The Internationalist No. 36 January-February 2014 50¢ Break with the Tripartite Alliance Popular Front – Build a Revolutionary Workers Party! South Africa: Workers Slam ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime The August 2012 massacre of mine workers at Marikana marked a turning point in South African history, intensify- Alexander Joe/AFP ing class struggle and opening what could become a revolutionary period. If the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 drove home the murderous nature of the apartheid re- gime of white supremacy, Marikana laid bare the deadly reality of its successor, the neo-apartheid regime presided over by the African National Congress (ANC), which is still based on the super-exploitation of black labor. Sharpeville, with its toll of 69 black protesters killed and more than 18,000 activists arrested in the aftermath, produced an outpouring of mass disobedience of the notorious passbook laws, as well as the banning of the ANC and the start of armed resistance. We are now witnessing the political fallout of the point-blank police slaughter of 34 strikers at the Marikana mine, and the reverberations will be felt around the world. Its role as guarantor of racist capital- ism exposed, the ANC’s governing alliance is beginning to come undone in the face of massive discontent among the vast black and non-white majority over the continued poverty, police brutality and exclusion. As South African workers direct their anger at their black capitalist rulers, the key to the outcome will be to forge a revolutionary Auto service workers, members of NUMSA, on strike in Johannesburg, 9 September 2013. workers party to fight for international so- ers union has been the object of a vilification continue to suffer poverty, unemployment of workers…. cialist revolution – a fight that starts now, not campaign by the ANC, SACP and COSATU. and inequality. “The ANC has been captured by the some time in the distant future. Otherwise, At the congress, NUMSA secretary general Barely a week later, the 1,200 delegates representatives of an enemy class. It has as always in the past, it will be the capitalist Irvin Jim declared that the union was “gat- at the NUMSA congress voted to break with adopted the strategic plan of that class. Its slave masters who will profit. vol” (fed up) with the attacks on it and would the ANC in no uncertain terms. The Declara- leadership has shown that it will not let From December 17 to 20, the National no longer support ANC candidates. tion issued by the congress states that: the small issue of democracy get in the Union of Metalworkers of South Africa NUMSA’s break came shortly after “… the leadership of the ANC and way of defending its control. As well as (NUMSA) held a special congress which the death of ANC leader and South African SACP is protecting the interests of white the continued poverty of the majority of the working class, the result of this has officially declared its break with the ANC, president Nelson Mandela, and the special monopoly capital and imperialism against been the slaughter of workers. and with the Tripartite Alliance – which congress was postponed in view of the offi- the interests of the working class. The ANC and SACP leadership defends the also includes the Congress of South Af- cial mourning period. For over a week, mil- “It is clear from this picture that the ownership and control of the mines, rican Trade Unions (COSATU) and the lions came out to view the casket, participate working class cannot any longer see the 1 banks and monopoly industries in the ANC or the SACP as its class allies in any South African Communist Party (SACP). in mass assemblies and line the streets for hands of white monopoly capital and meaningful sense.” The Metalworkers condemned the police the funeral procession in order to pay their imperialism…. The Declaration noted that “for more massacre at Marikana, while the SACP and respects to the man seen as the symbol of “That is why our comrades died as they than 20 years we have been urging our COSATU leaders defended the police and the fight against apartheid. But current ANC did at Marikana and de Doorns [where members to swell the ranks of the ANC and the government. Since then the Metalwork- president Jacob Zuma was roundly booed police shot down striking farm workers SACP,” but that “our existing strategy was and jeered by the thousands-strong crowd 1 NUMSA represents auto and steel workers, in January 2013]. It was not incompetence becoming outdated. Swelling the ranks has at the December 10 memorial meeting in Jo- while the NUM (National Union of Minework- on the part of the police. It was the merely resulted in delivering more working hannesburg’s soccer stadium. Many turned conscious, deliberate support, by the ers) had grown so close to the mine bosses that class victims, like lambs to the slaughter thumbs down and called for Zuma to resign armed forces of the state, for the interests at Marikana it called for the bloody suppression by the ANC’s bourgeois leadership.” of its own striking members. over pervasive corruption while the masses of shareholders and against the interests Consequently, the Congress “calls on COSATU to break from the alliance,” and stated that “NUMSA as an organization will Defend Wyatt McMinn, neither endorse nor support the ANC or any other political party in 2014.” NUMSA’s break with the Tripartite Defeat “Right to Slave”! . . . 5 continued on page 2 with ANC. This has provision of basic services is outrageously led to an eruption of deficient. But the masses of black South Af- popular unrest over the ricans still live in impoverished townships, last decade – over evic- shantytowns have spread, and the police still tions, police brutality, move in like an occupying military force to cutoffs and price hikes put down unrest. The massacre at Marikana of electricity, transport was only different in scope, as protesters costs, unemployment – in Khyelitsha, Grahamstown or Kennedy as South Africa has be- Road, Durban can confirm. come the “protest capi- The same “Randlords,” the owners of tal of the world.” But the mining conglomerates and banks who with NUMSA’s break, formed the core of the South African ruling this dispersed “rebellion class under apartheid, run the show today. Alon Skuy/The Times of Johannesburg Times Alon Skuy/The of the poor” could gain And this is also part of Nelson Mandela’s powerful working-class legacy. On his release from prison, he spoke organization and leader- of “a fundamental restructuring of our po- ship – and that spectre litical and economic systems to address the has South Africa’s rul- inequalities of apartheid” and nationalizing ers, white and black, the mines. But shortly after, as South African worried. economist Sampie Terreblanche explained The 1994 elections in his book, Lost in Transformation (2012), marked the end of for- Mandela started having secret meetings mal apartheid with its with Harry Oppenheimer, the retired head Marikana massacre, 16 August 2012. South Arican police pose with guns drawn over their rigid segregation, ex- of the Anglo-American Corporation and De victims. Then ANC authorities charged the victims with murder under apartheid-era law. clusion and denial of Beers Consolidated Mines, and in the end “Numsa will explore the establishment of basic rights, including the ANC leader agreed not to tamper with South Africa... a Movement for Socialism as the working voting, to the vast black majority (three- South African capitalism. continued from page 1 class needs a political organization quarters of all South Africans), as well as Another key factor was the collapse Alliance promises to be an earthquake in committed in its policies and actions to the discrimination against the coloured3 and of the Soviet Union, as a result of which, South African politics, and could even cost establishment of a socialist South Africa. Asian populations. But the elaborate legal according to SACP leader Ronnie Kasrils, the ANC its so-far overwhelming elec- Numsa will conduct a thoroughgoing superstructure was devised to secure a “doubt had come to reign supreme: we toral majority. With over 330,000 members, discussion on previous attempts to build regime of white supremacy based on the believed, wrongly, there was no other op- NUMSA is not only the largest trade union socialism.” superexploitation of black labor which tion” (Guardian [London], 23 June 2013). on the African continent, it has also been The question is, what is meant by existed long before the institution of formal Kasrils, the head of the ANC’s armed wing, looked to by hundreds of thousands of mem- “socialism,” and how do you get there? apartheid in 1948, and which survives es- Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Na- bers of other unions as the main leader of While the leaders of the National Union of sentially intact today. In fact, unemploy- tion), went on: working-class resistance to the increasingly Metalworkers, and many others in South ment has increased sharply in recent years, “From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the right-wing policies of the ANC government. Africa, accuse the SACP of abandoning the reaching 35% of the workforce; real wages ANC’s soul got under way, and was But more than that, the break puts the need struggle for socialism and instead admin- of workers have fallen, and the degree of eventually lost to corporate power: for a genuinely revolutionary workers party istering capitalism, they have not broken economic inequality is notably greater we were entrapped by the neoliberal 4 economy – or, as some today cry out, we front and center. The NUMSA Declaration with the Stalinist/Menshevik program that today than it was in 1994. ‘sold our people down the river’.” itself notes: long before Marikana laid the basis for this Sure, there are some black manag- 2 Western-trained ANC economists began “The South African Communist Party betrayal. When speaking of “socialism,” ers and even a few CEOs drawn from the (SACP) leadership has become embedded many are calling for different policies within ANC (Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa), meeting with the mine bosses at the in the state and is failing to act as the the framework of the present South African the Group Areas Act is gone, and Nelson Development Bank of South Africa and, vanguard of the working class. The capitalist state rather than socialist revolu- Mandela moved into the wealthy suburb of prodded by veiled threats from the U.S. chance of winning it back onto the path of tion to bring down that state. Yet no matter Houghton Estate. Yes, there has been some government of Bill Clinton, on the eve of working class struggle for working class who is sitting in government, capitalism in improvement in supplying water, electricity the 1994 elections, Kasrils says, the SACP power is very remote…. For the struggle South Africa is inherently racist and can and access to education (which is not free) and ANC made its “Faustian bargain,” for socialism, the working class needs a only be based on the grinding poverty of for the mass of the population, although the “we took an IMF loan … with strings political organisation committed in theory the black toilers. attached that precluded a radical economic and practice to socialism.” 3 The coloured population, often referred to as agenda.” The Declaration continues: What “Post-Apartheid” mixed race, is predominant in the Western Cape There followed a series of economic South Africa? province. programs – the Reconstruction and Devel- 4 Under apartheid South Africa was, by far, the The African National Congress has opment Plan (RDP) under Mandela, the Also On Our Website most unequal country in the world in terms of been in power for 20 years now, an entire income distribution, and is even more so today. Growth, Employment and Redistribution • Mexican Powder Keg: generation, yet for all the talk of a “post- (GEAR) program under his successor Turn the Teachers’ Walk- South Africa’s Gini coefficient, in which total in- apartheid” South Africa, the country is as equality (one person has all the income) would Thabo Mbeki, and now the National De- out Into a National Strike unequal as ever – or more so. And much be 1.0, rose from .64 in 1994 to .70 in 2008. velopment Plan (NDP) under Zuma – all Against the Reforms as they despise the racist rulers of the past, • Lessons of the On-Again, many poor and working people are gatvol Reuters Off-Again BART Strike 2 See “South Africa: Bloody Mine Massacre • Academic BS Against a Unmasks ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime” (29 Minimum Wage Hike August 2012), reprinted in The Internationalist special issue, November-December 2012. Visit the League for the Fourth International/ Internationalist Group on the Internet http://www.internationalist.org The Internationalist A Journal of Revolutionary Marxism for the Reforging of the Fourth International Publication of the Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International EDITORIAL BOARD: Jan Norden (editor), Abram Negrete, Mark Lazarus, Marjorie Salzburg The Internationalist (ISSN 1091-2843) is published bimonthly, skipping July-August, by Mundial Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: [email protected] Subscriptions: US$10 for five issues. Mass revulsion over Marikana massacre didn’t stop South African police from No. 36 1162-M January-February 2014 doing it again, shooting on and killing striking farm workers at De Doorn, in Western Cape province, 9 January 2013. 2 The Internationalist of which continued to fill the coffers of Not the ANC Freedom Charter leaders are now sharehold- Mail & Guardian the white capitalists while superexploiting But Workers Revolution ers in these companies, their black “wage slaves,” paying them might well provoke a civil In South Africa today, the most ad- even less than the bare minimum needed war before permitting it. vanced sectors of the working class must to live and raise a family. State-owned Such measures will require embrace the program of socialist revolution, companies were privatized, financial a workers and peasants and build a genuinely communist, proletar- markets deregulated, tariffs lowered al- government to carry them ian vanguard party to lead it. This has in- lowing massive imports and consequent out, and imposition of work- ternational dimensions, for uniquely in sub- de-industrialization, exchange controls ers control by the workers Saharan Africa, the land of apartheid, old eliminated allowing a massive outflow of seizing the installations and new, has a millions-strong working class profits, etc. – all of which were agreed to to wrench them out of the with an industrial, mining and transportation by the ANC and the SACP. grip of the bourgeoisie as NUMSA general secretary Irvin Jim. proletariat at its core. NUMSA’s break with In fact, the amount of money spent on part of the fight for workers rule of society to the discredited Tripartite (ANC-SACP- the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance could social grants to poor South Africans pales as a whole. COSATU) Alliance. But what is necessary play an important role in this, as could its in comparison to the hundreds of billions Another question will be the program in order to free South African toilers from call for “discussion on previous attempts to of rand in government funds pumped into of a “national democratic revolution,” or poverty and centuries of degradation is to build socialism,” for “an international study companies in order to promote Black Eco- NDR, which NUMSA leaders with their break with popular-frontism and to fightnow on the historical formation of working class nomic Empowerment (BEE). The result has Stalinist backgrounds still uphold, although for workers power. parties” and for a conference on socialism. been the creation of a narrow layer of BEE sometimes giving it a left twist, referring to This will clearly pose sharp debates. Beyond programmatic issues, there is tycoons, who have often led attacks on black a “socialist” or “socialist-oriented” NDR A key issue will be the whole question the question of the labor bureaucracy, a rela- workers. Cyril Ramaphosa, the former head (for example, in their document “Cosatu at of the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter and the tively privileged petty-bourgeois layer that of the National Union of Mineworkers and the Crossroads” [11 August 2013]). Along call for nationalization. While the current sits atop the unions and ties them to bour- quintessence of BEE capitalists, sits on the with their support for the Freedom Charter, ANC and SACP leaders clearly want to get geois politics. While the NUMSA leader- board of Lonmin. As such on 15 August this maintains the conception of a stage rid of any hint of nationalizations, talking in- ship’s break with the ANC is important and 2012 he demanded action against platinum prior to socialist revolution in “alliance” stead vaguely of “socialization,” the Charter may provide an opening for revolutionary strikers at Marikana engaged in “dastardly with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces calls only for “the mineral wealth beneath intervention, structurally and socially they criminal” conduct. The next day, the police aspiring to become a new ruling class. Yet the soil, the banks and monopoly industry” are little different than the COSATU tops. committed the heinous crime. Six months Marxist analysis and historical experience to be “transferred to the ownership of the It is undoubtedly true that the SACP and later, the ANC elected Ramaphosa as its going back to 1848 show that this program people as a whole.” No less an authority ANC got NUMSA ally Zwelinizima Vavi deputy president! is bound to lead to bitter defeat for the work- than Mandela himself wrote the next year suspended as COSATU general secretary So how does the South African Com- ers as the bourgeoisie will not undertake that the “breaking up and democratization (almost exactly on the first anniversary munist Party justify this promotion of black revolutionary democratic measures. of these monopolies” would permit “the of the Marikana massacre) because of his capitalists and the pro-business agenda development of a prosperous Non-European This poses another vital subject, the criticisms of their pro-big business policies. of the ANC government in which several bourgeois class.” As Mandela made clear, nature of the Tripartite Alliance as a na- But Vavi’s defense against charges of using SACP leaders sit while party members staff the call of the Freedom Charter is by no tionalist popular front chaining the workers union funds to pay for a trip for him and his every ministry including the police? It’s all means a blow against capitalism. movement to sections of the bourgeoisie. family to a Cape Town Jazz Festival was that in the service of the “National Democratic Throughout Africa, Asia and Latin NUMSA documents are sharply critical of the expenses were supposed to be paid for Revolution,” which “unites … a range of America, petty-bourgeois and bourgeois na- how the Alliance has turned out, but they by an investment bank. classes and social strata” and in which tionalist leaders and movements have called do not oppose such a class-collaborationist For his part, NUMSA’s general sec- “the working class builds its hegemony in for and sometimes carried out widespread political coalition on principle, quite the retary Irvin Jim, his tough talk against every site of power” (The South African nationalizations – often portrayed as “so- contrary. Yet it is crucial to understand, as capitalism notwithstanding, is also chair of Road to Socialism [2012]). From the out- cialism” – in order to provide the economic experience from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil the NUMSA Investment Company board of set, the SACP’s participation in the ANC basis for a “national” bourgeoisie by later War to Allende’s Unidad Popular in Chile directors. And despite his insistence against has been based on the Stalinist dogma of privatizing assets. Even state-owned com- in the 1970s shows, that in negating the the SACP that the state is still capitalist, he a “two-stage” revolution, in which the first panies under capitalism function as capitalist political independence of the proletariat the has threatened to go to the capitalist courts stage is supposedly bourgeois-democratic, enterprises: just look at PEMEX in Mexico popular front is a roadblock to revolution. to “seek justice” against the SACP for defa- or anti-imperialist, or anti-feudal, etc., but (which buys up companies in Spain) or Petro- It is, as Trotsky put it, “the main question mation (“NUMSA National office Bearers’ definitely not socialist. bras in Brazil (which bought Bolivian refin- of proletarian class strategy for this epoch” Statement,” 1 December 2013). In fact, the first tentative engagement eries, then sought to blackmail the Bolivian and “the best criterion for the difference with the African National Congress dates As for the SACP’s defense of the ANC government) before it was semi-privatized. between Bolshevism and Menshevism.” back to 1927 when J.T. Gumede headed and its policies, these supposed “commu- Coming from the mouth of Julius Malema, the ANC, at the same time that Stalin was In fact, in taking the ANC to task for nists” –reformists since the 1930s – have the former head of the ANC Youth League, insisting that the Chinese Communist Party resisting “the reconfiguration of the Alli- become part of the capitalist government calls for nationalization could even be a way be part of, and subordinate to, the Kuomin- ance into a strategic political centre,” and machinery. Moreover, the SACP has its of bailing out bankrupt BEE black capitalists. tang, the Chinese Nationalist Party then in proposing “the establishment of a new own capitalist investment fund, Masincaz- Depending on the context of the class headed by Chiang Kai-shek, who was even United Front” to coordinate struggles “in elane, with holdings in at least a couple of struggle, proletarian revolutionaries may made an honorary member of the standing a way similar to the UDF of the 1980s” platinum mines, as well as in the Gautrain intervene in struggles for nationalization committee of the Communist International. as well as to “fight for the implementation (a high-speed rail link between Pretoria and of the mines, banks and energy monopolies But once he marched into Shanghai in April of the Freedom Charter,” NUMSA is sug- Johannesburg) which the party had criticized like Sasol with demands for their expropria- 1927, Chiang carried out a bloody purge gesting that a new, slightly more left-wing as a costly boondoggle and for bypassing the tion without compensation. They would also of Communists and set off a “white ter- version of a popular-front alliance be built, black townships. Yet SACP deputy general warn that this would not be a simple legisla- ror” in which 300,000 CPers and militant one that is not simply a rubber stamp for secretary Jeremy Cronin, as deputy transport tive matter, since the ANC, many of whose workers were killed. In South Africa, the government policies, as an “alternative” minister, handed over the permit allowing the same Stalinist “strategy” turned out to be train to operate for the 2010 soccer World not a “road to socialism” but the road to the Cup. Justifying his about-turn, Cronin told Gallo/Mail & Guardian Marikana massacre. the Mail & Guardian (17 May 2012) he The policy of revolution in stages in co- didn’t want to be a “party pooper.” lonial and semi-colonial countries has served Build a Revolutionary Workers to promote petty-bourgeois or bourgeois lay- Party on a Leninist-Trotskyist ers to become a new capitalist ruling class, Program and has over and over again led to defeat for the working class and its allies. In contrast, Of the political groups to the left Leon Trotsky’s perspective of permanent of the governing coalition, perhaps the revolution held that in the present epoch, the most notable is the Democratic Socialist indigenous bourgeoisie is so bound up with Movement (DSM). The DSM was actively reaction and imperialism that even demo- involved with the independent workers cratic tasks such as national emancipation and committees which led the Marikana work- agrarian revolution require that the working ers’ struggle earlier that year, aiding them class take power, backed up by the peasantry, against the blatant strikebreaking actions and proceed to international socialist revolu- of the violently pro-government leaders of tion. This was what the Bolsheviks led by That was then: SACP deputy secretary general and deputy transport minister the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Lenin and Trotsky carried out in Russia’s Jeremy (“no party pooper”) Cronin and ousted COSATU general secretary and the SACP. Seeking to capitalize on this Red October of 1917. Zwelinzima Vavi. work, in December 2012 the DSM together January-February 2014 3 with the Marikana committees launched reformist Stalinists like the SACP, seek to the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP). gain influence in the capitalist state, con- However, the kickoff was a flop, as what tradicting everything that Marx, Engels and Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013 was initially planned as a rally in a sports Lenin wrote about its nature as an instru- UWC Robben Island Museum/Mayibuye Archive stadium turned into a “quiet” and “modest” ment of suppression of the workers by the The following article meeting “with just 20 delegates present” bosses, no matter who is in the government. is translated from the up- (DSM press release, 17 December 2012). This question comes to a head over the mat- coming issue of Vanguarda While DSM members have been sub- ter of the police, the backbone of the state, Operária, the newspaper of ject to repression, outrageously arrested in who carried out the massacre at Marikana. the Liga Quarta-Internacio- Rustenberg by police acting at the behest of For the CWI, the police are “workers in nalista do Brasil, section of the SACP and NUM, and it claims the WASP uniform” rather than the armed fist of the the League for the Fourth will not just be involved in elections, the new bourgeoisie.7 Interntional. formation has been built essentially as an And not just under the ANC. The 6 DECEMBER 2013 – At the electoral vehicle. This is in keeping with the MWT’s Congress Militant (September close of 2013, South Africa practice of the international tendency with 1993) ran an interview with the deputy has lost Nelson Mandela, which the DSM is affiliated, the Committee president of the Police and Prisons Civil one of the most decisive men for a Workers International (CWI) led by Pe- Rights Union (POPCRU), “comrade Enoch in that country’s life over the ter Taaffe.5 For over two decades the British Nelani,” calling for these enforcers of apart- last hundred years, almost a section of the CWI was buried in the Labour heid law and order to be admitted to CO- century – roughly the same Party. In South Africa, the DSM’s predeces- SATU (they were). And CWI guru Taaffe in duration as his life of trials ANC leaders Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in sor was the Marxist Workers Tendency of the his 1994 speech marveled that “black cops and tribulations – bringing Robben Island prison, 1986. ANC. In Mexico, Pakistan and elsewhere, the in South Africa who mowed down workers international expressions of sympathy and there was a victorious slave revolution. CWI has no compunction about being part of organizing trade unions” are now “organized support due to the scope of his struggle. Mandela had rich sources of inspiration capitalist parties. into a trade union themselves.” He went on: Mandela suffered persecution and torture and incentive. The South African Communist Moreover, the WASP has explicitly “These very same killers, these very same of every sort, which only someone with Party with the support of the former Soviet endorsed the “tactic” of dragging COSATU black police who were tools of the apartheid the build of a boxer, which he was, could Union and Cuba provided organization, ma- into the bosses’ courts to overturn the regime, were radicalized by the situation.” have withstood. Those who planned and terial and logistical support to the struggle suspension of Vavi as its secretary general His conclusion: “We can neutralize the maintained the racist South African apartheid of the ANC, without which apartheid might (WASP open letter to NUMSA Congress, forces of the state and win them over.” So system searched the world, in the best have survived. But history will also register 13 December 2013). This is a betrayal much for State and Revolution. schools, looking for human beings who had that Mandela, the South African Communist of working-class independence by Vavi’s It’s a straight line from there to the been turned into monsters. Many Nazis and Party and the ANC did everything possible to supporters, as is WASP’s approval. Internal Marikana massacre. We agree with Trotsky, fascists gave classes on torturing black men keep the struggle against racism in that coun- disputes must be settled within the workers who wrote in his pamphlet What Next? and women activists in particular. try confined to the framework of capitalism movement, not by appealing to the class Vital Questions for the German Proletariat At the head of the African National and bourgeois democracy. As a consequence, enemy. Any Marxist knows that the courts (1932): “The worker who becomes a police- Congress (ANC), held in the dungeons of the the black and coloured population today are not neutral, yet here are these supposed man in the service of the capitalist state, is a apartheid regime for 27 years, Nelson Man- still lives in poverty, in the racist system of socialists calling on the repressive organs of bourgeois cop, not a worker.” We demand, dela stood out and was the biggest personal neo-apartheid today presided over by the the capitalist state to rule against a workers cops out of the unions! When the DSM/ symbol of resistance in the struggle against bourgeois popular front of the ANC, CP and organization. For shame! WASP calls for a “mass workers party on a apartheid. He aided and came to symbolize the the union bureaucracy which upholds the Today, the DSM and WASP seek to socialist programme,” they mean a social- main confrontations of the political struggle economic domination of the white capitalists. exploit discontent with the ANC/SACP/ democratic party with a Labourite program against the racists. He was present practically Mandela’s policies headed up free-market COSATU Tripartite Alliance which is to reform the capitalist state. The League for from the beginning, the middle and the end of black capitalism within the African National repressing the workers. But in 1994, their the Fourth International calls for a Leninist- the aggressive white racist regime embedded Congress. The class collaboration of the South predecessor called to vote to put the ANC Trotskyist workers party on the program of in a multitude of 75% blacks, 12% coloureds African popular front prevented socialist revo- under Mandela into office, as the petty- permanent revolution. Between these two (mixed race people) and Asians facing an op- lution in that country, which at various points bourgeois nationalist movement turned into sharply counterposed positions runs the pressive and privileged layer of 12% whites. was entirely possible to achieve, a success that a full-fledged bourgeois party. Speaking in line between Menshevism and Bolshevism. At the same time, today Mandela is almost would have spread throughout the continent, New York in May 1994, Peter Taaffe op- There are many thorny tactical issues universally hailed as the symbol of “recon- delivering its population from terrible suffer- posed the call for a workers party, saying: facing revolutionaries in South Africa to- ciliation,” including by the capitalists and ing and turning the continent into a federation “The working class in South Africa has day, including the position to take towards imperialists who supported and profited from of socialist countries. to go through the experience of an ANC COSATU. Earlier some leftists were push- the system of apartheid slavery up to the end. Nelson Mandela will probably join the government. The slogan of a workers party ing for workers to leave COSATU, while Mandela’s almost century-long resistance pantheon of African heroes given the interna- was an incorrect slogan in the period prior others were even trying to cajole miners without a doubt prevented many from aban- tional scope that his struggle against the hated to the elections in South Africa. We wanted back into the NUM, which had unleashed doning the struggle. This tenacity, longevity South African apartheid achieved. At the same the biggest possible ANC majority.”6 the murderous repression. Trade-union unity and capacity to bear the struggle in such un- time, he joined those political symbols who, The DSM/WASP continues this policy is not an absolute principle. Where there are equal conditions was inspired in the first place however shining they might seem, turn out to today, forming an electoral alliance Julius splits in the bureaucracy that offer an open- by the capacity of the black population to have be an empty shell. These are the cases of the Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters. The ing for revolutionary Marxism, authentic experienced, confronted and overcome centu- former workers Lech Walesa (Poland) and populist EFF is a bourgeois political forma- Trotskyists would seek to intervene. But in ries of chattel slavery on the African continent Lula (Brazil), of the Indian Evo Morales (Bo- tion, which in its Founding Manifesto (July whatever trade union or labor federation, we and beyond. It was there in South Africa that livia), of the black man Barack Obama (U.S.) 2013) looks to repressive capitalist regimes fight to build a class-struggle opposition to the courageous Zulus defeated the English and similar cases, like the women Michelle such as Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea oust the pro-capitalist bureaucracy, oppos- colonial troops. The Ethiopians with bows Bachelet (Chile) and Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), as models for South African development, ing popular fronts and class collaboration and arrows put the Italian fascists on the run, who may wrap themselves in the most beloved and calls for industrialization by mining and in every guise, seeking to lay the basis for expelling them from their country, humiliating banners of the exploited and oppressed, while manufacturing “entrepreneurs” (capitalists), workers councils (soviets) that can be the Mussolini and Hitler. their policies lack any revolutionary character etc. Moreover, the EFF declares that “the organizing centers for workers revolution. The ANC and Mandela doubtless had and thus they have only managed to prolong police are not our enemy” and seeks to “build The Marikana massacre in South Africa contact with the literature that narrated the the life of capitalism. strategic and working relationships with the could have the effect that the Bloody Sunday heroic deeds of Zumbi dos Palmares in Brazil The results of the class collaboration cohesive components of the state, particularly massacre (9 January 1905) had in tsarist and Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, the great- of the South African popular front are ter- the military and the police.” But this coun- Russia, of crystallizing mass indignation est expressions in the “New World” of the rible. The end of apartheid gave way to and terrevolutionary line is not the EFF’s alone. and awakening the working class to strug- arduous, protracted and cruel struggle against prepared the way for the brutal capitalist ex- For genuine Marxists, the concept of a gle, touching off the 1905 Russian Revolu- the enslavement of human beings when this ploitation and oppression of the country, now class line is key. We seek to build revolu- tion. If so, this upsurge will be held back, was revived in the Americas in a historical governed by an inter-ethnic caste of whites tionary workers parties against all bourgeois not aided, by reformist electoralist parties retrogression, since mass slavery had already and rich blacks, icons of “neo-liberalism” of parties and politicians. Social democrats like that seek to maneuver with the bourgeoisie. ended more than five centuries earlier with the post-Soviet period on the continent, prov- the DSM and CWI, or Socialist Alternative Only unyielding struggle for the program of the fall of the Roman Empire. Palmares, the ing for the umpteenth time that the popular in the United States, on the other hand, and international socialist revolution can take republic of escaped slaves, resisted for a cen- front is a danger for the working class! Proof 5 See “‘Socialist’ Elected in Seattle on Platform the struggle forward, to a united socialist tury and the Haitian revolutionaries inscribed of this is the terrible massacre of the miners of Liberal/Populist Reforms,” on page 9 of this states of Africa and a socialist world. n their names in the annals of human history at Marikana last year by the police of the issue. by defeating the powerful army of Napoleon popular-front government. The liberation of 6 Quoted in Workers Vanguard No. 602, 10 June 7 See “Her Majesty’s Social Democrats in Bed and the other slave powers of the time. Haiti the black population will only come about 1994, at a time when WV was the voice of revo- with the Police,” in The Internationalist No. 29, became the only country in the world where through socialist revolution. n lutionary Trotskyism. Summer 2009. 4 The Internationalist Labor Activist Faces Jail for Protesting “Right to Work” Union-Busting Defend Wyatt McMinn, Defeat “Right to Slave”! No More Wisconsins! Defend Our Unions!

