Revolution No. 17 August 2020 50¢ The Racist Police Murder of George Floyd Only Revolution Can Bring Justice By Gordon Barnes as catalyzing moments for the current rebellion. They are not This article was first pub- Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group unique, but rather horrendously lished in June in Other Voices at routine, with previous waves disobedientbodies.com and re- reaching public attention in 2011, published at internationalist.org. 2014, 2015, while in reality they Amidst the unprecedented occur all the time. COVID-19 pandemic, the United That George Floyd repeat- States has been wracked by na- edly cried out “I can’t breathe” tionwide protests against racist po- while Derek Chauvin noncha- lice brutality and murder. Nightly lantly snuffed out his life is a we hear the helicopters overhead; chilling reminder of Eric Gar- daily come new images of police ner’s last words as an NYPD violence, repression, curfews, ar- officer strangled him to death in rests and the threat of martial law. 2014. Then, as now, a massive When talking heads and upsurge of discontent has fol- politicos decry the ongoing pro- lowed. What is different now is tests as having “nothing to do” that it occurs against the back- with getting justice for George drop of a profound economic Floyd, they seek to defame the crisis triggered by the pandemic. countless thousands (myself As the contradictions of Ameri- among them) who are filling Thousands of young protesters outside Mission High School in San Francisco, June 3, begin can society are laid bare for all the streets day after day in fury march demanding justice for George Floyd (in portrait), murdered by Minneapolis police. to see, from the police killings, and outrage. But this much is to the incapacity and inadequacy true: the protests aren’t only about the lence meted out by police forces across an explosive situation of social ferment. of healthcare infrastructure, to capitalism’s racist lynching of George Floyd at the the country. This historic truth, when Floyd’s murder was the proverbial anarchy of production, we must ask: Why hands of the Minneapolis Police. They juxtaposed to the combined coronavirus straw which broke the camel’s back, as does this continue to happen, how will it are about the everyday brutalization and and economic crisis’ disproportionate and it came shortly after the police murder of stop, and what does the future hold as these violence which is endemic under Ameri- horrific toll on black people,1 has created Breonna Taylor and the racist vigilante protests develop? can capitalism. Black people, as an op- killing (by an ex-cop and his son) of Ah- Why is it that, despite the waves of 1 Citing a paper from the Annals of Epidemiology, pressed race/color-caste – integrated into NPR (30 May) reports that “while disproportion- maud Arbery. The murders of Floyd, Tay- protest and cyclical pledges of “reform,” the U.S. economy but forcibly segregated ately black counties account for only 30% of the lor and Arbery are new notches in a grim the police keep murdering black people? at the bottom of society – bear and have U.S. population, they were the location of 56% of tally of black death at the hands of the capi- The list of their names is endless. As borne disproportionate levels of the vio- COVID-19 deaths.” talist state and racist vigilantes and served continued on page 12 Democrats, Republicans: Parties of Racist Repression As Protests Rock U.S., Cops Keep Killing By Maeve themselves met with police brutality. Cops and National The brutal May 25 kill- Guard troops launched tear ing of George Floyd by Min- gas and pepper spray, fired neapolis cop Derek Chauvin rubber bullets, fired flash-bang set off the biggest sustained grenades and beat protest- protests in the history of this ers with clubs and batons. In country. Multiracial crowds some cases, these “non-lethal” of demonstrators, largely means of repression resulted young but including people in permanent injury, as in the of all ages, filled the streets case of journalist Linda Ti- to voice outrage against rac- rado. In Minneapolis on May ist police terror, not only in WeWe RememberRemember 29, a rubber bullet penetrated major urban centers such as her goggles, blinding her in New York, Los Angeles and From left: David McAtee, Sean Monterrosa, Rayshard Brooks. one eye. At a July 11 protest Chicago, but in small, often in Portland, Oregon, federal officers fired a conservative towns throughout the country Many protesters hoped and believed killings by police and racist vigilantes in the “less-lethal” projectile at Donavan La Bella’s as well. Many participants remarked that that deeply-felt mass indignation against rac- U.S., the repressive forces have continued to head, fracturing his face and skull. they were demonstrating for the first time in ism would lead to a fundamental change in murder black people. In some cases people As we have noted, Democratic mayors their lives. Solidarity protests erupted inter- the way police operate. But the bitter reality have been killed right in the midst of protests are the bosses of the cops from New York nationally, with some of the first occurring – that racist cop terror derives from the very against this deadly scourge. to Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Bal- in Liberia and Nigeria on May 28, soon af- function of the police in capitalist America At one protest after another, demonstra- timore, Atlanta, Louisville, Albuquerque terward spreading to over 60 countries on – was shown once again. Even against the tors who came out to demand an end to un- all continents except Antarctica. backdrop of worldwide fury over constant relenting racist violence from the cops were continued on page 4 Protests Denounce Murders of Transgender People in Racist, Capitalist U.S.A.

By Will Samwel Leopardi Facebook Swiger Photography As we face a new school year in Fall 2020 amid the surreal realities of a society in crisis, Revolution recalls a protest at the City University of New York that has many echoes for us today. In Fall 2015, after a year of Black Lives Matter marches that were sparked by the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, racist cop terror con- tinued unabated. In a rural Texas jail, lynch- law terror had cut short the life of education worker and activist Sandra Bland in July of that year, bringing a new wave of horror and outrage. Not long thereafter, the CUNY Inter- From left: Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Jayne Thompson, Layleen Polanco. nationalist Clubs brought students, teachers, rendous death toll – 25 transgender people ly bigotry against transgender people. multiple stab wounds and her legs cut off. workers and activists together to remember had been killed in the U.S. so far this year, In his classic work on building a revolu- The particularly gruesome nature of Sandra Bland and others of our sisters and outpacing last year’s total of 27.2 Of those tionary workers party, What Is To Be Done? her murder underscores the deep-seated brothers – particularly transgender women – killed in 2019, 91% were black. Moreover, (1902), Russian revolutionary leader V.I. prejudices and dangers facing so many who who had been targeted by racist murder. At a 2014 report by the National Coalition of Lenin emphasized that such a party must do not conform to bourgeois gender norms the protest, Revolution reported, “carefully Anti-Violence Programs found that trans- be a tribune (defender) of all the oppressed, today. While talking-head hypocrites give made posters showed faces and names of gender people who survived violent attacks “able to react to every manifestation of tyr- endless speeches to glorify “the land of the transgender women, mainly African Ameri- were seven times more likely than non- anny and oppression.” Revolutionary Marx- free” (sic), and politicians parade for votes can and Latina, who have been murdered this transgender people to also experience police ists seek to expose the roots of oppression today in Pride marches, let us recall that the year, including London Chanel, Taja Gabri- violence when reporting those attacks. as part of our struggle to bring the power of murder of Rem’mie Fells occurred fifty-one elle DeJesus and Ashton O’Hara.”1 The capitalist dystopia called the United the multiracial working class into the fight years after Stonewall. That is, more than Yet in the racist, capitalist United States States is a living hell for the oppressed, triply to uproot all forms of social oppression. half a century after the “riot against police” of America, as we and millions more are con- so for black and Latino trans people. Endem- To win that fight, the workers and op- that the big-business media and politicians tinually reminded with each new name that ic, structural racism is key to how capitalism pressed will have to take power away from of both parties denounced – in which Mar- police terror and murderous bigotry add to operates in this country. Added to the deadly the oppressors and exploiters in a proletar- sha P. Johnson and other courageous Afri- the list, “it never stops.” Since Minneapolis mix is backlash and bigotry against anything ian revolution to open the way for a class- can American and Latina trans women were cops murdered George Floyd on May 25, deemed “threatening” to bourgeois society’s less socialist society on a world scale. Un- in the forefront of repelling violent police mass demonstrations against police terror institution of the nuclear family. Emerging like reformist leaders and groups that claim attacks right here in New York City. have swept the U.S. Amid this upsurge, pro- from the whole history of class society’s sub- “justice” can be achieved by voting Demo- On May 9, 33-year-old Jayne Thompson testers have called attention to the fate of Af- jugation of women, the nuclear family is cen- crat or relying on capitalism’s (in)justice was shot and killed by a state trooper rican American and Latino trans people killed tral to the ways property is passed down by system of cops, courts and jails, the Revo- in Orchard Mesa, Colorado. A newly at the hands of police, prison guards and re- the ruling class and new generations of work- lutionary Internationalist Youth emphasiz- transitioning trans woman, Thompson has actionary bigots. In New York on June 14, ers are brought up to be exploited. Upholding es: Only revolution can bring justice! been described by her close friend Samwel and “defending” the sanctity of this key insti- Leopardi as an “amazing person” who was roughly 15,000 gathered outside the Brook- Rem’mie Fells, Jayne lyn Museum for a rally and silent march re- tution of women’s oppression means demon- “thoroughly loved and cared for” (them, membering those lives and highlighting the izing as “unnatural” and dangerous anything Thompson, Layleen Polanco – 19 June). She was frequently harassed threat of violence, especially state violence, outside the rigid boundaries of traditional We Remember and targeted for being transgender and faced by transgender people in general and gender roles.3 For many, being an African Every time this sick society steals some- had children from a previous relationship black trans people in particular. American or Latina trans person can mean one’s life for the supposed “crime” of being whose mother was not accepting of As of early August – according to a finding oneself in the crosshairs of racial op- transgender, this is an attack on us all – work- Thompson’s gender identity, according study tracking documented cases in this hor- pression, the oppression of women and dead- ers and oppressed people everywhere who to Leopardi, who noted the adverse effect are subject to the violence and exploitation of this had on her mental health. On the 2 See “Violence Against the Transgender and 1 See “CUNY Internationalist Speakout the same ruling class that decrees “thou shalt day of her murder, Thompson was found Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2020” Against Racist Repression,” Revolution No. at hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-trans- not transgress our gender norms.” Remem- unresponsive outside a local grocery store, 12, March 2016. The speakout also featured and-gender-non-conforming-community- bering those cut down in this way – togeth- where she had remained motionless for the reading of a special statement sent to the in-2020. er with Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Sandra hours. State trooper Jason Wade claims that rally by parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa teach- 3 See “Gay Rights and Socialist Revolution,” Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and when he arrived on the scene to confront ers college students abducted in Mexico. Revolution No. 4, September 2007. so many more – and bringing their names Thompson, she lunged at him with a knife, into the marches and protests, we help make so he proceeded to shoot her dead. Visit the League for the Fourth International/ the point that they are not nameless, faceless Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Po- Internationalist Group on the Internet statistics. They were our sisters and brothers lanco was a 27-year-old black transgender http://www.internationalist.org with friends, families and aspirations, whose woman from the New York City area. Po- lives were criminally cut short. lanco was a participant in the local ballroom Write to the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth: Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Jayne scene, a member of the House of Xtrava- [email protected] Thompson, Layleen Polanco – these are just ganza, where largely African American and Write to CUNY Internationalist Clubs: [email protected] some of the names we remember today. Latino transgender people compete in run- 27-year-old Rem’mie Fells was a black way competitions and dance performances. trans woman; a dancer and artist, remem- One of her fellow house members described bered as “a social butterfly who was very her as “so spunky, so full of life ... and posi- close to her mother” with “dreams of being tive, always, never, ever, ever drama” (The Revolution a fashion designer” (Philly Voice, 12 June). City, 10 June 2019). In April 2019, Polan- co was arrested for an alleged assault and Newspaper of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, According to the Philadelphia Inquirer (12 youth section of the Internationalist Group, and CUNY students from June), “Fells made outfits and wigs for peo- held on $500 bail on drug and prostitution the Internationalist Clubs, for the program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, ple in her freelance fashion work and also charges stemming from a 2017 arrest. She published in accord with the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the organized the ‘Rock the Runway – A Trans was kept in solitary confinement on Rikers League for the Fourth International. Empowerment Fashion Show’ that took Island, where she became suicidal. On 15 place last year….” She was brutally killed May 2019, Polanco was sent to Elmhurst EDITOR: Julius Drago in Philadelphia only a couple of weeks after Hospital, where she was confined in the psy- Revolution is published by Mundial Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY George Floyd was murdered in Minneapo- chiatric prison ward. When she returned to 10008, U.S.A. Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: [email protected] lis. Rem’mie Fells’ body was found in the Rikers, she was put back in solitary and left No. 17 August 2020 Schuylkill River on June 8, badly beaten with unattended for 47 minutes despite suffering 2 Revolution No Segregation at Anti-Racist Protests! At a number of demonstrations that then non-black disabled people, fol- the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth lowed by everyone else. Fortunately, the has attended in the past period, liberal or- crowd of thousands was already inte- ganizers have literally tried to segregate grated and it stayed that way. protesters in line with their notions of Against the basic understanding hierarchies of oppression. Starkly coun- that effective struggle against the dou- terposed to real struggle against oppres- ble and triple oppression of transgender sion, such “privilege theory”-inspired people means joining forces with all the

antics are no joke. In the face of the cops, Internationalist photo oppressed, such calls seek to draw lines Immigration and Customs Enforcement of rank and hierarchy separating each (I.C.E.) and other repressive forces, this sector off from the others. Sometimes expression of guilt-tripping identity poli- this is accompanied by guilt-edged tics liberalism can quickly endanger the calls for “white allies” to act separately safety of protesters. to “protect” the oppressed, rather than A glaring example of this occurred working together in a common fight of at a 14 July 2019 protest against an comrades in struggle. This not only cre- I.C.E. raid carried out the day before ates the illusion that upon seeing a line in Sunset Park, a largely immigrant of white protesters, cops will thereby and Latino neighborhood in Brook- refrain from attacking the crowd, but lyn, New York. Cop cars continually can put a target on some demonstrators circled the block where the crowd of who are most vulnerable to repression over 100 was gathered. Using a public- and in some cases deportation. To de- address system, liberal organizers told Internationalist contingent at June 28 march in NYC. the crowd to form two separate groups. feat vicious and dangerous enemies of They said those who “feel vulnerable” – confused – stayed behind. (It was later they – doubtless despite their intentions – the oppressed, what’s needed is uniting as a result of the previous day’s I.C.E. stated that organizers had been incorrectly created a situation virtually ideal for cops, the exploited and oppressed in struggle raid should gather together to form one told that I.C.E. agents had been seen I.C.E. and/or anti-immigrant bigots to against each and every form of oppres- group. “People with privilege,” orga- standing near a sanctuary church a couple identify and isolate people. Our comrades sion, bringing in the power of the multi- nizers instructed, should remain where of blocks away, but it was “only cops” refused to participate in this grotesque and racial working class. they were standing and link arms with in plainclothes.) Intoning the standard dangerous display. So as we pointed out amid these each other. A kind of aisle was created popular-frontist chant of “el pueblo unido This year, at a June 28 protest called in and other episodes, attempts to seg- between them and the group that the or- jamás será vencido” (the people united will downtown Manhattan by the Reclaim Pride regate protests based on identity and ganizers’ liberal segregation tactics had never be defeated), the organizers, having Coalition, a lead organizer announced that “privilege” are a very real danger to the identified as being more vulnerable. grievously disunited those who had come the march, which highlighted the issue of oppressed. In opposing liberal and na- Then a cop car pulled up next to out to protest together against immigration police brutality, would be separated into tionalist attempts to impose segregation the protest; an organizer frantically said raids, then led those who still remained groups – according to tiers of oppression. at protests, we and other class-struggle something into the PA system. Most of to the church. So in idiotically acting out They instructed black trans people to go militants uphold the most basic interests the crowd took off running, while others their “check-your-privilege” theatrics, first, followed by black disabled people, of the fight against oppression.n

vanaugh Confirma- Moreover, just days before the Supreme tion: You Can’t Fight Court issued its ruling, the U.S. Department Supreme Court Reac- of Health and Human Services implemented tion with Democrats” a new rule removing discrimination protec- in The International- tions for gay, lesbian and transgender peo- ist No. 53, September- ple under the Affordable Care Act. “Under October 2018): the new rule, a transgender person could, “From its inception, for example, be refused care for a checkup the Supreme Court of at a doctor’s office,” the associate director the United States has of HIV policy at Kaiser Family Foundation

Internationalist photo been a bastion of reac- told National Public Radio (12 June). This is tion. It was intended as the latest in a string of attacks on the rights a check on Congress of trans people by the Trump administra- (a ‘barrier’ to the ‘en- tion, from banning transgender people from croachments and op- openly serving in the military to mandating pressions of the rep- resentative body,’ as that prisoners be placed in housing units Alexander Hamilton based on their biological sex, effectively put it in Federalist Pa- sentencing them to continual sexual assault Internationalist Club at Hunter College held a speakout against racist repression on 2 per 78), and thus inher- or being beaten or killed. The working class September 2015, highlighting some of the African American and Latina trans people who had ently anti-democratic. and all defenders of democratic rights must been murdered that year. “The reality, as we actively oppose discrimination and attacks on transgender people. from epileptic seizures and being at risk for given the recent confirmations of reaction- have insisted on issues ranging from abortion rights to freedom You can’t rely on the bourgeois state to suicide. Polanco died on 7 June 2019 of an ary justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Ka- for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the foremost protect the rights of the oppressed. Whether epileptic seizure. Recently released surveil- vanaugh, the former wrote for the majority class-war prisoner in the United States, Democrat or Republican, the capitalist politi- that “an employer who fires an individual lance footage shows guards laughing at her is that there is no justice in the capital- cians in control of the state, upholding the core as they approached her cell where she lay merely for being gay or transgender defies ist courts. To defend our rights, working interests of the ruling class, wage attack after unresponsive. They waited about an hour the law” (New York Times, 16 June). people and their allies must mobilize our brutal attack on the oppressed. and a half before calling for help. Marxists defend any actual reform or class power.” To put an end to this terror requires put- measure that benefits people oppressed by Just as the Supreme Court issued a ruling No Justice in the ting an end to the capitalist system itself, the capitalist social order. At the same time, against discrimination based on sexual orien- Capitalist Courts which in the U.S. was built on the backs of given illusions constantly pushed by liberal tation and gender, it can as easily reverse it. slaves and today continually wields racist ter- On June 15, the Supreme Court ruled representatives of that same order, we un- That is in the nature of a body set up by the ror to uphold the class rule of the bourgeoi- that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which derline the basic fact that any kind of reli- “Founding Fathers,” when slavery was the sie. What’s needed is a complete break with outlawed discrimination based on race, reli- ance on the Supreme Court is a recipe for law of the land, as one more anti-democratic 4 Democrats, Republicans and all parties of gion, sex or national origin, applies to sexual defeat. As the Internationalist Group wrote barrier to the exploited and oppressed. capital, and the formation of a revolutionary orientation and gender expression. In a 6-to- at the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Su- 4 See “Slavery and the Constitution” on page 15 workers party that can lead the multi-ethnic, 3 ruling that came as a surprise to some, preme Court confirmation hearing (see “Ka- of this issue of Revolution. multiracial working class to power. n August 2020 3 Cops Killing... continued from page 1 and one city after another where racist mur- Elijah McClain (1996-2019) der by the police is unending – despite the raft of “police reform” schemes carried out Walking home from the convenience soothe them. National protests against the over the years. Democratic governors have store with an iced tea in hand can be May 25 murder of George Floyd by Min- called out the National Guard in one state enough to get you killed in this country – neapolis cops served as the backdrop to a after another. NYC’s mayor Bill de Blasio, if you’re black. The infamous murder of violin vigil held a little over a month later the Bernie Sanders backer who not long ago 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 by for McClain at a park in Aurora’s Mu- was hailed as “progressive” hero, went out racist vigilante George Zimmerman made nicipal Center. On June 27, string players of his way to back up the NYPD when cops that abundantly clear to anyone willing Family photo from across the U.S. gathered to pay their drove a cruiser into BLM protesters. to see. In the midst of the most banal and respects to the young violinist. Bigot-in-chief Trump sent federal forces routine of errands – purchasing a drink and They were met with violent police against protesters near the White House and some candy at the local convenience store repression – batons, tear gas and pepper launched Operation Legend to send feds into in his father’s Sanford, Florida neighbor- spray, participants reported, from police in cities as an election ploy. Across the country, hood – Martin was gunned down. Because riot gear who charged the vigil. “It was re- repression by official forces of the capitalist he looked “suspicious” to a racist. Because ally a surreal scene.… You looked to the state has spurred more attacks by far rightists, he was a young black man. left to see all of us standing there with our and there has been a growing phenomenon of Fast forward to 24 August 2019 in hands up and the violinists continuing to vehicles being driven into protesters. Aurora, Colorado. Different date, differ- play, and you look to your right and see hundreds of cops in riot gear” (The Cut, David McAtee – Sean ent state, same racist U.S.A. A young black man named Elijah McClain was listening 29 June). For the cops, even playing music Monterrosa – Rayshard Brooks to music as he walked home from a conve- to honor the memory of yet another young Elijah McClain These are three of the people whose nience store after picking up an iced tea for black man cut down by their racist terror lives were stolen even as mass protests his brother. Someone decided the 23-year- if the officer’s action contributed as well.” was an unforgivable offense to be drowned against racist police terror continued. Only old massage therapist looked “suspicious” The three officers involved in McClain’s out and stifled with racist brutality. three of the many. These three were killed and called 911. When police arrived and murder were cleared of wrongdoing – the The unbearable story of how Elijah by the cops in the space of just 12 days in confronted McClain, one of them placed usual, outrageous outcome in a country McClain’s short life was brought to an end early June. Let us remember their names. him in a carotid hold, which is meant to cut where police murder black people with is one of countless stories of black people being killed simply for living their lives. Racist terror took the life of 53-year- off blood flow to the brain. Paramedics -ar impunity on a near-daily basis. As we fight to carry through our call – old African American David McAtee on rived 15 minutes later, supposedly to treat Elijah McClain was a self-taught vio- “Only revolution can bring justice” – we June 1, amidst a rampage by police and the him. Instead, they injected McClain (who linist and guitarist. He used to play his violin for stray cats and dogs, believing this helped will always remember his name. n National Guard. The place: Louisville, Ken- was 5’6” and weighed 140 lbs.) with ket- tucky, where protests were ongoing since amine, a powerful sedative often used as police killed Breonna Taylor, a 26-year- an anesthetic and a veterinary tranquilizer. old paramedic, in her own home over two It was double the usual dose. He went into months before the murder of George Floyd. cardiac arrest on his way to the hospital, As police and National Guard, imposing a where he died three days later. racist curfew, moved through the mainly The coroner’s report said McClain’s African American West End neighborhood, cause of death was “undetermined,” but McAtee was serving food at an outdoor noted hemorrhaging in his neck and abra- stand that was part of his small barbeque sions on his face, back and legs. The Den- restaurant. Considered a pillar of the com- Andy Cross / Denver Post ver affiliate of ABC (10 November 2019) munity, he was known for his kindness and stated that the report also noted that “an generosity. One local resident of the area idiosyncratic drug reaction (an unexpected recalled that he “tried to feed everybody. reaction to a drug even at the therapeutic He wouldn’t even charge half of them. He would just feed them so they wouldn’t go level) cannot be ruled out” and essentially hungry” (NBC News, 3 June). blamed McClain himself for his own mur- All of a sudden, as shown in video foot- der: “most likely the decedent’s physical Riot police attack violin vigil for Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado, June 27. age, the cops and National Guard just opened exertion contributed to death. It is unclear fire on people mingling outside McAtee’s restaurant and at a gas station across the his knees with his hands up. One officer in the back, one of the cops stood on his into a crowd of demonstrators, then fatally street, shooting pepper balls at them. Several fired five shots at Monterrosa with a shoulders; the other kicked his body as he shot Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man rushed inside the restaurant to try to escape high-powered rifle, shooting through the lay on the ground (NBC News, 18 June). who, together with his African American the onslaught. David McAtee tried to shel- windshield of an unmarked police vehicle One of the cops who murdered Ray- fiancée Whitney Mitchell, a quadruple am- ter his young niece, who was almost struck and hitting him in the back of the head. shard Brooks has now been charged with putee who was in a wheelchair, frequently in the head by the incoming munitions, and The cop claims he mistook a hammer in murder. Yet it would be a terrible illusion to participated in the anti-racist protests. sought to defend his family, as is his right. Monterrosa’s pocket for a gun. conclude that somehow “justice” is now on During the historic protests that have The police and National Guard proceeded to Now press coverage reports on an in- the way. Over 1,700 civilians a year have swept the United States and other countries fire 18 bullets at him, killing him on the spot. depth investigation by the Open Vallejo been killed by the police since 2014, over over the past period, many have been asking Sean Monterrosa was a 22-year-old news organization showing that some of 28,000 since 1 January 2000. As of June 10, how it is possible that the cops keep killing. Latino from San Francisco’s Mission Dis- the city’s cops have long engaged in a this year 889 people had already been mur- The most fundamental answer is that racist trict, an up-and-coming rapper, counselor in “badge of honor” ritual, “holding barbe- dered by cops.1 Since 2005, according to an police terror comes from the very nature of a community youth program and participant cues and bending their badges each time NBC News report (13 March), only 35 cops these repressive forces, the armed fist of the in the Black Lives Matter movement. On they killed someone in the line of duty.” have been convicted of any crime related to state. The police exist to uphold the prop- June 2, he was murdered by police in nearby The investigation began after last year’s an on-duty fatal shooting. The number who erty, wealth and power of the ruling class in Vallejo, a city notorious for its trigger-happy police murder of Willie McCoy in a Taco have been convicted of murder: five, and capitalist America, which emerged on the cops. (As of 2014, police shootings there Bell drive-through (Newsweek, 30 July). only three have seen those convictions stand. basis of genocide against Native Americans were 38 times the national average [KQED, Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Afri- This is just part of what we mean when and the system of chattel slavery; and whose 20 May 2014].) This is the Bay Area town can American man, was killed by police in we say: only revolution can bring justice. profit-driven social system is based on and where last year, police shot Willie McCoy, a Atlanta, Georgia on June 12. The father of As we go to press, the constant toll of continues to deepen enormous inequality. 20-year-old black man, while he was sleep- three daughters and a stepson, Brooks had racist murder and brutality continues. The To put an end to racist police terror we have ing in his car, firing 55 bullets in 3.5 seconds fallen asleep in his car while at a Wendy’s list of those cut down grows ever-longer, and to put an end to that social system: capital- (The Guardian, 5 June). drive-through. for many young people the horror is over- ism. The urgency of socialist revolution is Shortly before his murder, Monterrosa When Atlanta Police Department cops whelming. New reports arrive just about ev- clearer every day – helping build the multi- texted his sister a petition demanding arrived, they questioned him, administered ery day – such as the events at a Black Lives racial, multi-ethnic revolutionary vanguard justice for George Floyd. During a night a sobriety test and then sought to arrest Matter protest on July 25 in Austin, Texas. to lead it is our task. of protests in Vallejo, a little past midnight him. Brooks broke free. The cops said he There, a Fort Hood army sergeant drove David McAtee, Sean Monterrosa, Ray- cops pulled up to a Walgreens in response took a taser from them – yet video shows 1 See fatalencounters.org and “To Uproot Racist shard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd to reports of “looting.” Monterrosa stayed he was running away when they shot him Oppression: Socialist Revolution,” The Interna- and so many more: WE REMEMBER. Only in the pharmacy’s parking lot, dropping to in the back, twice. After shooting him twice tionalist No. 60, May-July 2020. revolution can bring justice! n 4 Revolution Rip Out the Turnstiles – For Free Mass Transit Cops Off the Trains and Out of the Stations! The following was distributed as a the cops, whose guns leaflet by the Revolutionary International- were pointing through ist Youth at November 2019 protests against the windows from out- racist police attacks on the NYC subways.

