois equality and empila;..i/.e the fested in the 1919 founding program of necessity of the ;..ocial revolution whieh and expropriating the capitalist class, the Communist Party, while the program will not only liherate all workers from ser­ which can at last realize the historic of the rival Communist Labor Party (the vitude hut is aLso the only way to free the struggle for black equality and freedom. enslaved Negro people," two groups merged in 1920) simply ignored the black question. In the years bcl'ore and during World Racist Terror and As Cannon, a former Wobbly who War L more than a million hlacks fled the Black Self-Defense became an early leader of the CP and rural Jim Crow South to enter Northern The Red Scare hit full stride in 1911). then founder of the American Trotskyist industry. In his Il) 15 pamphlet. NeH' /)I/Ia That year saw the crest of the wave movement, noted in his 1959 article: on the IBH'S GOl'erning Ihe neve/ollmenl of lahor radicalism which swept Europe "The earlier socialist movement. out of (){Capitalism in/lgriclIlllfl'e. Lenin wrote: in response to the great carnage of the which the Communist Party was formcd. "To show what the South is like, it is war and under the impact of the Rus­ nevcr recognizcd any need for a special essential to add that its popUlation is Ike­ sian Revolution. In the U.S., the ranks program on the Negro question. It was ing to other capitalist areas and to the considered purely and simply as an cco­ of the Socialist Party swelled to Illore nomic problem, part of the struggle be­ towns .... For the' emane i pated' Negroes, than 100,000, mostly foreign-born work­ tween the workers and the capitalists; the American South is a kind of prison ers, with two-thirds supporting the pro­ nothing could be done about the special where they are hemmed in, isolated and Bulshevik left wing. The U.S. was hit by problems of discrimination and inequal­ deprived of rresh air:' The hlack question thc higgest strike wave up to that time, ity this side of socialism .... in the U.S, was thus transformed from as four million workers walked olT their "The difference-and it was a profound difference-between the Communist primarily a Southern agrarian question johs in response to the mounting cost of Party of the Twenties and its socialist left unresolved in the aftermath of the living induced hy war inflation, Drives to and radical ancestors, was significd hy Civil War and the radical-del1locratic organize unions in meatpacking and steel its break with this tradition. The Ameri­ Reconstruction era to a key question of culminated in a huge steel strike that year can communists in the early days, under the proletarian revolution. the influence and pressure of the Rus­ which was smashed hy federal troops, siems in the Comintern, were slowly and Particularly with the rormation or the Shunned hy the .lim Crow craft unions of painfully learning to change their atti- integrated CIO industrial unions in the the AFt. Illany black workers had first 29

Chicago Historical Society Vanguard Press Left: Racist riots in Chicago, 1919, helped break meatpackers union organizing drive. Right: Chicago factory in 1920s. Migration from rural South to industrial North gave black workers social power as integral part of proletariat. heen hireu hy the hosses as scahs and callie in Tulsa. Okiahollla in May IlJ21. Though never a memher of the CP, workeu in non-union "open shops." Many As J"alse rUlllors spread that a young hlack McKay was outspoken and eloquent in more had heen hrought into rl"placc man had attacked a white female ele­ his support for the Russian Revolution white workers urafted into the military. vator operator. lynch mohs looted and and was inviteu to attend the CI's 1922 In the South, the sight oj" armed and hurned hlack homes and husinesses, Fourth Congress as a special delegate. uniformeu hlack soldiers drove the racists B lack residents. Illany of them army vets, When McKay met Trotsky, the Bol­ into a J"renzy. In Houston. 13 hlack sol­ organized to dcfend themselves. The shevik leader and Red Army commander diers were hangeu in Septemher IlJ 17 police. cOlllmandel"l"ing private planes, talkeu of his hopes of training a group of and 41 imprisoned J"or life for dcl"ending dropped dynamite on the heart of black American hlacks as officers in thc Red themselves against a racist Illoh. and the Tulsa. 8y the time it was over, the once­ Army and invited McKay for a three­ numher of lynchings escalated over the thriving black husiness district. known as week tour of Russian military facilities. next couple of years. Conn icts over hous­ "the Negro Wall Street." had heen razed. But. stressed Trotsky, "The training of ing and johs set the stage f()r a series oj" Over 200 blad, llIen. W01llen and chi Idren hlack propagandists is the most impera­ hloouy pogrollls and racist Illassacrl·'" (as well as some 50 white attackers) were tive and extremely important revolution­ heginning in East St. Louis in July IlJ17. ki lied. and over 4.000 more were thrown ary task of the present time." where over 40 hlaeks were killed. These into concentration camps. Even the cravenly Icgalistic NAACP conflicts intensified with the end oj" the What alarmed the hourgeoisie was not ran an editorial in its Crisis in May 1919 war. as white workers delllohili/ed J"1"0111 the llIunlerous ferocity of the racist in which euitor W. E. B. DuBois called the army demandedjohs at the expense oj attacks hut that they were met hy hlacks for black vets to "hattIe against the forces hlack workers and a postwar eC()J)()1l1ic with growing resolve for armed self­ of hell in our own land" and dcelared, downturn set in. dcl'ensc. The Chicago Whifl. one of a "We return from fighting. We return fight­ The Red Summer of I lJ I (), so called J"or numher of s111ltll hlack newspapers which ing." This was deemed so inflammatory the hloou oj" hlack victims that flowed typificd the "New Crowd Negro." drew that the New York Postmaster ordered through city streets, saw a series oj" racist the ire of the I-'eds when it headlined a 100,000 copies of the issue withheld, rampages that left hundreds dead across report on a 1920 racist riot in Jersey City despite the NAACP's record of loyalty to the country. In Wa.shington. D.C.. the in which three whites were badly heaten the racist rulers. During the war, DuBois entry of hlack workers into lower-level in self-dcl'ense hy besieged hlacks: had urged hlacks to "close ranks" hehind civil service johs during the war provoked "Started hy White Hoodlums. Finisheu U.S. imperialism, while NAACP chair­ a riot hy returning soldiers in which six by Tough Negroes." Following the Tulsa man Joel Spingarn served as an officer in hlacks were killed. /\ five-day riot in Chi­ pogrom. the paper carried a scathing military intelligence. hriefly heading up cago, which hroke the hack oj" the l11eat­ indictment of racist American "democ­ suhsection M 14E, which specialized in packers organizing drive, IcI"t 23 hlacks racy": "Allicrieanism l Is that the thing "invcstigations of hlacks' loyalties," as and 15 whites dead and over 500 people which lynches. hurns and murders the Kornweibel reports. seriously injured. In Elaine. Arkansas. the weak') If so. thl"n give us Lords and After the war, DuBois appcaled to the formation oj" the hlack Progressive Farlll­ Kings with guillotines and uungeons" victors of the imperialist hloodbath to ers and Householders Union was met with (quoted in the Cmsadl'l", July 1921). apply the "principles" of their rohbers' a racist onslaught. Following a moh attack Claude McKay gave voice to the new peace-Wilson's "14 Points" and thc Ver­ on a union meeting in Octoher. in which spirit of Illilitancy in his famous poem "If sailles treaty-to Africa and played a some 200 hlack men, wOlllen and children We Must Die" (llJllJ): leauing role in the Second Pan-African died. federal troops were called in and 12 "If we must uie. let it not he like Congress in 1lJ2!, which demanded noth­ sharecroppers were sentenced to death hogs .... ing more lofty than thc "right" of the colo­ and another XO to prison J"or "inciting Like mL"n we'll face the murderous nial slaves "to participate in the Icolonial] to insurrection." They were J"inally J"reed cowardly pack. government as fast as their develop­ after prolonged efJ"orts by the N/\/\( 'I'. Pressed t() the wall, dying. hut fight­ ment permits." Writing ahout this pcriod The worst oj" these racist atrocities ing hack'" in 1972. even a scholar sympathetic to

