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25¢ WfJlillEliS'''.fiU'II'~X-523. 18 May 1990 No. 502

Asian Immigrants Attacked, Bensonhurst Lynchers On Trial ew or ron MAY 14-For the last week this city grocer. On Saturday night, this racist the white mob was just defending its get off light. Mondello and the trigger­ has been poised on the edge, with an poison led to the predictable hideous "turf" against Gina Feliciano's black man Joey Fama may well not be con­ ear to the radio for news of the verdicts result-a gang of black youth attacked "junkie friends." In the midst of this, victed of premeditated murder, even in the trial of the Bensonhurst racist the home of three Vietnamese immi­ CCNY professor and racist ideologue though hours before Hawkins was shot mob that murdered black teenager grants, fracturing the skull of one with Michael Levin'declares that whites are to death Mondello boasted he would Yusuf Hawkins last August 23. "There a hammer. Meanwhile, black liberal justified in viewing blacks as crimi­ "blow the heads off the nigger bas­ will be a riot if those boys get off. Democratic mayor David Dinkins tried nals (see article page 4). When black tards." Star witness Gina Feliciano Definitely. Absolutely," said one black to cool things out with appeals for protesters marched in Bensonhurst on testified how Mondello said he had woman, her sentiments echoed by two "tolerance." Saturday, white residents screeched at "five guns-three .38s and two .45s ... dozen black people interviewed by Underlying the tension was the ex­ them, their faces contorted with hatred, and that he couldn't wait until tonight." Daily News columnist Bob Herbert cruciating courtroom replay of the "Not Guilty! Not Guilty!" and "Do the The only witness the D.A. put on the outside the courthouse in downtown racist murder of Yusuf Hawkins. Day white thing!" Yusuf 's father, Moses stand who said he saw Fama shoot Brooklyn. Across Prospect Park in after day on Court Street, Stephen Stewart, remarked that to this day he Yusuf Hawkins was a former mental Flatbush, black nationalist demagogue Murphy, the lawyer for lynch mob had seen "no remorse," not by the patient, who also told his doctors he is Sonny Carson has been whipping up his ringleader Keith Mondello, aggressively killers, not by Bensonhurst. controlled by helicopters. (He recanted own brand of race-hatred, organizing a and sneeringly claims the murder "nev­ In the trial, the prosecution has his testimony on the last day, although black boycott against a Korean green- er had anything to do with race," that practically guaranteed the killers will continued on page 13

As Soviet Jews Flee Pamyat Fascists... Zionist Drive Toward ~~Greater Israel"

The bloody course of Zionist Israel appears heading toward a decisive turn­ ing point. The intifada (uprising) of the Palestinian Arabs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza for more than two years has defied Israel's ability, despite mass terror from the army and settler fascist gangs, to control the territory it seized in the 1967 war. The economy is in sham­ bles with 10 percent unemployment and 20 percent a year inflation. The "Grand Coalition" of Zionist parties collapsed six weeks ago and a new government has yet to be formed. Now the crisis-ridden and overextended Israeli state is experiencing a massive influx of Soviet Jews, driven out by rising anti-Semitism and fear of pogroms by Russian fascists, and en­ couraged by the Zionists. These Soviet Jewish immigrants are slated to be used as both a pretext and as shock troops in the Zionists' "final solution" to the Ro ert/Sygma Palestinian question. Zionist rulers look to "war option" in drive to expel the There are projections that this year Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Israeli military alone as many as a quarter of a million terrorizes Arabs in West Bank (above). Soviet Jews will arrive in Israel. In the Arad/Woodfin Camp first three months of 1990, 17,000 have USSR now are not committed Zionists total immigration from the USSR. As "Big immigration requires Israel to be already emigrated, more than the total and would prefer to go to the U.S. or planeloads land in Tel Aviv, Palestinian big as well," pronounced Zionist terrorist number of Soviet Jews going to Israel another country in the West. But as a representatives are desperately appealing and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Sha­ between 1980 and 1988! And now they concession to Israel, Washington last fall to Gorbachev to curtail the outflow of mir at the beginning of the year, adding: are expecting 20,000 a month in a mass sharply limited refugee status for Soviet Soviet Jews and to Bush to let them into "we need the space to house the people" exodus. Jewish immigrants leaving the Jews and then placed a 50,000 ceiling on the U.S. continued on page 10 Defend the Palestinians! Israel Out of the Occupied Territories! Rep,rter Uncovers U.S./Afghan Disinformation Nest Last September it came out that CBS News had broadcast faked TV footage about Afghanistan (see "Dan Rather's Afghan Hoax," WV No. 487, 13 October 1989). Scenes of the supposed "largest sabotage operation of the war"-the blowing up of electric-power pylons­ were staged by "freelance" photographer Mike Hoover. What Rather. called the "biggest one-day defeat" for Soviet sol­ diers "since World War II" involved no Soviet soldiers at all. Shots purportedly showing a Soviet jet bombing an Afghan village turned out to be a Pakistani jet. And the shiny red "toy bomb" supposed­ ly planted by the evil Soviets to lure Haakan Ludwigsson Wide World Afghan children to their deaths was also The dubious Kurt Lohbeck (left) was CBS'~ "eyes and ears on the Afghan conflict." Right: Dan Rather poses with reportedly the work of Hoover. Caught Afghan mujahedin on 60 Minutes program pushing CIA disinformation in 1980. with their pants down, CBS promised to answer the charges "point by point," but unmasking the CBS fakery as part of its Walsh was the Journal's principal corre­ articles. No wonder that one "senior they didn't, and the rest of the media own vendetta against the liberal Rather, spondent covering Afghanistan and Pak­ intelligence official" admitted to Walsh quickly pulled a blanket of silence over the Wall Street Journal's top executives istan, often receiving high praise for her that "American reporters certainly had the affair. were spiking an even more explosive work. But when she submitted her article made his job easier" because they were Just as Murdoch's New York Post was expose on the subject. Mary Williams on the "corruption of CBS's Afghanistan so "docile." coverage"-as she describes it in a docu­ Walsh presents the story as an issue ment received by WV-she suddenly ran of journalistic ethics, but what's really up against a stone wall. Some senior involved here are class interests. It's Workers Defense Against editors privately told her that "something easy to recognize The Company's finger­ Anti-Semitic Terror fishy was going on"; the bottom line was prints on Lohbeck/Mercy Fund. CBS and they refused to publish her article while Dan Rather were producing government­ In the absence of a genuinely communist excluding her from the meetings where sponsored, imperialist war propaganda­ party based on the working class, the dis­ the decision was made. disinformation-as was the rest of the integration of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Soon vicious, slanderous rumors sud­ U.S. mass media which snapped to atten­ Union and East Europe has unleashed the denly began circulating to undermine tion for Washington's anti-Soviet jihad latent forces of reactionary nationalism and her credibility, e.g., she was a "known throughout the '80s. The flip side of this violent anti-Semitism. Soviet Jews now live in troublemaker," jealous and jilted, and is journalistic coverup, as in the refusal fear of pogroms by the Russian fascists of "sleeping with communist generals" in to investigate the roles of Reagan and Pamyat. The revolutionary Marxist movement Afghanistan. In a rare show of journalis­ Bush in the lran/Contragate affair, where TROTSKY in the tsarist empire was built in part by LENIN tic integrity, Walsh resigned and is now the media and the Democratic-controlled uniting Russian, Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish Toronto bureau chieffor the Los Angeles Congress acted in concert with the White and Transcaucasian workers against the Black Hundreds and other anti-Semitic pogrom­ Times. She finally got her story print­ House in protecting the interests of the ists. Hersh Mendel, a Polish Jew who joined the Bolshevik Party and later became a ed in the Columbia Journalism Review ruling class. Ditto for the executives of member ofthe Trotskyist Left Opposition, recalls such workers defense groups when he (January/February), though it was almost the Wall Street Journal when they spiked was a boy during the Revolution of 1905. killed there too, and the final version Mary Williams Walsh's story. The situation grew even more ominous when we got wind of the fact that a wave suffered some· heavy cuts due to "some And they do play dirty. Since they ofghastly pogroms was sweeping.Russia and all the towns and shtetis [villages] where extraordinary last-minute institutional were backing some of the purest male the Jewish people lived. Nevertheless, it seemed as if freedom had won the day, for interference." The story was also covered chauvinist pigs on earth-the mujahedin, . the workers kept coming to the hiring halls again and again without interference by by Extra! (published by Fairness & Ac­ who literally buy and sell women-it's the police. Economic strikes were conducted, party proclamations were freely distribut­ curacy in Reporting) and in the May no wonder they used sexist innuendo to ed and party newspapers sold-and nobody stood in the way. I was too young to take issue of the, Progressive. try to discredit a woman reporter. Walsh, it all in. The situation was peculiar: everybody was exuberant about the revolution Walsh reveals that CBS's "eyes and who began her career with a Bagehot but feared the morrow at the same time .... I thought that the pogroinists would have ears on the Afghan conflict" was one Fellowship to attend Columbia Univer­ to come from Russia, that when they had finished their work there, the tsar would send Kurt Lohbeck.an ex-convict and son of sity's School of Journalism, seems to be them to us in Poland. I had come to the conclusion that they would have to come from a top PR man for the nativist American one of those rare people who really be­ Russia, that they could not be indigenous Poles, because there were also Polish workers fascist Gerald L.K. .Smith. Lohbeck had lieved the ethics of Journalism 101, in participating in the self-defense organizations. On Pawia Street there were more Polish settled in Peshawar, Pakistan where his which journalists write "the truth" and workers organized for self-defense than Jewish workers. The Polish workers continual­ wife Anne Hurd was "field director" of "good" newspapers eagerly print it. She ly assured us that Poland was not Russia and that there would be no pogroms here. something called the Mercy Fund, bet­ even managed to slip some truth about Every courtyard had its committee; our courtyard was no exception. During the night ter known locally as the "Murky Fund." Afghanistan into the Wall Street Jour­ the gate was locked. The self-defense groups stationed themselves at specific points Walsh says Lohbeck acted as "some sort nal-in spite of her support of the U.S.­ while scouts took to the streets. I remember that from time to time, whenever the alarm of gatekeeper" who decided which jour­ backed mujahedin-when she suggested sounded, the self-defense groups threw themselves into specially readied droshkies nalists got into Afghanistan to interview that women's liberation was involved, as [carriages] at the snap of a finger and hurried off to meet the threat. Aside from the genuine guerrillas. He took care to build in a January 1989 piece which we quoted active self-defense groups, there were also auxiliary groups composed of all the up one particular mujahedin leader, in WV (No. 471, 17 February 1989): occupants of the apartment house, especially the Jewish ones. They were armed with Abdul Haq, who is privately referred to "In a backwardcountrywherethe female whatever was at hand: axes, hatchets, knives. Men from every calling came armed by American diplomats as "Commander peasantry stilI toils like medieval serfs, with the tools of their trade. My father too was in one of these auxiliary groups. Hollywood." As Walsh relates in CJR: Kabuli women have managedto hold on to many 20th-century freedoms .... In­ After the gate to the courtyard was locked, they stood at the entrance and waited. "The U.S. governmentencouraged jour­ stead of staying at home behind purdah Their assignment was to defend the gate in case of attack. nalists to touch base with Lohbeck and walls, they emergeeach day and work in Hurd, whose names were on a list of offices, hospitals and schools." -Hersh Mendel, Memoirs ofa Jewish Revolutionary 'selected contacts for covering Afghan (first published in Yiddish in 1959) affairs' handed out to reporters who From the beginning, the Afghan war stoppedby the UnitedStatesInformation pitted the forces of elementary social Service office in Peshawar. The handout listed the Mercy Fund-the only 'hostel progress against medieval reactionaries, forjournalists' listed;Lohbeck-the only the landlords, mullahs and khans, armed network representative listed-appears to the teeth by the U.S. in order to kill under 'C' for CBS." Russian soldiers. That is why we took !!!'!!!!!~'!~!~f!.!~ The Mercy Fund claims to raise money the side of the Kabul regime and frankly for medical MASH units in Afghanistan, hailed Soviet intervention at a time when DIRECTOR OF PARTYPUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon but "its financial statements show that its much of the left fell in behind Jimmy EDITOR: Jan Norden biggest budget item isn't health care at Carter's anti-Soviet "human rights" cru­ PRODUCTION MANAGER: Jorge Ramirez all but a 'public information' project," sade. Walsh found out that those who CIRCULATION MANAGER: Karen Valdez Walsh notes in 'the Progressive. The display too much integrity, honesty and EDITORIAL BOARD: George Foster, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, Len Meyers, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg "public information" is really just right­ backbone get thrown out of the "club" The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (Fourth wing propaganda sheets. The Washington (there were reportedly drinks all around tnternationalist) . director of the Mercy Fund, one Tony when the news of her departure from the Workers Vanguard (USPS098-770) published biweekly, except 2nd issue August and with 3-week interval December, Campaigne, reportedly has control of Journal reached the American Club in by the Spartacist Publishing Co., 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), "hundreds of thousands of dollars in Peshawar). We hope some brave souls (212) 732·7861 (Business). Address all correspondence to: BOK 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Domestic subscriptions: $7.00/24 issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changes grants from the U.S. Agency for Interna­ continue to slip bits of the truth into the to Workers Vanguard, BOK1377. GPO, New York, NY 10116. tional Development." Needless to say, mass media. But if you want to get the Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint. most of the regular media reporters who full story, read Workers Vanguard, which No. 502 18 May 1990 .passed through Peshawar simply fed tells the truth that the Bourgeoisie wants Lohbeck's prepackaged garbage into their to hide.• 2 WORKERS VANGUARD Mass Graves Found in Panama Just as Washington was trumpeting the victory of the "free world" with the opening of the Berlin Wall, the United States carried out a full-scale invasion of a country in its own "backyard" to "ar­ u.s. War Crime-- rest" the head of state. It was the biggest show of U.S. military force since the Vietnam War.' The country is Panama, the head of state General Manuel Anto­ nio Noriega, a well paid, highly connect­ ed longtime CIA operative. And it was the Panamanian population which bore the brunt of the invasion. With all the high-tech weaponry, several thousand men (both military and civilian), women and children were killed in "surgical" bombing followed by cold-blooded slaughter that went by the name of a "mopping-up operation." The U.S. Southern Command (South­ com) declared that the total number of civilian dead was 202. When this was met with disbelief, the Pentagon began talking about "collateral damage" and the difficulties in distinguishing "bona fide civilians." A delegation from the Nation­ al Lawyers Guild spoke with a volunteer worker at Santo' Tomas hospital who reported that on Christmas Day (the fifth day of the invasion) she had copied a list of 345 dead, and saw another list of an additional 200 fatalities. Later, Washington tried to reduce the number of civilian casualties. But on