PORTLAND, November 2013 headquartered in Olympia, Wash- – This past September 5, Cross ington rail against “government in- Trade Solidarity, a labor group in terference” in private business while the Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA seeking to use the government to area, called a rally to protest a prevent unions from representing all meeting of the union-hating “Free- workers at a workplace, even when Wyatt McMinn dom Foundation.” This right-wing this has been agreed to in collective the right-wing campaign to put such anti- outfit has launched a drive to enact bargaining. labor initiatives on the ballot in Washing- deceptively named “right-to-work” While vituperating against ton and Oregon in 2014 elections, the laws in the Pacific Northwest in an “welfare handouts,” the “right-to- short-sighted labor officialdom thinks that attempt to strip away basic union work” hypocrites would outlaw by business-as-usual lobbying and legal rights. While several dozen pick- contracts providing for an agency maneuvers they will go away. eted outside the meeting at Clark shop, which would make unions foot As the “right to slave” forces gear up Community College in Vancouver, the bill for freeloaders who enjoy in several states, the unions have learned a number of union members went the benefits of union wages without the wrong lesson from Wisconsin. There at inside, whereupon the labor-haters paying dues or agency fees. This least you had tens of thousands of unionists showed their idea of “freedom” would also threaten hard-won union in the streets before the labor tops sold out by calling the police to kick the rights like seniority protection and the struggle to the Democrats. Today, with protesters out. the union hiring hall, while weaken- the threat of effectively losing the right When the cops arrived and ing the ability of unions to enforce for public workers to bargain collectively ordered protesters out, Wyatt Mc- strikes and pickets. looming, the leadership of the major labor Minn, vice president of Local 10 While posing as defenders of groups has refused to mobilize to stop it of the International Union of Paint- the rights of non-union workers, the this assault in its tracks. Citing several ers and Allied Trades (IUPAT), “Union-busting has got to go!” Workers protest Freedom Foundation is funded by recent polls which indicate that voters may responded that he didn’t appreciate September 6 “right-to-work” forum in Vancouver. anti-union billionaires including the be in favor of “right to work” laws or are being “profiled.” He was immedi- port a mass mobilization to defend the port Walton Family Foundation (owners sour on unions, the union tops have stepped ately arrested and led away in handcuffs on workers, but the ILWU International then of Wal-Mart), the Sarah Scaife Foundation back from direct confrontation with right to the bogus charge of “trespassing” in this put the kibosh on a mass picket. Wyatt and other right-wing financiers. The group’s work groups. public meeting. At a November 6 hearing was also active in winning the backing of founder, Bob Williams, is closely linked to Relying on polls as an indicator of in Clark County Court, McMinn pled not a number of local unions to denounce re- the American Legislative Exchange Council what unions should be doing to mobilize guilty to the charge of first degree trespass- pression of Industrial Workers of the World and other far-right lobbyists funded by the their members is myopic. But more than ing. On this outrageous trumped-up charge, (IWW) members (see “Portland Unions billionaire Koch brothers and the Heritage that, it ignores the fundamental problem: the union activist faces up to 364 days in jail Denounce FBI Raids, Grand Jury Witch Foundation. Other Freedom Foundation that until the unions do something worth and a $5,000 fine. We urge all supporters of Hunt of Activists,” The Internationalist supporters include Scott Walker, the notori- supporting, they won’t gain the trust of the unions and of the rights of working people No. 34, March April 2013). ous union-busting governor of Wisconsin, millions of workers who need them. What’s to come out in support of Wyatt. Cross Trade – set up to bring con- and the right-wing hate-mongering TV needed instead of an ad campaign or anemic Wyatt McMinn most recently spear- struction workers from different trades commentator Glenn Beck. membership outreach is a real mobilization headed a campaign for active solidarity by together, defend each other’s picket lines, It’s no accident that “right-to-work” of workers in the streets and in the plants area unions with the locked-out workers of and promote workers power regardless of laws mainly exist in the South where unions to defend the right to union shops, seniority International Longshore and Warehouse jurisdiction – called the September 5 rally are an endangered species. The AFL-CIO and simple majority rule for workers form- Union (ILWU) locals at grain terminals in in order to expose the union-busters and has put out materials showing that workers ing a union. Portland and Vancouver. Six union locals their anti-worker agenda. The right-wing in states with such legislation earn $1,500 The way to stop the union-busting as- passed motions (see box) pledging to sup- “libertarians” of the Freedom Foundation, less per year on the average than those sault of the Koch brothers and their cronies, in states without such is to organize the unorganized by using union-crippling laws. workers’ power to withhold their labor. But recently “right-to- Faced with the labyrinth of anti-labor laws, work” laws have spread a fighting union movement would defy the to Midwest industrial likes of the Taft-Hartley ban on “secondary states such as Indiana boycotts” and shut down non-union firms and Michigan. Facing continued on page 22

Drop the Charges Against Wyatt McMinn! Wyatt McMinn, labor activist and vice president of Paint- ers Union Local 10, is scheduled to go on trial February 6 on the charge of first-degree trespassing for protesting at a public forum of the union-busting “Freedom Foundation.” He is facing up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine. Already, several Portland-area unions have passed reso- lutions calling to “Drop the charges against Wyatt McMinn!” These include IATSE Local 28, ILWU Local 5, IUPAT Local 10, IWW Portland, as well as labor historian Michael Munk. To add your name to the growing list of endorsers, and to contribute to Wyatt’s defense against the frame-up charg- es, write to McMinn Defense Campaign, P.O. Box 86902, Portland, OR or call (971) 282-7903. Please make checks or money orders payable to McMinn Defense Campaign. On “Freedom Foundation” against free speech. Suits call cops to throw out workers, arrest labor the Internet: facebook.com/defendwyattdefeatrighttowork. activist Wyatt McMinn in three seconds after warning. January-February 2014 5 CLASS STRUGGLE EDUCATION WORKERS Liberal Democrat NYC Mayoral Candidate Won’t End “Stop and Frisk,” Charters or Privatization of Public Education Despite the Hype, de Blasio Will Be “Bloomberg Lite”

By Class Struggle Education the contrast is not nearly

Workers/UFT so sharp. A Mayor de Photos: Steven Lovekin/Getty Image; Bill Lyons/Staten Island Advance; Seth Wenig/AP The following article was issued as a Blasio promises to be leaflet on October 29. Bloomberg lite. In the upcoming November 6 New An alarmed edito- York City mayoral elections, Democrat rial in the Wall Street Bill de Blasio is sure to clobber Republican Journal (29 October), Joe Lhota. With polls currently giving de “Occupy City Hall,” Blasio a 45-point lead (78% to 23%), in a shuddered that “New city where registered Democrats outnum- York voters are about to ber Republicans six-to-one, the outcome elect the Occupy move- is a foregone conclusion. De Blasio has ment to run America’s mounted a liberal campaign, calling to raise largest city.” Perish the taxes on the rich (by less than 1%) and criti- thought. But if the voice cizing the New York Police Department’s of the titans of high fi- “stop and frisk” tactics as racial profiling, nance endorsed Lhota, while Lhota has run a race-baiting, red- the ultra-establishment baiting, fear-mongering campaign appealing New York Times (27 Oc- to conservative billionaires and Tea Party tober), which backed reactionaries. With the prospect of an end Bloomberg all three to 20 years of Republican mayors, liberals, times he ran, came out labor bureaucrats and quite a few would-be for “Bill Blasio for Bill de Blasio (left) backed leftists are gaga for Bill. Mayor.” To those who Atlantic Yards project De Blasio has made his campaign have “already anointed of Bruce Ratner (right) theme the “Tale of Two Cities,” one for the him leader of a nation- to build sports arena super-rich and another for those struggling al rebirth of left-wing in downtown Brooklyn. to make ends meet. For his part, on pri- populism,” the Times Hundreds of residents were mary night, Lhota said the campaign would retorted, “Hold on.” The displaced, but promised highlight “two completely different visions de Blasio it was sup- “affordable housing” has for the future of our city.” The media has porting was “someone never been built. pitched the contest as the “unapologetic lib- to sustain and build on the 12-year legacy of eral” versus the “hardnosed conservative.” Asians and immigrants who are the targets the world to move here.” Racial profiling? Michael Bloomberg,” and “never mind the One banker labeled the prospect of de Blasio of racist repression. Democrats and Repub- Bloomberg wants more. Although 87% of revolution.” as mayor “terrifying.” At a diamond-studded licans both defend the interests of capital. those “stopped and frisked” by the police September 11 charity gala of wealthy pa- After campaigning for various com- And if Bill de Blasio could be portrayed as are blacks and Latinos, he says they “stop trons at the Waldorf-Astoria honoring Mi- peting Democrats in the primary (UFT, the candidate of Occupy Wall Street, that whites too much and minorities too little.” chael Bloomberg, a guest cried out, “Mayor Teamsters 237, TWU 100 for Thompson; is only because that populist movement, If working-class residents of the “outer Bloomberg should be mayor forever!” (New AFSCME DC 37 and DC 1707 for Liu; when it demanded anything at all, at most boroughs” are trapped by snowstorms of York Times, 11 September). But in reality, RWDSU and 32BJ SEIU for Quinn; 1199 sought minor reforms to capitalism rather inundated by floods, the CEO of NYC tells SEIU, CWA 1, UNITE/HERE than to replace the dictatorship of finance them to kick back and watch TV (if they and PSC for de Blasio), labor capital with the rule of those it exploits and have power, that is) or take in a Broadway officialdom unanimously em- oppresses. show (if they can shovel their way out). The braced the Democratic primary The wide support for de Blasio, who race and class arrogance of this would-be winner. That would be no sur- at first was dismissed by the professional master of the universe is boundless. prise, as the union bureaucracy pundits as an “unelectable liberal,” stems Republican Joe Lhota, who after leav- chains the ranks to the phony from the fact that millions of working ing the Giuliani administration was a highly “friends of labor” Democrats, people are hurting badly and fed up with a paid gofer for the Dolan family (owners of except that the UFT tops adopted mayor and government of, by and for the Madison Square Garden and Cablevision), a position of pro-Bloomberg plutocrats. Even by government statistics, has promised more of the same. He accuses New York Observer/Politicker New York neutrality the last two times unemployment in New York City is over de Blasio of waging “class warfare,” of be- around. (Lot of good it did 15%, the poverty rate is over 20% and ris- ing a “Marxist” and Sandinista, referring them.) But the reformist oppo- ing while incomes for the bottom half of to a stint the future Democratic candidate sitionists in the teachers union the population are falling. Despite a huge did in the 1980s working for the Jesuits’ also look favorably on de Blasio, public outcry, the racial profiling by the Quixote Center delivering food, clothing although some are wary to say so NYPD and attacks on the public schools and medical supplies to Nicaragua. (Just out loud as it would expose their by the Department of Education continue imagine what wannabe contra Lhota would pseudo-socialist pretensions. unabated. But all the Democratic candidate have said if de Blasio had worked with the In contrast, Class Struggle proposes to do is to tweak the Bloomberg Maryknolls!) Meanwhile Lhota’s attack ads Education Workers and the policies to make them a little less blatantly on TV are blatant racial fear-mongering, UFT president Mike Mulgrew announces the Internationalist Group tell the offensive. talking about “wilding,” the phrase used to union’s endorsement of Bill de Blasio for NYC bitter truth: neither candidate in Income gap? Not enough says the cur- frame up the innocent black youths who due mayor, September 18. Marjorie Stamberg of this election defends the interests rent mayor (whose net worth soared from to media hysteria and racist police coercion CSEW sought to oppose support to Democrats of the poor and working people $3 billion to $31 billion during his 12 years unjustly spent years in jail in the 1989 rape and call for a workers party at delegate assembly who make this city run, of the in office), claiming it would be a “god- of the Central Park jogger. but was denied the floor. African Americans, Latinos, send” if “we could get every billionaire in continued on page 8 6 The Internationalist Fast Food Workers Need a Whopping Raise, and a Fighting Union! Class Struggle Against Poverty Wages Appeals to Democrats Are a Dead End Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