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Pan-Africanism, Harvard political science new colonial elite with himsclf as their Indian militant Cyril Briggs. publisher of professor Azina Nwafor, observed: emperor. The only black nationalist the Crusader. Announcing the formation "These were, after all, the historical movement in the U.S. ever to attain a of tbe ABH. the Crt/sader wrote: "Those moments when the Bolsheviks had mass base, the Garveyites fed oIl the dis­ only need apply who arc willing to go the just triumphed in Russia and were exhorting all subject and colonial peo­ illusionment and demoralization which limit'" Briggs was led hy his uncompro­ ples to rise and overthrow their oppres­ followed the defeat of the postwar strike mising hostility to imperialist capitalism sors, their respective feudal and imperi­ wave and the 1919 riots. After a years­ to embrace a revolutionary outlook, and alist regimes, and to 'expropriate all the long vendetta, the Feds imprisoned Gar­ he and other AI3B leaders .ioined the CPo expropriators: Such revolutionary princi­ vey in 1925 on fraud charges, deporting When the CPo before then underground, ples and appeals were the real radical demands of the epoch-and not a wind him to Jamaica three years later. set up the Workers Party as a legal party, of these blew through the civilized halls The main targets of government the ASB sent a fraternal delegation to its of the Pan-African Congresses." repression, intimidation, infi Itration and founding convention in December 1921 -"Critical Introduction" to George frame-up were black leftists, especially and many ABB memhcrs joined the new Pad more, Pan-Africanism or Communism (1972) those like McKay who had traveled to legal party. Moscow and were suspected of bringing Briggs himself came under surveil­ When McKay criticized the Crisis in back instructions from Trotsky to set up a lance in 1<) 19 when the MID was alerted 1921 for "sneer[ing] at the Russian Revo­ "colored Soviet." The small number of by a Briti.sh intelligence report on "Negro lution, the greatest event in the history of black agents and informants recruited by Agitation" which described the Crll­ humanity," DuBois replied that "the the Feds were kept busy inriltrating sader as a "very extreme magazine" for immediate work for the American Negro numerous organizations, in some cases its opposition to imperialism, its admira­ lies in America and not in Russia" and simultaneously, and reporting on public tion of Bolshevism and its "abuse of the pronounced it "foolish for us to give up meetings and discussion circles. A par­ white man." Garvey's pro-capitalist sepa­ this practical program ... by seeking to ticular focus of government spying was ratist movement was a chief target of join a revolution which we do not at Martin Luther Campbell's tailor shop in the Cm.l'ader's polemical fire. This polit­ present understand" (Crisis, July 1921; Harlem, where regular discussions were ical struggle soon became muddied as reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. attended by a wide range of black radi­ Hoover's provocateurs tried to push it Allen, eds., American Communism and cals and Communists, including McKay toward a violent confrontation, just as 50 Black Americans: A Documentary His­ and leading CPer Rose Pastor Stokes. years later FB I provocateurs seized on the tory, 1919-1929 [1987]). This the liberal Among those targeted by the Feds were antagonism hetween the Panthers and DuBois would never understand, even left social democrats A. Phi lip Randolph Ron Karenga's "cultural nationalists" in after joining the by-then thoroughly refor­ and Chandler Owen, who published the Los Angeles to foment murderous feud­ mist CP in 1961, shortly before his death. Messenger. The second issue of the Mes­ ing. DuBois and Randolph were trying to senger (May/June 1919) featured head­ get the Feds to prosecute Garvey. Inde­ Hoover's Witchhunt Against lines like "The March of Soviet Govern­ fensibly, in 1922 Briggs joined with them Black Militants ment" and "We Want More Bolshevik in this. according to Kornweibel. alerting As racist mobs rampaged against blacks Patriotism." It was from the Mes.\·cll/il'r the "New York authorities that the Negro in 1919, Hoover directed his agents to pay group and the Harlem branch of the World had violated the law by printing "special attention" to "the Negro agitation Socialist Party that the Communist Party advertisements for it cure for venereal which seems to be prevalent throughout recruited its fIrst black members, includ­ disease." the industrial centers of the country and ing founding CPer Otto Huiswoud, a I n the wake of the 1921 Tu Isa massa­ every effort should be made to ascertain union printer from Dutch Guiana (now cre. the ABB was subjected to even whether or not this agitation is due to the Surinam). The post office withheld per­ closer government scrutiny and a hys­ influence of the radical elements such as manent second-class mailing status from terical press witchhullt I'm supposedly the IWW and Bolsheviks." In a report to the Messenger for two years for the fol­ organizing black self-defense efforts Congress that year, Hoover railed that "a lowing piece puncturing the racist hypoc­ there. But the ABB's membership soared certain class of Negro leaders" had shown risy of American bourgeois society: as it defiantly alTirmed the right or armed "an outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki "As for social equality, therc arc ahout self-defense. The CP distributed hun­ or Soviet doctrines," had been "openly, fivc million mulattoes in thc United dreds of thousands of copies of its own defiantly assertive" of their "own equality States. This is the product of semi-social leanet. "The Tulsa Massacre." which equality. It shows that social cquality or even superiority" and had demanded galore exists after dark, and we warn you called for blacks "to resist the armed "social equality" (quoted in Robert Gold­ that wc expect to have social cquality in assaulh upon their homes. their women stein, Political Repression in Modern the day as well as aftcr dark." and children." Three CPers were COIl­ America: 1870 to the Present [1978]). Though initially an admirer of the Bol­ victed and sentenced to rive months In its venomous crusade against any­ shevik Revolution, Randolph sided with uncler Connecticut's sedition law ror dis­ thing smacking of black self-assertion, the reformist wing of the SP in the 1919 trihuting this leaflet. the government even targeted Marcus split that led to the formation or the CPo While the ABB retained a separate Garvey's Negro World as "probable Bol­ In 1923, he and Owen ran an editorial existence and identity through 1924, it shevik propaganda." In fact, Garvey was titled "The Menace of Negro Commu­ was closely associated with and served an early exponent of the reactionary sep­ nists." By the 1950s, Randolph was a as a recruiting ground ror the Workers aratism and black capitalism today Cold War liberal and Democratic Party Party. In 1925, the CP attempted to espoused by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of stalwart. launch a black transitional organization, Islam. In 1922, Garvey even staged a the American Negro Lahor Congress meeting with the head of the KKK. The African Blood Brotherhood (ANLC). ill line with the Cl's recogni­ Garvey's United Negro Improvement The CP's real breakthrough in black tion of tbe Ileed for special organi­ Association tried to get blacks to move recruitment came from the African Blood zational forms to draw into the revolu­ to Africa and establish themselves as a Brotherhood, founded in 1919 by West tiunary movemcnt .specially oppressed 31 layers. Today's Labor Black Leagues and Negro rights on every Iront ... that the guidance of Lenin and Trotsky. initiated hy the Spartacist League are an hrought the results, without the help, and The Stalinists' sellout of the fight for example of such transitional organiza­ prohahly despite, the unpopular 'self­ hlack rights in the servicc of FDR's tions, which are linked to the proletarian determination' slogan." Democrats cast a heavy shadow over the vanguard party hoth programmatically Cannon explained that the profound American workers movement. That goes and through their most conscious cadres. changes in the atti tude of the American a long way to explaining why, in the suh­ The ANLC opposed the color har in the Communists to the black question intro­ sequent years, many hlacks-and white AFL, calling for unionization of black duced in the early 1920s, "hrought ahout workers as well-turned their hacks on workers, demanded full social and politi­ hy the Russian intervention, were to the Communist Party and the left in gen­ cal equality for hlack people and hailed manifest themselves explosively in the eral, leaving the field open to Demo­ "the workers' and farmers' government next decade." As the Great Depression cratic Party liherals like Martin Luther of Soviet Russia." Its founding confer­ led to a new period of struggle in the King Jr. and. today, Jesse Jackson. In ence declared, 'The white workers can­ early' 30s, the CP took the lead in fights concluding "The Russian Revolution and not free themselves without the aid of us against evictions, in struggles of the the American Negro Movement," Can­ dark-skinned people, and we cannot lib­ unemployed and in the Scottshoro and non wrote: erate ourselves unless they join with us Angelo Herndon defense campaigns. "In the next stage of its development, in an assault of the world hast ions of When the tumultuous hattles that gave the American Negro movement will be imperialism" (Daily Worker, 14 Novem­ rise to powerl'ul new industrial unions compelled to turn to a more militant policy than gradualism, and to look for her 1')25; reprinted in American Commu­ erupted, "the pol icy and agitation of the more reliable allies than capitalist politi­ nism and Black Americans: A Documen­ Communist Party at that time did more, cians in the North who arc themselves tary HistOfY. 19/9 to 1929). ten times over, than any other to help the allied with the Dixiecrats of the South. The CP did not have enough hlack Negro workers to rise to a new status of The Negroes, more than any others in this country, have reason and right to be at least semi-citizenship in the new labor cadre to get the ANLC off the ground, revolutionary. making little headway overall in this movement." "An honest workers' party of the new period marked hy a sharp decline in But, as Cannon put it, "the American generation will rccognize this revolution­ union memhership and massive growth Stalinists eventually fouled up the Negro ary potential of the Negro struggle, and of the KKK. Moreover, hy this time question, as they fouled up every other call for a fighting alliance of thc Negro the Bolshevik leadership of Lenin and question." By the mid-1930s, the CI had people and the labor l1lovement in a common revolutionary struggle against Trotsky which had sought to guide and adopted the overtly class-eollahorationist the present social system. educate the American Communists had "people's front" line, manifested in the "Reforms and concessions, far more been replaced by the hureaueratic regime U.S. in a policy of subordination to important and signillcant than any yet headed hy Stalin. Hostile imperialist Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" attained, will be by-products of this revo­ encirclement and the failure of revolu­ Democratic Party, whose Southern wing lutionary alliance. They will be fought for and attained at every stage of the tion to spread heyond backward Rus­ was the Klan-inf'csted Dixiecrat segrega­ struggle. But the new movement will not sia to the advanced capitalist world tionists. The CP played a key role in suh­ stop with reforms, nor be satisfied with led to the consolidation of a parasitic, ordinating the CIO unions and the fight concessions. The movement of the Negro nationalist hureaucracy which usurped for hlack rights to the Democratic Party, people and the movemcnt of militant labor, united and coordinated by a revo­ power through a political counterrevolu­ opposing lahor and hlack struggles dur­ lutionary party, will solve the Negro tion consummated hy the smashing of ing World War II in order to promote the problem in the only way it can be the Trotskyist Len Opposition in January war effort of racist U.S. imperialism. solved-by a social revolution." 1924. The Stalinist bureaucracy pro­ The forging of an authentically com­ claimed the nationalist dogma of "social­ Break with the Democrats­ munist vanguard party to lead the multi­ ism in one country," traHslo.rming the Forge a Workers Party! racial proletariat to power requires hreak­ Communist parties in the capitall"st world [n their introductory note to American ing working people and the black masses from instruments for socialist revolution Communism and Black Americans: A from the grip of the racist capitalist Dem­ into appendages of th6 Kremlin's diplo­ Documentw)' History, 1919 to 1929, Sta­ ocratic Party. This is the task of the Spar­ matic maneuvers. linist academics Philip Foner and James tacist League. As we state in the SLlU.S. The Stalinists' conservative policies Allen seck to justify this history of sell­ programmatic statement "For Socialist found an echo among American CP cadre outs hy spitting on the heroic and pio­ Revolution in the Bastion of World Impe­ weighed down hy the reactionary pres­ neering work of the early CPo They rialism I": "The shell game through which sures of an expanding and self-confident deep-six the central role of the Russian the Democratic Party-the historic party imperialism. The Soviet hureaucracy Bolsheviks in reorienting the American of the Confederate slavocracy-is por­ manipulated the ongoing and politically Communists on the hlack question and trayed as the 'friend' of hlacks and lahor unclear factional warfare within the criticize them for "requiring adherence has heen essential to prescrving the rule American party for its own ends. In to their full program" in the ANLC. They of racist American capitalism. Our princi­ 1928, the C[ decreed the so-called attack the early CP's "negative attitude pal task in the U.S. is to hreak the "hlack belt theory," insisting against all toward the Black middle c1ass"-i.e., its power of the pro-capitalist trade-union reality and the opposition of the major­ revolutionary proletarian perspeetive­ hureaucracy over the lahor movement. It ity of the CP's hlack cadre that the and counterpose the need for a class­ is this hureaucracy-itself a component hlack population in the South consti­ collahorationist "united freedom front." part of the Democratic Party-which tuted a nation and that the key task was Because they uphold the Stalinist class politically chains the proletariat to the to fight I'or hlack "self-determination." collahorationislll of the later CP, Foner bourgeoisie and is the major ohstacle But as Cannon noted in his 1959 essay, and Allen are necessarily hostile to the to revolutionary class consciousness, to "The Russian Revolution and the Ameri­ perspective of hlack liheration through the forging of a revolutionary workers can Negro Movement," it was the CP's proletarian revolution which animated the party." For black liberation through "aggressive agitation for Negro equality American Communist movement under socialist revolution!. 32 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 774, R Fehruary 2002

