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,0 2 Table of Contents Introduction This edition of Black Hi.lforv and fhe government's destruction of the PATCO Capitalist Rulers Wage War Class Struggle, the fourteenth in the series air traffic controllers union in 1981, which on Blacks, Immigrants ...... 5 of these Spartacist pamphlets, is devoted signaled the beginning of a wholesale to the crucial need for a proletarian inter­ onslaught against the unions. The PATCO Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! nationalist fight against the rising tide of strike was smashed by firing the entire For a Leninist Party, Tribune of the People! racist reaction in the U.S. and around the union membership and jailing union lead­ Immigration and globe. Internationally;the capitalist rulers ers. who were taken to prison in shackles. Racist "Fortress Europe" ...... 11 are shredding social programs for the Having gotten away with busting this working class and the' poor. Everywhere, overwhelmingly white, highly paid union Cops Invade Church, Arrest Immigrants the desperate immigrant has been made of professionals-without provoking even France: Mass Protests Against the first target in this-drive to increase the a token attempt by the trade-union mis­ Racist Deportations ...... 20 exploitation and oppression of all of the leaders to mobilize organized labor in working class. PATCO's defense-the racist rulers of Historically; social benefit programs America figured they could get away with Farrakhan and have been the product of class struggle. doing just about anything to the impover­ the Sudan Slave Trade ...... 22 with capitalist governments trying .to pac­ ished black masses in the inner cities. ify an aroused working class. For exam­ The social power of the integrated Spartacist Supporter Writes in Black Scholar: ple, in late 19th-century Germany under unions, which have a large black member­ "Million Man March Chancellor Bismarck, vast social reforms ship that could serve as a bridge in linking Appeases Racist Exploiters" ...... 26 were implemented to undercut the. Social the power of labor to the anger of the ghet­ Democracy, which had become the mass tos. has been sapped by a labor leadership party of the German proletariat. Follow­ which ties the interest of labor to that of Nation of Islam: Bodyguards for ing World War II, what became known as American capitalism. Now, reveling in the Hitler Apologist David Irving ...... 28 the "welfare state" was introduced in supposed "death of communism," the U.S. Europe to placate a combative workers rulers perceive little in the way of opposi­ Mobilize Labor/Black Power movement and to ward off the spectre tion to continuing to up the ante in grind­ . to Free Geronimo! ...... 29 of "Communism" which, in however a ing the working class and the poor. Setting bureaucratically deformed way, was rep­ the stage for the 1996 presidential elec­ resented by the Soviet Union. tions. which were a veritable carnival of Free Ride for Klan However, as the article "Immigration capitalist reaction, the Democratic White in Chicagt>-Why? ...... 32 and Racist 'Fortress Europe'" notes, the House joined the Republican Congress European bourgeoisies now see these in the inauguration of the "welfare re­ Defend Chicago Antl·Klan Three! .. 33 Cold War social programs as unnecessary form" bill. This racist legislation. which overhead expenditures. Destroyed by cap­ will condemn millions to starvation as italistcounterrevolution, the Soviet Union their meager welfare payments are choked On Chicago Anti-Klan Protest no longer exists as any kind of counter­ off, took immediate aim at immigrants Why Cops Protect Racist Terrorists balance to. the rapactous appetites of the for whom there was no "waiting period" By Mumia Abu-Jamal ...... 34 world's bourgeoisies who are now en­ before all social benefits were axed. gaged in a brutal drive to increase their The anti-immigrant provisions of the Sabo's Court: Racist Capitalist competitive edge against their imperialist new welfare law were foreshadowed in ':Justice" in Action rivals by attacking the wages, living and the passage of Proposition 187 in Califor­ Key Witness for Mumia Abu·Jamal working conditions of the working class. nia in 1994, denying education, health Arrested on the Stand ...... 35 Immigrant workers who were brought in as care and any social benefits to "illegal" low-wage labor are no longer needed, as immigrants. As we wrote at the time in mass unemployment provides a ready pool "Full Citizenship Rights for All Immi­ Black Churches Torched Across the South of cheap "native" labor. At the same time, grants!" (WV No. 612, 9 December 1994): Mobilize Labor/Black Power to Smash Racist Terrorl ...... 38 anti-immigrant racism is used to divide "While the anti-Latino nature of Prop. and divert the proletariat from united 187 is perfectly obvious, it is less clear struggle against the capitalist offensive. to many that this measure is part of a broader racist offensive whose main Courageous Fighter Against Racist Terror In the U.S., the social programs of and central target is the hiack ghetto Robert F. Williams, 1925·1996 .... . 43 Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" poor. Depriving 'illegal' immigrants of were launched during the 1930s as a food stamps and their children of school means to buy social peace in the face of lunches will legitimize eliminating these NYC Transit "Workfare" Deal programs entirely. The bipartisan drive to the pitched labor battles of the time which Enslaving the Poor, 'end welfare as we know it: in the words Busting the Unions ...... ' ... 46 built the industrial unions in this country. of Bill Clinton, has been given an enor­ In the I 960s;Lyndon Johnson's "War on mous boost by the passage of Prop. 187." Poverty" was aimed at trying to quell the mass ghetto upheavals which broke out in Capitalist Rulers Play the Race Card response to the failure of the civil rights Whipping up racial and ethnic hatred movement to ameliorate the desperate has long served the American ruling Spartacist Publishing Co. conditions of life in the inner cities. Such class in furthering the exploitation of all Box' 1377 GPO calculations no longer figure in the ac­ workers. The article "Capitalist Rulers New York, NY 10116 count books of the American bourgeoisie. Wage War on Blacks, Immigrants" cites January 1997 A key turning point was the Reagan 19th-century American robber baron Jay 3

Gould's boast: "I can hire one half of the population are their own "fault," reflect­ education and government jobs and· con­ working class to kill the other half." ing-insufficient "values" placed on educa­ tracts-speaks to the depth of the racial Well into the early years of the 20th tion, work and advancement. divide fostered by the capitalist rulers. The century, the central divide in the working Playing on such divisions, the capitalist spearhead for a racist purge of the univer­ class was' one which pitted "native" Prot­ rulers seek to pit the white working class sity campuses. Prop. 209 is also aimed estants against the mainly Catholic Ger­ against both blacks and immigrants by directly at the heavily integrated govern­ man, Irish, Italian. and other European portraying them as a drain on the tax dol­ ment workers unions. As Workers Vdn­ immigrant workers who were brought in lars of "hard-working white folks." Wel­ guard (No. 654, 25 October 1996) w'rote to provide the cheap labor and raw mus­ fare recipients have always been portrayed in "California: Vote No on Prop 209!": cle power for the factories, mines and as "sponges" with the purpose of both 'Taken together with the devastation of mills of this country. (On the West CQast, humiliating the poor and cheapening all welfare by Clinton and Congress and the Chinese laborers who were employed as labor by exalting the moral value of work­ widespread destruction of manufacturing virtual slave labor in building the rail­ ing at any wage and under any conditions. jobs. Prop. 209 is a declaration that no roads were the target of vicious "yellow In racist America, where the words "wel­ black person need ever be hired again." peril" racism.) With the mass migration of fare queen" have long served as code Hoping to discredit the right-wing blacks from the American South to the words for the black ghetto poor, the ruling forc~s mobilized behind Prop. 209, liberal industrial cities of the North, particularly class thinks it can get away with shredding student bureaucrats at California State during World Wars I and II, religious and welfare by playing the race card. Leaving University at Northridge invited David ethnic hostilities in the proletariat came to aside the fact that the majority of those on "Klan in a suit" Duke to "debate" affirma­ be supplanted by anti-black racism. welfare are white, the "welfare reform" tive action in September. This suicidal Brought to America in chains, blacks bill is aimed at driving down the wages "electoral tactic"gave Duke both the were emancipated from slavery by the sec­ and further immiserating the entire work­ mainstream respectability he craves .as ond American Revolution, the Civil War. ing class. This fact is being brought home well as a national platform to recruit to.his But the promise of black equality was with a vengeance in the implementation of program of lynch-mob terror, Elsewhere. betrayed by the Northern capitalists. The "workfare" programs aimed at busting the the fascists also seized on the opportunity Compromise of 1877, under which the last unions by forcing welfare recipients to provided by the labor bureaucrats, and Union Army troops were withdrawn from work these jobs at starvation wages. black Democratic Party officials. who the South, brought to an end the tumultu­ The "workfare" deal signed by the worked desperately to stop any p'rorests or ous decade of Radical Reconstruction. A leadership of Transport Workers Union strikes that might damage.Clinton·s re­ new form of white supremacy was es­ (TWU) Local 100 in New York City, election. to organize for their program of tablished in the South, codified· in the which will eliminate hundreds of union­ genocide .. ,"lim Crow" system of racial segregation ized cleaners' jobs and replace them with On 29 June 1996, the union tops and and police-state control. Blacks who fled welfare recipients, is the subject of the black misleaders did nothing in response to North to what they saw as "the promised article "Enslaving the Poor, Busting the an urgent appeal by the Partisan Defense land" were integrated into the workforce Unions." Grotesquely, the TWU tops and Committee to mobilize to stop the Klan at the bottom and forcibly segregated into the capitalist press tried to sell this deal from rallying in the. heart of labor/black inner-city ghettos. As the "last hired and as an "opportunity" for the black and Chicago. In the event. the KKK terrorists first fired," the black population supplied, Hispanic poor! Not having lifted a finger were routed by the hundred militants who in! the words of Karl Marx, a "reserve in defense of the homeless and the poor, did come out. Bur in the absence of ,any army of labor" for the· American capital­ many of who'm are the products of moBilization of the social power of ~abor. ists, The color bar became a fundamental the giveback contracts and mass layoffs the cops felt no constraint in rampaging dividing. line in' American society, a "negotiated" by the trade-union mislead­ against the anti-KKK protesters. three of key prop for obscuring the irreconcilable ers, the labor tops have now taken on ·the whom face up to. two years in jail on class divide between labor and capital. role' of overseers for the capitalist rulers' trumped-up charges of assaulting police. Today, there is a great deal of antipathy union-busting, slave-labor programs. Two ·months· later, hooded and robed on all sides between blacks and immi­ Klansmen got away with rallying in 'down­ gran~s. In California, more than 50 per­ Racist Terror U.S.A. town .Chicagocompletely unopposed.. As cent 'of the black population voted for the The current climate of all-sided racist the article '.'Free Ride for Klan in Chi­ anti-immigrant Prop. 187. The idea that reaction has encouraged the terrorists of cago-Why7': bitterly, notes: ,"Thekind of immigrants, the majority of whom labor the Ku Klux Klan and other white­ class-struggle mobilization that was des­ at the most demeaning, low-paid jobs, are supremacist organizations. This past year perately needed for the working people "getting ahead" at the expense of blacks saw an epidemic of church burnings and black masses to prevail was blocked is reflective of a false consciousness. But across the South, many of which bore the by the misleaders who would sell their it is one born of resentment against the mark of the KKK nightriders. Recalling mother to get Clinton re~elected." very real color bar in this country. the wave of terror against black churches Descendants of the African slaves who during the civil rights movement, the arti­ State Repression, Terror and Death were brought to America more than 200 cle "Black Churches Torched Across the The cop attack on the June 29 anti-Klan years ago, blacks in this country have South-Mobilize Labor/Black Power to protest in Chicago was part of the,. c.ity's more claim to being "American" than most Smash Racist Terror!" notes· that today, designs to keep the streets clear in prepar­ people. Yet, branded by the color of their "The racists burning down black churches ation for the Democratic National Con­ skin, much of the black population has are out to destroy what remains ofthe lim­ vention in August. More broadly. the legal remained at the bottom while more light­ ited rights gained by blacks in the civil vendetta that is now being pursued againioo, skinned immigrants havehistoricaHy been rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s." three of the demonstrators ,is part of an able to advance lUP the economic ladder. In California, the passage of Proposi­ accelerating drive by the American bour­ At the same tirne, many immigrants are tion 209--{)utiawing the token affirmative geoisie to quash any protest or opposition taught to believe that the desperate condi­ action programs which gave blacks and to their increasingly brutal class rule tions of life faced by much of the black other minorities limited access to higher through the abrogation of constitutional .. 4 rights, from freedom of speech and as­ the vehicle for revolutionary change. the mobilization of trade unions against sembly to the right of haheas corpus to The Panthers wrote off any prospect the deportation of 300 immigrant work­ the Second Amendment right to bear that in the course of class struggle white ers as a concrete demonstration of "the arms. As the gap between the rich few and workers could overcome their racist prej­ possibility of forging international class the impoverished millions grows wider by udices and recognize their common in­ unity between workers' struggles." As the the day, the U.S. rulers seek to contain the terests with blacks. This v.iew was fed by imperialist powers line. up in rival trade seething anger and discontent of those the racist AFL-CIO officialdom. Today, blocs-threatening to plunge all of hu­ who have been relegated to the bottom of the "new" AFL-CIO leadership of John manity into World War III in their drive this society through increasingly naked Sweeney postures as a force for revitaliz­ to defend or increase their profit mar­ state repression and terror. ing the labor movement, promising to gins-the potential for proletarian inter­ The cases of two fOlmer leaders of the bring in millions of new union members. nationalist unity that was seen on the Black Panther Party, Geronimo ji Jaga Yet the biggest mobilization of this "new" streets of Paris must be translated into a (Pratt) and Mumia Abu-Jamal, provide leadership was to get out the vote for reality of revolutionary class struggle. bitter testimony to the lengths this state Clinton's Democrats. And while Sweeney The racist rulers of America arrogantly will go to in order to silence those who plays up his involvement in efforts such as presume they can get away with starving challenge the racist status quo. The article the overwhelmingly Hispanic "Justice for the poor, .killing the sick and aged and "Mobilize Labor/Black Power to Free Janitors" organizing drives, the real pro­ further impoverishing all of labor without Geronimo!" documents the government gram of the AFL-CIO leadership .is to provoking any social protest. But this is a conspiracy-extending from the FBI to "save American jobs" by whipping up foolish calculation. While they bray that the Los Angeles Police Department and hatred of "foreign" workers. Marxism has proven to be a "failure," district attorney's office-to imprison this The dearth of any class or social strug­ they cannot eliminate the class struggle fighter for black freedom for a crime they gle, combined with the racist indifference which is born of the irreconcilable con­ all know he did not and could not have of the labor misleaders to the plight of flict of interests between labor and capi­ committed. the ghetto and barrio poor, has opened tal. People cannot stand having no future . Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award-winning the door to sinister black nationalist dem­ for themselves or their kids, or being op­ journalist who was targeted by the Phila­ agogues of Louis Farrakhan's ilk. As the pressed like slaves, with poverty, disease delphia cops for his searing indictments of article "Million Man March Appeases and homelessness threatening millions. their rampant racist terror, was sentenced Racist Exploiters" notes: There is tremendous pressure building up to death on frame-up charges of killing a "In the 1960s, 'I'm Black and I'm at the base of this society which can and Proud' race consciousness, influenced by will explode. Harnessing and directing policeman. The article on Jamal's case we masses in struggle, was defiant of the repr-int in this issue, "Key Witness for racist capitalist rulers. Today we witness this anger toward the eradication of a Mumia Abu-Jamal Arrested on the Stand," 'I'm black and I'm not a criminal' race system based on exploitation is a ques­ exposes the extent of the frame-up orches­ consciousness intluenced by a desperate tion of leadership. black middle class begging for 'under­ The road to black freedom lies in the trated by the cops, courts and D.A.'s office standing' from the racist rulers." struggle to shatter this racist capitalist sys­ which continues in their unbridled efforts Farrakhanite black nationalism embodies tem through proletarian socialist revolu­ to terrorize and silence those who can tes­ the aspirations of a black middle class tion, and the power to do that lies with the tify to Jamal's innocence. which,. having run up against the ceiling multiracial working class. But this power The Partisan Defense Committee, the of racism in the white business world, cannot and will not be realized unless a Spartacist League and the Labor Black sees a future in becoming the exploiters class-struggle labor movement actively Leagues have sought to bring the social of "their own" people. champions the cause of black liberation power of the multiracial working class to Any program for "black capitalism," and is mobil ized in defense of the rights of bear'in defense of Geronimo and Mumia. however illusory, necessarily mandates immigrants and all the oppressed. The key Only when labor is mobilized in defense the continued existence of segregated to unlocking the chains, forged by the of black rights and the rights of all the black ghettos as a market. The reactionary trade-union misleaders, that shackle labor oppressed can it begin to defend the inter­ logic of this program for black separa­ to its exploiters is the political struggle ests of all of the working people against tism, which seeks to turn the anger of to build a revolutionary internationalist capitalist repression and exploitation. the ghetto against Jewish and immigrant leadership of the working class. shopkeepers, was seen in black Oakland Farrakhanite Black Nationalism At the time of the Civil War, Karl where Farrakhan's Nation of Islam pro­ vs. Black Freedom Marx, the founder of modern commu­ vided security to protect a meeting of the In ,this issue of Black History we re­ nism, captured a fundamental truth of notorious British rascist David Irving. As print an obituary memorializing Robert F. American society in his statement that is pointed out in the article "Nation of.Is­ Williams, "Courageous Fighter Against "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the lam: Bodyguards for Hitler Apologist Da­ Racist Terror." Williams, who organized white skin where in the black it is vid Irving," the Farrakhanite nationalists blacks in armed self-defense against the branded." The Spartacist League; the share with the Klan and the Nazis a belief Klan nightriders in the South during the U.S. section of the International Commu­ in the need to "segregate the races." Con­ struggles against Jim Crow segregation, nist League, is fighting to build a multi­ temptuousof the ghetto masses at home did much to break a generation of young racial revolutionary workers party that whom the Farrakhanites see as "bringing civil rights activists from their liberal illu­ will wrest ..the tremendous productive down the race," the sinister Nation of sions in American "democracy." Mumia resources of this country out of the hands Islam leader is an apologist forblack slav­ and Geronimo were part of that genera­ of the greedy and corrupt capitalist own­ ery in Sudan as detailed in the article tion of black radicals. Yet while rejecting ers. When the power of the racist ruling "Farrakhan and the Sudan Slave Trade." the liberal pacifism of the civil rights class and its state is shattered, and this movement leadership which contained the For Black Liberation Through wealth is deployed for the benefit of fight against racist segregation within the Socialist Revolution! those who labored to produce it. the basis confines of capitalism, the Black Panther The article "France: Mass Protests will be laid for eradicating'all inequalities Party also iejected the working class as Against Racist Deportations" points to based on class, sex and race .• 5 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 653. 11 October 1996

Full ,C'iti:zenshJp ,'R"ig,hts for AU :Jm'mi:gr,a,nts! l' 1 , ~ ~ w' ~ .,. , • Capitalist Rulers Wage War on Blacks, Immigrants

______,_ Riven I Left: Black St. Petersburg, Florida demonstrators protesting grand jury verdict in favor of racist killer cop were attacked by police, November 1996. Right: Immigration cops in racist crackdown on Asians in California.