April 29, the Pentagon death tally was Vicky Pelaez/El Diario-La Prensa exposed as a blatant lie when a hydraulic Pentagon cover-up uncovered: Workers dig out bodies from mass grave in Panama City cemetery where 123 bodies scoop opened a lOO-foot-long mass grave were dumped in body bags by U.S. military. During December invasion press was prevented from photographing this. in the Jardin de Paz (Garden of Peace) cemetery in Panama City. The U.S. war one single shot fired into theirheads, in­ were just"collateral damage" as the U.S. have declared it immaterial whether "ar­ crime was laid bare as, one after another, dicating executions. Others came in with tried out the Stealth fighter bomber rests" in foreign countries are legal. 123 bodies in green plastic body bags bullet wounds but had been subsequently , (which missed its targets by hundreds of Noriega's lawyers resigned in protest bayoneted to make sure they were dead. were lifted out. The victims were buried Numerous witnesses report US troops yards), laser targeting, infrared sights over the government's freezing of his by GIs and hired help (who were paid used flame throwers to burn piles of dead and a whole high-tech arsenal for night assets (a standard tactic under RICO $20 a day). Vicky Pelaez, a reporter for bodies .... Tanks flattened people's cars, fighting and urban warfare. "racketeering" statutes to prevent defen­ homes and bodies in the streets. Whole On May Day, an estimated 10,000 dants from getting adequate legal coun­ shanties were blown apart by mortar fire with residents inside. Residents report workers marched in the streets of Pana­ sel). Washington would like to put off a soldiers collecting bodies in plastic bags ma City demanding U.S. troops get out trial forever, to prevent Noriega from and transporting them elsewhere." of the country. The economy is in ruins, spilling the beans about the U.S. gov­ Housing projects were subjected to overall unemployment is at an all-time ernment's own involvement in drug traf­ hours of mortar fire, killing many resi­ high of over 35 percent. The construction ficking (and his dealings with ex-CIA dents, after only a two-minute warning! industry is almost completely stopped, chief Bush). In the neighborhood of El Chorrillo, next 45,000 public sector workers have lost Noriega was a guard dog for the to army headquarters in Panama City, their jobs, and in the countryside land­ Yankee imperialists who slipped his tracer bullets ignited frail wooden struc­ owners are demanding "their" lands back leash. By sacrificing several thousand tures while bombs blew up others with from peasants who received them in the lives, Bush has now installed an obedient the residents still inside. U.S. troops limited land reform. Destruction is government of "sober-minded politi­ encircled the city of Colon, largely estimated at $3 billion, but even the $1 cians" whose aim is "safeguarding of populated by Caribbean blacks, barraging billion in promised U.S. aid hasn't U.S. strategic interests," to renegotiate it with mortar fire, trapping the residents arrived. While Bush's bloated puppet the 1977 Carter-Torrijos treaties and who were unable to escape to safety. president Guillermo Endara declared a secure "the U.S. military presence in the At the AprilS-NYC Town Hall meet­ fast, thousands face starvation. This is Panama Canal area till well after the year ing, Olga Mejia of the Panamanian Panama today, living under the "democ­ 2000" (from a 26 March 1987 State De­ National Commission of Human Rights racy" of U.S. military occupation, in the partment letter to Senator Jesse Helms). declared eloquently, "This invasion shall "peace" of the mass graves. We say: U.S. get the hell out of Panama! never be justified as a just cause." "The Meanwhile, Manuel Antonio Noriega And we vow that the American workers massacre of Chorrillo, of Colon, of San languishes in a jail cell in Florida. De­ revolution will avenge the victims ofthis Miguelito and the other marginal com­ spite the talk ofa "free trial," U.S. courts imperialist mass murder made in U.S.A.• munities was a crime against humanity," U. . epartment of Defense she went on. "That was our 'Merry "Drug war" vigilantes: U.S. agents Christmas.' Many people who left run­ kidnap Panamanian general Manuel ning were machine-gunned down in the Antonio Noriega, after invading coun­ streets by the American troops. Others [SPARTACJSTI~ try on pretext of arresting him. • were found dead in the walkways of the NUIIUoa . IlAYODE 1110 - • JUST OUT! EDlCtON ENE8MfIot. the NYC El Diario/La Prensa, was pres­ buildings, or found trapped among the ent at the exhumation along with many ruins, or dismembered, rendered totally Burocracia del mourning relatives. Human rights activ­ unrecognizable by the bombs or the SRartacist ists told her of an additional 14 mass flamethrowers. They were incinerated by Kremlin se fragmenta (Spanish-Language PAGINA4 graves, at Amador, Ancon, Corozal, the American troops and thrown in Balboa, Codense, Colon, Chepo, Chili­ plastic bags. Many cadavers were thrown Edition) into the ocean. Thousands of body parts bri, Franfil, Pacora, Pedro Nuevo, San No. 23 Miguelito, and the military bases at -arms and legs, parts ofthe head-were Marina de Colon and Rio Hato. This converted into waste matter." 1 May 1990 does not include casualties from fighting The U.S. press corps covered up these (32 pages) dirty crimes of Bush's "splendid little in Chiriqui province and other distant $.50 parts of the interior of Panama. war" in Panama. They dutifully printed At a meeting on April 5 at Town Hall handouts from the Pentagon and State Department. Stateside TV coverage fea­ in New York City, an Independent Com­ $2.00 four-issue mission of Inquiry on the U.S. Invasion tured "soft" images of U.S. soldiers subscription of Panama circulated a document report­ patting youngsters, celebrating Christmas, ing that Panamanian bishops Ariz and recovering in the hospital and crowds cheering. But the thousands of injured Emiliani estimate 3,000 dead due to the ~==d:~.~r and homeless, the widows, orphans and Make checks payable/mailto: invasion, the majority being civilians. Spartacist Publishing Co. ~~PNI*6"~.~~~ .25 mourners' were not interviewed by the _~:--,,*·doI_, The same document says: Box 1377 GPO _··········.·· 32 "Many people were killed and injured Pentagon-organized "press pool" (cess­ New York, NY 10116 from shrapnel and exploding bullets. pool). The corpses were mute, the man­ Many of the dead were brought in with gled bodies simply disappeared. They 18 MAY 1990 3 Young Sparlacus

Working-Class, Minority. Youth Under Attack CCNY Professor Levin-­ Mouthpiece for Race-Hate

Racist violence is at an all-time high here to a KKK member burning a flag in on American college campuses. Embold­ your backyard." We say: Down with rac­ ened bigots have lashed out with impuni­ ist ideologue Levin! Drop all charges ty at blacks, gays, Jews and other minori­ against the LIU protesters! ties at schools across the country. The What's needed is a movement with the spate of threats and provocations, cross­ social power to sweep the lynchers off burnings and violent lynch mob attacks the streets. The Spartacus Youth Club are not just so many "isolated" incidents; has been in the forefront of the fight to nationwide there is a race-hate movement ally students with labor to stop racist to drive blacks out. And it is having an attacks-arguing for strike action and effect. While the so-called integrated integrated defense guards, not bullshit schools get whiter year, by year, many "sensitivity training" for racist punks. In black students are choosing black colleg­ November 1988 we brought busloads of es partly out of fear. Now at New York students from campuses along the eastern City's predominantly black and Hispanic seaboard and as far west as Madison, CCNY campus, a white philosophy pro­ Michael Levin, Wisconsin to join forces with big battal­ fessor, Michael Levin, has emerged as a ideologue for ions from the union movement in a mas­ chief ideologue and apologist for white­ white supremacy, sive demonstration that stopped the KKK supremacy and racism. apartheid-style and skinhead fascists from carrying out Levin has been polluting the air at repression. a white-supremacist provocation'in the CCNY for a long time. His repugnant Left: NYC cops club streets of Philadelphia. It's actions like statements about black people have made black protesters this, that mobilize the strategic power of him a subject of controversy and protest trying to cross the working class on behalf of all the Brooklyn Bridge off and on since he first came to CCNY into Manhattan, oppressed, that will change the social in 1969. But today he's center ring in the August 1989. climate through decisive victories over media circus, making public appearances the race-haters.. and grabbing headlines to blare his bigot­ Mahmood Nadia/Impact Visuals ry, precisely because today the streets subway cars) and for the police to stop gang in Bensonhurst that pulled the trig­ Levin's "Theories"­ and campuses teem with thugs who are all blacks who drive fancy cars ("blacks ger. As one woman in the audience chal­ A Racist Lie already putting his views into action. are so largely involved in crime"). He lenged Levin, "Are you telling me that Levin tries to cloak his program for Levin incites them and he alibis them. defends shopowners who bar blacks from those people were justified in killing brutal racist repression in the "objectiv­ What makes this man so dangerous is their stores (a "discriminatory incon­ Yusuf Hawkins.because he was coming ity" of science but his "theories" are that he is not the oddball lunatic fringe venience for innocent blacks" is not "too to their neighborhood to mug them?" nothing more than the recycled trash but the academic spokesman for a reac­ high a price for reducing the risk of About 50 students gathered outside of Nazi eugenicists like the infamous tionary climate where racial slurs have murder for white store owners"). Levin's speech. As they began chanting Dr. Mengele. The Nazis' "theories" of become socially acceptable and physical The man is a walking incitement to "Levin must go!" 100 cops moved in, genetic racial inferiority also did not violence commonplace. riot-and that's exactly what happened spraying mace and swinging billy clubs, occur in a vacuum but were the ideo­ From his tenured academic enclave on May""2 when cops rioted against stu­ pushing and beating students to the logical cover for extermination of six in the middle of black Harlem Levin dents who protested an appearance by ground. Levin fled the stage and scurried million Jews and millions more "non­ preaches that the decline of American Levin at Long Island University's Brook­ out a back exit with police escorts. (What Aryans." Today, in a period of escalating education is due to racial integration, lyn campus. In the shadow of the Brook­ a performance from a man who fancies cop terror in the ghetto streets, desperate deploring "the staggering energy expend­ lyn courthouse where a white lynch mob men to be naturally ordained "hunters," unemployment for black youth, and ris­ ed to bring American Negroes into the is on trial for last summer's murder of "stronger and more daring" than women, ing infant mortality, Professor Levin is educational mainstream" while "the aver­ Yusuf Hawkins, Michael Levin delivered whom he deems intellectual weaklings.) the willing ideologue for a "natural" rac­ age black is significantly less intelligent a speech titled "White Fear of Crime Is In the melee outside, nine students were ist order that is aiming at state-sponsored than the average white" (New York Morally and Epistemologically Justified." arrested and one was taken to a nearby genocide of the black population. Observer,7 May). Levin is for apartheid­ Claiming "whites are morally justified in hospital to be treated for head injuries. Like William Shockley (who was style state repression of the black pop­ viewing all blacks as criminals" and The editor of the school newspaper, linked to the fascist J.B. Stoner) and ulation (a draft speech called for herding "blackness alone is a sign of danger," arrested while trying to photograph the Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin cites the blacks into segregated police-patrolled Levin gave the argument for the white cop rampage, said: "I liken Levin coming scores on standardized IQ tests for his fraudulent claims of white superiority. But there is no such thing as a "race gene," and these IQtests reflect and have historically been used to bolster the in­ equalities of the racist status quo. The first IQ test administered in this country, the Army Mental Tests of World War I, were used as an argument for the Immi­ Columbia gration Restriction Act of 1924 to bar University, 1987-Mass non-European and southern European demonstration immigrants-who were also often radical against labor agitators-from entering this coun­ racist attacks try. These tests do not measure intel­ on campus. ligence, which in any case cannot be Spartacist quantified in a single form, but are at signs call for best a measure of education. And it's no labor/black . secret that blacks get less and worse mobilizations education due to the inherent racism to stop of class inequality in this society racist terror. where "good schools" are in wealthy white suburbs while inner-city schools continued on page 12 4 WORKERS VANGUARD Chicago Cops Beat Up Grade Schoolers CHICAGO-On April lOa squad of city borhood, a longtime bastion of all-white white students gathered outside the cops went berserk outside Morrill Ele­ segregation. The apartheid-style assault school, an argument ensued and the cops mentary School, clubbing, punching and on children began after some 150 stu­ charged, swinging clubs and steel flash­ kicking a group of mostly Hispanic and dents, many accompanied by parents, lights at the black teenagers. Several black students as they scrambled for walked out of the school to protest the students sustained severe injuries. Ten cover. More than a dozen children, none firing of the principal, Eduardo Cada­ youths-all but one ofthem black-were older than 14, were sent to area hospitals vid, by the newly elected local school arrested and charged with "mob" action. for treatment of their injuries. council. Later that week an integrated crowd of One eleven-year-old black youth spoke A similar cop riot against black stu­ 150 people, mostly students, marched to from a wheelchair in St. Anthony Hospi­ dents took place March 1 at Morgan Park the Morgan Park district police station in tal: "I was trying to get into the building High, one of Chicago's few integrated protest. but then the police hit me with a stick" high schools. After the school council This is how "school reform" is imple­ (Chicago Sun-Times, 11 April). Morrill fired the white principal, someone pulled mented in Segregation City, U.S.A. Chi­ is located in the Marquette Park neigh- a fire alarm in protest. As black and cago's "school reform," instituted last Lenahan/Chicago Sun-Times fall, created nearly 600 local school Victims of cop riot: Daniel De La councils with the power to allocate funds, Cruz and Albert Kaspar, both age 12; determine curriculums, and hire or fire 11-year-old Eric Orr in wheelchair. principals-More than 17,000 candidates ran for positions on these councils, which reads at the eighth grade level. are comprised mostly of parents and In black and Hispanic neighborhoods community representatives, with token the schools have become day-prisons, teacher representation. With federal and many of them outfitted with metal detec­ state funding for education cut to ribbons tor entrances. Student drug testing and over the past decade, the "reform" plan dope-sniffing dogs are spreading like amounts to "community control" of rot­ Exxon crude. Student protest is treated ting, overcrowded and segregated institu­ like a Joliet Prison riot. When one group tions of state-sponsored ignorance. of eighth-graders was toured through Separate-but-unequal education is more police headquarters in early February, than ever the rule in Chicago, with 280 they thought they were being treated to of the city's 594 schools virtually all­ "something out of a fairy tale," as one of black, while 10 of the 27 suburban them put it. Another added: "When po­ districts remain completely white. The lice stop people in my neighborhood, high school dropout rate is a staggering they call you 'n----r' or 'punk' and treat 45 percent (more than 80 percent in you mean. The people down here were some ghetto schools), and half of the all smiles to us. But when you're out schools rank in the bottom one percent there in the street. .. it's not like that" Alcock/Chicago Sun-Times nationwide in college entrance exam (Chicago Defender, 7 February). Students protest police attacks at Morgan Park High School, March 5. scores. The average high school graduate continued Ofi page 12 Abortion Rights Pioneer Censored at "Pro-Choice"· Rally Feminists Try to Ban Bill Baird in Boston BOSTON-Twenty years to jhe day honor your brave 30-year struggle for that Bill Baird was "banned in Boston" women's fundamental right to abortion for pioneering the fight for women's .and birth control, and particularly your abortion rights, he was again censored work for these rights for working-class and threatened with arrest on Boston and poor women." Rally organizers Common. But on May Day 1990 the literally tried to snatch the SL statement outrage was committed by a bunch of out of people's hands and ran wildly junior bureaucrats in the "Massachu­ from tree to tree with reels of "POLICE setts Student Walkout for Choice." Bill LINE-DO NOT CROSS" tape and Baird has been fighting for abortion circulated the lie that Baird intended to and contraceptive rights longer than "storm" the stage! Many protesters his would-be student censors have been were shocked and disgusted to learn of on the planet. But to keep things cool the exclusion scandal and personally for capitalist politicos like Democrat­ went up to Baird to voice their support ic gubernatorial candidate Frank Bel­ and admiration for him. lotti (who Baird successfully opposed Not so the fake-left. The Socialist in his landmark 1975 case which won Workers Party, Socialist Action and wider access to abortion for minors other outfits refused to say one word in in Massachusetts), the student bureau­ defense of Bill Baird, even when we crats tried to muzzle the impassioned explicitly challenged them to do so. Baird. While "Right to Life" creeps were'free It didn't quite work out that way. Bill to roam through the crowd with their Baird turned up at the rally with a signs, the rally organizers marshaled a banner demanding free speech and free phalanx of cops and Guardian Angel choice-and a tape recording of the vigilantes to harass Bill Baird and the Young partacus organizers' threats to bring a restraining Spartacist League. But our determined Bill Baird (center) protests his exclusion at Boston Common rally, May 1. order against him! The Spartacist opposition and public exposure of their Spartacist signs salute Baird's lifelong fight for women's rights. League issued and distributed a state­ shameful exclusion attempt proved ment, addressed to Baird, protesting the stronger than their dictatorial antics. lead the fight for abortion rights in this mass mobilizations of women, minori­ exclusion: "You should be a guest of "Pro-choice" activists who deliberately society. ties and centrally the power of labor to honor at any women's rights gather­ play into the hands of the reactionary As a socialist organization we fight defend the clinics. Women's liberation ing!... We in the Spartacist League - right-to-lifers and police certainly can't for free abortion on demand and for through socialist revolution!