he movie Ali hrings to the screen to be. This brutal sport has always T the story of hoxer Muhammad heen about pitting two impoverished Ali, the heavyweight champion fighters, who are increasingly likely whose intransigent opposition to to be black or Hispanic, against one racist oppression and U.S. imperial­ another to beat themsel ves senseless ism's dirty war in Vietnam made him to the thrills of a bloodthirsty­ a hero to millions around the world. mostly white-crowd. Shortly after This gripping movie captures not Georgie Flores became the sixth merely the champ's prowess in the boxer killed in 1951, James P. Can- ring, his searing wit and compassion, non, leader of the then-Trotskyist but his courage in standing up to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) wrote: "Cock-fighting is illegal; it is con­ By Paul Costello sidered inhumane to put a couple of roosters into the pit and incite them U.S. government which threatened to spur each other until one of them him with imprisonment and stripped keels over. It is also against the law him of his heavyweight title and to put hulldogs into the pit to fight for a side het. But our civilisation­ livelihood. The movie reminds those which is on the march, to he sure­ who lived through this period. and has not yet advanced to the point acquaints those who didn't, why Ali where law and puhlic opinion forbid could claim. "I am the greatest.'· men, who have nothing against each other, to fight for money and the Directed by Michael Mann, with amusement of paying spectators." Ali's close cooperation, and starring -Militant, 24 Septemher 1951, Will Smith, the movie focuses on ten reprinted in Notebook I!{ an years of Ali's life. It hegins in 1964, Agitator (1958) when Ali (then named Cassius Clay), Ali was different. As he said after as a hrash 22-year-old underdog his 1971 victory over Jimmy Ellis, known as the "Louisville Lip," won "Ain't no reason for me to kill nobody the heavyweight title from Sonny A Review in the ring." Ali used his speed and Liston in 1964. It ends on a morning agility, circling to the left on his toes, in Kinshasa, Zaire in 1974, when as person who "got out of line." In 1955, 14- snapping offjahs and rapid-tire combina­ an aging "over the hill" underdog, Ali year-old Emmett Till was castrated and tions. With his hands at his waist, Ali recaptured the championship from the lynched for the "crime" of whistling at a dared his opponent to hit him, only to miss seemingly unheatahle George Foreman. white woman in Mississippi. widely as Ali either pulled his head back This was a period of vast social upheav­ The movie's riveting opening sequence or darted to the side, ripping oIl a stinging als-marked hy ghetto rehellions, the intersperses shots of Ali training for the jab as he "danced" away. This style gave rise of the "Black Power" movement, the Liston fight-including heing stopped by birth to his trademark slogan, coined by mass protests against U.S. imperialism's a cop who asks, "What you running from, his black, Jewish ring assistant, Drew brutal war against Vietnam. In 1975 came boyT-to moments in Ali's childhood "Bundini" Brown: "Float like a butterfly, the battlefield victory of the Vietnamese which shaped his consciousness. One sting like a bee:' workers and peasants over the world's scene shows Ali heing forced to move to most powerful imperialist military. the back of the hus in segregated Louis­ Ali and Malcolm X Ali grew up at the beginning of the vi lie, Kentucky. as he sees a newspaper Ali captured the title at the height of the movement for black civil rights. In 1954 headline on the Till lynching. Not shown, struggles against Jim Crow segregation the U.S. Supreme Court declared school however. is how Ali was greeted upon and a growing polarization within the civil segregation unconstitutional. Rosa Parks' returning home after triumphantly repre­ rights movement. Young activists were arrest in 1955 for refusing to move to the senting the U.S. in the 1960 Olympics. hecoming increasingly disillusioned with back of a Montgomery, Alabama hus led to As Ali later recalled, "With my gold King's paci fist strategy. Through bitter the year-long Montgomery bus hoycott and medal actually hanging around my neck, and repeated experience, young hlack mil­ thrust Martin Luther King Jr. of the South­ I couldn't get a cheeseburger served to itants, like those of the Student Non­ ern Christian Leadership Conference me in a downtown Louisville restaurant." Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), (SCLC) onto center stage as a national In disgust, Ali threw the medal into the learned firsthand that despite King's spokesman for pacifist "direct action." Ohio River. capacity to land thousands of activists in Across the South the KKK, heavily over­ Even before his puhlic condemna­ jails, he was unable to dent the stone lapping with local police forces, launched tions of American racism, Ali was heing wall of racist reaction. On the streets of a blitzkrieg of racist terror-lynchings, vilified by white sportswriters because Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, the dead church burnings and brutal beatings of civil he didn't fit their image of what a hoxer, end of King's pacifism was exposed in rights workers and just about any hlack especially one who is black, is supposed hlood. Sheriff Bull Connor and his storm- Black Slmggle and Ihe Vielnam War 33 troopers set upon black demonstrators for more than a quarter of a century, "blood was boiling" when a bomb planted with police dogs and firehoses set at attracting a few thousand followers and no by the KKK ripped through Birming­ pressures surficient to strip bark otf a serious interest among politically active ham's 16th Street Baptist church a year tree, hurling children up against the blacks. In the early I 960s, at the height before, killing four black girls. Malcolm walls. King's nonviolent philosophy was of the civil rights movement, the Black declares that no more will he allow him­ junked by the black masses who fought Muslims suddenly exploded into the con­ self to be restrained by Elijah Muhammad back with sticks. rocks, knives and bottles sciousness of black (and to a lesser extent in fighting for black freedom. against the racists in the streets. white) America. It had always been a tenet Refusing to be silenced by Elijah As the young civil rights activists of the NOI that the black Christian Muhammad and increasingly aware that became more radical, they found in Mal­ preacher was the white man's main tool for the NOI was responsible for the death colm X the one man who expressed keeping blacks subjugated. By this Elijah threats he and his family had received, boldly the thoughts they were still afraid Muhammad meant nothing more than that Malcolm split from the NOI and formed to voice themselves. Malcolm was the Christianity prcvented the black masses his own organizations, the Muslim voice of the angry black ghetto, of black from discovering "the natural religion of Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of militancy. He was black America's truth­ the black man." But amid growing dissat­ Afro-American Unity (OAAU). At an teller, intransigently opposed to the isfaction with the liberal leadership of the OAAU meeting in January 1965, Mal­ "white man's puppet Negro 'leaders' ," as civil rights movement, the Muslims' con­ colm read aloud a telegram he had sent he called King, Bayard Rustin and other demnation of Christian submissiveness to the Nazi Rockwell: liberal civil rights leaders. He reviled appeared to be something more, namely a "This is to warn you that I am no longer their calls to "turn the other check" in the political criticism of King's pacifistic lib­ held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's face of murderous attacks by the KKK eralism and tics to the white ruling class. separatist Black Muslim movement, and and other agents of Southern Dixiecrat Although they considered the white man that if your present racist agitation rule. He denounced their appeals to Dem­ to be the personilication of evil, the NOT against our people there in Alabama ocratic president John F. Kennedy and his opposed in principle any struggle against causes physical harm to Reverend King brother Robert, the attorney general who racial oppression. Instead they stood for or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as "came to the aid" of civil rights activists maintaining hard racial separation, even free human beings, that you and your Ku by sending the FBI and federal marshals inviting American Nazi leader George Lin­ Klux Klan friends will be met with max­ to suppress militant black protest. coln Rockwell to attend a 1961 NOT rally imum physical retaliation from those of After capturing the heavyweight crown, in Washington addressed by Elijah us who are not handcuffed by the dis­ arming philosophy of nonviolence, and Ali immediately came under fire for Muhammad. Where Elijah Muhammad who believe in asserting our right of self­ his association with Malcolm, who was continued to emphasize the sect's religious defense-by any means necessary." then the most prominent spokesman for nature, Malcolm X did not. It was largely Ali stayed with the NO!. The movie the Nation of Islam (NOl). As the movie through his powerful oratory that the Mus­ shows his last meeting with Malcolm, a shows, Malcolm had been seen with Ali lims attracted young black men who chance encounter while both were on sep­ before the Liston bout and rumors sur­ wanted to struggle against racist oppres­ arate tours of Africa before the rematch faced that Ali had joined the NO!. The sion. At the same time, Malcolm upheld with Liston. On 21 February 1965, Mal­ morning after he defeated Liston, Ali the NOl's separatism, declaring "No sane colm was assassinated in Harlem's Audu­ confirmed the rumors, announcing he black man really wants integration." bon Ballroom. In the movie Ali, driving was a Muslim, henceforth to be known Yet masses of blacks were fighting down a Detroit boulevard when he learns as Cassius X. Shortly afterward, NOI precisely for social, political and eco­ of Malcolm's murder, pulls the car over leader Elijah Muhammad gave him the nomic equality within American society. and breaks down in tears. Ten years later, name Muhammad Ali. Though a critic of the civil rights move­ Ali himself left the NOI. Ali's relationship to Malcolm X was ment, Malcolm remained outside. And outside the bounds of what was deemed while the young black militants admired "No Vietcong Ever acceptable for a black sports figure in him, they marched against the racists with Called Me N----r" racist America. And they were going to King & Co., not with the minister of the The year Ali won the championship, make him pay. Because he consistently NOl's Temple No.7 in Harlem. In the face 1964, saw the lynching of civil rights spoke out in support of the struggle for of the historic struggles for hlack rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Cha­ black freedom, Ali was pilloried by virtu­ that were shaking the country, Malcolm let ney in Mississippi, the cop riot in Har­ aIly the entire corps of white sportswrit­ it be known that he wanted to sec the NOI lem and passage of the Civil Rights ers. They wanted him to "know his place" abandon their abstentionism, arguing that Act, which formally ended Jim Crow in American society. This is conveyed in the Muslims were perceived as people segregation in the South. The next four the movie when Ali, walking in Harlem who "talk tough, but they never do any­ years were marked by ghetto rebellions in with Malcolm X, is asked by a reporter if thing, unless .~omebody bothers Muslims." Watts, Detroit and Newark, the rise of he is going to be "a great champ, like Joe When Malcolm responded to the 1963 the Black Panther Party for Self Defense Louis." Ali replied, "I'll be a great champ, assassination of John F. Kennedy by say­ and the assassination of King, which but not like Joe Louis." Louis agreed to ing it was a case of "chickens coming provoked an explosion of ghetto upheav­ be used by the racist rulers to build sup­ horne to roost," the civil rights and liheral als in scores of cities. It was marked as port for their imperialist war aims in establishment went apoplectic. Elijah well by the rapid development of mas­ World War II, which they claimcd was a Muhammad responded by suspending sive opposition to U.S. imperialism's war "war for democracy against fascism." him from the NO\. A scene in the movie on Vietnam. One of the lilm's great attributes is its captures the increasing political gulf Because it omits all but one of his box­ portrayal of Malcolm X's split with Elijah which would later lead Malcolm X to ing matches during this period, the film Muhammad and the NOI in a much more split with the NOT. Following Ali's victory fai Is to convey just how public a tigure honest way than Spike Lee did in his over Liston, Malcolm, under suspension Ali was, and accordingly why he was movie Malcolm X. The NOI had existed at the time, visits Al i and talks of how his so despised by the Feds. Unlike other

'1'1 II' 34

heavyweight champs, Ali took on all that he could coast through military serv­ Abdul Rauf was vilified for refusing challengers, He went overseas to fight ice hy performing hoxing exhibitions as to stand for the national anthem, in Europe's top hoxers, and gave a shot at the Joe Louis had done. Ten days later, he accordance with his religious beliefs, and title-and the only chance at a real pay­ was indicted hy a federal grand jury for ultimately driven out of the NBA. day-to journeyman fighters at the end of draft evasion. Convicted on June 20, Ali The New York State Athletic Commis­ their careers, like Cleveland Williams and was sentenced to five years in prison and sion stripped Ali of the heavyweight Zora Folley. Just ahout every match was a $10,000 tIne. The government's lead crown and revoked his boxing license. In hroadcast live on television. Ali was a prosecutor was former NAACP Legal short order, every other boxing commis­ fixture on the screen for weeks of pre­ Defense Fund counsel and liberal icon sion in the U.S. followed suit. Although fight promotion and post-fight interviews, Thurgood Marshall, who shortly after­ he remained out on bail while he ap­ speaking out against American racism and ward was appointed the first hlack jus­ pealed his conviction, the government drawing perceptive analogies hetween his tice on the U.S. Supreme Court. took away his passport, preventing Ali mistreatment hy the hoxing estahlishment Despite their increasing success in from boxing overseas as well. Unable to and the press and how the U.S. imperial­ foothall, basehall and haskethall, hlack support his family, Ali's major source of ists were trampling on dark-skinned peo­ athletes, who overcame vicious racism in income was the money he received for ples at home and abroad. their college and early professional speaking at college campuses, where he For his stand against racist oppression, careers, were then suhjected to a quota encouraged student activists in protesting Ali hecame one of thousands of black system which made sure that enough against the war. activists targeted by the FBI's deadly spots on team rosters were reserved for With their cash cow dried up, the NOI COINTELPRO program, which was re­ whites. Any step out of line would turned its back on its most famous and sponsihle for the killings of 38 Black threaten the loss of their sports careers, popular member. The film shows Ali being Panthers and the frame-ups of hundreds which was the only ticket-onen fleet­ suspended for a year by the NOI when he more. But it was his refusal to join ing-out of the ghetto hells. The few told Howard Cosell in an interview that he U.S. imperialism's killing machine that boxers who made any money found needed money. In an article titled "We Tell brought down the weight of government themselves Ileeeed hy unscrupulous man­ the World We're Not with Muhammad repression upon him. agers, promoters or the IRS, and left the Ali" (Muhammad Speaks, 4 April 19(9), Earlier found ineligible for the draft, sport with nothing to show for their Elijah Muhammad wrote: "Mr. Muham­ in 1966 Ali was rcclassified. As the press careers but hroken noses and scrambled mad Ali shall not be recognized with us corps hounded him ahout whether he brains. If they minded their Ps and Qs, under the holy name Muhammad Ali. We would serve if called up, Ali announced, they could make a few hucks as "greet­ call him Cassius Clay. We take away the "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet­ ers" at gamhling casinos or resort hotels. name of Allah from him until he proves cong." Capturing the sentiments of mil­ Middleweight champ Dick Tiger, who himself worthy of that name .... We, the lions of black people, Ali added, "No had donated his savings to his native Muslims, are not with Muhammad Ali in Vietcong ever called me n----r," which Biafra during the civil war in Nigeria in the desire to work in the sports world 'for promptly became a slogan carried by the late 1960s, was working as a secu­ the sake of a leetle money'." hlack activists at protests against the war. rity guard for New York City's Museum On 28 April 1967, he was called up. Ali of Natural History when he died penni­ A Decade of Social Struggle depicts how the champ refused to step less at the age of 42. The advent of Ali's refusal to join the U.S. military forward and complete the induction cere­ free agency and million-dollar salaries resonated not only with the growing mony when the name "Cassius Marcellus didn't alter this much. Just a few years movement against the Vietnam War hut Clay" was called, even though promised ago, hlaek haskethall player Mahmoud spoke for a generation of young black men. In the early years of the war, hlacks (II percent of the U.S. population) made up 31 percent of combat troops and 23 percent of fatalities. As revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, founder of the Soviet Red Army, pointed out, "An army is always a copy of the society it serves-with this difference, that it gives social relations a concen­ trated character, carrying both their posi­ tive and negative features to an extreme." Not surprisingly, black soldiers in Viet­ nam got shafted. They were singled out for front-line duty, forced to walk point on patrol-making them first in the line of fire-while positions in the rear were generally reserved for whites. Confeder­ ate flags were common in the rear areas, and there were even cross-burnings. As one GI recounted in the book Bloods (Random House, 19X4), which contains s personal accounts by 20 black vets, Left: Black soldier in Vietnam. Sign reads: "U.S. Negro Armymen! You are edited by Randall Terry: committing the same ignominious crimes in South Vietnam that the KKK "A few days after the assassination [or clique is perpetrating against your family at home." Martin Luther Kingl, SOIllC or thc white 35