Break with the' Democrats-For .. a Revolutionary WorJ~,er,s"Party~

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In the lead-up to the November denies food stamps and other social ben­ call is expressly tailored to be accept­ presidential election, the Democrats and efits to immigrants. able to the yuppie racist in the White Republicans have been engaged ina A march has been called for October House, promoting the capitalist rulers' grotesque competition over which party 12 in Washington, D.C. to "defend immi­ distinction between "legal" and "illegal" can be most vicious in attacking black grant rights." But the sponsors of this immigrants. people and immigrants. Last week, Dem­ demonstration have made it clear that And, as we noted last issue, this ocratic president Clinton signed yet they intend this march to be a vehicle not attempt to line up Hispanic and other another anti-immigrant bill that puts up for opposing the bipartisan assault on immigrants behind the racist Democrats barriers to refugees seeking asylum and immigrants but rather for mobilizing is being uncritically supported by a num­ denies legal redress in the courts against votes for the Democratic Party "lesser ber of reformist groups-primarily the arbitrary roundups and deportations by evil." Coordinadora 96, which initiated Socialist Workers Party and the Workers the hated migra cops of the Immigration the protest, declared that the purpose of World Party-who are doing the donkey and Naturalization Service (INS). This the march is to "get out the vote for work for the October 12 march organ­ new racist measure comes hard on the November 5th." Instead of forthrightly izers. Workers and minorities do not heels of last spring's "counter-terrorism" defending the rights of undocumented need a "lesser" evil party of racist capi­ law, which vastly expands the racist immigrants, these pro-Democratic Latino talism but a revolutionary workers party death penalty and mandates draconian misleaders plead only for a "streamlined which champions the cause of all the new restrictions on the rights of all non­ citizenship application process and an oppressed, fighting for full citizenship citizens, and the anti-welfare bill, which extension of the date of eligibility for rights for all immigrants! consigns millions of women and chil­ amnesty for all those who have entered We present below an edited transcript dren to homelessness and starvation and the U.S. prior to January I, 1992." This of a presentation at a September 21 6

I I Reulers Border police brutalize Immigrants. Clinton, seen here being endorsed by Fraternal Order of Police, has presided over massive militarization of Mexican border. Spartacist League forum in Chicago by and as an ideological counter to the racist U.S. imperialism is the main enemy Don Alexander, a member of the SL Soviet Union. Today, emboldened by the of the world's workers and oppressed. Central Committee and a veteran of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet militant black struggles of the 1960s. Union and East Europe, the rulers of Democrats Are No U.S. imperialism believe that they can do "Lesser Evil" * * * anything to workers and the oppressed at The capitalist ideologues and politi­ Around the world today the capitalist home and abroad. In the New World Dis­ cians, representatives of the government rulers are waging ferocious class war order, characterized by intensified inter­ of moneybags, say that no matter how against workers and immigrants. From imperialist rivalries, especially between bad things might be here, this is still Germany to France to Italy the social the U.S., Japan and Germany, the U.S. America-a supposed land of democ­ welfare programs established after World rulers are acting like cops of the world. racy, freedom, equality and transcendent War II are being ripped up, but not Increasingly and more brazenly, they are moral superiority. All of these are revolt­ without militant' defensive struggles by throwing their might around; as with ing lies. What we have in the U.S.~and the workers. Significantly, workers in Clinton's air 'strikes against Iraq. Mean­ in every capitalist "democracy"-is a France have also waged militant strug­ while, the European Union, 'itself torn dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a democ­ gles against deportations and in de­ by national antagonisms, is threatening racy for the rich. In the mid-19th cen­ fense of African immigrants against the retal'iationagain,st,the U.S. for ordering tury, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the right-wing regime of President Chirac. sanctions against them for investing in originators of scientific socialism, which Recently in Australia, workers joined .. . Cuba, Iran and Libya. From the Balkans, is powerfully embodied in the Commu­ with Aborigines in storming the parlia­ to Iraq, the world today resembles the nist Manifesto, explained that the capital­ ment building during a protest against: period leading up to World War I. ist state is a tool of class oppression: racist capitalist austerity measures. There The labor traitors who prop up this "The executive of the modern state is but is growing understanding that the attacks imperialist system have to be ousted and a committee for managing the common on immigrants' are an attack on the whole replaced by a revolutionary leadership of affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." That working class.,. , , the labor movement. Imperialism is not includes the president, the Congress, the But history has:.shown tim~and again some misguided policy, rather it is the courts and their armed enforcers. The thaHo raise such defensive struggles' into drive to export finance capital which is great Bolshevik leader Lenin in 1917 a g.eneralizedassault on the capitalist inherent within the system. For all the applied these teachings in leading the order itself requires the intervention· of current fashionable talk about the' "glob­ first successful workers revolution inhi's­ Lenirrist vanguard 'parties to instill revo­ aliZation of production," the productive tory. In The State and Revolution, Lenin lutionary consciolisnessin,' the working:' forces' of modem capitalist society have argued that the capitalist .state could not class.. Such parties. composed .of,the" long since come into violent conflict with be reformed but had to be smashed. mos6' politically advanced, detachments the narrow framework 'of the 'national The elimination of the federal Aid of the workingclass,must aetas tribunes: stafe. This conflict was the source of two to Families with Dependent Children of the- people, Aike the Bolshevik Party; ;"'world wars fought for the redivision of (AFDC) program by yuppie racist Clin­ built by Lenin.and Ttdtsky in tsarist Rus­ the world. Today, the capitalists are ton and the Republicans will destroy any sia which swept away capitalism. Lenin­ armed. with nuclear weapons, and the minimal lifeline for some 12 million ist parties are indispensable for new ' U.S.ru'ling class has already used them, people, more than two-thirds of them October socialist revolutions. in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ifl 1945. The children. New immigrants will be'ineli­ Many of the social programs now only way to defeat imperialism is through gible for any benefits unti1 they have under attack were set up to ward off international proletarian revolution. As been here five years, while SSI benefits the prospect of revolutionary upheavals the most powerful of the world powers, and food stamps will be denied to all 7 immigrants unless they have worked for that the capitalist- enemy in the form of shelved by court orders, its intent of at leasHen years. Welfare recipients will the racist Democratic Party can be pres­ intimidating and further marginalizing be restricted to a lifetime total of five sured to do the right thing. This is the immigrant communities has effectively years of benefits. and will be kicked off bankrupt program of class collaboration been realized. the. rolls after two years. The latter. of which is a roadblock to proletarian When the right-wing Republicans, course. is especially aimed at blacks. revolution. with California governor Wilson in the What the capitalists are after is to These opportunist outfits have swal­ lead, came out with Prop. 187, we lower the cost of labor by immiserating lowed the bourgeoisie's lie that commu­ pointed out that this was the spearhead the working class. This can be seen in nism-the struggle for the liberation of of a broader racist offensive and that its cities like New York. where starvation­ the international working class and the ultimate target was the black ghetto poor. level "workfare" recipients are forced to abolition of all class society-is dead. This has been proven true. Not skipping take jobs replacing unionized municipal Theirs is the program of the "popular a beat, racist politicians like Wilson workers. The bosses' bottom line is prof­ front," a political bloc with the so-called soon pushed the grotesquely misnamed its. Social Security and Medicare are liberal wing of the ruling class, which California Civil Rights Initiative against their next targets. from Spain in the 1930s to Italy today affirmative action, aimed at reversing The anti-immigrant. anti-black. anti­ subordinates the interests of the op­ any remnants of the gains of the.civil woman attacks can and must be met by pressed to that of the capitalist oppressors rightS:. movement. Many Latino rleaders mobilizing the power of the multiracial and has paved the way for bloody defeats. looked to the Democrats to stop Prop. working class fighting together in its The Spartacist League fights for mili­ 187. while turning. a blind eye to the own interests against the capitalists. How tant integrated class struggle against the plight of undocumented immigrants; But do we do that? It begins with a simple racist capitalist oppressors. We say: the Democrats are no less vehement­ truth: the root of all of the social ills of Break with the Democrats-Build a ly anti-immigrant than the RepUblicans. this society is the irrational, anarchic revolutionary workers party that cham­ While opposing Prop. 187, California capitalist system of production for profit. pions the interests of all of the oppressed Democratic Senators 'Boxer and Fein­ To smash the assault on minorities and exploited. We communists struggle stein called for militarizing the border exemplified by the destruction of wel­ for workers revolution-the seizure of with Mexico. which Clinton is imple­ fare and the imprisonment of masses of power by the working class and the menting at breakneck speed. ghetto youth, a class-struggle leadership creation of a socialist planned economy. We say: Defend affirmative action. -a revolutionary workers party~would and more-fight for free. quality educa­ fight for a shorter workweek with no Racist Rulers to Poor: tion for all. for open admissions with a cut in pay to spread the available work Drop Dead! living stipend. This-not quotas-is the around, and to organize the unorganized. When we say the message of the capi­ way to cut through the race and class It would fight for full citizenship rights talist .rulers to many blacks and poor privileges in higher education. Quotas for all immigrants. It would fight for free people is to drop dead, we mean it liter­ are tokenistic measures that accept .the abortion on demand, for free 24-hour ally. In addition to Latinos, Asian Ameri­ racist status quo, pitting various minori.­ childcare and free qualit.y health care. It cans have been brutalized and killed ties against each other. They have been would staunchly defend gay and lesbian in increasing numbers. I don't have to used in the past against Jews and today rights against "family values" bigots. speak about the raids by the Immigration against Asians. Immigrant rights and Racial, national and sexual oppression and Naturalization Service (INS) which black rights go hand in hand. and their are all rooted in the capitalist system. are sweeping this country. And although struggles advance the cause of emancipa­ The only "dependency" that the work­ the full implementation of California's tion of the whole working class. ing class and oppressed minorities need anti-immigrant Proposition 187 has been The same capitalist government which to get rid of is reliance upon capitalist political parties. We, must destroy the illusion that the Democratic Party is a "lesser evil" alternative to the more openly pro-business Republicans. This lie is pushed by the pro-capitalist union misleadership of the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney and by the black mislead­ ership, from Jesse Jackson to Louis Far­ rakhan, whose Nation of Islam today says "farewell to welfare" with barely concealed glee. An assortment of organizations mas­ querading as Marxists joined with the bourgeois liberals in San Francisco on April 14 for a "fight the right" pep rally for Clinton. They included the Interna­ tional Socialist Organization, Refuse & Resist and the Revolutionary Workers League. Then there's the Communist Party, which has one foot on a banana peel and another one in the grave, which !I!!::ii.·~ Wv ~~~;:J of course also supported this march for Latino misleaders channeled 1994 mass protests against California's Clinton. These groups foster the illusion immigrant-bashIng Prop. 187 Into support for racist Democrats. r;' ...•..

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has waged a racist "war on drugs" in the tiona 1 Communist League stand for joint blindness." Guided by the program of black ghettos has deported over 54,000 class struggle on both sides of the border. revolutionary internationalism, the Bol­ undocumented immigrants in ten months, Along with our comrades in the Grupo sheviks argued that blacks in the U.S. nearly 25,000 in California alone. The Espartaquista de Mexico and the Trot­ suffered double oppression-as workers vicious beatings of immigrants by sher­ skyist League of Canada, the Spartacist and from color-based racism. Uniquely iff's deputies in Riverside, California League/U.S. fights the NAFTA "free on the left today, our slogan to "Finish evoked images of the racist cop beating trade" rape of Mexico on the basis of an the Civil War-For black liberation of Rodney King. In "democratic," "civi­ internationalist revolutionary "program through socialist revolution!" is a recog­ lized" America, workers from Mexico directed against all the bourgeois rulers. nition that the fight for black freedom in and Central America'fleeing poverty, des­ It is because of their staunch support ' America necessarily requires sweeping peration and death are being drowned, of the capitalist private property system away the racist capitalist system. killed and maimed at the border. Mean­ that the AFL-CIO bureaucrats turn a As Karl Marx observed at the time of while, the Klan and other racist 'killers blind eye to the burning needs of immi­ the Civil War, labor in the white 'skin have organized "border patrols" to terror­ grants, blacks, women, gays and youth. can't be free if it is branded in the black ize immigrants. This is a deadly threat to It is because of this that Teamster mili­ skin. Black people were dragged over all workers and oppressed minoritit!ls. We tant Jesse Acuna continues to sit in jail here in chains, enslaved, bought and say: No deportations! Full citizenship on a five-year sentence for defending his sold like cattle. The Civil War which rights for those who have made it here! union on the picket line during the destroyed the slavocracy was a social For labor/minority mobilizations to stop national truckers strike in 1993. revolution. But the racist legacy of slav­ the Klan and skinhead fascist scum! ery has been institutionalized, refined, For Black Liberation Through "modernized" at each turn by the ruling Anti-Immigrant Racism­ Socialist Revolution! class and its institutions. Through mass Spearhead of Capitalist The fight against black oppression and bitter struggles during the civil rights Reaction anti-immigrant racism is central to revi­ movement the back of Jim Crow-that Wfth the massive attacks on' working talizing the labor movement in this coun­ is, the legal trappings of segregation­ people and minorities and the growing try. Especially in Los Angeles, Latino was broken, but de facto segregation and disparity between rich and poor, the U.S. workers in the past few years have discrimination remain. ruling class is obviously concerned about become a combative and militant section Black workers, potentially the most the seething discontent barely beneath the of the working class. Latino workers, advanced sector of the multiracial U.S. surface. That is why it is strengthening many of them refugees from dictatorial working class, are a strategic component the repressive apparatus of the state with regimes in Central America, can play a of the proletariat in this country and the huge increase in the number of police key role in the fight to organize the unor­ remain its most unionized section. Blacks on the streets, with the growth of private ganized and in combatting illusions fos­ are integrated into the political economy, strikebreaking outfits. Most of aU we see tered by the chauvinist AFL-CIO tops in but forcibly segregated at the bottom. this with the speedup on death row. For "democratic" U.S. imperialism. Contrary to the pseudo-nationalists, there years, the brutal racism of capitalist The bosses will do anything to divide is no material basis for a black nation, for America has been sharply refleCted by the foreign-born workers from their class an independent black political economy. savage injustice inflicted upon former brothers and sisters here. In the 19th cen­ Historic institutionalized racist subjuga­ Black Panthers Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) tury, railroad baron Jay Gould once tion has relegated black people to the sta­ and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Geronimo has boasted: "I can hire one half of the work­ tus of an oppressed race-color caste. been imprisoned for 26 years and Mumia ing class to kill the other half." In racist There ex.ists today a visible and sizable was placed on death row. Both were tar­ America, many immigrants learn to adapt geted for standing up for the oppressed. to ,the anti-black racism spread by the Under Clinton's new "anti-terrorism" "white ruling class, to the racist filth that law, immigrants can be jailed and the black masses remain at the bottom of deported for misdemeanors committed this capitalist society because of their years ~go'.no matter how long they have alleged lack of adherence to the "work lived here! Meanwhile, "English only" ethic," or because they lack "positive atti­ laws now exist in 23 states. Undoubtedly, tudes" or "proper genes." Immigrant the spirit of the 1857 Dred Scott ruling­ workers must grasp clearly that the fight that a black man had no rights that a against black oppression is central to any white man is bound to respect-lives on struggle to defend democratic rights and i,n the current ruling-class drive to strip the interests of the working class. It is immigrants of any rights. only the program of united class struggle, The response of the AFL-CIO bureau­ the fight for revolutionary integrationism, crats to these increasingly vicious attacks that holds out the promise of black free­ is to push the lie that Mexicans and other dom and working-class emancipation. foreign workers are "stealing" American In the U.S. the black question is strate­ jobs. NAFTA has turned Mexico into a gic for proletarian revolution. It is a private preserve for unbridlect':capitalist question of special oppression, and we exploitation by the U.S, But the labor acquired our attitude toward this ques­ tops opposed NAFTA on flag-waving tion first and foremost from Lenin and protectionist grounds, attempting to .line Trotsky's Bolsheviks, who hammered in­ up U.S. workers behind the American rhl­ to the heads of the early American Com­ Selb/LA i ing class and against their class' brothers munists that they had to break with Jesse Jackson, front man for Clin­ and sisters in Mexico. We in the Interna- a social-democratic tradition of "color ton's racist Democratic Party. 9