18 MAY 1990 5 I~~~~~=

"strongly support Eastern Airline and Greyhound Line strikers." A group of mine workers up from the coal Striking New York City fields also marched. One miner, not taken in by the glowing rhetoric from the fake-left about the Pittston Unionists Rally contract, told WV that it was a sellout and most Pittston Six hundred trade unionists, many of them on strike, miners only grudgingly voted it up. rallied on May 3 outside the Port Authority's 42nd The lessons of the union bureaucracy's sabotage of Street bus terminal chanting "scabs must go!" Grey­ labor's recent battles from Pittston to Eastern (where hound drivers and mechanics have been out for two a court-appointed trustee carries on Lorenzo's union­ months, immigrant Haitian and Dominican garment busting) must be drawn. Take the Domsey strike: real workers' are striking for union recognition at Domsey trade-union solidarity could quickly win that strike Trading, and Eastern workers remain on strike after 14 against a racist cockroach capitalist outfit. Mass pickets months, having outlasted Lorenzo. At the Daily News, to stop the scabs, Teamsters refusing to handle "hot ten unions have been put on hold by the bureaucrats, cargo," and one visit from an ILA delegation explaining marking time as the paper prepares to run scabs. New to the sweatshop bosses that dock workers won't load York City workers could sure use some labor solidarity­ Domsey rags unless the company rehires the strikers beginning with massive support for the organizing drive and recognizes the garment workers union with a decent by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union contract-that would do the job! And a victory here (ILGWU), which brought out a sizable and spirited would go a long way to stiffening the backs of labor contingent on May 3. What they got instead was hot air. facing assaults by union-busting bosses, from Grey­ Demonstrators heard speeches from ATU Local 1202 hound to the Daily News. For victory to NYC labor­ Stop the scabs now! (Greyhound) president Harold Mendlowitz, an ILGWU WV hoto organizer and a whole gaggle of Central Labor Council May 4-Rally at Filtron Co. in Bethpage, New York big shots like TWU Local 100 president Sonny Hall. All against firing of Haitian workers. of these pro-Democratic Party bureaucrats abuse the words "unity" and "solidarity" as a cover for their O'efend Fired Haitian Racist Company" while chanting "Hey, hey, Filtron, stop legalistic, gutless maneuvers relying on "friend of la­ supporting FDA" and "Management must go!" These bor" capitalist politicians and courts. The ATU bureau­ Workers! militant Haitian workers are also fighting against a crats' no-fight ideas consist of appeals for consumers LONG ISLAND, NY-Haitian workers at the Filtron company union, the National Organization of Industrial to boycott Greyhound while Mendlowitz makes pleas Co. are fighting a mass firing of 26 workers. The sack­ Trade Unions, which has colluded with management in to the scab-herding cops to enforce an obscure city ings are an act of racist retribution against these immi­ the firings. We demand their immediate reinstatement­ ordinance against recruitment of scabs in NYC proper. 'grant workers who took off work April 20 to join with No victimizations! . The scab buses continue to roll uncontested out of the tens of thousands of other Haitian workers in lower Various lawsuits have been filed against Filtron by Port Authority, while outside on the street the bureau­ Manhattan denouncing the Food and Drug Administra­ Haitian community groups and lawyers, including with crats blow hot air. Although Greyhound lost $56 million tion's attempt to ban all Haitians from donating blood the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But last quarter, the bus company has arrogantly and falsely as possible "AIDS carriers." A rally at the Bethpage the way to win back the jobs of these workers and a claimed that the strike is over. A union spokesman defense contractor's electronics plant on May 4 brought real union at Filtron has already been demonstrated­ responded "that's like Napoleon declaring victory at out almost a hundred supporters of the fired workers workers action to stop production. The April 20 rally Waterloo." But it will become a Waterloo for the ATU who braved the rain to demand their jobs back. After against the FDA blood ban was a de facto general strike if the scab buses aren't stopped now. Real labor unity giving management a month's notice of their plans to by New York Haitians, and they won. NYC labor and solidarity means building mass picket lines to stop attend the April 20 demo, the sacked workers got tele­ should give full backing to these courageous workers the scab buses and keep the strikebreakers out of grams the day after the rally informing them that they by manning picket lines to shut down the racist Filtron Domsey. were fired. exploiters. Behind a big ATU Local 1202 banner, union contin­ On the Monday following the April 20 protest, the Over a quarter million Haitians reside in New York gents from the city transit workers union to the Team­ fired workers were barred at the factory entrance by six City alone. The Spartacist League appeals to these and sters marched from the Port Authority to Rockefeller cop cars. The workers then learned that Filtron bosses other class-conscious workers to join us in building a Center, shouting "No justice, no peace!" and "What do had replaced them with white employees earning $4 to multiracial vanguard party to lead the international we want? Contract!" Domsey strikers marched and sang $5 more per hour! At the May 4 rally, Filtron workers struggle against racist, capitalist exploitation through in the ILGWU contingent with signs proclaiming they carried signs reading "Filtron Shame on You... What a socialist revolution.•

TWU Bureaucrats Join in Blaming Victims NYC Transit Workers Kined by TA Policy On May 8, signal maintainer Robert given drug and urine tests. Did the D.A. Nicholson and his helper Daniel Walsh also scrape the blood of the victims off were sent out to make aaemergency the tracks for testing? signal repair south of the Kings High­ Blaming the victim is standard operat­ way station in Gravesend, Brooklyn. ing procedure in the TA-dead men Between them they had 36 years of can't talk. And the TWU bureaucracy is service as NYC transit workers and there to cover up the TA's crimes. Local outstanding safety records. It was rush 100 Safety Director George McDonald hour. They evaded a northbound train but also attacked the dead men, telling Work­ were crushed to death minutes later by ers Vanguard they failed to "put out a southbound F train. flags." And when they aren't blaming the The motorman had 22 years exper­ victims, the union tops' policy is "Do it ience on the job but was never informed and grieve it later." In this decrepit and by the tower that men were working dangerous industry that policy means ahead on the track and there was no "die first, then grieve it." flagman to stop oncoming trains. The The transit system will not be safe Transit Authority sends signal main­ for workers or riders until workers con­ tainers out without flagmen: workers' , Sheehan/Newsday trol safety practices. Militants in the lives are cheaper than adequate manning Gravesend, Brooklyn-Track where two transit workers were crushed by train. Committee for a Fighting TWU are fight­ scales. So two more workers are dead ing for elected union safety committees because of the TA's callous disregard for ly marked track; 12 track workers en­ union brothers who were killed by the with the power and authority to shut workers' lives. gulfed in a fireball and three with critical TA's callous disregard for workers' lives. down all unsafe and dangerous work on In an incredible obscenity, Transport burns over large sections of their faces At the recent Workers Memorial Day the spot. As they wrote in a leaflet issued Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 pres­ and bodies when they were sent to work ceremony in New York, James Byrne's after the death of Melsinker and Davis ident Sonny Hall has now joined the TA near the 600 volt third rail with the brother demanded that the "mass murder­ last year: in blaming Nicholson and Walsh for "bad power on; telephone maintainers Stewart ers at the Transit Authority" be held "The only way workers have ever won safety habits" and waiving "the safety Melsinker and David Davis killed on the accountable. anything, including safety in the work­ rules" (Chief-Leader, 18 May)! curved tracks at Astor Place last March The TA spends millions on drug test­ -place, is by wielding their power in defi­ In a little over a year, five transit -train operators were never told they ing and spies ("beakies") but won't ance of the bosses laws .... We spend workers have been killed and many more were ahead on the track. spend the money for the necessary safety every day in the tunnels and barns and under the buses and cars and we know badly injured on the job: James Byrne Hundreds of transit workers have at­ measures or adequate manpower to save what works. Without us, the city doesn't crushed to death on the J line less than tended the wakes for Nicholson and workers' lives. In the latest tragedy, the move. You can bet if we ran transit, we'd six months ago on a section of incorrect- Walsh, paying their last respects to their shocked motorman. was immediately make it run safe!". 6 WORKERS VANGUARD For Workers Mobilization to Crush the Fascists! Nazi Outrages in East Berlin The following article is translatedfrom party] and left-wing activists gives a Spartakist No. 70 (8 May), published by green light for fascist attacks on the the Spartakist Workers Party ofGerma­ workers movement. ny, section of the International Commu­ The first victims of the capitalist An­ nist Leagueti:ourth Internationalist). schluss of the DDR are working people from abroad. In the past few weeks Inthe aftermath of the March 18 Volks­ alone, plant directors have laid off thou­ kammer [parliament] elections, which sands of mainly Vietnamese workers, brought the parties of the Fourth Reich following the racist logic "before a Ger­ into the government, the fascists in the man goes, a Vietnamese goes." In Dres­ DDR [East Germany] have been going den last week a general "freeze on the over to the offensive in an increasingly admission of foreigners" was decreed brutal and brazen fashion. On April 20, under the pretext of the housing shortage. following a stomping march through At the same time, the government's Berlin, hundreds of brawling Nazis/skin­ commissioner for foreigners, Almuth heads rioted for hours in Alexanderplatz, Berger, called for the enactment of quo­ in "celebration" of Hitler's birthday, tas for foreigners. raucously shouting racist slogans and Today German imperialism hides its wounding over 50 people. They smashed Drang nach Osten [drive to the East] up the "Mocca Bar," known as a homo­ behind "peace-loving" phrases, but it is sexual meeting place, and attacked the the bourgeoisie of Auschwitz that is at patrons with knives and stones. Previous­ work setting up its Fourth Reich. In the ly they had attempted without success to Volkskammer elections of March 18 only attack first a Jewish cemetery and then the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany a squatters' building known as an anti­ . Bauer/ADN ran on a program of unconditional oppo­ Skinhead punks give Nazi salute in East Berlin's Alexanderplatz, April 20, to fascist center. "celebrate" Hitler's birthday. sition to capitalist reunification. The PDS But in contrast to policemen who [the renamed SED], seeking to define wanted at long last to drive out the skin­ nately terrorized people who stopped in Ever since the collapse of the Berlin itself as an opposition party within a head gangs, the Volkspolizei leadership the streets. When a supporter of the Wall, and of the Stalinist system along capitalist Germany, thereby feeds illu­ on the spot in Alexanderplatz allowed Spartakist Workers Party intervened to with it, the squads of Nazi thugs have sions in a "new democracy." them to shout fascist slogans such as defend his wife he was wounded in the been openly offering their services to Thus, following the Nazi march in "Splatter Turks and Reds" and "Heil eye. In Cottbus and Sangerhausen .skin­ capital, for example at Kohl's election Alexanderplatz, the PDS called for a Hitler" and to wreak violent havoc for head gangs wrecked several restaurants rally in Dresden last December where stronger, more effective police leader­ ship. Its former youth organization asks hopefully, "Are the police, after months of doing nothing, beginning to get over their uncertainty?" (Junge Welt, 23 April). While many Volkspolizei members certainly want to defend the achievements of the DDR and hate the skinheads, the PDS-Ied popular front appeals to the police leadership under Spartakist Interior Minister Dietzel, an arch­ Workers Party, marching on reactionary from the DSU [German May Day from Social Union, affiliated with the Bavaria­ East to West based Christian Social Union in West Berlin, calls for Germany], to lead the fight against the workers unlted­ fascists! front action to It is less than half a year since 250,000 stop the fascists people turned out against the Nazi dese­ and for full cration of the Soviet memorial in Trep­ citizenship rights tow Park on January 3, a powerful for Ifllmlgrant united-front rally which took place as a workers and their families. Front result of the Spartakists' initiative. The banner 'reads: DDR was built oyer the ruins of Hitler "Against .' fascism through the victory of the Red Privatizatlon­ Army. Today there live in the DDR tens No to Capitalist of thousands of Vietnamese workers­ Reunification!" whose heroic history of victorious strug­ gle against U.S. imperialism should be a powerful inspirationfor all working people -who want to fight against fascism. hours on end. It was only after some arid injured patrons and staff. And on they cleared the streets of counter­ What we urgently need are mobilizations 400 anti-fascist Autonomen and youths May Day, the international day of the demonstrators for him. And the anti­ for concrete workers united-front actions showed up from Kreuzberg [in West Ber­ working class, the [fascist] "Central Communist witchhunt staged by the against the Nazis, actions which must lin] that the skinheads were driven out by Germany National Democrats" were able imperialists and their Social Democratic protect and include in their ranks the the police. A Turkish anti-fascist from to openly assemble in the Leipzig mar­ lackeys against PDSers and ex-members many foreign workers and minorities in Kreuzberg described it: "It wasn't until ketplace while police held back hundreds of the SED [the former ruling Stalinist the DDR .• we heard that the skins had attacked a of counterdemonstrators. gay hangout and beaten people up pretty InWest Germany and West Berlin fas­ badT'y that people decided to go over." cist skinhead terror-especially against Since this horrendous Nazi provocation immigrant workers and other minorities in the capital of the DDR, mob actions -is part of the daily scene. Eight hun­ and terrorist attacks by fascist gangs dred Nazis gathered in Munich on April have escalated throughout the country. 23 to "celebrate" Hitler's beer-hall Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League Over 500 armed "neo"-Nazis and Nazi putsch. Three days later, 1,200 police skinheads, who in large part came from protected a Republikaner meeting in 0$7/24 issues of Workers Vanguard $3/3 issues of West Germany, gathered the next week­ o Wuppertal. West German Nazi "fuhrers" (includes English-language Spartacist) Women and Revolution end for an "All-Germany Meeting" in are now focusing their activities (and o New 0 Renewal 0$2/10 introductory issues Nordhausen, stormed a restaurant, at­ their money) on the DDR. . International rates: $25/24 issues-Airmail $7/24 issues-Seamail of Workers Vanguard tacked the patrons and then barricaded We have warned from the beginning (includes English-language themselves in. Only after a pitched battle that a capitalist Anschluss (annexation) 0$2/4 issues of Spartacist (edicion en espanol) Spartacist) with the police were they driven out. of the DDR will not take place peaceful­ Name _ In Dresden over 500 skinheads ram­ ly. The fascists are merely the spearhead paged through subway stations after a of the terror that a Fourth Reich would Address _ soccer game. In another case they di­ bring to minorities and the working class. ______Apt. # Phone (_) _ rected their deadly terror against a Viet­ The workers must organize now to de­