side the car. Seconds Gothamist before the doors open, UPDATE: On Friday, 22 November Napier is heard calling 2019, a second “emergency action” out to other passengers march against NYPD brutality was to “call my mom,” ter- called, this time in Harlem. Some 1,000 rified that these may demonstrators took off from the Adam be his last moments. Clayton Powell state office building on As the doors open, po- 125th Street, surrounded by hundreds of lice storm the car and police. The Revolutionary International- viciously drag Napier ist Youth chant of “Only revolution can to the ground. Rough- bring justice” was picked up by many ly a dozen cops, some in the crowd. Cops frequently blocked with guns still drawn, streets, forcing the march to turn, and pile onto the young in the end ploughed into demonstrators man and proceed to using their bikes as battering rams. In to- cuff him. His “crime”? tal, 57 people were arrested as the police Not having $2.75 for besieged the heavily black and Latino subway fare. march. The RIY demands that everyone The next day a arrested be immediately released, and second video went vi- all charges be dropped! ral of a rabid gang of Hundreds protesting cop brutality marched through Harlem in the face of an army of police cops punching black constantly blocking streets and arresting demonstrators. Over 1,500 people protested on No- youth in the Jay St. vember 1 in downtown Brooklyn against Metrotech station, as if in a drunken pub alist Group sign declared: “We Remember This police crackdown is racist to the a wave of racist police brutality in the sub- brawl. Lawyers with Brooklyn Defender Allan Feliz, Antonio Williams, Victor Her- core – and it is massive. According to nyc. ways. Protesters marched through the streets Services revealed that one of the cops had nandez – Victims of NYPD Terror.” This gov, in the three months from April to June and blocked major intersections along At- been involved in a prior arrest in which he escalation of police terror is a direct result of this year, 15,820 summonses were is- lantic Avenue and Fulton Street, chanting tore a one-year-old child from his mother’s of so-called “broken windows” policing, sued for fare evasion; 71% were to African “being broke is not a crime” and “What’s arms and brandished a taser against a crowd championed by former mayors Bloomberg Americans and Latinos, who were also hit our mission? Abolition.” The Revolutionary of outraged onlookers. Two weeks later, yet and Giuliani and continued by de Blasio, of with 86% of the 682 arrests in the same pe- Internationalist Youth joined in. The RIY another video surfaced showing police de- massively arresting African American and riod for the same non-crime. Likewise, the calls for cops out of the subways, and to rip taining a woman at the Broadway Junction Latino youth for petty “crimes.” recent targeting of subway vendors is espe- out the turnstiles – for free mass transit, station for selling churros. The woman was In response to the video of Napier being cially menacing to Latina women and black run by the transit workers rather than the crying as she was taken away in handcuffs manhandled by NYPD thugs, seen by over 3 youth, some of whom are only children. real estate speculators and Democratic Party and her cart was confiscated. million viewers, de Blasio defended the cops’ Cuomo and the MTA have tried to justify pols who control the system today, and have These wanton attacks occur in the brutal action, saying that someone had identi- the heavy cop presence by citing an increase been running it into the ground for decades. context of a recent spike in fatal shootings fied him “as someone they saw with a gun.” in crime and assaults on transit workers. But The outrage against the armed fist of by the killer cops of the New York Police But Napier did not have a gun, so they charged even the NYPD chief called Cuomo’s bluff, the state was in response to two widely Department (NYPD). Six people have him with fare evasion for jumping the turnstile labeling it “a total mischaracterization” (AM viewed videos of assaults on black people been killed by police in the past month trying to escape from the pistol-brandishing New York, 31 October 2019). From the be- by police. On October 25 a video emerged and eleven in total since the beginning of police gang. He was another black man in ginning, when the plan was announced, de showing 19-year-old Adrian Napier sitting the year. (The trigger-happy lawmen even the wrong place at the wrong time in the rac- Blasio threw his weight behind it, declaring on a train, hands up, as passengers scattered killed two of their own in “friendly” fire.) ist U.S.A. As for the woman selling churros, “the additional officers we’re deploying to to the ends of the car to get out of range of At the November 1 protest, an Internation- de Blasio declared “she shouldn’t have been the subway system will protect riders, pre- there” and that “the vent fare evasion and respond in emergen- officers comported cies,” while adding that transit workers “need themselves properly” more protection.” But neither Cuomo nor de (New York Times, 11 Blasio give a damn about worker safety. This November 2019). is all about racist terror. The terror on While Bloomberg was in office, “bro- the subways comes ken windows” also meant “stop-and-frisk” months after Dem- – the NYPD practice of racially profiling ocratic governor African American and Latino men for un- Internationalist photo Andrew Cuomo’s constitutional searches. The policy was be- agreement with the gun under Giuliani by NYPD commissioner Metropolitan Transit William Bratton, who was then brought Authority and Demo- back as top cop by de Blasio. The ostensible cratic mayor Bill de aim was to “get guns off the street,” but the Blasio to flood the real purpose of stop-and-frisk was to terror- trains, stations and ize the non-white majority of the popula- buses with an addi- tion. In 2011, the stops peaked at 685,724 tional 500 uniformed (see “Thousands Protest Racist ‘Stop and cops in a so-called Frisk’,” The Internationalist, Summer “quality of life” bid 2012). In the 12 years of Bloomberg’s three to stop “fare beaters.” terms as mayor, there were over 5 million RIY chants of “Only revolution can bring justice” and “Eric Garner, Michael Brown, shut the Are they also target- stops, 90% of black and Latino men, the whole system down” were picked up by many in the crowd during 22 November 2019 march ing high cholesterol vast majority innocent of any crime. through Harlem. from churros?! continued on page 8 August 2020 5 For Labor/Black/Immigrant Mobilizations Against Police Killings! Racist Cop Terror Stalks Connecticut The following was issued as a Revo- with things such as police having to obtain lutionary Internationalist Youth leaflet in SoundCloud, Cruz family, Negron family permission from superiors before jumping in Connecticut in the summer of 2019, fol- front of a moving vehicle during a pursuit. lowing a string of racist police murders The rest of the bill is dedicated to protect- against black and Latino youth. ing cops’ access to their firearms following a The first half of 2019 has seen a ram- shooting incident – preventing any penalties page of racist police murder and repression after they seek mental health treatment or af- in Connecticut. On April 16, a young black ter they voluntarily surrender their gun for a couple, 21-year-old Paul Witherspoon time. The bill also reinforces racist “gun con- III and 23-year-old Stephanie Washing- ton, were pulled over by two Yale PD and trol” measures aimed against undocumented Hamden PD cops in New Haven, who pro- immigrants, a population already deprived of ceeded to unload a barrage of gunfire into its most basic democratic rights. Gun control their car, wounding Washington. Four days laws, historically created and used to enforce later, on April 20, 18-year-old Anthony racist repression against black people, must Jose “Chulo” Vega Cruz was murdered by be opposed by all those who understand the police in Wethersfield. After initiating a Victims of racist police terror. From left: Zoe Dowdell, Jose “Chulo” Vega racist nature of the capitalist state and the car chase, the cops intentionally jumped in Cruz, Jayson Negron. need for working class self-defense. front of Chulo’s vehicle with guns drawn propped up by racist oppression since the the gruesome case of Sandra Bland, who was Various police departments in Connect- and shot him in the head twice. origins of this country. the victim of racist lynch “justice” in Texas. icut – Fairfield, Westport, Stratford, Trum- Those who dare speak out against rac- Nationwide attention was drawn to rac- In Hartford County, the Hispanic population bull and Norwalk, as well as Southern Con- ist police terror have also been the targets ist police terror in mass protests over the mur- is well aware of police racism, with cops necticut State University – have received of repression. On May 9, on the two-year ders of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and others routinely having their guns drawn when national media attention over their collabo- anniversary of the execution-style murder and the brutal military repression following stopping youth in the area. Police chases in ration with the I.C.E. Gestapo. Immigrants of 15-year-old Jayson Negron by Bridge- the Baltimore uprising of 2015 following the Connecticut have killed others as well, like have been victims of police repression else- port cops, a rabid mob of police assaulted a police murder of Freddie Gray. Today in Con- 18-year-old Corbin Cooper, killed in June where in New England. Nelson Fuentes- memorial being held at the site of Jayson’s necticut, police keep close tabs on the mostly 2018 when he was a passenger in a car that Lopez and Nolasco Perez, members of the killing, arresting eleven protesters and a black-led protests. Across the country, they crashed in Bridgeport. Luis Martinez was immigrant rights group Cosecha Massa- journalist from Hearst Connecticut Media. guard provocations by fascist organizations, another victim, a 17-year-old from Hartford chusetts, were arrested by New Hampshire Police terror against black people, Lati- such as the recent “Straight Pride” fascist who was killed in a police chase crash. State Police on May 13 and handed over to nos and immigrants is a fundamental feature provocation in Detroit, where openly armed Outrage over these types of incidents led I.C.E. While both have been released, for of capitalist society. The police were founded Nazis marched through the Motor City with to the passing of a so-called police account- now, both are threatened with deportation. as slave patrols in the South and strikebreak- a police escort. And on the U.S.-Mexico bor- ability and transparency law, SB 380, by the I.C.E. is notorious for targeting political ac- ers in the North, serving the vital interests of der in New Mexico this April, Customs and Connecticut state legislature on June 5. This tivists who defend immigrants’ rights, such the capitalist ruling class. Their function is to Border Protection (CBP) cops collaborated law was written with the participation of state as Siham Biyah of Occupy Boston, as well enforce the racist, capitalist “law and order” with the fascistic United Constitutional Patri- police chiefs as yet another way of assuring as Ravi Ragbir and Jean Montrevil in New upholding the system of private property and ots militia to detain migrants. that the “reforms” would do nothing. The York City. The Revolutionary International- exploitation. The only way to put an end to cop Racist police repression against black law requires police departments to release ist Youth demands: No Deportations! Let terror for good is through socialist revolution. people and Latinos, fascist provocations video footage of police shootings within 96 Perez and Fuentes-Lopez Stay! Relying on Democrats, the bosses of the racist against immigrants, gay, lesbian and hours of an incident. But the state would still killer cops in many major U.S. cities, to bring transgender people, CBP throwing migrant be “investigating” itself – as happens in so You Can’t Fight Trump With “justice” for the victims of the capitalist state children and families into concentration many of these situations, including in Jayson the Democrats is a deadly illusion. Instead, the Revolution- camps, I.C.E. Gestapo raiding immigrant Negron’s murder. Experience has repeatedly Trump’s racist tirade against four black ary Internationalist Youth, youth section of the homes and workplaces – these are attacks shown that for the racist injustice system, a and Latina Democratic congresswomen, Internationalist Group/U.S., calls for labor/ against the entire working class. As Trump cop’s word counts far more than camera foot- one of whom is an immigrant, telling them black/immigrant mobilizations against cop announces vicious mass raids against age of police murder. to “go back” to the “crime infested places terror. As we emphasize in the Internationalist undocumented immigrants, the struggle In regard to how police are to deal with from which they came,” is yet another vile chant in protests against this racist terror: Only against police repression is intimately linked moving vehicles, much of SB 380 has to do continued on page 8 revolution can bring justice! to the fight against anti-immigrant attacks. Connecticut’s recent spate of po- What’s needed are massive mobilizations lice repression is business as usual for bringing out the power of the multiracial departments across the state. On 14 De- working class and oppressed to STOP cember 2017, police in New Britain shot deportations, to smash fascist and racist Internationalist photo and murdered 20-year-old Zoe Dowdell attacks, and to fight for full citizenship in his car, firing over 50 rounds into the rights for all immigrants. As the youth vehicle. They continued shooting even section of the Internationalist Group/U.S., after Zoe was clearly dead. The two wit- the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth nesses to the murder, 18-year-old Noah works to win students and youth to this Young and 15-year-old Caleb Tisdol, struggle, as part of the fight to forge a passengers in Zoe’s car who were also multiracial, multi-ethnic revolutionary shot, were subsequently thrown in jail on workers party that would lead the fight to trumped-up charges. Like in New York overthrow the capitalist system. City, where Ramsey Orta was put behind bars as retribution for filming the 2014 The Capitalist State: chokehold murder of Eric Garner by the Machine of Racist Repression NYPD, this underscores the thoroughly Before video footage of the police racist nature of the bourgeois “justice” murder of “Chulo” Vega Cruz was released system. From the municipal police force in May, police claimed he had tried to run on up to the Attorney General and Su- them over with his car. This was disproven preme Court, these institutions of the by dash cam footage showing the cops on capitalist state exist to defend bourgeois a road rage rampage. In this country, traffic Marxist Student Union at 26 January 2019 protest against racist police class rule, which is and has always been stops are common sites of cop terror, as in murder of Zoe Dowdell in New Britain, Connecticut. 6 Revolution Defend International Students! Defeat Attacks Against Immigrants!

amounts to a police state, the threat of UPDATE: It has generally been deportation looms.