oI struggles and the program of workers ::E power. The recruitment of a substantial '"C. r layer of black communists would have OJ had an enormous impact on the course of :;

""--""",",,,,,,,,,111 II""'''"''''''''''''''I'''~'''''.''''''''''I.''''.'''' __'_' ______.. ____ llln.I.IIIIIIIIIII.IIII.IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII~ II I I II, 36 offer but heroic gestures while the cops was hreaking out in the army: at Fort round to recapture his crown. This was and Feds murdered some of their leaders, Hood in Texas, fur instanee,·+3 hlaek sol­ a fitting triumph for Ali. and bought off the rest. diers refused to go to Chicago to he used Foreman's caret:r was prope lIed hy Stressing that what was posed in Viet­ against antiwar demonstrators outside the winning the heavyweight gold medal at nam was a social revolution, the Sparta­ 196X Democratic Convention. the I %X Olympics in Mexico City. Ten cist League raised the slogans of rev­ What wa.' missing wa.' a revolutionary days hl'fore the games opened, hundreds olutionary proletarian internationalism, party, with roots and authority in the of student protesters were slaughtered hy "Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution! working class and among the hlaek Mexican troops and cops in the infamous All Indochina must go Communist I" We masses, to have hrought this all together '['Iatelnko Massacre. The games them­ called for labor strikes against the war, to in the fight for proletarian state power. se IVl'S wne marked hy a hoycott hy mobilize the U.S. working class in Kareem /\hLiul-Jahhar (then still known action. The prospects for such action Imperialist War and as LeVI. Akindor) and other prominent were not far off at the time, despite the Bourgeois Hypocrisy hlack athletes to protest racist oppression efforts of the AFL-CIO hureaucracy In June 1970 the U.S. Supreme Court in the U.S. One of their demands called under George Meany-a racist and rahid overturned Ali's conviction. and months for A Ii to he reinstated as the heavy­ Cold Warrior-which did all it could to later the hoxing lords reinstated his weight champ. In solidarity with the oppose any mobilization of lahor power license to fight. Rusty after his forl'l'd protests, hlack sprinters Tommie Smith in the black freedom struggles of the exile from the sport Illi' three years. ;\Ii ;\IlLi John Carlo.s raised their gloved fists 1960s and was among the staunchest suffered his first professional loss in when receiving their gold and hronze supporters of the war. March 1971, a l'i-round decision in his medals for the 220-yard dash. They were The same National Guard unit that effort to regain the championship from imillediately kicked oil the team and murdered four students at Kent State in Joe Frazier in Madison Square Carden. hanished from the Olympic Village. 1970 had been called out to put down a A rematch was squelched when George Foreman's response to the protests was Teamsters strike in Ohio. That same year, Foreman took the championship from to demonstratively wave an American postal workers went out in the first major Frazier in 197'2. Though few "experts" flag after winning his gold medal. strike against the federal government in gave him a chance, in 1974 a 32-year-old Today, Muhammad Ali is no longer a the history of the U.S. Open defiance Ali knocked hlreman out in the eighth pariah. Two years ago, he was named ath­ lete of the century hy Sports fill/strutI'd. Last month, a star-studded extravaganza was held to eelehrate his 60th hirthday. But while the racist rulers may have tem International Communist League poraril)' forgiven his "transgressions" of (Fourth Internationalist) the past. they have not heen forgotten. New International Center: Box 7429 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA York's f)i1i/r N('\\'.\' chose to "honor" Ali's Web site: www.icl-fLorg hirthday hy reprinting 30-year-old draw­ ings of what for them is the "highlight" Spartacist League of Australia ...... " Spartacist League, GPO Box 3473 Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia or Ali" career--his loss to Joe Frazier. The ruling class of this country merci­ Spartacist League/Britain ...... Spartacist League, PO Box 1041 Ie.,sl), hounded ;\Ii for his courageous London NW5 3EU, England Trotskyist League of Canada/ opposition to its dirty, losing war in Viet­ Ligue trotskyste du Canada ...... Trotskyist League, Box 7198, Station A nanl. Today, they hypocritically seiJ:e the Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X8, Canada opportunity to paradc Ali, seriously dehil­ Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands .... SpAD, c/o Verlag Avantgarde itated hy Parkinson's disease, hefore the Postfach 2 35 55 10127 Berlin, Germany media to promott: the virtucs of their "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan and at Spartacist Group Ireland ...... PO Box 2944, Dublin 1 home. But the movie Ali reminds audi­ Republic of Ireland ences of why "thc champ" was so revered Ligue trotskyste de France ...... Le Bolchevik, BP 135-10 hy tens of millions of people around 75463 Paris Cedex 10, France the world. In Brooklyn, overwhelmingly Spartacist Group India/Lanka...... write to ICL, New York, USA hlad audienl'es cheer as Ali declares: "I Lega trotskista d'ltalia ...... Walter Fidacaro am not goi ng ten thousand mi les from C.P 1591,20101 Milano, Italy here to help murder and kill and hurn poor Spartacist Group Japan ...... Spartacist Group Japan people simply to help continue the domi­ PO Box 49, Akabane Yubinkyoku nation of \~hite slave masters over the Kita-ku, Tokyo 115-0091, Japan darh.er pcople." Here is a measure of the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico ...... Roberto Garcia, Apdo. Postal No. 1251 fragility or the American imperialists' Admon. Palacio Postal 1 "national unity" crusade, a cynical fraud C.P 06002, Mexico D.F, Mexico ail11l'd at furthering hrutal exploitation and Spartacist/Moscow ...... " write to Le Bolchevik, Paris, France racial oppression at home and ahroad. Our Spartakusowska Grupa Polski ...... " write to SpAD, Berlin, Germany purposc is to take the <.,ympathies of those wito identify with the ;\Ii who refused to Spartacist/South Africa...... Spartacist, PostNet Suite 248 Private Bag X2226 serve the interests of American imperial­ Johannesburg 2000, South Africa iSIli and translate them into the forging of a rl'\()iutionary proletarian party that will Spartacist League/U.S ...... Spartacist League, Box 1377 GPO New York, NY 10116, USA L'nc! the rule of the ulpitalist .,Iave masters through \\orkns socialist rl'volution .• 37 reprinted Fom Workers Vanguard No. 781, 17 May 2002

New York Times Smears Courageous Harlem Communist In Memory of Bill Epton Bill Epton, a longtime leftist lem, prominent among them active at various points of his Bill Epton. life in the Progressivc Lahor In carly April 1964, the Party (PL), the Negro Amer­ Brooklyn branch of CORE ican Lahor Counci I and the planned an action in which cars Black Radical Congress. died would run out of gas in order to of gastric cancer in New York disrupt traffic heading toward City on January 23. Hc was 70 the World's Fair site in Queens years old. at which Dcmocratic president As an avow cd communist in Lyndon B. Johnson was plan­ Harlcm in the I <)60s. Epton ning to speak. The city rulers emhodied thc com hi nation of turned the threatened "stall-in" black and red so feared by the into a showdown, mobilizing Amcrican ruling class. When tens of thousands of cops and thc country's largest ghetto was tow trucks, passing new laws subjectcd to a policc occupation with heavy penalties in one and rcign of terror in thc sum­ day and unleashing a withcring mcr of 1<)64, Epton sought to scare campaign in the mass providc Icadcrship and organ­ media. Although the CORE ization to the hesieged hlack "stall-in" was rather haphazard, masses. For his courageous it was yet another indication efforts. hc bceame the first per­ that black people in New York son convicted of "criminal anar­ were becoming increasingly chy" in New York State since politicized and militant. thc I <) I <) "red scare." Democratic Party mayor Rob­

The New York Times. which Wide ert Wagner and Police Com­ acted as a mouthpiece and apol­ Harlem, July 1964: Bill Epton (left), arms linked with missioner Michael J. Murray ogist for the New York Pol icc Conrad Lynn, at assembly point for banned march, were intent on confronting and Department (NYPD) in 1<)64, just before arrest by cops. smashing this wave of black continued its vcndetta against protest. Thc city administration Epton even after hi~ death. In a 3 Febru­ PL instead looked to the scemingly more heefed up the police presence in Harlem, ary obituary, the bourgeoisie's "ncwspa­ militant Chinese Stalinists under Mao including generous detachments of Tacti­ pcr of rccord" indicted Epton for "preach­ (eventually breaking with Beijing as cal Patrol Force heavies. In April, one of ing violence" in the midst of a "bloody well). Though PL was always limited hy these squads provoked what was called race riot." claiming that he urgcd the kill­ its continued adherence to Stalinism, it the "Little Fruit Stand Riot," using clubs ing of cops and judges. The only riot in was a left split from the ('1' and at that and blackjacks against a group of young­ Harlem in the summer of I <)64 was thc time a very serious group. sters who had simply been playing with NYPD rampage. and it stopped when the some fruit fmm a street stand. When a cops withdrew. Epton was a levelheaded. The Harlem Police Riot black hosiery salesman, Frank Stafford, lucid man interestcd in jaZi. a skilled The years I <)63-64 saw the Southern tried to intervene, the cops beat him with printer and an eloquent orator and writer. civil rights movcmcnt move North into cluhs at gunpoint, gouging out one of his He did playa key role in the evenh of the center of American capitulism. Rent eyes. By thc time Stafford was taken to a I <)64, but of a rather different natun.' than stri]"'es explodcd throughout Harlem and hospital 19 hours later, after a further the Times insinuated. We were there, and by I <)64 had spread into Brooklyn. Two beating in the station house, it was too we remember Epton's courage and lIli Ii­ effective school boycotts against segre­ late to save his eye. A Puerto Rican sea­ tancy in that tunlllituous time. gated and run-down condit ions gal va­ man, Fecundo Acion, had his nose shat­ Bill Epton. a founding member of the ni/.ed opposition to the racist policies of tered for attempting to pull the cops off Progressive Labor Movement (later the thc New York school board. The second Stafford. Eventually Acion, Stafford and Progressive Labor Party). was at the time hoycott pulled l)() percent of children out Wallace Baker, a member of a karate cluh vice chairman of PL and the head of its of ghetto schools. despite lack of support who tried to intervcnc, were arrested. Harlem branch. PL came out of the COIll­ by "respectable" black leaders and social Soon thereafter, when two Jewish munist Party (CP) in I <)62, based primar­ democrats likc Bayard Ru~tin. who used shopkeepers were brutally attacked, one, ily on trade unionists repelled by the CP's their influential role in the Congress of fatally. the cops simply rounded up abject reformism and ~upport to the Racial Equality (CORE) to try to sabo­ Baker and several fellow karatc club Democratic Party. Rejecting the staid tage the boycott. Self-proclaimed com­ members who had been seen at the fruit pro-Moscow Stalinism upheld by the CPo Illunists were getting a hl:aring in Har- stand and framed them up for the attack. 38