namese man traveling by train to Berlin, fend their organizations and in defense City ....,....-State Zip _=: chasing him the whole length of the of their foreign coworkers, homosexuals, 502 train. InHalle, scattered skinhead groups Jews, all the intended victims of fascist Make checks payable/mall to: Spartaclst Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 and fascists in bomber jackets indiscrimi- terror. 18 MAY 1990 7 Black History and the Class Struggle

Under the leadership of Karl Marx, the International Workingmen's Association (First International) rallied the workers of Europe behind the North in the American Civil War against the slavocracy.

In February, during Black History most bitter and brutal expose of the cyn­ The Red'48ers had participated in the Month, Spartacist League Central Com­ ical charade that "freedom and democ­ failed German bourgeois-democratic rev­ mittee member Don Alexander gave two racy" has conqueredfrom Eastern Europe Progress Publishers olution of 1848. Many of them came public talks on the West Coast which paid to Managua. Now the imperialists are over to the U.S. as immigrants. They had tribute to the revolutionary interna­ salivating over the prospect of the un­ posed the slavocracy even though it already acquired an internationalist per­ tionalists of Karl Marx's First Inter­ bridled exploitation .and oppression of meant a temporary lowering of their stan­ spective and they became the backbone national who mobilized the active soli­ workers from East Berlin to Moscow, dard of living. Of course, the murderous of the Union Army at a very critical mo­ darity of workers in Britain for the and if they succeed it will mean the in­ anti -black, anti -draft riots of mainly Irish ment, when that army was desperately struggle against slavery in the United creased immiseration of working people working men was a big exception. These short of experienced soldiers. One of the States during the American Civil War. "at home," particularly blacks, whose riots were opposed by native American Union officers, Joseph Weydemeyer, was These workers not only stood up against lives the U.S. rulers already consider as and German workers. The Irish workers a close collaborator of Karl Marx. He a barrage ofpro-Confederate propaganda an expendable surplus. at that time were largely organized by was an organizer for the Communist but also endured the misery and desti­ While British capitalists supplied guns the party of slavery, the Democratic League in Cologne, for which Marx and tution inflicted on them by the British andfinancedthe Confederacy in exchange Party. The riots were in part fed by a Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. ruling class. For although they were for cotton for their Lancashire mills, the resentment over the fact that if you paid Weydemeyer was instrumental in keeping thousands of miles away from the battle­ role ofthe British workers who struck a $300 you could have a substitute fight the Confederacy from seizing the federal fields they understood that the war to crucial blow for black freedom during for you in the Union Army, and also by arsenal in St. Louis. Many other '48ers smash black slavery in the American South the Civil War stands as a living testi­ the fact that they keenly feared the performed heroic feats in the course of was part of the fight for their own mony to the power ofproletarian inter­ competition from freed blacks. the Civil War, including opening up the emancipation. nationalism in defeating the designs of The Marxists and class-conscious work­ road for Sherman to take Atlanta and Todaythe capitalist rulers international­ the imperialist rulers. ers of the First International had their finish off the slaveholders. ly are riding triumphant as they celebrate We reprint below edited excerpts from sights set not only on the struggle against It took a social revolution, blood and the "death ofCommunism." Yet one need comrade Alexander's forum given at the chattel slavery but also on creating more iron, to destroy chattel slavery. It's im­ look no further than the streets of the University ofCalifornia Berkeley campus favorable conditions internationally for portant to bear that in mind. Frederick inner-city ghettos in this country for the on March 3. the overthrow of the last form of slavery, Douglass, a radical abolitionist like John capitalist wage slavery. Shortly after the Brown and Harriet Tubman and others, Civil War, a year later, the struggle for raised the slogan "Death to Slavery," and the eight-hour day broke out in the var­ he counterposed this to all of the futile Spartacist~ Forum ious cities in this country. , appeals to the conscience of the bloody slaveholders. From the inception of the The First International and the war against slavery he was for arming I'd like to talk about three things to­ Fight Against Chattel Slavery the slaves, enrolling them into the Union night: Marx and Engels' views on the The First International, or the Interna­ Army as soldiers in order to "fling wide Civil War, the role of the First Interna­ tional Workingmen's Association, was open the iron gate of prejudice against tional in the struggle to overthrow black born in England. This is no accident. black people." chattel slavery, and why the Marxist England was the cradle of industrial capi­ There's a remarkable convergence of program of international working-class talism, the most economically advanced views between Douglass and Marx. Marx revolution is the key for black freedom country in the 19th century. This is where and Engels also understood that it would and working-class emancipation. modern class antagonisms first arose and take revolutionary methods to destroy The Civil War was the second Amer­ where the basic forms of working-class chattel slavery. Marx advocated recruit­ ican Revolution, the last of the great struggle against the capitalist class mani­ ing blacks into the Union Army which he bourgeois-democratic revolutions. De­ fested themselves. In the great Chartist said would "have a remarkable effect on spite the racism in the [Union] army and movement of the 1840s one can clearly Southern nerves." Marx and Engels re­ in society, 200,000 black troops along see the first political movement of the spectively referred to the Civil War as with white soldiers joined together to proletariat as a class fighting for its own the greatest event of the age and the first smash the hated slavocracy. The betrayal interests. Mass nationwide trade unions grand war of contemporary history. The of the promise of black equality by the and workers organizations were set up. Civil War was the decisive turning point Northern bourgeoisie during the period WV Photo The First International existed from of the 19th century in the U.S. It was not of radical Reconstruction lies behind our Spartacist spokesman Don Alexander 1864 to what was effectively its end in an isolated national event. In Europe call for finishing the Civil War, for an 1872. In 1919, Lenin noted its historical there were a series of national and civil integrated struggle for black liberation the Civil War, Marx and Engels viewed significance, that it "laid the foundation wars spanning from the struggle for Po­ through socialist revolution. the struggle to abolish chattel slavery as of an international organization of the lish independence to the struggle for In Volume I of Capital Marx stated: an inseparable part of the fight for workers for the preparation of their Italian unification to the Paris Commune, "In the United States of America every working-class emancipation. revolutionary attack on capital." The the first example of the establishment independent movement of the workers is Now one doesn't want to suggest that First International was in the vanguard of of -a workers government in history, in paralyzed so long as slavery disfigures a the struggle for a workers government the various internationalist anti-slavery 1871. part of the Republic. Labor cannot eman­ was on the agenda in the United States fighters-from the German '48ers to the In their Civil War writings one is cipate itself in the white skin where in in the '60s of the last century. The labor British workers who played very critical -struck by Marx and Engels' astonishing the black it is branded." As communists; movement was still relatively weak. roles in the Northern victory over the knowledge of American history. This as revolutionary internationalists during During the Civil War it generally op- slaveholders. should dispel the very ignorant prejudices 8 WORKERS VANGUARD that these Europeans were unfamiliar with the peculiar conditions ofthe United ~'The English working class has earned undying slaveholders, even though the continuation of the States. They took head-onand refuted-the historical honor by defeating with enthusiastic American Civil War burdened the English workers arguments disseminated by the Southern mass meetings the repeated attempts of the ruling with the most terrible suffering and privation." sympathizers in England. At the outset of the Civil War there classes to Intervene on behalf of the American -Karl Marx, 1863 were a lot of Confederate sympathizers in England and they spread the lie that the Southern Confederacy W!lS fighting for self-determination. Marx pointed out that the South was not a country but a battle cry, and that the war of the South­ ern Confederacy was a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery: "Thepresent struggle between the South and the North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, between the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on _d Jl6roluvn.Jinuk_ the North Americancontinent.It can only ._1Jrt~ibrnl :f11. lftnitrll j;!n.!I:!l _ be ended by the victory of one system or ~mrti. the other." : ·--5 ... -- . England was especially affected by the outbreak of the Civil War because the landed and the capitalist class relied very heavily upon Southern cotton. The textile Dietz Verlag industries needed Southern cotton and so Police attack workers' meeting in London's Hyde Park, 1a62. Letter of International Workingmen's Association greets Abraham Lincoln's re­ they had an interest in breaking the election in 1864 as signaling the "death of slavery." Northern blockade on Southern ports. Moreover, the South had imported Eng­ lish goods without tariffs in contrast to ties that were stacking up. They tried tive radical workers, Ernest Jones, a left­ class but the heroic resistance of the the young manufacturing North which very hard to stampede the workers into wing Chartist, scorned this argument in working class of England that "saved the had tariffs. This is what made the siding with the South, to starve them a speech to British workers: West of Europe from plunging headlong English middle classes interested in an out in order to force them to adopt pro­ "Independence! It was not for the Union, into an infamous crusade for the perpetu­ but for the lash; not for freedom, but for independent Southern Confederacy. The interventionist views. ation and propagation of slavery on the The textile factories in the North of fetters. Independence! The right of rebel­ other side of the Atlantic." earlier abolitionist impulses of the Eng­ lion in defiance of all law.Independence! lish ruling class disappeared under the England were shut down, more than half Independence for every man to whip his Friedrich A. Sorge, the outstanding pressure of their class interests and they of the looms and spindles were idle. I'm slave! But in order to gull the English, American Marxist of the post-Civil War began to advocate intervention in favor talking about the period right at the be­ 'lind get their sympathies, Southern advo­ era, wrote that it was the proletarians of ginning of the Civil War, the 1861-62 cates said 'Oh! we are in favor of the Lancashire, the weavers and spinners of of the South. emancipation of the negro as much as France was interested in events in the period. Savage wage cuts were imposed you, but the North are going the wrong the cotton factories in England, who United States. Louis Napoleon had larger on those that still had jobs, which lit­ way to accomplish it' .... We were told "raised their voices in favor of the North designs in mind. It wasn't simply the erally led to starvation. Women textile that the wayto emancipatethe slaves was of the United States, in favor of abolish- to allow the South to secede. Then what cotton famine which drove him to sym­ workers were particularly hard hit. Marx commented: was the war for? Why was the South pathize with the South but rather he had making slavery the chief stone in their a lust for conquest, particularly he had "No wonderthat, in some parts of Lanca­ edifice, if the whole fabric is to be shire a kind of famine fever broke out.... kicked down as soon as it is built?" designs on Mexico that could not be But the working-peoplehad to suffer not carried out if the United States remained only from the experiments of the manu­ The [British] government at the time, intact. And that's why he sided with the facturers inside the mills, and of the under Gladstone,was particularly hypo­ South. He wanted to break the blockade. municipalities outside; not only from re­ critical and sought to disguise its secret but he needed England's cooperation. duced wages and absence of work, from desires for intervention. But there wasn't want and from charity, and from the It's hard to overstate the extent to eulogistic speeches of Lords and Com­ anything secret about the workers' re­ which the English ruling class went to mons. Unfortunate females, who in con­ sponses to the various machinations of line up the British workers to support the sequenceof the cotton famine, were at its the ruling class. In hundreds of public Confederacy. From the very beginning commencement thrown out of employ­ meetings all over the country, in. all ment, and had thereby become outcasts they held labor demonstrations to show of society, and now, though trade has industrial sections and large cities, they that the majority of workers supported revived.and work is plentiful, continue opposed the government. They hailed Lin­ the South. But under the influence of members of that unfortunate class, and coin's Emancipation Proclamation though many workers associated with and who are likely to continue so. There are also they bore the brunt of the starvation and belonged to the General Council of the in the borough more youthful prostitutes the misery. than I have known for the last 25 years." International Workingmen's Association, I'm riot suggesting that at the very be­ the working class ofEngland waged very The English bourgeois press and their ginning the English w.orkers understood determined and very bitter opposition to labor lackeys, they'd say to the British that the question was siding with the rogress u ishers these pro-slavery policies. workers, "Are you on the side of Lin­ North. It took time. At first the old-line Ernest Jones, English radical work­ The manufacturers resorted to every coln? He's not fighting against slavery. labor leaders prevailed and their policies ers leader, denounced ruling-class trick in the book to break their class will. The Civil War is just a gigantic enter­ had to be challenged. But once it was support for slaveowning South. Since there had been an overproduction prise in shedding human blood. Why are clear that the issue was slavery, they in the cotton [textile] industry in England you starving- to death because of that understood that chained black labor in ing slavery.... Honor to the English in 1860, the demand for labor had de­ dictator Lincoln?" They deluged them the South meant that they would be kept workers for that!" Frederick Douglass creased. They used this as an opportu­ with propaganda about the South fight- down in England and that a blow against paid tribute to the Chartists, to the Brit­ nity to close factories which increased . ing for a noble cause, for independence. slavery was for their liberation also. ish workers, for their magnificent inter­ the prices of the accumulated commodi- .One of the most eloquent and very ac- Especially during the winter of 1862-63, nationalist solidarity. American labor these meetings broke out all over the papers also credited the British workers place. At first it started in the North in with having prevented the Palmerston Manchester. The workers in London government from intervening on behalf came to the fore at a very critical mo­ of the South. MEN OFCOLOH ment. The government, then under Pal­ For Proletarian ~rms! merston, was about to declare war Internationalism To To Arms! against the Union. The Scottish workers also rose to the occasion. They beat back Now, in a capitalist class society you