5 DECEMBER 2013 – Hardly a day goes by country, as well as various pro-Democratic Internationalist photo that there isn’t another call from the politi- NGOs. Their focus is on pressuing Demo- cians and talk in the media about “doing cratic “elected officials.” something” about low wages. Now President This is hardly surprising. Of all the Obama is getting in on the act, with a speech unions in the U.S., the SEIU is most notable trying to whip up support for his health care for its close ties to the Democrats, practi- law after its disastrous inauguration, and cally acting as the labor auxiliary of that backing a Democratic bill to raise the federal capitalist party. (1199 SEIU was the main minimum wage bit by bit from the present union backing de Blasio before he won the miserable $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. But Democratic primary.) And groups like New that would still be far below what it was 45 York Communities for Change (NYCC, years ago in terms of purchasing power, and formerly ACORN) and Make the Road would still leave millions of workers mired are essentially fronts for the Democratic in poverty. The fact is that the capitalists, Party. But what exactly do they want the their politicians and their media mouthpieces Democrats to do? That’s not entirely clear will never do anything against the scourge at this point, perhaps even to the SEIU tops of poverty – unless they are forced to, by us, led by Mary Kay Henry. It will doubtless the workers. include legal challenges to franchise op- Over the last year and a half there have erations, local minimum wage ordinances, been a number of well-publicized protests promoting “worker centers,” and eventually at fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, (they hope) signing up lots of dues-paying On December 5, two dozen Domino’s delivery workers at a pizza outlet in Burger King and Wendy’s, and at stores of members. Upper Manhattan left work to demonstrate for a higher minimum wage. When the vast Walmart chain, the largest private That the union bureaucracy is making a two days later the boss fired a worker, the others stood with him. Supporters employer in the world. Although they have serious push is clear. A recent article (“Fight from the community, labor activists and others including the Internationalist been billed as “strikes,” the number of for 15 Confidential,”In These Times, 11 No- Group joined nightly protests of up to 200 picketers at the store (above, workers who have actually walked off the vember) by Arun Gupta based on interviews December 10). Even as Democratic Party city council members and legislators job is very small – for obvious reasons, with a number of low-wage organizers and took up the issue, the IG insisted that the Democrats are enemies, not “friends since they face immediate dismissal by reviewing “hundreds of pages of internal of labor.” Under pressure from the state for paying sub-minimum wage, the their viciously anti-union employers at the documents from the campaign,” reports that owner finally gave in and reinstated the fired workers. least sign of labor militancy. Mostly these the SEIU poured some $3 million into the have been media events organized by a coffers of Action Now in Chicago (another for a national “strike” on August 29 was closed stores, because the new owner, bil- few unions and foundation-funded NGOs former ACORN affiliate), as well as $2.5 launched at a mid-August convention in lionaire private equity investor Ron Burkle, (“non-governmental organizations”). But million to NYCC in New York and mil- Detroit of 700 workers, organizers and staff is a big Democratic Party donor. they have gotten attention and the conditions lions more to public relations firms includ- where they held a stage-managed vote with At a demonstration outside a Wendy’s faced by low-wage workers are so terrible ing Purpose, M+R Strategic Services and little or no prior discussion before the event. restaurant on Fulton Street in Brooklyn that they could eventually spark something. BerlinRosen for help with “branding,” a Workers democracy it ain’t. this morning, protesters chanted “we are If and when that happens, the question social media campaign and communications Some of the organizers have become the mighty, mighty workers” and “union will be posed starkly: what next? The vast strategies. If this sounds like some corporate disillusioned with the rigid top-down con- power.” But to mobilize that power, and to majority of these protests are actually aimed operation, that’s no accident: that’s how trol, and worry about what the ultimate wage a serious fight against poverty wages, at influencing the Democratic Party. The SEIU operates. outcome is to be. This is also echoed by it is necessary to drive the pro-capitalist rally today in New York City is billed as For now, what the SEIU tops are after is some on the left who have been involved labor bureaucrats out of the unions. And “New Day New York” and demands “an end grabbing market share so that they dominate in the organizing but are a bit queasy about while the SEIU, UFCW and NGO officials to inequality and the tale of two cities.” This the low-wage organizing field. In the past the methods. Big surprise: the SEIU are past treat the few low-wage workers they have is a clear reference to last month’s election their typical strategy has been to pressure masters of bureaucratic class collaboration. attracted as props or movie extras to be of Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor and employers to agree to “neutrality pacts” to Whatever the specifics, any organization bussed in for crowd scenes in their media echoes his campaign themes. But the idea let the union sign up members, and then to they build will not be subject to rank-and- productions, unionizing fast-food workers that putting a liberal Democrat in charge of negotiate contracts with few benefits and file control. But this critique is insufficient. will take real strike action that requires City Hall instead of Republican billionaire (of course) an iron-clad no-strike clause. The bottom line is that to wage a genuine developing worker cadres with the skills, Michael Bloomberg would end, or even In the case of fast-food workers, they have and potentially successful struggle against consciousness and political program to wage put a serious dent in, inequality is a fairy preferred to work through NGOs and worker poverty wages, it is necessary not only to a bitter fight against a powerful class enemy. tale. (To be sure, Bloomberg’s arrogance centers rather than unions, arguing (as do have union democracy but also its pre- As the momentum has built up in the is unmatched: he insisted on finishing his various would-be leftists) that this is a way requisites: total independence from the fast-food campaign, several reformist left golf game in Bermuda before jetting back of getting around the spider’s web of anti- capitalists, the capitalist parties and the groups have sought to get in on the action, to NYC after the Metro-North crash!) labor laws. But once they have a dues base capitalist state. some signing up as organizers. Experiencing So who is running this “movement” solidified, they will submit to those very The sorry state of trade unions in the the heavy hand of the SEIU/NGO operation and what is their game plan? The main force laws which the bureaucrats hide behind in U.S. is not due so much to anti-labor laws as has led to some public controversy, notably behind the Walmart “strikes” is the United order to stave off membership demands for to the unwillingness of union leaders to defy among supporters of the International So- Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) militant action. the bosses’ legality. The policy of the labor cialist Organization, with some agonizing union which has funded the groups OUR It’s a whole bureaucratic operation. fakers is class collaboration as opposed to over the effect on the workers while oth- Walmart and Making Change at Walmart. Gupta’s article quotes a number of low-wage class struggle. A main reason that grocery ers side with the bureaucrats to the point But rather than a serious drive to union- organizers detailing how “At the shop level unions have not been able to organize up- of opposing a rank-and-file caucus (see ize Walmart workers, the UFCW’s main we control the messaging, we control the scale non-union outfits is that new hires in “Assessing the Fight for 15,” Socialist strategy has been to get Democratic-led tactics, we decide what we want to organize non-unionized stores like Whole Foods and Worker, 9 September). But mild critics and city councils to keep the big box stores out around, we motivate the strikers…. If it’s Trader Joe’s make upwards of $2 an hour bureaucratic apologists alike will find that of the major cities. As for the fast-food pro- been decided at some level that there will be more than those in unionized supermar- once the media operation is over they will tests, these are mainly led (and financed) by an action on a given day, then it’s going to kets, where they typically start out at the be discarded “like squeezed lemons,” with the Service Employees International Union happen. It’s just a question of going through minimum wage and hardly rise from there. only the hard-core Democratic Party loyal- (SEIU), which is behind Fast Food Forward the motions of getting people to come to the Meanwhile, the unions (RWDSU/UFCW) ists making it onto the payroll. in NYC and “Fight for $15” elsewhere in the decisions that they want them to.” A call backed the 2012 buyout of A&P even as it continued on page 8 January-February 2014 7 cation Policy (PEP).” Big deal. Those of us Viacom and other top-tier Wall Streeters. De Blasio... who defend public education in the interests And according to the Wall Street Journal, Poverty Wages... continued from page 6 of working people oppose mayoral control de Blasio has raked in far more in campaign continued from page 7 What turned the mayoral race around lock, stock and barrel, we call for abolition contributions from big-ticket donors ($4.2 An example of a successful campaign to by all accounts. and what distinguished de of the puppet PEP and for the schools to be million) than has Lhota ($1.3 million). unionize low-wage workers was the struggle Blasio from the other Democratic contend- governed by councils of teachers, students, Meanwhile, New York City public em- at the Hot and Crusty bakery/restaurant on ers, was his TV ad against “stop and frisk” parents and workers, which would decide ployee unions are all pushing to “back Bill.” Manhattan’s Upper East Side last year, in featuring his son Dante. While the media on such issues as school closures. Almost all their contracts have run out, as which the Internationalist Group and CUNY chatter is all about his (now presidentially De Blasio recognizes that “unfair sus- Bloomberg’s City Hall dragged its feet (and Internationalist Clubs actively participated. sanctioned) afro hairstyle, what grabbed pensions and arrests to solve minor student union leaders preferred to wait for the suc- Two months of picketing resulted in a con- people is that they could see that Dante behavior” are used to “disproportionately cessor to the labor-hating mayor). The pow- tract with union control of hiring, something was precisely the kind of young black man hurt students of color and students with erful Transport Workers Union Local 100 almost unheard of in recent years although it that the cops would go after. The victims of disabilities.” But what is his answer? A demonstrated October 29 several thousand was key to building strong unions in formerly racist stop and frisk were no longer name- “Graduated Response Protocol” prior to strong for a new contract, and the United low-wage industries like dock workers and less and faceless. Meanwhile, most of other arrests. So students will still be marched Federation of Teachers (UFT) is gearing up the construction trades. Key to victory at Democrats were tiptoeing around the issue, out of school in handcuffs, the police will its phone-banking operations to get out the Hot and Crusty, even on a small scale, was talking of modifying it. The only Demo- just “conference” with principals first. The vote next week. But as de Blasio poses as determination to hold out on the picket line cratic candidate who actually said he would CSEW demands: cops out of the schools. De the classic “friend of labor” Democrat, even for weeks on end, not relying on the capitalist stop “stop and frisk” was John Liu, but he Blasio calls to “improve school transporta- he is saying that there is no way the unions state or politicians, and bringing out broad tripped up over a campaign finance scandal. tion,” but he doesn’t say a word about the will get full retroactive pay hikes. labor support. (See “Hot and Crusty Workers The fact is that Bill de Blasio is NOT, Bloomberg administration bidding criteria As for opposition currents in the unions, Win With Groundbreaking Contract,” The repeat NOT, calling to end the policy of cops aimed at breaking the school bus workers’ an October 25 posting on the ICE (Indepen- Internationalist, December 2012 and other wantonly stopping black and Latino young union and replacing qualified drivers and dent Community of Educators) blog asks, articles at www.internationalist.org.) men on the street. Instead, he explicitly says matrons. The CSEW (unlike the reform- “Is There Room For Optimism Under de Giant corporations like Walmart, “Stop and frisk is a valid police tool.” His ist oppositions in the UFT) went all out to Blasio?” Its answer is that a letter from the McDonald’s and the other wage-gougers platform only calls for “meaningful stop- support the school bus workers strike earlier Democratic candidate to Bloomberg’s pup- are not going to become model “corporate and-frisk reforms.” Meaning what, exactly? this year. pet PEP calling for a moratorium on school citizens” just because a well-funded labor Meaning that he will sign a City Council Sure, Democrat de Blasio wants uni- co-locations and closures, “is cause for a outfit launches a flashy media campaign. bill against racial profiling and call on the versal pre-K, as do Democratic president little optimism.” An earlier post (“No Tale Their entire profits and the entire capitalist NYPD to “reduce unwarranted stops.” Yet Obama and Democratic governor Cuomo. of Two de Blasios,” 6 October) argued that system are based on merciless exploitation the job of the police is to enforce racist “law Sure, but hardly cutting-edge: ever since “The odds of a sell out will increase sig- of working people. Who’s going to pay for and order.” In fact, the entire policy is a Head Start was begun in the 1960s it has nificantly if we do nothing and just sit back the luxury $35 million luxury Bombardier flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment been shown that pre-school programs and wait for de Blasio to do right by the corporate jet that McDonald’s just bought to the U.S. Constitution banning “unreason- have a major impact on education. He public schools.” Since the Democratic soon- if not the wage slaves sweating for the able searches and seizures.” Any serious op- wants school breakfasts more available. to-be mayor supports mayoral control, it minimum wage in its kitchens? The present ponent of racism and defender civil liberties Of course – it’s hard for students to learn called for recommending that he name campaign aims at installing a bureaucracy must demand an end to all random police when they’re hungry. Against bullying and “strong public education activists” for the to keep “labor peace” for the bosses, and stops and entrapment. for more after-school programs. Fine, but toothless PEP. Talk about putting lipstick on that will be so whether the bureaucrats are The question of the police is a perfect all this is to sidestep the fact that there is a a pig! former Occupy Wall Streeters or seasoned example of what the Democratic candidate war on public education, against teachers At a special UFT Delegate Assembly SEIU operatives. actually stands for. He calls for “com- and against teacher unions, and that war is in September on endorsement of a mayoral At this morning’s demo outside Wen- munity policing,” “focused deterrence” being spearheaded by the Democratic Party, candidate following the Democratic prima- dy’s in Brooklyn, workers chanted, “We and for “increasing the number of Argus from Barack Obama on down. ry, Marjorie Stamberg, a delegate from Dis- can’t survive on $7.25,” the national mini- cameras — particularly in high-crime ar- As a loyal Democrat, a Mayor de Bla- trict 79 who is an activist of Class Struggle mum wage which is also the minimum in eas in the outer boroughs.” So he wants to sio will carry out that war. He will enforce Education Workers, sought to speak against NYC, one of the most expensive cities in the blanket the projects in East New York or “the new teacher evaluations mandated by endorsing Democrat de Blasio and to call for country. Several protesters, added “We can’t the South Bronx with police surveillance the state,” which have nothing to do with a workers party. In the past she has several survive on $8.25,” on $9.25, on $10.25, and cameras like they have done to Lower improving education and everything to times called to oppose any candidate with kept on going. They’re right. No nickel-and- Manhattan. De Blasio praises his role in do with driving out union-conscious ex- “D” or an “R” after their name on the bal- dime, penny-ante increase in the minimum enacting the “Safe Streets, Safe City” perienced teachers. Far from opposing the lot, or indeed any capitalist candidate. But wage will do. The only road to actually initiative in the Dinkins administration privatization of public education, he wants in flagrant violation of Robert’s Rules of breaking the cycle of poverty, racism and which “significantly expanded the number to develop “a minimum of 100 community Order, UFT president Michael Mulgrew endless war that is inherent in capitalism of NYPD officers on the streets,” and calls schools” based on the model of Harlem refused to allow any opposition speaker, is for those organizing low-wage workers for putting 500 more cops on the streets Children’s Zone, the charter run by million- and the motion was rammed through, with to put forward a program of militant class today by taking them off of civilian duties. aire Geoffrey Canada. He wants to connect delegates of the Movement of Rank and struggle, breaking with the Democrats to This is a program for more focused racist technical high schools to a college, industry File Educators (MORE) either voting for it form a revolutionary workers party. repression, not to end it. or business. This is Obama’s campaign for or sitting on their hands. Such a program must not limit itself Similarly with de Blasio’s education corporate takeovers of schools, by Micro- The massive discontent in the ranks to wages but must take up all the forms of policies. He does NOT call for an end to soft, Motorola and Verizon in Chicago, and of labor and among the poor and working oppression we face. Women are a majority privately run “charter” schools or to school by the IBM-connected P-Tech that gutted people which has fueled the outpouring of of low-wage and part-time workers, and a closures, only for a temporary pause (mora- Paul Robeson HS in Crown Heights. support for de Blasio, as happened before large number are single moms. A real fight to torium) and opposing “unfair” shutdowns. Contrary to portrayals of de Blasio with the election of black Democrat Barack defend them must include demands for free, He calls for charging rent to charters “co-lo- as a “liberal firebrand” (New York Times), Obama in 2008, will inevitably be frus- 24-hour daycare. Also, most employees of cated” in public schools, and for “increasing a theme which plays well in liberal New trated. The reason is simple: the war on the fast food restaurants are African American, parental engagement and communication York, de Blasio is basically a “mainstream” unions, on immigrants, on hard-hit African Latino and Asian workers who also face in the co-location process,” instead of op- Clinton Democrat (he was an official in the American, Latino and Asian populations racist repression, like the notorious “stop posing and undoing this practice which has Housing and Urban Development Depart- in the U.S. are the result not of a policy or and frisk” practices of the NYPD. Instead of caused endless disruption in the service of a ment under Bill’s administration and man- even a party, but of the decaying capitalist talking of “reforming” this racist profiling, program of privatizing public education. So aged Hillary’s Senate campaign in New system, as are the imperialist wars waged as mayor-elect de Blasio does, class-struggle after holding off awhile and paying a token York). Along with his populist rhetoric, he by the U.S. in the Middle East. To confront militants call for workers mobilization to put lease, Eva Moskowitz and her ilk will still has been cozy with real estate developers, this onslaught, no amount of tinkering or an end to “stop and frisk” once and for all. be able to go about their wrecking operation notably Bruce Ratner, who co-hosted de tweaking or “triangulating” by suppos- For the large number of undocumented on the public schools. Blasio’s 50th birthday fundraiser party and edly “progressive” capitalist politicians will workers trapped in low-wage jobs, a key In fact, the future Democratic mayor who has yet to build any of the promised make a damn bit of difference. demand is for full citizenship rights for supports mayoral control which has done affordable housing in the Atlantic Yards We need a class-struggle workers party all immigrants: everyone should have the so much damage to New York City’s public boondoggle backed by de Blasio. to fight for a workers government, and we same rights. And as U.S. imperialism un- schools; he only spouts empty phrases about Since the primary, de Blasio has been need it now! n der commander in chief Obama continues “involving and listening to parents.” Mean- assiduously appealing to business tycoons, its wars around the world, working-class ing what, exactly? Meaning he would “allow saying finance is New York’s “hometown For further information: E-mail internationalists fight to defeat the war on [email protected] Community Education Councils an advisory industry.” He had a private sit-down with working people, “at home” and abroad, vote on major school utilization changes” media moguls Murdoch and Zuckerman, as Visit the CSEW web page: through international socialist revolution. A and to “provide insight to the Panel for Edu- well as with the heads of Goldman Sachs, http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com tall order, but it’s the only road. n

8 The Internationalist Top Local Democrats Back Kshama Sawant “Socialist” Elected in Seattle on Platform of Liberal/Populist Reforms In November, voters in Seattle, Wash- What about the rest of Sawant’s plat-

ington elected Kshama Sawant, candidate form? The other two key planks were “a Ted S. Warren/AP of Socialist Alternative (SAlt), to an at-large rent control ordinance to make housing seat on the City Council, preferring her to affordable, and a tax on millionaires to Richard Colin, the incumbent Democrat fund transit, education, and other public ser- who had held the post for 16 years. The vices”( “How a Socialist Candidate Won an bulk of the left cheered in unison. Socialist Election in Seattle,” Socialist Alternative, 22 Action (November 20) declared that, despite November). Rent control is hardly a socialist differences, Sawant’s election was “as an demand: it was begun by Democrat Franklin important victory for the entire socialist D. Roosevelt in World War II, and continued movement.” The International Socialist since then in New York, which has tens of Organization (December 11) saw it as a thousands of homeless. A number of Cali- harbinger of “The electoral opening for the fornia cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, left.” And, naturally, Socialist Alternative Oakland, Berkeley and others) likewise have (November 20) was ecstatic, headlining rent stabilization regulations. As for a “tax an article on their website, “Victory for on millionaires,” this is the bread-and-butter Socialist in Seattle! – ‘Earth-shattering con- of Democratic liberals to give a populist sequences’ in the US and internationally.” veneer to their capitalist politics. Curiously, though, the capitalist rul- In fact, the most prominent candidate ers didn’t feel the ground crumbling under who campaigned for a “millionaire’s tax” their feet. For all the considerable national in the November elections was New York Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative candidate elected to Seattle city council. media attention, the big business press was City’s mayor-elect, Democrat Bill de Bla- of the police. In the fine print of Sawant’s strike at an oil refinery where hundreds of remarkably nonchalant about the victory sio. Sawant’s election has been linked by election fliers there is a call to “build a workers demanded “British Jobs for British for a nominally Marxist, socialist working- various liberal commentators to de Bla- mass movement against police brutality and Workers.” class party. The monopoly Seattle Times (26 sio’s victory (see “Kshama Sawant’s City racial profiling,” and to “create an elected Sawant received a fair amount of labor November) which endorsed her opponent, Council victory reflects broad trends,” in civil review board with full powers over support, including endorsements from AFT carried a sympathetic profile of councilor- The Nation, 16 December). The would-be the police.” No mention of the position of Local 1789 at Seattle Central Community elect Sawant, quoting her colleagues-to-be, socialists also saw the parallels: the ISO Socialist Alternative and its international College where she teaches economics; from all Democrats, voicing hopeful anticipation (December 16) wrote that “De Blasio … organization, the Committee for a Work- AFSCME Council 28 of Washington state of her role on the City Council. “Council- ran a campaign that successfully painted ers International (CWI), that police, the employees; from IBEW Local 46 electrical member Mike O’Brien said adding Sawant him as a populist-challenger to the pro-Wall armed fist of the capitalist state that unions workers, and from a number of Seattle-area to the council means he and other members Street agenda of previous administrations.” confront on the picket lines, are supposedly union officials. Of course, endorsements by can be more aggressive passing liberal leg- And SAlt (November 22) headlined, “De fellow workers (see “Her Majesty’s Social labor bureaucrats, who generally support islation.” So Sawant’s presence will help Blasio Campaign in New York Creates Huge Democrats in Bed with the Police,” The the Democrats, don’t indicate a radical pro- pusillanimous Democratic “progressives” Expectations – Millions are Looking for a Internationalist No. 29, Summer 2009). gram. But a video of Sawant speaking to a screw up their courage! Left Alternative.” Tell that to the Occupy Wall Street activ- November 18 rally of Machinists at Boeing How does one explain the bourgeois The election of both Sawant and de ists who were pepper-sprayed, beaten and has been billed as a call for workers to seize media and politicians’ equanimous reac- Blasio has been portrayed as “the Occupy their homes searched by the Seattle Police the plants. Not so. What she actually called tion? Sawant did not hide her party affilia- movement goes to the polls.” Of course, Department. for is for “Boeing to be under democratic tion in this nominally “non-partisan” race. the ISO, SAlt et al. argued that de Blasio As for civilian review boards, these public ownership by workers, by the com- But Seattle’s “politically potent alternative would turn his back on his campaign themes exist in various places with no effect what- munity.” That is something quite different weekly,” The Stranger, marketed to the once in office. But the fact is that the liberal soever such as New York City, the “stop and from workers control. younger, hipper audience of middle-class Democrat and the “democratic socialist” frisk” capital of the U.S., or the Bay Area An article on the Sawant campaign’s café-dwellers, noted in endorsing her that, campaigned on similar themes. In fact, Rapid Transit system, where a BART cop web site, “Why Socialism,” calls for “tak- “Despite her ‘Socialist Alternative’ label, SAlt’s “how to” article on the election win shot Oscar Grant in cold blood. The idea ing the top 500 corporations that dominate there isn’t anything particularly radical highlighted the importance of “Democrats that the capitalist ruling class would allow our economy … into public ownership and about the core of Sawant’s progressive for Sawant.” This outfit included the former its racist enforcers to be subject to genuine placing them under the democratic con- agenda.” They got that right. Sawant treasurer of the local Democratic Party who “democratic control” by their victims is a trol of elected representatives of workers, campaigned on a straight liberal/populist said, “Kshama Sawant’s positions on issues deadly illusion. Even where police chiefs consumers, and the community at large.” program. Her platform was hardly to the left are far closer to King County Democrats are supposedly elected, this guarantees It argues, “We already have some essential of candidates of the Green Party, a minor than Richard Conlin’s actual record.” An- nothing. The infamous immigrant-hunting industries that are publicly owned under capitalist party, which endorsed her, as did other of the Democratic Party “activists” Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ari- capitalism that provide a glimpse of how the local “Progressive Party,” whose hero is supporting Sawant was the former chairman zona has been elected five times by popular socialism could work.” Actually, not. Un- Teddy Roosevelt, the racist butcher of the of the King County Democrats. vote. No civilian review board would stop der capitalism, nationalized industries are Philippines. The fact that the “socialist” candidate the SPD from murdering native American still subject to the laws of the market, and Sawant’s campaign protested The could garner support of a segment of the woodcarver John Williams or strangling the dictates of capitalist governments. The Stranger’s evaluation, while trumpeting Democratic Party officialdom reflects the and beating African American Leo Etherly. National Health Service in Britain was never its endorsement: “Sawant’s campaign is fact that Socialist Alternative – like Socialist Sawant’s platform also calls for the really socialized medicine, and under both radical in that it is a direct challenge to the Action, the International Socialist Organiza- Seattle City Council to “campaign for im- Labour and Conservative administration its Democratic Party,” it wrote in an August 2 tion and the other left groups supporting her mediate, unconditional citizenship rights for services have been slashed. statement. It would be hard not to be, since candidacy – are reformist social democrats all undocumented immigrants.” This could Socialist Alternative’s equation of there was no Republican candidate. But her who support the capitalist system. They just be a step forward, but full citizenship rights “public ownership” of top corporations most prominent campaign issue, the $15 per want to throw in a few reforms to make it a won’t be enacted by a city ordinance. It will with socialism is not some local aberration. hour minimum wage, was endorsed by both little more “people friendly.” When they talk require a tumultuous class struggle led by a SAlt’s mentor, Peter Taaffe, leader of the major (Democratic) mayoral candidates, the of socialism they mean a social-democratic workers party that champions the cause of CWI and of the Socialist Party in Britain, incumbent Mike McGinn, and his victori- “welfare state” on the European post-World all the oppressed. In contrast, SAlt has for wrote in his treatise on The State (1983): ous challenger, state senator Ed Murray. In War II model, with “public ownership” of many years acted as cheerleaders for Ralph “If the next Labour government introduced fact, Sawant underbid the Greens who have various industries and utilities. They have no Nader, a virulent nationalist immigrant- an Enabling Bill into Parliament to na- called for a $16.50 minimum wage while intention of carrying out a socialist revolu- basher who told the American Conservative tionalise the 200 monopolies, banks and arguing – like many “mainstream” econo- tion to bring down the capitalist state – their (21 June 2004) that he opposed legalization. insurance companies.... A peaceful socialist mists – that “enacting a liveable wage would ambition is to administer it. Moreover, SAlt’s co-thinkers in England transformation of society, would be entirely boost the [capitalist] economy.” This is brought to the fore over the issue were in the leadership of a chauvinist continued on page 20 January-February 2014 9 Free Abortion on Demand! Ecuador: Populist President Correa Attacks Women’s Right to Abortion 20 DECEMBER 2013 – There is an on- way he expressed himself.” The Fundación

slaught against women’s right to abortion Nacional Francisco Franco, promoting the Alianza por la Solidaridad underway, extending from the U.S. to Cen- legacy of the ultra-rightist Catholic national- tral and South America. This is notably the ist and misogynist Spanish dictator, joined case in Nicaragua, El Salvador and now Ec- the chorus of praise. The fact that Correa uador, all three countries under supposedly was not alone among “leftist” nationalists leftist governments: the Sandinista National in the region, was not lost on the imperialist Liberation Front (FSLN), Farabundo Martí press. The Madrid daily El País (26 October National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the 2013) headlined an article, “The Pious Left PAÍS (Proud and Sovereign Fatherland) of Latin America.” Alliance respectively. Like the international Against this unholy alliance of right drive to privatize public education, this of- and “left” against women’s rights, the In- fensive against women cannot be viewed as ternationalist Group and the League for the an isolated case in each country. Even more Fourth International call for the repeal of all grotesque is the fact that it is not right-wing laws penalizing or restricting abortion, and governments who are spearheading this fight for free abortion on demand, in safe, concerted attack against women, but rather high-quality medical facilities. Whether to governments that claim to be “progressive.” terminate an unwanted pregnancy is for the Case in point, Ecuador’s president Rafael woman, and her alone, to decide, for it is her Correa, a bourgeois populist who came to of- body and she will bear the consequences. fice in 2007 and was just reelected for a third Bishops and capitalist politicians, hands term: claiming to lead a “civic revolution” of off! We call to defend abortion clinics and to nationalist policies and social reforms, 1 Correa mobilize against the reactionary bigots who recently let loose a tirade to squelch any talk would endanger and ruin the lives of women Women’s rights activists form “red carpet” in front of Ecuador’s Legislative of reform on abortion. “Let them say what (and even murder abortion providers) in the Assembly on September 27 demanding decriminalization of abortion. they want, but I will never legalize abortion,” name of the “right to life” of an embryo or back-alley abortions. CREO, chimed in with his total support for he thundered, accusing women legislators fetus, which is not a separate being but a Since 1971, the Penal Code of Ecuador the president. Reeling under the blowback, from his PAÍS Alliance of “disloyalty” and developing organism that is biologically has stipulated, under Sections 441-447 of the next day in the Legislative Assembly, “treason” for proposing to permit abortion in united with and dependent on the woman. Article 149, that abortion can be legal only in Paola Pabón capitulated. In her speech of cases of rape. If they persisted, he threatened to The issue of the right to abortion in cases where the life of the woman is seriously surrender, after first saying to Correa that resign as president, and even after they backed Ecuador is quite concrete: according to the endangered and for rape victims who are men- “with the immense affection we have for down, the authoritarian leader who describes World Health Organization and the national tally impaired. Otherwise, under current law you, we say that this time you are wrong,” himself as a “humanist, Catholic and leftist” Health Ministry, an estimated 125,000 abor- any medical personnel performing the abor- she continued: “to maintain the unity of demanded that the deputies be sanctioned and tions are performed annually in the coun- tion face two to five years jail, and the woman this parliamentary fraction [of the AP] … I possibly thrown out of office. try – 350 a day in a country of 15 million could be imprisoned for one to five years. withdraw my motion.” Correa’s virulent opposition to legaliza- people. Complications due to clandestine The current session of the legislative as- Not content with forcing the with- tion of abortion was immediately saluted by abortions are the third most frequent cause sembly has been devoted to Correa’s project drawal of the motion, “tough guy” Correa some of the most reactionary forces. The of death for women. In a recent study of for a global overhaul of Ecuador’s criminal insisted that the AP sanction Pabón, Soledad head of Ecuador’s Episcopal Conference, 18,000 Ecuadorian homes by the National laws. Among the proposals of the COIP Buendía and Gina Godoy. And in fact, the Monsignor Antonio Arregui, hailed the Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) and (Integral Organic Penal Code) was a new three assemblywomen were suspended from president’s vituperation against abortion, in the Ministry of the Interior, one out of four Article 150, which would sanction medical their posts for the entire month of November particular the “courage and nobility in the women aged 15 and above have experienced professionals in all cases that involve termi- for daring to propose even this extremely sexual abuse, and six out of ten women have limited liberalization of laws against abor- 1 See “Civic Revolution or Workers Revolu- nating a pregnancy. In response, on October tion. While this public humiliation of the tion? Ecuador Needs a Workers, Peasants and suffered domestic abuse. Hospitals report 10 Alianza País (AP) legislator Soledad Indian Government,” The Internationalist (De- that they receive around 20,000 to 30,000 Buendía appealed for the decriminalization women lawmakers had an unmistakable cember 2007) women each year due to complications from of abortion in cases of rape. Another AP male chauvinist tone, it also reflected the assemblywoman, Paola Pabón, proposed a increasingly authoritarian character of Cor- motion to permit abortion during the first rea’s presidency, in which all manner of left- trimester (12 weeks) in the case of a victim wing dissent is subjected to state repression. EFE of rape, and to reject the proposed Article Criminalization of Social 150. As they spoke, activists of the Front Protest in Correa’s Ecuador for the Defense of Sexual and Reproductive Rights demonstrated outside. Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa gained a certain reputation as a champion Around 7 p.m., the Assembly took of liberty earlier this year in hinting at the a short recess. However, that then led to possibility of granting asylum to Edward tabling the motion until the next day, and Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed later that night President Correa went live the massive spying on civilians by the on Oramar TV with his diatribe: U.S. National Security Agency. Correa has “When they talk of decriminalizing abortion, the constitution clearly says to also celebrated the 2008 Constitution he the contrary, defend life beginning with sponsored as an example of “participatory conception. Anything that goes against democracy.” Yet on the day the Constitu- that is simply treason.... I will never ent Assembly that wrote the Constitution approve the decriminalization of abortion opened, Correa’s government unleashed a beyond what’s in the current law. What’s brutal assault on the Amazonian parish of more, if these betrayals and disloyalty Dayuma where indigenous rebels had the continue … I will resign from office.” temerity to block a road, shutting down Along with the praise of Archbishop Arregui oil production. That pattern, of spouting Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa with Catholic pope Francis, ferocious of Guayaquil, Guillermo Lasso, leader democratic rhetoric while repressing social opponents of abortion. It is the woman’s right: politicians and clerics, hands off! of the right-wing bourgeois opposition protest, has continued ever since. For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