bhlck middle c1ass-class inequalities women's rights. In the late 19th century, sc'arcely a month passed in which there among black people ate greater even than Douglass opposed the scapegoating of weren't a half dozen or more. among whites. Nonetheless the color line Chinese immigrants and denounced the During this period, from the late remains even for those middle-class 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Today, it's 1880s to the early 1920s, half a million blacks who have made it out of the ghetto. even more urgent that black workers and immigrants from Europe, Asia and Latin If you're black in this country of the most militant youth break with black Demo­ America flocked to the U.S. With. white .• developed, lying, hypocritical "democ­ crats and nationalist demagogues in order planters in the South openly seeking Tacy," you always run up against what to wage an effective fight for black liber­ immigrant labor to pick cotton, harvest radical black democrat W.E.B. Du Bois ation. So it's crucial to throw a brief his­ sugar and plant vegetables, there was .called an invisible but tangible plate toricallight on the question of anti­ widespread fear among blacks of being glass. immigrant chauvinism among blacks. replaced by immigrants. This fear was ',Racism is not It matter of individual At the turn of the century, Booker T. promoted by Booker T. Washington. In prejudice per se.. Racism and racial Washington was one of the most promi­ his Atlanta Exposition address of 1895, oppression in the U.S. have been pushed nent spokesmen for "black capitalism." Washington said, 'To those of the white by the exploiters to, keep white workers Washington, who was born a slave in Vir­ race who look to the incoming of those bigoted, backward and unorganized­ ginia in 1856 and died in 1915, founded of foreign birth and strange tongue and this is its central purpose, as a prop and a the Tuskegee Institute, which was the habits for the prosperity of the South, pillar for the capitalist system. It's the center of the "self-help" gospel. The cap- were I permitted, I would repeat what I capitalisl'> who benefit ,from the brutal oppression of blacks. The fight against . the special oppression of blacks is insep­ arable from the struggle ,to free all of the·' working people from capitalist exploitation. Louis Farrakhan BI'ack Misleaders Push (left) echoes Anti-Immigrant Chauvinism Booker T. There is no militant black leadership Washington In today. Yow've got people looking to Al . spewing anti-Immigrant Sharpton, an,admitted FBI fink, for lead­ chauvinism ership. You've got people looking to and pushing Louis Farrakhan, who wanted Malcolm accommodation X dead and whose organization defends to racist status fascists (see "Nation of Islam: Body­ quo. guards for Hitler Apologist David Irv­ ing," page 28). , Black misleaders have joined in the Ramsey/AP Library of Congress scapegoating of immigrants. Back in italists made him a big shot. Washington had to say to my own race, 'cast down 1986, Coretta Scott King and Reverend advocated that blacks accommodate to your buckets where you are'." Walter Falilntroy supported the Simpson­ the racist status quo. His motto was "sep­ Much of this anti-immigrant prejudice Mazzoli bill, which called for sanctions arate but equaL" But separate can never was particularly aimed at Italians. The against employers hiring immigrants. be equal. During the militant struggles for Voice of the Negro, a popular black jour­ Fauntroy is the preacher who in Novem- black rights 30 years ago, particularly by nal, pounded away at Italian workers for ber 1982, in Washington, D.C. tried to the radical nationalist Black Panther being "hell-generating Mafia," organ­ keep blacks, away from the 5,OOO-strong Party, the name of Booker T. Washington izers of labor unions, strike happy. By I'abor/black mobilization initiated by the was rightfully associated with Uncle and large, Italians imported to the South Spartacist, League that swept the Klan Tom, a sellout, a bootlicker, a lackey.of did not stay at agricultural jobs, and off the streets. The KKK tried to rally the bourgeoisie. Today the black nation­ those who remained there settled in the against immigrants, but the integrated alists and Democrats pay tribute to this cities where they opened up restaurants, working dass under our Marxi'st leader­ man who agreed with the white ruling fruit stands and hotels. Moreover, many ship handed them a big defeat. In D.C. class that blacks should accept segrega­ Italians, were vociferous in denouncing anq elsewhere, our anti-fascist mobiliza­ tion and "stay in their place." Washing­ lynohing in the South and were' baited tions are based on our class-struggle pro­ ton's pro-capitalist program was echoed . for being friendly to blacks. Italian im­ gram and have been built in .opposition at last year's Million Man March. migrants were themselves lynched,. par­ to black Democratic mayors. who front After the Civil War destroyed the slave ticularly in 1892 in New Orleans. The for the capitalist ruling class. system, the burial of Radical Reconstruc­ ironies of history! Thanks to the petty-bourgeois black tion in the Souttr-:-notably with the so­ The black press also fostered anti­ misleaders, there is significant anti­ called Compromise of 1877-signaled immigrant chauvinism toward Mexicans, . immigrant chauvinism among blacks, the betrayal of the promise of black free­ Chinese and' Japanese. In the· 1920s, reflected in the fact that over half of black . dom by the Northern capitalists. The . A. Philip: Randolph's Brotherhood of voters In California supported Prop'. 187. dreams and expectations' of black, people Sleeping Car Porters, the first black trade In contrast to the likes of Farrakhan and were buried under the ashes of Recon­ union, waged ,a campaign to exclude 'others,. the great revolutionary Abolition­ struction, with Klan terrorists providing Japanese workers from becoming porters. ist Frederick Douglass was an opponent the torch. Black.voters, jurors and elected When the bosses launched a red scare of all social oppression and fought ener­ officials became rare. Lynchings were at after World War I and deported thousands getically to the end of his life for an all-time high: at the turn 'ofthe century of immigrants. and radicals, the black

" __• ____ · ___ ~._ •••• _~ ...... " •• ~._W"'.N .• __ ._. --.•• --"'_··~_._" ______"_'_"'.'''''_''''_'.'_'''''' __.'_'''''._'''.I.1"11 I I II '- 10

masses.in the name of "black 'solidarity." nTH Our task js to mobilize the most con­ ~ lSI! scious layer of the integrated labor move- NSHIP 'ment under revolutionary leadership to fight for power against this murderous' rs ruling class and its dying system. Black II .1 workers are, as Trotsky .so succinctly iHTS. stated, convoked by history to play avaIl-; -'I"'yl." guard role in the liberation' not only of blacks and the American working class; but as cadres for world revolution. The Labor Black Leagues initiated by and affiliated with the Spartacist League have mobilized against Klan/skinhead terrorists, have joined in defending abor­ tion clinics against "right to life" terror-' isis, have initiated actions against the attacks on immigrants, and mobilized to protestracis.t cop murder. The Labor Black Leagues seek to intervene ,in, so­ WV Photo cial struggle as transitional organizations San Francisco protest, AprilS, against videotaped beating of Mexican linked to the· Spartacist League, as part immigrants by Riverside County sheriff's deputies. of the fight to build·,a revolutionary middle-class reformists labored under the and Arabs and Koreans are the enemies of workers party. Black, Latino, Asian and delusion that support to anti-immigrant black people. He is an apologist for slav­ white workers, men and women, ,must legislation would radically improve the ery in Sudan. And his Million Man March fight together in a revolutionary Marxist conditions of blacks, The Philadelphia was a segregationist, anti-woman, anti­ working-class party to advance the inter­ Trihune, a black newspaper, remarked working-class march for "atonement" ests of all the poor and oppressed against that "restricted immigration is fundamen­ which blamed blacks for their oppression. all the capitalists, no matter what their tally sound and will help keep the work­ It was an accommodation to, the racist color or sex. " , i ers with full dinner pails," As a historian status quo. That's why the racist rulers We are Trotskyists. We proudly say of the period aptly remarked, "The De­ praised it. And that's why the cops that we are the party of the Russian :Rev­ pression would soon empty those full din­ left it alone. Why, Reaganite Republican olution, A collectivized, planned econ­ ner pails," Subjected to intense racism vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp omy is necessary to provide for jobs, and excluded from economic life, many recently said that some of the things Far­ housing and education for all, to end blacks were embittered by the fact that rakhan is doing are "wonderful"! the oppression of women and minorities immigrants had access to theaters, hotels If there is any doubt where the Nation and provide a future for youth. tInder­ and other social amenities, and bought of Islam and Farrakhan stand, read his mined by decades of Stalinist, misrule into. the prevalent white racist prejudices response to Clinton on Libya. It's a nau­ and betrayal, the gains of the October against immigrants. But blacks remained seating, ingratiating pledge of allegiance Revolution were finally wiped out by no less poor and downtrodden as a result. to the U.S. "democracy" of slaveholders: capitalist counterrevolution. Today we "America as the flower of democratic fight for a new October, to put the work­ For a Class-Struggle Fight society, guarantees its citizens the free­ ing class in power around the world. Against Racial Oppression! dom of religion, freedom of association, Our principal weapon is the program of freedom of the press, freedom from fear, It is necessary to reject and politically and it gives the citizen the right to sue uncompromising class .struggle, interna­ defeat self-proclaimed spokesmen for . the government if the government has tionalist, proletarian and revolutionary. the oppressed who spread vile anti­ abridged these constitutional guarantees. We fight for a Trotskyist party of world immigrant poison, echoing ,the racist This is what makes America great. The socialist revolution, a reforged Fourth saving grace of democracy is it allows International. rulers' divide-and-conquer schemes. The those who disagree to have a forum in sinister demagogue Farrakhan has regu­ 'order to correct what may not necessar- We encourage you to become fighters larly gone after immigrants, Koreans and ily be in the interest of the people or the for the revolutionary program of Trot­ Arabs, for example, because the aspiring administration." skyism, to study the genuine Marxism petty black capitalists he speaks for want You tell that to Geronimo or Mumia embodied in the writings of teachers of " exclusive rights in exploiting the ghetto Abu-Jama\! the working class' like Marx, Engels, masses. Recently, the Clinton administra­ Black front men for the racist status Lenin, Trotsky .and Rosa Luxemburg, tion threatened legal action against Far­ quo are on the same side as the racist who gave their all for the emancipation rakhan if he accepted money from Libya. capitalist oppressors and are contemptu­ of the workers and oppressed from capi­ We say that Farrakhan should be able to ous of the poor and exploited. Their role talist exploitation. We hope that your get money from wherever he desires and is not only as a buffer between the black patient and systematic examination of the racist capitalist gang in the White masses and the white ruling class, but as the fruits of their theoretical labor and House should butt out of it. Not only his overseers for the capitalist rulers to keep revolutionary practice will lead you to but the rights of all of us are at stake. the lid on and to put out any fire that join the International Communist League Many black 'people look to Farrakhan might consume the master's house. They in our fight for world proletarian revolu­ as the only black .leader today fighting are opposed to militant, integrated strug­ tion and for,an egalitarian socialist soci­ back and speaking out. But what is Far­ gle. To the contrary, they,are about a ety without exploiters, a society fit for all rakhan speaking out about? That Jews black elite fattening itself off the black of us to live and learn in .•

·-·_____ .. ft. 11 reprinted from Workers Vanguard Nos. 652 and 653, 27 Septemher and 11 Octoher 1996 --Immigration and-- , ' " ' Racist "Fortress Europe"

Across Europe, racist attacks on'immi­ grants are at the cutting, edge· of 'the capitalist rulers 'assault on the' living standards and union; 'organizations of the entire working' class. Most recently, on September 19 the German govern­ ment of Christian Democratic chancellor Helmut Kohl announced plans to expel 320,000 Bosnian refugees from the country. This comes' at the same time as the German bourgeoisie is preparing' to push through a massive package 'ofaus­ terity measures .. The same holds true in France, where the government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppe is proposing $12 billion in budget cuts affecting workers, pensioners and stu­ dents, while carrying out vicious racist attacks on immigrants and residents of African and North African descent. When .French riot cops last month stormed a Paris church occupied by immigrant workers seeking permits. to stay in the country, it provoked unprecedented pro­ test demonstrations in which trade~uniol'l contingents marched together with black and Maghrebin youth (see "France: Mass Protests Against Racist DeportationS'," WV No. 650, 30 August). The International Communist League has consistently fought for mobilizing the power of the working class. to defel'ld' immigrant rights, raising the calls for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and for worker/immigrant mobilizations to stop racist terror. Moreover, in countries like France, Germany, Italy and Britain, foreign-born workers are a central and Rebours/AP often strategic sector of the proletariat. PariS, August 21: Trade-union contingents Joined mass, demonstration In During last December's strike wave by solidarity with Immigrant protesters besieged by cops. public sector workers in France, our com­ rades insisted on the crucial need for the form, an article on the question of immi­ strikers to take up the fight against racial gration in Europe which first appeared PART ONE oppression, emphasiZing that this was in Spartacist .(French edition, No. 29, . necessary to extend the struggle to the Summer 1996), This article was initially For most of modern history the United private and mainly industrial sector,. with published as an introduction. to a French States was the only advanced capitalist its strong component of workers 'from the translation· of "In Defense of Revolution­ country in .which there existed a large Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa.' ary Integrationism" (Spartacist [English oppressed minority defined by race. The We publish below, in slightly edited edition] No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94). famous and influential study of blacks in

•...... , .... " •••• " •••• ,,, •• '''.'' "" "1/+>1'-, 12 the U.S. by the Swedish social democrat Over the past decade large fascist NOrth Africans and, blacks in France as Gunnar Myrdal in the 1940s was entitled parties, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's well as youth of African and Caribbean An American Dilemma. European social National Front in France and the descent in Britain. Groups defending democrats and liberals adopted an air Austrian Freedom Party of Jorg Haider, immigrant rights in Europe have rallied of moral superiority toward anti-black have arisen on a platform af "ethnic to the international campaign to save racism and segregation in the United c1eansing"--the mass expulsion of non­ Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Pan­ States as if their own societies were Europeans living in their countries. A ther and radical journalist on Pennsylva­ immune from such despicable prejudices British Labour Party member of the Euro­ nia's death row as a result of a police/FBI and practices. pean Parliament. Glyn Ford, decries "the frame-up. They see in Mumia not simply I Today, from southern Italy to north­ rising quagmire of racism and xenopho- a victim of injustice but a comrade. in the. ern Germany, it has become com-· . bia, promoted by right-wing extremism, fight against racial oppression. monplace for dark-skinned people­ into which our societies run the risk While in the past the presence ofa immigrant workers and their children, of sinking." But those who bewail the large oppressed racial minority was refugees from civil wars and communal­ trend while accepting the framework regarded as unique to the United States, ist massacres in the Third World-to be of capitalism can do nothing to resist one now encounters an opposite ten­ killed by fascist gangs or the police. The or reverse the increasing descent of dency, a failure to recognize certain jim­ cultural event of the year in France was "respectable" politics into an orgy of damental differences in the social char­ the film La lIaine which depicts 24 chauvinist immigrant-bashing. acter of the. American black population hours in the life of three rootless young It is understandable that militants in and the recently formed non-European men who hang out together, all second­ West Europe\ immigrant communities, communities in West Europe. generation immigrants: an East European .. living in ghettos under racist police occu­ . The . descendants of black Africans Jew, a North African Arab and a West pation, now identify with American enslaved and taken in chains to the New African black. "An Arab in a police sta­ blacks, their historic struggles and es­ World at the birth of the capitalist system tion doesn't last an hour," one of them pecially their most radical spokesmen. were integral and central to the building remarks as a truism. It is telling that in The powerful personality, writings and of the American nation. and later of the France. the term "immigrants" is used speeches of Malcolm X-inspirer of American nation-state. The American routinely to include people who were "revolutionary" hlack nationalism in the nation was formed in the era of mercan­ born in France and are French citizens. U.S. in the I 960s--are admired by young tile capitalism through . British .colonial settlement of a region inhabited by a sparse population of aboriginal peoples with a stone-age culture who proved hor­ ribly vulnerable to Afro-Eurasian dis­ International Communist League eases. The massive importation of slaves (Fourth Internationalist) from sub-Saharan Africa provided the International Center: Box 7429 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA labor force for the establishment of large-scale plantation agriculture in the Spartaclst League of Australia ...... •. Spartacist League, GPO Box 3473 southern tier of Britain's North American. Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia colonies. The owners of these slave plan­ Spartaclst League/Britain ...... '. . . . • . .. Spartacist Publications, PO Box 1041 tations, who developed an aristocratic London NW5 3EU, England Trotskyist League of Canada/ mentality akin to the European landed Ligue trotskyste du Canada ...... '... . Trotskyist League, Box 7198, Station A nobility, became a dominant component Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X8, Canada of the ruling class in the' American Spartakist-Arbelterpartel Deutschlands ...... SpAD, Postfach 5 55 colonies. 10127 Berlin, Germany When the colonies achieved indepen­ Dublin Spartacist Group ...... PO Box 2944, Dublin 1 Republic of Ireland dence from Britain in the late 18th cen­ tury, the United States of America was Ligue trotskyste de France ...... Le Bolchevik, B. P. 135-10 75463 Paris Cedex 10, France formed as ·a bourgeois democracy for white, male property owners. Within a Spartacist Group India/Lanka ...... write to Spartacist, New York few generations, however, male suffrage Lega trotskista d'ltalia ...... , Walter Fidacaro C. P. 1591, 20101 Milano, Italy was extended to the white lower classes. Southern plantation agriculture, centrally Spartaclst Group Japan ...... Spartacist Group Japan PO Box 49, Akabane Yubinkyoku cotton, supplied the, principal exports Kita-ku, Tokyo 115, Japan for the early American bourgeois state, Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico ...... H. Herrera, Apdo. Postal 453 thereby providing the financial resources 06002 Mexico 1, D.F., Mexico for the rapid growth of mercantile and 'Spartaclst/Moscow ...... ; . write to Le Bolchevik, Paris industrial capitalism in the North based Spartakusowska Grupa Polski...... Platforma Spartakusowcow on "free" wage labor. Skrytka Pocztowa 148 The increasing conflicts of interest 02-588 Warszawa 48, Poland between the Southern plantation owners Spartaclst/South Africa ...... •...... ·Spartacist, PostNet Suite 248 and burgeoning Northern capital led to . Carlton Center . a full-scale civil war in the 1860s which Level 100, Shop 140' resulted in the abolition of black chattel Commissioner Street Johannesburg 2001, South Africa slavery when the North won, in part due to the recruitment .of hundreds of thou­ Spartaclst League/U.S. Spartacist League, Box 1377 GPO New York, NY 10116, USA sands of blacks into the Union Army. After a tumultuous decade of inter- 13 racial bourgeois democracy ("Radical Reconstruction:"), a new form of white supremacy was established in the South. The so-called Jim Crow system of legally enforced racial segregation and totalitar­ ian police-state control lasted three­ quarters of a century, until the civil rights struggles of the late 1950s-early 1960s brought about a semblance .of bourgeois' democracy in the region. American blacks have always shared with whites the two main determinants of a: national culture: language '(English) and religion (Christianity). Interesti;ngly, when the Plains Indians-aboriginal peo­ ples living in the central part of North' America-first encountered blacks in the late 19th century, they termed them "the black white men."Blacks in the U.S. are an oppressed race-color caste integrated into the American capitalist economy, including strategic 'sectors of the indus­ trial proletariat, while at the same time Detroit News largely segregated at the bottom of Amer­ Black workers played militant role in UAW strike at Detroit Chevrolet plant ican bourgeois society; In mld-1940s, while Jim Crow segregation reigned In the South. The fight ,There will be no social revolution in against black oppression is key to American workers revolution. the United States without thee, united struggle of black :andwhite workers led by their multiracial vanguard party, which must be the most consistent and active defender of all the specially oppressed layers of society. The revolutionary cadres will certainly be drawn heavily from black proletarians as militants are won to recognizing that there can be no other road to eliminating the special oppression of black people than the conquest of power by the American work­ ing class. Capitalist Counterrevolution Fuels Anti-Immigrant Racism " Unlike' the black color-caste in the U;S., the presence of a large non-white .'1" I population in West Europe is. in histori­ cal terms, a quite recent development. It was'only in the 1960sthat the Caribbean :.j) islands and Indian subcontinent displaced AP Ireland as the main source of immigration Le Pen, who got 15 percent of the deported. Throughout the decade anti­ into Britain. It was not 'until the 1970s vote, campaigned to "send back home" immigrant demagogy, directed especially that the number of Turkish Gastarheiter three million non-European "immi­ at Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany (foreign workers) surpassed Italian Gast­ grants." And ,it would not require the vic­ and East Europe, fueled French fascism arheiter in West Germany. And only in tory of fascism or even the entry of a fas­ and other right-wing. pOlitical move­ the past decade has the number of foreign cist party into the government in, France ments, thus setting the. stage for the workers, mainly North African Arabs, in or elsewhere ,to. forcibly expel hundreds . deportat~on of Jews by the Vichy regime Italy exceeded the number of Italians of thousands, if not. millions, of immi-' to the death camps of Nazi-occupied, working in other European countries. We grants and refugees, especially thpse who Europe.: ' are thus seeing the recent formation of do not have, citizenship rights. Over 20 years: ago, when anti­ large non-European, predominantly tradi­ By, way of historical analogy, dur­ immigrant sentiment re-emerged as a tionally Muslim (except in Britain) com­ ing the Great Depression of the early major factor on the West European polit­ munities in long-established bourgeois 1930s the number of foreign workers in ical scene, our tendency stated: nation-states. France-mainly Italians, Poles. and AI-· ,"The line between refonnist social chau­ ; Hence the thrust of nationalist reaction gerians-was reduced by haifa million, vinism and proletarian internationalism , in 'Western Europe must be drawn on in West Europe is toward the mass expul­ equal to 5 percent of the total labor force. the· demand that all foreign workers sion of the non-white population . .In last Some left because they couldn't find jobs, ~ are entitled to immediate and' full citi­ year's presidential election in France, but many were simply. rounded up and " zenship rights in the nations where they