NOW OR~"'., ..-... ~_.NEVER,-....._.- -. ~ .. ~ .. -... the pro-Confederate labor misleaders in don't learn very much about the true their midst, which was not an easy task. history of the working class and the This is one of the most glorious and oppressed. This is necessarily the case THREE YEARS'...... ,_...... _ .. Ta1SERVICE! inspiring pages in the history of the because the dominant ideas, as we Marx­ BATTLES or LIBERTY AND THE UNION i working class. The English workers suf­ ists say, are the ideas of the ruling class . '.'" '~-.'.~ :-~':::::-;:::,::::::::::'':':...-.:;.:_::.,';7:'';: :::=::':~':':':::. ,~::'::.~-:':.-: fered and starved and died for the cause and the ruling class certainly doesn't tell FAIL NOW, &OUR RACE IS DOOMED of black freedom in America. They tran­ you about their defeats. In this century, -"".,:":::.'.-:--._.-'.-:::_:.':'-:"::::::.:"::'.:':: scended their immediate economic inter­ the greatest defeat for world imperialism Tff'f~:rffti=f~ ests because they understood the need for and the greatest victory for the working SII,nn: nil: ,iilt" internationalist solidarity, and thanks to class was the Bolshevik-led 1917 work­ them the North didn'thave to fight Eng­ ers revolution, in the Soviet Union, which VALolfANIfHEROISM land and perhaps France at the same is history's only successful workers revo­ PORT HUDSON BEND. time. lution. Trotsky, Lenin and the Bolshe­ _~. rPiD'MiLiiKEN'S ~., _ .•. __ 4 __ "' _ ._..•.• _ ••. _ •.•.•_ •••_ ARE FREEMEN LESS BRAVE ·THAN SLAVES To this very day the bourgeoisie and viks, following in the footsteps of the its apologists and ideologues hate what founders and teachers ofscientific social­ 0I1l I, lST oritmni',ol'il"lils'-nti£ the English workers did. They're trying ism.iMarx and Engels, worked to instill ".{"" :-i:;:;., to rewrite history and say it was the an internationalist perspective in the Frederick Douglass House MEN or COLOR.BROTirEBS!NilFATBERS! Revolutionary abolitionist Frederick upper classes in England that stopped the workers of the world. Douglass campaigned for blacks to WE APPEAL TO YOUf English government from siding with the . Trotsky underscored this in his work join the Union Army, South. That's crap. As Marx wrote, it The Permanent Revolution, which was was not the wisdom of the British ruling continuedon page 14 18 MAY 1990 9 o a; III Ol 3 OJ 3 '0. III en (;; o

Russian fascists of Pamyat (left) threaten anti-Semitic pogroms, spurring Jewish emigration. Planeloads of Soviet Jews arrive in Tel Aviv as Washington closes door on immigration from USSR.

most combat-ready army in the Near are harassed at school and on the streets ofthe rise of a nationalistic bureaucracy, Israel... East, one million men, Hussein has in Moscow. Leaflets have appeared the USSR was the only state to save mil­ threatened to destroy half of Israel with throughout Odessa, the Black Sea port lions of Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust (continued from page J) chemical weapons if Israel tries to repeat with a large Jewish population, quoting in World War II. Then the imperialist (New York 1ii.mes, 18 January). Hitler its 1981 bombing of Iraqi nuclear facili­ Mein Kampf and calling for pogroms. "democracies" slammed their doors to also claimed he needed more "living ties. Iraq has demonstrated its ruthless Rumors of a pogrom on May 5 (the day Jewish refugees from the Third Reich. space" or "Lebensraum" for a "Greater willingness to use chemical weapons in of St. George, patron saint of medieval For decades the imperialists have tried Germany" as his armies conquered Eu­ the past, both against Iran and against its Russia) spread rapidly and were picked to undermine the Soviet Union by bleed­ rope and millions of Jews and other own Kurdish population. Thousands were up by the international press. The po­ ing it of its scientific and cultural elite, peoples were killed in concentration murdered in a single attack on the Kurd- grom did not occur but the rumor man­ in which Jewish intellectuals play a camps. The Zionists have already fought ish village of Halabja in 1988. . aged to generate widespread fear. prominent role. The imperialists were five major wars as well as countless In response to blustering from Bagh­ There is no question that Pamyat fas­ assisted by 65 years of Stalinist lies, minor battles to conquer Lebensraum for dad, Israel launched a special spy satel­ cist demagogy is dangerous because it is corruption and terror which destroyed the a "Greater Israel." lite Ofek-2. The liftoff had perhaps more feeding off real hardships and fears gen­ revolutionary ·traditions of the Soviet The hyper-militarized Israeli economy, military significance than the cargo be­ erated by perestroika. Gorbachev's base intelligentsia. Even a Solzhenitsyn went massively subsidized by U.S. imperialism cause it showed Israel has the capacity is a privileged section of the intelligent­ into the Gulag as some kind of commu­ and American and West European Jewry, to launch missiles capable of carrying a sia, who would sell the land of the Octo­ nist only to later become a raving tsarist cannot in its present contours absorb warhead 1,500 miles, well within range ber Revolution ·for a VCR. His market reactionary. To put a stop to this drain of hundreds of thousands of new immi­ of Baghdad... or the Soviet Union. And reforms have brought the black market vital human resources requires ousting grants from the Soviet Union. Moreover, Israel will not wait to be attacked. Re- out in the open and encouraged it to the nationalist bureaucracy and returning many of these are highly specialized to the internationalism of Lenin and intellectuals (scientists, technicians, doc­ Trotsky. tors). There is practically no available housing in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other "Talks About Talks" Israeli cities. So there is talk of tempo­ and Plans for War rarily having the new immigrants live in tent camps. However, those who agree to Israel's 1982 invasion Of Lebanon settle in the West Bank will get fat showed the Zionist capacity for waging subsidies, cheap housing and free land. a murderous Blitzkrieg. But their igno­ In March, Israeli authorities imposed minious retreat also showed their inca­ military censorship on reports concerning pacity to sustain a prolonged war of the status of Soviet immigrants, especial­ occupation much less absorb new territo­ ly the government's efforts to settle them ry. With 3.7 million Jews in Israel­ in the West Bank. 15,000 of whom left last year alone to At the beginning of the intifada, the live in the U.S. and elsewhere-as liberal Zionist Yehoshafat Harkabi, a against a rapidly growing Palestinian former head of Israeli military intelli­ population of over 2.5 million in Israel gence, pointed worriedly to the growing and the Occupied Territories, not to calls in Israel for annexing the West speak of the 100 million Arabs in the rest Bank and expelling the Palestinians: of the region, its tiny economy and small "Behind the preference for annexation is population are insufficient to dominate a preference for expulsion, and since the Tannenbaum/Sygma the region. But now many Zionists think Armed Israeli settlers in West Bank spearhead Zionist drive for,~'Lebensraum" a few hundred thousand Soviet Jews will Arabs will be reluctant to leave, it will through terrorizing and driving out Palestinians. .' . be necessary to use force against them change this social reality overnight. Thus Simcha Dinitz, chairman of the Jewish and kill them" (Journal of Palestine sponding to Hussein, Shamir warned: legally flourish. They have generated a Agency, bragged: "If we were a flicker­ Studies, Spring 1988). The large-scale "Israel will know how to defend itself in new class of money-grubbing entrepre­ ing island in a sea of hostile Arab states immigration of Soviet Jews-a by­ the future and defeat the evil designs of neurs charging exorbitant prices while before, now we will be a different story. product of the disintegration of jhe Sta­ its enemies." The courageous Israeli the masses face empty shelves, in state We will have people to settle the land" linist bureaucracy-greatly accelerates nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu stores. Feeding off the economic frustra­ (Boston Globe, 10 January). the Zionists' drive toward the genocidal today languishes in a Shin Bet (Israeli tions, racist demagogues echo the poi­ While the influx of Soviet Jews will massacre of the Palestinian Arabs. secret police) prison for seeking to warn sonous rantings of the tsar's pogromist embolden the Zionist expansionists and the world that for its 'next war Israel has Black Hundreds to "Beat the Yid." warmongers, the imperialist epoch has Near East Powder Keg prepared a huge arsenal of atom bombs. And in March Gorbachev appointed a not been a promising one for late-coming The threat today is not simply a localized prominent Russian nationalist anti-Semite Nor is the saber rattling in the Near would-be great powers. A Zionist Reich, conventional war but a nuclear conflagra­ close to Pamyat to his 15-man presiden­ East restricted to Israel. After his bloody even equipped with nuclear weapons, has ten-year war with Iran, Iraq's Ba'athist tion which could quickly go global. We tial council, the writer Valentin Rasputin. despot Saddam Hussein is moving to take demand freedom for Mordechai Vanunu! In a recent interview (New York Times Magazine, 28 January), Rasputin said his place at the head of the "hardline" Soviet Workers Must Arab states. Having built the largest and that the guilt of Jews is great, both "for Crush Pamyat the killing of God" and the "sin of hav­ The destabilization of the Soviet Union ing carried out the Revolution, and for produced by Gorbachev's perestroika the shape it took." Gorbachev's move Spartacist League pro-capitalist market reforms has sharp­ underlines our warning that it is criminal­ Public Offices ened nationalist strife throughout the ly stupid to call upon the Kremlin bu­ multinational USSR. But the most dan­ reaucracy, which has tolerated and at - MARXIST LITERATURE­ gerous manifestation is the resurgence of some levels cultivated Pamyat, to sup­ Bay Area virulent anti-Semitic Great Russian na­ press these nativist fascist scum. These Thurs.: 5:30-8:00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m. tionalism, embodied by the sinister fas­ new Black Hundreds constitute a sinister 1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) cist Pamyat organization and a host of threat to Russian working people, non­ Oakland, California Phone: (415) 839-0851 other reactionary outfits. Russian minorities, Jews and Commu­ Chicago In January, Pamyat attacked the con­ nists. A powerful mobilization of the Tues.: 5:00-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 11:00a.m.-2:00 p.m. ference of the liberal writers grouping Soviet working class is needed to crush 161 W. Harrison St., 10th Floor Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715 "April" in Moscow, screaming "Yids them now. out" and vowing: "Today we came with The Soviet Union under Lenin and New York City a megaphone; the next time it will be Trotsky first gave Jews the opportunity Tues.: 6:30-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m. 41 Warren St. (one block below with machine guns." The membership to playa leading role in the political and Rev. Chambers St. near Church St.) requirement for joining Pamyat is sup­ cultural life of the country precisely be­ Free MordechaiVanunu-courageous New York, NY Phone: (212) 267-1025 plying the home addresses of four Jew­ cause it was internationalist. Even under nuclear technician exposed Israel's ish families. Jewish high school students Stalin, who revived anti-Semitism as part huge arsenal of A-bombs. 10 WORKERS VANGUARD no other future except Armageddon. The Then on May 4 an Israeli navy boat U.S. underwrites this terribly overextend­ opened fire on the yacht of Jordan's ed regional power with its advanced King Hussein and chased him into .Saudi military industry to the tune of $3 billion waters. Hussein is a leading Arab "mod­ a year. In return Israel does some of erate" and one of Washington's main Washington's dirty work like supplying puppet rulers in the region. The Ameri­ nuclear arms technology to South Africa can ruling class is getting fed up with the and training the death squads of Central insane provocations of Shamir & Co. The America and the drug traffickers of Bush administration is proposing for the South America. Yet Israel is not a puppet first time ever to cut U.S. aid to Israel, of U.S. imperialism but a very dependent slated for $3.7 billion this year. ally. Both the Carter and Reagan admin­ The stage is being set for what the istrations tried to create an anti-Soviet hardline Zionists see as the "final solu­ Near East "strategic consensus" between tion" to the "Palestinian problem": mass Israel and so-called Arab "moderates." expulsions of Arabs from the West Bank But except ferIsrael's deal to return the (which Likud & Co. refer to as Judea and Sinai Peninsula to Egypt for a peace Samaria) in order to make Israel's con­ treaty, nothing came ofthis, particularly trol militarily secure and permanent. If after Israel's 1982 rape of Lebanon. Shamir succeeds in forming a coalition, With Stalinism disintegrating in East Labor party leader Shimon Peres says the Europe and Gorbachev caving in to result would be "an extremist right-wing Bonn's drive for a Fourth Reich, Israel's government the like of which Israel capacity for anti-Soviet troublemaking never had." Actually, the so-called "La­ Media Images has become temporarily less interesting bor" party is a thoroughly capitalist for­ Israeli leaders Shimon Peres (left) and Yitzhak Sha­ to the White House. As the New York mation, which incorporates the Zionist­ mir command nuclear arsenal and missiles (Ofek-2, Times (16 March) noted: "With every­ controlled trade unions. Although the right) capable of devastating Arab states...and hitting thing that is happening in East Europe, Western press tries to give Labor a "dov­ the Soviet Union. Central America and the Soviet Union, ish" image, it is the historic party of most senior officials appear to have Zionist colonialism and expansionism. Arab rights. Instead they propose giving means perpetual military mobilization grown bored with the Middle East." The It was the Labor government that Palestinians living in the Occupied Terri­ and the ever-present prospect of war, Bush administration sees Israel's isola­ waged four major wars which created tories fake self-government, while Israel including nuclear holocaust-a Sparta tion and especially its inability to sup­ Israel out of the destruction of Palestine, would retain.existing settlements and dominated by orthodox rabbis and socio­ press the intifada in the Occupied Terri­ driving out hundreds of thousands of would ring the territories with Israeli paths like Kahane and Sharon, hurtling tories as a source of instability in the Palestinian Arabs in 1948; which seized military posts. down the road to Armageddon. Or they Near East. the Occupied Territories in 1967 and The fanatic "Revisionists" who today can turn against their own rulers who are The Bush White House opened negoti­ established the first Zionist settlements dominate Likud, and groups even further leading them to destruction. In a frame­ ations with the once-shunned Palestine to force further population transfers. to the right, split from "labor Zionism" work of mutual cooperation rather than Liberation Organization (PLO). It pro­ According to the Jerusalem Post Interna­ in the 1930s. While Labor built the Haga­ dead-end confrontation with the vastly posed negotiations over the future of the tional Edition (10 March), it was Labor nah, which would become the Israeli larger surrounding Arab peoples of the West Bank with a Palestinian delegation prime minister Levi Eshkol who after the army, the Revisionists built underground region, the highly educated and over­ from which the PLO would not be com­ 1967 war issued "a call to the Jewish terrorist organizations like Menachem whelmingly secular Hebrew-speaking pletely excluded. All of these proposi­ people of Israel can be a valuable com­ a; ponent in the socialist transformation of tions are heresies to fanatics like Shamir Cl Q) and the sects even further to his right. '0. the Near East. (/) The U.S. is supporting Soviet immigra­ Q; The Palestinians, for their part, flung tion to Israel, including with a $400 o into their own diaspora, include some of million housing grant, but with the fig the most radicalized elements in the Arab leaf that it not be used to settle Soviet East. In Israel they were the base of the Jews in the Occupied Territories. Then Communist Party, and in the West Bank at a press conference in early March a modest labor movement has arisen that Bush stated: "We do not believe there now embraces the deeply exploited Arab should be new settlements in the West Iraq's despot woman worker as well. In the oil fields Bank or East Jerusalem." Saddam Hussein of the Persian Gulf they constitute a threatened to That was the final straw for Shamir retaliate with substantial section of the proletariat and and his political cronies in Likud: they chemical weapons of the technical-managerial personnel. threw the "Labor" party, which supports if Israel repeats But neither the petty-bourgeois national­ the American peace proposals, out of the 1981 bombing of ists of the PLO who have embraced the cabinet, thereby again bringing down the Iraqi nuclear Bush/Baker "peace" plan, or the Islamic "Grand Coalition." This led to a political reactor. fundamentalists who want to turn the crisis which has focused attention on the West Bank into a miniature Iran, provide sordid horse trading to form a new co­ a road to social emancipation for the alition. Small religious parties look to Palestinian oppressed. Rabbi Schneerson in Crown Heights, The Bush/peres "peace plan," even if Brooklyn as a kingmaker. But meanwhile people throughout the world ...to settle Begin's Irgun and the even more fanati­ it could be implemented, offers Palestini­ the Likud is now in sole control of the the length and breadth of the newly liber­ cal Stern Gang to which Shamir be­ ans living in the Occupied Territories machinery of state, and .after years of ated land." The terror in the West Bank longed. After the 1948 War.these gang­ nothing more than a third-rate bantustan paralysis in the coalition with Labor they and Gaza, the deportations, shootings and sters were reintegrated into the Zionist in which an Israeli military comman­ have now begun to act decisively. Plans mass arrests, including of Palestinian establishment, and made responsible for der determines if the PLO flag can be are under way to found 14 new "settle­ women and children, has been run by building Israel's hated and feared secret flown. Arafat in turn calls for a second­ ments," where fanatical Zionist settlers Labor minister Yitzhak ("Iron Fist") police. A new book by Robert Friedman, rate one in which the PLO flag is as­ act as military outposts, in the Occupied Rabin, who called to crush the intifada The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane­ sured. The only way out that ensures Territories. And the government secretly with "force, might, beatings." From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, democratic rights for all the peoples of financed a move by a group of Zionist . The Labor party's "peace program" is reveals that the anti-Soviet terror cam­ the Near East, including genuine self­ ultras who took over a building in the often described in the Western press as paign in the U.S. carried out by Meir determination for the Palestinian people, Christian quarter of Jerusalem. This set giving up "land for peace." In fact, Labor Kahane's Jewish Defense League was is social revolution against the "progres­ off a storm of protest throughout the is nowhere near so "generous" as to give orchestrated by former Stern Gang mem­ sive" colonels and generals as well as Christian world, as well as from Ameri­ back the territories they seized 20 years bers who went into the Mossad (Israeli the feudal sheiks and kings, in which can Jews. ago, and they certainly don't recognize CIA). This operation was headed by none a section of the Hebrew-speaking popu­ other than Yitzhak Shamir. lation, especially among the proletariat, The London Independent (26 February) are turned against their Zionist masters. reported that a coalition has formed be­ Probably only great historical events Order Now! tween Kahane's fascistic Kach party and such as Israel's decisive defeat and hu­ Volume 2, NO.4 $5 other "underground extremists" called the miliation in war or a severe economic (Spring 1990) (58 pages) , "Congress of the State of Judea" which crisis can now break a section of the "threatens organised, armed resistance to Hebrew-speaking proletariat from Zion­ In,cludes: any negotiated deal with the Palestini­ ism and lay the basis for a binational • Damien Durand, "The Birth of the ans." Tiran Pollack, military leader of mass revolutionary party. But for that Chinese Left Opposition" these thugs, stated that "if they let us outcome to be possible a Trotskyist nu­ • Pierre Broue, "Chen Duxiu and the manage the area we'd solve the inti­ cleus must be crystallized now in Israel Fourth International" fada .... Maybe in five years' time, kill­ from left-wing students and workers and • Frank Glass, "The Communist League ing the Arabs will be the only solution. above all from the oppressed Palestinian of China" For the moment we can still force them Arab population. It is already very late. • Zheng Chaolin, "On the Nature of Revolution" to leave the country." A proletarian vanguard must be forged; that can break the cycle of bloody wars • Peng Shuzi, "Trotskyism in China" The Tragedy For a Socialist Federation of • Wang Fanxi, "Problems of Chinese of nationalist expansion and revenge of Trotskyism" of the the Near East which Lebanon is a microcosm, exploit­ Chinese Revolution Kahane and Ariel Sharon, the butcher ing the contradictions within the Zionist (Back issues also available) of Lebanon who holds himself ready as bunker to explode it from within, in or­ Order from: a strongman waiting in the wings, would der to lead the oppressed and exploited Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 carry out Nazi-like genocide in the Near to a socialist federation of the Near East East. For the population of Israel, this in which every nation can live in peace .• 18 MAY 1990 11 May 1988) added, "the schools cannot Chicago... improve unless the people of Chicago (continued from page 5) stand fast against this union bludgeon." Scapegoating the teachers union is the The police exist for one purpose: to capitalist rulers' attempt to bust a com­ defend the racist, capitalist status quo. bative and integrated working-class or­ Now with Boss Daley Jr. in City Hall, ganization while deflecting anger over the cops know they have a free hand to the "malign neglect" of the inner city. do this job with unrestrained brutality, The Democratic Party factions vying for terrorizing even grade schoolers. leverage in the local school councils Parents have to feel boundless resent­ accept a "community control" framework ment over this state of affairs, and their that reinforces Greater Chicago's strictly massive participation in the council elec­ segregated and vastly unequal education­ tions last fall showed it. The whole pur­ al facilities. Thus the school councils poseof the "reform" is to divert that could easily become tools for mobilizing anger away from those who are responsi­ masses of the oppressed against the ble: the Republican and Democratic unions, like during the 1968 New York politicians, and the capitalists they an­ teachers strike. swer to. Thus, manipulated by business­ What's needed is a fight for quality, funded "neighborhood organizations" like integrated education for all. This means UNO (United Neighborhood Organiza­ a massive busing plan, extended to the tion), many councils have been consumed far reaches of the suburbs. Quality edu­ in struggles to fire long-time principals cation can only be won by a broad fight on ethnic or racial grounds. that takes on as well segregation and This ploy backfired at Bums Elemen­ racism, unemployment, cop terror-the WV Photo tary, where a majority-Hispanic coun­ Chicago teachers strike against givebacks in 1987. Current "school reform" whole fabric of capitalist oppression. cil fired principal Donald Kriz, who is plan is designed to break power of Chicago Teachers Union. What's needed is leadership, a revolu­ white. The following Monday nearly the tionary workers party that strives to unite entire student body of this predominantly suing the teachers union. Black alderman go Tribune also lashed out at the CTU black, white and Hispanic workers at the Hispanic school walked out in protest Dorothy Tillman blasted the strikers, during the last strike, the ninth in 18 head of all the oppressed in common and outraged parents mobilized to de­ calling for school decentralization as "a years: "Decentralization, as it is now struggle. mand the council's resignation. structure to weed out the bad teachers." being discussed, has the magic appeal of Students who want to fight the injus­ ; The Chicago "school reform" plan was "Tired of the annual school strikes, the destroymg the clout of both the school tices of this decaying society must ally cooked upin 1987 by a confab of capi­ demands for salary increases while board bureaucracy and the Chicago themselves with the working class, which talists and Democratic politicos under the school performance levels continue to Teachers Union" (13 September 1987). has not only an interest in seeing the administration of Harold Washington, decline, Tillman said there is a need for That fall Reagan's miseducation secre­ profit system go but also the social pow­ the city's first black mayor. It came in local control of area schools" (Chicago tary William Bennett came to town and er to do the job. The Spartacus Youth response to that year's 19-day teachers Defender, 21 September 1987). labeled Chicago's public schools "the Club is the revolutionary youth group of strike, which saw black and Hispanic The combative and majority black and nation's worst." He returned the follow­ the Spartacist League and is allied with community groups organizing anti-strike Hispanic Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) ing spring to denounce the CTU for union militants fighting for such an anti­ rallies, and pro-Washington activists like is indeed a prime target of this so-called "standing in the hallways and blocking racist and anti-capitalist program. Join Operation PUSH counsel Lew Meyers reform. The racist, union-busting Chica- up the doors ofreform." The Tribune (29 the SYC!.