reported that on July 14 the Trump Internationalist photo ●● Now the end of moratoriums on evic- administration abandoned its attack tions in New York and other states is set on international students, in which it to cause a deluge of evictions, in which ordered that they change universities immigrants will be among those hit first or face deportation if their course and hardest. load was fully online. In reality This horrendous situation is a bipartisan- they took only a half-step backward, orchestrated affair. As Nancy Pelosi’s House allowing students presently enrolled Democrats push for a Senate vote on the HE- to continue their Fall 2020 studies ROES Act, best believe there will again be even if they are fully online, no relief for the over 11 million undocument- while maintaining the ban for new ed immigrants (and their families), many of international students. whom are deemed “essential workers.” Break with the Democrats – Statement of the Revolutionary For Socialist Revolution! Internationalist Youth After 11 September 2001, the CUNY NEW YORK CITY, July 7 – On Monday, administration attempted a university-wide July 6, Immigration and Customs Enforce- “war purge” of undocumented immigrants. ment (I.C.E.) launched a vicious attack As “illegal aliens” they were declared a against international students. Students CUNY Internationalists initiated protests bringing out hundreds of threat to “national security” by both Repub- pursuing high-school, higher education and students, immigrant workers, teachers and community activists to stop licans and Democrats. How was this purge vocational studies through F-1 and M-1 vi- City University’s “war purge” of undocumented students after 9/11. to be accomplished? By hiking the tuition of sas now “may not take a full online course dents come from China. Over 200,000 students and classmates and we will not immigrant students, thus forcing large num- load and remain in the United States.” So from India. And tens of thousands more, stand by and watch them be dragged away. bers out. The Internationalist Group initi- decreed the U.S. immigration Gestapo. For respectively, from South Korea, Vietnam, The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth de- ated protests bringing together hundreds of these students, the options are limited: 1) Iran, Mexico and Brazil, among many other mands: Let them stay! Students, faculty and students, immigrant workers, teachers and if schools and programs have not adopted countries. We all know that the purpose of staff must fight to bring out the power of or- community activists to stop this attack and either an in-person or hybrid method of in- measures such as this outright purge against ganized labor to stop the deportations and demand “Full Citizenship Rights for All struction, they must transfer to a college or international students is not to “curtail” or xenophobic attacks on immigrant students. Immigrants!” and defeated this despicable university that meets federal regulations; “defeat” the coronavirus, whatever the bigots This latest display of sadistic bigotry act of “patriotism” by the administration.1 or 2) leave the U.S. or be deported. in Washington may claim. The profit-driven, comes after: Then when the first iteration of the racist This is the latest in the chain of xeno- racist capitalist system in the U.S. is inca- ●● Hundreds of asylum-seeking migrant “Muslim ban” was signed in January 2017, phobic attacks, targeting over one million pable of even basic effective measures amid children and adolescents were summar- the CUNY Internationalist Clubs organized of our brothers and sisters who are inter- the pandemic. It has continued spreading the ily deported to Guatemala and Hondu- protests outside of Hunter College denounc- national students. It comes as hundreds virus while seeking to hold off a complete ras at the start of the pandemic without ing the xenophobic targeting of immigrants of thousands have taken to the streets to collapse of the medical system by sending being able to plead their case or, in from majority-Muslim countries. As a result, protest racist oppression and the police sick people back to their homes to infect their many cases, even speak to social work- the CUNY Internationalist Clubs formed murder of George Floyd and so many oth- families. Putting into effect Trump’s ravings ers. Now over 2,000 unaccompanied the Committee to Defend Immigrants and ers. The Revolutionary Internationalist against the “foreign invader,” the new I.C.E. children have been sent back, and the Muslims. We wrote then, “It is the respon- Youth (youth section of the International- measure means further exportation of the vi- Supreme Court has ruled that the U.S. sibility of students, faculty and workers to government can deport asylum seekers ist Group) says: an attack against one is rus even as it surges through one region after help defend our brothers and sisters who without formal court proceedings. an attack against us all. We call for labor/ another within the U.S. are being targeted by this racist onslaught” ●● Additionally, faulty coronavirus testing black/immigrant action against racist po- At the City University of New York and not look to the administration or Board methods, like inconclusive tempera- lice and anti-immigrant terror, and to stop of Trustees. This holds true today. We must (CUNY), there are about 9,000 international ture checks, have meant that thousands this vile attack on international students. be prepared to shut the campuses down in students. There are over 40,000 at the Uni- of coronavirus-positive migrants have the event I.C.E. tries to enter the schools or More than 350,000 international stu- versity of California. These are our fellow been deported, with 351 flights to Latin deport any student or employee. America and the Caribbean since Febru- ary (“Exporting the Virus,” The Inter- The capitalist ruling class every day cept, 26 June). Countries like Mexico, attempts to convince us that the enemy re- Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador sides within a foreign camp. But the enemy have been forced to take in tens of thou- is here at home – Wall Street, Washington, sands of deported immigrants a month. Democrats and Republicans alike, the bour- ●● Moreover, a 60-day freeze on employ- geois parties of the foremost imperialist ment-based visas targeting health-care, country in the world. The Democrats pre- Internationalist photo education and tech professions, issued tend to be friends of immigrants, while stab- in April, has been extended to the end bing them in the back and using them as po- of the year to “reserve 525,000 jobs for litical pawns. And the Trump administration American citizens” because, according is seizing on the pandemic to ram through to the Trump White House proclamation anti-immigrant policies to rival the record of (22 June), immigrant workers suppos- ex-Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama. edly pose “an unusual threat to the em- To put an end, once and for all, to ployment of American workers.” raids and deportations, students and work- ●● Meanwhile, the Education Department’s ers must break from all illusions in the $6 billion emergency relief to students Democratic Party, and all capitalist parties. under the CARES Act was granted to citi- Defending immigrants requires real power zens and legal residents only, as per Edu- capable of coming up against the capitalist cation Secretary Betsy DeVos’s orders. state – the power of the working class or- ●● This came on top of the exclusion of ganized in a revolutionary workers party to undocumented immigrants from re- fight for socialist revolution, the only way ceiving stimulus checks or filing for to uphold the rights of all the oppressed. ■ CUNY Internationalist Clubs protest at Hunter College against Trump’s “Muslim unemployment. Immigrants are facing ban,” 2 February 2017. A key demand was for letting CUNY graduate student a dire situation as their savings (if they 1 See the Internationalist pamphlet, Defend Saira Rafiee back into the U.S. She had been visiting family in Iran over winter have any) are quickly used up on every- Immigrant Students - Defeat CUNY’s “War break and was prevented from returning by Trump’s ban. day essentials. While living under what Purge” (December 2001). August 2020 7 and a member of the Connecticut House of Cop Terror Stalks... Representatives in the Black and Puerto Ri- continued from page 6 can Caucus. All the tokenism is the world Gothamist landmark of his administration, of a piece cannot hide the fact that the function of the with calling neo-Nazis “very fine people.” police, as an institution, is racist repression in But racist and anti-immigrant terror did not the service of the capitalist system. Like hav- begin with the xenophobic filth spewed by ing Obama as the CEO of U.S. imperialism, Donald Trump. Anti-immigrant policies perpetuating racist wars abroad and ramping have a long history under both Democratic up deportations “at home,” the capitalist sys- and Republican presidents: the war on im- tem is perfectly capable of hypocritically us- migrants, black people and all the oppressed ing “diverse” faces in high places to reinforce “at home” goes hand in hand with unending this racist social order. Only the overthrow of U.S. imperialist aggression and war abroad. that capitalist social order can get to the roots Indeed, most U.S. wars have been led by of racial oppression. Democrats, who posture as “friends” of la- Effective struggle against racist police bor, black people, women, etc. terror and repression requires massive, mili- It was during Bill Clinton’s administra- tant class struggle. Millions of workers are tion that the first stretch of border wall was fed up with poverty pay, racism, the oppres- built, anti-immigrant laws beefed up and sion of women and skyrocketing inequality. Police carried out 58 arrests on 22 November 2019, at protest denouncing “effective death penalty” and vicious “anti- What is needed is to unchain the power of cop brutality in NYC subways. RIY demands: Free them all, drop the charges. crime” laws enacted, dramatically escalating the working class. That means fighting to mass incarceration. It was Barack Obama free it from subordination to the bosses’ those they exploit and oppress. Breaking who massively expanded the deportation government, institutions, parties and politi- Off the Trains... the chains that bind working people and continued from page 5 machine Trump oversees today, ramping up cians. In this country the key instrument for the oppressed to the Democratic Party re- the militarization of the border and deporting that subordination is the Democratic Party – Now that he is making a bid for the quires a program of political independence over 8 million immigrants, earning himself the oldest capitalist party in the world. Democratic presidential nomination, hav- from the racist capitalist rulers that points the title of “deporter-in-chief.” Democrats Yet calls to vote for Democratic politi- ing again switched parties after his stint as the way to international socialist revolu- continue to push for high-tech “border secu- cians or for “community control of the po- Republican mayor, billionaire Bloomberg tion. The social force that has the power rity” measures in place of Trump’s “wall.” lice” are precisely the dangerous illusions is shedding crocodile tears over his stop- to head up that fight is the working class Once again on June 26, House Demo- peddled by many activists, including many and-frisk “mistake.” Five million stops is no that makes the cities run, and can bring this crats overwhelmingly voted to fund the De- self-described socialists. On March 8, the mistake! And as the pro-police stance of de citadel of finance capital to a grinding halt. partment of Homeland Security to the tune “Justice for Jayson” campaign put out a Blasio and Cuomo over the cop terror in the But that requires a fighting leadership. of $4.5 billion, which runs the concentra- memo rightly expressing indignation at the subways underscores, both parties are racist On October 30, just days before the tion camps of immigrants and refugees on Bridgeport PD. At the same time, it calls for to their core, upholding American capital- demonstration against cop terror in the the southern U.S. border. While Alexandria the establishment of an “all civilian review ism, which since slavery days has been built subways, thousands of members of Trans- Ocasio-Cortez and other “progressive” Dem- board with power to investigate police” – but on oppression of black people. As we re- port Workers Local 100 gave a taste of ocrats voted against the funding measure the whole history of civilian review boards peatedly pointed out, in major cities across their power as they rallied outside MTA this time (unlike on their first day in office), shows that these do nothing to stop the po- the country, it is Democratic mayors who headquarters, where management has been their key political function is to tie discon- lice from killing black, Latino and other give the orders to the racist killer cops. stonewalling contract negotiations with the tented youth and workers to the Democratic oppressed people. The police cannot be re- The multiracial crowd of protesters at union. Transit workers are fed up with the Party of U.S. imperialism. Their liberal icon, formed, only revolution will bring justice. the November 1 rally correctly denounced bosses on the MTA board, most of whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt, threw 100,000 Another of their demands was “Reduce the police as racist, but organizers tried to are appointed by Democrat Cuomo, and Japanese Americans into concentration Police Power. Build Community Power.” channel the outrage into the dead end of many said they are ready to strike. Yet the

camps during World War II. His Democratic Here too, it is crucial for those who want to fashionable “identity politics.” They gro- union leaders are in Cuomo’s pocket, back- do away with racist police terror to see that tesquely attempted to segregate the crowd successor Harry Truman, after A-bombing ing him at election time and looking to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deported millions it is neither a matter of “reducing” the pow- by ordering white demonstrators to the governor to bail them out. of Mexican immigrants (and many U.S.-born er of police nor of illusory “community con- back and sides of the march and having Local 100 is the stronghold of NYC la- Mexican Americans), setting the stage for the trol” over them, but overturning the system black protesters move up front. Fortunate- bor, and if transit workers’ anger were to in- vilely named “Operation Wetback” mass de- that breeds police repression. Indeed, this ly, very few complied with that Jim Crow tersect with the campaign against cop terror portation program under Republican Dwight same group has placed blame on the “entire edict. Not only would this have exposed in the stations, it would produce an explosive Eisenhower. Anti-immigrant repression is bi- system,” but what needs to be stated clearly black activists even more directly to the partisan in capitalist America, as it is funda- is that this system is capitalism, which in the wrath of the police, such ploys reinforce social struggle that would rock the city. The mental to the functioning of capitalism. United States was founded on slavery and the divisions fostered by the ruling class fight against racist police attacks in mass Liberals often present more “diversity” genocide and whose very existence contin- to prevent the mobilization of the power of transit and on the streets of the U.S. must and “representation” in positions of power ues to be rooted in racist oppression. the multi-ethnic working class in struggle be waged politically. Behind each blow in- as the solution to racism and anti-immigrant As we remember Jayson, Chulo, against black oppression. flicted by the enforcers of capitalist “law and chauvinism. Yet Chulo was killed by a black Zoe and so many others whose lives were Without a political fight against U.S. order” are the dictates of Wall Street. Only cop. In the shooting of Stephanie Washing- snuffed out by racist police terror, the goal capitalism’s dual parties of imperialist war by breaking with the Democrats, forging a ton, both officers were black. As for SB 380, of ending it forever can only be achieved and racist repression, nothing will change. class-struggle workers party and organizing it sets up a “police transparency and account- through international socialist revolution The job of the police is to defend the inter- on a revolutionary class program can work- ability” task force that would include a dis- – the conquest of power by the proletariat. ests of the exploiters and oppressors against ing people and the oppressed fight to win.n abled person, a “justice-impacted individual” But that can never happen so long as the working class and op-

pressed are chained to Internationalist photo the Democratic Party through their mislead- ers in the labor bu- reaucracy and class- less “social justice”

Internationalist photo movements. What’s needed above all is a definitive break with all capitalist parties and the formation of a revolutionary work- ers party to lead that revolution. This is the path to winning the struggle against rac- Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at 17 July 2019 ist police terror and At 1 November 2019 protest, RIY and Internationalist Group signs called for march in NYC commemorating the five-year anniversary every form of social cops out of the subways and remembered Allan Feliz, Antonio Williams and of Eric Garner’s murder by NYPD. oppression n Victor Hernandez, youths recently killed by cops in the Bronx. 8 Revolution Free Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange! Hands Off Edward Snowden! The Lies Behind Imperialist Crimes: From Pentagon Papers to Afghanistan Papers Bryan Denton/Corbis PFC David Epstein

Left: Vietnamese man captured by U.S. Army awaiting interrogation, 1967. The Pentagon Papers revealed, among other things, U.S. imperialism’s covert torture campaigns and psychological warfare operations in Indochina, including the wholesale slaughter of entire villages suspected of being sympathetic to the National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”). Right: U.S. imperialism’s murderous “war on terror.” Marines detain men in Helmland Province, Afghanistan. By Jacob talist parties in Congress, launched the trina vanden Heuvel began: “They lied. ministration to stop their publication. As bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in They lied repeatedly, year after year, about Last December, the Washington Post detailed further below, they revealed the October 2001. Between 2014 and 2018, America’s longest war....” With the Af- published a trove of 2,000 internal govern- endless lies pumped out by each and ev- SIGAR conducted interviews with senior ghanistan war in its 19th year, she noted, ment documents confirming and demon- ery Democratic and Republican adminis- officials and military commanders toin- the newly published papers showed that strating in bloody, horrendous detail what tration throughout the course of the war, vestigate how their war and occupation be- “presidents, department heads, generals, many had long suspected: that throughout and its secret widening, in the face of came a “failure” in their own terms – that civilians and uniformed military up and the nearly two decades of U.S. imperial- mass domestic opposition, into Laos and is, in order to derive “lessons” to more ef- down the line” had systematically “mis- ism’s criminal war on Afghanistan, three Cambodia. In short, the Pentagon Papers fectively prepare for the next time U.S. im- led” the public. Moreover, “those who successive administrations, Republican were a bombshell. perialism invades another semi-colonial, have consistently lied to the American and Democrat alike, together with the mili- Today, however, the reception to oppressed country. people – the generals, such as David H. tary brass they commanded, systematically the release of the “Afghanistan Papers,” As highlighted by the Washington Post Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal; the na- lied about the war. based on SIGAR’s internal report, has report, “At War with the Truth” (9 Decem- tional intelligence operatives, such as John The “Afghanistan Papers,” obtained been drastically different. Decades after ber 2019), the documents reveal that the Brennan and James Clapper; the civilians, through a Freedom of Information Act the Vietnamese Revolution inflicted a consensus among personnel “from provin- such as Obama’s former defense secre- request and a lengthy legal battle, come stinging defeat on U.S. imperialism, and cial outposts to the highest circles of pow- tary, Leon Panetta – populate news talk from a project entitled “Lessons Learned” the Watergate scandal unleashed a tor- er,” including U.S. diplomats and military shows” parading their “expertise” to this carried out by the Office of the Special rent of revelations of government decep- officers, as well as Afghan officials, con- day.1 Vanden Heuvel calls for an “account- Inspector General for Afghanistan Recon- tion and permanent war, it is widely taken sidered the war to be a total farce even as ing,” while studiously avoiding terms like struction (SIGAR). This institution of the for granted that the U.S. government, its presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama war crimes and claiming that the imperial- U.S. government (which calls its colonial politicians and bureaucrats, are a sordid and Donald Trump, faced with a doubtful ist military can be “reformed.” (This is in occupation “reconstruction”) was created collection of lying crooks. (Unlike both public, cited the criminal war’s “progress” line with the role her own magazine, The in 2008, seven years after the war officially liberals and conservatives, revolutionary to justify prolonging U.S. intervention. Nation – which worked overtime to pitch began when Republican president George Marxists point out that this reflects the An anguished piece in the Post (17 Obama’s “Hope and Change” – plays as a W. Bush, fulsomely backed by both capi- very nature and function of the bourgeois December 2019) by liberal columnist Ka- left-liberal publicist for U.S. imperialism’s state: representing the interests of the Democratic Party.) capitalist ruling class.) At the same time, The publication of the Afghanistan some of the most sinister institutions of Papers reinforces the widespread skepti- capitalist rule, like the Central Intelli- cism towards and distrust of the govern- gence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau ment within U.S. society since the period Alamy of Investigation (FBI), have had their im- when the “Pentagon Papers,” from which ages refurbished in the wake of Trump’s they draw their name, were published election. during U.S. imperialism’s genocidal, These organizations, collectively re- losing war on Vietnam. Leaked by for- sponsible for the overthrow of elected mer military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the governments from South America to Af- “Pentagon Papers” consisted of reports rica, and for the murder and imprisonment produced by the Department of Defense of countless revolutionaries, fighters for that were published in the New York democratic rights, and opponents of U.S. Times in 1971, against frantic attempts imperialist war, have been elevated by the by then-president Richard Nixon’s ad- Democratic Party to the status of national 1 In 2013, the City University of New York ad- heroes, and have been increasingly inte- ministration made the provocative political grated into the ranks of its representatives decision to hire war criminal Petraeus, former in Congress. Afghanistan and Iraq war commander and ex- What U.S. imperialism and its CIA chief of the CIA, to “teach” at CUNY. On the campaign against this launched by the CUNY operatives have done in Afghanistan is Internationalist Clubs, see “David ‘Death Squad’ a sinister story indeed. To understand Prisoners being transported to U.S. imperialism’s Guantánamo Bay torture Petraeus: Out of CUNY Now!” and related mate- recent events, it is important to go back center, 2002. Many would languish there for years without charge or trial. rials in Revolution No. 10, October 2013. to the U.S. role in fostering reactionary August 2020 9 terror in Afghanistan during the admin- ogy firms such as Google, Facebook and istrations of Democrat Jimmy Carter, Apple. Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos followed by Republican Ronald Rea- The capitalist state began an imme- gan. In 1978, Afghanistan underwent its diate and relentless pursuit of Manning, “April Revolution,” an effort launched Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian by modernizing intellectuals of the Peo- Assange under the Espionage Act, a drive ple’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan which has recently been escalated. Follow- (PDPA) to carry out modest land reform ing the leaks, Manning was imprisoned by and introduce some democratic rights, military jailers in Kuwait, held in a cage among them legal equality and education within a tent in the searing desert heat. for women. She was later transferred to the brig of the “The fact [is] that under the Soviet- Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. allied PDPA, for the first time in history There, Afghan women were freed from the suffo- “Manning spent 23 hours a day in cating head-to-toe burqa, that girls could be- a 6-by-8-foot cell, for nearly nine come literate, study in schools and universi- months, much of it on Prevention of ties and become teachers and scientists.” Of Injury, or P.O.I., status, in conditions course, such things were “never mentioned” that a United Nations special rappor- as bourgeois politicians and their kept me- teur later said could qualify as torture.” dia beat the drums for the U.S. invasion in – New York Times, 12 June 2017 The Obama administration began a 2001 while hypocritically claiming to care Above: Volunteers for women’s militia organized in 1989 by Soviet-allied criminal investigation into Assange, while about Afghan women (see “U.S. Sponsors Afghan government. With their rights under direct assault by U.S.-backed Sweden sought his extradition from the Enslavers of Afghan Women,” The Interna- mujahedin “holy warriors,” Afghan women fought back. tionalist No. 12, Fall 2001). UK, compelling him to take refuge in the In 1979, the Carter administration intelligence official who exposed Trump’s Drop All Charges Against Ecuadoran embassy. In 2013, the U.S. gov- launched “Operation Cyclone,” the code- 25 July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian Assange, Manning and Snowden! ernment charged him under the Espionage name for the clandestine program to arm, president Volodymyr Zelensky, which then Act; he faces up to 175 years in prison. As bankroll and train Islamist mujahedin led to the impeachment probe and trial. This Referring to the intelligence agent for Snowden, after his revelations he was (holy warriors) waging an ultra-reaction- came after the Russia/Trump investiga- who outed Trump’s Ukraine call, House forced into exile in Russia. ary war to overthrow the Soviet-allied re- tion conducted by former FBI chief Robert Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Manning was released in 2017 after form regime in Afghanistan. Continuing Mueller – who was instrumental in selling Schiff declared that “Congress must do all her sentence was commuted, but was sent under Reagan, the decade-long operation the lies sold as a pretext for the Iraq War. it can to protect this whistleblower, and all back to prison last March after refusing was “one of the biggest ever mounted by The Democrats’ scenario of Mueller serving whistleblowers.” Yet three years ago Schiff to testify against Assange. She is being the Central Intelligence Agency,” reported as “savior of American democracy” fizzled. demanded that Edward Snowden – the charged a fine of $1,000 for every day she the New York Times (18 April 1988). The But with Trump’s Ukraine call, Democrats former National Security Agency contrac- does not testify. Manning’s imprisonment left-nationalist PDPA, while hardly “com- trumpeted that now they had their smoking tor who bravely exposed the NSA’s wide- in retaliation for not testifying is another munist,” was targeted by this murderous gun, and it was all thanks to a career spy- ranging surveillance programs of civilians, instance of her treatment that has been for- backlash launched by mullahs (religious turned-whistleblower. both domestic and foreign – be given no mally classed as an act of torture (NPR, 12 authorities) and other sectors that lived But as the Internationalist Group reprieve: “The U.S. government must hold December 2019, citing U.N. special rap- from the “bride price,” ruthless exploita- wrote last October, “the idea that it was the him accountable for his actions.” porteur on torture). Assange was arrested tion of the rural poor and other forms of work of a lone courageous CIA ‘whistle- When a wave of exposés followed in London last April after the Ecuadoran deeply entrenched oppression. Particularly blower’ is ludicrous. It’s quite clear that the Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan government withdrew his asylum. He has incensed by even modest efforts to foster ‘national security’ apparatus up to its very war, the government cracked down hard. In reportedly been kept in solitary confine- women’s rights, they denounced teaching top levels decided to launch the operation” 2010, 23-year-old Army Specialist Chelsea ment for 23 hours a day. girls to read and write as atheistic heresy. (“Impeachment Crisis: ‘Deep State’ vs. Manning (then known as Bradley, Man- An open letter of over 60 doctors con- (Among those working with the CIA in Af- Bigot-in-Chief,” The Internationalist No. ning has become an important figure in firms that Assange’s health is deteriorat- ghanistan was one Osama bin Laden. And, 57, September-October 2019). So the very the fight for transgender rights) disclosed ing so quickly due to maltreatment that he of course, his anti-Soviet insurgency was institutions key to preparing and carrying hundreds of thousands of documents re- “could die in prison” (The Guardian, 25 the seedbed for the Taliban.) out the U.S. imperialist wars in Afghani- vealing extensive war crimes in Iraq and November 2019). Hearings over extradi- The U.S. was eager to have a coun- stan and Iraq, as well as in Vietnam and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Published by tion to the U.S. are scheduled to begin in terrevolutionary base of operations on the Korea, are hailed as supposed champions The Guardian, the “War Logs” revealed February. We demand: Free Chelsea Man- Soviet Union’s vulnerable southern bor- of all that is right and good by the Demo- numerous massacres carried out by U.S. ning and Julian Assange! Drop all charg- der. When the Soviet Union intervened cratic Party.2 Needless to say, as they are armed forces and the common practice of es now! Hands off Edward Snowden! in December 1979 to stave off a collapse up to their necks in capitalism’s crimes torturing prisoners. Chilling raw footage of of the embattled Afghan government, the themselves, their impeachment of Trump U.S. airstrikes deliberately targeting civil- Lying Through Their Teeth Carter administration revved up Cold was not for his crimes against immigrants, ians was also made public. The significance of The Afghanistan War II. The bourgeois press helped whip incitement of racist violence and myriad WikiLeaks subsequently published Papers lies in that once again, they expose up the anti-Soviet war drive and praised attacks on democratic rights. Instead, it another leak dubbed “Cablegate,” of diplo- the total cynicism and duplicity of the the woman-hating cutthroats as “freedom was for holding up weapons of war for a matic cables provided by Manning, dating American ruling class, its political repre- fighters.” Most of the fake left joined in “strategic ally” of U.S. imperialism, there- from 1966 to 2010, documenting decades sentatives – Democrats and Republicans the anti-Soviet frenzy. In contrast, genu- by infringing “national security.” of State Department intrigue and coercion, alike – and armed forces propagandists. ine revolutionaries – Trotskyists – pro- It’s no wonder, then, that the Afghani- and another set of secret files document- They have also inadvertently displayed claimed “Hail Red Army” in Afghanistan stan Papers have largely remained under ing torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison the role of the bourgeois press, particu- and called for the gains of the October the radar. camp that the U.S. military runs on land it larly the liberal Washington Post itself, as Revolution of 1917 to be extended to the holds as an imperialist-occupied enclave a vehicle for marshaling public opinion on 2 For more on the real history of the imperi- central Asian country. alists’ Murder, Inc., see “CIA Out of CUNY in Cuba. Then in 2013, Edward Snowden behalf of the ruling class, as they churned The Stalinist bureaucrats who gov- Now!”, “Speaking Out Against the U.S. War brought to light extensive global surveil- out articles, columns and opinion pieces erned the USSR, seeking illusory “peace- Machine” and related articles in Revolution No. lance programs by U.S. intelligence agen- supporting military intervention and esca- ful coexistence” with imperialism, eventu- 15, September 2018. cies in cooperation with big U.S. technol- lation. The Post even denied the signifi- ally abandoned their half-hearted defense of Afghanistan, and after Mikhail Gor- Markus Schreiber / AP Frank Augstein / AP Frank Augstein bachev ordered Soviet forces’ withdrawal, Phillip Faraone / Getty the country was plunged into decades of fundamentalist terror and the caprices of regional warlords. Democrats Hail Imperialism’s Murder, Inc. Today, this history is part of what the Democratic Party wants to whitewash away as it paints a picture of dutiful, patriotic CIA agents joining the “resistance” to Trump. From left: Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden. These couragenous individuals risked their lives to Hailed as a heroic whistleblower, it was an expose just some of the brutality and widespread spying carried out by U.S. imperialism. 10 Revolution cance of the 2010 WikiLeaks revelations, “As intelligence makes its way up which in addition to exposing U.S. war higher, it gets consolidated and really crimes made public the “military failures” watered down; it gets politicized. It gets Astrid Riecken/Getty and graft that, almost a decade later, bour- politicked because once policymakers geois pundits have met with expressions get their hands on it, and frankly once of shock. operational commanders get their hands In their assessments of the Afghani- on it, they put their twist to it…. After stan Papers, the capitalist media say little 2006, for me, it was actually irrelevant because we were just killing so many about the terror and murder wrought by people and it wasn’t making any differ- U.S. imperialism in its colonial occupa- ence at all. We were capturing a lot of tion of that country. In fact, the reflections people too. Commanders and policy- of the bourgeois journalists have served to makers, on the spectrum of news, they further falsify the motives and character want to always be good news. Opera- of the war. The Post’s six-part report au- tional commanders, State Department thored by Craig Whitlock is part exposé, policymakers, and Department of De- part cost-benefit analysis for U.S. - impe fense policymakers are going to be in- rialism, critiquing the strategy and tac- herently rosy in their assessments. They tics with which it pursued its objectives, will be unaccepting of hard hitting intel- while essentially accepting those objec- ligence.” Republicans and Democrats, dual parties of U.S. imperialism. Above: tives – and the imperialist system behind Yet these particular statements are Obamas and Bushes at inauguration of African American History Museum them. The underlying assumption is that omitted from the Post’s coverage of the SI- in Washington D.C., 24 September 2016. the war is basically just but the methods GAR findings. The total silence about the are flawed. Whitlock even goes as far as slaughter and plunder by marauding U.S. knowledge, the U.S. had begun sending policy” (“Vietnam: A Historic Defeat for to peddle the typical colonialist narrative invaders is astounding, especially after shipments of military equipment to the U.S. Imperialism,” Revolution No. 15, that the U.S. occupation has been benev- months of wide coverage on war crimes by French since 1950, and was subsidizing September 2018). Understanding this is es- olent, even too generous, portraying the Navy SEAL chief Edward Gallagher, the the majority of the French war by 1954. sential for any real fight against imperial- imperialists building schools, hospitals attempted internal cover-up of his activi- In that same year the U.S. began to un- ism, based on the program of international and roads. According to him, military ties by the officer corps, and the scandalous dertake direct “acts of sabotage and ter- socialist revolution. ror warfare against North Vietnam” (New objectives floundered as a result of - sup clemency granted to the sadistic murderer Censorship Bid Fails posedly humanitarian efforts aimed at “re- by Trump, who then brought him to his York Times, 13 June 1971), contrary to the building a shattered [country]”: Mar-A-Lago resort. claims the Eisenhower and later Kennedy Panicked by the Pentagon Papers, the “Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get Gallagher indiscriminately killed administrations made that only military Nixon administration took legal action mired in ‘nation-building,’ it’s wasted civilians, including children, and posed “advisors” were sent to the region. against both the whistleblower Ellsberg, billions doing just that.… The U.S. with the corpse of a teenage captive he The documents also revealed how, for leaking the documents, and the New flooded the country with money – then had slain with a hunting knife. Of course, after the imperialists created the pup- York Times, attempting to prevent their turned a blind eye to the graft it fu- the military brass knows such acts are part pet state of “South Vietnam,” the U.S. publication. Ellsberg was prosecuted un- eled…. The scale of the corruption was and parcel of the colonial occupation, but installed the dictator Ngo Dinh Diem der the Espionage Act along with several the unintended result of swamping the they objected to Trump’s glorification of in 1955, then abetted the military coup other charges of theft and conspiracy, war zone with far more aid and defense Gallagher, as this open embrace of war against him and his ultimate assassina- threatening a total maximum sentence contracts than impoverished Afghani- crimes broadcasts to the entire world the tion in 1963. The next year, under JFK’s of 115 years in prison. The case was dis- stan could absorb.” limitless cruelty of U.S. imperialism and successor Lyndon B. Johnson, came the missed only after it was revealed that the So the imperialists play the role of its endless wars. bipartisan congressional Tonkin Gulf FBI had Ellsberg wiretapped, and agents purported philanthropists by allowing the Resolution, one of the most notorious fab- had broken into the office of his psycho- defense contractors and local elites to line The Pentagon Papers rications of a casus belli (pretext for war). analyst to swipe files in search of black- their pockets. And in this way Whitlock Almost a half century before the Af- LBJ’s massive escalation was followed mail information. and the other bourgeois journalists coach ghanistan Papers, the Pentagon Papers by Nixon’s carpet bombing. In his recent book Doomsday Ma- the imperialists about their thoughtless were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and pub- The Pentagon Papers revealed that by chine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner charity, lack of a clearly defined strategy, lished by the New York Times in 1971. 1965 the Defense Department’s main pri- (2018), based on his experiences working etc. Revealed to the public, they presented ority, evaluated at 70% of its aims, was “to in the U.S. nuclear program in the 1960s, Despite the certainty with which the one damning revelation after another avoid a humiliating US defeat.”4 As for us Ellsberg explains that the Pentagon Papers war objectives were laid out and “prog- about U.S. imperialism’s war in Vietnam, revolutionary Marxists, we called for the were only a fraction of the Top-Secret-rat- ress” was proclaimed in press conferences and the extent of U.S. involvement going defeat of the U.S. imperialists’ counter- ed documents he copied between 1969 and by the Bush administration, the SIGAR back to the French war to keep Indochina revolutionary war and the triumph of the 1970. Complications arising from his civil documents reveal that two years into the as a colony after World War II. Ellsberg, social revolution in Vietnam. And in fact case prevented him from disclosing anoth- war, Bush’s war secretary Donald Rums- formerly a military analyst at the RAND the war was ended not by “peace” march- er, much larger, tranche of documents re- feld was writing: “I have no visibility into Corporation, had leaked a several thou- es but through the military victory of the lating to nuclear planning. These revealed who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or sand-page study of the war conducted by heroic National Liberation Front (NLF or the elaborate plans of U.S. imperialism in Iraq. I read all the intel from the commu- Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense “Viet Cong”) and North Vietnamese com- the event of war to obliterate the Soviet nity, and it sounds as though we know a under Democratic presidents Kennedy batants – an inspiration for the working Union and China through nuclear strikes, great deal, but in fact, when you push at it, and Johnson. class and the oppressed the world over, which the planners estimated would cause you find out we haven’t got anything that The Department of Defense docu- including within the United States. 275 million fatalities and the death of an 5 is actionable.” (8 September 2003 memo ments revealed that the U.S. war against As they did then, liberals today refer additional 50 million from fallout. quoted in Whitlock, “The Afghanistan Pa- the heroic Vietnamese Revolution was to the Vietnam War as a “mistake,” as if The combined effects of U.S. imperial- pers” 9 December 2019). essentially unwinnable.3 This sharply it were just the result of a misconception. ism’s defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate In a 2015 interview with SIGAR, pub- contradicted the pronouncements of In reality, the genocidal U.S. war, which affair, in which the Nixon administration lished by the Post in the Afghanistan Pa- Kennedy and Johnson, and later of Re- killed an estimated three million people burglarized and bugged the Democratic pers, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General publican Richard Nixon. Without public – with the U.S. dropping more than twice Party headquarters and then launched an Michael Flynn, who later became National 3 As we note in our in-depth discussion of the the amount of bombs than all sides in escalating cover-up, was mass public dis- Security Advisor to Donald Trump, speaks war in Revolution No. 15 (September 2018), World War II – “resulted from the system trust of the government. The Pentagon Pa- with horrific candor about the imperialist in 1954 Communist-led independence forces of imperialism, ‘the highest stage of capi- pers fueled that distrust by publicly expos- war machine: defeated the French in the Battle of Dien Bien talism,’ which cannot be explained away ing government lies and criminality. Phu. With capitalist rule smashed in the north- “There is a machinery that is behind or reformed away as just some mistaken The stunning defeat that the Vietnam- what we do, and it keeps us participat- ern part of Vietnam, the southern half was given ese Revolution inflicted on U.S. imperi- 4 ing in the conflict because it generates back to the defeated imperialists’ collaborators. Draft Memorandum from John McNaughton alism hammered home, for large sections What the Vietnamese called the “American to Robert McNamara, “Proposed Course of Ac- wealth…. of the U.S. public, the fact that the lies War” pitted the U.S. and its “South Vietnam” tion re: Vietnam,” 24 March 1965, reprinted in “I spent three years hunting human be- puppet forces against the incredibly coura- The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1972). “their” government had used to sell the ings to kill them or capture them in Iraq, geous NLF and North Vietnamese combatants, McNaughton was an Assistant Secretary under continued on page 18 Afghanistan and East Africa. We refined whose victory in 1975 reunified Vietnam, which McNamara, the former Ford Motor Co. execu- 5 A briefing paper intended for the Joint Chiefs our processes in Iraq. We experimented Trotskyists characterize as a “bureaucratically tive who oversaw the war under Kennedy and of Staff from 1961 outlined these plans, and was with capabilities, techniques and proce- deformed workers state,” calling for its uncon- Johnson. After his stint as the Democrats’ Sec- brought to light in 2011 by George Washington dures in Iraq. What we learned in Iraq, ditional defense against imperialism and coun- retary of “Defense,” that is mass murder, Mc- University’s National Security Archive through we began to apply actually globally, terrevolution, and for a proletarian political Namara became president of the World Bank. a Freedom of Information Act request. The because that was JSOC’s [Joint Special revolution to establish workers democracy and He is the subject of the chilling documentary briefing can be found here: https://nsarchive. Operations Command] mission…. revolutionary internationalism. The Fog of War (2003). files.wordpress.com/2011/11/1961-06-26a.pdf. August 2020 11 from the likes of the white George Floyd... supremacists and fascists like continued from page 1 Juneteenth ILWU Port Shutdown the Ku Klux Klan, with which marchers chant them, some of they have so often, in this us add “It never stops.” Why country’s deadly history, gone