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Beginning with the, 16th century, the I development of mercantile capitalism in England pauperized the peasantry, sharply reducing its size as peasants became agricultural laborers and artisan proletarians (e.g., weavers of 'woolen cloth working in their own .homes). In England, the pioneer country of the industrial ,revolution, factories soon ab-' sorbed the indigenous surplus population despite the massive use of child labor. From the mid-19th 'century onward, the expansion of British capitalism required the importation of impoverished peasants. from its oldest and nearest colony, Ireland. In many impOrtant respects, especially in its political effects, the Irish immigra­ tion in late-19th-century Britain was sim­ ilar to the Third World immigration in II London News present-day West Europe. Differences in Irish emigrants leaving home In mid-19th century. Chauvinist prejudices religion-Roman Catholic for the Irish; against Irish immigrant workers undercut development of class consciousness Protestant for the English-acted as a for­ of British working class. midable barrier to intermarriage in an era when the church played a far more impor­ labor. As any Jamaican or Bengali 'citi­ establish a sod/llist economy in a society tant role in working-class communities zen' of Britain will attest, formal citi­ free of exploitation and all oppression. than it does in contemporary Europe. Fur­ zenship rights do not automatically end Like black Americans, West Europe's the oppression of immigrants. How­ thermore, the colonial subjugation of Ire­ dark-skinned proletarians are not just ever, winning full citizenship rights land impeded not only intermarriage but· for West Europe's foreign workers defenseless victims but a very important even social ties between the two main would be a great victory for proletarian component of the forces capable of national components of the proletariat internationalism." destroying the racist capitalist system. in Britain. Many English workers were,. - "West Europe's Imported West Indian transport workers and South deeply infected with their rulers' imperi­ Labor: A Key to Revolution" Asian nurses in Britain, North African (WV No. 31,26 October 1973) alist chauvinism toward the Irish" while Arab and Berber auto workers in France, Irish immigrant workers ,viewed all Eng- . In the present climate of political Turkish coal miners and Kurdish chemi­ lishmen as members of the oppressor reaction-marked by mass unemploy­ cal workers in Germany will play an nation. ment, .the drive to dismantle the social­ important part in a European proletarian Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels con" democratic "welfare state" and the ef­ revolution. These workers are a bridge to sidered the Irish/English antagonism to , fects of the counterrevolution in East the workers and peasant masses of the be a major factor, if not the major fac­ Europe and the former Soviet Union­ neocolonial Third World, a living link in tor, contributing to the relative political even formal citizenship is not in itself a an international socialist perspective. To backwardness of the working class in the guarantee against "ethnic cleansing" in transform this perspective into reality British Isles despite the 'existence ofa West Europe. The immigrant communi­ requires above all the construction of mass trade-union movement. Addressing ties are subject to increasing racist revolutionary parties, the reforging of the the 1871 London conference of the First ' oppression-ghettoization, police brutal­ Fourth International based on the princi­ International, Marx stated: ity,fascists. Increasingly segregated, ples of Lenin and Trotsky. prey to cop and racist violence, and on "You will know .that between the English Immigration and Labor workers and the Irish workers there has the bottom of the economic "ladder," . existed of old very considerable antago­ dark-skinned European citizens would in 19th-Century Britain nism the causes of which are actually recognize a lot in the conditions of and France very easy to enumerate. This antagonism American blacks. Unlike in North America, mercantile has its origin in the differences of lan­ guage and religion; and in the competi­ In the United States, a central slogan and then industrial capitalism in Europe tion between Irish workers and. English of the ICL is "Finish the Civil War­ developed on a preexisting feudal socio­ workers over wages. In England this ' Black liberation through socialist revolu­ economic structure based on the exploi­ antagonism is the dam that holds back tion." A central 'slogan in Europe is for tation of the peasantry, which constituted the flood of Revolution, hence it is skill­ the overwhelming majority of the popu­ fully exploited by the government and "full citizenship rights" for all immi­ upper classes, who·are convinced that no grants, reflecting the fact that the immi­ lation. Thus in most of Europe the indus­ bond would be able to unite the English gration question is fundamentally a dem­ trial revolution entailed the massive emi­ and Irish workers." ocratic question, which is, however, gration, so to speak, of peasant youth The following year Engels, speaking strategic to proletarian unity. Arid today, from the countryside to the cities rather at the International's General Council, democratic rights-e.g., equal rights for than the importation of labor from for­ condemned "the belief, only too com­ women, national independence of the eign countries with radically different mon among English workingmen, that colonies, immigrants' and minorities' national. cultures (e.g., language, relig­ they were superior beings compared to rights--can be won and secured only by ion). There were, however, two ,impor­ the Irish, and as much an aristocracy the proletariat fighting to take state tant exceptions, each in a very different as the mean whites of the [American] power away from the bourgeoisie and way: Britain and France. Slave States considered themselves· to

'''1' I 11111 I 15

be With regard to the Negroes." essary for the development of an indus­ French colonies or semi-colonies'. Thus Throughout the rest of the 19th cen­ trial capitalist economy. With the begin­ there was no longstanding political tury, the English trade unions remained nings of the industrial revolution under antagonism between Italian immigrant politically subordinate to the bourgeois the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon workers and Frenchmen in the late 19th Liberal Party, while Irish working people (1850-70), the French ruling class delib­ century as there was between Irish immi­ remained under the sway of petty­ erately opted for the large-scale importa­ grants and Englishmen at that time or bourgeois nationalist movements. It was tion of foreign labor. Given their wel\­ between Algerians and Frenchmen in not until the early years of this century grounded fear of social revolution, they . France today. that there emerged even a reformist party wanted to preserve traditional peasant An assimilationist policy was also of the British working class, the Labour villages dominated by the local parish strongly promoted by the bourgeoisie. In Party. It is perhaps not a historical acci­ priest as bastions of social and political ' . 1889, the anniversary of the. Revolution, dent that the Labour Party became the conservatism. a new law granted automatic citizenship hegemonic party of the British working The working class in France was to anyone born .on French soil. While class in the early 1920s, the same time therefore made up in, large part of im­ this law was certainly objectivelypto­ that Ireland gained its independence from migrants from Italy, Spain,Belgium, gressive, its authors were by no means Britain, albeit with the partition of the southern Germany and, somewhat later, motivated by liberal democratic ideals. northern counties of Ulster. Nonetheless, Poland. In certain periods the scale of Faced with the new, inore powerful and the Irish Republic remained a relatively immigration exceeded even that of the populous German Second Reich, the impoverished neocolony of Britain, ex­ United States. Many of the members and French ruling class wanted to conscript porting labor to the factories and con­ supporters of the National Front would ,the sons of Italian and Spanish immi­ struction sites of London and the Mid- not today be Frenchmen if Le Pen's pro­ grant workers into its army. 1a:i1ds. And to this day, the British upper gram had been applied to their grand­ Nonetheless; the cosmopolitan char­ classes continue to skiHf4lly exploit fathers and great-grandfathers! acter of the working class in France antagonism between English and Irish Until the 1930s, the mass of these strengthened the forces of the left. This' working people to impede the forces '()f white, mainly Catholic immigrants were· became manifest in the Dreyfus Affair of social revolution. . assimilated through widespread inter­ the. late 1890s, when the frame-up of a '. In France, the radical bdurgeois­ marriage with the French within a single Jewish army of~cer 'by an anti-Semitic democratic revolution' of 1789-93 effec­ generation. A number of factors con­ cabal in the' general staff resulted in· a tively destroyed the laMed aristocracy tributed to this development, unique in sharp' left/right polarization leading to and produced a large and entrenched the history of European industrial capi­ 'the brink of civil war. A heroic and effec­ class of peasant smallholders. The birth talism. First, the overwhelming majority tive role in defense of Dreyfus was rate in 19th-century France, unusually of immigrants came from countries played by the famous writer Emile Zola, low by European standards, further re­ which, like France, were traditionally the son of an Italian immigrant engineer duced the supply of surplus labor nec- Catholic. Nor were these countries father and a French mother.

Army's victory over Hitler's Wehrmacht, Europe experienced another period of PART TWO while large sections of the European political instability conditioned by a bourgeoisies were tainted by their col­ series of long, losing colonial wars­ Why have large numbers of non­ laboration with the Nazi occupation Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique. 'Europeans entered and settled in West forces. Especially in Italy and France, A new generation of militant working­ . Europe over the past few decades? the national Communist parties had also class and student youth came to the Why have second-generation immigrants gained greatly increased authority in the fore, hostile to the traditional social­ (North African and African youth in working class. In order to pacify the democratic and pro-Moscow Stalinist France, Turkish and Kurdish youth in working masses, with the indispensable parties. In Latin Europe, this period of Germany), many of whom do not even help of the social democrats and Stalin­ radicalization .culminated in the, pre­ speak the language of their parents' native ists (who joined postwar "popular front" revolutionary crises of the May-June land, not assimilated through widespread governments with capitalist parties), the 1968 events in France and Italy's "hot . intermarriage as did the children of Ital­ bourgeoisie needed to offer a far better autumn" the following year, and later the ian and Spanish foreign workers in deal than the prewar conditions of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-75. To 'France in the late 19th and early 20th cen­ Great Depression and the rise of fascism. restabilize the bourgeois order in the turies? Why has anti-immigrant racism At the same time, American imperialism 'southern tier of NATO, greater conces­ increasingly dominated West European promoted and funded social-democratic sions were made to the working class political and social life in recent years? bureaucrats in the trade unions and anti­ while social democracy was deliberately The answers to these questions are rooted Communist reformist parties in order to strengthened in this region. in the post-1945 Cold War division of cohere the NATO alliance against the From the late 1940s through the late Europe which ended with capitalist coun­ Soviet bloc. Thus originated the complex 1970s, the West European bourgeoisies terrevolution in East Europe and the for­ of social programs known as' the "wel­ bought social peace and co-opted the ref­ mer Soviet Union. fare state"-free or inexpensive medical ormist (social-democratic and Stalinist) At the end of World War II, West care, partially government-funded pen­ bureaucracies by accepting a lower rate Europe was pregnant with social revolu­ sions, unemployment insurance, four or of exploitation than the historic norm. tion. The Soviet Union had acquired five weeks' paid vacation annually, etc. This, however, made it increasingly enormous new prestige from the Red In the 1960s and early I 970s, West difficult and uneconomical to employ

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labor., By the 1960s, the main source of West Europe's imported labor was the neocolonies of the Third World-the West Indies and South Asia in the case of Britain, North Africa and West Africa in the case of France, and Turkey in the case of West Germany. Thus was introduced into West Europe a large population that was not white and not Christian. Following the 1974-75 globaleco­ nomic downturn, most West European governments moved to cut down the fur­ ther influx of foreign workers. West Ger­ many, for example, restricted new immi­ gration to reuniting families and a few particular professions and crafts. The Bonn government even offered Turkish workers lump-sum payments to, return to Anatolia but found' few takers. Since the mid-1970s, the main source of growth in the "immigrant" communities has been

Le Boichevik the European-born children of the origi­ Llgue Trotskyste contingent in Paris demonstration against expulsion of nal immigrants. In Britain, for example, Immigrants, 1993. new immigration has been effectively zero for many years, and half of the 2.5 indigenous West European workers at fare state," West European capitalism was million people considered members of the lower end of the labor market-the able to maintain an acceptable rate of racial minorities were born there. kind of jobs historically filled by peasant exploitation only through the large-scale These second-generation youth are youth fresh from the countryside. To importation of labor from poor countries. taught in European schools, speak Eng­ induce West German, French or Dutch The Cold War also indirectly deter­ lish, French, German, Dutch, etc. as youth to work as unskilled manual mined that those poor countries would their primary and in many cases only laborers-especially ,at jobs that were increasingly be Third World neocolonies, language, and grew up watching Euro­ hard, dirty, dangerous or regarded as especially the traditionally Muslim re­ pean and American films and television demeaning (e.g., household servants)­ gions of North Africa and Anatolia (the programs, etc. The children of Pakistani would have required ratcheting up the Asian part of Turkey). Before World War parents in Britain would be completely entire level of wages and' henefits to lev-: II, East Europe was an important source~:i' alien in Karachi. Yet while these second­ els incompatible with profitability. By of foreign labor for the more developed generation immigrants are culturally the 1960s, young West Germans would,' western half of the continent. For exam­ , European, they have not been assimilated simply not take jobs like garbage collec­ ple, in the 1920s and '30s a large propor­ through widespread intermarriage with tors or janitors. And this ~ttitude is now tion of coal miners in northern France and their white European contemporaries. prevalent even in the more backward Belgium were Polish. To the pervasive racism of European southern tier of Europe. According to a The rapid industrialization of the • society is added the Christian/Muslim government official in Rome, "These post-1945 East European bureaucrati­ divide. To be sure, many, if not most, days you have Egyptian cooks and Fil­ cally deformed workers states, based on second-generation Arabs and Turks in ipino maids. There are certain jobs ital­ planned, collectivized economies, ab­ West Europe are not religious. And this ians won't do anymore" (New York Times, sorbed peasant and unemployed urban is also true of French and German, youth. 8 September 1994). youth who in previous generations would But the decision to marry across racial have worked in West Europe or emigrated and religious lines usually ,means risk­ The Cold War, the "Welfare to the United States. Since the Stalinist ing the prospective couple's being cut State" and Mass Immigration regimes sought to maximize total nation­ off from both families. Mixed marriages 'in West Europe al output (not the rate of profit), they also are thus uncommon, and those that do The relative prosperity, "welfare state" prevented emigration through police-state occur-subject to hostile social pressures benefits and, increased cultural level of controls. Thus, except for Yugoslavia, on many sides-experience a high rate post-1945 Wt:st Europe also, brought East Europe ceased to be a source of of breakups. In 1990, only 1 percent of about a significant change in social life cheap foreign labor for West European all children born to Turkish mothers in and demographic 'conditions. Women, capitalism until counterrevolution swept Germany had ethnic German fathers. The traditionally housewives beholden, to their across the region in 1989-91. level of mixed marriages is far higher in husbands, went to work. The birthrate The first waves of immigrant workers France with its traditionally more liberal fell sharply even in traditionally Catholic in West Europe were from poorer Euro­ attitude toward race. In 1990, of all chil­ countries like Italy. There are, now more , pean countries-Irish in Britain, Span­ dren born in France to Algerian mothers, Italians over the age of 65 than ,under the iards and Portuguese in France, Italians, one quarter had Gallic fathers. Nonethe­ age of 15. Thus the economic effect of the Greeks and Yugoslavs in West Germany. less the underlying thrust of French soci­ higher cost of indigenous West, European "However, the combined effects of eco­ ety today is against integration of the labor was reinforced by reduced supply. nomic growth, rising living standards and Maghrebian community, as compared, for Short of massive, long-term unemploy­ falling birthrates in these countries example with the assimilation of the ear­ ment and a political assault on the, "wel- reduced their pool of cheap exportable lier Polish immigrants, who (although 17