have toned down their demands, rejecting CCNY... the call for open admissions as "utopian" (continued from page 4) and appealing to the very cops who arrive to arrest them to speak out against are dilapidated holding pens. the cuts and to the school chancellor The noted biologist Stephen Jay Gould himself to call a "general strike"! exposed the direct correlation between At the same time, students who know the popularity of these pseudo-scientific they've been sold down the river by the theories of genetic inferiority with peri­ Democrats are looking for answers. The ods of political reaction: Spartacus Youth Club was invited to "If current biological determinism in the speak at a protest at Hunter College study of human intelligence rests upon no because organizers knew we were the new facts (actually, no facts at all), then why has it become so popular of late? only students with a program to link up The answer must be social and political. with labor. Spartacus Youth Club (SYC) The 1960s were good years for liberal­ members have fought to broaden the ism; a fair amount of money was spent protests from the single issue of budget on poverty programs and relatively little happened. Enter new leaders and new cuts to also address the rampant racism priorities. Why didn't the earlier pro­ on campuses. At CCNY, a Spartacist grams work? Two possibilities are open: picket sign reading "Levin's Racist Ide­ (I) we didn't spend enough money, we ology Breeds Fascist Terror" was taken didn't make sufficiently creative efforts, by students occupying the administration or (and this makes any established leader jittery) we cannot solve these problems building to prominently display from the Young Spartacus without a fundamental social and eco­ window. Students protest on May 8 against CCNY plans to honor Joint Chiefs of Staff nomic transformation of society; or (2) While students perceive that the head, war criminal General Powell. the programs failed because 'their recipi­ administration is also disgruntled at the ents are inherently what they are-blam­ state measures against white people. who hurl racist and sexist epithets, they ing the victims. Now, which alternative­ budget ax coming down on education, will be chosen by men in power in an . they fail to see that the administration is We do not appeal to the administration may have to learn the hard way that such age of retrenchment?" the arm of and answers to the state. Look nor do we want to place more power in calls to violence will not be tolerated. -"Racist Arguments and IQ," who they've chosen to honor at this their hands to determine what is "accept­ At bottom these codes are a reflection Ever Since Darwin (1977) year's commencement at CCNY: General able" speech on campus. The administra­ of the inability of their student supporters Now nobody even talks about throwing Colin Powell, head of the Joint Chiefs of tion and the board of trustees should be to understand the class basis for racist money at problems. Democrats try to Staff-the chief architect of the bloody abolished! IfCCNY students, faculty and terror and other attacks against minori­ outdo Republicans in screaming for U.S. rape of Panama. As one student's workers ran the campus as a genuine ties. The very state that they would ask repression-more cops in the ghetto for sign aptly stated: "Powell's Policy in place of learning, Michael Levin would to protect them is the same state that the hypocritical "war on drugs," building Panama = Levin's Hope for Harlem!" be placed in a museum of antiquities next protects and employs fascist groups like prisons and juicing up the electric chairs The SYC has joined forces with other to another racist hoax like the skull of the KKK and Nazis who don't just talk, while closing schools and hospitals. students in calling for protests against "Piltdown Man" or cruel relics like the but lynch. Recalling recent young victims Powell at the CCNY commencement. slave auction block. of cop terror, Spartacus Youth Club Protests Hit CUNY Campuses At City College, students have raised spokesman Leticia Candia spoke out at While Levin foams at the mouth over the demand that the administration fire Free Speech and Red Herrings a May 5 rally at Hunter College: affirmative action, liberal Democratic Michael Levin. This is a misguided The Reagan/Bush years have taken "We need simply recall the names of governor Cuomo moves to cut services appeal to the wrong forces. The position their toll in myriad ways-from the Phillip Pannell and Jose Lebron to see and raise tuition by $200 per semester at of the administration is clear. CCNY erosion of elementary democratic rights clearly what little value the state places CUNY campuses. This would slam shut president Harlston has set up a commis­ like abortion to the resegregation of on the lives of working-class and minori­ ty youth. Making education the privilege the only door thousands of working-class sion of inquiry to investigate both Dr. education to vicious attacks on the of the wealthy is yet another way of youth think they have to a better life. In Levin and Dr. Jeffries, a black nationalist unions. In response to the rise in verbal throwing us on the scrap heap.... To response, for the second year in a row professor Levin accuses of racism. To and physical assaults against minorities defeat the racist attacks at the hands of CUNY students have taken over build­ equate Jeffries with Levin is poisonous on campus, liberals have sought new the police and the racist mobs, what is ings and marched through the streets to "evenhandedness" and simply absurd. restrictive "student speech codes." But urgently needed is for students, minorities and all of the oppressed to mobilize protest the cutbacks and tuition hikes. Jeffries is a cultural nationalist who attempts to suppress speech by decree are behind the power of the integrated labor Last year, massive, well organized and describes white people as "ice people" utopian at best and will more likely movement for a class-strugglefight, with integrated struggles backed down the and black people as "sun people" and backfire against minorities and leftists. our own party, against the whole system government. This year the NY state believes the more melanin, the better the Such codes would be used to outlaw of capitalism which keeps blacks segre­ gated at the bottom ofthe economy. To legislature is determined to balance their person. Nutty, but not the lightning rod scientifically accurate descriptions of open the door for working-class and budget with blood from working-class for terror that Levin is in this racist Levin as a "racist pig" or of Colin minority youth we must fight for open kids. And the far smaller student protests society. And he does not call for police- Powell as a "war criminal." As for punks admissions and free tuition! Join us!". 12 WORKERS VANGUARD ­ (continued from page 1) ';:; o ~ this was not being reported to the jury.) E o A police detective's testimony that Mon­ o dello admitted he saw Fama pull the en trigger was deemed legally inadmis­ sible against Fama as the two are co-defendants. Prosecutors complained that dozens of Bensonhurst residents witnessed the kill­ ing but did not come forward. Still, the Demonstrators district attorney presented the weakest outside Brooklyn case imaginable in what"is an open and courthouse shut case of racist mob murder. A City demand guilty Sun (4 April) expose into the workings verdict for of the Brooklyn D.A.'s office reports racist killers how black lawyer Bruce McIntyre was currently on trial. pulled off the case after he argued back in January that they needed to renew the investigation and find new witnesses. In the Howard Beach murder trial, the state managed to cool things by bringing in Charles Hynes as a special prosecutor, who at least got a conviction of some of hair could be considered a leader in the (and their assailants got off). In New encies" of the Democratic Party are increasingly at each other's throats. the killers for manslaughter. Now Hynes African-American community, I would York City today, it has been officially A social force that has the strength and is D.A., but the racist murders keep on have told them they were crazy. So when proclaimed that the poor do not have the coming, and now as the juries go into I stepped out and found things of that "equal right" to sleep in the parks or beg class interest to overcome internecine their second week of deliberations there nature, I realized how desperate things on the subways. This unadorned class ethnic/racial hostility and "turf' wars is in fact present. Organized labor is the is growing bitterness over the idea that have become in the black community." and race prejudice reflects the social climate of this city where the Reaganite most integrated social institution in the Fama and Mondello may walk. Outside the Red Apple grocery in Flat­ Outrage over the killing of Yusuf bush, Sonny Carson has been whipping rich and famous like Donald and Ivana city and the country, reflecting the role of the working class in capitalist produc­ Hawkins last fall and distaste for loud­ up anti-immigrant frenzy against "people Trump ostentatiously flaunt their life­ mouth racist mayor Koch for fanning who don't live in our community." He styles and divorces, and Wall Street tion. And the recent period has seen the flames which brought New York to threatens, "In the future there'll be "masters of the universe" (like the yuppie some signs of life among New York City unions-from black and Hispanic work­ flash point played a major role in the funerals not boycotts" (New York Times, lead in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the election of Dinkins, who campaigned to 7 May). Whose funeral does he have in Vanities, now being filmed in the South ers at Greyhound and Caribbean immi­ "heal the wounds" of the fractured city. mind? Cao Anh Tuan, the 36-year-old Bronx) roar around in their BMWs while grants in the Domsey garment workers But although the liberal black mayor is Vietnamese worker who lies in Kings the minority poor are condemned to strike to white craft unionists at the County Hospital with a fractured skull stealing the hubcaps. Daily News and doctors who recently from the hammer attack on Saturday So Dinkins' "gorgeous mosaic" is won union recognition at Bronx Lebanon night? The boycott is supposedly based being slashed by the jagged edge of Hospital. But labor is saddled with a on an incident in January involving an race-hatred. What's particularly criminal union leadership tied to the capitalist exchange between a Haitian woman and about the situation is that, even as re­ Democrats, and the most "progressive" the Korean storeowner. But Carson & fracted through the bourgeois elections, support Dinkins even when he is about Co. have been pushing this racist filth there is a widespread desire for racial to shove layoffs down their throats. since 1986, when Carson led a mob harmony. Reagan/Bush got less votes The black nationalists look to the through the streets of Brooklyn smashing here than practically any other part of same capitalist forces. Carson, of course, up candy store windows, while Sharpton the country. It's the most ethnically rounded up votes for Dinkins for a price. went after Arab storeowners in Harlem. mixed city in the U.S.-with the popu­ Sharpton did the same earlier for racist In 1988, Carson pulled a boycott outside lation a quarter black, a quarter Hispanic, Republican Senator D'Amato. Their pro­ a Korean-owned market in Bed-Stuy, as a quarter Jewish, and the rest made up of test marches in Bensonhurst militantly Sharpton led crowds in Harlem against a whole range of Asians, Caribbeans, chant "No Justice, No Peace!" But this Korean candy stores. white ethnic Catholics and others. Recent call is in fact an appeal to the state. According to Carson, the Korean­ studies show more than 35 percent of Even tactically they rely on the state­ owned stores are "a conspiracy against the population doesn't speak English at the only thing that stood between the the black community," and "it's racist home. But in the era of decaying capi­ black marchers and the mobs of enraged that we don't own any businesses." Car­ talism, far from being a "melting pot" of whites in Bensonhurst was the blue line son wants black shopowners to get a few racial and ethnic groups, it is a boiling of the racist NYPD. But justice for of the crumbs from overcharged ghetto cauldron of race-hatred. blacks and all the oppressed can only be customers. He grotesquely echoes the It's rooted in the deepening crisis of won by fighting against capitalism, not same attitudes of Bensonhurst bigots­ American capitalism. Ex-mayor Koch's by following its cynical flunkeys. the whites kick the blacks, the blacks insane Zionist hectoring verbal assaults The ethnic and racial hatreds can be kick the Koreans, who as new immi­ on poor blacks and Hispanics.expressed overcome. On Monday a black teacher Ed Quinn grants are a vulnerable community. Fol­ his bank-dictated program to slash serv­ brought his class to shop at the Korean Lynch mob lawyer Stephen Murphy lowing the Jewish merchants who were ices to the ghettos and barrios. After the grocery on Church Ave., declaring: the ghetto slumlords, the liquor store and 1987 stock market crash, the city is sink­ "This is a city of immigrants. And in about as personally decent a bourgeois grocery store owners, Koreans have come ing again into deficits and disorder. this community we can be together." The politician as you're likely to get, his to occupy a niche as small-time capital­ Dinkins has been brought in to oversee critical need is to put the power of labor appeals for reconciliation will have ists in the ghetto, scrambling to make a the cutbacks and retrenchment. There in the forefront of a deep-going struggle zero effect on the deep roots of racist .buck while the big profits are raked in by was talk of a revival of the. old FDR against all forms ofoppression. And this oppression in New York, U.S.A. The the Fortune 500 corporations. To the coalition-but empty liberal rhetoric requires a class-struggle leadership that cops "celebrated" Dinkins' inaugural by anti-Semitism which the black nationalist won't keep the lid on. In the absence of doesn't look to the Democrats as phony blowing away eight people, mainly demagogues have been pushing since the a perspective of social struggle for "friends of labor" but sees them as they minority youth, in the month of January mid-'60s, notably against the 1968 NYC mutual benefit, the various "constitu- are, the agents of capital. A revolutionary alone. Now, in response to this first teachers strike, they now add anti-Asian party must be forged which fights to crisis of his administration, Dinkins went poison. make the working class the vanguard of on TV Friday saying the city was Adding his bit to this seething brew of all the oppressed in struggle against the "aching, and we must heal the pain." The race-hatred was tabloid columnist Jimmy capitalist system which is rotting socially very next day came the attack on the Breslin, who went into a fit of racism and economically just as surely as the Vietnamesez who were mistaken for and chauvinism, calling a Korean Ameri­ New York City bridges and subways are Koreans. can woman colleague at Newsday a "yel­ rotting away physically. While Dinkins was pleading with lib­ low cur" and "slant eyed" together with The working people of New York bad­ eral rhetoric, the anger of the ghetto was a filthy anti-woman slur, after she pro­ ly need some tangible victories, through being exploited and turned in the most tested a column he wrote complaining integrated struggle based on the power of despicable directiori by white-baiting that his wife wouldn't take care of his labor which can draw in black, Hispanic black nationalist hucksters. In a rally at laundry now that she is on the city,coun­ and Asian minorities as well as white the Slave Theater, prior to the march cil. Also repulsive was how the liberal working people. While the capitalist on Bensonhurst, the Sharpton gang went media rushed to Breslin's defense', even parties rely on their racist cops and through their usual nasty stuff. Spewing after he compounded it by venting his courts, powerful working-class mobiliza­ anti-Semitic filth to applause from the spleen against Koreans on the Howard tions can isolate and crush the lynchers crowd, lawyer C. Vernon Mason called Stern talk show, the early morning show­ while winning the black masses away the black mayor a "Judas," who's "got case of raunchy racism. from the nationalist apostles of despair. too many yarmulkes on his head." The Meanwhile, on May 10, a federal By relying on our own organization and provocateur and FBI fink Sharpton is appeals court upheld a ban on begging strength we can enforce the right of demonstrably trying to whip up race war. in the subways. The judge ruled that everyone to walk anywhere in this city As black radical Dhoruba Moore, one of begging amounts to "nothing less than without fear, and build a movement of the Panther 21 recently freed after 17 assault," creating in passengers the ne/Newsday the exploited and oppressed that will years in jail on a COINTELPRO frame­ "apprehension of imminent danger," Nationalist demagogue Sonny Car­ avenge the deaths of Yusuf Hawkins, up, remarked: "If someone told me in although in two recent cases it was pan­ son spews anti-Asian poison outside Michael Griffith and all the victims 1969 that an informer with processed handlers who were beaten up and killed Korean-owned grocery in Flatbush. of racist terror.• 18 MAY 1990 13 The Price of Being Black in Racist America Four years ago a black baby girl was Americans as compensation for slavery; born in New York City. Unlike the more for past discrimination, and for the toll of than 40,000 black babies who die before racism that persists unto this very day." their first birthday every year in this Sperm Bank Suit But Julia Skolnick could win millions of country, she lived. Unlike over half the dollars in her case and it wouldn't make black children in America who live in a dime's worth of difference for the lives poverty, most in families headed by sin­ male college graduates and one-half of school dropout-40 percent of black of the overwhelming bulk of-the black gle black welfare mothers, she doesn't. college-educated black women earn less males in their 20s are unemployed. Their population in this country. Her mother is not bad off, middle-class than poverty-level wages (as compared "career options" are to make a living on The racist rulers of this country have and white. But the daughter is black, and to one-sixth and one-third respectively of the mean streets of the ghettos. They already determined that the financial cost although she has yet to reach her fourth white college grads). wouldn't even be allowed into "New of maintaining blacks in the inner-city birthday she is already the target of rac­ ghettos is an expendable overhead. Itis Malveaux goes on to point to the reali­ York's best stores." They are considered ist bigotry and discrimination. Now the no longer necessary for American capi­ ty that this little black girl faces-of to be permanent outlaws in the inner girl's mother is seeking compensation in talism to preserve the lives of poor being stereotyped in school and tracked cities where terror comes not in effigy a lawsuit which is coming to be known blacks as a "reserve army of labor"; now "away from certain career paths," of but in cold blood-fired out of the guns as the "Sperm Case." they are considered to be a completely finding herself being followed in New of racist cops. There are no jobs for the Julia Skolnick, a 33-year-old widow, worthless, parasitical population. How York's best stores "because her skin millions of single black welfare mothers. is suing Idant Laboratories, a Manhattan can one expect "reparations" when the color makes her a shoplifting suspect," Yet under the provisions of the "work­ sperm bank, and a doctor at Advanced powers that be-Democrats and Repub­ of missing her curfew "because taxis will Fertility Services for negligence, claim­ fare" act the government is going to cut licans-are shelving welfare programs ing that she was mistakenly inseminated speed away instead of stopping when she them-and their children-off all bene­ as money wasted? In the 1960s, the with the sperm of a black man rather hails them." She asks: "If the New York fits for not working! rulers paid to keep a lid on seething than that of her white husband. In 1985, widow is troubled about the taunting her Malveaux notes: "When the courts revolt in the ghettos with their "War on Skolnick's husband, who was dying of daughter suffers at 3, how will she feel attempt to measure the cost of blackness, Poverty" programs which bought and cancer, deposited sperm at Idant Labora­ when her daughter is 13 or 23? How will they should consult recent health studies paid for the black Democratic Party tories so that his wife could have his she feel when her college-aged daughter that show the difference between black mayors who act as the overseers of the child. In 19-86, Julia Skolnick was artifi­ tells her black women have been hung in and white life expectancy." Only 40 per­ inner-city ghettos on behalf of their cially inseminated and in December of effigy on campus?" cent of black children have been immu­ white capitalist masters. No price could that year she gave birth to a black baby But Malveaux only measures the cost nized against polio, 30 percent of AIDS possibly repay the death of eleven girl. In her lawsuit Skolnick is demand­ of being black in racist America for what victims are black, 60 percent of those black people, including five children, ing compensation for the alleged mix-up, W.E.B. Du Bois termed the "talented afflicted with tuberculosis-the disease who were murdered in Wilson Goode's citing in particular the racial harassment tenth" of the black population. The over­ of the 19th century workhouses-come terror bombing of the Philadelphia and ridicule her young daughter has been whelming majority of black kids in this from the black population. A recent study MOVE commune in 1985. subjected to. society never finish high school much by two Harlem Hospital surgeons showed To do away with the "penalty" for A column in the San Francisco Chron­ less see the inside of a college. The that the death rate for black men in Har­ being black in racist America the work­ icle (26 March) titled "Measuring the inner-city schools are nothing more than lem over the age of 40 is higher than of ing people of this country-black and Costs of Blackness in America" by Juli­ cop-patrolled holding pens where igno­ the male population in Bangladesh! white-must rise up together to take anne Malveaux asks, "Can the courts rance is reinforced by the disease, des­ What is the price for this toll ofdeath? back the fruits of their labor from the measure the amount of earnings lost titution, crime and wasted lives that Malveaux writes that Skolnick's lawsuit racist capitalist rulers and put all the by African Americans because of their surround them. may "finally establish the financial cost wealth that the workers have produced color?" The column points to statistics Even black high school graduates are of blackness in America" and "indirectly in the service of building an egalitar­ which show that one-third of black less likely to get hired than a white high raises the issue ofreparations for African ian, socialist society.•