This hecallle the case of the Harlem Six, gether to form a "Unity Council," whose and responded enthusiastically to the which was taken up by radical civil members ranged from the Nation ofIslam speakers. Among the speakers at this rights attorney Conrad Lynn and is to the NAACP, Malcolm X's Organiza­ united-front rally were Lynn, PL leader recounted in his autobiography, There Is tion of African American Unity, business­ Milt Rosen and Workers World editor a Foul/lail/ ( 1979 J. men and local Democratic Party hacks. Vince Copeland. In his speech, Spartacist In an article headlined "Negro Struggle The Unity Council pledged itself to editor James Robertson described the role in the North" (Spartacist No.2, luly­ "restore peace in the community." But the of the cops in creating the riots and August 196.+ J. written just before the cop only action [1ursued by this alliance of responded to frenzied redbaiting by the occupation of Harlem, we warned: "Over "leaders," as we noted in our article, "was bourgeois press. which sought to blame the past few months New York has wit­ directed against the one serious attempt the Harlem protest on a communist con­ ncssed an unprecedented campaign of that was made to give effective organiza­ spiracy. Robertson remarked, "Unfortu­ tion and direction to the people in the nately there aren't many Reds in Harlem streets," that of the Harlem Defense now-but there will be!" Council (HDC) led hy Epton. The HDC issued a leaflet urging: Epton: "Guilty" of Being a "ORGANIZE YOUR BLOCKS. The Black Communist events of the last two days have shown that if we are not organized we are just While anti-Communist black national­ BREAK UP a mob and not in a position to prop­ ists were granted audiences with the mayor and allowed to stage their own HARLEM PR!YI'EST; erly deal with the enemy. ORGAN­ IZE APARTMENT BY APARTMENT, rallies in Harlem, Epton and those who , 2LE~ISTS SEIZED HOUSE BY HOUSE' The Harlem De­ supported him were subjected to fierce I fense Council calls on all black people 'Ismail Band of FGlloW8rS II repression and a wide-ranging witch­ Dispened After Defying of Harlem to set up Block Committees M~rphyandlnlunctlon with the purpose of defending each and hunt. Sweeping injunctions were issued PLEAS PROVE FAUlTLESS every block in Harlem from the cops." against all those who were even remotely I -.-.---- :NegrOleadmHadSoullht The HDC called for a march and mass associated with either Epton's march or I ta Avert Demanatrallon, demonstration on July 29 and, though a the HSC, including Robertson, prevent­ I butOppose~~TO~

I By B. W. Al'PU: Jr. small group, did what it could to concre­ ing them from "assembling, gathering Ipr~I::t>O~;~~I"f~~::'';,,~ t." .. }tY8rntO

sively for refusal to drag in the names of innocent people or to render false testimony." In defense of Epton and others targeted in the witchhunt, we collected signatures, distributed literature and organized meet­ ings and Epton defense committees in various cities, including Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area and Ithaca, New York. Our defense of Epton was not always welcomed by PL, however, which in sectarian fashion declared their Com­ mittee to Defend Resistance to Ghetto Life (CERGE) off-limits to "Trotskyites." In a letter to one of our Chicago com­ rades, PL leader Bill McAdoo fulminated that "in general" Trotskyists were "coun­ terrevolutionaries." In February 1965, PL expelled Spartacists Paul Gai lIard and Shirley Stoute from the HDC on the basis of their Trotskyist politics. Nonetheless, we forthrightly continued to defend Epton. That month, a Spartacist

New York Times supporter proposed a motion which was Spartacist-initiated Harlem Solidarity Committee rally in NYC garment district, passed unanimously in CORE's Harlem July 1964. branch that read: "N.Y. CORE condemns the attempt to make Bill Epton the scape­ was an immediate call to action. Piling at a protest against the witchhunting goat for the brutal action of the police last one falsification atop another, the Times grand jury. Robertson was himself served summer against the people of Harlem. It obituary portrayed Epton's "criminal with a subpoena to testi fy. Lynn agreed to supports Epton's right to speak, and calls anarchy" case as raising the question of serve as Robertson's legal counsel, and upon the City to drop its indictment whether there was "a constitutional right assisted in preparing his testimony. A against him." to say, 'Burn, hahy, hurn'." In fact, that Spartllcis/ Special Supplement (March Epton's case drew support from around phrase wasn't even heard until thc time 1<)65) is~ued as a "Report to Our Read­ the glohe, ranging from philosophers of the Walls upheaval ill 1<)65 and only ers" summarized several key points from Bertrand Russell and lean-Paul Sartre to became famous when it was used hy H. Rohertson's appearance hefore the grand Amnesty International. In a statement of Rap Brown in 1967. jury. including that "Rohertson has never support, the National Liberation Front of In a powerful statement to thc court at heard Bill Epton advocate acts of vio­ South Vietnam stated: the time of his conviction, puhlished hy lence and terrorism; moreover, since "We strongly protest against the unjustifi­ PL as a pamphlet titled We Accu.\(': Bill ahle arrest and trial of Bill Epton on the Comrade Epton is a declared Marxist ground of trumped up charges and l:'pfOIi Spc(/ks 10 the COlllt ( 1<)66), Epton such advocacy would be in fundamental demand his immediate release by the explained the real reason for the capitalist contradiction to his heliefs." Rohertson U.S. authorities. We call upon all justice state's vendella agai nst hi m: also testified that "the New York City loving people in the U.S.A. and in the "I have heen found 'guilty' of af!itating cops, not communists, provoked the riots world to raise their voice of opposition against the conditions that Iny people are to this effect as they have raised their last summer." voice to protest against the aggressive forced to live under in New York and all Explaining why the Spartacist group over the country. war waged by the U.S. imperialists in "I have heen found 'guilty' of protest­ was cited hy the state along: with PL, the Vietnam." ing the murder--yes, murdn---or legal supplement noted: In later years, Epton moved to the lynching, whatever you choose, of James "The SPARTAClST editor has been right, bitterly exiting PL in 1970 in the Powell hy Thomas Gilligan, a New York dragged into the witchhunt because of midst of internal turmoil. Unable and policcman. our detailed exposure of the police over "I have bcen found 'guilty' of organizing the riots last summer: our determined unwilling to transcend its Stalinist frame­ the Harlem comillunity against police defense of Bill Epton and Progressive work, PL itself soon began moving right­ hrutality that has heen occurring in the Lahor against legal intimidation and per­ ward, promoting one "single issue" ref­ Black ghettos for hundreds of year,s. secution: and our initiation last summer ormist campaign after another. Epton "I have been found 'guilty' of standing of the militant Harlem Solidarity Com­ spent many of his later years working up for the right of all men to he frec---to mittee which rallicd working class sup­ he free from the system of exploitation port in New York's garment center for with the Malcolm X Museum. He was of lTlan hy Illan. the people of ilarlem during the police also involved in the Black Radical Con­ "[ have heen found 'guilty' of proclaim­ riots." gress and the Citywide Coalition to Stop ing that capitalism i,s an oppressive sys­ The supplement also explained why we Giuliani, hoth "left" shills for the Demo­ tem and that socialism is the only solu­ chose to have Robert~on appear before cratic Party and both a far cry from tion for mankind to li\l~ in peace and humanity .... the grand jury: "The Spartacist group Epton's politics in the 1960s. Nonethe­ "And finally-[ have heen found 'guilty' has no reason or desire to conceal either lcss, we remember Epton as a committed of heing a communist .. and a Black onl' its political views or its actions. Quite and courageous working-class militant' at that I:; the contrary; should its officers he sent to who in a volatile time did not bow before We were actively involved in Epton's jail for reeusal to testify. we want it crys­ the onslaught of the bourgeois state or defense from the start. In Fehruary 1<)65. tal clear that such punishment is exclu- bend to the pressures of liheralism .•

''' ...... ,-..---~.,--.-----.-.,--. ------.. ----- 40 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 787, 20 September 2002 Mass Jailing of Blacks in Tulia "War on Drugs" Texas Style