ble to cop tetror, the second-generation youth face astronomical levels of unem­ ployment and are stigmatized as "crimi­ nals." Racist oppression thus directly engenders segregation and the defensive compaction of the Maghrebian "commu­ nity," also strengthening the hold of religious and other "traditional" values. Thus the immigrant-derived youth who are condescendingly counseled to "assim­ ilate" are in fact thrown by racist oppres­ sion and indifference back into the em­ brace of their families-an embrace often closer than many, especially young girls, would choose if they really had an option of integrating into an egalitarian, plural­ istic, anti-racist society. ,!).~. Despite differences between various ~;,Jf European countries, the basic social fact • I' is that large communities of dark-skinned Sygma non-Europeans now exist within ,West Fight against anti-immigrant racism Is key to mobilizing workers against Europe's bourgeois nation-state system. capitalist attacks. Above: Workers of North African descent played prominent role in French Peugeot auto strike, 1983. Below: 1992 march In defense of And these communities' have become the Immigrants in Italy. ,main target of bourgeois reaction fueled by the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc. Social Democracy: "Left" .Face'of· Racist Reaction The 1980s saw the efforts of the Euro­ pean bourgeoisies to increase the rate of exploitation which had become unac­ ceptably low by international standards. While the Thatcher regime in Britain launched a frontal assault on the "wel­ fare state" and the trade-union move­ ment, the anti-working-c1ass offensive in continental West Europe first manifested itself at the level of employment. Capi­ talists simply cut back on hiring young workers newly entering the job market, claiming that the prevailing levef of wages and state-mandated, benefits made it impossible for them to compete effec­ L'Espresso tively with the Americans and Japanese. Mass unemployment, especially among they included a component of Jews) were further exacerbated by the bourgeoisie's the' youth, has been a major feature of "white." hatred for the Algerian people, which the West European economies since the The self-conception of bourgeois defeated French imperialism and, won world downturn of 1982-83. French society is that France is not racist national independence in 1962. France in the 1980s,' in particular, in the American sense of discrimination Over the past eight years, France has offers clear and compelling proof of based on skin color. Those who assimi­ been repeatedly swept by massive, inte­ the impotence of social-democratic ref­ late into "French culture," so the story grated youth protests, as "French" and ormism in the face of the capitalist goes, will be accepted as French. This is "immigrant" youth have demonstrated market, national and international. The the "secularist" rationale behind such together against cop killings and against country had a social-democratic presi­ racist measures as expelling girls from ruling-class measures to cut costs for dent, Franc;ois Mitterrand, while the school for wearing the hljab (Islamic education and to introduce a sub­ Socialists were the dominant and at times 'headscarf). A particular obstacle to as­ minimum wage for young workers. But sole party of government. Yet the level of similation is that racism in France is the French left, which is still perfectly unemployment far exceeded that under also a legacy of colonialism. The ex­ capable of rallying tens of thousands to the previous three decades of right-wing colonial peoples, whom the bourgeoisie protest nuclear testing, by and large has bourgeois governments. The unemploy­ has always considered subhumans need­ not raised a peep of protest as legions of ment rate, which was 6 percent when Mit­ ing to be "civilized" with the gun, the cops sweep through the Metro to "check terrand entered the Elysee Palace in 1981, , Bible and the national anthem, today the papers" of anyone with a dark skin. c1irnbed to over 10 percent by the end of form 'the core of the immigrant work­ With the immigrant-derived popUla­ the decade and has continued rising in force. And racist anti-Arab repression is tions increasingly isolated and vulnera- the 199Os .

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Far from protecting the economic capital now has no need for additional mobile workers in 1982, quickly took a interests of the working class, the Labour imported labor from Third World coun­ series of disgusting racist measures. In and "Socialist" politicians are benefici­ tries, while second-generation immigrant 1988, Mitterrand declared that France aries of anti-working-c1ass "austerity": youth are economically redundant and had reached the "threshold of tolerance" . the bourgeoisie hands them the trappings regarded as a source of social unrest. For of immigration. And in Germany in of governmental power precisely when it the first time in decades, French and 1993, the Social Democrats joined with wants to defuse resistance to its attacks. German youth, facing chronic unemploy­ the Christian Democrats in effectively As New York City's former black mayor, ment, are willing to take the kind of jobs eliminating the right of political asylum David Dinkins, once promised the bank­ that a few years ago only Arabs, black written into the postwar West German', ers, the working people "will take it from Africans, Turks and Kurds would do. constitution. A few nights later. fascists me." . Furthermore, capitalist counterrevolution "celebrated" by firebombing the home oC At the same time, West European cap­ in the Soviet bloc has opened a major Turkish families in a Ruhr city, killing italists have utilized immigrant workers new sphere of exploitation for European, five women and children. The struggle '.. to hold down and reduce labor costs, especially German, imperialism. A few against anti-immigrant racism must be often by disregarding labor laws and years ago, German industrial spokesman conducted .not only militantly against the health and safety codes. Many foreign Tyll Neckar exulted: "Right on our fascists but equally on the political plane workers, especially "illegals," are hired doorstep in Eastern Europe, for the first against the reformist misleaders of the "off the books" so they do not get med­ time we have a vast pool of cheap and workers movement. ical, unemployment and pension benefits. highly trained labor." Instead of import­ In classical. Marxist terms, the ref, In the mid-1980s, GUnter Wallraff, a West ing labor from Turkey, German industry ormist parties express the immediattl German journalist of leftist sympathies, is exporting capital for the exploitation interests and bourgeois consciousness of disguised himself as a Turkish Gastar­ of labor in the Czech RepUblic, Hungary, the "aristocracy of labor"-the whitest . beiter (named "Ali") and recounted his Poland, etC. and most skilled layers of the proletariat experiences in Ganz unten (Rock ·Bot­ As we have pointed out, the social­ and especially the labor bureaucracy. tom), In one job Wallraff/Ali and his fel­ democratic "welfare state" originated and Nowhere is this clearer than in their pros-. low Gastarbeiter were not only forced to was maintained because European impe­ tration before the anti-immigrant frenzy, work two regular shifts a day but had to rialism needed to secure the support or at The German SPD sees itself as repre· clean coke dust from steelmaking equip­ least neutrality of their working classes senting the workers of the majority group, ment without wearing masks or helmets. for the Cold War against the Soviet and certainly not the Turkish and Kurdi~h As a result, Wallraff suffered chronic Union. Now, however, the European workers who do not even . vote. The damage to his bronchial tubes. bourgeoisies are scrapping these social bureaucratized French trade unions were Thus, rising unemployment among overhead costs and moving to maximize happy to' use the non-participation of West European youth has gone hand in the rate of exploitation in intense compe­ the "private sector" (heavily immigrant­ hand with the brutal superexploitation of tition with the United States and Japan. derived) industrial workers as the excuse· dark-skinned immigrant workers. In the Anti-immigrant demagogy and terror are to call off last winter's strike wave, but absence of revolutionary, i.e., genuinely being used to divide and dil'ert the work­ never tried to organize strong militant communist, parties capable of uniting the ing class from united struggle against the unions to break the non-union and working class in struggle against the rav­ present capitalist offensive. company-union patterns in industries like ages of capitalism, the fascists and other The main body of social democrats the private auto companies. far-right forces have taken advantage of have abandoned their liberal posture on West Europe's deteriorating social and the immigrant question and are vying For Proletarian Struggle economic conditions. For example, Aus­ with the right in chauvinist demagogy. Against Anti-Immigrant Racism! tria's Jorg Haider, whose Freedom Party Brought to power in 1981, the French The interests of labor and minorities received over 20 percent of the vote in the "left," facing strikes by immigrant auto- advance together, or they fall back last elections, organizes rallies with Nazi SS veterans, praises Hitler's "proper employment policy" and . terms Nazi death camps like Auschwitz "punishment camps." One of his standard lines is: "There are 140,000 unemployed Austri­ ans" and" 180,000 foreigners." Similarly, a cadre of France's National Front recently told American journalist Mark Hunter, "If unemployment goes down, . we're finished" (New York Times Mag­ azine, 21 April). While unfortunately an oversimplification. this statement ex­ presses an important core of truth. It is common on the European left to blame the rising tide· of anti-immigrant racism on the demagogy of "extreme" right-wing groups. But the fascists are simply expressing in an open, unvar­ nished and violent way the economic and Istoph political interests of the European ruling Ruhr aluminum factory. Turkish and Kurdish workers are strategiC component classes at the present juncture. European of industrial proletariat in Germany.

'1\,. , ... ,,'" ,,,. IIII~' I' II 19

together.' In the mid-to-late 1950s, the CGT at Renault Billancourtorganized a ~HTepHCIlV'OHenMcTM4ecKMA npMBIT large proportion of the workers in the HeWMH TOBepMILIBH plant (unlike today's"minority" union COBeTCKMH conneTeH M o~M~epeH! representation). The Communist Party's naked social-patriotic betrayal of the I ~~:~C~:t::;:~:;;i:~:;;::'~::::':;:~::~chen Genossen! anti-colonial struggle in Algeria, lining :;:'":' each mOnh qu6c-t6 chao d6n c~nlf san b,n Vlet-Nam!

up with French imperialism as it blood­ J' ""UP' C.~h • -"-, __ thIn HlillliT'r. 'on ~.·th't:~ Ii u"h ••~I tJ.,t. ilyrepressed the Algerian masses, struck Pozdrow.ienla od Intemaelonallst6w; a terrible 'blow against class conscious­ Wltalele Polsey Towarzysze! ness and communist sympathies among In fIght for PoJl~c2na rewolucja robotnlk6w ralemlecklch DJ.woTuje dp bobultlkl~'lrady~ji ~can. pobkicao I nl.miecklcKO komuniunu oparlt 00 Inif:ilzynorudowa 'etlno,e Algerian workers in France, who includ­ proletarian pOlitical akej' ed the majority of workers at Billan­ revolution against iSaludos internacionallstasa i court The CP underlined its betrayal capitalist restoration tuol>o nuestros compafieros cubanos! -pn'l" when the Humanite office barred its In East Germany, .,ncu: In(ernalionalislische Grime an unsere kubanlschen Genolsenl doors against people trying to escape the' 1989-90, ICL Issued "' pr0101.... Internationalist Greellngs to our Cubln Comradel! , bullets and clubs when an October 1961 Internationalist 111,ali II",", La nevoJuci6n Bolchevlqua dl t 917 acogl6 a todos 101 fuchllldorl' greetings to Soviet p"" reyoluclonarlos del mundo como cludadanos plenos In '. nUlva repUblica demonstration. in Paris for Algerian inde­ 00.". lovi4Uca. Asl t8mbl6" 18 revolucl6n politic. proletarll alemana lei ollKe • pendence was attacked by the cops, leav­ soldiers and TllUt: uSlede., nuestro I hermanot de d...... mana d,'. 50lJdarld8d Vietnamese, POlish l.oh Internaclonalist8. ing hundreds dead. los obrerot ,evoluclonlrlOI do l.r nOA' saludon las apol1oclonet dllfador .. and Cuban workers. Que Uds. Y 'UI compatrlotss han hecho en su vlclorlos8 royolucl6n contra 101 . Immigrant workers at factories like sangulnarias Imperiallstas non.amerlcanos V sus .Ilados burgun•• cubanos. Counterrevolution Reeonocemo, loslorrlbles ucrifldos que han hacho aillevar a cabo sus t Isluerzos 'nternElcionalisla. en su del,nN de Angola y Namlbla conlr. lal - Talbot, on strike during the winter of has fueled antl­ luerzas det apartheid sudarrlcano. 1983-84, were a spearhead of militant Immigrant terror. Una nueva Alemanl. gobernada pOr 'a oenulna democrac/a prOtetari.: de .00;/.", cons'los de obreros ., loldodo"·_Ina Alemanla roJa que LInin, class struggle in defense of the economic lu)(emburg ., lIebknecht reconoc.rlan como luya-e.dender4 • todos 101 Irabai_dore. fraternal •• aquf un tataria y vllll_nde decent•• , ,. Igualdlld interests of the entire working class. But ~oclal. dfg,..!dad. 111)tJr1M Y ... .,"~,. the bureaucracy left them hanging out to M!ont'.!! el esln'l"f,mo fln Europ:t OrienTal se derrumba balO ,u prop'" dry. The splitting effects of this betrayal remain in the consciousness of the prole­ splits the working class and serves only directly from a perspective of class col­ tariat. Among the results of a "leader­ the bourgeois masters. The revolutionary lahoration. The fundamental method of ship" that won't fight on behalf of the Trotskyists of the International Commu­ the reformists is to seek allies in some specially oppressed are weak unions that nist League have actively championed sector of "their own" national' bour­ don't defend the interests of any of their the rights of immigrants, fighting for geoisie (this year in France, the CP is members and a political climate domi-' full citizenship rights. for everyone­ trying to form' a bloc with' the "anti­ nated by racist arguments in the mouths no matter how they managed to get Maastricht" bourgeoisie) and certainly of both the right,and the "left." here. The ICL's French section, the Ligue . not to look for allies among the specially The reformist betrayers, who always Trotskyste, fights fof' organizing mass oppressed layers of the working people. begin by accepting the limits of whatever labor/immigrant mobilizations to smash We proletarian, revolutionaries are the racist capitalism says· is "possible" (in fasc.ist provocations. In 1993 in Paris, we opposite: not made stupid and corrupt other words, profitable), are more than waged a propaganda campaign for the chasing after "friends" among the class willing to compete with the rightists in labor movement to turn out en masse to enemy, we know who our friends are. chauvinist attacks on minorities. Trailing defend the 18th arrondissement. which While there are important differences along .behind them are many of the groups had been placed under a state of siege: the in the nature and role of blacks 'in the of the "socialist" left, who-when they racist state sent in an army of cops to United States and the non-European do not openly echo the bourgeoisie's crush a revolt of youth who took to the immigrant communities in West Europe, racist: code words about "drugs" and streets after a young African was shot in the struggle to overcome racial, .and eth­ . "crime" and "terrorism" and the bureauc­ a police station. LTF supporters in the ni.c divisions' is strategically central to racy's poisonous appeals against foreign public sector during last December's communist leadership of the working workers "stealing our jobs"-content strikes called on their unions to tight the class and its ames in all regions of the . ,themselves with: abstract "anti-racist" racist ban on employment of immigrant capitalist world. As we wrote over 20 appeals which they do nothing to really workers in government jobs. years ago in "West Europe's Imported implement, 'for example' in the unions Only a new, revolutionary leadership Labor: A Key to Revolution" (WV No. where .they have influence. Their empty -a Trotskyist proletarian party--can 31,26 October 1973): moralism dovetails conveniently with the unite the working class in opposition to "Just as achieving racial unity is central hypocrisy of the big reformist'.parties who the class enemy and its racist system. to working-class consciousness in the' turn around and organize mass· marches Only such a party can win to the side U.S., so integrating foreign workers into for "tolerance" ... after the official racist of workers revolution the immigrant the labor movement is now key to deep­ ening the internationalist consciousness consensus in which they partake has workers and the new generation of of the French and German proletariat. emboldened fascist terrorists to' bum activist youth. Thousands' of youth Conversely, anti-foreign-worker policies down immigrant hostels, murdering men, throughout Europe have sought to mili- are now the main axis for West Euro­ women and children. , tantly defend immigrants and second­ pean reaction. When the French fascist There can be no compromise between generation youth; many now think of 'Ordre Nouveau' (New Order) reasserted the internationalist program which the themselves as "anarchists," out of disgust its public presence recently, it did so through a rally to expel foreign workers. proletariat requires to fight for power­ with the chauvinism and indifference of The struggle against the oppression of and even to wage defensive struggles in parties calling themselves "socialists" foreign workers is at the same time cru­ . the' imperialist' epoch-and the accep­ . and "communists." cial to winning the West European prole­ tance of the poisonous racism which Indifference to racial oppression flows tariat to socialist internationalism." _ 20 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 650,30 August 1996