10 The Internationalist Defend South Korean Workers Against Anti-Union Repression Ever since coming to office a year ago called in the San Francisco Bay Area on after elections that were heavily manipulated December 28 by the Transport Workers by South Korea’s military/police apparatus, Solidarity Committee and supported by a Internationalist photo the government of Park Geun-hye has number of reformist left groups as well as sharply stepped up repression against its by the Doro-Chiba rail union in Japan. The perceived opponents. The president, daugh- TWSC demanded immediate release of ter of the former dictator Park Chung-hee jailed unionists, reinstating strikers, halting who ruled South Korea with an iron hand privatization of the rail system and for the from 1961 to 1979, has taken particular aim resignation of the Park government. at South Korea’s militant trade unions. To be replaced by what, exactly? In In late October, the government out- effect this was a call for a general strike lawed the Korean Teachers Union (KTU) to put in a government of the bourgeois on the grounds that it refused to expel opposition, the Democratic Party (DP) Internationalist demonstrators outside Salvadoran consulate in New York, members who had been dismissed by and Unified Progressive Party (UPP). But June 5, protesting refusal to permit therapeutic abortion for “Beatriz.” the authorities. Then when the Korean replacing one capitalist government by Railway Workers Union (KRWU) struck another will not put an end to strikebreak- The authoritarian actions by the popu- on improving social, educational and living against threatened privatization of the the ing and anti-labor repression. The TWSC list Correa have escalated sharply in his third conditions through dialogue” (El Telégrafo national KORAIL system at the beginning also called for “a working class party that term, after winning the February presidential [Guayaquil], 14 December 2013). Some of December, the Park government went represents their political interests.” election in a landslide (57%). In June, the “dialogue”! Anyone who dissents from the after the union with a vengeance. But South Korea already had the summus pontifex of the Andean republic president’s line is accused of “treason,” and Some 500 strikebreakers were hired Democratic Labor Party (DLP), which in launched his offensive against independent those who protest in the streets against it are by KORAIL, all strikers (over 8,000 work- 2011 folded into the UPP. And what about ers) were fired, and on December 17 police North Korea, an inescapable issue on the movements of workers, peasants, Indians jailed for “terrorism” and “sabotage”! conducted a “search and seizure” operation divided peninsula, one which split the and leftists with presidential Decree 016. The Partido Comunista Marxista Le- at KRWU offices in the capital, Seoul. Five DLP? South Korean workers don’t need Their membership, finances, statutes and ninista del Ecuador (PCMLE) supported days later, 4,000 police were mobilized to another reformist labor party but a workers political statements would henceforth be the call for “decriminalization of abortion, storm the headquarters of the Korean Con- party that fights for revolutionary reunifica- subject to state control. Under this decree, for which women’s organizations and federation of Trade Unions (KCTU) seeking tion of Korea through socialist revolution in labor unions are now banned from making left-wing political groups have fought for to arrest the leaders of the KRWU. the capitalist South and workers political political statements or supporting candi- decades” (En Marcha, 1 November 2013). The KCTU responded with a call for a revolution in bureaucratically deformed dates. Likewise for indigenous groups, That is interesting coming from a party that general strike beginning on December 28. workers state in the North. so that the Confederation of Indigenous displays on the front page of its newspaper On that day more than 100,000 workers The fact that even a general strike was and opponents of the authoritarian govern- not enough to win the Korean railway work- Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) is now an effigy of Stalin, who in 1936 outlawed 2 ment rallied in Seoul and other major cities. ers’ struggle underscores that today simple forbidden to work with the bourgeois politi- abortion, reversing the Bolshevik legacy. Hundreds of students joined in, as did 500 trade-unionism, no matter how militant, is cal party, Pachakutik, it spawned. The PCMLE may even call to “Defeat Capi- KTU members. However, the next day the iincapable of winning gains from a decaying This imposition of state tutelage of all talist Rule to Achieve Women’s Liberation” KRWU called off the rail strike, at 22 days and increasingly repressive capitalist sys- social movements was then backed up by (En Marcha, 4 March 2011). But as arch- by far the longest in South Korea’s history. tem. Workers need a leadership based on heavy-duty judicial repression, accusing left- Stalinists, it poses the issue essentially as In the U.S., a solidarity rally was a program of revolutionary class struggle. ists of “terrorism” and “sabotage.” Last year one of democratic rights, without going to Pachakutik legislator Pepe Acacho and Shuar the roots of female social inequality in the “In words, bourgeois democracy promises Just as the fight for decriminaliza- Indian leader Pedro Mashiant were sentenced family. (It is also practically silent on the equality and liberty. In fact, not a single tion of abortion is linked to the struggle to 12 years in prison on these trumped-up issue of homosexual rights.) bourgeois republic, not even the most against the repressive policies of the Cor- charges for leading a 2009 protest in which a The pioneer socialist Charles Fourier advanced one, has given the feminine rea government, the struggle for women’s Shuar professor was killed in a clash with the declared that the degree of emancipation of half of the human race either full legal liberation cannot be separated from the police. Another Pachakutik deputy, Cléver women is a key measure of the degree of equality with men or freedom from the broader struggle against the social oppres- Jiménez, was sentenced to 18 months in jail social progress in a society. Already in the guardianship and oppression of men… sion engendered by capitalism. In Ecuador, along with two union leaders under Article Communist Manifesto (1848), the founders Bourgeois democracy is democracy women workers, indigenous women and of pompous phrases, solemn words, 494 of the penal code ordering imprisonment of modern communism spoke of the aboli- Afro-Ecuadorian women will be key lead- exuberant promises and the high sounding for those who insult or falsely accuse govern- tion (Aufhebung), or superseding of the ers of socialist revolution. Women fighters slogans of freedom and equality.” ment authorities. Even high school students family in order to “do away with the status of for the oppressed have played a key role Marxists understand that under capi- have been arrested for protesting. women as mere instruments of production.” throughout the history of Ecuador, par- talism, the system of private property and Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Fam- ticularly in the struggles of the indigenous The Struggle for the production for profit places severe limits to ily, Private Property and the State (1884), peoples. Manuela León led the December genuine social equality of women. As we not- Liberation of Women traced women’s oppression to the rise of 1871 revolt in Yaruquies, Chimborazo ed in an article in defense of a young woman, In the end, the reform of the Ecuadoran class society, in which the institution of the while Juana Calcan led an uprising in 1899 “Beatriz,” denied the right to a therapeutic penal code was approved by the National family arose in order to transmit property, in Pesillo in northern Ecuador with her abortion in El Salvador: “It is no coincidence Assembly on December 17. The proposed turning the woman into the property of her infant daughter Lucia Lechón on her back.3 that the first country to legalize abortion was Article 150, which would have punished master. Recognizing this, the victorious In the 20th century, Dolores Cuacuango Soviet Russia, in 1920, as a result of the medical professionals for performing any Bolsheviks championed the emancipation was an organizer of the peasant unions of October Revolution.” In fact, the Bolsheviks abortion whatsoever, was dropped. But the of women from domestic slavery. Cayambe, founder of the Ecuadorian Indian introduced “free abortion on demand,” just as previous law banning more than 99% of In Latin America today, abortion is Federation (FEI), a pioneer of bilingual the League for the Fourth International calls all abortions was maintained, with slight still banned in almost all instances except indigenous education, a leading fighter for for today. We noted that “the oppression of modifications. Even as opinion polls show for Cuba and, with restrictions, a few other women’s rights and a leader of the Commu- women will not be abolished by mere legis- two-thirds of the public supporting the right places (Guyana, Puerto Rico and recently nist Party, as well as a champion of equality lative reforms,” and raised a working-class to abortion in case of rape, the legislators Uruguay and Mexico City). As we have for black and mixed-race Ecuadorians. As program pointing to the need for a socialist refused to permit abortions even in the case stressed before, while the right to abortion Trotskyists, we fight for the program of revolution, including demands for: of girls age 14 and under. This defeat for is a democratic right it will not be made a permanent revolution to emancipate the women’s rights was the result of submis- reality for all women without hard class ●● Free, 24-hour day care centers; working class and all the oppressed, includ- ●● Equal pay for equal work; sion to the dictates of the president and the struggle leading to a socialist revolution. ing poor peasants, indigenous peoples and ●● Separation of church and state; bourgeois parties. The opposition of Rafael Correa and other Afro-Ecuadorians, fighting for a workers, “left-wing” populists to women’s repro- ●● Unrestricted right to divorce; Not only did the Alianza PAÍS legisla- ●● Full rights for homosexuals, and peasants and Indian government to begin tors capitulate before Correa’s threats, so ductive rights is part of their support for the socialist revolution. Particularly today, capitalism, despite all their phony rhetoric against interference of the state in did much of the supposedly socialist left. consensual sexual relations; with one-tenth of Ecuador’s population about introducing “21st century social- Demonstrating outside the National As- ●● Abolition of all obstacles, legal or de forced to emigrate, that revolution can only ism” without expropriating capital. As sembly as the issue was being debated, a facto, preventing access to skilled be completed on an international scale. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin noted in spokeswomen for the Juventud Comunista jobs; For women’s liberation through so- del Ecuador (JCE), called for permitting his article “Soviet Power and the Status of ●● Socialization of household work; cialist revolution! n Women” (1919): abortions for young girls, “but she made ●● Free, high-quality socialized medicine. 3 Marc Becker, Indians and Leftists in the Mak- clear that it [the movement] would continue 2 See Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor in the Family,” –“Down with El Salvador’s Abortion ing of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Move- to support the government program focusing in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) Ban!” The Internationalist (June 2013) ments (2008) January-February 2014 11 No Justice in the Racist Capitalist System Workers Revolution Will Avenge Trayvon Martin

The following article is ab- a jury has spoken.” But people breviated from the full text, which wouldn’t shut up. After nights is available on the Internet at of angry protest in black areas of www.internationalist.org. Oakland and Los Angeles, Obama JULY 2013 – The image of Tray- went before television cameras, von Martin in his hoodie will again calling to accept the jury’s remain forever etched in the verdict, adding “that’s how our memory of this generation of system works.” But this time he youth and many others – as were spoke in personal terms of the Emmett Till and Medgar Evers experience of young black men for earlier generations – as the facing hostility and suspicion. symbol of unrelenting racist ter- Many older African Ameri- ror in America. We will never cans said they appreciated the forget how Trayvon was lynched recognition from the White House by a bigoted, hate-filled vigilante, of the continuing painful reality of for the “crime” of walking while what Obama timidly called “racial black. And then again in the courts disparities.” Even as he claimed where prosecution, defense, judge “things are getting better,” despite and jury worked together to pro- all evidence to the contrary, he was duce a legal lynching. forced to admit “It doesn’t mean that we’re in a postracial society,” “The whole damn system as was widely proclaimed follow- is guilty” chant demonstrators ing the election of the first black at protests around the country. president. But this kind of “I feel Damn right, and that system is your pain” talk reminiscent of Bill capitalism. As capitalist politi- “We are all Trayvon Martin!” Demonstrators march in Harlem, July 14, to protest acquittal of Clinton left even many of his sup- cians seek to exploit his memory racist vigilante George Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin. porters dissatisfied. to push their reactionary agendas, guilty” on July 13 after a grotesque parody Obama was right about one Trayvon’s legacy to us is the challenge to of a trial, in which Trayvon was murdered You couldn’t miss the message sent thing: “that’s how our system works” – bury this inhuman regime that produces all over again, tens of thousands took to the by the acquittal in the Florida trial. A racist the murderous system he represents and endless poverty, racism and war. We the streets to protest the racist verdict. killer stalks and murders an unarmed black presides over. In this case, even a liberal working people and oppressed, without Across the U.S., young people, older teenager walking home with a soft drink and black commentator like Charles Blow has whose labor the system could not function, people, black, white, Latino came out to candy, and the killer gets away with it: this to admit that “The Whole System Failed are its gravediggers. Our task is to fight for denounce this abomination. The day after the is a declaration of open season on young Trayvon Martin” (New York Times, 16 July). workers revolution to avenge Trayvon and verdict was announced, thousands marched African American men. Young people came But what is that system? Florida’s “Stand all the victims of racist terror. in New York City stopping traffic and shut- forward to make their first speech in public, Your Ground” law wasn’t even used in this When Trayvon Martin was murdered in ting down Times Square shouting, “We are all saying “I feel like this puts a bulls-eye right case, while police procedure and rigged Sanford, Florida in February 2012 at the age Trayvon Martin.” As some continued north on my back.” Many felt it in their gut: the court proceedings are only part of it. It was of 17 by racist vigilante and wannabe cop to Harlem, police arrested 14. In Los Angeles verdict is an indictment of a racist injustice racist American capitalism that lynched George Zimmerman, a wave of anger swept protesters occupied the Interstate 10 freeway system that sends millions of black youth to Trayvon, and then lynched him again in the country as millions expressed their out- and then marched onto Crenshaw Boulevard prison while letting racist murderers go free. the courtroom. rage. Black families felt a cold chill, fearing where L.A. police shot into the crowd with At New York’s Union Square on Sun- From the time of slavery, the bedrock that their son or brother could be next to die. rubber bullets. A week later, protests were day, July 14, protesters joined the Interna- on which it was founded, the U.S. capitalist Then, when Zimmerman was declared “not held in over 100 cities nationwide. tionalist contingent in chanting “Trayvon’s economy has claimed countless black lives dead, Zimmerman’s and will continue to do so until it is swept free, that’s what they away. The Supreme Court’s cancellation call democracy.” And last month of the key section of the 1965 again the next day as we Voting Rights Act, part of a general rolling marched on the courts at back of the limited gains of the civil rights Foley Square chanting, movement, is part of that system. So is the “Racist system – an- municipal bankruptcy of black Detroit, other black victim.” At Internationalist photo principally the result of the closure of the a rally on 125th Street auto plants in the 1980s, leading to mass in Harlem, people ex- unemployment of black workers and vast pressed their apprecia- population loss. tion for International- Speaking for the IG at the July 14 ist Group signs saying Harlem rally, Charlie Morán, an immigrant “Stop Racist Murder worker, said a TV reporter had questioned our from Afghanistan to sign saying “Trayvon Martin Was Lynched – Florida and N.Y.” and No Justice in the Capitalist Courts.” Voices in “Stop and Frisk = Amer- the crowd exclaimed, “Yes!” One cried out, ican Apartheid.” “that’s what they’re doing to black boys.” Anticipating an Our comrade continued: explosion of anger, po- “No question about it, legal lynching is lice from New York to what this is all about, in the U.S.A., and Internationalist contingent in NYC protest against racist acquittal of Zimmerman, July 15. California were in full it has been for the past three hundred riot mode. President years. Even if we have a black president Mobilize Workers Power to Shut Down “Stop & Frisk”! Barack Obama issued in the White House, nothing has changed. a statement saying “we Democrats, Republicans, they’re not For the Right of Armed Black Self-Defense! are a nation of laws, and continued on page 18 12 The Internationalist Drive Out the MINUSTAH! Workers to Power! Haiti: Women Workers Strike Against Starvation Wages 12 DECEMBER 2013 – This week the workers at Premium Apparel plant stopped anger of workers in Haiti’s export garment work demanding to talk to the boss. At the industry over their miserable wages finally U.S. Unions Must Join the Battle nearby One World Apparel factory there was boiled over. On Tuesday, December 10, a two-hour wildcat strike. This year thou- hundreds of workers gathered outside the sands demonstrated on May Day demanding gates of the SONAPI industrial park near 500 gourdes. the airport outside the capital of Port-au- Very occasionally the starvation wages Prince to demand, as they have for months, a of Haitian workers makes it into the “main- minimum wage of 500 gourdes (US$11.50) stream” media, usually when some respect- per day. As the workers, mostly young able NGO or research group makes an issue women, marched into the city brandishing of it (or in the wake of another murderous tree branches hundreds more joined them. factory fire in Bangladesh). Recently, a study Outside the legislature they shouted, “We by the Worker Rights Consortium (“Stealing can’t take it any more,” and “We’re ready From the Poor: Wage Theft in the Haitian to die for 500 gourdes!” Apparel Industry,” 15 October 2013) reported The next day, the scene was repeated. that “the majority of Haitian garment workers The manufacturer’s association ADIH are being denied nearly a third of the wages complained that union activists entered the they are legally due as a result of the factories’ plants and pulled the workers out, shutting theft of their income.” Employers outright down production. This time they tried to refused to pay overtime rates. Instead they march to the upscale town of Pétionville essentially imposed a 60-hour workweek (ten where Haitian president Michel Martelly hours a day, six days a week). lives in the hills above the sweltering capital. Earlier this year, a study by Better However, they were turned back by heavily Work Haiti, a monitoring program set up by armed forces of the CIMO riot police. On the United Nations-affiliated International Thursday, the employers retaliated by lock- Labour Organisation and the International ing the workers out “to ensure the safety of Batay Ouvriye Finance Corporation, reported a “100% non- employees and their workplace.” KOSIT garment workers union demonstrates in the capital for a 500 gourde compliance rate in Minimum Wages,” since Throughout the last month, workers have (US$11.50) a day minimum wage, November 26. all 24 garment factories producing for export been agitating to raise the minimum wage. profit-gouging factory owners, but also from self-proclaimed leftists who regurgitate the set piece rates so low that only one out of six On November 7 there was a walkout in the Haiti’s bourgeois government and from their bourgeois images, there is a small Haitian workers could make the legal wage of 300 CODEVI industrial park in Ouanaminthe on imperialist patrons in the U.S. embassy. proletariat, concentrated in light industry.1 gourdes in eight hours (“Better Work Haiti: the border with the Dominican Republic. On Against this solid wall of capital, the only Roughly 30,000 workers are employed in Garment Industry 6th Biannual Synthesis November 26, the unions took to the streets road out of grinding poverty for the Haitian garment plants producing for export, and Report,” 16 April 2013). The apparel plants of the capital. They complained that under masses is an international struggle for so- though largely non-unionized they have were also “100% non-compliant” on medi- the existing law, since October 2012 apparel cialist revolution, together with Dominican engaged in militant actions when they could. cal and safety conditions, with hazardous manufacturers were required pay at least 300 workers and peasants next door and with In 2009, when then-president René chemicals unlabeled and none of the legally gourdes. The bosses simply refused. But workers in the U.S. imperialist heartland. Préval got a legislative committee to repeal required medical facilities and staff. on November 29, the High Commission on The imperialist media typically present the 200 gourde minimum wage, thousands The vast majority of men and women’s Wages (CSS) decreed that wages would be Haiti as a basket case of a county, summed of workers walked out of SONAPI to march underwear sold in the United States is made “raised” to 225 gourdes, or $5 a day. up in photos of malnourished children with on parliament. A week later they responded in Haiti, by contractors working for Hanes Hunger: Everyone admits it is impossible distended bellies, for which the only solu- to a police attack by stoning the car of a U.S. Brands, Fruit of the Loom and other retail- for workers to survive on such starvation wag- tion is charity, provided by NGOs or West- diplomat (see “Haiti: Battle Over Starvation ers. Levi’s jeans, Dickies uniforms and a es. In fact, garment workers are constantly in ern governments directly. The dire poverty is Wages and Neocolonial Occupation,” The whole array of garments sold by major chain debt and can’t even afford to feed themselves, real, and much of the capital is still in ruins Internationalist, November 2009). Last stores including Gap, Old Navy, Target, much less their families. So the government since the January 2010 earthquake, with fall, when the companies responded to a Kohl’s, K-Mart and Walmart are produced announced the next day that it would subsidize over 350,000 people still living in makeshift scheduled increase of the minimum wage to in these plants. But their labor costs are breakfast and lunch at the plants. But that camps. But contrary to the claims of some 300 gourdes by raising piece-work quotas, infinitesimal. Workers at the Genesis fac- would only be a pittance. A leading Haitian economist, Camille Chalmers, calculated

that basic living expenses for a family of four From NYC: Solidarity With Haitian Workers Internationalist photo are at least US$25 a day. A 2011 study by the American AFL-CIO labor federation put the bare minimum at US$29 a day. Radicalization: The head of the Tex- tile and Garment Workers Union (SOTA), Telemarque Pierre, declared: “We know per- fectly well that the police are the armed fist of the bosses and the state” (AlterPresse, 12 December). Workers denounced union reps on the CSS who agreed to the $5 a day wage, at least one of them from the U.S.-backed CATH labor federation, as “traitors.” A Col- lective of Textile Workers Unions (KOSIT) has been formed, including the leftist Batay Ouvriye (Labor Struggle), to organize the walkouts and marches. But it will take much more than that to win this battle. As in 2009, when thousands of workers repeatedly took to the streets demanding an increase in the minimum wage, work- On December 21, a demonstration was held in New York City to protest anti-union repression and starvation wages ers face bitter opposition not only from the in Haiti. The protesters demanded that fired union leaders be immediately reinstated (see article, page 14). January-February 2014 13 Internationalist photo UNMultimedia