is it, year after year, day after Bay Area News Group hand in hand. day, that the list keeps getting Trump has menaced on longer? Simply put, it is an Twitter that “when the loot- outgrowth of the function of ing starts the shooting starts.” the police. Born as a profes- Is it surprising to know that sionalized force from the slave Obama called protesters thugs patrols in the U.S. South, the and criminals during the up- police serve the ruling elite surges over police violence and protect their property in 2014 and 2015 (New York and social order. That is the Times, 28 April 2015)? Not fundamental role of the cops if we understand what “sys- under capitalism. And today temic racial oppression” actu- that class whose property and ally means, and the bipartisan wealth have always depended nature of how it is adminis- on subjugation, and the power tered in capitalist America. to maintain it, is the one that Then as now, it was Demo- calls the shots. Literally. No crats who called out the mili- set of policies will alter the tarized police and National social role and function of Guard. While Trump and his the police and no amount of media chorus rant against “moral suasion” or “implicit “anarchists” and antifascist bias training” will get them For workers strikes against racist police terror! On June 19, the International Longshore and activists to spur on more reac- to somehow be egalitarian or Warehouse Union shut down all 29 West Coast ports of the U.S. and Canada against police tionary and racist backlash, a non-repressive, since repres- brutality and systemic racism. Above: Thousands marched through the Port of Oakland as string of Democratic mayors sion is their job and upholding the giant cranes in the distance stood idle with their booms up. and governors threaten “out- social inequality and exploita- side agitators.” As a pretext tion their very purpose. answer is: neither. Democratic Party: for repression they cite vandalism and the Now, cops and even notorious police Meanwhile, ex-candidate and Biden Roadblock to Black Liberation destruction of property, as they have ad chiefs are displaying supposed “solidarity” endorser Bernie Sanders has proposed Central to this all, and what is in danger nauseam whenever these flashpoints erupt. with marchers at some protests, “taking a a list of police “reforms,” including his of occurring again during the current cycle The lives of black and brown people knee” with protesters. It should come as no dangerous call to make social workers, of fervent protest, is the funneling of dis- do not in fact matter in the least to the rul- surprise, though, when these same police EMTs, etc. into a “supplement [to] law sent into the Democratic Party. Yes, it is the ing class (nor do those of poor white and officers brutalize and arrest protesters mere enforcement.” Democratic Party, the oldest and most expe- working people or any others “essential” hours after the charade, as has happened Just as previous police reforms – rienced capitalist party in the world, which but expendable in their profit system). repeatedly. The numerous racist curfews from more racial diversity to civilian re- has proved, and indeed will prove, to be the America’s foremost class-war prisoner, are enforced by these same police. (Yes, view boards, to bodycams and implicit central roadblock to black liberation. former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, the curfews are racist; they are legal weap- bias training – did not change the function The racist and misogynistic bigot-in- asked the question in the title of his recent ons to suppress protests against racist ter- of police, while the list of those they kill chief in the White House flagrantly stokes book, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? ror. Here in New York, “progressive Dem- and maim keeps growing, neither will the race hate and xenophobia. Yet the Demo- Today, with massive outrage at the mur- ocrat” mayor Bill de Blasio has imposed current reform proposals. As many pro- crats, too, uphold the social order that der of George Floyd, and given the daily an 8 p.m. curfew, with cops wielding it to testers and commentators state, the issue makes racism systemic, have built up its oppression so many black people face, a round up protesters.) Repression of the on- is systemic. I believe it is essential today forces of racist repression, and wield them striking 54% of Americans think protesters going protests has been severe – including to help young anti-racist protesters think against the oppressed. Democratic mayors were justified when they overran and razed driving vehicles into protesters. through what that means. “Systemic” largely control the urban centers in this a police precinct building in Minneapolis. Trump has added fuel to the fire, country, and their police forces. It is these Which side are we on? Not a hard threatening martial law and having mount- means inherent to the nature of this sys- Democratic mayors who have instituted the one to answer. There is only one side to ed cops and tear gas drive protesters away tem, which continually creates racist op- various curfews and police crackdowns, choose here, that of the oppressor, or that from the White House so he could pose for pression. That system is capitalism. Rac- and a series of Democratic Party governors of the oppressed. The Democratic Party is a photo-op, bible in hand, outside a nearby ist police violence cannot be ended within have, along with their Republican con- no solution. What is needed for genuine church. Co-host to the horror show is pre- the confines of the already existing capi- freres, deployed the National Guard. black liberation is not just an upheaval, sumptive Democratic Party nominee for talist system. This has been demonstrated Black Democratic Party politicians, but an overthrow of the capitalist system. president Joe Biden, who suggested that time and again with the ebb and flow of such as Lori Lightfoot and Keisha Lance Today, many a liberal and social democrat police shoot unarmed people “in the leg” killings and protests over the course of the Bottoms, mayors of Chicago and Atlanta, talks of “dismantling white supremacy” rather than in the chest. Is it better to die last two decades. And it has been demon- respectively, have led the way in such dra- and “decolonizing spaces” by “checking whilst bleeding out from your femoral ar- strated anew with each new set of “police conian and racist measures. The latter was privilege” and other ritual phrases to claim tery or perish quicker with a bullet (and reforms,” which have done nothing to end supported in an address by rapper Killer change through a combination of moral knowing cops, it is likely to be dozens or the killings or ameliorate the constant rac- Mike who proceeded to grovel at the feet suasion and guilt-tripping, while continu- hundreds of them) to the chest? The simple ist brutalization. of the masters, while wearing a “Kill Your ing to herd people into the Democratic Masters” T-shirt. As the politicians speak Party. Those who may signal “wokeness” out of both sides of their mouths, decrying with a reference to Malcolm X (in the same the murder of Floyd while lambasting pro- breath as MLK), rendering him a harmless testers for “violence,” it’s clear whose side icon, conveniently neglect to mention that the Democrats are on. It is the Democratic he pointedly condemned all obeisance and Party which seeks to advance racist gun support to the Democratic Party, castigat- control legislation,2 which would block the ing it as a pillar of racism. And if he was crucial right of self-defense (central to the right to emphasize that “you can’t have advocacy and practice of black freedom capitalism without racism” – which he was

Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP Manuel Balce Ceneta / pioneers from Ida B. Wells, Robert F. Wil- – then what this means must be brought liams, the Deacons for Defense, the Black home to young protesters today. Panthers and many others). And as has Racial oppression must be smashed, been made abundantly clear, the police can torn asunder, fundamentally defeated and obviously not be relied upon for protection torn up by the roots. This can only be achieved through a social revolution. With 2 See “Who Controls the Guns?” in The In- ternationalist No. 34 (March-April 2013) and so many now joining protests, often for the Bourgeois fakery: Congressional Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy “Democrats Exploit School Shooting to Push first time, I believe it is crucial to help the Pelosi, take a knee in African kente cloth, June 8. In major cities across the Racist Gun Control” in The Internationalist No. most thoughtful grasp the meaning of a U.S., Democrats are the bosses of the racist killer cops. 51 (March-April 2018). revolutionary program for black freedom, 12 Revolution that is, of black liberation through socialist and wide – is the fight for workers defense revolution. guards3 against racist terror, and the West For protests flooding the street are Coast longshore union’s port shutdowns Internationalist photo not enough, inspiring as they may be. The for Mumia’s freedom (joining with work- most striking aspects of the protests here in ers in Brazil), against the police murder of New York City, where I live, are the multi- Oscar Grant (depicted in the filmFruitvale racial makeup, the amount of youth (many Station) and against imperialist war in Iraq protesters are in their late teens and early and Afghanistan.4 twenties), and the demonstrations’ largely Right now, it is urgent that labor bring unorganized – that is, spontaneous – char- its power to bear in the ongoing struggle. acter. Even with COVID-19 an ever-pres- I witnessed the potential for this in micro- ent threat, thousands have poured into the cosm at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn streets to protest the killing of Floyd and when an MTA bus driver refused to trans- so many others, and indeed the systemic port people who the cops arrested (after violence against blacks so central to U.S. having beaten them with clubs). On May society. In a way that sometimes has the 29, the Transport Workers Union’s power- quality of ritual, they are chanting the now ful New York local stated that “bus opera- popularized “official” slogans of “No Jus- tors do not work for the NYPD” (New York tice, No Peace,” “Black Lives Matter” and Police Department) and “should refuse to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” amongst others. transport arrested protestors.” In Minneap- And from reports around the country, this olis too, bus drivers are refusing to do the trend is not unique to NYC, as the protests police’s dirty work, and now the Washing- Internationalist contingent at NYC Juneteenth march against racist police have now spread to every U.S. state. The ton, D.C. transit union has followed suit. repression, June 19, with banner saying “Democrats Are Bosses of Racist demonstrations have spread so widely that What is needed now more than ever are Killer Cops,” “The Police Can’t Be ‘Reformed’” and calling for “Black the National Guard has been mobilized in workers strikes against racist repression, Liberation Through Socialist Revolution.” over half of the states. the curfews and the threats of martial law. Today that poses a crucial need for a revo- to steer discontent with the system into To shut down the ports, to quit transport- Workers Strikes Against lutionary workers party. the capitalist parties’ electoralism which ing goods and harvesting food, to cease the Its need is more urgent than ever right helps keep the ghastly realities of this so- Racist Repression functioning of transit, in other words, to here, right now. ciety alive. With double-speak and duplic- The unorganized and spontaneous na- paralyze the system. Working-class struggle is necessary lest ity they have just reauthorized the USA ture of these protests is one part of where Such strikes against racist terror, the wave of discontent fall back into the dead Freedom Act, which affords Trump more we find their limitations. Demonstrators deploying workers power at the point of end of relying on Democrats to fix a situation police powers. They are, alongside Trump horrified, chilled to the bone and filled production, transport and communications, they neither want to nor are capable of reme- and the Republicans, the many-headed with anger at the wanton killing of black would link the still largely middle-class dying. The ruling class has offered some sac- hydra, essentially the same beast with dif- people obviously shed no tears for corpo- and youth protest movement with the rificial lambs (to save the little semblance of ferent heads. rate private property. But no amount of working class that makes everything run face that it has) in arresting the officers guilty The politics of lesser evilism will not shattered glass can change the racist sta- in this society. Youth alone do not have of Floyd’s murder. But as radical students of suffice in the current moment as civil soci- tus quo beyond mere policy adjustments the social power to overturn this racist the Internationalist Clubs at the City Uni- ety shows increasing fractures and the spec- and tinkering and a further sprinkling of system, and neither do black people in versity of New York (where I work) pointed tere of civil war is once again no figment “black faces in high places,” when what and of themselves, but those whose labor out during the last wave of police brutality of imagination. The Civil War has rightly is needed is at the level of the social. To keeps it running, and can bring it to a halt, protests, “There is No Justice in Racist Capi- been called the Second American Revolu- overcome the racial oppression which is, do. Doubly oppressed, in cities throughout talist America.” Only 1% of cops who kill tion. With the key participation of 180,000 and always has been, part of the bedrock the U.S. black workers are concentrated in unarmed civilians are convicted, and at that black troops, it defeated the Southern slavo- of American capitalism, the power of the strategic sectors of the capitalist economy. with paltry sentences. The cop who murdered cracy, but the Northern bourgeoisie betrayed multiracial working class must be mobi- Today there is enormous potential to take Oscar Grant in 2009 was given two years the promise of black freedom. lized. The working class in this country, the lead in joining with their class sisters for an execution-style killing. Only three of Today, a Third American Revolution with its large and strategic black and im- and brothers, immigrant, Latino, Asian, the six who snapped Freddie Gray’s neck in will be necessary to end the subjugation of migrant component, is the only social white, Native American, as the current anti- 2015 with a “rough ride” were charged, and black people, but that will only be the case force with the ability to carry through this racist struggle, combined with economic not one convicted. The list goes on. if it is a war between social classes. For their momentous task. And time and again, go- crisis and the pandemic’s ravages against People on the outside of the protests part, the two big factions of the ruling class, ing back to the struggle to smash slavery, the workers and poor, shakes this country. looking in have contributed by making Democrat and Republican, differ on how to black freedom struggles have been on the With their hands on the levers of social social media posts, which largely get lost administer the endless war of the exploit- cutting edge of class struggle in this coun- power, workers, many of them black, have in the cacophony that is online politics, or ers against black people, immigrants and try. Part of that history – often “buried” and the ability and requisite power to challenge by donating to various organizations, of- the working class as a whole. With an elec- important to unearth and communicate far and indeed overturn this racist system. ten bail funds. While these bail funds are tion in November, both are gearing up for Here too the question of leadership is important, particularly so with the racist intensified conflict with China, with Biden crucial. For far too long official “leaders” dragnets of the curfew in various locales, actually positioning himself to the right of have chained black people, Latinos, immi- many of the other organizations to which Trump (NPR, 22 April) in the saber-rattling grants and the working class as a whole to people donate lobby Democrats and are – two racist imperialists indeed. this social order, through the Democratic aligned with them, at least in part, in the With all this in mind, amidst the din of Party. Studying black freedom struggles failed strategy to somehow effect “social police sirens and bullhorns, the thrumming here and elsewhere back to the Haitian justice” through one of the two main or- of helicopters and cadence of thousands Revolution of Toussaint Louverture,5 we gans of racist capitalist rule in the U.S. of protesters, we must remember: “Only see that revolutionary leadership is key. The Democrats are already attempting Revolution Can Bring Justice!” 