Last Friday, at a workers' general ::'B'o'psW:i'nvaae'''''Chu;r9Hj:r~ArresFrrrn'mjYg!ra'i1t~?jj assembly of the SUD and CGT. unions at the Paris-Bourseul postal money order center, a -supporter of the LTF countered the bureaucrats' insipid motion to write a protest letter to Chirac. She called for the France: Mass Protests unions to mobilize the power of the , working class to stop the deportations: "We are still living under the reign of Against Racist Deportations Vigipirate. a campaign of racist terror " , against which the union organizations AUGUST 25-Twenty thousand people deporting four of those arrested at the did not mobilize hist December. If they marched through the streets of Paris last church along with about 50 other had, we wouldn't be in this situation. Friday to protest the cops' storming of a "illegal" immigrants, 150 stone-throwing Against this terror what is needed are church occupied by over 300 immigrant,' demonstrators who tried to block the mass workers actions organized by our unions. At the time of [Zairian immi­ workers seeking permits to stay in the flight fought with police. grant) Makome's murder in the same country. The protest march came hours Although clearly taken aback by the arrondissement [district) some years ago, after a thousand club-wielding riot cops scope of the protests, the conservative what was needed was for the organized had assaulted St. Bernard churclt with government under President Jacques working class to converge on the 18th arrondissement. Today, the government tear gas, smashed through the ring of, Chirac is determined to deport most of wants to load up military charter flights people who had blocked the entrance in the arrested immigrants. The interior because the pilots unions refuse to fly solidarity with the immigrants, and broke ministry announced that only about 40 of them. What is posed is mobilizing pow­ down the doors of the church with axes. those seized in the church would be erful workers contingents in ViJlacoublay Police completely sealed off the heavily granted residence permits. But the judi­ [military airportl to stop these deporta­ tions. And right now it is necessary to immigrant Goutte d'Or quarter around cial proceedings against the 80 immi­ demand immediate freedom and the the church to ensure that none' of the grants who have so far been dragged dropping of all charges for all those immigrants slipped through their drag­ before administrative court have been arrested this morning." net, and many neighborhoOd residents such a travesty-with patently falsified As French authorities·, prepared to were chased down and beaten. documents, arrestees held incommuni­ deport immigrants on a military charter The early morning raid came just hours cado, etc.-that judges have repealed 45 after civilian pilots refused to fly the after Prime Minister Alain Juppe railed of the expulsion orders. During the first deportees out, the union of Air Afrique on national television that the immigrants six months of this year, over 7.000 people employees issued 'a formal instruction "have no right to live in France." A leader have been deported in a steady succession that none of that carrier's workers of Le Pen's fascist National Front of charter plane flights to Africa initiated throughout Africa "should' take part in applauded the racist assault, declaring, by the former president, "Socialist" the base task of helping these flights of "This should have been done 45 days Franr;ois Mitterrand. These workers. who shame." When the French military trans­ ago." Ten of the immigrant protesters, came to France seeking a better life, are port carrying the deportees made a who were in the eighth week of a hunger being thrown back to face poverty, repres­ stopover in the Senegalese capital 'of strike, were dragged off to military hos­ sion and, in some cases. starvation. Dakar, it was detayed .because the ,airport pitals where they were placed under ground staff refused to service it. When guard. Some 2\0 arrested immigrants, Full Citizenship Rights the plane finally arrived in Bamako, the including 68 children, were locked up in for All Immigrants! capital of Mali, airport personnel again the Vincennes military detention center The Ligue Trotskyste de France (LTF), boycotted it, and French authorities had on the eastern edge of the capital. section of the International Communist to use a military cargo plane to fly in an The government's action provoked a League. has consistently fought for exit ramp in order to get people off the virtually unprecedented protest demon­ mobilizing the power of the working plane. stration in defense of immigrants, in class to defend immigrant rights. During Such actions coricretely demonstrated which trade-union contingents marched last December's strike wave by public the possibility of forging international together with youth of African and North sector workers, the LTF insisted on the class unity between workers' struggles in African descent. There were contingents crucial need for the strikers to take up France and Africa. Such a perspective of of metalworkers, Air France employees, the fight against racial oppression, warn­ proletarian internationalism is sharply teachers, postal workers, and others from ing: "The working-class leaders' refusal counterposed to the chauvinist protec­ the COT, CFDT and SUD union fed­ to fight against racist terror is an obsta­ tionism pushed by the reformist working­ erations. Chanting "Liberons /es sans cle to the necessary extension of the class leaders, like the call of the Commu­ papiers!" (Let's free the undocumented struggle to the private and mainly indus­ nist Party (PCF) to "prOduce French." immigrants!), thousands of militant pro­ trial sector, with its strong, combative The protests over the threatened testers continued marching on to the Vin­ component of workers from the Maghreb deportations are an extremely significant cennes detention center. When the police and sub-Saharan Africa" (see WV No. event for French workers. The bour­ brutally charged the demonstration at 636, 5 January). In the face of wide­ geoisie-joined by the reformist mis­ Vincennes, the protesters fought back, spread anti-immigrant racism and ram­ leaders-relies on exacerbating racial and there were running fights, with the pant fascist and cop terror, our comrades and ethnic divisions in the working class cops until well into the night. When the raise the call: For worker/immigrant to undercut class struggle. The labor tops first plane took off last night from the mobilizations to stop racist terror! Full supported Chirac's "anti-terrorist" Oper­ Evreux military base ,west of the capital, citizenship rights for all immigrants! ation Vigipirate, in which the army was

" '., .---,.... "1'11111'1"11' 21 called out to terrorize immigrant neigh­ (PO) and the Jeunesse Communiste popular. With masses of workers on the borhoods. For years, the PCF and COT Revolutionnaire (JCR)-totally ignored, streets opposing anti-immigrant racism, leaders have put the blame for unem­ in their leaflets to strikers, the need to PO has now issued a leaflet (dated 23 ployment on immigrants, calling for fight racial discrimination and segrega­ August) calling "For Working-Class closing the borders and expelling "ille­ tion, the exclusion of foreign" 'workers Mobilization to Stop the Deportations!" gals." And during his 14-year reign, Mit­ from the public sector" and the racist "But nowhere is there any mention of last terrand made anti-immigrant racism a Vigipirate campaign. December's strikes. Little wonder, since ,hallmark of his rule. The question of revolutionary leader-, at the time PO refused to so much as men­ Following the powerful strike wave ship is key" The most advanced workers tion the need to mobilize the working last winter; Chirac ratchetedup the racist must be won to a program which ,links class to fight Operation Vigipirate and the campaign against "immigrants" (which their immediate struggles to the revolu-' all-sided attacks on immigrants. And far in France means anyone with dark skin). tionary overthrow of capitalism. Other- . from exposing the .treacherous role of the Last March when the immigrant families wise, even the most powerful working­ reformist bureaucrats, PO builds illusions arrested on Friday, along with others, class mobilization, can be undercut, by calling on the' trade-union leaders to occupied another Paris church, St. dissipated, and channeled into the reac- . "make their acts conform to their words!" Ambroise, the cops brutally drove them tionary dead end of class collaboration. But the union tops have no words out at the request of the Roman Catholic After ducking the' question of racial when it comes to racial discrimination in hierarchy and many were deported. This oppression during last December's strikes jobs, housing and education; to racist racist assault provoked protest demon­ in order not to antagonize the bureaucrats, cop terror and Operation Vigipirate; to strations in several cities. who were lined up behind the govern­ . the denial of citizenship rights to immi- The size of Friday's demonstration, ment's racist offensive, the centrists now grants.' The bureaucrats refuse to chal­ called by the trade unions on just a few seek to cynically use Chirac's attacks on lenge· racial oppression because it is hours' notice, testifies to a sound instinct immigrants in order to channel support to inherent to the capitalist system, which within the working class in favor of class the new class-collaborationist popular they uphold. In its August 23 leaflet, PO unity. The size of the demonstrations is front which the PCF, the PS and their c1amors~ "It's Chirac ... who must be doubly impressive when one realizes that bourgeois partners are putting together. thrown out!" But to be' replaced by what? Paris is virtually deserted in August as Thus, the LCR and LO signed a joint PO's unspoken answer is obvious: a new most people leave on vacation. During the declaration last week with the PCF, the class-collaborationist alliance, with the occupation of the St. Bernard church, PS, the ultra-chauvinist Mouvement des bourgeoisie. PO has ·always supported hundreds of people came every day to Citoyens (Movement of Citizens) and the the popular front by calling fora vote to demonstrate their support, including lead­ bourgeois Radical Party calling on Chirac ,its reformist working-class components. ers of the COT and other unions. Friday's" to negotiate with the immigrantsoccupy­ ,The LTF is fighting, in sharp political demonstration comes after a previous one' ing the, church-because "the image of ·struggle against such opportunism, to last Wednesday-which also included France could be lastingly tarnished." regroup and consolidate the cadres for sizable trade-union contingents-to pro­ While PO, which is affiliated with the the forging of a revolutionary workers test an earlier cop assault on the same British Workers Power group. formally party. Such a party would be, in Lenin's church. stands outside this reactionary lash-up. in words, a tribune of the people, uniting Last week, the COT and CFDT trade­ reality it constitutes the left wing of what minorities, women, youth and all the union federations, along with the FEN Trotsky called a "syphilitic chain" of oppressed behind the proletariat's strug­ and FSU teachers unions, issued a joint class collaboration. leading through the gle to overthrow the capitalist system­ statement calling for "direct negotia­ PCF and PS to the bourgeoisie. As the root cause of racial oppression-and tions" by the government with the always, the centrists of PO tail what is set up a socialist order.• hunger-strikers and for a "freeze on deportations." But what was needed was to unleash the power of the working class, including through strikes and mobilizations of thousands to block the military airports until Chirac backed down. Revolutionary Leadership Is Key The massive outpouring of protest against the racist deportations exposes the lie of various fake revolutionaries who write off the possibility of winning the working class to the fight against racist attacks. During the strike Wave last December, the LTF was unique in under- ., lining the key importance of this issue in its propaganda directed at striking work­ ers. The entire gamut of organizations to the left of the PCF and the Socialist Party (PS)-from Alain Krivine's Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) to Lutte Ouvriere (LO), Pouvoir Ouvrier Paris cops storm Church, drag away Immigrants on August 23.

111.'11 22 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 638,2 February 1996 Farrakhan and the Sudan Slave Trade Louis Farrakhan is currently traveling through Africa, where he has met with, among others, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Far­ rakhan launched his "friendship tour" in order to pursue his political and social aims and projects and for evident self­ enhancement, newly magnified by his , leadership of the Million Man March in October. Particularly in light of the Nation of Islam (NO!) leader's height­ ened prominence, it behooves alI those who struggle for black emancipation to look even more sharply and closely at the aims and practices of Farrakhan's move­ ment as shown in concrete circumstances. Through newspaper articles, confer­ ences and demonstrations, "new aboli­ tionists" have exposed the continuing existence of black chattel lilavery in Nation of Islam demagogue Louis Farrakhan (below left) maintains cozy Mauritania, on North Africa's Atlantic relationship with Islamic fundamentalist leader, Hassan al· Turabi of Sudan coast, and ,in Sudan, Africa's largest '(below right), denies existence of slave trade there. Above: black slaves sold at market in Sudan. country. When this issue hit the black press, it naturally caused an uproar among American blacks, who were emancipated from slavery barely, 130 years ago with the victory of the Union Army over the slaveholding South. What particularly made this a red-hot issue for black people was the revelation that Far­ rakhan and the NO! are acting as apolo­ gists for black African slavery, stemming from their close tics to the vicious mili­ tary dictatorship of Sudan, which pro­ fesses Islamic fundamentalism. Farrakhan's support to the Sudanese slave masters is yet another example of his utterly reactionary program and pur­ pose. Last fall, Workers Vanguard forth­ rightly called his Washington, D.C. march for "atonement" a "poisonous reactionary mobilization" which was "directly counterposed to any struggle for black emancipation" (WV No. 631, 20 October 1995). We noted that despite eVent as they courted Farrakhan's rights ,of blacks in, this increasingly the racist rulers' hypocritical denuncia­ increased following, while virtually all vicious racist society. Farrakhan's pos­ tions of Farrakhan's anti-Semitic and the black press signed on as publicity ture asa black "leader" who stands up to anti-white demagogy, capitalist politi­ agents for the march. And much of the , the racist rulers will likely be strength­ cians ranging from Democratic president reformist "left" threw its support to the ened now that he is being vilified by Clinton to Republican Senate leader Bob march while claiming to separate the right-wing yahoos in Congress for secur­ Dole embraced the march's aim of mak­ "message" from its "messenger." ing a promise of financial assistance ing black males take "responsibility" for Many blacks who marched in Wash­ from Libyan 'strongman Qaddafi,who the conditions of their own oppression. ington did so out of a desire for some, was himself targeted for assassination by Almost all black politicians hailed the any action that .c1aimed to.fight for the U.S. imperialist air strikes on Tripoli in

I 'II" !~ III I 23

, 1986. For its part, the Justice Department I immediately threatened to force the NOI i leader to register as an agent of a foreign government. Yet the U.S. government I didn't bat an eye over Farrakhan's, em­ II brace,during his tour, of Nigerian mili­ I !' tary dictator Sani Abacha, whose recent 'I execution of well-known poet Ken Saro­ Wiwa and seven other dissidents has pro­ voked international outrage. However, Farrakhan,'s trip' got major media attention when he met with South African president Nelson Mandela. The NOI head hypocritically played up to Mandela by appealing for "Muslims and Christians and Jews" to "work together, for the common ,,,good." Nonetheless" Mandela felt the need to distance himself from the racialist NOI demagogue, admonishing him ,about the ANC princi­ ple of "nonracial ism." Louis Farrakhan is no fighter for black rights. He is a sinister huckster who are given as wedding' gifts. traded for are tied up and taken to the Arab north .... seeks only to be an exploiter of "his" peo­ camels. guns or trucks. and inherited .... The women and children are put to work ple. Farrakhan's backward worldview "In the Islamic Republic of the Sudan. in the fields-all without pay-and are degrades black people themselves, not as a result of an Islamic vs. Christian also available as slave concubines" (Vil­ least black women,l,who lead a, strictly civil war. Black women and children (mostly Christian) are being captured in lage Voice, 12 December 1995). segregated existence ,in' the NOI and were raids on their villages and sold as chattel excluded' en masse from the Washington slaves." Farrakhan's Sudan Connection march. And h1S cozying up to brutal mil­ Such reports: have been widely docu­ Enraptured by Farrakhan's new politi­ itary chiefs who engage in and protect the mented in recent years by a number of cal clout, much of the American black growing market for black African sla¥es human rights groups, such as Anti­ political establishment has utterly ig­ in Sudan gives further proof Of what we Slavery International in London and the nored the revelations of slavery in Africa. have said all along, that Farrakhan is bad Puebla Institute, affiliated to the Catholic Jesse Jackson has yet to make a state­ news for black people. church. ment, although both the NAACP and the The Scourge of In 1994, a United Nations special head of the Congressional Black Caucus African Slavery Today report on Sudan by Hungarian lawyer have issued condemnations, but they Gaspar Biro detailed systematic torture are seeking to refurbish the "democratic" The Brooklyn-based black newspapers and "disappearances" of opponents of the credentials of U.S. imperialism. City Sun and Daily Challenxe have run regime and reported that women and chil­ African anti-slavery activists wrote to ,literally dozens of articles in the past dren "are kept in special camps where Farrakhan' asking for a speaker on the year e,xposing the horror of contempo­ people from the north or from abroad subject at the Million Man March; he rary slavery in northern Africa, notably a come to purchase them for money or turned a deaf ear to them. ihis was no three-part series last February by the goods such as camels." In its report, The aberration: Farrakhan had already dis­ City Sun's', Samuel Cotton. Others who Tears a/Orphans (1995), Amnesty Inter­ missed the 'issut!of slavery in Sudan as a have been active in the anti-slavery cam- national confirmed reports of abduction concoction of the "Western press." This ,paign include Nate Clay of Chicago's and enslavement of women and children was hardly a statement of concern for the New Metro News and WLS radio, Wash­ ' in Sudan, adding that the southern hypocrisy and lies regularly doled out by ington, D.C. radio,ho~t Joe Madison, and Sudanese anti-government forces have the mainstream imperialist media. His Republican Tony Brown, whose PBS TV also murdered and abducted villagers, not protestations came in the form of a letter show aired documentary evidence. only suspected government sympathizers read by NOI international spokesman Protest meetings and debates have been but others who fell afoul of'tribal and fac­ Abdul Akbar Muhammad to a "Popular held at Harlem's Schomburg Library and tional conflicts. Arab & Islamic Conference"· in Khar­ at black churches and schools uptown Village Voice coliminist Nat Hentoff toum last March. The conference was and in Brooklyn. Abolitionist confer­ has also written a number of articles run by Islamic ,fundamentalist Sheik ences at Columbia University and the recently on the slave trade in Sudan. In Hassan al-Turabi, the power behind the New York Law School have featured one of them, Hentoff cites an account by Sudanese regime. The year before, Far­ eyewitness reports on slavery, in Maurita­ Professor Ushari Ahmad Mamoud, who rakhan himself had been feted as a guest nia and Sudan. was imprisoned by the previous Sudanese of Sudartese leaders General Omar Has­ ,"As you read this," ~rote Cotton, regime in 1986 for his reports on the slave san al-Bashir and Sheik Hassan al­ "there are Black people ,being bought trade: "What usually happens is that Arab Turabi; who of course themselves deny and sold in two North African countries" armed militias go into the Southern vil­ that slavery exists in their country. (City Sun, I February 1995). Cotton lages or the Nuba mountains .... They Ina venomous anti-Semitic diatribe in continued: , "Although slavery was, declared abol­ burn the villages. The men are kifled if the NOI's Final Call (12 April 1995), ished three times since Mauritania's in­ they don't escape, and the women and Muhammad· denounced the anti-slavery dependence in 1960, it persists. Slaves children are rounded up. The survivors campaign as a "Big Lie," later charging 24 that it seeks to "divert attention from the bloodsuckers." This is pogromist, a recipe role Jews played in the slave trade" (Final for all-sided race war, which could only 80 Million Women Manned Call, 26 April 1995). In an outraged benefit the likes of the KKK and other response to this despicable disinforma­ fascists and in which black people would The Crime of tion campaign, which was picked up by be the biggest losers. some of the black press, black journalist Female Genital Mutilation William Pleasant wrote in his new weekly U.S.fUN Imperialists: paper, the Liberator (4 January), that Hands Off Africa I much of "the Black media either turned A number of opponents of slavery in its back on the African slaves or adopted Africa have appealed to the U.S. govern­ the numbskull, Jew-baiting arguments in ment or the United Nations to act to end support of the slaving regimes of Sudan the trade in human chattel. For example, and Mauritania served up by the Nation the "Coalition Against Slavery in Africa" of Islam's Akbar Muhammad." demonstrated outside the UN in Septem­ As part of its attempt to channel black ,ber demanding, in the words of CASIA anger against capitalist oppression into president Dede Ombombassa, that Sudan anti-Semitism, including in such tracts and Mauritania be "diplomatically, finan­ as The Secret Relationship Between cially and culturally isolated" (Daily Blacks and Jews, the NOI .has long pur­ Challenge, 25 September 1995). Such Women and veyed the absurd claim that 75 percent of calls are an invitation to continued impe­ slaves in the American South before the rialist exploitation and oppression. In Revolution Civil War were owned by Jews. As we Zaire in the 1960s, UN intervention was Women and Revolution Issue No. 41 pointed out in "Farrakhan Is Bad News a cover for the assassination of Patrice (Summer/Autumn 1992), available for for Black People" (WV No. 600, 13 May 'Lumumba, the leader of the fight against $1 from Spartacist Publishing Co., 1994): "In reality, the not very numerous Belgian colonial rule in the Congo. More Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 1 0116~ Jews in the South in 1860 owned a tiny recently, the 1993 neocolonial occupa­ fraction of the four million slaves, and tion of famine-stricken Somalia, also the treacherous King Leopold II of Bel­ only a tiny proportion of the Atlantic carried out under the UN flag and in the gium carved out a monstrous regime of slave trade involved Jewish merchants." name of "humanitarianism," was marked terror in the Belgian Congo, under which Arab merchants and black African tribal by ,brutal massacres like the slaughter of some eight million Africans died over chiefs were heavily involved in the some 200 civilians in Mogadishu, who a 50-year period-the holocaust of the Atlantic slave trade,. too., But of course were gunned down by U.S. troops firing 19th' century. The rival imperialists tore Farrakhan disappears this incontrovert­ from Cobra helicopters. the tribal ·structures and agrarian soci­ ible historical fact. Today Washington labels the Khar­ eties of the continent apart, while ensur­ For all of Farrakhan's hypocritical toum regime as "terrorist." But today's ing the survival and reinforcement' ·of denunciations of the Atlantic slave trade, "terrorist" is often yesterday'S CIA ancient tribal practices suited to the Euro­ the vile bigotry of his racialist demon­ "asset." During the Cold War, Turabi and peans' "divide and rule" program. This is ology reveals shared social values with his reactionary Muslim Brotherhood what the Dinka people of southern Sudan the contemporary slave traders in the group were considered an "asset" by the call "the time when the world was spoilt." Sudan, particularly their anti-woman fun­ State Department because of his vehe­ As David Levering Lewis. writes in his damentalism. NOI doctrine holds, in Eli­ ment anti-Communism and his alliance book, The Race to Fashoda (Weidenfeld jah Muhammad's words, that "the woman with mullahs fighting against the USSR & Nicolson, 1987), by the late 19th is man's field to produce his nation." This in Afghanistan. With the collapse of the century: is no doubt music to the ears of the Soviet Union, the U.S. no longer needed "Territorial dispossession, institutional Islamic establishment iIi .Sudan, which this relationship with the Sudan regime. chaos, collective panic, and disease and famine had ignited a waVe of f1esh­ imprisons women in the veil and where As CovertAction (Summer 1994) noted, eating that spread from inveterate canni­ the hideous practice of female genital . "Throughout the Cold War, the official bals like Bakusa to Batetela, the Mang­ mutilation is pervasive. The would-be U.S. position was that the [southern] betu, and much of Zande. Before the end exploiter of the black ghetto masses in the SPLA rebel army was simply a commu­ of the decade [the 1870sJ, the felon U.S. clearly feels at home with the heads nist organization set up by the Eastern interplay of raids, migrations, and animal and crop wastage would open the Inte­ of African dictatorships. bloc to destabilize a pro-Western Sudan." rior to tsetse fly. Trypanosomiasis, sleep­ Despite his affinity with the Arabic­ But now American attentions have shifted ing sickness, would soon devastate speaking Islamic fundamentalist regime south, and the U.S. "is looking for any whole peoples from the mouth of the in Khartoum, ;n the U.S. Farrakhan pur­ excuse to provide mote substantial assis­ Congo to Lake Victoria. Much of Africa veys anti-Arab and anti-Asian no less tance" to the rebels. was becoming as anarchic, pestilential, and brutal as the arriving missionaries, than anti-Jewish bigotry. In his infamous Historically, it was the imperialist physicians, soldiers, and commissioners "bloodsuckers" speech on the eve of the "scramble for Africa" in the latter part of never tired of reminding the outside Million Man March, Farrakhan ranted: the 19th century which created the struc­ world that it had always been." "We considered them [the Jews] blood­ ture of Sudan today. This is the period of The first British attempt to control suckers because they took from our com­ the British drive to create a "Cape to Sudan in the 1880s ended in humiliation munity and built their community but did­ Cairo" East African empire linked by rail when the ·forces .of the Islamic Mahdi n't offer anything back to our community. and telegraph, which the French sought to creamed the insufferable General Gordon And when the Jews left, the Palestinian spike by creating a colonial belt across at, Khartoum. When the British finally Arabs came, Koreans came, Vietnamese Central Africa from the Congo to the Red established colonial rule in 1898, they and other ethnic and racial groups came .. , Sea. The Italians and the German Kaiser instituted a policy to keep the south seg­ And so this is a type and we call them grabbed bites wherever they could, and regated, welcoming Christian missionar-