(Right) “Clintons, Democrats Push Sweatshops in Haiti!” say protesters at December 21 NYC demonstration supporting Haitian workers. (Left) Bill Clinton and U.N. secretary general Ban Ki Moon at Multiwear factory at Sonapi industrial park, March 2009. Multiwear pays workers less than $5 a day. tory which makes t-shirts for Montreal- What’s required is the mobilization of Haiti to feed those people because of what based Gildan Activewear (the largest t-shirt workers’ power in class struggle, but not just I did.” Nevertheless Bill and Hillary are manufacturer in the world) receive one cent Haitian workers. We’re not dealing with a still pushing the policy of starvation-wage (US$.01) for every six shirts their module few fly-by-night contractors. Any serious at- factory labor, tourism and agro-industrial produces, which would mean producing tempt to raise Haitian garment workers’ pay export crops in the north. To this has now 3,600 t-shirts just to make the minimum would likely be met by the “multinational” been added mining, searching for gold in US$7 daily minimum wage. They actually corporations switching to suppliers in even the hills of Quisqueya as the avaricious make an average of US$5.55. lower-wage countries, notably Bangladesh Spanish conquerors did in the early The WRC report noted that pay was and Cambodia. Strikes would be brutally 1500s (in the course of which they com- even lower at the Caracol industrial park in- attacked by the “United Nations” occupying mitted genocide against the indigenous augurated in October 2012 with great fanfare force, the MINUSTAH, which acts as mer- Taino population). (and the presence of Bill and Hillary Clinton, cenaries for U.S. imperialism in suppressing Ever since the modern conquis- movie star Sean Penn, fashion designer unrest in its Haitian neo-colony. And even tadores of U.S. imperialism first Donna Karan and Haiti’s current and former legislative action to raise the minimum invaded Haiti in 1915, they have presidents) as the U.S.’ main contribution to wage would face massive resistance by the pursued economic policies that Haiti’s post-2010 earthquake reconstruction, American embassy, which despite Haiti’s condemn Haitian workers to end- although it is 100 miles from the quake zone. small population is the fourth-largest U.S. less misery, whether it was producing sugar The Caracol complex (factory, power plant, mission in the world. cane then or t-shirts today. In order to escape housing, and future port) was paid for almost A trove of confidential U.S. government from this endless cycle of poverty, it is not the remnants of Duvalier’s macoutes and entirely by U.S. AID and Inter-American cables released in 2011 by the WikiLeaks enough to pressure the rubber-stamp Haitian other bourgeois sectors and recognizing “the Development Bank funds. Its only tenant, Internet transparency group revealed a mas- parliament or pliant Haitian presidents to imperialists’ objective of exploiting Haitian the Korean SAE-A corporation, vowed to be sive embassy operation behind the employer pass laws which are never enforced. It is workers’ sweat and blood,” B.O. does not globally competitive “without compromising rollback of the 200 gourde ($5) minimum necessary to defeat not only the sweatshop go beyond simple trade-unionism and talk on labor and environmental standards. Yet wage law in 2009. A 17 June 2009 cable oligarchs like Charles Henry Baker but of a “people’s camp.” workers there make only US$4.67 a day. from U.S. chargé d’affaires Thomas Tighe also their imperialist sponsors. And that In a lengthy essay analyzing the vari- Haitian workers literally cannot live to his boss Hillary Clinton said that a “200 requires common class struggle by workers ous bourgeois forces (“The Nature of the on these starvation wages. Moreover, any Haitian gourde minimum wage would make in neo-colonies like Haiti and the Dominican Transformation Occurring in Haiti Today,” conceivable increase in the minimum wage the [assembly] sector economically unviable Republic together with their class sisters and May 2011), Batay Ouvriye summed up decreed by the government (only to be ignored and consequently force factories to shut brothers in the imperialist heartland. its program by calling for the “popular by the employers) won’t even come close to a down” and “would devastate the industry A real struggle to massively raise wages masses,” “all genuine progressives” and living wage. Claims by manufacturers and re- and negatively impact the benefits of the would have to shut down the entire Haitian “the people’s side” to be clear that “faced tailers that this low pay is necessary to remain Haitian Hemispheric through Opportunity export apparel industry. To prevent manu- with the failure of the ruling class and all the competitive and that they would go bankrupt if Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II)” facturers from simply shifting production corrupt politicians, the workers’ interests are it was significantly raised are hogwash. They (“WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a elsewhere, it would require active support the INTERESTS OF THE WHOLE COUN- could quintupple Haitian garment workers’ Day,” The Nation, 1 June 2011). action by U.S. unions, from garment and TRY!” This is false and leads ultimately to wages and only add a few cents to the cost of Going back to the dictatorial regime of retail workers to dock workers. Such a the same dead-end as the bourgeois popu- producing a t-shirt that sells for US$5 to $50 Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier in the campaign requires breaking with the Demo- lism of Lavalas. In contrast, Leon Trotsky retail. But it is inherent in capitalist exploita- 1980s, the U.S.’ “development strategy” crats – the party of Bill and Hillary Clinton, stressed that the working class can become tion that the bosses will not concede even such for Haiti has always focused on low-wage whose policies are a direct cause of Haitian “the leader of the subjugated nation,” stand- a minimal amount unless forced to do so by factory labor. The most immediate effect of poverty – and a fight to build a class-struggle ing in the forefront of the struggles of the the action of the workers. this policy was to devastate food production, workers party. In Haiti it means confront- downtrodden masses against imperialism Appeals to the “conscience” of the giant as hundreds of thousands of impoverished ing all the bourgeois parties, including the and its Haitian slave drivers. retailing corporations and sweatshop factory peasants flocked to Port-au-Prince in search populist Lavalas movement of Aristide, To do so, the most conscious sectors must owners are useless. The bosses perfectly un- of jobs. When the Haitian garment industry which seeks to silence the struggle to raise cohere a party of the proletarian vanguard to derstand the truth spelled out by Karl Marx was decimated (going from 100,000 jobs the minimum wage. And it requires driv- fight for workers rule on a program of per- in Capital, that their profits derive entirely to less than 10,000, in good part because of ing out the MINUSTAH mercenaries who manent revolution, in which the democratic from the surplus value represented by the the embargo on Haitian imports backed by enforce imperialist law-and-order. objectives grow over into socialist measures difference between what workers are paid liberal Democrats after the Haitian Army’s In Haiti, the leftist Batay Ouvriye has and the revolution is extended internationally for their labor time and what they produce 1990 ouster of the populist priest-president led protests over the minimum wage, won to the imperialist centers. Only on that basis with their labor. Following the publication Jean-Bertrand Aristide), the former workers a union contract at the free trade zone in will it be possible to actually put an end to the of the WRC study, Gildan and Fruit of the remained in the capital’s shantytowns which Ouanaminthe on the Dominican border and starvation wages and endemic poverty that Loom announced that they would instruct were devastated in the 2010 quake. is seeking to build unions among garment have plagued Haiti since it became the first their contractors to pay the minimum wage Bill Clinton confessed to the U.S. Senate workers in Port-au-Prince and the Caracol successful slave revolution in history, inspired (Toronto Star, 18 November). But that Foreign Relations Committee in 2010 that industrial park. B.O. rightly recognizes the by the French Revolution of 1789-1894 and in is peanuts, and Hanes and other retailers U.S. policy of gutting Haitian agriculture and “permanent crisis” in Haiti reflects “the turn inspiring slave revolts from the Caribbean refused. Lobbying by liberal groups like forcing massive imports of cheap food staples historical incapacity to realize a bourgeois to the United States. Only in this way will it be United Students Against Sweatshops may “may have been good for some of my farm- national project.” Yet while opposing the possible to finally break the colonialist/impe- win a concession or two, but even that lib- ers in Arkansas,” but the consequence was grandon landowners, the corrupt gran- rialist blockade that the first black republic of eral activism has fallen off of late. a “loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in manjè (big eaters) who feed off the state, the Americas has faced ever since. ■

14 The Internationalist Obama Backs Off, But the Threat Remains Defend Syria Against U.S. Imperialist Attack!

28 SEPTEMBER 2013 – In the early 75% of the population opposed to an attack. people and resulting in 500,000 con- morning hours of August 21, there were a Facing the threat of a direct military genitally malformed babies. series of explosions in the Ghouta region of strike by the U.S. against Syria, there were Nor should we forget that if Sad- Syria, to the east of the capital Damascus. protest demonstrations in many cities. Vir- dam Hussein used chemical weapons Immediately afterwards, there were reports tually the entire left limited itself to saying against Iranian troops, it was because of dozens and later hundreds of victims “Hands off Syria,” which let them join “for years the imperialists actively showing signs of poising by chemical with bourgeois liberal “doves,” as well as supplied Iraq with chemical and weapons. The fact was particularly notable covering up the responsibility of the social- biological agents, built the factories as only two days beforehand a United democratic reformists who, in the name of to produce CBW arms, fed Baghdad Nations inspection team had arrived and a non-existent “Syrian Revolution,” sup- intelligence data on where to use was billeted only 4 miles from the site. In port the Islamist rebels who are clamoring them, and dispatched agents to the record time the Internet was inundated with for Western intervention. In contrast, the battlefields to check up on their usage” videos uploaded by opponents of the regime Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the (see the Internationalist pamphlet, showing bodies – many of them women League for the Fourth International, raised The Great Chemical Weapons Hoax, and children – without visible wounds. The the slogans, “Defeat U.S. imperialist war!” May 2003). But that didn’t stop the rebels and the imperialist press in unison and “Defend Syria against imperialist at- imperialist warmongers from using blamed the government of Bashar al-Assad tack!” While maintaining our political the imaginary existence of “weapons for the massacre.1 opposition to the authoritarian Assad re- of mass destruction” as a pretext to The attack took place almost exactly gime, in the face of imperialist assault it is invade Iraq (during which they used one year after U.S. president Barack Obama necessary to take sides militarily with the a new bomb, the Mark77, similar to declared that if Syrian government used semi-colonial country under attack. napalm, against Iraqi troops). chemical weapons it would be crossing a “red Anticipating an imminent defeat in In the Syrian case, we can already line,” which would result in a direct military Congress, with a likely majority in both conclude that the allegation that the intervention by the United Sates. As was to be houses voting against attacking Syria, the Assad government used chemical expected, immediately following the attack Obama administration launched a trial weapons against the population is a there was a mounting outcry for the Western balloon suggesting that Assad could avoid lie, designed to unleash and justify powers to “punish” Assad by bombing Syria. being bombed if he got rid of his chemical imperialist attack. A lie not because The leaders of France and Britain let loose arsenal. In order to keep up appearances, as the Syrian regime categorically denies with war cries and, after several days of well as the tattered U.S. “credibility” after Internationalist photo having done so, nor because it is inca- hesitation, Obama announced he intended to 12 years of war in the Middle East, it fell to Internationalist contingent at Sept.­ 7 NYC pable of “killing its own people” – its attack the Near Eastern country. The Penta- Russia to formalize the proposal. The Syrian protest against U.S. threats to bomb Syria. bombings of urban areas has certainly gon shifted its military deployment, placing government quickly accepted, and agreed to nuclear weapons in the face of threats of at- killed thousands of civilians – but ships of the Sixth Fleet off the Syrian coast ratify the international convention against tack by the U.S. and Israel. And in any case, because there isn’t a single trustworthy piece from where they could launch Tomahawk chemical weapons. After some diplomatic whatever accumulation of chemical weap- of evidence indicating that the government cruise missiles. horse-trading, on September 27 the U.N. ons Syria may have, it is nothing compared did it2; because it had no interest in doing Nevertheless, the attack has not been Security Council approved a motion call- to the thousands of tons in the U.S. arsenal. it, above all at that time and place when the carried out, yet. Along with highly placed ing for the destruction of Syria’s chemical We should not forget that the United recently arrived U.N. inspectors were pres- imperialist voices who warned against wad- weapons stocks, with the threat of unspeci- States is the only country in the world which ent and knowing that this would trigger an ing into the Syrian quagmire, there was an fied “consequences” if it did not comply. has used nuclear weapons in war, murder- imperialist attack; and because there are a additional factor that the imperialist strate- Let us be clear: Syria has the right to ing between 170,000 and 250,000 people in number of reports suggesting that it was the gists overlooked at first: the deep-seated possess and use any weapon to defend it- Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945; that rebels (who had plenty of reason to do it) who aversion in the U.S., British and French self against the imperialist marauders, and five months earlier it slaughtered more than unleashed chemical agents.3 populations to yet another military adven- its Zionist allies who keep the Palestinian 100,000 residents of Tokyo which chemical It would not be the first time that the ture in the region after the fiasco of the wars population under its military boot and oc- incendiary bombs; that in the Korean war, United States had used a lie to launch an and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. cupy Syrian territory (the Golan Heights). In U.S. military forces (disguised as U.N. imperialist war. In fact, it almost always Taking stock of the popular opposition, reality, the Syrian arsenal was conceived as troops) dropped thousands of tons of napalm does it. Let’s not forget the explosion in the British legislators stunned everyone by vot- a response to the Israeli military juggernaut, on the North, killing hundreds of thousands Navy warship Maine which furnished the ing against undertaking a “humanitarian” which has hundreds of nuclear warheads of Koreans; that from 1963 to 1973, the U.S. casus belli for the U.S. invasion of Cuba in military assault. And when Obama asked and probably the largest stocks of chemical dumped thousands of tons of napalm and 1898; the supposed Tonkin Gulf incident for the support of Congress, a defeat there (and biological) weapons in the Middle East. herbicides like Agent Orange on the Viet- in 1964, later disavowed, which was used was taking shape as opinion polls showed We also defend the right of Iran to develop namese population, killing some 400,000 continued on page 22

Footnotes: Books, 8 December 2013; United Nations Mission State Department, shows no indications of hav- Damascus that the sarin gas missiles were fired 1 Note: This article was written in late September to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical ing transported sarin; and (d) that in the cases of by Assad’s army.” Fisk quotes a member of a 2013. Since then considerable additional evi- Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic, Final re- munitions in other places were there were traces Western NGO saying, “if Assad really wanted dence has come to light strongly suggesting that port, 12 December 2013; and “Conclusion” from of sarin, there were indications that these and to use sarin gas, why for God’s sake, did he wait it was Islamist insurgents who unleashed chemi- website whoghouta.blogspot.com. other potential evidence was “moved and pos- for two years and then when the UN was actu- cal weapons on the population of the East Ghouta 2 The “Report on the Alleged Use of Chemical sibly manipulated,” according to the investiga- ally on the ground to investigate?” area of Syria. This includes: (a) U.N. weapons Weapons in the Ghouta Area of Damascus on tors (“Questions Plague UN Report on Syria,” 3 Among these are the statement by two rebel experts testimony of the low quality of the sarin 21 August 2013” transmitted by the U.N. Inves- Al-Akhbar [Beirut, Lebanon], 23 September). fighters to a reporter that they had received arms gas; (b) videos of Liwa al-Islam rebel fighters on tigative Commission on September 13 indicates A U.S. expert on chemical, biological and from Saudi Arabia that they did not understand August 21 launching rockets visually identical that: (a) all the victims presented to the investi- nuclear weapons who has worked in the past and that using them incorrectly detonated an to those found at impact sites while wearing gas gators were previously chosen by the rebels and for the White House described as “strange” the explosion; and the statements by a Belgian pro- masks; (c) U.N. investigators’ reports of several that the doctors who attended them were rebel reports of convulsions without prior less-severe fessor to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir and by other uses of gas likely by anti-regime insurgents; sympathizers; (b) in the area where the victims symptoms, and above all the reports that 78% a reporter of La Stampa of Torino, Italy, both (d) calculations by weapons experts of the rock- showed the highest level of exposure to sarin of the victims presented experienced a loss of of whom had supported the Syrian rebels, that ets’ trajectories indicating they could have been gas, Moadmiyah, the investigators found no consciousness while in previous cases of sarin while they were held hostage by Islamist groups launched from rebel-held areas; and (e) multiple environmental samples which showed any evi- poisoning this is an extremely grave condition they overheard a conversation in English via reports of communications by high-level U.S. in- dence of sarin, indicating that there was no at- that occurs shortly before death, and therefore Skype in which rebel officials “said that the op- telligence officials saying the Syrian government tack in this area and suggesting that the victims is rarely the case with survivors. erations with gas in the two neighborhoods of was not responsible for the attacks, and of a U.S. were brought from another place; (c) the rocket Veteran reporter Robert Fisk reported Damascus were carried out by the rebels as a government intelligence report indicating al Nusra whose trajectory has been extrapolated by “ex- (The Independent [London], 22 September) provocation in order to induce the West to inter- Front had chemical weapons capability. See Sey- perts” of the “non-governmental organization” that “grave doubts are being expressed by the vene militarily,” and that “according to them the mour Hersh, “Whose Sarin?” London Review of Human Rights Watch, which is close to the U.S. UN and other international organisations in number of dead was exaggerated.” January-February 2014 15 Social-Democratic Pawns Beg for U.S./NATO Arms Brazil: Leftists in the Camp of Pro-Imperialist Syrian Islamists The following article is translated from simpletons, they know full well that this in