On 23 July 1999, 46 men and women affected as friends and family members court. They run 'em through like cattle were rounded up in cady-morning raids were caught up in the dragnet. Those and put a numher on ' em. They just in Tulia, a windswept West Texas town of whites who were arrested either had stuck 'em all in prison." For his role in 5,000 halfway hetween Luhhoek and close connections to Tulia's hlack popu­ this monstrous frame-up, Coleman was Amarillo. All hut six of those dragged lation or lived in the ramshackle part of named the Texas "Lawman of the Year"! from their homes to the county court­ town, still often called "N----rtown" hy Fifteen of those arrested remain behind house, often half-dressed and wondering racist whites. hars despite overwhelming evidence of what they were heing targeted for, were The narcotics agent almost single­ their innocence. black. Framed up on phony drug charges handedly responsihle for the arrests, Tom And who were these "drug dealers"? hy a racist, corrupt narcotics agent, 42 Coleman, is a real piece of work. Cole­ Overwhelmingly, they were poor, local of those arrested were thrown into prison man is a stone racist noted for his fre­ hlack people, most of whom had no hy overwhelmingly white juries for mam­ quent use of racial epithets against hlack criminal records or anything to do with mothjail terms. Tulia epitomizes what the people. Even Coleman's former hoss, the drug trade. Police found no traces rulers' racist "war on drugs" ean mean in Sheriff Ken Burke of nearhy Cochran of illicit drugs in the houses of those the rural South. County, informed the Texas Commission arrested, no weapons and no money. The case has recently gained national on Law Enforcement that "Mr. Coleman There were no fingerprints on the drugs coverage through the efforts of New York should not he in law enforeement if he's the cops claim to have "seized." Joe Times columnist Boh Herbert, who has going to do people the way he did this Moore, a 57-year-old hlack pig farmer, catalogued the egregious manufacturing town" (London Independent, 20 August). currently serving a 99-year sentence, of evidence, racist targeting of hlack peo­ [n the midst of Coleman's "investiga­ was identified as the "kingpin" of the ple and harsh sentencing in recent tion," Cochran County hrought him up on ostensible cocaine ring despite his obvi­ columns. Herhert has also exposed how misdemeanor charges of theft and abuse ous poverty and even though the charges this "'monstrous, racially motivated mis­ of his position. Swisher County sheriff against him involved only 3.5 grams carriage of justice" wrought havoc in Larry Stewart, Coleman's hoss in Tulia, of powder cocaine. Kizzie White, a 24- Tulia's small hlack community and how allowed Coleman to put his "investiga­ year-old mother of two with no criminal those who organized this breathtaking tion" on hold while he resolved the record, got 25 years, while her husband, series of frame-ups were lauded for their charges. a white man named William "Cash" efforts hy the Texas state government, Coleman's "investigation," had it not Love, received a sentence of 434 years in then run hy George W. Bush. been so devastating, would be almost prison. The now-defunct local newspaper, the comical. He wrote down "reports" of Liheral Times columnist Herhert has Tulia Sentillel, crowed, "Tulia's Streets "drug deals" on his hody, threw away placed his hopes in a federal investiga­ Cleared of Garhage" after the raids and many of his records and built his case tion. He states that "federal investigators praised the cops for sweeping up Tulia's on uncorroborated, unsuhstantiated tes­ who arc both honest and diligent will find ·'scumhags." Reverend William Guenther, timony. Everyone who knew Coleman plenty of evidence of official wrongdoing the jury foreman in one of the first trials, well knew that he was a liar and a crook, waiting for them in Tulia" (New York which handed down a 25-year sentence, hut the word of a white cop was suffi­ Til/WI', 22 August). While Tulia may be an proclaimed, "The whole idea hehind the cient to railroad the Tulia defendants cxtreme example of the degree to which sentence was to send a message to drug into prison. the war on drugs is aimed at black people, dealers: We don't want you in this com­ In spite of polygraph tests corrohorat­ it is not an aherration or an isolated mis­ munity." The defendants, overwhelm­ ing the innocence of those arrested and carriage of justice. The war on drugs is a ingly poor, had to rely on underpaid and the ohvious unreliahility of Coleman as a racist war against black people/ [n many overworked public defenders in the face witness, only four cases were thrown inner-city ghettos, one in three black men of racist juries and a D.A. out for hlood. out, generally over egregious misidentifi­ is entangled in the criminal "justice" sys­ The charges and arrests, though, had cation by Coleman, whose physical tem, often due to minor drug charges like nothing to do with drugs and everything descriptions of several defendants were those the Tulia defendants faced. Over to do with terrorizing the town's black wildly inaccurate. [n most cases, though, half of the two million people in Amer­ population. a comhination of inadequate legal repre­ ica's prisons, most of whom are hlack and Tulia's hlack community of 350 peo­ sentation and relentless prosecution led minority, are there on the hasis of drug­ ple was devastated as over 10 percent of to sentences breathtaking in their sever­ related convictions. the hlack populace and half the adult ity. "What happened in the courtroom," West Texas is not New York, Philadel­ hlaek men were swept into prison. House says Freddie Brookins Sr. of Tulia's phia or Chicago, however. Tulia's black after house stands empty, and virtually NAACP chapter, which has heen fighting population is isolated in the arid plains every hlack family in town has heen the convictions, "was really a kangaroo of a remote region of a Southern state 41

justifiably infamous for its heavy-handed ent jurisdictions, anybody who wants cratic president Bill Clinton who in 1996 approach to "justice." While the "war on to come along can play. During the ordered the Department of Housing and course of this, the wrong doors get ,drugs" is used throughout the U.S. to kicked.... A whole lot of illegal Urban Development to strictly enforce .terrorize black people and other minor­ searches and seizures go on." the "one strike you're out law" in public housing, which mandated the eviction of ities, in the rural South it has been used - Texas Observer, to decimate entire communities, and that's 26 October 2001 any public housing tenant if that per­ exactly what happened in Tulia. The son-or even a guest of the tenant­ authorities manufactured a drug ring out In the United States, where the special is caught using drugs anywhere. And of whole cloth and then used it, in effect, oppression of black people is integral to black Democrats like Jesse Jackson to target the entirety of the town's black capitalist class rule andto the exploitation played a prominent role in promoting population. Perhaps 80 years ago a racist of the entire working class, drug laws are the racist rulers' anti-drug crackdown in mob might have been the instrumentality, used to repress and herd a generation of the ghettos. as when a deputized white mob burned black youth into jail. Tulia grotesquely The "war on drugs" is one expression the black Greenwood section of Tulsa to reveals the racist injustice in which drugs of an overall ratcheting-up of repression the ground in 1921. Now all you need is are used as a pretext for waging war against working people and the op­ a zealous D.A. and a creative narc. "It against the black population as a whole. pressed. But black people" who form a was a mass lynching that day," 'Roy We Marxists call for the decriminaliza­ significant portion of the American work­ Credico of the William Moses Kunstler tion of drugs. Those addicted to drugs ing class, are not helpless in the face of Fund for Racial Justice asserts. "It's like should have free access to quality medi­ this onslaught. The working class, the being accused of raping someone in Indi­ cal care and counseling. only class with the social power and ana in the 1930s. You didn't do it, but it Herbert favorably quotes New York objective interest to take down the capital­ doesn't matter because a bunch of Klans­ Democratic Senator Charles Schumer as ist system, can and indeed must take up men on the jury are going to string you saying that Tulia looks like "racial pro­ the fight against the racist "war on drugs" up anyway." filing, arresting and prosecuting with as part of a fight for the rights of all the Such blatant disregard for the rights of trumped-up evidence." Yet Schumer has oppressed. A political struggle against the accused is not unique to Tulia. A for­ long supported both the racist death pen­ both the Democrats and their hangers-on mer narcotics agent in Chambers County, alty-a direct legacy of chattel slavery in in the trade-union bureaucracy is neces­ Texas summed up a typical drug bust as the U.S.-and the very "war on drugs" sary to bring the social power of the follows: that spawns such outrages as~Tulia. The working class to bear. Key to this strug­ Democrats are just as responsible for gle is forging a revolutionary workers "It's probably better known as a free­ for-all. You get a bunch of warrants, the racist assault on bhlck people under party that will fight for an egalitarian search and arrest, get 'em all ready to the auspices of the "war on drugs" as socialist future, from the South Bronx to go, get 30 or 40 officers from differ- the Republicans. Indeed, it was Demo- the southern plains .•

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42 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 790, 1 November 2002 NYC: Racist Frame-Up of Black, Latino Youth the cops what they wanted to hear so they could go home. The cops and prosecutors always knew there was no physical evidence linking On 19 April 1989, two particularly hei­ aged to extort a statement from 15- the five to the attack. Although the jogger nous crimes were committed in New York year-old Yusef Salaam after unlawfully lost 75 percent of her blood during the City. The first was the bludgeoning and denying requests by family members and brutal beating, not a drop of it was found brutal rape of a 28-year-old woman who close friends to see him. Among them on them. The tabloids dutifully reported came to be known as the Central Park was Salaam's "Big Brother" counselor, days after the attack that the cops jogger. The second was the launching of who happened to be an Assistant United believed not only that the jogger was a racist frame-up of five black and His­ States Attorney. Throughout the trial, the raped eight times but that the attacks panic teenagers who were rounded up by five recanted the "confessions" and main­ came in shifts. But only one semen sam­ the cops. Everyone from the bourgeois tained their innocence. ple was ever discovered-which turned media to racist pig and then-mayor of Even in the forced "confessions," not out to be Reyes'. It has recently been New York Ed Koch and billionaire real one of the youths ever admitted to actu­ revealed that the cops knew that a similar estate mogul Donald Trump clamored for ally raping the jogger. Instead, they told rape had occurred in the park two nights a lynching. All pretense of "innocent until stories of being part of a group attack in earlier, which Reyes has also since con­ proven guilty" was tossed out the window which others committed the rape. In the fessed to. But they never told the teens' amid screams over "wolfpacks" of black basic details as to the location of the lawyers about the earlier attack-infor­ youth, "animals on a feeding frenzy." The attack, the description of the woman, the mation which would have been vital to not-so-subtle message that black and His­ number of people involved and the weap­ the defense-because it didn't jibe with panic ghetto youth are subhuman was ons used, the stories told by each of the the frame-up that had been concocted. brought home in a fuil-page ad by Trump five were so disparate from each other­ The police department's forensics howling: "They should be forced to suf­ and the known facts-as to have cast sig­ expert testified that hair found on. one of fer and, when they kill, they should be nificant doubt that they were anything but the youths, Kevin Richardson, could be executed for their crimes .... CIVIL LIB­ the product of scared kids trying to tell described as "consistent with and similar ERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS." The five youths-Anton McCray, Ray­ mond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise-were all con­ victed and served their full terms, ranging from nine to twelve years. They were consistently denied parole for refusing to admit to the rape, which they did not commit. Last January, serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed that he, and he alone, committed the rape. DNA testing corrob­ orated his -account. But the District Attor­ ney's office still refuses to exonerate its 21 October 2002: victims. At a court hearing on October 21, Dolores Wise the D.A.'s office was given until Decem­ (at left), mother of ber 5 to complete its "investigation" and framed-up youth Kharey Wise, advise the court whether it is joining in at rally outside the defense application to overturn the Manhattan convictions. - Supreme Court. The conviction of these youths was a racist frame-up in the best American style. The centerpiece of the prosecu­ tion's case was coerced "confessions"­ four of them videotaped-extracted after hours of interrogation, threats and false promises of leniency. Police only man-