---·····,-'~"!IIiIIIII'''I·1 25

ies there while banning Islamic prosely­ of her husband? Is this, too, simply' a , the fight -to reforge Trotsky's Fourth , ,tizers.,The" "Southern· Policy" kept. the matter of "cultural heritage"? Such International. 'area, economically primitive, as the heinous practices are vestiges of pre­ Today, the fight against chattel slavery British cQncentratedeconomic resources, capitaIistand even pre-feudal stages of is intimately linked to the struggle investments. roads. and schools in the human development and are represerita­ against all, fOrlns of oppression and for 'north. ,The -northern region, whose black tive of the all-sided sexual, social and world socialist revolution. As we wrote population has intermixed for many cen­ economic oppression of women: , , in "The Crime of Female Genital Muti­ turies with Arab settlers, know defined· Marxists are not advocates of "national lation" (Women and Revolution No. 41, as primarily Arab and Islamic, with a culture." Even in writing about the Summer/Autumn 1992) in regard to mingling of Egyptians, Turks and Circas­ advanced capitalist countries of Europe Sudan and other parts of Africa: sians. The south is populated mainly by and the oppressed peoples of the tsarist "The banner of revolutionary socialism black tribal groups. The educated elite in empire, Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin seems .an empty reference in sub­ this region tends to be Christian, while remarked that "the general 'national cul­ Saharan Africa, where the Marxist con­ ception of 'combined and uneven devel­ many of the poorer farmers, marsh fish­ ture' is the culture of the landlords, the opment' would only encompass marginal ermen .and 'cattle herders maintain ani- _ clergy and the bourgeoisie," adding that pockets of industrialization, There are oil mist beliefs. socialist internationalists "take from each workers in Nigeria. dock and rail work­ British colonial rule was ended in national culture only its democratic and ers in Kenya, miners in Zambia. They 1956 after having exacerbated these socialist elements; we take them only and are presently isolated and politically subordinate to demagogic nationalist regional and religious divisions in this absolutely in opposition to the bourgeois regimes, but they represent a strategic country which encompasses ,peoples culture and the bourgeois nationalism of industrial workforce. It is the challenge speaking more than, 400 different lan­ each nation" ("Critical Remarks on the of an international revolutionary party to guages. Since independence, Sudan has National Question," December 1913). transform this sector into a human link to the workers movements of the Near been ruled by a series of more or less Industrial capitalism in the West East and the industrial proletariat of eccentric and ruthless military regimes in drew women into the proletariat, and South Africa, Mobilized against their Khartoum, interspersed with a very few, bourgeois-democratic revolutions legally capitalist exploiters, these vanguard lay­ very short periods of parliamentary and formally wiped out the more abhor­ ers can launch a struggle to emancipate "democracy." The social devastation of rent aspects of women's oppression. But the cruelly oppressed men and women civil war combined, with Islamic funda­ the Western "democracies" did not bring throughout Africa." mentalism has intensified barbaric hor­ these bourgeois-democratic reforms with This revolutionary perspective is rors, from punishment by, flogging, and them into the colonial countries. The pen­ closely linked with the struggle against amputation to female genital mutilation. etration of decaying capitalism into the black oppression in the U.S., imperialist "Third World" has fostered the most reac­ heartland. Black workers are a strategic For Permanent Revolution!. tionary aspects of degenerated tribalism. component of the multiracial U.S. work­ Today, apologists for Western imperi­ This underscores the validity of Trotsky's ing class. We fight to build a revolution­ alism, which has brought us such barbar­ theory of permanent revolution, that in ary workers party which, will champion ities as the Holocaust and the nuclear the semi colonial countries the gains of the cause of all the oppressed as part of incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bourgeois-democratic revolution can the struggle for socialist revolution. This pontificate about the "lack of civiliza­ only be achieved through the proletarian requires telling the truth about people tion" in backward countries of Africa. seizure of power and the extension of like Farrakhan, who give aid and com­ While condemning such racist hypocrisy, socialist revolution to the imperialist fort to the murderous racist ruling class we donot'share the outlook of some libe centers. This. requires the construction at .home and to its slaving neocolonial erats who', in the name of "cultural rela- of Leninist vanguard parties as· part, of regimes abroad .• . tivism," condone the inhumane legacies of the past practiced by semicolonial peoples. In many cases, this goes hand in . SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY hand with support to "Third World" O'akland nationalism. National Office Los Angeles In order to mobilize sufficient support , Box 1377 GPO Box 29574 Box 29497 New York, NY 10116 Los Feliz Sta. , Oakland, CA 94604 ! to establish themselves as the ruling I (212) 732-7860 , ' Los Angeles, CA 90029 . (510) 839-0851 class in their own countries after gaining (213) 380-8239 independence, the new bourgeois rulers Boston San, Francisco had to rely on backward-looking "cul­ Box 390840, Central Sta, Box 77494 tural traditions." Thus, Jomo Kenyatta, Cambridge, MA 02139 New York San Francisco, CA 94107 . (415) 777-9367 the darling of Pan-Africanists, endorsed (617) 666-9453 Box 3381, t female genital mutilation as a form of Chicago Church St. Sta. Washington, D.C. nationalist resistance to European colo­ New York, NY 10008 Box 6441, Main PO (212) 267-1025 Box 75073 nial domination. Likewise, cheerleaders Chicago, IL 60680 Washington, D,C. 20013 for the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 (312) 454-4930 (202) 872-8240 "Islamic Revolution"in Iran wHite­ washed the imposition of the head-to-toe chador-which reflected the social seg­ TROTSKYIST LEAGUE, OF' CANADA/LiGUE TROTSKYSTE DUCANADA regation of women and their imprison­ ,Toronto ''Montreal Vancouver ment in the home-as a symbol ofoppo­ Box 7198, Station A C.P. Les Atriums Box 2717, Main P,O. sition to Western imperialism. And what Toronto, ON M5W 1X8 'B,P, 32066 Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2 of the Indian practice of suttee, in which (416) 593-4138 Montreal, QC H2L 4V5 (604) 687-0353 the widow is burned alive afterthe death

""'"I! 26 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 647. 7 June 1996 Spartacist Supporter Writes in Black Scholar: "Million Man· March Appeases Racist. Exploiters" unity"-a 'million black men standing the liberal-led civil rights movement had together. In the I 960s, "I'm Black and . no program to address the de facto seg­ By Don Cane I'm Proud" race consciousness,' influ­ regation and ghetto poverty of blacks in enced by masses in struggle, was defiant the major Northern cities-all they could Reprinted from of the racist capitalist rulers. Today we offer was utopian pie-in-the-sky: the witness "I'm black and I'm not a crimi­ "brotherhood'ofman" under the thumb THEBLACKSCHOLAR nal" race consciousness influenced by a of a genocidal racist ruling class. desperate black middle class begging for The perspective of the Labor Black The following article is reprinted from "understanding" from the racist rulers. League for Social Defense and the Black Scholar Vol. 26, No. I (Winter! The black misleaders, branded by race Spartacist League is one of revoluti·on­ Spring 1996). Comrade Cane is a themselves, can barely conceal their con­ ary integrationism-for black freedom spokesman for the Spartacist League in tempt for the black masses on whom through socialist revolution. It is rooted the Bay Area and a member of the Labor they call to "atone." I say black people in the understanding that the brutal Black League for Social Defense. .have nothing to atone for! But the false oppression of blacks in this country is The rulers of America are conduding a prophets of the "American Dream" part of the very bedrock of American one-sided class 'war against the working blame the victim for not "succeeding" capitalism and it is one thl),t guides class, targeting as their main scapegoats and degrade the proud history of black our practical work. Together with the the black ghetto masses. With barely a working people who have struggled long Partisan Defense Committee, we have peep from the "leaders" of organized and hard for freedom from the chains of sought to bring the social power of labor, they have gutted industry, busted racist oppression. the integrated working class to bear' in unions and driven down wages. The With the defeat of Radical Reconstruc­ mobilizations demanding freedom for wealthy few have condemned the impov­ tion the social revolution that launched black death row political prisoner Mumia erished many in the black ghetto as a the American Civil War remained unfin­ Abu-Jamal and the abolition of the racist "surplus" population. Permanent unem­ ished. Chattel slavery was destroyed. but death penalty.· The perspective of an ployment, the elimination of welfare, the blacks were not free from ruthless politi­ integrated revolutionary fight for black assault on Medicare, intensified police cal and economic subjugation. The social freedom was what guided the PDC­ terror, an overflowing prison population ferment unleashed by the Civil War har­ initiated labor and black mobilization and the speedup on death row-all speak bored the underlying question: Who cre­ against an· attempted Klan provocation to the impulse to genocide inherent in the ated the society's wealth and who should in Springfield, Illinois on Martin Luther. policies of the racist rulers. rule? If the free slave demands 40 acres King Day in 1994. Organized' labor, Seeing no leadership willing to fight and a mule from the confiscated planta­ led by the Chicago transit unions" was the Gingrich/Clinton reaction, many tions why not the workers the factories? the hard core of this mobilization which blacks grabbed at Louis Farrakhan's Mil-" Why should these laboring classes not lion Man March like a drowning man for unite and overthrow the masters, SotJth a straw. The Million Man March dressed and North? In defense of private property, up a black constituency with the conserv­ the masters (South and North) united to Spartacist League ative trappings of anti-woman "family head off any incipient workers 'struggle Public Offices values" and segregationist bigotry. As by withdrawing the Union'army from the journalist Don Terry noted in the New South (bringing it North to break strikes) -MARXIST LlTERATURE- York Times (15 October 1995), "Mr. Far­ and sanctioning race terror and the Bay Area rakhan is a conservative and on the sur-' repressive Black Codes (the foundation Thurs.: 5:30·8:00 p,m., Sat.: 1 :00-5:00 p.m. face, at least, some of the rally's themes of Jim Crow). 1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) echo those heard at Republican gather­ American capitalism was built on the Oakland, California Phone: (510) 839-0851 ings: God, loyalty, family, discipline." forcible segregation and subjugation of Chicago In order to court America's party of blacks at the bottom of society. This is Tues.: 5:00-9:00p.m\Sat.: 11:00a.m.-2:00p.m.' 328 S. Jefferson St., Suite 904 . property (Democrats and Republicans)· the fundamental fact that the civil rights Chicago, Illinois,. Phone: (312) 454-4930 the black misleaders-Farrakhan, Jesse movement crashed into when it came Jackson, BenChavis-condemn blacks "up North" in the 1960s. This mass New York City . for their own oppression and black movement, built on the courage of mil­ Tues.: 6:30-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m. 41 Warren 51. (one bl6ck below women "to.be the slave of.a slave." lions of black and white activists, did Chambers St. near Church 51.) Much is made of the· march as a overturn the "Jim Crow'" system of de . New York, NY Phone: (212) 267·1025; demonstration ·of "black operational jure segregation of Southern blacks. But

.. _,•• "'!'"IIIIII~III'I' III 27

spiked the KKK lynch mob. Revolutionary integrationism is a pro­ gram for building a fighting labor move­ ment that champions the cause of all the oppressed and a revolutionary multiracial workers party that acts as the tribune of all the people in. the fight for an egali­ tarian socialist America. Revol'ut'ionary integrationism recognizes that black oppression is the Achilles' .heel of Amer­ ican capitalism, with the understanding, that "because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most. conscious and experienced section. revo- . Jutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming Ameri­ can revolution" ("Black and Red-Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," Spartaclsts and Labor Spartacist No. 10, May-J une 1967). Black Leagues protest Jim "Marxist utopian rubbish!" the liberal Crow raCism at Denny's integrationist and the segregationist restaurants, July 1993. nationalists would both shout in unison. But let us see whose program is utopian. In an article in the Nation (30 October \995), Eric Foner writes that his "vision of a nation transformed, one in which equality is a reality for all Americans" will "require not only the passage of new laws but a change of America's hearts and minds." Racism is a conscious tool ficiary of the civil rights revolt, although ties. It is utopian to believe that this rul­ of ruthless capitalist hegemony-it poi­ its constituents continue to endure the ing class will share any part of its market sons class consciousness and divides to daily humiliation of racism and are with a yet unformed black capitalist class. rule. It is the whip that drives American watchlng the openings which they were Farrakhan's cockroach capitalism is ,workers, white and black, to pull the afforded slam shut for their children. premised on the benevolent acquiescence capitalist cart through war, economic Their despair at the prospects for inte­ of the white power structure while at the depression and social ruin. grated social struggle against racism is same time feeding off of segregation. The idea that racism can be fought by conditioned by their lack of faith in the Farrakhan's is a program to sweep up 'changing "hearts and minds" finds. power of the multiracial working class as the crumbs that fall from the capitalist grotesque reflection in the whole prem­ an instrument of change. For them the table for a price. He advertises himself as ise of the Million Man March: racist ghetto masses are a social weight "hold­ an alternative to revolution: "if black oppression is the fault of blacks them­ ing down the race" (them) from upward people rise up in an evil manner, we selves. Louis Farrakhan recalls with nos­ mobility. For them an integrated labor could foment revolution inside this coun­ talgia the Jim Crow era: "When civil movement is a poor cousin compared to try and so weaken America that she rights broke down the segregation laws the powerful, wealthy patrons of the could not entertain war with her enemies we began to lose black businesses and Democratic Party. These patrons made it on the outside" (Back Where We Belong, spend our money with white businesses. clear they have no need for demanding 1989). Indeed, the "Mission Statement" So throughout the South the economic blacks or bothersome workers when in of the Million Man March Organizing advancement that we gained under Jim 1992, Clinton's New Democrats focused Committee offers "the Black commu­ Crow is ,literally dead" (Emerge. August his campaign toward the "racist Reagan nity .. .in a partnership with government" 1990). Economic advancement for Democrats." to form "the salvation army of the whom? Surely not the sharecropper Farrakhan denounces the small Jewish, world"-to make the world safe for Wall chained by debt to the plantation store now Arab and Asian ghetto shopkeepers Street profiteering and plunder. and the rural capitalist's land. Surely not as "bloodsuckers." The new Booker T. Malcolm X, once said of American the "last hired, first fired" urban worker Washingtons seek to be the .real blood­ capitalism: "The system in this country who fought tooth and nail for a decent suckers-the capitalist exploiters--of cannot produce freedom for an Afro­ paying job in industry. Surely not the "their own" people, claiming the ghetto American. It is impossible for this sys­ youth who studied in dilapidated class as their illusory "exclusive market." In tem, this sodal system, this system, as it rooms with outdated books because pub­ their political role as overseers for their stands, to produce freedom right now for lic .tax money was needed for projects to capitalist patrons the language of fascism the black man in this country." enhance business opportunity. serves to divert black anger from the real What Malcolm said also goes for the Today 20 percent of black families earn enemy, the capitalist White Anglo-Saxon average American workers, who are half of all black income. This is the black Protestant ruling class, to the hapless being squeezed by the system. We can­ middle class created by Johnson's "War small change "foreign" shopkeeper. For, not reform the racist capitalist system. It On Poverty" as a buffer against black the ghetto masses and even the middle threatens us with total annihilation. It unrest exemplified by the 1960s ghetto class the "empowerment" of "Black cap­ must be overthrown. It is socialism or upheavals. 1;his layer was the main bene- italism" is a fraud--old wine in new bot- barbarism .• 28 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 653, 11 Octoher 1996