Civil War... (continued from page 9) • directed in large part against the utopian, self-serving Stalinist dogma of"socialism in one country." He noted that "Marxism takes its point of departure from the world economy, not as a sum of national parts but as a mighty and independent Under Tory reality which has been created by the government international division of labour and the of Lord world market. and which in our epoch Palmerston, imperiously dominates the national mar­ Britain outfitted kets. The productive forces of capitalist blockade­ society have long ago outgrown the na­ running ships tional boundaries." This material/social for the South. foundation of the world economy consti-. tutes the actual foundations of Marxist internationalism. Granger Collection Chicago Historical Society Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks exploit. They talk about equality in a wage slaves. Any talk about freedom and the Trotskyists, noting the tasks of fin­ taught us some fundamental truths about class-divided society. You cannot have equality that runs counter to the emanci­ ishing the Civil War, made a very key capitalist class society, about the hypoc­ equality between the oppressors and pation of workers and the oppressed from point: "The slaveholders had to be lifted risy and deception of the bourgeoisie. oppressed, the exploited and the exploit­ the yoke of capital is sheer deception. to the heights before they were dashed to When they talk about "freedom," they ers, those who own the means of pro­ This talk is not just about history for the ground and annihilated forever in the have one thing in mind, the freedom to duction and those who are propertyless the sake of history. Over 50 years ago, Civil War." This is a historic precedent that is good to keep in mind when the advancing world reaction seems to be carrying everything before it. This is a critical moment in history in which American and world imperialism are going all out to carry out bloody capitalist counterrevolution. The Stalinist bureaucracies from East Germany to the Soviet Union are caving in to the unprec­ edented campaign of imperialist destabi­ lization in East Germany, for a Fourth Reich which could set the stage for an­ other imperialist war and the prospect of the annihilation ofhumanity. Only prole­ tarian socialist revolution can provide peace and plenty and progress for the working people of the world. This ur­ gently requires the forging of a multi­ racial revolutionary working-class party that is capable of leading the working Library of Congress Ironclads, like the U.S.S. Cairo (above), strengthened naval blockade which class to power, to the seizure of state strangled Southern slavocracy. Cotton for British mills lies rotting in power by destroying the last form of Charleston, South Carolina harbor. slavery-capitalist wage slavery.• South Carolina Historical Society 14 WORKERS VANGUARD labor movement that could finish the organized labor from the May 5 protest onstrators wouldn't gang up on a small S.F. Skinheads well-deserved lesson those dozen fascist is primarily the responsibility of a supine group of fascists! As an expression of punks started to get. The massive social labor bureaucracy politically under the hostility to class struggle, the organizers' Routed ... power of integrated class -struggle can thumb of Democratic Party mayor Art "open mike" at the rally concluding the (continued from page 16) sweep the racist terrorists off the streets. Agnos. But the organizers of this protest May 5 demo was open to a so-called It also stays the hand of the cops who -which included Anti-Racist Action, Di­ "anti-racist" skinhead to rave that he some 200 anti-fascists marched in the tend to be fond of busting anti-fascist rect Action Against Racism, Revolution­ 10veQ his country. But the microphone Haight-Ashbury district, in response to heads. ary Workers League and the John Brown became almost inaudible when black a rumor that skinheads planned to stage Just over ten years ago, on Hitler's Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC), made no _Spartacist spokesman Don Alexander a "white workers day" provocation there. birthday in 1980, the SL-initiated "April attempt to mobilize mass labor/black addressed the crowd. No organized skinhead presencematerial­ 19 Committee to Stop the Nazis"mobi­ power. At a planning meeting on May 2, It's a good/thing when racist thugs ized, but the anti-racists managed to send lized the integrated Bay Area labor "labor" was dismissed as a waste of time get "educated" in an appropriate manner a couple of jeering skins packing. The movement, stopping the Nazis from their to pursue. While they may contain some -but it's not enough. To rely for anti­ bourgeois press screamed that the anti­ intended "celebration," saying, "San young militants with the appetite to deal fascist "victories" on the acquiescence of ­ fascists attacked innocent bystanders: Francisco is a labor town, not a Nazi with the fascists with dispatch, the liberal the cops is to indulge in fatal illusions the Examiner (2 May) ran the headline, town!" In Washington, D.C. in 1982 and politics of these groups place them in the in the armed fist of the capitalist state. "Skinheads don '1show, so anti-skinheads in Philadelphia in 1988, labor/black tow of the Democrats. More centrally, the fascist gangs thrive beat up teens." On the night of May 5, mobilizations initiated by the SL and the The ex-New Leftists of the John on the decay of capitalist society. For the a group of about 30 skinheads marched Partisan Defense Committee stopped the' Brown Committee should be remembered threat of barbaric reaction to be deci­ unannounced a couple of blocks up Tele­ KKK/skinheads from carrying out racist for their cringing appeal to the bourgeois sively defeated, their capitalist masters graph Avenue in Berkeley shouting provocations. These victories were won state to "ban" the fascists in April 1989 must be overthrown, along with their "white power," until surrounded by cop in the teeth of opposition from the when Duke's Populist Party was plan­ rotten system of racist wage slavery. cars. Three were arrested for possession bosses' parties, their government and ning a public meeting in Hayward, Cali­ That requires the independent mobiliza- of weapons including a hatchet, a heavy their cops, including especially from fornia. At the planning meeting for the .tion of the working class at the head of chain and sawed-off pool cue-charges black front men for the racist, capitalist SF protest, the JBAKC, capitulating to all the oppressed, under the leadership since dropped by the D.A. One of the Democratic Party. the bourgeois media hysteria over May of an integrated revolutionary workers skinheads arrested in Berkeley-19-year­ San Francisco workers know and hate Day, wanted assurance that in Union party. Finish the Civil War-Forward to old David Lindley-t-was cited by the these skinhead scum. The absence of Square, the hundreds of expected dem- a Workers State! • Examiner as one of the supposedly inno­ cent bystanding "teens" in the Haight on o s:o May Day. ll. The Spartacist League brought a mili­ ~ tant contingent of about 40 for the May 5 Union Square demonstration with a banner reading, "Workers and Minorities: Sweep the Nazis/Skinheads/KKK Off the Streets!" The fascist action groups are organized to kill-blacks, Jews, social­ Spartacist ists, trade unionists, Asians, Hispanics. contingent Emboldened by the takeover of East at May 5 Germany by the West German successor anti-skinhead state to the Third Reich, as the imperial­ action. The ists trumpet their wished-for "death of massive social power of the Communism," skinhead violence is on integrated labor the rise internationally. In East Germany movement must immigrant workers are daily assaulted be mobilized to and harassed. Recently, skinheads were sweep the arrested in Texas for planning to pump racist terrorists cyanide gas into a synagogue. off the streets. Workers must crush these vermin in the egg. What was missing from the SF action on May 5 was the integrated