l ~~~ ______~ ______-- ______i~\ ______------~~ 43

with" the jogger's hair. This is a standard dIes, baseball bats, spiked clubs and tire ghetto youth are portrayed as inveterate ploy by the cops when they don't have an irons, while white homeowners in flush­ criminals. From the moment the victim iQta of physical evidence to back up their ing torched a building which the city had was taken to the hospital, the black and case. "Consistent with" is meaningless; leased to house black and Latino foster Latino youths were being lynched in the there could be countless millions of peo­ care infants. press. The obligatory "alleged" was not ple who had hair "similar" to the jogger's. The raw racist nightmare that defined used when describing them as rapists. But the prosecuting attorney then baldly New York was replicated in cities across Even before they were coerced into giv­ told the jury at the trial that the forensics the country. With the devastation of ing their statements, the New York Times expert "found on Kevin Richardson's whole swaths of industrial plants, Amer­ (21 April 1989) ran the headline, "Youths underpants a hair that matched the head ica's capitalist rulers came to see the res­ Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger," hair" of the jogger. DNA tests performed idents of the inner-city ghettos which while the right-wing gutter rag New York earlier this year revealed conclusively used to provide a reservoir of unskilled Post the same day screamed, "Wolfpack that the hair did not match. labor for the auto plants and steel mills­ Rapes Jogger." Liberal columnist Pete Northwestern University Law Profes­ a "reserve army" of the unemployed to be Hamill disgustingly added, "I think this is sor Steven Drizin, an expert on false tapped when the economy needed them an insult to animals in general and wolves confessions, pointed out, "It is almost an -as a "surplus" population. The .cold­ in particular" (New York Post, 25 April absolute certainty they were not involved blooded policy of starving black welfare 1989). Even today, after their innocence has in this rape. That would require a scenario mothers and their kids was augmented by been proven, one of the lead cops on the so unlikely, it's impossible to believe. You a "war on crime" which snatches young case continues to refer to them as "mutts." also have to explain how five teenage men and women from the streets and Citing Family Court chief prosecutor boys could sexually assault a woman and throws them into prison hellholes. One Peter Reinharz as authority, the Times not leave a shred of physical evidence at statistic sums it up: As one million assem­ wrote of hundreds of "wolfpack" attacks the scene. Why is there no DNA? Teen­ bly line jobs were lost in the 1980s, one a year. Of course, this didn't include the age boys can't make peanut-butter-and- million people were added to the prison white mob that murdered Michael Grif­ . jelly sandwiches without leaving a mess population. In the decade since, on the fith in 1986, who were always politely behind" (Newsday, 18 October). heels of what was hailed as U.S. cap­ referred to as "Howard Beach residents." italism's greatest economic expansion, The immediate aftermath of the Cen­ New York 1989: ghetto conditions have only worsened and tral Park attack was renewed calls to A City on the Edge the prison population has continued to bring back capital punishment to New At the time the jogger's bludgeoned skyrocket. York State, which at one time had been body was discovered lying in the park, Ed An article in the Boston Review (April/ the death penalty capital of the U.S. A Koch was in the middle of a tightly con­ May 2002) by LOlc Wacquant noted: Post (26 April 1989) editorial demanded, tested mayoral primary race with black "The United States far outstrips all ad­ "Channel Your Outrage: Demand the vanced nations in the international trend Death Penalty." Donald Trump paid Democrat David Dinkins. Koch, who towards the penalization of social inse­ rode into office appealing to the white curity. And just as the dismantling of $85,000 for full-page ads in the city's "ethnic" vote, seized on the jogger case to welfare programs was accelerated by a four major newspapers declaring: "Bring once again play to the racist vote, giving cultural and political conflation of black­ Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our fuel to lynch mobs on the street. Four ness and underservingness, so, too, the Police." Trump demanded: "Let our poli­ months after the rape, a gang of white 'great confinement' of the rejects of ticians give back our police department's market society-the poor, mentally ill, power to keep us safe. Unshackle them punks in Bensonhurst blew away 16-year­ homeless, jobless, and useless--can be old black youth Yusuf Hawkins, who was painted as a welcome 'crackdown' on from the constant chant of 'police bru­ in "their" neighborhood to visit his white them, those dark-skinned criminals from tality' which every petty criminal hurls girlfriend. The neighbors excused this a pariah group still considered alien to immediately at an officer who has just coldblooded murder by pointing to the the national body." risked his or her life to save another's." Central Park rape. The Central Park jogger case played a Pataki's support to the death penalty New York had long been a city on the critical role in feeding a climate where played a large role in his 1994 election as edge, a trail of horrors punctuated by the names of those many black people killed by Koch's cops-among them 67-year­ Marxist Bulletin No.5 Revised Marxist Bulletin old grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs, 25- g_ Key Documents and Articles IIIVIIII year-old artist Michael Stewart, 17-year­ ; old black honor student Edmund Perry. 1955-1978 Ii In 1987 alone, Koch's killer cops gunned Contents InClude: WRATSTRATE8Y . down 24 people-21 of them black or • For the Materialist Conception Hispanic. of the Negro Question FOR BLACK LIBERATION? Emboldened white thugs on the streets • For Black Trotskyism frotsfcJlsm had for years engaged in a wave of • Rise and Fall of the Panthers: IS ; . pogromist attacks. In 1982, black transit End of the Black Power Era Black Nationalism worker Willie Turks was beaten to death • Soul Power or Workers Power? after he stopped into a bagel shop in the • The Rise and Fall of the League of Gravesend section of Brooklyn. In 1986, Revolutionary Black Workers KeydocumentsandartJCfes a Howard Beach lynch mob chased 23- 19$54978 $1.50 (72 pages) year-old Michael Griffith to his death i Make checks payable/mall to: on the Belt Parkway. In 1987, a bus of .: >".'" .~, .Y ".X" Spartacist Pub. Co., Box 1377 GPO 'j mostly black passengers was attacked by ---~eo.. ... unGftO,""_NVMI11' New York, NY 10116 "" a gang of 20 white punks with ax han- - iill"'.

44

governor over Democrat Mario' Cuomo, nity in some pockets of urban Amer­ of the capitalists' racist rule. A former who had repeatedly vetoed death penalty ica is deviant, delinquent and criminal spokesman for the Black Panther Party, legislation. In 1995, the New York legis­ adults surrounded by severely abused and a supporter of the MOVE organization, lature voted to bring back capital punish­ neglected children, virtually all of whom Jamal was railroaded to death row on ment, a law enthusiastically signed by were born out of wedlock." Together with charges of killing Philadelphia police Pataki. right-wing ideologues William Bennett officer Daniel Faulkner in December In a recent column in Newsday (22 and John Walters, DiIulio warned in the 1981. One year before Matias Reyes October), Jimmy Breslin nailed Trump: 1996 book Body Count of a "rising tide of came forward to absolve the Central Park "If the woman jogger had died and the juvenile superpredators." Although the defendants, Mumia's lawyers presented young men were' convicted of murder and "rising tide" was actually plummeting, to the courts a sworn confession of executed, and the evidence of being not with youth crime in 1999 at its lowest Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot gUilty suddenly came out now, it would level in 25 years, their rantings provided and killed Faulkner. But to date the fed­ be murder by the state and Trump would inspiration for "The Violent Youth Preda­ eral and state courts have refused to even be as good as an accomplice. The most tor Act of 1996," under which juveniles consider Beverly's confession and Jamal you'd get out of him would be a shrug. are housed in prison with adults. Increas­ II remains under the shadow of death in Calling for the police to be let loose ingly, children as young as 12 are being Greene County, Pennsylvania. Another meant exactly what it said. Louima, tried as adults. example is the frame-up of Geronimo ji Diallo. Let's go. Break their heads. Slam Jaga (Pratt), a former Black Panther who 'em." In fact, dozens of death row in­ The American Injustice System spent 27 years in prison for a crime the mates have been released in recent years The damage done to the lives of the government knew he did not commit. The after DNA evidence exonerated them. five young men and their families is murder he was accused of took place in Shortly after the rape, Family Court immeasurable. As Yusef Salaam's mother Santa Monica, but the FBI had wiretaps prosecutor Reinharz declared: "I think pointed out, "Every time he shows up showing that he was in Oakland at the that kids like this, given what I would call someplace, he goes and he applies for a time, 400 miles away. their predatory nature, are people who, job, people can look on this list and see The hysteria whipped up around the given the chance, would do something he's a felon and a sexual predator. Would Central Park jogger case was a not-so­ like this again. There really isn't any way you hire someone like that?" Speaking of distant echo of the lynch mob "justice" of to control them-at least we haven't her Son Kharey, who is now 30 years old, the Deep South. That this one played found it in the juvenile justice system" Dolores Wise poignantly said: "He was "up North" is simply a measure of the (New York Post, 25 April 1989). He was raised in prison" (Newsday, 22 October). increasingly genocidal impulses of the echoed by Pete Hamill: "Jail does not Her other son was attacked by a teacher rulers of this country toward the black cause them fear. They come from a world upon learning he was Kharey's brother. popUlation, whose segregation at the bot­ where jail is just another puberty rite. And Among the fears city officials have in tom of this society has always been a in jail they will only continue the educa­ agreeing to overturn the frame-up convic­ linchpin of American capitalism. Critical tion that brought them to Central Park. tions is opening themselves up to million­ to maintaining this state of affairs has And we know one more thing: atrocities dollar lawsuits. No amount of money can been the role played by black Democrats. like this will go on and on .... We know mend what has been done to their young David Dinkins came to office in 1989 why. There aren't enough cops. There lives, or to their families. But we wel­ assuring Wall Street that the working peo­ aren't enough jails. There aren't enough come any money the five can wrench out ple and minorities "will take it from me." judges" (New York Post, 23 April 1989). of the racist city fathers-selling off At the time, admitted FBI fink and all­ This view of black youth as inherently Trump Plaza and giving them the pro­ purpose hustler Al Sharpton was postur­ "predatory" has been the ideological ceeds would be a start. ing as the voice of the increasingly desti­ cover for Democratic and Republican Frame-ups by the cops and prosecu­ tute and' desperate black masses of the administrations putting tens of thousands tors, whose role in society is to protect the city. Today, Sharpton opines that at the of killer cops on the streets; for the pas­ class rule of the bourgeoisie, are endemic time of the Central Park jogger case, "All sage of stiffer mandatory sentences and to the American capitalist justice system. we had was our outrage. Now the feelings the vast expansion of prison construc­ In the typical case, the cops find a sus­ are the same but the expression is dif­ tion; for the drastic reduction of funding pect, usually black or Latino, and suspend ferent. We have proven that we can take . for public defenders; for the gritting of further investigation to pin the crime on the system on and win." What Sharpton habeas corpus appeals and the death row him--coercing confessions, concealing is saying is that he has made it as one speedup. Largely due to the "war on evidence, intimidating witnesses, bribing of the main spokesmen for the Demo­ drugs," the prison population has more finks. And then there are those cases cratic Party in New York City, and in this than doubled over the past 20 years, with in which the political ends served by a role wants to contain any expression of over two million behind bars, more than false conviction enormously magnify the outrage in the face of the demonstrative half of them black and Hispanic. duplicity of the cops and prosecutors. The proof of the innocence of the five black As the government continues to starve jogger case is one example, used to and Latino youths who were vilified as the ghettos and barrios, the Bush admin­ whip up a climate of racist hysteria to "animals" and thrown behind bars. istration set up its Office of Faith-Based further the ends of a ruling class that The case of these youths illuminates and Community Initiatives in order to has condemned a Whole generation of the racist frame-up machine of American I I funnel government funds to church groups. black youth to unemployment, poverty capitalist "justice." It will take a workers i I John DiIulio was hand-picked by Bush and prison. revolution to put the state's machinery of last year as the first head of this of­ The case of black death row political repression and death out of business once fice. As a Princeton professor, DiIulio, prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is another and for all and bring to justice the hired the exemplar of "compassionate conser­ kind of example, an overt frame-up aimed thugs who have committed untold crimes vatism," wrote in the National Review: at silencing a man feared by the state against the working class and minorities "All that's left of the black commu- for his eloquent and outspoken defiance in the name of "law and order.".

"b~ ______~ ______~ ______~_ 'l i 45 reprinted/rom Young SQartacus pages, Workers Vanguard No. 801, 11 April 2003