the upcoming issue of Vanguarda Operária, Mouaz MoustafaAFP itself would be a military intervention, one newspaper of the Liga Quarta-Internacio- that the imperialists would only undertake nalista do Brasil, section of the League for in order to control the rebel forces (as in the Fourth International. Libya). And to which “Syrian resistance” The raging communal civil war in Syria should the arms be sent? To “hard-line” and imperialist threats have put the would- sectors who reject the siren song of im- be socialist and communist left to the test. perialism? No, the PSTU recognizes that Following a formula they adopted during these fellows want “a new dictatorship by the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that Al Qaeda” (which it claims is “Assad’s fifth began the “Arab Spring,” the large major- column”). So it calls for arms to the Free ity of leftists in the West have backed, and Syrian Army, which they admit “has never continue to support, what they falsely call done anything except repeatedly clamor for the “Syrian Revolution.” Their opportunism imperialist intervention.” Imperialist arms leads them to chase after whatever movement for imperialist puppets! is popular, even when this turns out to be re- Another curious inconsistency: in Syria actionary. But as it has become increasingly the LIT calls for arms to the FSA, many of evident that all the Syrian armed rebels are whose components (such as the Farouk Bat- fighting to establish an Islamic regime, and talions) are well-known to be close to the internal divisions mount between openly Brazilian PSTU places itself in the “camp” of pro-imperialist Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. But in Egypt, after pro-imperialist forces and jihadis (holy war- insurgents in Syria. Above: U.S. Republican Senator John McCain poses in the overthrow of President Morsi and the riors) who support Al Qaeda, these inveterate May 2013 with Free Syrian Army leader General Salim Idriss (center right), seizure of power by the army at the begin- tailists are caught in a dilemma. who participated in rebel massacre of at least 190 Alawite villagers in August. ning of July and the ensuing crackdown From early 2011 on, the opportunist left Flanking them are two leaders of FSA’s Northern Storm Brigade, Mohamed on the Brotherhood, the LIT shamefully and the entire bourgeoisie agreed on declar- Nour and Abu Ibrahim, who earlier kidnapped Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. demanded: “No democratic rights or right ing the fall of Ben Ali in Tunis and Mubarak rebel militias of the FSA [Free Syrian Astro II missiles and Guará armored personnel of expression for the Brotherhood and its in Cairo to be revolutions, even though the Army] and the Local Coordinating carriers produced by Avibrás? The question political leaders so long as they are mobi- military was the core of the regimes both Committees, without any conditions becomes interesting when one realizes that lizing for Morsi’s return!” (Declaration of before and after. In the face of setbacks since whatsoever.” the unionized workers at these companies are the LIT, August 15). However, what at first then, such as the ouster of Egyptian presi- –PSTU, “To Call or Not to Call for Arms represented by the Metal Workers Union of sight appears to be a contradiction is cleared dent Morsi (of the Muslim Brotherhood) from Imperialism?” (14 October 2013) São José dos Campos (in São Paulo state), up when one considers that imperialism by the army last July and the subsequent The same document explicitly states: affiliated with the Conlutas union federation supports the FSA in Syria and the military massacres, these leftists have sought refuge “The LIT [the international to which led by the PSTU? Let us note in passing that regime in Egypt. The LIT “critically” tails in the myth of a “revolutionary process” the PSTU is affiliated] demands and for all the PSTU’s (rather mild) criticism of after “democratic” imperialism. would accept weapons and ‘planes’ from which supposedly is still underway. But as Brazil’s intervention in Haiti, with all “due How does the PSTU/LIT justify this ‘France and the United States,’ or from the predominance of bloodthirsty Islamists respect” for ex-president Lula, who was outrageously pro-imperialist policy? It dis- any other government, for the rebel camp among the Syrian “rebels” has became so elected with its votes, it has never called to tortedly quotes Trotsky on the Spanish Civil in general, even if most of these arms evident that it is worrying the imperialists, would go to the bourgeois leaders of this drive out the occupation troops and it has never War. What an insult to the great Russian many pseudo-socialists have been backped- camp….” blocked production of the munitions used to revolutionary, who always fought against aling a bit in their unconditional support for And in another document, the LIT demands: suppress the Haitian population (as well as the imperialism! In Spain during 1936-39 there the armed opposition. “anti-aircraft missiles, tanks with modern impoverished favela neighborhoods of Rio de was an attempted workers revolution which And when at the end of August, U.S. technology. This kind of weaponry can Janeiro and São Paulo). was smashed by the fascists and militarists president Obama threatened to bomb Syria only be obtained if it is provided by But the government of the Partido dos on Generalissimo Franco’s side, and by the as a reprisal for the supposed use of chemical governments of the region and by the Trabalhadores (PT – Workers Party) under bourgeois democrats and Stalinists (with weapons against the population by the regime imperialist governments.” Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff also help from the anarchists) on the Republi- of Bashar al-Assad, these opportunist leftists –Declaration of the Executive Committee doesn’t put much stock in the “critical” can side. Workers occupied the factories, felt compelled to distance themselves from of the LIT (27 September 2013) collaboration of the PSTU “comrades.” formed workers militias, collectivized the the “rebels” who vociferously demanded You can’t be clearer than that. The On the other hand, we of the Liga Quarta- agricultural estates. There is nothing of that that the Pentagon rain death on Syrian cities. PSTU, the main party of the Liga Internacio- Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB – Fourth in Syria today. Quite the contrary, there is But not all of them felt ashamed to be allied nal dos Trabalhadores (LIT – International Internationalist League of Brazil), section no workers mobilization, and instead all with openly pro-imperialist elements. The Workers League) which follows the political of the League for the Fourth International, the factions of the armed “resistance” have Brazilian Partido Socialista dos Trabalha- line of the late Argentine pseudo-Trotskyist call for workers action to expel Brazilian committed massacres along religious lines. dores Unificado (PSTU – United Socialist Nahuel Moreno, along with being an apolo- troops from Haiti, and the Military Police At the beginning of the uprising against Workers Party),1 in particular, demanded that gist for pro-imperialist sectors of the “rebel from the Rio favelas. We have even won the Assad regime there were, for a few the imperialists supply heavy weapons. The camp” in Syria, is offering its services as a the approval of this call by various unions weeks, mass demonstrations initiated by PSTU literally said: pawn of imperialism, in particular U.S. im- (notably the SEPE-RJ and CNTE teachers secular oppositionists, “armed” with their “Thus we hold that it is imperative to push perialism, the main oppressor of the peoples unions) over the resistance of the PSTU/ laptops, iPads and iPhones to send out in- for the broadest mobilization to demand of the world today! Unfortunately for the Conlutas. On Syria, the LFI doesn’t support formation to social networks. They were not that the governments of our countries, and Morenoites, White House and Pentagon either side in the current communalist civil entirely peaceful, as is often claimed, and all governments around the world, even strategists don’t answer to the wishes of war, opposing both the authoritarian Assad over the course of the spring of 2011 they of the imperialist countries, immediately some screwed-up “left” social democrats regime and the Islamist insurgents. But in took on an increasingly religious character, send modern heavy weaponry … to the in Brazil. Even the “Socialist” president of the face of threats of attack by the Western starting out from Sunni mosques with the 1 The PSTU, with several thousand members and imperialist France doesn’t seem interested. powers, we defend Syria, a semi-colonial cry for jihad (holy war), Alahu akhbar (god control of a trade-union federation (CSP-Conlu- The longed-for F-16 fighter bombers and country, against imperialist aggression (see is great). However, in the face of heavy (but tas) claiming a membership of 600,000, is the Rafale jets won’t be arriving. What a pity! article on page 15 of this issue). inconsistent) repression by the regime, the largest party of the Brazilian (not so) “far left.” It Carried away by the arms race in Brazil, The policies of the PSTU/LIT are chock resistance was soon dominated by armed is also the leading section of the Liga Internacio- nal dos Trabalhadores-Quarta Internacional (LIT already the fifth largest weapons exporter in full of apparent contradictions. It claims to bands, some of them openly religious – International Workers League-Fourth Interna- the world, could the PSTU perhaps ask for “always have been against imperialist inter- militias and others (of the phantom FSA) tional) which was founded by the late Argentine some Super-Tucano planes produced by the vention,” at the same time as it “demands made up mainly of Sunni deserters from pseudo-Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno and is largely Brazilian aircraft company Embraer, a favorite of governments the sending of arms and the Syrian Army who were fighting against present in various countries of Latin America. in counterinsurgency operations? Or some materiel to the Syrian resistance.” Not being the “Alawite regime,” referring to Assad’s 16 The Internationalist religious sect. by the PSTU is “semi-stageist,” when it is The PSTU/LIT refers to a “democratic perfectly obvious that the latter’s policy of a revolution” in Syria. Aside from the fact that “democratic revolution” is the quintessence of this Morenoite slogan is diametrically op- the reformist “stageism” of the Stalinists and posed to Trotsky’s policy of permanent revo- Mensheviks which has always led to defeat lution and reproduces the Stalinist schema for the working class. The LER/FT says that of “two-stage” revolution (first bourgeois the policy of the PSTU is “semi-campist,” democracy, later for socialism), the armed when in fact it is centered on identifying the “resistance” in Syria is not democratic – not (bourgeois) “progressive military camp” in by a long shot. When the PSTU/LIT and order to then swear allegiance to it, instead of others claim that there is a secular wing of calling for workers action against their imme- the armed resistance, and when they go on diate enemies according to their class interests. to identify this with the FSA, this is a gross After breaking with the Morenoite cur- lie. Among the hundreds of armed groups, rent in 1988 in the course of the split-up of almost all seek to erect an Islamic regime, in the LIT following the death of its founder which their sect’s version of sharia (Islamic the year before, the FT distanced itself law) would hold sway. This is inherently from various of Moreno’s theses, to the anti-democratic, for women who defend their point of criticizing “the revisionist elements rights, for other religions and those who are contained within ‘Morenoism’.” But even not religious, for minority Islamic sects and though the FT rejects the anti-Trotskyist those in the Sunni majority who don’t want conception of a “democratic revolution,” to live under the dictatorship of non-elected which demonstrated its bankruptcy in the sharia courts. Those armed groups which counterrevolutionary wave that swept East Goran Tomasevic/Reuters don’t openly declare themselves Islamist are, Europe and the USSR during 1989-92; and for the most part, bands of thieves. PSTU hails “unity of action” with imperialism against Qaddafi. Above: NATO even if it recognizes that this theory and Among those who preach Islam as a launches war on Libya in March 2011 by bombing government supporters Moreno’s other revisions of the Transitional political system, the bourgeois press refers near Benghazi. Program amount to a rejection of Trotsky’s to supposedly “moderate” Islamists, many of even applaud the pogrom. class is not leading the struggle in Syria, permanent revolution, these ex-Morenoites them linked to the Muslim Brotherhood; to which is obvious to all. But in the polemi- preserve a methodology focusing on demo- The LER and the Fracción salafists, who seek to impose a radical version cal exchange, the LER hesitates to make cratic demands and a series of historical of sharia; and to jihadists who call for holy Trotskista: Centrists Trapped the basic point that the armed “resistance” positions inherited from Morenoism. war against infidels. But the reality is that even in the Syrian Quagmire to the Assad regime isn’t even bourgeois- Thus the FT calls on popular non- the large majority of the “moderate” Sunni The Morenoites of the PSTU/LIT claim democratic. Thus it says “we are in agree- proletarian forces to undertake actions Islamist bands are takfiri, meaning that they that all opposition to their policy of “uncondi- ment with the general content” of the LIT’s which rightfully fall to the working class accuse other Muslim sects of being apostates, tional support” to what they say is “the armed position on demanding arms from imperi- (for example, calling for the Zapatistas or a crime potentially punishable by death. The struggle of the Syrian people” against Assad alism, it only insists that the arms should even the bourgeois opposition leader López “moderates” seek to subjugate the Shiites, amounts to the same line as the “Stalinist, be “in favor of the working and popular Obrador in Mexico to lead general strikes). Druzes, Alawaites, etc., along with the Chris- and especially Castro-Chávez” position of masses, in the framework of a developing It continues Moreno’s “frontist” policy tians, while “radicals” like the Al Nusra Front considering the Syrian regime a paragon of revolutionary process.” of constantly calling for electoral fronts or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) anti-imperialism. They have a lot of trouble Defending itself against the charge of various opportunist forces, such as the want to expel or even annihilate minorities, when the criticisms of their pro-imperialist of being abstentionists in the Syrian civil Workers and Left Front (FIT) in Argentina particularly the Alawite communities, which policies make reference to the program and war, the FT only wants the LIT to distance with its entirely reformist program; calling form a base of the support for the regime. heritage of Trotsky. The need to protect its itself a bit more from the bourgeois leader- for a vague “political tool of the working Therefore a victory of the Syrian “re- left flank, including against questioning in ship of the phantom “FSA” and the other people” in Venezuela rather than for a sistance” would produce at least a massive its own ranks, explains the PTSU’S lengthy figureheads chosen by the imperialists to workers party on a revolutionary program expulsion of the Alawite population from October 14 polemic, adorned with 34 cita- head up the armed resistance, who are now to combat Chávez-style populism; or run- the cities and predominately Sunni regions, tions in footnotes, against the Liga Estraté- more marginalized than ever. But genuine ning a candidate in Rio de Janeiro on the if not from the country as a whole, and most gia Revolucionária (LER – Revolutionary Trotskyists faced with a reactionary in- slate of the arch-reformist PSOL (Partido likely massacres on a grand scale. The popu- Strategy League), the Brazilian section of surgency aided indirectly by imperialism Socialismo e Liberdade – Party of Socialism lation is well aware of this danger, and for the Fracción Trotskista led by the Argentine against an authoritarian regime, which is and Freedom) right after the PSOL stabbed that reason many who in different degrees PTS (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas also reactionary, would say clearly that the the Rio teachers strike in the back. oppose the Assad regime prefer it to the – Socialist Workers Party). working people should struggle against both With such practices, the Transitional “rebels.” The Morenoites seek to cover up In this polemic, referred to above (“To sides, but that if imperialism takes control Program and the struggle to forge a revo- this reality, prettifying the FSA and the Lo- Call or Not to Call for Arms from Imperial- of the rebel side, proletarian revolutionaries lutionary vanguard based on Trotsky’s cal Coordinating Committees, which are in ism?”), the PSTU returns to disputes over would, while maintaining their political in- permanent revolution are relegated to the fact militarily subordinate to the dominant the war in Libya. The LER/FT responds dependence from the Assad regime, defend archive of historical references, without Islamist bands (and whose electronic equip- (“The LIT Sinks in the Complex Syrian Syria against the imperialist onslaught. concrete expression today. ment is furnished by the U.S. government.) Scenario,” 14 November) by recalling that Thus unlike the LER/FT we of the LQB Concerning Syria, beyond the correct An example: in its declaration of Sep- after the assassination of Qaddafi (by “reb- and the League for the Fourth International points made against the LIT, what does the tember 27, the LIT says that “the rebels have els” on the NATO payroll), the LIT declared oppose sending imperialist arms to the reac- FT call for? It rejects the chimera of a (bour- achieved victories in Aleppo and Latakia.” that it “effusively greeted” this “tremendous tionary bands of the Islamist insurgency in geois) “democratic revolution,” but con- The supposed “victory” in Latakia was a political and military victory of the Libyan Syria. If the imperialists in fact it supplied stantly refers to a “revolutionary process” massacre of the Alawite population in several people and for the entire revolutionary pro- the heavy weaponry demanded by the LIT, that began in the “Arab Spring,” without mountain villages of the district. And this cess which is shaking the Arab world.” The we would be in opposite trenches from the specifying its class character. It criticizes massacre – which took place in the first half LER/FT also quotes how the LIT justified Morenoites. Recall that in the 1980s, when the LIT for calling for a “free and sovereign of August, and in which at least 190 civilians its support to the mercenary gangs alleging Moreno & Co. hailed the CIA-aided muja- Constituent Assembly” (a demand which the were slaughtered, among them 57 women, at that “there was a unity in action between hedin in Afghanistan, in particular because FT itself raises in just about every place and least 18 children and 14 elderly men – was imperialism and the masses to defeat Qad- it threatened the Soviet Union, our tendency circumstance, from Oaxaca to Chile). But praised as a victory by none other than the dafi” (“The People in Arms Destroying the saluted Soviet intervention and proclaimed then the LER/FT calls to “impose a revolu- commander of the FSA, General Idriss, who Qaddafi Regime,” statement of the LIT, 25 “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” And when tionary Constituent Assembly,” only saying personally took part in it along with his units.2 August 2011). Hailing NATO bombs as Gorbachev ordered the pullout of Soviet that this must be guaranteed by a “workers Thus the PSTU/LIT is praising “communal/ “unity in action with imperialism” – what a forces in 1989, a betrayal which contributed and peasants government.” But if in Syria religious cleansing” of the worse sort. The monstrous perversion of everything Lenin greatly to the counterrevolutionary destruc- the working class is not acting as a force in Morenoites identify as “resistance” to the and Trotsky stood for! What shamelessness tion of the USSR, we formally proposed to the struggle, as the FT rightly says, what “bloody despot” Assad the forces who have of these camp followers of imperialism! the Afghan government to send an interna- reality does this slogan have? carried out pogroms like the Black Hundreds The LIT insists over and over in com- tional brigade to join the fight against the The FT doesn’t want to cap its “democ- did against Jews in tsarist Russia, and they paring the Syrian situation today with that imperialist-backed mercenaries supported ratist” program with a call for “democratic by the Morenoites. revolution,” yet its program is centered on 2 See the report by Amnesty International, of Spain during its Civil War of the 1930s, The LER/FT’s critique of the PSTU/ democratic demands like the LIT (Con- “You Can Still See Their Blood”: Executions, which is absurd. The LER/FT responds Indiscriminate Shootings, and Hostage Taking that there are big differences between the LIT is partial, due to the origins of the Frac- stituent Assemblies everywhere) and shies by Opposition Forces in Latakia Countryside two cases, underlining that the working ción Trotskista in the Morenoite tendency. away from calling for workers revolution. (October 2013). The LER/FT says that the policy followed It wants to leave the outcome open whereas