3 In 1975, C.B. Dennis, a black auto worker in Chicago’s United Auto Workers (UAW) Local

6, was the target of a racist attack when his new- Internationalist photo ly purchased home in the predominantly white neighborhood of Broadview was firebombed. Militants of the Labor Struggle Caucus in Local 6, supported by the then-revolutionary Sparta- cist League, organized workers defense guards to stand watch outside Dennis’s home, sending a clear message that an injury to one is an injury to all and putting an end to the attacks. 4 Once again, longshore workers have taken up the Cover of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 2017 call for workers action against racist police terror, shutting down all 29 West Coast ports this past book, Have Black Lives Ever Mat- Juneteenth to protest “police brutality and systemic tered? Mumia is the foremost class- racism.” See “ILWU Port Shutdown: Bay Area war prisoner in the U.S., imprisoned March/Rally Against Racist Police Brutality” in since 1982 on frame-up charges as The Internationalist No. 60 (May-June 2020). revenge for his coverage of racist 5 See “Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Supporters of the Internationalist Group with members of Bay Area ILWU Local police repression in Philadelphia. Revolution” at internationalist.org. 10 on June 19 during West Coast port shutdown. August 2020 13 What Led Me to RIY Feminism or Women’s Liberation? By Noor and became a sociology major, I began to counterposed to fem- further investigate women’s oppression inism. As a self-iden- In the late 1980s, my parents im- through an academic lens. I was immedi- tified radical femi- migrated to New York City from Ban- ately introduced to feminism, finding what nist, I was convinced gladesh, in search of a better life. They seemed like explanations for and solutions that if one did not settled in Queens, New York – the most to my problems and those of other women fully agree with or ethnically diverse borough in the city. – and I was hooked. What I was taught will accept the program of Queens is famous for having countless sound familiar to many: that women’s op- feminism as an abso- immigrant enclaves, including a massive pression is caused by sexist and misogynist lute truth, there was South Asian community, so it made sense ideas imposed by men onto women; and no way they could be that my parents felt most comfortable liv- that the fight for equality is a fight against an advocate for wom- ing there. After their arrival, they had four those ideas. en’s liberation. children – three sons and one daughter In my classes, we studied numerous Like many, I had (me). Like many South Asian men in New feminist theories and approaches: transna- always assumed that York, my father became a cab driver; my tional feminism, post-colonial feminism, women’s liberation mother stayed home to take care of the black feminism, “xenofeminism,” eco- and feminism were house and kids. feminism, the list goes on. I read count- the same thing. But Growing up as the only girl in a male- less books and essays by authors like bell these Marxists were dominated Bangladeshi household, I was hooks, Audre Lorde, Emi Koyama and Ju- saying that in real- proud of my culture and background but liet Jacques, drawn to the many different ity, far from being also quickly became aware of my position flavors and interpretations of feminism’s synonyms, there is a in the family. I watched my brothers go basic premises and conclusions. It felt as counterposition be- out whenever they wanted, wear whatever if there was a different type of feminism tween the two. I kept they wanted and speak their minds freely for every identity out there. I enjoyed asking myself, “What Bourgeois propaganda, anyone? “Queens of the to our parents. In contrast, I was expected learning about these differing perspectives don’t these people Resistance” biographical series describes Democratic to be soft-spoken, modest and dedicated and felt solidarity with other women who understand? Femi- politicians Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez and other prominent to helping my mother take care of the seemed to be fighting for the same cause. nism means creating Congresswomen as “beloved boss ladies,” stating “it’s household. In my college years, being with My favorite thing about feminism was a society in which time to yield to the alternative – the power of women.” my parents and their friends meant being that it claimed inclusivity – anyone could women are equal to asked questions about my marriage pros- be a feminist so long as they believed that men, the concept is so simple! If Marx- bigotry – but in order to win that fight we pects and whether I would be a good wife women should be equal to men. ists fight against women’s oppression, why need to uproot the material conditions that to a future husband. There was always an As I continued my college education, aren’t they feminists?” continually generate them. unquestioned expectation that I would in- I became interested in revolutionary poli- As I attended more Club meetings and When I read Friedrich Engels’ The evitably get married, have children and tics through reading Karl Marx in my so- undertook political discussions with mem- Origin of the Family, Private Property take care of my family. No one I grew up ciology courses. I came across the CUNY bers of the Revolutionary Internationalist and the State, I learned that women’s op- with ever asked me if I actually wanted that Internationalist Clubs at a Hunter College Youth (RIY), I saw that they were serious pression under capitalism is rooted in the for myself. No one ever took me seriously club fair in 2018. I was also interested in about fighting for women’s liberation. In nuclear family. I was never taught in my when I said that I didn’t want kids. It felt the Committee to Defend Immigrants and the course of this I joined the Internation- Women and Gender Studies courses that as though being female defined the way ev- Muslims that they had initiated, and par- alist Club. We spent weeks preparing for the nuclear family is the main institu- eryone perceived me, at the same time as ticipated with them in activities defending our event on International Women’s Day tion through which wealth and property I would often be called out for not acting immigrant students and workers. (before meeting them I had never learned are passed down from one generation to “feminine” enough. At the time, I thought I knew what its origins as a socialist holiday), where the next. I began to understand that pri- As I got older, I became annoyed that “being a Marxist” meant, and that Marx- we gave presentations about and honored vate property is passed via familial lines I was always held to different standards ism and feminism were just two sides of radical and revolutionary women such as through men’s children. Women are ex- than my male counterparts. I was tired of the same coin. So after going to a few Club Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner pected to bear those children and devote regularly being asked about marriage and meetings, I was surprised to learn that Truth, Louise Michel, Alexandra Kollontai much of their lives to maintaining them. bearing children, as if that were the basic these Marxists, who said they fight very and others.1 Additionally, the nuclear family is appropriate conversation topic. It especial- militantly for women’s liberation, were not The Internationalist Club dedicated where the next generation of laborers are ly bothered me that I was still surrounded also feminists. After all, I had spent years the entire month of March to studying Bol- brought up and taught conformity and by sexist ideologies while being a child studying feminism in school, where it is shevik writings on the woman question. I subservience, so that they too can labor of immigrants in a country that suppos- advertised as the solution for women’s op- was introduced to the works of Kollontai, better for the sake of capital. It is through edly encourages equality between men and pression (and any deviation from this ide- Clara Zetkin, Nadezhda Krupskaya and the institution of the family that marriage, women. The reality of these experiences ology is frowned upon). So I was confused Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionary women child-rearing (for women), the domes- led me to ask questions about how I and by their insistence that women’s liberation I had never encountered in my academic tic servitude of housework (for women), others could be liberated from these back- could only be achieved through social- courses. Their points about liberation were and monogamy (for women) subjugate ward expectations. When I went to college ist revolution, and that this was somehow profound. When studying oppression in women. It is out of these oppressive condi- my sociology classes, I had never consid- tions that male-chauvinist, sexist, misogy- ered its material basis. My focus had al- nist ideologies arise to justify and explain ways been on attacking the ideologies per- women’s oppression. The Marxist program petuated by the people I grew up with and for women’s liberation underscores the by society in general. I was now learning need to provide social institutions that can that ideas and historical changes are based systematically replace this subjugation, so- on material conditions. cializing these tasks as part of building an In the case of women’s oppression, egalitarian, socialist society. misogyny and sexism are ideological man- Feminism inverts this, placing the root Internationalist photo ifestations that arise as justifications and cause of women’s oppression in backward explanations for it. Marxists combat them ideas. It does not get to the root of the prob- intransigently, and have always supported lem in class society, which is part of why any step or genuine reform that advances many bourgeois women embrace it. Femi- women’s rights and conditions, while ex- nists draws a gender line in society, seek- plaining that the capitalist system can’t be ing to unite women across class lines. They reformed away. So obviously, we need to require the mutual collaboration of all fight every form of backward ideology and women, implying, and sometimes openly Protesting Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Nikki Haley at April 1 Together with an extensive report on the forum, asserting, that women of all social classes 2017 Women of the World summit. Internationalists emphasized: bourgeois excerpts from presentations made there were have similar interests, bonded by “sister- politicians, imperialist criminals are “not our sisters.” published in Revolution No. 16, May 2019. continued on page 18 14 Revolution Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Slavery and the Constitution Origins of U.S. Capitalist “Democracy”

By James This is a key reason why the U.S. Con- stitution established a series of institutions Long ago and far away – or so it seems Sarah Silbiger/UPI that are strikingly anti-democratic. They these days – in the B.C. era (Before Corona- remained so even after slavery’s aboli- virus, that is), bourgeois politics in the Unit- tion through the Civil War and a number ed States fixated briefly on impeachment. of modifications over the years. The same On 18 December 2019, the lower house of governmental framework for administering Congress – the House of Representatives the bourgeois state – a machine of organized – voted to impeach Donald Trump. On 5 violence against the oppressed – continued February 2020, the curtain came down on to bolster the capitalist rulers’ power. a farce foretold, as the upper house of Con- gress – the Senate – voted to acquit him. Of, By and For Whom? As we Marxists noted at the time, Generations have had a lot of patriotic the Democrats leading the lower house of pablum pounded into their heads about the Congress did not, of course, impeach Don- figures who, supposedly guided by selfless ald Trump for his crimes against the op- devotion to abstract principles, wrote the na- pressed, for example his “sadistic murder- tion’s charter at the Constitutional Conven- ous cruelty against refugees at the border” tion, held in Philadelphia back in 1787. A and “vicious persecution of immigrants in good antidote is to look at how institutions the U.S.” After all, the record deportations enshrined in the Constitution reflect the real under the Democratic administration that class forces and material interests involved. paved the way for Trump made Demo- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signs articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, January 15. “#DefendOurDemocracy” became the ● The presidency. This crowns the cratic president Barack Obama “deporter- structure largely built to the slave own- in-chief.” Instead, they staged an electoral Democrats’ rallying cry throughout the impeachment fiasco, in which the bigot-in-chief was tried by the wrong class for the wrong crimes. ers’ measure. “For 32 of the Constitution’s gambit accusing Trump of getting in the first 36 years,” a “slaveholding Virginian way of strategic goals of U.S. imperialism up by Democrats and Republicans in this Abolitionists Said Constitution occupied the presidency.”3 And for 50 of by holding up the delivery of weapons of country, Marxists are the most intransi- Was a “Covenant with Death” the 72 years up to 1860, slave owners held war to a “U.S. ally” (Ukraine), in which the gent defenders of those rights, which were Written when “We the People” meant the office, and openly pro-slavery North- Democrats banked on dissatisfaction with won by mass struggle. Some of them were erners such as James Buchanan (known as the erratic, “soft-on-Russia” president in codified in the Bill of Rights; the smash- that black people, Native Americans, wom- en, as well as many white poor and working “doughfaces”) did so the rest of the time. the military and intelligence “community.” ing of chattel slavery in the Civil War re- The framers of the Constitution knew it Trump was “brought up on charges by the sulted in a number of key amendments, people were openly excluded from “democ- racy,” the United States Constitution still wasn’t feasible to have a king, though Alex- wrong class for the wrong crimes,” noted and women’s suffrage was finally -estab ander Hamilton wanted the president to serve The Internationalist.1 lished through the 19th Amendment. established a series of major barriers to the exercise of the vaunted “will of the people.” for life. They settled for establishing an exec- While Democrats charged Trump Bourgeois democracy is a form of gov- utive branch headed by a president, to whom with obstruction of Congress, his backers ernment administering the capitalist state. Taught in civics classes as the embodiment of impartial “checks and balances,” they were the Constitution gave extraordinary power. pointed to Article II of the U.S. Constitu- Quoting Engels, Lenin emphasized that the in fact designed, and explicitly motivated by Today, that includes the power to blow up the tion, claiming that it allows the president to core of that state consists of the “armed the Constitution’s “Framers,” to protect prop- world. The president can presently be elected do “whatever he wants.” In fact, the Con- bodies of men” (police, armed forces, etc.) erty and wealth against the masses. Above to up to two four-year terms and is virtually stitution established a powerful executive, whose function is to uphold the power and all, key institutions were established to bol- impossible to remove from office. often called the “imperial presidency.” property of the ruling class – that is, to ster and uphold the power of the slaveowners ● The Electoral College. This was Democrats and Republicans vied to see enforce the class dictatorship of the bour- in the newly established American republic. established to help ensure the election of which party of racist U.S. capitalism could geoisie. In “normal” times, the democratic Slavery shaped the Constitution so fla- a president with what Hamilton called pretend to be more passionate about differ- republic is “the best possible political shell grantly that William Lloyd Garrison, a pio- the “requisite qualifications,” that is, ac- ing “interpretations of the Constitution.” for capitalism,” in which capital “estab- neer of the abolitionist movement, called it ceptable to the ruling class. In particular, Both wielded an old political and ideologi- lishes its power so securely, so firmly, that a “covenant with death” and “an agreement though, the Electoral College boosted the cal weapon: what historians call the “civic no change of persons, institutions or par- with Hell.”2 One of the best-known aboli- power of the Southern states based cen- religion” that has taught one generation af- ties in the bourgeois-democratic republic tionist polemics was The Constitution A trally on slave labor. This is because the ter another the mythology of the Constitu- can shake it” (State and Revolution). Pro-Slavery Compact (“compact” meaning number of electoral votes assigned to each tion as an abstract embodiment of “democ- But when the capitalists consider their deal in the language of the day), by Wen- state is determined by that state’s “whole racy” in general, an abstract ideal akin to rule to be threatened, they can sweep away dell Phillips. Published in 1844, it called the Number of Senators and Representatives,” the Ten Commandments to be worshipped all trappings of democracy, constitutions, Constitution “that ‘compromise’ ... granting which included slaves under the infamous alongside the “Founding Fathers,” etc. Yet parliaments and the rest. One only has to the slaveholder distinct privileges and 3/5ths Clause, until slavery was finally the creators of the Constitution understood to look at how the “democratic” German abolished through the Civil War. very well that they represented not “the protection for his slave property, in return government turned power over to Hitler in for certain commercial concessions upon his In the 1800 elections, for example, people” in general but the ruling class of 1933, or how the Chilean bourgeoisie had “without the votes of the extra electors that planters and merchants, and wrote it to part toward the North.” Phillips denounced the “constitutionalist” army head Augusto “our fathers” (aka the Founding Fathers) for resulted from the addition of three-fifths of safeguard their interests. Pinochet carry out a bloody coup in 1973 the South’s slaves to the population calcu- In works like the Communist Mani- having “bartered honesty for gain,” with a to establish the military dictatorship that Constitution that embodied the Northern lation,” Thomas Jefferson would not have festo (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ruled with an iron fist for 17 years. won the presidency.4 Jefferson, who sought 1847) and State and Revolution (V.I. elite being “partners” with the slaveholders, Looking at the particular set-up of capi- to “share in the profits of their tyranny.” to extend the Southern slaveocracy’s pow- Lenin, 1917) – crucial reading for all who talist rule in the United States, the fact is that er to the Caribbean and beyond, was par- want to do away with capitalist oppres- the U.S. Constitution set up a particularly 2 See “Garrison’s Constitution: The Covenant with 3 “The Troubling Reason the Electoral College sion – the founders of our movement ex- anti-democratic institutional framework. By Death and How It Was Made,” Prologue, Winter Exists,” Time, 26 November 2018. plained that “bourgeois democracy” was way of comparison, in many parliamentary 2000, online at archives.gov/publications/pro- 4 Eric Foner, “The Corrupt Bargain,” London a step forward compared with monarchies systems the government can fall through a logue/2000/winter/garrisons-constitution-1.html Review of Books, 21 May. Since the workings and the feudal aristocracy. Today, against no-confidence vote by the majority of elected After a close association with Garrison, the great of the Electoral College gave the 2000 election attacks on basic democratic rights ramped radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass broke with to George W. Bush and the 2016 one to Donald representatives, which would be followed by him; disagreement with Garrison’s adherence to Trump, despite both losing the popular vote, 1 “Against Trump and the Democrats – Build new elections. In Britain, for example, votes pacifistic “moral suasion” came to a head when today Democratic liberals are unhappy with it, a Workers Party. Impeachment Crisis: ‘Deep of no confidence have brought down 21 Douglass hailed the raid on Harpers Ferry that while continuing to portray the Constitution as State’ vs. Bigot-in-Chief,” The Internationalist prime ministers since the office was estab- John Brown launched in October 1859 in an effort virtual holy writ and the structure it set up as the No. 57, September-October 2019. lished in 1742, must recently in 1979. to spark a slave insurrection in the South. incarnation of ‘democracy.” August 2020 15 Marxists understand that the ers like those had who launched Shays’ publication in 1962.7 Its title was doubtless entire institution was formed as Rebellion in western Massachusetts in intended, in part, as a riposte to Capitalism one more means to prevent the 1786-87. Angry about poverty, foreclo- and Slavery (1944), a key historical work by population from having “too sures and new taxes, the rebels, many Trinidadian leftist Eric Williams. In fact, as much” exercise of democratic of them Revolutionary War veterans, at- Karl Marx explained, the slave trade and the rights. As the Trotskyist press tacked courthouses and government of- system of chattel slavery played a crucial role noted in 1936: fices, demanding debt relief and stopping in the onset of the capitalist era, as well as in “That the Supreme Court is judges from holding court. the growth of capitalist economy internation- but one of a host of instru- Massachusetts’ Henry Knox, a mili- ally and in the United States specifically. mentalities and principles tary commander during the Revolution Together with his incisive analysis embodied in the Constitution and the future first Secretary of War, wrote of the U.S. Civil War, Marx’s writings on by its makers to thwart for- George Washington in October 1786 about these topics are highly relevant today for ever the possibility of major- the rebellious farmers: understanding the roots of racist oppression ity rule; that the Founding Fa- “They see the weakness of Govern- and the historical forces that shaped the so- thers had as their fundamental ment[,] they feel at once their own ciety we live in. In recent years, since the aim the erection of such poverty compared with the opulent, 2008 depression led to growing interest in permanent barriers; that the and their own force, and they are deter- critiques of the capitalist system, leftist his- hostility to majority rule is, in mined to make use of the latter in order fact, the very essence of the torians have published a number of studies to remedy the former. Their creed is that further detailing just how central Southern Constitution – such ideas are the property of the United States has repugnant to the ruling class, slavery was to the rise and development of been protected from the confiscations of U.S. capitalism as a whole, including wealth which prefers to perpetuate Britain by the joint exertions of all, and and fortunes accumulated in the North.8 the myth that the Constitution therefore ought to be the common prop- 5 It was indeed “profits,” as Wendell is a democratic document.” erty of all.… Our government must be ● The Senate, the upper braced, changed, or altered to secure our Phillips noted back in 1844, that underlay house of Congress, with two sen- lives and property.” the alliance between Northern and Southern Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian ators per state regardless of how This and similar rebellions alerted the propertied elites that gave birth to the U.S. Revolution, which terrified U.S. slaveholders. big or small each state’s popu- Northern elite to the need, from their stand- Constitution. Both groups had come to see ticularly alarmed by the Haitian Revolu- lation is. Originally elected by point, for a more centralized government their interest in breaking loose from Britain tion. “If this combustion can be introduced state legislatures, not directly by voters, the with much broader executive powers. This in the late 1700s. Both resented new taxes among us ... we have to fear it,” he wrote Senate was established as a way of making meant scrapping the Articles of Confedera- levied by London. Northern merchant and James Madison, warning against allowing extra-sure that the House of Representatives, tion, under which the U.S. operated from commercial sectors were held back by laws news of Haitian slaves’ heroic uprising to elected on the basis of population, would 1781 to 1789, and replacing it with a new forcing them to sell their goods in Britain; reach the slave states of the U.S. As presi- not enact measures unpalatable to wealthy Constitution. One of their complaints was Southern planters like George Washington dent, he sought to work with the European property owners. After all, Madison, the Vir- that unicameral legislatures in the states and Patrick Henry were angry at Britain for powers to seal off and strangle the black ginia slave owner who wrote the first drafts had shown too much “weakness” toward restraining westward expansion of slave republic. Vastly expanding U.S. territory – of the Constitution and co-wrote the Feder- the poor farmers, and they saw a strong na- plantations after the “French and Indian” and with it the land for slave plantations – alist Papers, said the rights of property must tional Senate, made up of men of property, War, and at their growing debts to British through the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson be protected “against majority factions.” as part of the “remedy” to such dangers. merchant houses. Seeing a colony establish independence later wrote to James Monroe (author of the Virginia governor and slave owner Edmund The origin and nature of the Senate is from the “mother country” and reject monar- Monroe Doctrine of U.S. dominance of the Randolph warned the Constitutional Con- connected to the ludicrously undemocratic chy – which for centuries had claimed a di- Western Hemisphere) with the proposal to vention against “the turbulence and follies of nature of the impeachment process. A pres- vine right to rule – stirred hopes among many annex Cuba, where the sugar industry was democracy,” and advocated a “good Senate” ident is “impeached” when the House of around the world inspired by Enlightenment coining enormous wealth from slave labor. to “restrain, if possible, [democracy’s] fury.” Representatives brings articles of impeach- ideals and fed up with the old order. But ● The Supreme Court, made up of John Dickinson of Delaware, a slave owner ment against them. But it takes a two-thirds what America’s “Founding Fathers” sought nine black-robed dispensers of ruling-class and signer of the Constitution, said senators majority of the Senate to convict and re- and carried out from 1776 to 1783 (when “justice” appointed for life by the presi- should be “distinguished for their rank in life move a president. This has occurred ex- the British conceded defeat) was a political dent. (The president also appoints many and their weight of property.” No wonder the actly zero times. Though the House of U.S. Senate came to be known as a “million- separation from Britain, so the American other federal officials, who often remain in Representatives has voted in favor of im- aires’ club.” peachment on three separate occasions in propertied elites could rule the roost. Unlike office for decades.) Up until the Civil War, the French and Haitian revolutions it helped the Southern slavocracy essentially con- Securing “Monied Interests” U.S. history, the Senate has rejected the impeachment, voting to acquit the sitting touch off, the American Revolution was not a trolled the Supreme Court. For the vast ma- Northern framers of the Constitution president, every time. social revolution – and Marxists do not cel- jority of the antebellum period, the Chief had reasons of their own for backing the The origins of the impeachment pro- ebrate the Fourth of July. Instead, we recall Justice of the Supreme Court was a South- establishment of the Senate, with Eldridge cess date back to 14th-century England, Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “What, to ern slaveowner, and over half of justices Garry of Massachusetts highlighting the 9 where aristocrats were tried by their peers, the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?” As for the throughout that 72-year period also owned need for making “the commercial & mon- i.e., other nobles. As the liberal New Yorker national anthem, it is a star-spangled paean slaves. Southern planter domination of the ied interest ... secure.” Roger Sherman of magazine noted last October: to racist oppression, threatening “the hireling Supreme Court resulted in verdicts such as 10 Connecticut, who signed the Declaration “The House of Commons couldn’t at- and slave” with “the doom of the grave.” the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that of Independence as well as the Constitu- tack the King directly because of the Though the founding elites had to use residence in a free state or territory did not tion, said the people “should have as little fiction that the King was infallible plebeian sectors to defeat the British, their entitle an enslaved person to their freedom to do as may be about the Government.” (‘perfect,’ as Donald Trump would own needs and outlook marked the new re- – with chief justice Roger Taney stating Hamilton, one of the most far-seeing rep- say), so, beginning in 1376, they im- public’s set-up. While the American Revo- that black men had “no rights which the resentatives of that “interest” in the North, peached his favorites, accusing Lord lution gave an impetus to end slavery in the white man is bound to respect.” warned his fellow Founding Fathers not William Latimer and Richard Lyons Northern states (by 1804, all of them had By Constitutional design, the Supreme to “incline too much to democracy.” Their of acting ‘falsely in order to have ad- 7 After a U.S.-backed junta seized power in Court can stymie legislative changes; and drive for a new Constitution was partly fu- vantages for their own use.’ Latimer, Chile in 1975, overthrowing the elected gov- it can roll back decisions like Roe v. Wade, eled by fear of unrest among small farm- a peer, insisted that he be tried by his ernment of Salvador Allende, crushing unions which at least finally recognized women’s peers – that is, by the House of Lords, and murdering thousands of leftist workers and basic democratic right to abortion, under 5 Felix Morrow, “The Spirit of the U.S. Constitu- not the House of Commons – and it youth, Friedman got a chance to put his idea of the impact of mass antiwar, black freedom tion,” New International, February 1936 (online was his peers who convicted him and “freedom” into practice, devising the starvation and women’s rights struggles – and, above at https://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow- sent him to prison. That’s why, today, “shock treatment” economic plan for military felix/1936/02/constitution.htm). This was writ- dictator Augusto Pinochet. all, the victorious Vietnamese insurgents’ the House [of Representatives] is pre- ten in the midst of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New 8 Historian Sven Beckert gives a good descrip- fight against U.S. imperialism. Yet the anti- paring articles of impeachment against Deal, when the Communist Party joined main- Trump, acting as his accusers, but it tion of recent research in “Slavery and Capital- democratic set-up of U.S. “democracy” stream Democrats in pushing liberal myths and is the Senate that will judge his inno- ism,” The Chonicle of Higher Education, 12 means Roe v. Wade will never be safe from legends about the Constitution, Washington, Jef- cence or his guilt.”6 December 2014, online at chronicle.com/article/ repeated attacks (and over the years the ferson, etc. Its formerly revolutionary politics slavery-and-capitalism. For Karl Marx’s crucial Democrats helped reduce abortion rights destroyed by Stalinism, the CP was promoting Capitalism and Slavery analysis, see the Internationalist pamphlet Marx time and again). There is no possibility of the “popular front” line of support to FDR, even Capitalism and Freedom, a paean to the on Slavery and the U.S. Civil War (2009). proclaiming that “Communism is 20th-Century 9 You can hear the great black leftist actor Ossie democratic recall of justices or any form of profit system by right-wing economist Mil- Americanism.” Today, Democratic (Party) “so- Davis read it here: https://www.youtube.com/ popular accountability. Liberal fascination cialists” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria ton Friedman, has been admired by apolo- watch?v=2yZD3eA2buw with the Supreme Court centers on waiting Ocasio-Cortez have made a specialty of red- gists for “free-market” exploitation since its 10 See “Kaepernick Protest Inspires Youth De- for one of its members to die or retire white-and-blue appeals to the tradition of FDR, 6 “The Invention – and Reinvention – of Im- fying Racist Repression,” Revolution No. 13, and pushing for more liberal judges, but the New Deal, etc. ad nauseam. peachment,” The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2019. November 2016. 16 Revolution decreed its abolition), it was followed by a Boston Athenaeum New-York Historical Society