For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All! Chanting "Jim Crow-hell, no!" thou­ sands demonstrated outside the Supreme Court on April 1 as Bush administration lawyers argued that a University of Mich­ igan admissions policy that takes the race of minority applicants into account is unconstitutional. If the Court agrees, it will spell the death of what remains of affirmative action programs for blacks and other minorities set up as a result of the mass struggles of the 1950s and '60s for school integration. Noting that Bush's vilification of affirmative action on Mar­ tin Luther King Jr. Day was followed by a modest increase in government funding for historically black colleges, a protester from one such institution, Hampton Uni­ versity, remarked, "It was his 'go back to Africa' statement." The drive to eliminate affirmative action is part of a continuing racist purge of higher education, from the gutting of ",tAP open admissions and remedial programs Washington, D.C., April 1: Thousands rally outside Supreme Court to protest at the City University of New York to attack on University of Michigan affirmative action program. massive tuition hikes there and at other public universities to the latest effort by C-average student whose entire silver­ daughters of rich or powerful alumni. As right-wing forces to do away with minor­ spooned life, including his admission to late as 1966, at the height of the civil ity scholarship programs. The doors to Yale, was greased by having the surname rights movement, only 400 of the Univer­ the best universities are not just being Bush. Another "principled opponent of sity of Michigan's 32,000 students were slammed shut, but bolted against all but affirmative action': is the new Republican black, this in a state where black school the thinnest layer of black and Latino governor of Alaska, former Senator Frank enrollment in Detroit alone was over students. And those who remain have Murkowski. When he was elected gov­ 150,000. Even under the current Michi­ been subjected to a nightmarish hell in ernor, it became his job to select his gan plan, a white applicant from a rural recent years: racist graffiti on a main replacement as Senator. After deep thought high school with an honors program can sidewalk at the University of Michigan; a and much research, he decided the best get almost as many preference points, 16 black mannequin hanging by a noose person for the job was ... his daughter, compared to 20, as a black youth. from a tree at liberal Antioch College; a Lisa Murkowski. 'IYour mother and I are As part of our fight for full equality for "ghetto party" at a white fraternity at very proud," he beamed in announcing black people and other minorities, the Dartmouth; simulated lynchings of black the appointment. Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth students by white frat boys dressed in Higher education, like every bourgeois Clubs oppose the reactionary assault KKK robes at Auburn. institution in American society, is shot against affirmative action. However, unlike Bush condemned aftirmative action for through with race and class bias. As a liberals and reformists who uncritically giving preference to some applicants "not Wall Street Journal (20 February) head­ hailed these programs, we emphasized because of any academic achievement or line acknowledged, "At Many Colleges,. from the beginning that those who look to life experience, but solely because they the Rich Kids Get Affirmative Action." , the American capitalist state to eliminate are African-American, Hispanic or Native Duke University, for example, allocates racial and sexual discrimination were liv­ American." So preference is supposed to as many as 160 places for "applicants ing in a fool's paradise. We seek to mobi­ be based on "academic achievement" and with rich or powerful parents who are not lize the working class in a fight for jobs "life experience"? This from a former alumni," above and beyond the sons and and free, quality, integrated education for 46 all. To reach out to the masses of unem­ Supreme Court that the liberals and their of affirmative action have abandoned ployed minority youth and women, we left hangers-on look to as a bulwark even talk of black equality in favor of call for special union recruitment and of affirmative action today. The platform the rhetoric of "diversity"-an aim Bush training programs. To provide real access of the April 1 rally was chock-full of himself deems "laudable~'-as though the to higher education, we call for national­ Democratic Party politicians like presi- purpose is to prepare yuppies for the real izing the private universities and for open . dential hopeful Al Sharpton, who intoned, world by sitting alongside a handful of admissions and free tuition with a state­ "We're not asking the court for favors. black students in the classroom. paid living stipend for students. We're asking the court to make right what Typically, Boston' University's Glenn it made wrong." The demonstration orga­ Loury writes in an op-ed piece in the New Supreme Court of Injustice nizers, the By Any Means Necessary York Times (29 March) that "in our racially The assault on affirmative action began coalition (BAMN) launched in 1995 by stratified society, diversity is a necessary long before Bush Jr. entered the White the Revolutionary Workers League, en­ part of an effective college education" House. In the 1978 Bakke decision, which thused in their protest call that "a victory and that "a racially integrated elite" is is now presented as some kind of anti­ at the Supreme Court will open up a new essential. Scores of Fortune 500 corpora­ racist beacon for at least allowing race to struggle for progress towards integra­ tions and former Pentagon bigwigs have be a factor in university admissions, the tion and equality in education and filed amicus briefs on behalf of the Uni­ Supreme Court outlawed quotas for black throughout American society." A BAMN versity of Michigan. "Diversity creates and other minority students at the Univer­ petition posted on its Web site hailed stronger companies," says a vice presi­ sity of California. As the Supreme Court affirmative action as "the only successful dent of the Merck pharmaceutical giant, prepared to hear the. case, we warned: method for integrating all of this nation's an argument embraced even more em­ "Bakke has become the leading edge of a universities." phatically by the military brass, who fear wave of racist reaction aimed at rolling To proclaim as a victory the retention that a return to a Jim Crow officer. caste back every gain made by blacks" ("Down of the miserable, racist status quo is truly would "hurt morale" among enlisted With Bakke!" WV No. 177, 14 October a statement of bankruptcy. The stark truth ranks drawn heavily-as high as 44 per­ 1977). In 1995, the UC Regents voted to is that there is no way to overcome cent in the Army-from minorities. eliminate affirmative action. In 1996, the entrenched racial oppression within the At the April 1 rally, a speaker from the grotesquely misnamed California Civil framework of capitalism, in the univer­ Detroit NAACP beat the drums for the Rights Initiative (Proposition 209) passed, sities or elsewhere. Affirmative action imperialist war machine and its rape of eliminating affirmative action in public programs were set up as a sop to defuse Iraq, declaring: "If we can build democ­ education and government contracting social struggle and in order to create and racy over there, we must also maintain and hiring. In the following five years, co-opt a "talented tenth" of black middle­ democracy over here." The "democracy" black undergraduate enrollment at UC class professionals. But these paltry, to­ U.S. imperialism has in store for the peo­ Berkeley plunged 33 percent-on top of a kenistic efforts never made a dent in the ple oflraq is a colonial version ofthe racist drop of nearly a third over the previous deep-seated oppression of the black police-state terror and degradation daily five years largely due to skyrocketing ghetto masses, whose condition has con­ meted out to black people in this country. tuition costs. tinued to deteriorate over the past few No decisive victory for black and work­ Yet it is to an even more right-wing decades. Today, many liberal proponents ing people was ever won in Congress or the courts. It took the Civil War to smash the slave system, in which teaching black people to read or write was a crime pun­ ishable by death, and to establish public education for black people in this country. Web site: www.icl-fLorg • E-mail address:[email protected] It took a mass movement of millions on the streets, courageously defying South­ National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (212) 732-7860 ern Democratic "Dixiecrat" governments Boston Los Angeles Oakland and their truncheon-wielding cops and Box 390840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 29497 KKK mobs, to put an end to Jim Crow Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 segregation in the schools. From Little (617) 666-9453 (213) 380-8239 (510) 839-0851 Rock in 1957 to James Meredith's coura­ Public Office: Sat. 2-5 p.m. Public Office: Chicago geous stand as the first black student at 3806 Beverly Blvd., Room 215 Sat. 1-5 p.m. . the University of Mississippi five years Box 6441, Main PO 1634 Telegraph Chicago, IL 60680 New York 3rd Floor later, the fight for school integration was (312) 563-0441 Box 3381, Church St. Sta. the flashpoint of battle after battle for Public OffIce: New York, NY 10008 San Francisco black equality. Sat. 2-5 p.m. (212) 267-1025 Box 77494 But the black Democrats and refor­ 222 S. Morgan Public Office: San Francisco mists demobilized those struggles, strain­ CA94107 (Buzzer 23) Tues. 6:30-8:30 p.m. ing to keep fighters against black oppres­ and Sat. 1-5 p.m. sion within the confines of Democratic 299 Broadway, Suite 318 Party electoralism, preaching reliance on the Supreme Court, on Congress, on the FBI and federal troops-on anything but the independent mobilization of the mul­ Toronto Vancouver tiracial working class. The 1974 defeat, at Box 7198, Station A Box 2717, Main P.O. the hands of howling mobs of racists, of Toronto, ON M5W 1X8 Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2 (416) 593-4138 (604) 687-0353 a busing plan to integrate Boston's pub­ lic schools opened the floodgates to a 47 nationwide assault on school desegrega­ tion. And it was the liberals and refor­ mists who helped set up busing for the kill, channeling the fight to defend busing into dead-end appeals for federal inter­ vention. Barely four years after busing was smashed on the streets of Boston came the Bakke decision. Disgustingly, some fake leftists like the Revolutionary Socialist League, the pre­ decessor organization of Sy Landy's League for the Revolutionary Party, even joined with the racists in opposing busing and integration. As black schoolchildren were being terrorized on the streets of Boston for trying to enter an all-white school, Landy & Co. rai led that integra­ tion "means the subordination of blacks to the dominant whites. It represents a strategy to quell the black struggle" (Torch, December 1974). Capitulating to black separatists who despaired of the possibility of integrated class struggle, these "separate-but-equal socialists" ended up in an objective bloc with outright WV Photo Washington, D.C. protest against racist Bakke lawsuit, April 1978. racist scum. We supported busing in Boston and Today, more than 70 percent of black "competitive employment" opportunities, elsewhere-demanding its extension to students attend predominantly minority a state appellate court recently asserted the overwhelmingly white, middle-class schools, and fully one-sixth attend so­ last year that learning to wrap Big Macs suburbs-and called on the unions to called "apartheid schools," which are was just about all the "basic education" organize laborlblack defense guards to almost 100 percent nonwhite. most inner-city kids needed. Lecturing repel the racists. Against the reactionary In a Young Spartacus review of Kozol's that the majority of jobs "may well be low pipe dream of black separatism and the book headlined "Education U.S.A.-Sep­ level," the judges warned that any higher liberal integrationist lie that black people arate and Unequal" (WV No. 544, 7 Feb­ standard of public education would pose can achieve full equality within this ruary 1992), we noted: a challenge "to the capitalist system in racist capitalist system, we fight for revo­ "The ruling class spends on educating general"! lutionary integrationism. We seek to those they exploit and oppress only what The fight for school integration and mobilize labor's social power in defense they can realize back in profit. Having free, quality education for all must and of even such partial steps toward racial taken the wrecking ball to the auto facto­ ries, gutted the steel mills and closed can only be waged as part of the broader integration and equality as are possible many of the mines, there are few jobs struggle for black liberation through under capitalism, understanding that full left for which to train the children of the socialist revolution. As the Spartacus social and political equality for black working class and poor. And if educating Youth Club wrote in a leaflet addressed to people can only be achieved through the sons and daughters of white workers has increasingly become an expendable an August 1995 protest at UC Berkeley in workers revolution and the creation of an overhead for decaying American capital­ defense of afflrmative action (WV No. egalitarian socialist society. ism, the children of black workers and 628, 8 September 1995): poor are deemed an expendable popula­ "We need to fight for education to be the For Black Liberation tion. Once a reserve army of labor to be right of everyone-not a privilege for the Through Socialist Revolution! maintained, albeit minimally, today for wealthy and chosen few. The only way the racist rulers the black ghetto poor are The liberal-led civil rights movement to cut through the 'savage inequalities' not worth 'wasting' money on even to of education in racist America is to fight of the 1950s and '60s shattered the Jim keep alive, much less educate." for OPEN ADMISSIONS-with no tui­ Crow system of legalized segregation in Black youth, particularly black men, tion and a state stipend for all who want the South, gaining formal equality for are fast becoming "missing persons" to go to school. Nationalize the private black people. But in refusing to challenge from a society that's locked them into universities-no more class privilege in educationl Massively expand remedial the capitalist profit system itself, it could ghettos with no exit from poverty and a programs so that students deprived of do nothing to tackle the economic bed­ likely stretch in prison other than as the right to an education in inner-city rock of racial oppression in jobs, educa­ cannon fodder for the imperialist mili­ holding pens' misnamed 'schools' can tion and housing. Writing of the landmark tary. The cynically named No Child Left catch up with those who had the advan­ 1954 Supreme Court ruling that over­ Behind Act siphoned off scarce funds tage of well-funded suburban and private turned "separate but equal" segregation, schooling .... from public schools attended by the poor "For universities to really become public liberal journalist Jonathan Kozol stated into voucher programs for parochial and institutions of learning open to all re­ in his book Savage Inequalities (1991): other private schools. Bush's current bud­ quires a revolutionary struggle against the "In day-to-day fact, the 1954 Brown deci­ get would slash hundreds of millions capitalist system itself. The Spartacus sion is now dead. Indeed, this nation has more from public education, eliminating Youth Club is dedicated to building the , revolutionary party, based on the multira­ yet to live up to the 1896 Plessy v. Fergu­ 47 government programs entirely. Ruling cial working class, which is necessary to son decision. Our schools are still separ­ against a New York City suit demanding lead that struggle to victory in a socialist ate, but they're certainly not equal." sufflcient funding to prepare students for revolution." • Blaelt Hlston and the Class Struggle _ -110.16,:;;, free Mumia Abu .. Jaman Order Back Issues of Abolish the Rac'st Death penaltY! I Black History and the Class Struggle

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