January-February 2014 17 the LIT puts forward an explicitly bourgeois opposed to this intervention with an light of the repression against the Barcelona ance between “democratic” bourgeois and program. Why this vagueness on the part of independent political program. This workers by the Republican and Stalinist po- pseudo-socialists in the Middle East, which the FT? A key is its mention of the “Iranian logic is erroneous because it doesn’t take lice during the May Days – this can change. has diverted struggles for the last three tu- Revolution” of 1979 as a “great revolu- into consideration that even though the If the imperialists were able to conciliate the multuous years, is beginning to come apart. tion (in the Marxist sense) … despite the uprising against Qaddafi was diverted two camps, the workers could well have seen The working masses need genuine Trotsky- reactionary leadership of the ayatollahs.” and controlled by bourgeois leaderships themselves facing Republican army general ism, which fights for permanent revolution, This short phrase sums up a betrayal laden allied with imperialism, it continued to Miaja and Franco together. for workers in the region – particularly with consequences for the world proletariat. be, on this basis – of being the protagonist The methodology of camps is sharply the powerful Turkish proletariat – to take of spontaneous mass actions – more There was no Iranian revolution in the counterposed to the class policy of the power at the head of all the oppressed, to fruitful to struggle politically to raise up Marxist sense, of the overthrow of the rule Trotskyists. This fundamental revision of open the way to a socialist federation of a vanguard section of the working class of one class by another, but the substitution Marxism was borrowed by Nahuel Moreno the Middle East in which all peoples will with a policy independent of the various of one bourgeois dictatorship (of the shah) bourgeois factions.” from Michel Pablo, then secretary of the have a place, including an Arab-Hebrew by another (of Khomeini), with a toll of tens –“The Syria Crisis and the Need for a Fourth International. At the beginning of the Palestinian workers state and a united of thousands of leftists killed. Revolutionary Policy,” Palavra Operária, 1950s, in his article “Where Are We Going” socialist Kurdistan. n The Morenoites share with the vast October 2013 (January 1951) and other documents, Pablo majority of the left internationally a heavy In the first place, let us recall that, as divided the world into two camps in anticipa- Trayvon... responsibility for this bloodbath. The FT we showed in detail at the time, the uprising tion of a third world war, the imperialist and continued from page 12 writes of the “Iranian revolution of 1979, against Qaddafi was dominated from the outset the Stalinist, and called to take up position in friends of the working class, they’re not in which the working class played a deci- by monarchist and Islamist elements, in close the latter. With this opportunist political line, friends of Latinos, of black people. Also sive role in the overthrow of the Shah with collaboration with the imperialists (see articles he abandoned Trotskyism and the struggle for Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in prison. He a general strike and built workers shuras in The Internationalist No. 33, Summer 2011, a revolutionary proletarian vanguard, leading was 30 years on death row. We need to (councils), which even appeared in sections including “Libyan Showdown” and “Libya to the split of the Fourth International and its mobilize power, the power of the work- of the fractured armed forces.” What is true and the Opportunist Left”). There wasn’t even organizational destruction as the world party ing class to stop this legal lynching, to is that the workers general strike played a a brief interval of a few weeks when secular of socialist revolution. stop the murder of our black brothers and key role, but from the beginning of the in- liberal elements predominated, as occurred Particularly when in the late 1950s the sisters, of our Latino brothers and sisters.” surrection and even beforehand, almost all in Syria; there were no “spontaneous mass Pabloites’ “campism” was extended from At the same rally, Sándor John, speak- the ostensibly Marxist groups capitulated actions” which were later diverted, the Libyan the Stalinist bureaucracy to embrace other ing on behalf of the CUNY Internationalist to Khomeini, allowing the ayatollahs and uprising was reactionary from the very first non-proletarian forces (Algerian nationalists Clubs, recalled the 1857 Dred Scott case, of mullahs to take power. They immediately moment. And when NATO attacks, it was not a and Cuban Castroites), this policy attracted a slave who was taken to a so-called “free proceeded to arrest workers leaders, stone tactical question (“fruitful” or not) but a matter Nahuel Moreno because it fit perfectly with state” and then sued for his freedom: women who did not wear the veil, and mas- of principle to defend Libya, even under the his own practice, starting with his “deep “The Supreme Court not only said it was ruling against him, but he had no right to sacre Kurds and other minorities. despot Qaddafi, against the imperialists. As entry” in the “camp” of General Juan Perón. sue in the courts. Those Supreme Court The shuras which existed in many Lenin wrote in 1915: His adaptation to Peronism was succeeded lynchers in black robes said, and I quote, workplaces did not mobilize against these “For example, if tomorrow, Morocco by tailing after Guevarism, Maoism, social that black men had ‘no rights which the attacks, not even against the Islamic con- were to declare war on France, India democracy, Sandinismo and other currents white man was bound to respect.’ Trayvon stitution, and in a matter of a few months on England, Persia or China on Russia, then in vogue. Finally, consecrated by his Martin’s case shows that this is still true they were effectively suppressed. The and so forth, those would be ‘just,’ thesis of a “democratic revolution,” his today. And it will be true until we over- thesis that there was an initial progressive ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who odyssey culminated in the combination of throw this capitalist system.” revolution, based on workers councils, attacked first; and every Socialist would reformist electoralism and trade-union bu- which only later was smashed by Islamic sympathize with the victory of the reaucratism, marking his definitive integra- Racist Vigilante, Racist Police, reactionaries, is an invention by the op- oppressed, dependent, unequal states tion into the capitalist system, whose prime Racist Town, Racist Courts portunist left to cover up its own capitula- against the oppressing, slave-owning, example is the Brazilian PSTU. predatory ‘great’ powers.” At the trial and in recent coverage in the tion, based theoretically in the reformist As we already indicated, the FT and –V.I. Lenin and G. Zinoviev, Socialism “mainstream” (bourgeois) media, there has concept of a “two-stage” revolution, in the LER have not broken totally with More- and War been a cover-up of the racism of the killer which the first step would be “democratic” noism. They preserve much of his heritage The duty of defending the oppressed vigilante. Yet although race and racism were or “anti-imperialist” and thus could be led at the same time as they reject various of country against the imperialist power also at the heart of the stalking and murder of a by a cleric. Moreno himself, like many his most flagrantly anti-Trotskyist theses. does not depend on the character of the re- 17-year-old black youth by a white vigilante, others, had already called for more than Reflecting this outlook, they treat the PSTU spective governments. When Italy invaded none of this came up in the trial. Trial judge a decade for the slogan of a (bourgeois) and LIT as some kind of misguided revolu- Ethiopia in the 1930s, Trotsky defended Debra Nelson ruled out any mention of “ra- “Arab Revolution.” tionaries who could be put back on the right the African country even though it was cial profiling,” even though the charge was Our tendency, at the time the inter- track by rereading Trotsky. Far from it. Do governed by the emperor Haile Selassie, a second-degree murder, which is defined as national Spartacist tendency, was unique a tabulation. If we add up the LIT’s support feudalist with serfs and even a slave-owner. killing with spite, hatred or ill will. And even on the left in calling at the key moment to Cuban gusano counterrevolutionaries, In our times, we defended Iraq under Sad- though tapes of Zimmerman’s 911 calls about for “Down with the Shah, Down with the to the Venezuelan escuálido reactionaries, dam Hussein against the imperialist invaders suspicious persons were admitted as evidence, Mullahs!” to the Brazilian police and even military in 2003, and defended the Sunni and Shiite 100% complaining about blacks, the prosecu- A second noteworthy absence in the police; its hosannas for NATO’s “victory” insurgents to the extent that they fought tion never used them and never referred to his FT’s polemic against the LIT on Syria is any in Libya, its call to deny democratic rights against the occupation troops. blatant racial profiling in its closing arguments. indication that in the face of an imperialist to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its We don’t doubt that there will be those While the state deliberately ducked the attack it would call to defend the semi-co- call for imperialist arms to the pro-imperi- who have fought for the last three years issue of racism, leaving even some bourgeois lonial country. To be sure, it writes, “Down alist “rebels” in Syria, the sum isn’t even against the repressive regime who will re- media incredulous, Zimmerman’s counsel with Imperialist Intervention in Syria!” centrism (as the FT describes the LIT). Mark O’Mara is a foaming racist who tried (Palavra Operária, September 2013). But fuse to defend Assad’s Syria against a U.S. attack. In fact, the friends of the empire are The PSTU and LIT are shameless re- every smear and distortion he could get away then, so does the PSTU. The FT ends its formists who support the capitalist system. with to put the victim on trial. Portraying article with a call for “the broadest possible not limited to the FSA or the CNS (Syr- ian National Council): there exists today Their policy on Syria is a powerful proof. Trayvon as a violent aggressor, he used a campaign against imperialist military inter- Their real existence in the interstices of foam dummy as a stand-in for Zimmerman, vention in Syria, and for the revolutionary a whole layer of Syrian activists who are dependent on or have been rewarded by im- the trade-union bureaucracy provides the crushing it with his large body, and raining overthrow of Assad” – nothing about the material basis. Refusing to see this reality blows on it, cracking its head repeatedly defense of Syria against the imperialist ag- perialism. But in the Syrian population there will be many who will come to the defense produces a centrist political blindness on the on the imaginary concrete, supposedly rep- gressors. This hole is not accidental. In a part of the FT with potentially disastrous resenting the 158-pound Trayvon Martin subsequent article, the LER criticizes us for of their country against an imperialist and Zionist attack. consequences. Consider the fate of the Ira- pummeling 250-pound George Zimmerman! having called for the defense of Libya, even nian Trotskyists in 1979 who thought they Yet this surreal outrage was permitted by the under Qaddafi’s rule, against the attack by Trotskyism vs. “Campism” were fighting inside the revolutionary camp. judge and not objected to by the prosecution. the NATO imperialists. It writes: Beyond that, it is evident from the brief What will be the fate of Syrian activists who The special prosecutor in the Zimmer- “Some tendencies of a Spartacist origin polemic against us that the LER/FT accepts follow the same logic today? man case, Angela Corey, also prosecuted criticize the possibility of tactical- the LIT’S methodology of identifying with a Trotskyism is not a policy of constant a black woman, Marissa Alexander, who military alliances with rebel sectors in “military camp.” Neither we over Libya and adaptation, the registered trademark of got 10-20 years in prison for firing a pistol Libya not in order to prettify Qaddafi in the air trying to ward off her dangerous as an ‘anti-imperialist’ leadership, but Iraq, nor Trotsky in the Spanish Civil War, Morenoism; the Fourth International is the from the viewpoint that imperialist enrolled in one “camp” or the other. It is only party of intransigent opposition, against husband, against whom she had a restraining military intervention foretold a war of a military bloc, to point our guns in the same imperialism, against all wings of the bour- order. Yet white vigilante Zimmerman kills national oppression, on the basis of direction, against a common enemy. And as geoisie, and against opportunism, the senile an innocent black youth and goes free. The which revolutionaries should supposedly Trotsky indicated, in his pamphlet, Spain: sickness of ex-communists. jury, too, was racist, and had not one African place themselves in the military camp Last Warning (1937) – written after, and in These days the ill-fated Holy Alli- American among the six women. That alone 18 The Internationalist is prima facie evidence of discrimination in of the pervasive racism of a city that is 30 percent black. But the state American society. As for a Michael Fleshman/Flickr accepted this outrage. supposed “duty to retreat,” During the impaneling, when one po- if Trayvon had sought to flee tential juror said Trayvon should not have it’s a good bet that Zimmer- been out at night, reflecting racist opinion man would have put a bullet in this “sundown town,” the judge overruled in his back. This case was the prosecution’s objection and seated her. never about self-defense, it Another juror, B37, called the peaceful was a cold-blooded execu- protests over the killing “riots,” yet she was tion. The killer got out of his seated without objection from the state. Af- vehicle with his gun to make ter the verdict, B37 told journalist Anderson sure that this “punk” didn’t Cooper that Zimmerman was driven to kill “get away.” Facing threaten- by “vandalism,” that he “profiled” Trayvon ing racists, any black person because of his hoodie, and that Trayvon as anywhere has the right of well was “responsible” for his own death. self-defense. Throughout, not only did the prosecu- As we have stressed tion avoid the key issues and really damning before, gun control kills evidence against Zimmerman, it made so blacks (see “Who Controls many “mistakes” that the inescapable con- the Guns?” The Internation- clusion is that it never tried to win the case. alist No. 34, March-April The fact is that the state never wanted this 2013). Malcolm X was more case, taking six weeks to charge Zimmerman than right when he said black people have the right to with anything, and only sought to appease Thousands marched on Times Square in NYC July 14 to protest not guilty verdict. the outcry. Lead prosecutor Corey, ap- defend themselves “by any pointed after weeks of massive protests, said means necessary.” We noted in our earlier Workers World Party (WWP) called to hold socialists and communists have dealt with as much following the verdict: “What we article about Trayvon Martin: Obama’s top cop Eric Holder to his word the effects of black oppression, raising an ex- promised to do was get this case in front of “[T]o call for the capitalist state to control about a federal investigation. In response to clusively democratic program to eliminate a jury, and give Trayvon Martin and George firearms … is to suggest that the police this and chants of “No justice, no peace,” discrimination without touching the funda- Zimmerman their day in court.” How won- are or could somehow be neutral or even Class Struggle Education Workers activist mentals of capitalism which forcibly confine derfully even-handed! Of course, there is a favorable to the black, Latino, Asian and Marjorie Stamberg remarked: the descendants of slaves to the bottom of immigrant population when they are in fact difference: Trayvon is dead and never got to “There is no justice in this system. We U.S. society. Yet every time there has been the greatest force of oppression. From the speak, while his murderer (whose lies were only have faith in our own independent an advance in democratic rights, sooner or White Citizens Councils of the 1960s to repeated by all sides) is free. organizing of the working class and the later a new mechanism of subordination is ‘community watch’ groups today, vigilan- oppressed. We’re the ones who have the In fact, George Zimmerman was not instituted. After the abolition of slavery in tes get their power from their connection to power – TWU, UFT, 1199, all the unions the Civil War, the brief democratic period of really put on trial, Trayvon Martin was. the state. And following the Monroe, North of the working people, the students, the Radical Reconstruction was soon replaced All parties in this travesty of a trial (de- Carolina NAACP and Bogalusa, Louisiana parents, all of us, we have the power to by rigid “Jim Crow” segregation, which fense, police, judge, prosecution and jury) Deacons for Defense1 in the 1950s and stop the wheels of production. We need lasted almost a century, up until the 1960s. worked together to convict the innocent, ’60s, to fight them we stand for the right a revolution, a workers revolution – that When the segregationist Southern laws unarmed black youth of his own death and of black armed self-defense.” is how we are going to get justice for were overturned as the result of the mass so- to absolve the killer who was guilty as hell Currently Democrat Jesse Jackson Trayvon Martin and all the victims of this of first-degree (premeditated) murder. Of is calling to boycott all things Florida to racist capitalist system.” cial struggle of the Civil Rights movement, course, police gun down African Americans induce the state legislature to overturn the Given the depth of the anger, some left this did not change the hard realities for and Latinos with impunity all the time. The “Stand Your Ground” law, while Democrat groups have struck a more radical posture black residents of the impoverished ghettos only reason there was even a mock trial here Al Sharpton is calling to put pressure on than usual. The Maoist Revolutionary Com- of the North, where inequality was not de was due to protests, and because sectors of the Justice Department to charge Zimmer- munist Party (RCP) has been popularizing jure but written into the economic laws of the ruling class want to reinforce the state’s man with civil rights violations. These are the slogans “the whole damn system is capitalist society. When the ghettos erupted monopoly of armed force. deliberate attempts to divert protest away guilty” and “revolution, nothing less.” But in massive upheavals, these were put down from the struggle against racist terror, which the RCP is cagey about what that system is: with military force, and soon the racist capi- Gun Control Kills Blacks is centrally the work of the police, and to since their political strategy is to ally with talist rulers hit on a new method of keeping And after the verdict, they’re still at channel anger into support for the Obama liberals who might be scared off by too- the black people down. A petty-bourgeois it. The bourgeois liberal establishment is administration. This will do nothing to win strident denunciations of capitalism. In line layer would be fostered and even a tiny trying to channel outrage into a campaign justice for Trayvon Martin and will likely with liberal “discourse” they talk of white black bourgeois elite, epitomized by Obama, against Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” lead to a demoralizing dead end. supremacy in terms of ideology and dis- while the mass of poor blacks, particularly and similar statutes everywhere. And since young black men, would be criminalized. What Is to Be Done? crimination, separate from the material roots that law was never invoked in this trial, they of black oppression. As for the “revolution,” This has led to a huge expansion of the claim it “colored” the proceedings and take The lesson is reaching quite a few people that boils down to “getting into BA,” mean- prison system, currently holding 2.4 million aim at the right of self-defense generally. that “black faces in high places” change noth- ing Bob Avakian Thought, the pompous prisoners (plus tens of thousands of immi- “Certainly it [the Zimmerman case] is about ing essential about how this country operates. declamations of a megalomaniacal Stalinist- grants in concentration camps awaiting de- race,” admits a New York Times (15 July edi- So now we have a black president in the cultist jerk. The radical rhetoric masks what portation), while millions more ex-prisoners torial), even though that subject was banned highest place in American politics. Yet as an is at bottom warmed-over liberal idealism. are denied basic rights. This diabolical sys- from the trial. But what’s key, it argues, is older African American demonstrator told The The oppression of African Americans tem, in which up to a third of young black to get guns out of the hands of the populace. Internationalist at a July 20 NYC rally at 1 is not due to the undifferentiated domina- men are in prison, on parole or probation, The population – black, white or other – Police Plaza: “Obama’s talking about people’s tion of white people in general, or simply was particularly aided by racist anti-drug would then be left defenseless, while in fact sons and all the while his drones are killing the result of racist ideas. The ideology of laws. The basic purpose is social control. As it is the police who gun down far, far more dark-skinned children in Afghanistan and racism emerged from the material oppres- Michelle Alexander writes in her book The black and Latino young men than vigilantes. Pakistan,” while “here we are in the shadow sion of the black population, going back New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Obama remarked in his July 19 appearance of this huge perpetrator of death” against black to slavery and continuing – as Northern Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2012): “[T]he most important parallel between before the TV cameras, “I just ask people to people in New York, the NYPD. capitalists came to terms with their Southern mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and Meanwhile, Obama’s government brethren, betraying the Civil War’s promise both have served to define the meaning and armed, could he have stood his ground on wages a deadly vendetta against Chelsea of black freedom – to the present day. It is significance of race in America. Indeed, a that sidewalk? And do we actually think that Manning and Edward Snowden for tell- the product of capitalist rule which can only primary function of any racial caste system ing the truth about U.S. war crimes and he would have been justified in shooting Mr. survive by dividing the working class and all is to define the meaning of race in its time. Zimmerman?” Our answer is Trayvon was massive spy-agency surveillance. Yet at the exploited, conceding a few privileges to Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a being stalked by a racist potential killer who a protest rally on July 15, a leader of the petty-bourgeois and “labor-aristocratic” sec- slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant was armed and dangerous, and if the hunted tors, and then using those to foster massive to be black (second class citizen). Today 1 The Deacons successfully faced down the youth feared for his life and was armed, racism. This poisonous false consciousness Mass Incarceration defines the meaning KKK in the racist bastion of Bogalusa, Lou- he would absolutely have been justified in must be fought wherever it appears, but it of blackness in America: black people, siana. See “Bogalusa 1965: Deacons for De- shooting Zimmerman. fense,” The Internationalist No. 34, March- can only be eliminated through multiracial especially black men, are criminals. That In that case it is virtually certain that the April 2013 and the vivid portrayal in the film class struggle and sweeping away its mate- is what it means to be black.” black youth would be tried and convicted Deacons for Defense (2003), starring Forest rial basis by workers revolution. In today’s America, the more enlight- of murder, no matter what the law, because Whitaker and Ossie Davis. Both liberals and many self-proclaimed ened bourgeois ideologists admit that race January-February 2014 19 is a social construction, not a biological socialist...” This bourgeois seal of approval The inglorious history of “municipal reality, at the same time as they argue as if Sawant... was proudly reproduced on votesawant.org. socialism” is symbolized in the U.S. by race is some kind of eternal category that continued from page 9 Certainly Sawant stayed well away from the the “sewer socialism” of Milwaukee’s “causes” racial oppression. For Marxists, possible.” This directly contradicts the basic dreaded “R-word.” Yet in this epoch of de- racist Socialist mayor, Victor Berger. In Alexander’s observation underscores the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, no caying capitalism, with social programs and France on the other hand, the “red belt” of bitter fact that since black oppression is matter what its form and who administers union gains under assault across the board, working-class suburbs surrounding Paris part of the material reality of capitalism in it, as an instrument of the suppression of the “politics of the possible” are a lie. The were administered by Communist-led city this country, the ruling class has repeatedly the working class and all the exploited by ruling class will not bestow lasting reforms councils for over half a century, and some found new forms of control and subjugation capital. For workers to rule, this state must on the working people and the oppressed, still are. While housing projects were built, of the African American population, whose be smashed. and any advances will be the product of hard with the mass unemployment produced struggle for genuine liberation proves, time SAlt has its origins in the former Mili- class struggle pointing to socialist revolution. by capitalism, these turned into high-rise and again, to be incompatible with a society tant tendency in Britain, which for decades While SAlt, SA, ISO, FSP et al. may ghettos besieged by the cops. In Britain’s based on exploitation. was buried inside the social-democratic La- make a ritual tip of the hat to Lenin and cities, Labour-led councils were common, A working-class fight against the bour Party. Faced with the rise of blatantly Trotsky, their practical politics are quite dif- but Thatcher hobbled them by sharply re- criminalization of black and Latino youth is pro-capitalist “New Labour” leaders like ferent from those of the Bolshevik leaders. To stricting their finances. “Think globally, act urgently needed. That includes mobilizing Tony Blair, who argue that “there is no al- be sure, Marxist revolutionaries do not reject locally” may be a watchword of liberals, but the power of labor, African Americans, La- ternative” to “neo-liberal” free-market capi- using the platform of bourgeois elections and tinkering with local issues is not a road to tinos and all defenders of democratic rights talism, Taaffe’s Socialist Party harks back parliaments – always making it clear that this is revolution. Over a century ago, Lenin wrote: to shut down the police practice of racial to the “Old Labour” traditions, including the terrain of the class enemy, that workers and “The bourgeois intelligentsia of the profiling known as “stop and frisk” which the famous Clause IV of the Labour Party the oppressed cannot peacefully take power West, like the English Fabians, elevate has led to 4 million arbitrary searches of constitution calling for “common owner- through the ballot box – in order to expose municipal socialism to a special ‘trend’ New Yorkers. The racist intent of this policy ship of the means of production, distribu- the crimes of capitalism, dissipate illusions precisely because it dreams of social peace, of class conciliation, and seeks is so blatant that even though 87 percent of tion, and exchange.” Yet this would leave in bourgeois “democracy” and agitate for to divert public attention away from the those stopped are black and Latino, pluto- the state intact. And as we noted, like all socialist revolution. Writing on the Bolshe- fundamental questions of the economic crat mayor Bloomberg complains that not social democrats, no matter how “militant,” viks’ election campaign to the tsar’s toothless system as a whole, and of the state enough blacks and Latinos were stopped! Taaffe and his followers seek to administer Duma, Lenin declared: “the substance and structure as a whole, to minor questions A small taste of workers action against the capitalist state. What’s more, when the mainspring of the Social-Democratic election of local self-government.” racist police terror occurred in October 2010 chance has arisen, they have done so. platform can be expressed in three words: for As capitalism spirals downward, the when Local 10 of the International Longshore Today Sawant’s program calls for “no the revolution!” (“The Election Campaign and U.S. is mired in the fifth year of economic and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down layoffs or attacks on public sector unions.” the Election Platform,” October 1911). depression, with wages continuing to fall the port of Oakland, California for a day to Really? An article on “Why We Run Social- As Trotskyists, the Internationalist and millions of workers unemployed so long protest the slap-on-the-wrist manslaughter ist Candidates” by Tom Crean in Socialist Group calls to break with all the capitalist that the government has written them out of conviction of transit cop Johannes Mehserle Alternative No. 1 (September-October parties, and to oust the pro-capitalist labor the workforce. Obama’s “affordable health who murdered young black worker Oscar 2013) declares: “In Liverpool, England bureaucrats who chain workers to the Demo- care” act has ensured mega-profits for insur- Grant on New Year’s Day 2009 (see “ILWU in the mid-1980s, our sister organization cratic Party of U.S. imperialism. We call for ers, increased premiums for union workers, Shuts Ports Demanding Justice for Oscar played the leading role in the establishment building a workers party, not a milk-sop and is cutting off funds for hospitals that Grant,” Revolution No. 8, April 2011). of a socialist majority on the city council,” parliamentary labor party as in Britain, but serve the uninsured, notably undocumented and that “The Liverpool socialist council, Hopefully protests over the racist lynch- a revolutionary workers party to lead the ex- immigrants. “Immigration reform” is a dead backed up by mass demonstrations and ing of Trayvon Martin will continue. Yet to ploited and oppressed in class struggle. This letter, while Obama has deported almost strikes of the city’s workers, refused to im- have an effect, the key is the political direc- is very different from the SAlt/SA/ISO/FSP two million people. Even as Washington’s pose cuts as dictated by the Thatcher govern- tion and leadership of such protests. As Jesse social democrats who, although they may global clout declines, it keeps raining death ment….” Actually, as part of a struggle with Jackson and Al Sharpton push gun control, sometimes run their own candidates, look to from the skies with its drones. Yet far from Thatcher & Co., the “Liverpool socialist various reformist groups that call themselves the formation of a (bourgeois) “third party,” fighting imperialism, the social democrats council” terminated the contracts of tens of socialist seek liberal allies by calling (as does what Sawant called a “mass political alterna- all support the Syrian “rebels” who are thousands of municipal workers! As Taaffe Michelle Alexander) for a “new civil rights tive to the two-party system.” This is why clamoring for U.S. support. himself has written: movement.” This will solve nothing – the old they all look to the likes of Ralph Nader or The struggles for the immediate needs “The Labour group [in the Liverpool civil rights movement came to a dead end the Greens while spouting populist rhetoric. of workers and the oppressed must be council] decided on the ‘tactic’ of issuing precisely because, in accepting the limits of linked to the fight to forge a revolutionary 90-day redundancy notices to the 30,000 The election of Socialist Alternative capitalist society and reform politics, it could candidate Kshama Sawant to one of nine workers party. The reformists talk about not rip out the roots of black oppression. strong workforce to gain that period as a breathing space in order to build the positions on the Seattle City Council with “change” not revolution, about corporations The legal lynching of Trayvon Martin campaign.... However, the issuing of 93,000 votes reflects wide discontent with not capitalism, about the 99% rather than is the system functioning as it is supposed ‘redundancy notices’ turned out to be a the Democratic Party of Obama and the the working class, and SAlt would have us to. The fundamental task of the courts and major tactical error.” Clintons, which mimics the Republicans “imagine 200 Occupy candidates running cops is to maintain and defend the property –Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn, on virtually every issue. But that discon- for Congress this year.” Social democrats and power of the social class that owns this Liverpool – A City That Dared to Fight tent is reflected as well in liberal/reformist promote illusions in bourgeois democracy society: the capitalists. To unleash the power (1988) enthusiasm for Democrat de Blasio in New and the supposed reformability of capital- of the working class that can bury capitalism This is the utterly reformist tradition York. Sawant declared that “I think we have ism. Genuine communists, in contrast, use requires a political struggle to free labor, that Socialist Alternative follows, even as shown the strongest skeptics that the social- the capitalist electoral platform – and every blacks and all the oppressed from the shack- it tries to cover itself with the revolutionary ist label is not a bad one for a grassroots other venue – to prepare our class for deci- les chaining them to the Democratic Party mantle of Trotskyism. While not so blatant, campaign to succeed.” Red-baiting certainly sive battles to sweep away the exploiters and and to build the nucleus of a multiracial the program of piecemeal reforms to capital- doesn’t have as much political mileage as it oppressors. As the 1912 election platform revolutionary workers party. ism is common to the ISO, Socialist Action, used to, but as the reformists look to the bal- of the Russian Bolsheviks proclaimed, they As one of the Internationalist speakers Freedom Socialist Party and all groups of lot box with cookie-cutter social-democratic participated in elections “in order to prepare at the July 14 Harlem rally said: the social-democratic spectrum. Since they campaigns, revolutionary communists look an army of class-conscious fighters for a “I want to be frank here. It’s not just have largely interchangeable programs, the to the class struggle. new Russian revolution.” Florida. What about Ramarley Graham, question arises, why don’t they join together, Electing a “socialist” in a one-party As it fights against poverty wages, where was he? In this city. What about or at least support each other’s candidates? Democratic town like Seattle may liven unaffordable housing and health care, a Abner Louima? Tortured by the police, When SAlt proposed to the ISO that it en- up the city council, but don’t count on communist campaign would emphasize by the racist NYPD. What about Amadou dorse Sawant’s 2012 campaign for the state much more. Sawant’s first action as coun- that the imperialist war abroad and the Diallo? What about Alberta Spruill? What legislature, the ISO dismissed it as “shoe- cilwoman-elect has been to announce that war on workers here is one and the same. about Sean Bell? What about Anthony string effort.” Yet as it dawned on them that she will join the mayor-elect’s “Advisory Only international socialist revolution that Baez? It’s not just Florida, it’s not just smashes the capitalist state and raises the the Deep South, it’s not just Up South Sawant might win for city council, the ISO Committee of business and labor leaders” up here, it’s all around this country. So switched gears and effusively endorsed her. to discuss the $15/hour minimum wage. The working class to power can overcome the we need to mobilize a greater power But then, opportunism is the name of clear purpose of this class-collaborationist deepening impoverishment of the masses, than their power of terror, and their dirty the game for the reformist pseudo-socialists. committee is to water down and delay any by instituting a global planned economy, imperialist wars, and their filthy racist The absence of revolutionary substance is action, since the June deadline for its report freed from the constraints of private murder machine, whether they be in white precisely what appealed to The Stranger, would make a ballot initiative on the issue property. As a metastasizing police state sheets, blue uniforms or the black robes of which usually backs Democrats, in endors- next to impossible. A class-struggle program spreads its cancer everywhere, repressing the of the Supreme Court of death. That ing Sawant. It noted “one of the biggest to fight poverty wages would be to organize the oppressed and spying on everyone, only power is the power of the working class, contrasts between Conlin and Sawant: The low-wage workers into a fighting union that the working class in power can put an end to overthrow this racist capitalist system. politics of the possible. Sawant doesn’t talk could undertake real strike action. But that to wage slavery and rescue human culture Only then will we begin to get justice.” ■ revolution like your typical clown-variety won’t be decided in the city council. from mounting barbarism. n 20 The Internationalist Revolution Petraeus, ROTC Out! Drop All the Charges – Cops Off Campus! Smash CUNY Board of Trustees’ Drive to Ban Student Protest! The following leaflet was issued on 21 As the CUNY Internationalist Clubs November 2013. For extensive coverage of have documented in our paper, Revolution, the struggle this past fall against militari- the trustees have been following a script Internationalist photo zation of the City University of New York – written by the American Enterprise Institute, particularly the hiring of war criminal and a right-wing business think tank. In the past former CIA director David Petraeus and months, the CUNY tops have: the reintroduction of the Reserve Officers’ ● Hired war criminal David “Death Training Corps – see the newspaper of the Squad” Petraeus and reinstated the Reserve CUNY Internationalist Clubs, Revolution Officers’ Training Corps. No. 10, October 2013. ● Unleashed violent police repression, Closely linked to its drive to militarize targeting protesters for beatings, arrest and CUNY, the Board of Trustees has launched prosecution. a head-on as-sault on the most basic rights ● Seized the Morales-Shakur Center of everyone who works and studies at the at City College while locking down the City University of New York. Cooked up campus. in secret, its proposed “expressive conduct” ● Suspended CCNY activists, banned policy has a laughable name – but the attack them from campus, then had them jailed and is dead serious. What they’re trying to ram charged by the District Attorney and NYPD. CUNY Internationalist Clubs banner at November 25 protest outside Board of through is an outright ban on student protest. ● Pushed the “expressive conduct” Trustees meeting against administration’s attempt to outlaw student protest. This attack must be denounced, defied, policy aimed at banning and criminalizing and defeated, by massively and militantly campus protest. working class is shown by CUNY’s own government if they are chained to the capi- exercising the very rights they’re trying to We demand that all the charges and history – open admissions was originally talist politicians that run that government. take away. ALL OUT ON NOVEMBER disciplinary measures be dropped. Restore won when militant student protest gained And with even a fraction of the resources 25, when a range of groups have called to the Morales-Shakur Center. All cops off key backing from city labor. it poured into backing de Blasio, the PSC demonstrate against the Board of Trustees campus! Formed in the struggle against CUNY’s faculty/staff union could and should mobi- meeting being held at Baruch College (Lex- Together with militarization, the bank- “anti-immigrant war purge” in 2001, the In- lize many of its 25,000 members against the ington and 25th St.) beginning at 3:30 p.m. ers, real-estate speculators and union-bust- ternationalist Clubs win students to the fight BoT’s attacks. Everyone must understand What’s needed is mass, militant mobi- ers who make up the Board of Trustees seek for socialist revolution. There is no way to that we are facing a crucial battle. lization of students, teachers and workers the privatization, elitization, “whitening” “liberate CUNY for the people” under the To unchain the power of NYC’s labor – drawing in sectors of the city’s multi- and corporatization of CUNY. The BoT and capitalist system of exploitation, racism and and oppressed, the political fight must be millioned working class, and the oppressed administration can’t be reformed or made war. Nor will racist police brutality be ended waged – against all forms of capitalist poli- population that faces racist police repres- to “represent us” – they must be abolished. by Bill de Blasio and the Democratic Party tics, for a revolutionary workers party. The sion on a daily basis – to smash the attack CUNY should be run by elected councils of of imperialist commander-in-chief Obama struggle against militarization and repression from these arrogant, unelected and increas- students, teachers and workers, with open (whose favorite general is David Petraeus). at CUNY can and will be won as part of the ingly dictatorial representatives of the city’s admissions and no tuition. The importance Workers and youth can’t wage effective fight for the workers to take over society here capitalist elite. of bringing in the power of the multiracial struggle against attacks from the capitalist and around the world. Join us in that fight!n

No Criticism of Democrats at Petraeus Protests? Nonsense See With Your Own Eyes How They Lie By now many people know that the formerly while standing in demonstrations where there were

Trotskyist Spartacist League is in the habit of distort- multiple signs, chants and speeches denouncing the Internationalist photo ing, falsifying and just plain lying about the positions Democrats. of the Internationalist Group. What they cannot stand Once again at a November 8 rally at City Col- is that we have continued to uphold the fundamental lege to protest the suspension of two activists of the positions of Trotskyism that the SL has increasingly Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee and abandoned as it slides deeper into centrism and cyni- the seizure by the administration of the Morales-Shakur cal despair. Most striking about this is that they make Center, a speaker for the SL said: “The Internationalist claims that anyone can see are false. Groups [sic] over here, which claims to be Marxist, A clinical example is the utterly false assertion said not one word opposing the Democrats for most of by the SL that in protests against the reintroduction the semester, in order to maintain their bloc with other of the U.S. military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps reformist student groups, like the RSCC.”1 (ROTC) and the hiring of war criminal David Petraeus SLers later claimed that the reference to “most of to “teach” at the City University of New York this fall, the semester” was stuck in since earlier during the rally the IG and the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Milita- IG supporter Sándor John had attacked the Democrats. rization of CUNY, in which the CUNY Internationalist Yet not only did we denounce the Democratic Party Clubs have played an active role, were silent about the and Democratic president Barack Obama in one speech Democratic Party. after another since the beginning of the semester, so An article in the SL’s Workers Vanguard (4 did our published materials and our signs, which, un- October) stated, “The IG is only too happy to ditch fortunately for the SL, can be verified by anyone who its paper opposition to the Democrats for the sake looks at the photos shown here. Protest at October 16 gala at John Jay College against David of joint statements of unity with liberals and reform- 1 Both can be seen on a videotape of the rally at http://www. Petraeus, the former CIA director, former Afghanistan and ists.” SL supporters would brazenly claim that we youtube.com/watch?v=1A5imjyiduU. Iraq U.S. occupation forces commander and war criminal were “ducking the issue of the Democratic Party” continued on page 22 hired to “teach” at CUNY. January-February 2014 21 Demonstrations Against War Criminal Petraeus and Militarization of CUNY Internationalist photos