vast expansion of slavery for the Southern Smithsonian plantation owners, whose domains grew ever larger as the U.S. pushed westward through the Louisiana Purchase, “removal” and genocide against Native Americans, the acquisition of the Oregon Territory through threats of war against Britain, the creation of the Texas slave state, and then the Mexican-American War (1846-48). In a series of letters published in a Viennese newspaper at the beginning of the Civil War, Karl Marx explained the economic and political logic of the slave system’s expansionism. Though there isn’t space to go through his points here, we would highly recommend the summary of them that is part of an in-depth article Heroic fighters for the abolition of slavery: Harriet Tubman, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. marking the 150th anniversary of the further expansion that resulted from this by the government there to aid the South. of the Civil War. Emancipation Proclamation, in The Inter- war for expanding slavery, Northern and In a famous address by the International to “The need to fight for black liberation nationalist (No. 34, March-April 2013).11 Southern politicians worked out the Com- Lincoln in November 1864, Marx wrote: through socialist revolution is high- One key aspect was that the slave system’s promise of 1850. The new Fugitive Slave “The working classes of Europe un- lighted by the fact that the betrayal of production of cotton and other export crops Act it entailed was even more vicious that derstood at once, even before the fa- Reconstruction meant that the Southern was threatened due to soil depletion. As the one Congress had passed in 1793. 1850 natic partisanship of the upper classes rulers could not only rewrite the story the article notes, “The slavocracy’s prof- also saw the infamous Dred Scott decision. for the Confederate gentry had given to suit their interests, but roll back a its in [key] states were coming more and Four years later, the Kansas-Ne- its dismal warning, that the slavehold- large part of what Reconstruction had achieved, as they pushed social rela- more from slave raising and the provision braska Act led to armed clashes, most ers’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin tions as far back as possible towards of slaves to other slave states. The market famously in Kansas, where slavers and for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of slavery-like conditions.” for slaves in the other states was limited, abolitionists poured into the state to sway labor, with their hopes for the future, and so the expansion of slavery into other the referendum on slavery. Heroic aboli- For Socialist Revolution and even their past conquests were at stake areas where extensive cultivation could tionists like John Brown fought to blaze in that tremendous conflict on the other Proletarian Democracy be undertaken was imperative.” Addition- a path toward the destruction of slavery side of the Atlantic.” Democratic (Party) “socialists” and ally, the advance of Northern industry and during the battles of “Bleeding Kansas” After one defeat after another for reformists of various descriptions are for- population threatened to reduce the politi- in 1856. In 1859, leading a heroic force Union armies, Lincoln issued the Eman- ever serving up new variants of the old il- cal advantages the Constitution had given of black and white fighters in an attack cipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, lusions in bourgeois democracy (“partici- the South. The slaveholders needed more on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, in freeing three million slaves (though not patory democracy,” “people’s budgeting,” slave states to maintain their political hopes of touching off a slave revolt across yet abolishing slavery throughout the “radical democracy,” etc.) But a basic un- power in Washington. the South, Brown was captured by troops U.S.). When black combatants were fi- derstanding that every capitalist state exists The Second under the command of Robert E. Lee and nally allowed to fight in the war, and al- to uphold the interests of the ruling class, American Revolution J.E.B. Stuart. On the day of his execu- most 200,000 served under arms, this was and a look at the specific governmental tion, Brown declared himself “quite cer- crucial in the Second American Revolution As the U.S. expanded westward, the forms through which the bourgeois state is tain that the crimes of this guilty land will that defeated the slaveholders’ rebellion administered in the U.S., highlight Marx’s balance of power between the Southern never be purged away but with blood.” slavocracy and the Northern merchants and and smashed the system of chattel slavery. point that the working class cannot “lay After the election of Abraham Lincoln The 13th Amendment to the Consti- hold of the ready-made state machinery manufacturers kept threatening to blow up. (on a program not of abolishing slavery One “compromise” after another was made tution (1865) formally abolished slavery and wield it for its own purposes.” but of preventing its further extension), throughout the U.S. It was followed by two Revolutionaries explain the need for a and then broke down. Already in 1820, the master class of the South launched the leaders of the two “sections” of the U.S. other amendments key to the postwar Re- revolutionary workers party to lead a social- Civil War in 1861 with the bombardment construction period: the 14th (1868, giving ist revolution to overthrow the entire capital- put together the Missouri Compromise, of Fort Sumter. The forces of their “Con- stipulating that slave states and free states citizenship to all those born in the U.S.) ist system. This means establishing a work- federacy” would be commanded by the and the 15th (1870, giving black men the ers state (what Marx called the dictatorship would be admitted to the Union in pairs. same Lee, Stuart, et al., some of whose vile After Mexico’s abolition decree (1829) led right to vote). However, the former slaves’ of the proletariat). Based on the experience statues are finally being torn down today. call for “forty acres and a mule” – which of the Paris Commune and the 1917 Bolshe- slaveholders like Samuel Houston and Ste- Like Frederick Douglass and other radical phen Austin to carve Texas out of Mexico would have meant seizing and dividing up vik Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky, we abolitionists in the U.S., Karl Marx – then and bring it into the U.S., the White House the plantations – was not realized, particu- advocate that the proletarian democracy of a writing from London – understood that staged a “border incident” to launch war on larly after the Paris Commune of 1871, in workers state rest on workers councils. These the Union could not win the war without Mexico and seize half its territory. With the which French workers briefly took power, were the “soviets” that took power in Rus- tearing out the root of the conflict: slavery. heightened Northern capitalists’ fears of a sia (before capitalist encirclement and inva- 11 The article, “The Emancipation Proclama- With other leaders of the “First Interna- general “assault on property.” sion by over a dozen countries, including the tion: Promise and Betrayal,” is available online tional” (the International Working Men’s Reconstruction’s promise of black U.S. under ultra-racist Democrat Woodrow at internationalist.org/emancipationproclama- Association) and trade unionists, he helped freedom was broken and sold out, a be- Wilson, led to the degeneration of the Soviet tion1304.html organize workers in Britain to stop moves trayal sealed by yet another “compromise” workers state and the rise of Stalin’s conser- between the men of property and power in vative bureaucracy). both North and South. This was the Com- The U.S. Constitution was created promise of 1877 between the former slave- to represent the interests of the American holders’ Democratic Party and the Repub- ruling class, whose interests have always lican Party that increasingly represented been opposed to those of the workers and the interests of Northern industrialists. As oppressed. For this vast majority, workers noted in “The Emancipation Proclamation: rule will be a thousand times more demo- Promise and Betrayal”: cratic than any capitalist state. Yet as Marx “The promise of black freedom was and Lenin argued, international socialist thus betrayed by the Northern bour- revolution will lay the basis for a classless geoisie, which sacrificed Reconstruc- and stateless society: socialism. With the tion on the altar of profit and ‘national