William Leonard of Lynwood, was struck kids get together, they call it a sorority are picked up again, a gang affiliation on American and killed by more than a dozen bul­ or fraternity. When it's black or Latino a profile card sets them up to be arrested, lets when he attempted to comply with kids, they talk about gangs." beaten or blown away as "known crimi­ conflicting orders from deputies about Norman Curry of the Santa Monica nal elements." The NAACP refused to go Apartheid ... whether or not to put up his hands. NAACP told WV that when his group along with this continuing victimization. (continued from page 16) protested the brutal treatment of the Both the NAACP and MAPA are back­ clean up other people's trash. Four were "Operation Hammer" youths in the Pacific Palisades 'case, the ing the Palisades Park civil suit. The taken to the police station where two Targets Black Youth police promised an internal investigation. NAACP still believes the killer cops can were kept overnight on transparently Systematic war is being waged on But when the cops arrived at a commu­ be reformed by having the worst offend­ fabricated charges. the city's population by the LAPD's nity relations meeting, they treated the ers fired. But the cops, the instruments This outrage occurred while Los Ange­ "Operation Hammer," the "routine" week­ youths as criminals, including.attempting of repression of the bourgeois state, exist les was being rocked by three controver­ end cop assaults which arbitrarily pick to take photos of them. Such mug shots to protect and defend the racist capitalist sial cop murders. On January 11 the cops up thousands of black and Hispanic are used in making "profile cards" for state, not the population. It will take were called in a domestic dispute and residents unlucky enough to be in the youths picked up in police sweeps. These - nothing short of a socialist revolution, fired 26 shots at April May Alvarado, vicinity of a raid. Playing on anti-gang cards record gang affiliations, such as the led by an integrated working-class party, one of which struck her in the forehead hysteria, the now-infamous police barri- false ones taken in forced confessions to sweep away for good the whole mur­ and killed her. On January 23, Oliver . cades imprison entire neighborhoods. The from the youths in Palisades Park. Ifthey derous apparatus of racist state terror.• Beasley, a young Nation of Islam mem­ . phony, hypocritical "war on drugs" is in ber, was shot in the head at pointblank reality a war on the black and Hispanic range during a stop for a routine traffic poor. As Tony Vasquez of the Santa violation. And two weeks later, on Feb­ Monica Mexican American Political As­ SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY ruary 10, an unarmed, nearly blind man, sociation .(MAPA) put it, "When white National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 • (212) 732-7860 Atlanta Detroit Norfolk Box4012 Box 441043 Box 1972, Main PO Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 Boston Los Angeles Oakland Box 840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 32552 Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 (617) 492-3928 (415) 839-0851 The poe is a class-struggle, (213) 380-8239 non-sectarian legal and social Chicago San Francisco defense organization which Box 6441, Main PO Madison Box 5712 champions cases and causes Chicago, IL 60680 Box 2074 San Francisco, CA 94101 in the interest of the whole (312) 663-0715 Madison, WI 53701 (415) 863-6963 of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with C'leveland New York Washington, D.C. the political views of the Box 91037 Box 444, Canal St. Sta. Box 75073 Spartacist League. Cleveland, OH 44101 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013 (216) 781-7500 (212) 267-1025 (202) 636-3537 Withyour contribution of $5 or more receivea subscription to Class-Struggle Defense Notes. For a single copy TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA send $1 to: Toronto Vancouver PartisanDefenseCommittee Box 7198, Station A Box 2717. Main Post Office P.O. Bpx 99, Canal 81. Sta, Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X8 Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X2 NewYork, NY10013 (416) 593-4138 (604) 255-0636

18 MAY 1990 15 ... WfJ/tNE/tS,,111(}(JII/t,

WV Photo Greenhouse/Oakland Tribune San Francisco: Nazi skinheads, bloodied by rocks, bottles and sticks, were surrounded by anti-fascist militants in Union Square, May 5. ascist In• ea s oDte In• ranCISCO• SAN FRANCISCO-An angry, integrat­ cops. But not before the would-be storm­ main part of the anti-fascist demonstra­ In fact. when the Nazi skinheads entered ed demonstration drove a clot of fascist troopers were bloodied. tion spilled into the street, where a the square to face the rage of black and skinheads out of Union Square on May Cowering behind a thin police line, the Confederate flag was shredded and an white protesters, the cops basically 5. The Nazi skinhead American Front frightened group of a dozen little Hitler­ attempt made to burn it. Then the 200­ turned their backs for a minute or so. had announced plans to hold a "white ites were bombarded for some 15 min­ 300 demonstrators marched several But it was only the police who saved workers parade" in the small park at the utes with cans, bottles, rocks, sticks and blocks to Powell and Market where a this bunch of fascists from a really center of San Francisco's fashionable other objects-including a portable radio closing rally was held with an impromptu bad beating. Six anti-fascist protesters shopping and hotel district. When these that hit one fascist in the head. Then the "open mike." were arrested, three on felony charges. race-terrorist scum tried to goose-step cops pulled a paddy wagon into the park Without the organizing influence of a Drop all charges against the anti-fascist into the park with a large Confederate and the racist creeps ran for shelter like Tom Metzger or David Duke, the skin­ protesters! flag and wearing Nazi-type uniforms, scared rabbits-saved by the state which heads are lumpen criminal elements· The May 5 rout was the second in a hundreds of anti-fascists sent them run­ these genocidal nuts call the "ZOG" given to violent unpredictability, which week for the SF skins. On May Day, ning to take refuge behind a cordon of ("Zionist Occupation Government"). The even the racist cops hav~little use for. continued on page 15 LAPD's American Apartheid LOS ANGELES-An integrated group teenagers were told by the cops that the of black and Hispanic youths from the scenic park where movie stars come to Santa Monica area thought they could play polo and where the Reagans lived enjoy a holiday at nearby Will Rogers prior to the 1980 presidential elections State Park in exclusive Pacific Palisades was "for rich white people" only. One on Lincoln's Birthday. Instead, the reali­ cop underlined what was really going on ty of racist America came crashing down by taunting, "Just because that n----r on them. They were getting ready to Mandela got out, that doesn't give you leave the park after several hours of guys the right to go anywhere you want." picnicking and ball playing last February The day before, South African black 12. Not used to such a scene in this lily­ leader Nelson Mandela was released af­ white enclave, the park rangers called the ter 27 years in the jails of the white­ LAPD, who arrived waving 12-gauge supremacist apartheid regime. The LAPD shotguns. They forced the 30 teenagers wants to enforce apartheid here! to lie face down in the dirt for two and Hubbard described how the teenagers a half hours of brutal, degrading interro­ were "interrogated" as they lay in the gation. As Jermaine Hubbard put it, "We dirt: "I was kicked in the side of the ribs came to the park to celebrate Lincoln's and asked if I was from a gang. When I birthday, and we still have to listen to said, 'no,' I was handcuffed and hit racial remarks more than a hundred years numerous times." Others made up the after he freed the slaves." name of a gang in a desperate attempt to At a press conference April 10, law­ stop being beaten. Toward the end of the yers for the group announced they are ordeal, the cops made the youths crawl filing a civil suit against the city for 30 yards on their hands and knees and Clark/S~'~ta Monica Outlook physicaland mental damages. According oink like pigs. Then they were forced to Black and Hispanic youths protest the racist cop brutality they encountered to the Los Angeles Times (11 April), the - continued on page 15 when they tried to picnic in exclusive Pacific Palisades park.

16 18 MAY 1990