August 31 September 3 September 9 September 16 September 17 September 23 war threats against Syria, we had numerous Against War Criminal Petraeus” (http://www. “To face reality squarely; not to seek See How... signs denouncing the Democratic Party. Our youtube.com/watch?v=AUw71O9XepM) – the line of least resistance; to call things continued from page 21 chant, “Remember Hiroshima, remember despite SLers’ brazen claims that the video by their right names; to speak the truth Vietnam, Democratic Party, we know which shows no signs against the Democrats. to the masses, no matter how bitter it In fact, the flier we put out when Pe- side you’re on,” was one of the most popular The pathological pattern of prevarication may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true traeus’s appointment was announced in then and in every protest since then. This seeks to cover the SL’s centrist political degen- in little things as in big ones; to base the spring, which was widely distributed slogan was also prominently displayed on eration, manifested most spectacularly in their one’s program on the logic of the class during the protests this fall, denounces IG signs, along with others including: support for the 2010 invasion of Haiti by U.S. struggle; to be bold when the hour for the “Democratic/Republican war party’s action arrives – these are the rules of the 2 • imperialism under Democratic commander in endless colonial carnage.” This leaflet “Against the Democrat/Republican Fourth International.” chief Obama. After months of vociferously is reprinted in the CUNY Internationalist Party of Imperialist War – Build a For the latter-day Spartacist League, this defending this imperialist line, and shrieking Clubs’ newspaper Revolution (October Revolutionary Workers Party!” has all been turned on its head – their denunciations of the IG for opposing the oc- 2013), along with other articles detailing • “Petraeus, Obama, Bush, Steele, Kerry, guidelines are to be false in little things as cupation, the SL made a self-criticism, without the crimes of the Democratic Party of U.S. Clinton – Imperialist War Criminals” in big, to lie to the masses, to turn their back trying to get to the roots of this betrayal. imperialism, notably in the Vietnam War. • “Against the Democratic/Republican on the class struggle, to run away when Moreover, beginning at the very first Party of Imperialist War: For Workers Meanwhile, their falsehoods and slan- the hour for action arrives – in the service protest this semester, on August 31 over U.S. Revolution” ders against the Internationalists continue. of a political program that runs ever more 2 Available online at http://www.international- Many of the same signs can be seen Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program clearly counter to that of the Bolsheviks ist.org/petraeusoutofcuny1304.html. in our video “Police Attack CUNY Protest ends with the memorable call: Lenin and Trotsky. n

Party, outright Nazis who have begun to population on the basis of the exploitation Criminalización de la protesta Defend Wyatt... organize in Portland. by a tiny bourgeois minority of the work- social en el Ecuador de Correa ing people who produce all the wealth. The continued from page 5 But in order to mobilize the unions El presidente ecuatoriano Rafael Correa League for the Fourth International calls with mass picketing. But to do that, and to take action, it is necessary above all ganó cierta reputación como defensor de for the formation of workers parties in ev- defeat union-busting outfits like the Free- to break with the Democrats and oust the la libertad hace unos meses al sugerir la ery country on the Leninist and Trotskyist dom Foundation, a class-struggle leadership bureaucrats who chain the workers to the posibilidad de dar asilo a Edward Snowden, program of the October 1917 Bolshevik must replace the sellout labor bureaucracy capitalist laws and political parties. As quién reveló el masivo espionaje contra Revolution, the program of international now sitting atop the unions. And when our an Internationalist Group banner at the civiles realizado por la Agencia Nacional socialist revolution. n brothers and sisters stand up to the anti- defense meeting/fundraiser proclaimed: de Seguridad de los Estados Unidos. Co- union bullies, all of labor must support and “Capitalism Can Not Be Reformed – Build rrea también ha celebrado la Constitución n defend them. a Revolutionary Workers Party.” Ecuador... que patrocinó en 2008 como ejemplo de The local AFL-CIO wouldn’t support sigue de la página 24 “democracia participativa”. Sin embargo, the September 5 picket initiated by Cross Defend Syria... siguiente, retirándose bajo el ataque, Paola el día que inició sesiones la Asamblea Trade Solidarity. Speaking at an October continued from page 15 Pabón capituló en la Asamblea Legislativa. En Constituyente que escribió la Constitución, 26 fundraiser for his defense campaign to launch U.S. bombing of North Vietnam; su discurso de rendición, después de apelar a el gobierno de Correa lanzó un brutal held at the Musicians Local 99 Hall in and the case of the non-existent weapons Correa (“con el inmenso cariño que te tenemos, ataque contra la parroquia amazónica de Portland, Wyatt reported that the response of mass destruction used to justify the at- te decimos que esta vez of labor officialdom was “ignore it, don’t tack on Iraq, to cite only a few of the most te estás equivocando”), League for the Fourth International worry about it, don’t fight these people, notorious examples. continuó: “por la unidad LFI, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY don’t show up, we’ve got it taken care For now, in the face of popular op- de esta bancada... retiro 10008, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] of.” Yet when “we showed up it was re- position, reticence by the military and mi moción”. ally exciting to see the ILWU out there, possibly by the increasingly evident fact No contento con ha- Internationalist Group/U.S. the Carpenters, the Painters and all these that anti-Western jihadi forces (holy ber forzado el retiro de Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street different unions that have jurisdictional is- warriors) are in now the forefront of the la moción, el “tío duro” Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. sues, who fight all the time over nonsense, armed rebels, Obama has put “on hold” his Correa insistió en que E-mail: [email protected] coming together to actually fight over real intention of attacking Syria. But that does AP sancionara a Pabón, New York Tel. (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 problems, which is the right wing and the not eliminate the threat. From 2005 on, Soledad Buendía y Gina Portland Tel. (971) 282-7903 Democrats.” public opinion polls in the U.S. showed a Godoy. Y de hecho, las “In my experience,” McMinn con- majority of the population was against the tres asambleístas fueron Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil tinued, “one of the biggest roadblocks Iraq war and in favor of withdrawal of the suspendidas de sus pues- in the organized labor movement is the troops, but U.S. forces stayed for six more tos durante todo el mes Brazil: write to Caixa Postal 084027, CEP 27251- AFL-CIO bureaucracy.” At the September years. At any moment, and for reasons that de noviembre por haberse 740, Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil 2013 state AFL-CIO convention in Bend, have nothing to do with Syrian reality, the atrevido a proponer esta Rio de Janeiro: write to Caixa Postal 3982, CEP Oregon, where McMinn was a delegate, Pentagon could launch its cruise missiles liberalización extrema- 20001-974, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil the bureaucrats advised attendees that in in order to rain death on Damascus and damente limitada de las E-mail: [email protected] other Syrian cities. leyes contra el aborto. talking about “right-to-work” not to men- LIVI/Deutschland tion unions, “because unions don’t poll As internationalist communists we do Aunque la humillación well.” “I think that’s the problem with not fight for a different “foreign policy” for pública de estas legisla- Germany: write to Postfach 74 06 41, 22096 Hamburg, organized labor,” Wyatt summed up. “We the Yankee empire but rather for its defeat, doras tiene un inequívo- Germany don’t attack enough. We should be proud to smash imperialism. That requires the co tufo machista, refleja Grupo Internacionalista/México to be in unions, even if that’s the minor- mobilization of the world working class también el carácter cada ity.” The way to defeat “right to work” is to sweep away the capitalist system, which vez más autoritario de la México: write to Apartado Postal 12-201, Admón. by showing up to oppose them wherever in its death agony unleashes one war after presidencia de Correa, en Postal Obrero Mundial, CP 03001, México D.F, México they raise their heads, and also to “fight another and which constantly generates la que toda forma de di- E-mail: [email protected] the bigots who hide under the Tea Party poverty, racism and the social oppression sidencia izquierdista está Tel. Mexico City: 55-3154-7361; Guadalajara: 33-1752- banner,” such as the American Freedom suffered by the vast majority of the planet’s sujeta a represión estatal. 6643; Oaxaca: 951-129-2086 22 The Internationalist Dayuma, donde rebeldes indígenas habían son encarcelados • abolición de trabas, legales o de tenido la temeridad de bloquear un camino, por “terrorismo” y Internationalist Foto: The facto, que impiden acceso a empleos paralizando así la producción de petróleo. “sabotaje”! calificados; Este patrón, consistente en escupir retórica El Partido • socialización del trabajo doméstico; democrática mientras reprime la protesta Comunista Mar- • medicina socializada gratuita y de social, ha seguido desde entonces. xista Leninista del alta calidad. Las acciones autoritarias del populista Ecuador (PCMLE) –“Contra la prohibición del aborto en El Correa se han intensificado considerablemen- apoyó el llamado Salvador” (suplemento especial de El te en este, su tercer período, tras haber obte- por la “despenali- Internacionalista, junio de 2013) nido un triunfo aplastante en las elecciones zación del aborto, Así como la lucha por la descrimina- presidenciales de febrero (con un 57 %). En reivindicación por lización del aborto está ligada a la lucha junio, el sumo pontífice de la república andina la que han lucha- contra las políticas represivas del gobierno lanzó un ataque contra movimientos indepen- do por décadas las de Correa, la lucha por la liberación de la dientes de obreros, campesinos, indígenas e organizaciones de mujer no puede separarse de la más amplia izquierdistas mediante el Decreto Presiden- mujeres y políticas lucha de clases en contra de la opresión social cial 016. Su personal, finanzas, estatutos y de izquierda” (En producida por el capitalismo. En Ecuador, declaraciones políticas estarían, a partir de Marcha, 1 de no- obreras, indígenas y afroecuatorianas serán entonces, sujetos al control estatal. Bajo este viembre). Esto es dirigentes clave de la revolución socialista. decreto, los sindicatos obreros tienen ahora interesante, provi- Protesta frente al consulado de El Salvador en Nueva York, Las luchadoras a favor de los oprimidos han prohibido hacer declaraciones políticas o niendo de un par- el 5 de junio de 2013, contra la prohibición del aborto hasta jugado un papel fundamental a lo largo de la pronunciarse a favor de candidatos. Lo mis- tido que despliega en el caso de la joven “Beatriz” cuya vida estuvo en peligro. historia de Ecuador, particularmente en las lu- mo vale para los grupos indígenas, de modo en la primera plana de su periódico la efigie burguesa es la democracia de las frases chas de los pueblos indígenas. Manuela León que la Confederación de Nacionalidades de Stalin, quien en 1936 proscribió el aborto, pomposas, de las palabras solemnes, de dirigió la revuelta de diciembre de 1871 en Indígenas de Ecuador (CONAIE) tiene aho- revirtiendo así el legado bolchevique.2 El las promesas liberales, de las consignas Yaruquies, Chimborazo, en tanto que Juana ra prohibido trabajar con el partido político PCMLE puede incluso llamar por la “de- grandilocuentes sobre libertad e igualdad”. Calcán dirigió en levantamiento en 1899 en burgués Pachakutik, que aquélla engendró. rrotar el dominio del capital para alcanzar Los marxistas entienden que bajo el Pesillo en el norte de Ecuador con una hija La tutela estatal sobre todos los movi- la liberación de la mujer” (En Marcha, 4 de capitalismo, el sistema de la propiedad pri- pequeña, Lucía Lechón, en su espalda.3 mientos sociales ha sido impuesta mediante marzo de 2011). Pero como lo archiestali- vada y de la producción para la ganancia, En el siglo XX, Dolores Cuacuango fue una fuerte represión judicial que acusa a los nista que es, el PCMLE presenta la cuestión hay severos límites para la genuina igualdad organizadora de los sindicatos campesinos izquierdistas de “terrorismo” y “sabotaje”. como una de derechos democráticos, sin ir a social de la mujer. Como señalamos en un de Cayambe y fundadora de la Federación El año pasado el legislador de Pachakutik las raíces de la desigualdad social de la mu- artículo en defensa de una joven mujer sal- Ecuatoriana Indígena, pionera de la educa- Pepe Acacho y el dirigente indígena shuar jer en la familia. (También es prácticamente vadoreña, “Beatriz”, a quien se le negó el ción indígena, destacada luchadora a favor Pedro Mashiant fueron sentenciados a 12 mudo en lo que toca a los derechos de los derecho a practicarse un aborto terapéutico: de los derechos de las mujeres y dirigente años de cárcel sobre la base de tales acusa- homosexuales). “No es casual que el primer país en legalizar del Partido Comunista, así como defensora ciones debido a que dirigieron una protesta El pionero socialista Charles Fourier el aborto fue la Rusia soviética, en 1920, de los ecuatorianos negros y mulatos. Como en 2009 en la que un profesor shuar murió señaló que le grado de emancipación de a raíz de la Revolución de Octubre”. De trotskistas, nos basamos en el programa de la en un enfrentamiento con la policía. Otro la mujer es una medida clave del nivel de hecho, los bolcheviques implementaron el revolución permanente para emancipar a la diputado de Pachakutik, Cléver Jiménez, progreso social en una sociedad. Ya en el “aborto libre y gratuito”, que es por lo que clase obrera y a todos los oprimidos, inclu- fue sentenciado a 18 meses de cárcel junto Manifiesto Comunista (1848) los funda- la Liga por la IV Internacional llama hoy yendo los campesinos pobres, los pueblos con dos dirigentes sindicales bajo el Artículo dores del comunismo moderno hablaron en día. Señalamos que “La opresión de la indígenas y los afroecuatorianos, luchando 494 del Código Penal que ordena el encarce- de la abolición (Aufhebung) o superación mujer no será abolida por medio de meras por un gobierno obrero, campesino e indí- lamiento de aquellos que insulten o acusen de la familia para “acabar con la situación reformas legislativas” y presentamos un gena que inicie la revolución socialista. Hoy falsamente a autoridades gubernamentales. de la mujer como mero instrumento de programa obrero que apunta a la necesidad más que nunca, ya que en la actualidad la Incluso estudiantes de bachillerato han sido producción”. Friedrich Engels en El origen de una revolución socialista que incluye las décima parte de la población ecuatoriana ha arrestados por protestar. de la familia, la propiedad privada y el es- siguientes reivindicaciones: sido forzada a emigrar, la revolución sólo tado (1884) explicó la opresión de la mujer • puede ser completada a escala internacional. La lucha por la liberación guarderías gratuitas, accesibles 24 sobre la base de la aparición de la sociedad horas del día; ¡Liberación de la mujer mediante la de la mujer de clases, en la que la institución de la • pago igual por trabajo igual; revolución socialista! A final de cuentas, la reforma del familia surgió para transmitir la propiedad, • la separación del estado de la Código Penal ecuatoriano fue aprobada en convirtiendo así a la mujer en propiedad de religión; 3 Marc Becker, Indians and Leftists in the Mak- la Asamblea Nacional el 17 de diciembre. su amo. Al reconocer esto, los bolcheviques • el derecho irrestricto al divorcio; ing of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Move- La propuesta de artículo 150, que habría victoriosos lucharon por la emancipación de • plenos derechos para los homosexuales, ments [Indígenas e izquierdistas en la creación castigado a los profesionales médicos por la mujer de la esclavitud doméstica. contra toda intromisión del estado en de los modernos movimientos indígenas de Ec- la realización de cualquier aborto, fue En América Latina hoy en día, el aborto las relaciones sexuales consensuales; uador] (2008) eliminada. No obstante, con pequeñas sigue prohibido en prácticamente todos los modificaciones se conservó la ley previa casos, excepto en Cuba y, con restriccio- que prohíbe el aborto en el 99 por ciento de nes, en otras pocas jurisdicciones (Guyana, The los casos. A pesar de que las encuestas de Puerto Rico, y recientemente Uruguay y la Internationalist opinión muestran que dos terceras partes de Ciudad de México). Como hemos señalado la población apoyan el derecho a abortar en antes, aunque el derecho al aborto es un A Journal of Revolutionary Marxism for the caso de violación, los legisladores se rehusa- derecho democrático, será necesaria una Reforging of the Fourth International ron a permitir los abortos incluso en el caso dura lucha de clases rumbo a una revolu- de niñas de 14 años y menos. Esta derrota ción socialista para hacerlo realidad para Publication of the Internationalist Group, para los derechos de la mujer fue resultado todas las mujeres. La oposición de Rafael section of the League for the Fourth International de la sumisión a los dictados del presidente Correa y otros populistas “de izquierda” a y de los partidos burgueses. los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres Annual subscription US$10 for five issues. No sólo los legisladores de la Alianza es parte de su apoyo al capitalismo, a pesar Name______PAÍS capitularon ante las amenazas de Co- de toda su falsa retórica acerca de la imple- rrea, sino que lo hizo también buena parte mentación del “socialismo del siglo XXI” Address______de la izquierda supuestamente socialista. sin expropiar al capital. Como señaló el Durante una protesta afuera de la Asamblea dirigente bolchevique Vladimir Lenin en su ______Apt. #_____Tel.(___)______Nacional cuando se debatía la cuestión, artículo “El poder soviético y la situación City______State/Province______una portavoz de la Juventud Comunista del de la mujer” (1919): Ecuador (JCE) llamó por permitir el aborto “La democracia burguesa promete de Postal Code/Zip______Country______para las niñas pequeñas, “aclaró que seguirá palabra la libertad y la igualdad. Pero en la apoyando el proyecto político gobiernista, práctica ni una sola república burguesa, ni Make checks/money orders payable to Mundial Publications and mail to: que se enfoca en mejorar las condiciones la más avanzada, ha otorgado a la mujer (la Mundial Publications sociales, educativas y del buen vivir a través mitad del género humano) plena igualdad Box 3321, Church Street Station New York, NY 10008 U.S.A. de propuestas de diálogo” (El Telégrafo de derechos con los hombres, ante la ley, ni [Guayaquil], 14 de diciembre). ¡Vaya “diá- ha liberado a la mujer de la dependencia y Write the Internationalist Group at the above address, or contact: logo”! ¡Cualquiera que disienta de la línea opresión de los hombres…. La democracia Tel (212) 460-0983 Fax (212) 614-8711 del presidente es acusado de “traición” y 2 Véase León Trotsky, “Termidor en el hogar” E-mail: [email protected] quienes protestan en las calles en su contra en La revolución traicionada (1936) January-February 2014 23 El Internacionalista enero-febrero de 2014 ¡Aborto libre y gratuito! Ecuador: Correa ataca el derecho de la mujer al aborto! 20 de DICIEMBRE de 2013 – Actualmente después de que las legisladoras retiraron hay una ofensiva contra el derecho de la mu- su propuesta, este autoritario dirigente que Alianza por la Solidaridad jer a abortar, que se extiende desde EE.UU. se describe a sí mismo como “humanista, hasta Centro y Sudamérica. Son notables católico y de izquierda” exigió que las di- los casos de Nicaragua y El Salvador, a los putadas fueran sancionadas y, posiblemente, que ahora se suma Ecuador, tres países con destituidas. gobiernos supuestamente izquierdistas: del La virulenta oposición de Correa a la Frente Sandinista para la Liberación Nacio- legalización del aborto fue inmediatamente nal (FSLN), el Frente Farabundo Martí para aplaudida por algunas de las fuerzas más re- la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) y la Alianza accionarias. El presidente de la Conferencia PAIS, respectivamente. Como en el caso de Episcopal de Ecuador, monseñor Antonio la campaña internacional para la privatiza- Arregui, alabó el vituperio presidencial ción de la educación pública, esta ofensiva contra el aborto, y en particular “la valen- contra la mujer no puede tomarse aislada- tía y la nobleza de ánimo con que habló”. mente en cada país. Aún más grotesco es el La Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco, hecho de que no son gobiernos derechistas que promueve el legado del ultraderechista los que encabezan este ataque concertado católico nacionalista y misógino dictador en contra de la mujer, sino gobiernos que español, se unió al coro de alabanzas. El dicen ser “progresistas”. hecho de que Correa no esté solo entre los Un caso emblemático es Ecuador, don- nacionalistas “de izquierda” que atacan el de el presidente es Rafael Correa, un popu- derecho al aborto no pasó inadvertido en la lista burgués que llegó a la presidencia en prensa imperialista. El diario madrileño El 2007 y que acaba de ser reelecto por tercera País (26 de octubre) tituló un artículo “La vez. Jactándose de dirigir una “revolución izquierda beata de América Latina”. Activistas forman una “alfombra roja” frente a la Asamblea Legislativa ciudadana” mediante políticas nacionalistas En contra de esta profana alianza de ecuatoriana el 27 de septiembre exigiendo la despenalización del aborto. y reformas sociales,1 Correa recientemente derecha e “izquierda” en contra de los dere- que amenazan con arruinar las vidas de las objeto discutir la iniciativa de Ley propuesta soltó una amenaza con el propósito de chos de la mujer, el Grupo Internacionalista mujeres (e incluso con asesinar al personal por Correa para ajustar globalmente el código impedir la menor consideración de una re- y la Liga por la IV Internacional llaman a médico que practica abortos) en nombre del penal. Entre sus propuestas para un Código forma a la legislación sobre el aborto. “Que derogar todas las leyes que penalizan o “derecho a la vida” de un embrión o un feto, Orgánico Integral Penal (COIP) se encontraba hagan lo que quieran, pero jamás aprobaré restringen el aborto y a luchar por aborto que no es un ser separado, sino un organismo un nuevo Artículo 150 que sancionaría a los la legalización del aborto”, tronó, al acusar libre y gratuito, en condiciones seguras y en desarrollo que está unido biológicamente profesionales médicos en cualquier caso en a legisladoras de su Alianza PAIS de “des- en instalaciones de cuidado médico de alta a la mujer, de la cual depende. que estuvieran involucrados en la terminación lealtad” y “traición” por haber propuesto la calidad. Terminar o no con un embarazo no El problema del derecho al aborto en de un embarazo. En respuesta, el 10 de octubre legalización del aborto en caso de violación. deseado es una decisión que atañe exclusiva- Ecuador es bien concreto: según la Organi- la legisladora Soledad Buendía de la Alianza De persistir en el empeño, Correa amenazó mente a la mujer, pues se trata de su cuerpo zación Mundial de la Salud y el Ministerio PAIS (AP) se pronunció por la descriminali- con renunciar a la presidencia, e incluso y es ella quien tendrá que lidiar con las con- de Salud nacional, un estimado de 125 mil zación del aborto en caso de violación. Otra secuencias. Obispos, políticos capitalistas: abortos son practicados cada año en el país asambleísta de la AP, Paola Pabón, propuso 1 Véase nuestro artículo “¿Revolución “ciu- dadana” u obrera? Ecuador necesita un gobierno ¡saquen las manos! Llamamos a defender (es decir, unos 350 diarios en un país de 15 una moción para permitir el aborto durante el obrero, campesino e indígena”, El Internaciona- las clínicas de aborto y a la movilización millones de habitantes). Las complicaciones primer trimestre (12 semanas) en caso de que lista (diciembre de 2007) en contra de los fanáticos reaccionarios derivadas de abortos clandestinos repre- lo solicitara una víctima de violación, y para sentan la tercera causa de muerte para las rechazar el propuesto artículo 150. Mientras mujeres. En un estudio reciente realizado hablaba ante la Asamblea, activistas del Frente por el Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y por la Defensa de los Derechos Sexuales y Censos (INEC) y el Ministerio del Interior Reproductivos se manifestaban afuera. en 18 mil hogares ecuatorianos, una de cada En torno a las 7 p.m., la Asamblea tomó cuatro mujeres de 15 años o más ha sufrido un breve receso. Sin embargo, eso luego abuso sexual, y seis de cada diez han sufrido resultó en la posposición de la discusión de EFE abuso doméstico. Hospitales reportan que la moción hasta el día siguiente. Esa misma reciben cada año a entre 20 y 30 mil muje- noche el presidente Correa apareció en vivo res debido a complicaciones resultantes de en Oromar TV con su diatriba: abortos clandestinos. “¿Dónde se habla de despenalizar el Desde 1971, el Código Penal de Ecuador aborto? Por el contrario, la Constitución ha estipulado, bajo las secciones 441-447 del dice defender la vida desde la concepción. Artículo 149, que el aborto puede ser legal Cualquier cosa que se aparte de esto es sólo en casos en los que la vida de la mujer simplemente traición… Yo jamás aprobaré está seriamente en peligro, así como para la despenalización del aborto más allá de lo víctimas de violación con “discapacidad que consta en las actuales leyes. Es más, si mental”. En los demás casos, según la ley siguen estas traiciones y deslealtades… yo en vigor, el personal médico que practique presentaré mi renuncia al cargo.” un aborto enfrenta una pena de entre dos y Junto con la alabanza del arzobispo Arregui cinco años de cárcel, en tanto que la mujer de Guayaquil, Guillermo Lasso, dirigente de puede ser encarcelada entre uno y cinco años. la derechista oposición burguesa del CREO, El presidente ecuatoriano Rafael Correa y el papa católico Francisco, El actual período legislativo de la Asam- expresó su total apoyo al presidente. Al día furibundos adversarios del aborto. ¡Políticos y clérigos, saquen las manos! blea Nacional ecuatoriana ha tenido como sigue en la página 22 ¡Liberación de la mujer mediante la revolución socialista!