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper Frank Leslie’s use of technology and the productive forc- reconciliation.’ The counterrevolution es providing plenty for all while radically against Radical Reconstruction was then justified in national myth: the cause of cutting time needed for labor, this will thorough-going emancipation and racial pave the way for communism. Curious equality was buried under layers of lies about outlived class societies of the past, so thick that generations of schoolchil- future students will doubtless learn many dren were taught – by liberal and right- things about the final phase of capitalist ist historians alike – that Reconstruction barbarity when they study the reactionary Illustration of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, prelude to the Civil War, had been a terrible mistake, and even U.S. Constitution in museums of capital- which Marxists also call the Second American Revolution. that slavery was not the underlying issue ist antiquities. n August 2020 17 workers and peasants under the gun of “our Afghanistan... own” imperialist government, and to wage continued from page 11 class war against imperialist war. AFP / Getty in Indochina showed a basic fact: the U.S. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin em- government lies all the time. In the after- phasized in key works like Socialism and math, imperialist politicos and strategists War (1915), Marxists and class-conscious worried that Washington’s global power, workers must stand for the defeat of “their and preparation for future wars, were own” imperialist rulers and the defense hampered by what came to be known as of colonial and semicolonial countries the “Vietnam Syndrome” – that is, mas- targeted in their wars. At the same time, sive domestic aversion to overseas mili- Marxists give no political support to the tary adventures involving large numbers bourgeois governments of those countries; of U.S. troops. instead, the working class must fight for its In 1991, at the end of his “Desert own revolutionary governments there and Slaughter” war on Iraq, George Bush I throughout the world. proclaimed: “By God, we’ve kicked the In the bourgeois press, the Afghani- Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Not stan Papers are regarded as either reveal- so. A decade later in 2001, George Bush ing nothing of importance, or as being II hoped it would be overcome when he a totally new revelation. The truth lies seized on the September 11 attacks to somewhere in between. Even at the be- launch the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan ginning of Bush’s “Operation Enduring Fifty thousand Bangladeshi women garment workers on strike, January 2019. and a new “Desert Slaughter” in Iraq, Freedom,” as his spin doctors dubbed the Workers producing garments for H&M, Walmart, Tesco and Aldi walked out which was on his infamous “axis of evil” imperialist war on Afghanistan, some re- demanding higher wages, affecting over 4,500 textile and clothing factories. list. This was sold with the lie of “WMD” porters asked if the U.S. was sinking into Police responded with rubber bullets and tear gas, killing at least one striking – that Saddam Hussein’s government a “quagmire,” as, decades previously, worker. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, another capitalist “boss was supposedly stockpiling “weapons of many in the media had come to call the lady,” does imperialism’s dirty work in siccing police on strikers. war in Vietnam. So at a press conference mass destruction” – a blatant fabrication own experiences with women’s oppres- in November 2001, uber-cynical war loyally parroted by the bourgeois press, sion growing up. The fight for women’s secretary Rumsfeld asked the roomful of Feminism or... and especially by the New York Times. continued from page 14 liberation first became important to me In Afghanistan the U.S. government pro- reporters to join in: “All together now – hood,” and should unite on that basis. This because of my personal experiences with claimed that war against Islamist forces, quagmire!” (Bob Woodward, Plan of At- being treated unfairly due to my gender. that it had in large part promoted and tack [2004]). program of class collaboration is counter- posed to winning women’s liberation. Studying the history of the revolutionary armed as anti-Soviet “freedom fighters,” Today, a headline in the London Daily real life and history have proven movement and the basis of the Marxist was part of a global “War on Terror.” In Guardian (9 December 2019) encapsulates time and again that working-class women program, I learned that all forms of spe- reality, it was yet another war of imperi- the liberal line: “Afghanistan papers reveal do not have the same interests as ruling- cial oppression – of women, of black peo- alist terror for world domination by the US public misled about unwinnable war.” class women. The boss is not and cannot ple, of immigrants, of gay and transgender U.S. capitalist ruling class. Here again the “failures” of the imperial- be the “sister” of the women worker – that people, etc. – are rooted in class society, Yet U.S. rulers and their propagan- ists’ war add up to its being “unwinnable,” idea helps the capitalist and harms the and that the struggle against it is a class dists continued to be haunted by the while bourgeois liberals cover over war’s struggle of those he or she exploits. A fe- struggle. Vietnam syndrome. In 2009, a year af- criminal, imperialist purposes, rooted in male garment worker in the sweatshops of A word is in order here on “iden- ter Obama’s election, “The Incurable the fact that imperialism is not a mistaken Bangladesh, who on average earns about tity politics.” To believe that an effective Vietnam Syndrome” was the title of a policy but the system of capitalism in its $33 per month,2 will never have the same fight against oppression rooted in capital- column by neoconservative pundit Max blood-drenched death spiral. interests as the bourgeois women who own, ism comes from uniting all those with a Boot (cbsnews.com, 14 October 2009). Though many of the realities of U.S. or whose families own, those sweatshops, common “identity” based on gender is an Boot – a warmonger in the most literal imperialism’s war in Afghanistan have and who profit from their exploitation. The example of this outlook, which college been known for years, the Afghanistan Pa- sense – bemoaned the “incalculable dam- women working in these factories, who students are literally trained in. As RIY’s pers do expose the all-sided duplicity of age to America’s standing in the world” are doubly oppressed, facing both gender founding statement points out, this ideol- the bourgeois politicians and military elite, caused by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and class oppression, have more in com- ogy advances political objectives coun- who routinely and continuously lie as part grotesquely stating that this was due to mon with their working-class brothers than terposed to a genuine fight for liberation, of the bloody, bipartisan business-as-usual the imperialists, who made napalm a they will ever have with the bourgeois serving as “a glue for ‘unity’ with Demo- of capitalist rule. As they rain death and de- household word, losing the “willpower” women subjugating them both. The task of cratic Party politicians” while it “feigns a to win in Vietnam. struction on the peoples of the world, they women’s liberation is that of the working fight against oppression through ‘check- 3 Urging Obama to “make a serious must seek continuously to hide the truth class as a whole, and one revolutionaries your-privilege’ liberal idealism....” and prolonged commitment” to the war, from the population “at home” that they must win them to, to bring workers power This account has focused on the Boot praised the “careful, on-the-ground claim, with the red-white-and-blue rhetoric into this fight as part of the struggle for the topic of women’s oppression, which is review” of the Afghanistan war by U.S. of deception, to “represent.” workers to take over internationally, open- what first politicized me; this is one facet commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. What the Afghanistan Papers do not ing the way for a classless society that can of what led me to join the Revolution- Today, unsurprisingly, the Afghanistan Pa- do is seek to bring to light the bloody na- eliminate all forms of oppression. ary Internationalist Youth. Many other pers show in detail that McChrystal was ture of imperialism, exposing the daily Feminism ultimately reflects the out- issues have been key in my political de- one of the main promoters of lies and de- crimes and barbaric cruelties committed by look of bourgeois women seeking the same velopment as well. Among them are the ception in the service of this dirty colonial the U.S. against its victims. The WikiLeaks advantages and power enjoyed by bour- fight for black liberation, our call for full war. Meanwhile, Boot went on to endorse revelations of 2010 did both. geois men. They seek this kind of equality citizenship rights for all immigrants and Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and Yet despite these hundreds of thou- (for themselves) within the existing social the intensive work that the Internation- is lionized by liberals today as he decries sands of documents that have made framework of capitalism. Marxists oppose alist Group, RIY and Trabajadores In- Trump as insufficiently tough on Russia their way to the public, there is still so any discrimination based on gender within ternacionales Clasistas (Class Struggle and an impediment to “America acting as much more to know – we have not even capitalist society (yes, including if it affects International Workers) carry out among a world leader.” scratched the surface of U.S. imperial- women who are not part of the exploited immigrant workers and youth. Of partic- ism’s crimes. It was not until after the ular importance is Trotsky’s program of To Put Murder Inc. class) – but being genuinely radical aim Russian Revolution of 1917 that the impe- to smash the system that gives rise to that permanent revolution. It is key for South Out of Business rialist powers’ secret treaties to re-divide discrimination and to women’s oppression Asia, for all formerly colonized regions, Chiming in with Democratic liberals the world through the first imperialist in general. Thus, as I continued to work and for the countries and peoples crushed to proclaim that “peace is patriotic,” re- World War were revealed. Just two weeks with RIY, I learned that the struggle for down by imperialism and the local ruling formist left groups constantly raise chants after leading the victorious workers in- women’s liberation is inextricably linked classes today. like “Money for schools, not for war.” surrection, Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik to the struggle for working-class libera- It took some time for me to break with Exemplifying what Marxists call “social- government’s Commissar for Foreign Af- tion. Therefore, to effectively fight against feminism and come over to revolutionary patriotism,” this promotes the idea that fairs, published them for the whole world women’s oppression requires a break with Marxism, and my political consciousness slaughtering oppressed people abroad is to see. And it will take nothing less than feminism, which obscures the root of kept sharpening in the process. Women’s just too expensive and U.S. imperialism a socialist revolution in the U.S. to bring women’s oppression and seeks to tie work- liberation can only be achieved through so- should change its priorities, as the money to light all the crimes of the imperialists, ing women to their bourgeois “sisters.” cialist revolution, and as a member of RIY would be better spent here “at home.” In and ultimately bring their perpetrators to I now understood the root of my that is exactly what I am fighting for. n contrast, revolutionaries stand for prole- justice. Only world-wide workers revolu- 2 See “Sweatshops in Bangladesh” at https:// 3 “Revolutionary Internationalist Youth Found- tarian internationalism, in solidarity with tion can put an end to imperialist war. n waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh. ed,” Revolution No. 14, January 2018. 18 Revolution Herding Votes for Biden, Pushing More Cash for Cops Like We Said: Bernie Sanders’ “Political Revolution” Was a Scam By Jacob tion to capitalism’s Democratic Party. Join- ing Ocasio-Cortez et al. in this task are the Bernie Sanders is at it yet again. With ABC News / Apple News / WMUR-TV populistic bluster about a “political revo- Democratic Socialists of America (DSA, lution against the billionaire class,” the of which AOC is a member), the Jacobin senator from Vermont who calls himself magazine crew (intellectual technicians a democratic socialist drew wide support for packaging capitalist politics as “social- from youth disenchanted by capitalism’s ism”), and many others. To youth who may escalating crises. His foot soldiers revved suspect they have been swindled, the mes- them up, registered them as Democrats sage is, in effect: Nothing to see here, move and lined them up for the November 2020 on – onward to November. vote. In April, Sanders dropped out of the Yet under the impact of U.S. capitalism’s primaries, throwing his weight behind the triple pandemic of racist police terror, embodiment of the “Democratic establish- coronavirus and economic devastation, ment” his followers had reviled: Joe Biden. many workers and youth are increasingly Like we said from the beginning: Sanders’ open to radical politics. Berned once, Berned so-called political revolution was and al- twice, some of those who supported Sanders ways has been a political scam, in the ser- feel conned (which they were). And despite vice of the Democrats. intensive efforts by Democrats and their left So now Bernie Sanders proclaims that assistants to channel protesters against police Joe Biden could be the “most progressive terror into illusory Democratic schemes president” since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders embrace at February 7 Democratic presiden- to “reform”/“defund” capitalism’s police, This PR pitch came after the “Unity Task tial primary debate in New Hampshire. determined opponents of racism want to get Forces,” which the presumptive Demo- mechanisms of capitalist electoral politics, America, the bombing of Hiroshima and to the root of systemic oppression. Marxism cratic nominee and Bernie’s team set up in to make them more effective at deceiving Nagasaki, imperialism’s genocidal war is essential for doing this, and for showing May, released policy recommendations for the exploited and oppressed. “No, Bernie against the people of Vietnam....” the link between effective struggle to uproot a Biden presidency. Coming from Sanders, Sanders Is Not a Socialist,” we insisted Today, Sanders stumping for Biden, racism and the fight to unchain the power of this was high praise indeed. Like his ally (Revolution No. 12, March 2016).3 Telling the godfather of mass incarceration, should the working class and oppressed from the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who snagged a it like it is – which is the first duty of Marx- come as no surprise. It was only a matter Democratic Party. prized post as co-chair of Biden’s climate ists, who fight for a workers revolution to of time. He said all along he’d work for the Sanders’ political record is littered with taskforce, Sanders holds up Democratic overthrow the capitalist order – contrasts eventual Democratic nominee. Four years examples of how he has worked to uphold imperialist icon FDR and his New Deal as sharply with the pretexts and gimmicks ago, he did the same, for Barack Obama’s the interests of U.S. imperialism. He voted a model and inspiration. In fact, Sanders that reformist groups cooked up to justify war-hawk secretary of state. “I did my best to support U.S. wars and interventions in explains “democratic socialism” as a con- their quest to cash in on Bernie-mania. To to see that Hillary Clinton get elected,” Yugoslavia (in 1998 and 1999), Somalia tinuation of FDR’s New Deal.1 help peddle imperialist Democratic liberal- Sanders told CNN (10 November 2016). In (in 1993), Libya (in 2011) and Afghanistan The comparison is telling. Roosevelt’s ism as supposedly some kind of socialism the lead-up to election day, he herded votes (in 2001). He voted against the Iraq war in “New Deal coalition” was instrumental in was, we pointed out, a textbook example of for her in 21 rallies, by his count. In the 2004 – and then voted to fund it in 2004, chaining labor, African Americans, Latinos what Marx and Lenin called opportunism. same interview, the “socialist” (sic!) senator 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and and would-be leftists to the Democratic segued into vowing: “I intend to work with 2013. In fact, as far back as 1998 Sanders Beating the Drums for the Party Party’s machinery for administering the President Trump on those issues where he voted for the “Iraq Liberation Act,” the capitalist system of exploitation, imperial- of Hiroshima and Vietnam War will, in fact, work for the middle class and regime-change measure that helped pave ism and racist repression. Today, Bernie, It’s never been a secret: “What I am working families in this country.” As we the way for the imperialist carnage. He AOC and other “progressives” are work- trying to do is revitalize the Democratic have noted since the beginning, Sanders is voted for the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, ing overtime to reinforce those chains. Party, bring in the young people, bring in a bourgeois politician – and all this comes written by Joe Biden and signed into law That they’re doing this in tandem with the working people,” Sanders told ABC with the territory of bourgeois politics. by Bill Clinton, which ramped up the Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer et News (27 November 2017). Time and Quite a few young people who mass incarceration system, and for the al. has upset some of Sanders’ followers. again, he has reiterated this objective, in thought supporting Sanders had something USA Freedom Act, which renewed and But in fact, he always stated explicitly that the service of U.S. imperialism’s oldest to do with “socialism” – or might at least expanded government domestic spying. he would throw his weight behind whoever and most trusted political party, responsi- improve things under capitalism – balk at Sanders said he “held [his] nose” the Democrats wound up nominating. ble for waging one U.S. war after another. backing Biden. One function of the Biden/ and voted funds for Trump’s border wall Thus “socialist” Sanders praising Joe As we emphasized in an in-depth ar- Sanders Unity Task Forces was to mobi- (CNN, 24 June 2018), arguing that this “shoot ’em in the leg” Biden2 is the clos- ticle explaining “No, Bernie Sander is Not a lize up-and-coming “progressives” and was in exchange for tenuous protections ing act in his “political revolution,” a Socialist” (Revolution No. 12, March 2016): members of the Bernie team to overcome for some undocumented immigrants. He drama that was always meant to bolster a “The political function of Bernie Sand- such doubts and hesitations. The objective: said “we have to protect the dreamers,” as largely discredited Democratic Party with ers’ campaign is not to sharpen the strug- firmly refastening the shackles of subjuga- he backed a bill that would prohibit them the votes of the young and discontented. gle against capitalist reaction but to blur As revolutionary Marxists, we have high- consciousness and lead those increas- lighted this from the beginning. This has ingly fed up with the status quo back meant stating forthrightly that far from into supporting the Democratic Party of Andrew Harnik / AP war, racism and police terror.” any kind of revolution, Sanders’ campaign Against illusions in Democratic (Party) has been an effort to update the timeworn 1 “Socialists,” we wrote in the same article: Mainstream media have noted this in articles “The Democratic Party is and has al- such as “Bernie Sanders’s New Deal Socialism,” ways been a machine for subjugating The New Yorker, 20 November 2015; “Bernie the working people and oppressed to the Sanders: ‘Democratic Socialist’ Is Just a Syn- onym for New Deal Liberal,” New York Maga- capitalist class, going back to the party’s zine, 23 April 2019; “Bernie Sanders Pitches origins as the party of slavery, then Jim ‘Democratic Socialism’ as Next Stage of FDR’s Crow. Its crimes include boundless op- New Deal,” HuffPost, 12 June 2019, etc. pression against the peoples of Latin 2 A week after the police murder of George 3 This article is reprinted in the Internationalist Floyd, in a speech to Wilmington, Delaware Af- Group pamphlet DSA: Fronting for the Demo- rican American community leaders, Biden said crats (2018), together with key materials on the cops should be trained to shoot people “in the real nature and history of “democratic social- Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton at meeting in Portsmouth, New leg instead of the heart.” ism” and its services to U.S. imperialism. Hampshire, 12 July 2016. August 2020 19 from sponsoring their parents for legal sta- ers lost the Democratic nomination the first tus. He sang the praises of deceased war time around. Endorsing Hillary Clinton, in criminals John McCain and George H.W. line with his promises, he then went on to Office of the Attorney General of California Bush. He gave “progressive” cover to the say: “I also look forward to working with U.S.-backed coup attempt in Venezuela Secretary Clinton to transform the Demo- (which fellow “democratic socialists” Oc- cratic Party” (The Atlantic, 16 June 2016). asio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib voted $20 Today, Bernie is playing the same role million to support), calling on Venezuela as in 2016, as he coaches Biden on how best to let in U.S. arms shipments masquerad- to pander to his disappointed supporters: ing as “humanitarian aid.” “I think what Joe is gonna have to do – and he’s beginning to move in that direction – We Told the Truth About It is to say to those working class people, say When Sanders conceded in April, the to those young people, say to those minori- response from prominent campaign stal- ties, ‘Listen, I understand your situation’.” warts was that the “movement” is “Bigger – “Sanders says his supporters will vote Than Bernie” (title of a book by Jacobin for Biden but he needs to court them,” apparatchiks Meagan Day and Micah Uet- The Guardian, 17 May 2020 richt). But as we have said from the begin- Despite claims made by some self- ning, this “movement” is a move deeper proclaimed socialists that the Bernie cam- and deeper into the Democratic Party. paign would create the “momentum” to Genuine socialists do not support eventually give way to a break from the Kamala Harris (in police jacket), then the California Attorney General, candidates of capitalist parties, let alone Democrats, the opposite has happened. As pictured with Border Patrol agents at U.S.-Mexico border fence in 2011. As one responsible for as much death and large numbers of young Bernie supporters Biden has now chosen the former California top cop as his running mate, destruction as the imperialist Democratic joined the DSA, they (and left groups tail- Sanders will be herding votes for her too. Party. “Left” Bernie backers tend to shrug ing them) were led deeper into Democratic cratic Party to live up to its heritage as counterinsurgency war of mass murder in all this off and mutter “well, nobody’s Party politics. DSA-promoted candidates the party of FDR, the commander-in-chief the Philippines. like Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib be- who interned Japanese Americans in de- perfect.” Yet opposition to the militarism of Cops = “Socialism”? Hell No! the ruling class and its terrorization of our came stars in the Democratic firmament. tention camps and waged imperialist war working-class brothers and sisters abroad Even before winning a second term in her with a Jim Crow army, highlight the point Democratic politicians have been is not some kind of bargaining chip. Nor Congressional district, AOC is moving that their “democratic socialism” is noth- working overtime to placate protests against are the rights of immigrants and refugees into the big leagues with her inclusion in ing more than Democratic Party liberalism. racist police terror with illusory schemes to who enter the U.S. fleeing destruction and Biden’s campaign brain trust. In line with this, the Kennedy clan “reform” the police. The one that has gained poverty made in U.S.A. As Marxists we Opportunist left groups have provided looms large, as in the case of Alexandria the most traction is the slogan of “defund- fight for international socialist revolution. different rationales for why they tailed Ber- Ocasio-Cortez. A feature article in the New ing” the police (by which they mean reduc- Part of that struggle means fighting for the nie. The now-defunct International Socialist Yorker (23 July 2018) by the magazine’s ing their budget, or claiming to do so). Thus, defeat of “our own” imperialist ruling class. Organization gushed about Bernie having editor noted that she worked in Edward Democrats call to “shuffle some of that So who told the truth about the Bernie put “socialism in the air.” The “Interna- Kennedy’s Boston office while attending money around,” in Nancy Pelosi’s words Sanders campaigns for the 2016 and 2020 tional Marxist Tendency” urged the veteran university. “When I asked her about her (MSNBC, 8 June). Yet a cheaper nightstick Democratic nominations? imperialist politician to run as an indepen- political heroes,” she “named Robert F. will still crack a skull. Some reformists even “The pretensions of Bernie Sanders to dent and help form a “mass socialist party.” Kennedy. In college, reading his speeches promote the illusion that the ruling class be a leftist, let alone a socialist, are a Socialist Alternative took it a step further, – ‘that was my jam,’ she said.” As the In- might dissolve its own repressive forces. joke. His cheerleaders of the pseudo-left organizing a “Movement4Bernie” to help ternationalist press noted: This fantasy can only politically disarm may present him as a friend of ‘working channel youth into his campaign. “RFK is the guy who bugged Martin the exploited and oppressed in the face of folks,’ but the real record of the Vermont At the same time as it sought to promote Luther King’s phones, waged a union- a ruthless enemy. Racist terror is intrinsic senator is no laughing matter. As a ‘criti- a revolutionary image of itself, the Party for busting campaign against the Teamsters, to American capitalism and only revolution cal’ voice of support to U.S. imperial- Socialism and Liberation (PSL) worked to and tried to wipe out the Cuban Revolution can bring justice. ism, Sanders is an enemy of workers and aid the Sanders campaign. “Although we with big brother JFK, from the Bay of Pigs On the question of the police, Sanders the oppressed world-wide…. If donkeys are not Democrats, we encourage those vot- to threatening to blow up the world in the has actually marked himself off from some could fly, pressure would transform the ing in the upcoming Democratic Party pri- Cuban Missile Crisis, to launching endless “progressive” Democrats by coming out likes of Bernie Sanders into the opposite maries to vote for Bernie Sanders,” the PSL attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.” against “defunding” in favor of increasing of what he is: a capitalist Democratic wrote in its newspaper Liberation (4 Febru- – “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Res- funding for the cops. politician…. Generating illusions in the ary). That’s a little like saying: for all those cue of the Democratic Party,” The Interna- Democratic campaign of Bernie Sand- Bernie Sanders was endorsed by the tionalist No. 53, September-October 2018 ers is just the most recent embodiment drinking the Kool-Aid, though of course we cop “union” in Burlington, Vermont when A mainstream magazine aimed at mil- of the policy followed by generations don’t, we recommend the Sanders Blast fla- he ran for mayor, winning the position in lennials, Quartz (29 October 2015), took of leftists in the United States who have vor. Characterizing his campaign as a “ves- 1981. But even if you didn’t know that, helped channel discontent and disillu- sel for a progressive, vaguely socialist insur- it to a logical though absurd extreme in we’ve all heard Bernie’s standard cam- sionment back into capitalist politics.” gency within the confines of the Democratic a piece titled “If elected, Bernie Sanders paign trail refrain many a time: “When you – “Bernie Sanders and the Pressure Poli- Party,” they went on in the same article to wouldn’t be America’s first socialist presi- go to your public library, when you call tics of the Opportunist Left,” The Inter- promise: “If Bernie Sanders wins the Dem- dent.” Their ridiculous claim is that public your Fire Department or the Police Depart- nationalist No. 40, Summer 2015 ocratic nomination … the PSL will not run services, social welfare programs, etc. are ment, what do you think you’re calling? … That was from the year before Sand- candidates in battleground swing states.” all “socialist” parts of a capitalist economy. These are socialist institutions” (New York (At Hunter College, some Sanders cam- What Sanders Calls Times, 19 October 2015). paigners handed out post cards pushing the “Democratic Socialism” Hell no. The police are the armed fist same idea.) In addition to FDR and John of the capitalist state, terrorizing black and “The truth is,” Sanders told CBS News F. Kennedy, they cite Harry Truman, who brown people on a daily basis, breaking (25 February), “nothing I am saying is rad- twice dropped the atom bomb on Japanese strikes and escorting scabs (strikebreakers) ical” (though many leftists kept claiming civilians (in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and across picket lines, as has been the case it was). Liberal economist and New York led the genocidal U.S. war in Korea. ever since the union movement started. We Times columnist Paul Krugman penned an An image widely circulated on the in- call to oust the police and their “unions” op-ed during the primaries explaining: ternet in 2016, titled “Democratic Socialist from the labor movement, for labor/black/ “Bernie Sanders isn’t actually a social- Presidents of the United States,” based on immigrant mobilization against racist at- ist in any normal sense of the term. He the same claims, shows where this kind of tacks and to stop deportations, and for doesn’t want to nationalize our major “malarkey” (to use one of Joe Biden’s fa- industries and replace markets with cen- workers strikes against racist cop terror. vorite words) can lead. It depicts Bernie in tral planning.… He’s basically what Eu- a line of presidents including FDR; Lyndon Political Independence of the ropeans would call a social democrat.… Working Class So why does Sanders call himself a B. Johnson, who rained bombs, napalm socialist? I’d say that it’s mainly about and Agent Orange on the people of Viet- Key to all of this is the basic Marxist personal branding, with a dash of glee at nam; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose principle that to defend its most basic rights shocking the bourgeoisie.” administration overthrew the governments and interests, and use its power to uproot – “Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist,” of Iran, Guatemala and the Congo to back all forms of oppression, the working class New York Times, 13 February up U.S. imperialist interests. For good must win its own political independence, Mourning in America for Jacobin & Bernie’s and AOC’s evocation of the measure, it throws in Theodore Roosevelt, against the parties, politicians and institu- Co. after Biden beat out Bernie. New Deal and their calls for the Demo- the colonialist racist who oversaw the U.S. continued on page 23 20 Revolution Resignation from the International “Marxist” Tendency Real Marxists Don’t Support Police and Prison-Guard “Unions” We reprint below excerpts from the let- institutions of bourgeois rule. Misusing that expropriates the entire bourgeoisie, es- through which capitalism subordinates hu- ter of resignation from the reformist “Inter­ dialectics in a way that mystifies real strug- tablishing a workers state based on workers man rights to the demands of private prop- erty. If the cops sometimes falter in their national Marxist Tendency” (IMT) by gles instead of clarifying the underlying is- councils. Learning more about the history of antisocial tasks, it is simply because they comrade James B., who joined the Revolu- sues, arguments are continually raised that the tendency, I believe this is closely linked – like the guns they use – are subject to to Militant’s famous call for a Parliamentary tionary Internationalist Youth in 2019 after in practice deny that the class line is funda- rust when not engaged in the deadly func- “Enabling Bill” making possible a “peace- waging a principled political fight to - up mental to Marxist politics. tion for which they are primarily trained.” ful socialist transition.” hold the fundamental Marxist principles of We are repeatedly faced with arguments We also discussed the IMT’s enthusi- Lastly, I would like to return to the working-class independence and for an au- that it is “sectarian” to see that the police, or astic support for the Alberta prison guards’ question of the police and prison guards. thentically revolutionary program. His let- capitalist politicians like Sanders, or bour- “strike.” I cited material showing concrete- Here the question of the armed fist of the ter, along with other documents pertaining geois parties like [Mexico’s president] López ly what prison guards “strike” for, which bourgeois state is as concrete and clear to this struggle, were published in the Inter- Obrador’s MORENA, etc., have a given is to be better able to, better paid for and as can be. This cannot be wished away nationalist Group pamphlet Left Reformists class character. The fact remains that they do. have better conditions for carrying out through the kind of speculative “what if?” in Existential Crisis (June 2019). Obscuring this can only mean misleading the their job of brutal repression against the mystification that has been used. At the last As comrades know, over the past pe- working class. The catastrophic results that prisoners. (With regard to police “unions,” aggregate, I urged comrades to read the riod I have questioned and opposed the blurring the class line on such fundamental a range of recent exposés have detailed section explaining the Marxist position, on IMT’s support to police and prison-guard questions can have for the working class how their contracts work to “shield officers the basis of the mass Trotskyist-led strikes “unions” and “strikes”; its innumerable have been shown over and over – as in Chile from scrutiny” when they brutalize, intimi- right here in Minneapolis, in Farrell Dobbs’ calls on Bernie Sanders, a bourgeois politi- in 1973, to mention just one example. date or even kill people; see for example Teamster Rebellion. I would strongly urge cian, to form a “mass socialist party”; entry Program is not only a written document the special Reuters report “Protecting the comrades to read that entire part of the into and political support for bourgeois par- with that name, but what an organization Blue,” January 13, 2017). book, which is in chapter 10 (“Bloody Fri- ties in Mexico, Bolivia, Pakistan and other fights for and against in practice. Yet return- During the discussion, I stated the ob- day”) and is as unequivocal as can be. To countries, etc. – positions that clash with ing to the question of the formal written vious: you cannot be in “solidarity” with quote just one passage: and contradict the stated Marxist goals and program itself, here too a series of reform- “Under capitalism the main police func- prison guards and at the same time with principles that led me to join. ist formulations (such as “Cut the military tion is to break strikes and to repress other prisoners; with the professionals of racist The common thread that unites such budget and invest instead in social needs,” forms of protest against the policies of the repression and those who it is their job to positions is blurring and in fact erasing the “make the rich pay for the crisis,” “public ruling class…. Personal inclinations of in- repress, arrest, handcuff, chain, jail, lock class line dividing Marxist, working-class ownership,” “Nationalize the Fortune 500,” dividual cops do not alter this basic role down, strip search, beat and brutalize. You politics and the class interests of the work- etc.) are far from the insistence by Marx, of the police. All must comply with ruling- cannot have it both ways. Here too the ers and oppressed from bourgeois politics, Lenin and Trotsky on the need to smash the class dictates. As a result, police repres- question is, Which side are you on? You bourgeois parties and politicians, and the bourgeois state in a proletarian revolution sion becomes one of the most naked forms continued on page 23 IMT Supporters Dodge Debate We publish below an email exchange Students for Socialist Revolution rejects We have received your email of 17 ●● Building illusions in and calling to between the Hunter Internationalist Club the “request to debate” from the IG due to September. It is unfortunate, though not vote for the current president of Mexi- and Hunter Students for Socialist Revolu- its long history of distorting our positions and surprising, that you have refused our co, bourgeois populist Andrés Manuel tion, the International Marxist Tendency’s disrupting our activities and those of our af- challenge to a public debate on campus. López Obrador. AMLO has created a (IMT) campus club, from September 2019. filiates. This makes us believe that fair treat- It would have been an excellent oppor- new “national guard” militarized police Since then, the IMT has published a lengthy ment in the discussion will be impossible. tunity for Hunter students interested in force and mobilized it to assault mi- grants and refugees and prevent entry polemic against our tendency in their pub- The IG’s method is entirely dishonest, for ex- socialist politics to see for themselves into the U.S. at the bidding of Trump. lication, Socialist Revolution, upholding ample, when they published email exchanges and to help clarify the real differences These political positions and oth- their grotesque line on the cops. we had with a former member (James B.) – between our two organizations. It is said ers held by the IMT are the opposite of while conveniently and selectively redacting that he who seeks to dodge a debate may Debate Challenge Presented to revolutionary Marxism. This cannot be try to impress and distract people with relevant parts in order to falsely paint the obscured by blatantly false claims such IMT Supporters deep-sounding proverbs about fools, IMT as “bureaucratic.” Instead of clarifying as that we have supposedly “disrupted” 3 September 2019 wise men or what have you – but this is political positions dialectically, the IG sets up IMT events, which we have never done; To: Hunter Students for Socialist Revolu- unlikely to work very well with students strawman arguments, quotes selectively and we stand for workers democracy. As for tion/IMT who want to understand important politi- out of context, and applies rigid categories to the equally blatant attempt to dismiss the From: The Hunter Internationalist Club cal issues and differences. living processes. It is said that a fool can raise powerful political exposure of IMT posi- Subject: Debate: “The Meaning of Social- Of course, if the IMT and Hunter more questions in an hour than a wise man tions in the correspondence reprinted in ism, Revolution and Marxism Today” Students for Socialist Revolution were can answer in 10 years – and this is the case the Left Reformists in Existential Crisis The Hunter Internationalist Club chal- really convinced of the claims made in here. Any discussion on that basis is entirely pamphlet by claiming it was edited in lenges the Hunter Students for Social- your email, the debate would have been unproductive and does not raise anyone’s some supposedly “dishonest” way: pub- ist Revolution/IMT to a public debate on an ideal setting for you to supposedly set level of understanding. Our time is better lish the correspondence yourselves so that campus, at the earliest opportunity, on the the record straight and defend your views served by our regular activities. readers can judge for themselves. topic “The Meaning of Socialism, Revolu- before an audience of interested students. Students for Socialist Revolution is Your letter boils down to arguing that tion and Marxism Today.” In reality, they are pretexts to avoid having wholeheartedly interested in an honest de- because you have big disagreements with Speakers for each side would have equal to defend IMT positions such as: bate of ideas as part of the fight against the us you refuse to debate. But the entire time; there would be a chairperson accept- ●● Support to police and prison-guard able to both sides; and a discussion period for capitalists and their politicians. Anyone in- Marxist tradition shows that polemics and terested in our ideas, perspectives, and strat- “unions” and “strikes,” calling for “uni- questions and comments from the audience. ty” between the workers movement and debate over political differences is key to egies to bring about revolutionary change is Please give a response by Tuesday, these representatives of the armed fist of the struggle for political clarity. Since you welcome to attend our events, read our lit- September 17th. the capitalist state. have refused the debate challenge, we will Signed, erature and website, and to arrange personal ●● Calling on capitalist politician Bernie provide you 10 minutes to put forward Jacob Kaye and Kaitlan Russell discussions about any and all political, his- Sanders to “build a mass socialist party your positions and defend them publicly at For the Internationalist Club torical, and theoretical questions. of the working class”; spreading illu- our forum on 26 September on “Socialism: What it Is (and Isn’t).”1 Our Response sions in Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio- Rejecting Debate Cortez and others bourgeois politicians Fraternally, 17 September 2019 21 September 2019 who seek to rope discontented workers Jacob Kaye and Kaitlan Russell To: Hunter Internationalist Club To: Hunter Students for Socialist Revolu- and youth into the fold of the Demo- For the Internationalist Club From: Hunter Students for Socialist Revo- tion/IMT cratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in 1 [Editor’s note: No surprise, the IMT dodged lution/ IMT From: The Hunter Internationalist Club the world. doing that too.] August 2020 21 being thrown out on the street. Even millen- Millennials, Gen Z... nials whose economic/family/social circum-

continued from page 24 stances and/or opportunities had given them Ben Fractenberg / The City cans and Latinos.3 some sense of security fear that the ground is Overall, from 1974 to 2019, the median opening up beneath their feet. income of 25- to 34-year-olds increased by Already before the pandemic hit, the im- just $29 (in 2017 dollars). As a point of com- possible housing situation led to an important parison, in that same time period the median fight by University of California Santa Cruz house price increased by $127,862 (39%). graduate student workers who didn’t even And “let’s not even get into healthcare costs,” come close to making the $2,600 it costs on wrote SuperMoney (13 September 2019). average to rent an apartment in Santa Cruz. Then COVID-19 hit. The hospitality and Launching a strike last February, their only leisure industries, which draw the majority of demand was a cost-of-living-adjustment of their workforce from millennials and Gen $1,412 a month to keep up with these wildly Zers, ground to a halt overnight.4 Especially inflated rents. (See “A Militant Program to for those working in the restaurant industry, Win UC Grad Student Workers Strike,” in- where earnings largely depend on tips, this ternationalist.org, March 2020.) has meant a precipitous drop in income. The Systemic Racial Oppression Hundreds of residents of Corona, Queens, line up to receive free food from economic news was hard to fathom. Back in a church, April 27. More than 200,000 undocumented workers in New York May, even the Wall Street Journal (10 May) In describing the millennial and Gen City have lost their jobs or cannot find work in the midst of the pandemic. was headlining that the slump was the “Worst Z cohorts of the U.S. population, the me- Since Great Depression” – and that was dia often call them “more diverse” than What about for workers “without papers”? class and oppressed. Housing is one example months before the worst-ever fall in GDP re- preceding generations in the United States. Many industries and services depend on their of why the workers must use that power to ported at the end of July. They often quantify this by referring to the labor, and billions in taxes are taken from their free the means of producing the necessities decrease, from one generation to the next, pay. Yet among the innumerable basic rights of life – which were created by, and depend Housing: From Unbearable to in the percentage of people classified as denied them are unemployment benefits (not on, their labor – from the death grip of capi- Impossible? “white”: 75% of Baby Boomers, 61.5% of to mention the weekly additional $600 or tal. To make housing a right for all requires, Millennials who got stimulus checks Generation X, then about 56% of millenni- stimulus checks). Together with our comrades in the first place, expropriating the parasitic have been more likely than Baby Boom- als and 51.5% of Gen Z in 2016 (Brookings of Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas landlords. This certainly won’t happen under ers or Gen X to use them to cover housing Institute, “Diversity defines the millennial (Class Struggle International Workers), we de- capitalism. It is part of the program of social- costs. In New York City, many were left on generation,” 28 June 2016). mand an immediate end to this discrimination, ist revolution and a workers government. the hook for sky-high rents, when roommates What Marxists call special (or double) and that all workers have equal access to these Student debt is another example, and is or subletters who had come to town for work oppression is also reflected in the differen- benefits. The bourgeoisie subjects immigrant an issue of enormous concern both to mil- or study now fled the epicenter to quaran- tial ways that the current situation is affect- workers to ruthless super-exploitation during lennials and Gen Z. Wiping out that debt is tine back home. For large numbers of young ing African American and Latino millen- times of “normal” business and profits – and an important demand, but one that the capi- people, moving to big cities has long been a nials.5 Mass protests against the unending now holds the threat of starvation over them talist system cannot support. Total student necessity when it comes to getting any kind epidemic of racist police terror have high- and their families, together with I.C.E. raids, debt in the U.S. totals $1.6 trillion dollars. of decent job – yet more often than not, rent lighted the fact that racial oppression is cages and deportations. Full citizenship rights And while shady loan-shark operations do winds up canceling out potential gains. systemic, and here we see more examples for all immigrants! the foot work of collecting payment from of what that means. debtors, these collection agencies are of Among those remaining, extra strain Capitalist Irrationality or was added to close living quarters, as quar- On top of the deeply-rooted, ongoing course tied up with the whole system of Socialist Revolution antine set in; many have been holed up at history and long-term structural effects of ra- finance capital. To proposals to write off home nearly 24/7. Moreover, living with cial oppression, both the 2008 and coronavi- So today, what was already an uphill $1.6 trillion in student debt, the big banks roommates or multiple family members rus crises have produced enormous addition- climb for millennials and Gen Z now seems would point out that the capitalist economy can mean a greater risk of being exposed al “disadvantages” (as bourgeois economists like trying to scale an insurmountable sum- would tank – even if it weren’t undergo- to the virus, especially if any household call it) for black and Latino millennials in mit. Like those interviewed in the mass me- ing a crisis that by various measures has members are frontline workers. terms of jobs, finances, housing, education, dia’s feature stories, many wonder whether already surpassed that of the 1930s. Now eviction moratoriums are begin- etc. A disproportionately large number must we will ever have a stable job, or any chance But is that debt sustainable, or to ask ning to expire. Vast numbers of people, above also support aging parents. Many now find at a stable future. As meager incomes often the question another way: can we pay it? all those whom racist oppression and poverty themselves part of capitalism’s “essential but plummeted to zero, in March and April it be- Obviously not. The only realistic approach wages make most vulnerable to the depreda- disposable” workforce, while African Ameri- came a “thing” for tenants to share screen- is based on an understanding that canceling tions of the profit system, face the threat of can and Latino people are being hit especially shots on social media of text and email corre- it goes together with breaking the power of hard by the pandemic. Over the past months, spondence in which their landlords harassed capital, expropriating the banks and industry 3 “Unemployment rates by age, sex, race, and higher percentages of black and Latino work- them about paying rent, scolded them for not and establishing an economy democratically Hispanic or Latino ethnicity,” (U.S. Bureau of ers have been laid off or had their hours cut. having enough savings to cover a months- planned for human needs, not profit. Need- Labor Statistics, 2 July) shows that unemploy- less to say, no capitalist government can or ment rates among black people and Latinos – For people who “qualify” for unemploy- long shutdown and threatened to evict them already higher than among whites – increased ment benefits, navigating through the bureau- the second moratoriums expire. will do this. These are tasks of a workers gov- disproportionately in all age brackets, including cratic maze of the application process is a Meanwhile, hotels and luxury high-rises ernment. What’s totally unrealistic is accept- millennials and Gen Z, with the development of nightmare that can seem like a full-time job. sit empty. This is the irrationality of capital- ing the limits imposed by capitalism. the COVID-19 pandemic. ist society, in which the necessities of life for In the weeks after Minneapolis cops mur- 4 See “Why the Covid-19 economy is particu- 5 See, for example, “The American Dream al- millions are held hostage to the private prof- dered George Floyd, outrage over racist police larly devastating to millennials, in 14 charts,” ready eluded millennials of color. Then came its of a few. The same workings of this sys- brutality and the systemic racism of U.S. so- Vox, 5 May. coronavirus,” Washington Post, 28 April. tem, that keeps houses and apartments empty ciety led to the biggest sustained protests in if they don’t make money for real-estate bar- U.S. history.6 While Democratic politicians, ons, meant pouring milk into ditches while “non-governmental” organizations (NGOs) children starved in the Great Depression. and reformist “left” groups have worked over- Why? Because profit wasn’t being made time pushing illusions that police terror can from it. What was perfectly logical from be reformed away, we have built revolution- capitalism’s standpoint was totally irrational ary contingents emphasizing the raw truth that from that of human needs. The stark coun- racist capitalism cannot be reformed and that only revolution can bring justice. Articles in Internationalist photo terposition between the two radicalized a generation in the 1930s. Today, when human this issue of Revolution approach many as- existence is at stake in so many ways, those pects of these burning questions. horrified by capitalism’s irrationality need to Millennials and Gen Z are largely reject the lie that capitalism can be reformed, critical of capitalism and many express and join the fight for socialist revolution. sympathy toward radical ideas, often Struggles over racist oppression, evic- voicing a favorable view of socialism. “I tions, homelessness, unemployment, work- don’t want the next 20 years to look like the ers’ health and safety and other burning is- previous 20 years,” a Morehouse College Internationalist contingent at July 7 protest outside New York City housing sues give a glimpse of some of the battles that 6 See “Millions Take the Streets in Upheaval court in Brooklyn. Instead of pleading with Democratic Party politicians to can break out over the next period. Crucial Against Cop Murder Machine – To Uproot enact “fair” housing policies, we call for worker/community action to stop to these is revolutionary leadership, bring- Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution,” The evictions and to expropriate the real estate barons through workers revolution. ing out the power of the multiracial working Internationalist No. 60, May-July 2020. 22 Revolution without burning indignation and revulsion Bernie Sanders... against this and the whole system of racist continued from page 20 police repression and racist mass incarcera- tions of the exploiters and oppressors. tion. That is the opposite of “solidarity” with With police killings of black people prison guards, support for cop “unions” and continuing unabated and American capital- the rest of it. This position also has its roots in ism showing ever more blatantly its inabil- the tradition of the Militant Tendency, which ity to meet the population’s basic needs, it called for “democratic control” of the police, is vital that we define our terms and know a reformist, social-democratic demand raised who our friends and who our enemies are. by the British section of the IMT as well. On top of 150,000+ deaths, many of them I have been asked what I think of the preventable, from the coronavirus pandem- Internationalist Group and its program. What ic, the working class faces large-scale un- has become more and more clear to me over employment, impoverishment, cuts to ser- the past period is that the IG does fight to put vices and an anticipated avalanche of mass the program of revolutionary Marxism into evictions. The upsurge of protest after the practice in the class struggle. Here are some police murder of George Floyd points to aspects of this: raising it in the thick of mass further social struggle ahead. For young protests against police repression; in union people who see the need to fight effectively organizing drives of immigrant workers; and avoid the many traps and pitfalls set by sparking strikes and work stoppages against Graduating college students display their accumulated student debt. those whose business it is to deceive and imperialist war and for the freedom of Mu- student told Buzzfeed News (20 April). As communists, we “speak the truth demobilize us, political clarity is essential. mia Abu-Jamal; raising the defense of Ven- “I don’t believe that just moving 2 feet is to the masses, no matter how bitter it may Part of the struggle for that political ezuela and of the deformed workers states of enough,” going on to paraphrase Malcolm be,” and “base [our] program on the logic of clarity has been forthrightly showing China and North Korea against U.S. imperi- X: “if there’s a knife in my back and it’s 9 the class struggle,” in accordance with the the real role of “Democratic socialist” alism; fighting for the political independence inches deep and you take it out 6 inches, you “rules of the Fourth International” that Leon politicians like Bernie Sanders and AOC, of the working class against all illusions in haven’t done anything to help me, really.” Trotsky – who together with V.I. Lenin led and those who have assiduously spread Sanders and other Democratic (Party) “so- Hailey Modi, a 21-year-old student at UT the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution – put for- illusions in them. The fight against racist cialists,” the DSA, etc.; fighting to reforge 7 oppression, capitalist exploitation and Austin, is quoted in the same article: ward in the “Transitional Program.” The the Fourth International of Trotsky as world imperialist war can never be waged within “Our whole lives, these structures have truth is that only through socialist revolution party of the socialist revolution. failed us and we are looking for politi- can our most basic problems be tackled. the Democratic Party – and given its central In the course of the recent discussions cal stances outside the mainstream – be- Against the ruthless logic of the profit role in U.S. capitalism’s political set-up, and study, these issues have become increas- cause we feel like we don’t have time to system, we demand what is needed for the that fight is largely a struggle against the ingly clear – and even glaring – to me. Con- solve these issues like income inequality working class, youth and all the oppressed. Democratic Party. To fight for socialism, tinuing my commitment to put the Trotsky- and climate change. Incremental change In the depths of the Great Depression, it is crucial to break once and for all with ist program into practice, I intend to deepen isn’t going to get us there in time to pre- when “property owners and their lawyers” the Democrats and build a revolutionary my study of the program and practice of the vent – this is dramatic, but it feels like a denounced the demands of the exploited workers party to lead the multiracial, Internationalist Group/Revolutionary Inter- societal collapse.” as unrealizable, the Transitional Program multi-ethnic working class to power. n This is a big shift from the highly anti- stated: “The question is one of life or nationalist Youth and League for the Fourth communist consciousness that came out of death.... If capitalism is incapable of satis- International, and encourage others to do as 1950s McCarthyism and the Cold War. Of fying the demands inevitably arising from Resignation... well. I hereby resign from the IMT. continued from page 21 course, when it comes to what socialism the calamities generated by itself, then let James B. actually means, U.S. capitalism’s education it perish.” Calling to “open the road to the cannot be on the side of Mumia Abu-Jamal Minneapolis-St. Paul 1 system teaches people very little except youth,” it raised the red banner of interna- and of his jailers. 29 April 2019 rank mis-education. The same goes for the And as we all know, tional socialist revolution. League for the Fourth International real history of radical and revolutionary Today, capitalism’s time has long been the struggle against racist movements. Partly as a result of that, it police repression and mass up; it is high time for it to perish. Join us in , Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY was easier for opportunist illusion-pushers incarceration is one of the LFI the fight for a socialist future!n 10008, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] to market claims that “socialism” is Bernie most burning issues of all 7 Sanders-style “progressive” Democratic “The Transitional Program” is the popular name in this country founded on Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil liberalism, harking back to Franklin D. for The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks slavery. This is most defi- Roosevelt’s New Deal. Lots of millennials of the Fourth International, the founding program nitely the case here in the Brazil: write to Caixa Postal 084027, CEP 27251-740, of the Fourth International (FI). The Revolutionary Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil and Gen Zers bought into Sanders’ hype, Twin Cities area. In Min- Internationalist Youth is the youth section of the In- nesota “at least 164 people : write to Caixa Postal 3982, CEP but after the Bernie-mania bubble burst ternationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for Rio de Janeiro (twice), it’s started to dawn on some that his the Fourth International, which was established in died” at the hands of the 20001-974, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil so-called political revolution was a political 1998 with the objective of reforging Trotsky’s FI, police between 2000 and E-mail: [email protected] scam. (See article on page 19 of this issue.) the world party of socialist revolution. 2017, as reported by the Internationalistische Gruppe/Deutschland Star Tribune (March 21, 2018). How many cops Germany: write to Postfach 80 97 21, 21007 Hamburg, were even charged in that Germany Order Now! period? Two. None were E-mail: [email protected] convicted. It is not pos- Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia sible to be a Marxist, to With the Bernie Sanders actually fight for social- Italy: write to Anna Chiaraluce, Casella Postale N. 6, candidacy and the ism and world revolution, 06070 Ellera Umbra (PG), Italy dramatic growth of E-mail: [email protected] the Democratic (Party) 1 [Footnote from original Grupo Internacionalista/México Socialists of America, the document.] Speaking of left reformists have been Mumia, the former Black México: write to Apartado Postal 12-201, Admón. thrown into crisis. Panther and radical black Postal Obrero Mundial, CP 03001, México D.F, México This 84-page pamphlet journalist whose case has E-mail: [email protected] features documents from been a world-wide ban- Tel. Mexico City: 55-3154-7361; Guadalajara: 33-1752- left oppositionists who ner of the struggle against 6643; Oaxaca: 951-185-6815 fought inside to uphold the racist death penalty, Internationalist Group/U.S. the revolutionary politics mass incarceration and of Lenin and Trotsky. bourgeois frame-up “jus- Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street tice” for more than three Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. decades: a search for his E-mail: [email protected] US$5 name on the IMT social- New York Tel. (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 (includes postage) istrevolution.org site only Los Angeles Tel. (323) 984-8590 Order from/make checks payable to Mundial Publications, Box 3321, gives two results, one New England Tel. (617) 213-5010 Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. from 2000 and the other Pacific Northwest Tel. (503) 303-8278 twelve years ago in 2007. August 2020 23 Revolution August 2020 Socialist Revolution the Only Way Out Capitalism’s Crises Pummel Millennials, Gen Z

By Cora dercount the jobless by This is part of a longer upcoming not counting those who article to be published in the press of the have given up looking Juan Figueroa / Dallas Morning News Internationalist Group/Revolutionary In- for work). On July 30, ternationalist Youth. it was reported that the The idea that capitalism is crushing U.S. economy had the generations of young people used to be dis- biggest quarterly fall missed by the mainstream media as far-out ever, with gross do- leftist rhetoric. Yet it’s a basic fact of the so- mestic product (GDP) ciety we live in – and these days, even pillars plunging by almost a of the big-business press run one story after third on an annualized another about some of what this means on basis from April to June. the ground. What is to be done about it? On The following day, we that, of course, they haven’t got a clue. But saw the news that the for those of us unwilling to be thrown on the $600 extra weekly Pan- profit system’s scrap heap, there is only one demic Unemployment real way out: joining the fight for socialism, Compensation had for international working-class revolution. come to an end, with Things were grim for millennials and any potential extension Generation Z before the current crisis.1 remaining a political football between Dem- How much worse it’s gotten now is hard to July 24 protest of unemployed restaurant workers in Dallas, Texas. Demonstrators demanded ocrats and Republicans. comprehend. Millennials were already hit an extension of the $600 weekly Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, which For those who were able hard by the crash of 2008, plus the crippling was a lifeline for millions of unemployed. amounts of student debt they took on in the to get it, that money was hope of securing the kind of stable, well- what made it barely possible to buy grocer- worked for closed, she spent the entirety of afford, and my parents were some of those paying jobs that have become so elusive. ies and try to keep up with sky-high rents. her $80 savings on her car payment, bor- vulnerable people…. They had bought a And even before the current pandemic/eco- Huge numbers are asking ourselves: how rowed $200 from a friend to cover rent, and new house and we thought everything was nomic meltdown, the oldest of Generation are we supposed to survive? In the Great then was able to make some extra money going well and it turned out that it was a Z was poised to be – or already was – in the Depression of the 1930s, reds posed the by selling foot pictures (it’s a niche market) house that they couldn’t actually afford. So position the oldest millennials were in when stark alternative: “Fight or starve!” In 2020 on the internet. “You compare it to the older in 2008, we lost our house, too.” the bubble burst in 2008: graduating into a it sure looks like that’s what faces us now. generations – they worked up and saved The impact of 2008 continued to money,” she said. The situation she faced loom large for millions. In 2016, millen- barren job market that will set them up for From the 2008 Meltdown to low and stagnant wages, if any. even before losing her job in mid-March nials’ median income was 10% lower than Today’s Triple Pandemic Now, youth by the millions are thrown made her feel “like I’m never going to have it was in 2007, and their median wages in into unemployment, which has reached the Back in April, a flurry of “human inter- a stable job that has benefits and health in- 2017 were 20% lower than those of “Baby highest levels since World War II even by est” coverage in the media gave part of the surance.” Today, millions of millennials and Boomers” had been at the same age. (Vox, 5 official statistics (which systematically -un story of what it meant for the lives of millen- Gen Zers can say the same, or worse. May) They are getting married and having nials and Gen Z to be shaped by one devas- It’s been a long time since the standard children later, and fewer are buying houses 1 The Pew Research Center defines these demo- tating crisis on top of another in the course of expectation of parents in the U.S. was sup- (Washington Post, 19 March 2019). While graphics: “millennials” are people born between a dozen years. A young woman named Gia posed to be that the next generation would many bourgeois pundits loved to decry 1981 and 1996, while if you were born from 1997 onward, you’re part of “Generation Z.” related how, growing up in Detroit during the live better than them. For millennials and these as symptoms of immaturity, unwill- Those born from 1965 to 1980 make up “Genera- financial crisis, “I saw so many people whose Gen Z now, life and what they expect from ingness to settle down and a penchant for tion X,” while people born from 1946 to 1964 are only options were to abandon their homes it has been shaped in large part by the capi- avocado toast, pollsters found most mil- “Baby Boomers” (pewresearch.org, 28 April). and leave and run – and these were full fami- talist economic meltdown of 2007-08 fol- lennials valuing stable employment, which lies who had no safety lowed now by a new economic crisis – the was hard to come by and now sounds like net, no one to take care worst since the Great Depression – that, pie in the sky. Meanwhile wages stayed of them, nothing to while already on the horizon before the stuck (though of course prices didn’t, tu- fall back on and their coronavirus hit, was touched off by it. To- ition climbed ever upward and rents kept only option left was to gether with these afflictions, unending rac- getting even more insane). abandon their lives … ist police terror makes it a triple pandemic. According to a 2016 Gallup report it just seemed like such In the period after the Wall Street cri- (“How Millennials Want to Work and an illusion” (Buzzfeed sis exploded in 2008, as older millennials Live”), as of that year millennials had the

Wall Street Journal Wall News, 20 April). were entering the workforce, many of their highest rates of unemployment and under- The pressure- younger counterparts watched their parents employment, 7% compared to 5% of Gen cooker sense of accu- and those around them struggle financially. X and 4% of Boomers. (Again, the official mulating hopelessness Many working-class families, and middle- rates are systematically undercounted – is palpable in a feature class ones too, that had managed to “own” and of course things are drastically worse story in the New York homes often lost them amidst the subprime today.) The same report listed an even Times (6 April) on mortgage crisis.2 Winthrop University se- greater generational disparity for people youth trying to cope nior Téa Franco described her family’s employed part-time but who want to be with the debt burden experience with that financial crisis to working full-time: 10% of millennials, and economic crisis. Buzzfeed News (20 April): 6% of Gen X, and 4% of Boomers. While Among those the Times “They got a bunch of vulnerable people to the report did not break figures down by interviewed is 23-year- pay more for houses than they could really race or ethnicity, the reality of systemic old Jayci Cumberledge 2 See “It’s Not Just the ‘Banksters,’ It’s the oppression means unemployment rates in Amherst, Ohio. Af- Capitalist System” (review of The Big Short), are persistently higher for African Ameri- Annualized GDP fell by 32.9% from April to June. ter the restaurant she Revolution No. 12, March 2016. continued on page 22