Islam has joined with fascists. In 1961, Letter Elijah Muhammad invited a delegation from the American Nazi Party to an NOI convention. In 1985, Farrakhan invited Nation of Islam: Bodyguards ' California Klan leader Tom Metzger to an NOI rally in L.A. and accepted a $100 donation from this racist terrorist! Far­ for H'itler Apologist David Irving rakhan also recalls with nostalgia the Jim Oakland, CA land police also mohilized to guaran­ Crow era: "When civil rights broke down I October 1996 tee Irving a platform. A racist white­ the segregation laws we began to lose To the Editor: supremacist like Irving should have been black businesses and spend our money Workers Vanguard has repeatedly run out of Oakland. The fact that instead with white businesses. So throughout the warned that Louis Farrakhan is bad news he had the protection of the Nation of South the economic advancement that we for black people [see, for example, Islam is a condemnation of Farrakhan's gained under Jim Crow is literally dead" "Louis Farrakhan: Apologist for Slavery program of black separatism, which puts (Emerge, August 1990). The Farrakhan­ in Sudan," WY.No. 651, 13 September]. the NOI in a bloc with racist segregation­ ites use anti-Jewish, anti-Arab or anti­ Just how bad was demonstrated recently ists and violent terrorists like the KKK Korean bigotry to create scapegoats and here in Oakland, California, where about and Nazis, since they all believe in the divert black people away from the strug­ 43 percent of the population is black and "separation of the races." gle for equality. For the Farrakhanites, another 28 percent is Latino and Asian. This British fascist Irving seeks to use their program for black capitalism re­ Many, black people settled in Oakland "academic" credentials to deny that six quires the continued existence ofsegre­ during and after World War II, moving million Jews, and hundreds of thou­ gated black ghettos to guarantee a market here from the Deep South to work in the sands of Gypsies, homosexuals, Catho­ for blacks exploiting blacks. Richmond shipyards and other indus­ ,1ics, communists and others designated In this period of open racist reaction, a tries. Many black families had firsthand as Untermenschen ("sub-humans") were racial demagogue like Farrakhan gets a experience with the night-riding Ku Klux, gassed in Hitler's concentration camps. certain hearing among black workers and Klan race-terrorists. So if the hooded He· is the star attraction at ,meetings of youth because he appears to be anti­ Klansmen ever tried to have a rally in European fascist terror gangs which have racist. But as the NOI's defense of the downtown Oakland, you can bet they carried out murderous campaigns against notorious racist David Irving shows, this wouldn't last five minutes. dark-skinned immigrants and Jews: the "leadership" is based on smoke and mir­ But no less of a racist provocation British National Party, the Hitlerite "Na­ rors, designed to conceal its reactionary occurred here on the night of Septem­ tionale Offensive" in Germany. the white­ accommodation to the racist capitalist ber 10, when one of the world's most supremacist Heritage Front in Canada. exploiters. notorious Hitler-loving Nazi organizers Irving has twice been denied a plat­ The acceptance of separatism has his­ and propagandists, named David Irving. form by militant demonstrations here in torically meant accommodation to op­ slipped into downtown Oakland to give the Bay Area for his fascist recruitment pression and renunciation of struggle. an organizing speech titled, "Freedom of meetings. In October 1994, an integrated The separatist doctrine is the cover for the Speech and Adolf Hitler's Final Solution protest of 300 students, leftists and black nationalist misleaders' program of Finally Solved"! His presence here was workers initiated by the Spartacus Youth peace with the racist ruling class. In fact, an insult and a threat not only to the Club broke up a fascist rally outside the fundamental truth of the race question majority black, Latino and Asian popu­ UC Berkeley. Irving was reportedly flat­ is that the interests of the working class lation, but to every person who hates tened on the floor, sprawled amongst his and those of blacks-an oppressed race­ racism and fascism. How could this have , Nazi paraphernalia.)n February 1995, color caste-are not antagonistic but go happened without a massive mobilization the grotesquely misnamed "UC Berkeley hand in hand. . by all the people-many of them trade­ Free Speech Coalition," a front group of As an oppressed racial fuinority, blacks union members-who would be the in­ anti-Semitic, gay-baiting, racist Islam­ find a driving force in their struggle for tended victims of this dangerous racist? ic fundamentalists, organized a second emancipation in the demand for full The answer is that Irving's meeting took provocation on campus with UC admin­ equality, the right to complete integration place in cooperation with and under the istration support. This time Irving's and assimilation into American life. The protection of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of intended meeting site was surrounded Spartacist League and the Labor Black Islam (NOI) on the basis of their shared by a spirited 400-strong demonstration Leagues fight to mobilize the working program onew-baiting anti-Semitism! that stopped the Hitlerites from daring class on the program of revolutionary The time and location of the meeting to enter the building. integrationism-complete social, politi­ was kept secret until the day it occurred, Humiliated, Irving and his cohorts cal and economic equality in an egal­ when an ad appeared in the Daily Cali­ have been probing for a way to get a foot­ itarian, socialist society. Achieving that fornian at the University of California­ hold in the Bay Area. It is an outrage that goal requires the building of a multiracial, Berkeley. On site at 24th Street and Tele­ Irving was given this opportunity under revolutionary vanguard party which can graph Avenue, six of the NOl's Fruit of the auspices of Farrakhan and the Fruit of lead the multiracial working class to the Islam (FOI) stood guard at the front door Islam, thus' setting up a potential scenario seizure of state power. The road to black of the hall where Irving spewed his anti­ of integrated anti-racist demonstrators freedom lies here-in proletarian eman­ Semitic filth. Other members of FOI' clashing with black nationalist security cipation, the building of a society in security stood on nearby street corners squads protecting the meeting of a white­ which those who labor rule! with communications devices and more supremacist in heavily black Oakland. Comradely, were seen going into the meeting. Oak- This is not the first time the Nation of Deborah Maguire

., •• " , III "1111( 29 Mobilize Labor/Black Power to Free Geronimo!

.. Los Angeles courthouse dem­ onstration for Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), December 17.

As Black History fioes to press, a short of the time that Nelson Mandela three sets of· FBI wiretaps on Panther court' hear,ing is continuinfi in Santa was imprisoned by the South African offices showing that Geronimo was 400 Ana, California to rule Oil the request for apartheid state. He has been denied miles away at the time the murder was a new tr~al for former Black Panther parole 14 times and will not be consid­ uncovered; the victim's husband's identi­ Party leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). ered again until the year 2000. Framed fication of another suspect was dis­ The,hearing, which began on 16 Decem­ up by the LAPD and the FBI's "Counter­ closed; and the man who testified Geron­ ber 1996, is centrally focused on the tes­ Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO) imo had confessed to the crime, one tim rilly of Julius Butler, the prosecution's for a crime everybody knows he did not Julius Butler, was revealed as an FBI and "key witness", in Geronimo's 1972 trial and could not have committed, Geron­ LAPD informer with an ax. to grind j(J/' a murder the government knows he imo is a living condemnation of the against Geronimo (facts Butler lied abOUl did not commit. While a plethora offacts American capitalist state and the racist on the stand); All of this was known at documenting Butler's role asaninform- "justice" of its courts., the, time by the FBI, the LAPIJ and rhe , ant for the FBI and Los Angeles Police " The fight for Geronimo's freedom district attorney's office and was hidden Department have surfaced over the last received a savage blow on April 17 Jrom the defense. Geronimo's petition /7 years, it was revealed for the first when the Los Angeles Superior Court also provides statements from former time last summer that Butler was also an refused to hear his case to,:,overturn Panthers that they were at a meeting with informant for the LA distril·t ;attorney' s his conviction. This continues the series Geronimo in, Oakland .at the time of the office before and during Gerdnimo's of grotesque cover-up operations by state murder, and documents the investigation trial. and' federal courts since his conviction by lay minister Jim McCloskey which We reprint he/ow a 4 May 1996 state­ in 1972. The current round of court . identified the likely real killers as associ­ ment issued hy the Partisan Defense hearings was the result of a habeas ates of Butler. Committee fol/owinfi a Los Angeles'Supe­ · corpus petition filed on February 26, Presiding judge Michael A. Cowell rior Court ruling ill April afiainst hearing · Geronimo's fifth attempt at exposing ·his had ordered L.A. district attorney Gil Geronimo's appeal to (}\'erturn his con­ frame-up for the 1968 murder of' a Garcetti-who has.been "investigating" viction. The statemellt appeared in Work- schoolteacher in Santa Monica., The this, material· for three years-to respond ·ers Vanguard No. 645.10 May 1996, petition detailed two decades of disclo- on March 28. Instead, Garcetti first · sures of government misconduct. orches­ asked for a three-month postponement to Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a former trated misidentification and perjured "investigate"and then, the day before the leader of the Black Panther Party and an testimony. )··hearing, .he argued that Geronimo's attor­ unbowed fighter against black oppres­ :Since Geronimo's original trial,CO­ neys.had filed in the wrong .court. Judge sion, has been behind bars in the U.S. for ,INTELPRO's conspiracy to destroy .. the Cowell, ,assigned to; hear the case, .a quarter of a century-just one year · Panthers has been exposed; ev.idence i,of acknowledged that Geronimo had raised 30

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"01' t.he In!'ol'Cl8tion or t.h. 1aure~\I: in "tew or mAW' ••4"lInt IlIpI'Ulton ot hatred toward bw entoreement ~"Ion"el In General, no eonll~=r.tlaa 1~ ~.lnc ,lvln ~ ..alntervlcu ~1A~~ ro .. the purpo •• or deYel.. p~nt ••• PrlI. It 13 "oted, h"",,¥,Z' tll,t conIUM eo"~I'~r"Uon 13 Gl¥en to tbe pn~'lbl11t1 o~ the . ut111~.tSon ot oounte"ln~.111een=. ~~.ures .1th .ffort. belne dlro:tGd to.~rd n.utr'll~ln6 PRATT .~ an .rreatS.. 8PP runetion'1'1. II that the

1969 police raid on L.A. BlackPanther Party headquarters. 1970 FBI document calls for "neutralizing PRATT" as part of murderous COINTELPRO vendetta against black militants. "some very substantial issues" but gave There are not a few in bourgeois cir­ country by the Panthers' rejection of credence to the D.A.'s "late challenge." cles who built their careers on the gov­ Martin Luther King's passive acceptance· By the next hearing, Cowell had under­ ernment vendetta against the Panthers. of the brutally oppressive capitalist gone a stark change in attitude. In the 13 Contragate co-conspirator Edwin Meese order. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover April Los Angeles Times, an unusual presided over the war on the Panthers as ordered the "neutralization" of the Pan­ "correction" appeared to a story on the Governor Ronald Reagan's top cop in thers for their advocacy of black ,armed March hearing which supposedly "incor­ California. Richard Held, a COINTEL­ self-defense against the cops who were, rectly suggested that a Superior Court PRO specialist who played a major role and still are, gunning down black youth judge had found merit in arguments to in targeting Geronimo in L.A., led the with impunity. overturn Geronimo Pratt's murder con­ FBI's August 1985 roundup of Puerto Thirty-eight Panthers were shot in viction." Four days later, Cowell came Rican militants, and went on to head the cold blood by the COINTELPRO "opera­ into court with his mind made up. Ignor­ FBI in San Francisco. Richard Kalustian, tions"; those not killed were framed up ing the law which clearly permits a hear­ the deputy D.A. who prosecuted Geron­ and imprisoned for years. Mumia Abu­ ing in Superior Court. he transferred the imo and paved the way for FBI fink Jamal's role as a young Panther leader in case to the California Supreme Court and, Butler's admission to the California bar, Philadelphia put him in the cops' cross echoing the arguments D.A. Garcetti had is now a sitting L.A. County Superior hairs; today, from Pennsylvania's death made in response to an inquiry from Court judge. row, he is fighting to keep his voice of Geronimo's longtime defender, Con­ American capitalism rests on the brutal protest against police brutality and: racist gressman Ron DeHums, the judge blamed oppression of black people, who are inte­ oppression from being silenced forever. the delay on Geronimo's attorneys for fil­ grated into, but forced to the bottom of Geronimo was targeted for death as a ing in the wrong jurisdiction. society as a race-color caste. The hard­ "Key Black Extremist," narrowlyescap­ 'fought and only recently won juridical ing death' in a 1969 raid on the L.A. COINTELPRO'sDeadly War rights of blacks are once again being Panthers. Against the Panthers overrun as the daily reality of jobless­ This is a blatant attempt to once again ness, cuts in education, welfare "reform" No Justice· in the ., bury Geronimo's case. The judge and and health care destruction take place , Capitalist Courts D.A. know that the Supreme Court is not side by side with summary executions by Many supporters of Geronimo thought likely to permit any court to hear further the cops in the ghettos, a burgeoning that the unambiguous evidence of his documentation on the government's mur­ black prison popUlation under "three . innocence, announced by attorneys John­ derous war against the Panthers. Ap­ strikes" laws, and legal lynching ordered nie Cochran and Stuart Hanlon at a press pointed in their majority by California's by the courts. Geronimo is a symbol of conference which included significant right-wing governor Pete Wilson, the pre­ black revolt against this. oppression; His participation by important witnesses and sent Supreme Court was assembled as a continued imprisonment is· a message community activists, would lead in short conservative law-and-order body with the from the ruling class: Those who chal­ order to Geronimo's release. We in the, explicit mission of tearing apart the lenge the racist status quo will. not be Partisan Defense Committee, who have court's long history of judicial liberalism, tolerated. worked for Geronimo's freedom for over most recently under anti-death penalty The state's refusal under any circum­ a decade, would have surely welcomed judge Rose Bird. Since 1990, Pete, Wil­ stances to ·allow Geronimo a new trial, such a tum of events. But our under­ son's court has upheld 94 percent of death· let alone free him, is testimony to the standing of the nature of the state, race sentences under appeal. . fear inspired in the racist rulers of ;this and class in America has led us to see'

'. 'IIUII I 31

that there is no justice in the capitalist frame-up Of Geronimo, where the bour~' the trade-union tops, who won't even :courts. , geoisie has, worked assiduously to foster call their members into action to protect Justice in America is neither blind nor racial animosity in the wake of the multi­ their own economic interests against the does it carefully weigh the evidence on racial rebellion against the Rodney King union-busting offensive currently being balanced scales. The courts, like the verdict. In a city which has a gap waged throughout the U.S. The union cops, are part of the state, which is ,not a, between rich and poor that ranks third bureaucracy is wedded to the defense of neutral body but exists to administer the 'behind Rio de Janeiro and Calcutta, the the bourgeois order through support to exploitation of the working class by the ruling class relies on racist cop terrono the capitalist Democratic Party; their job handful of rulers who own the wealth of contain any manifestation of soci,al is to keep the workers in tine, and lined society. Every extension of democratic protest. This fact has been understood by up to vote for Clinton in ,November. :rhe rights in this country-from the right to the SEIU's "Justice for Janitors," with its union banners come out only for Demo­ strike, to universal suffrage, to the dis­ heavily immigrant membership, which cratic election vehicles. In the words of 'mantling of Jim Crow in the South-has successfully fought the bosses and their Mumia Abu-Jamal in a 1993. message come about only as a result of struggle cops to organize their union. In 1994, from death row, the Clinton White House 'against the state. The recent attacks on SEIU locals organized a protest the day was "born in the blood of executions and -affirmative action programs are ample before Geronimo's 13th parole hearing, bent on out-Republicanizing the Repub­ evidence that these gains are also only marching into Garcetti's office to present licans ... proving once again that repres­ partial and reversible. petitions and demand he review the evi­ sion is stil1 repression, no matter which , The ruling class has always attempted dence in Geronimo's case. ;party is in power." :to victimize those who struggle for an Integrated unions representing over The big ,business of union-busting 'extension of rights for working people two million workers have gone on record 'feeds on racism; if the state can with )md the oppressed. The Partisan Defense in support of Geronimo. and a number of impunity frame up and keep in prison 'Committee was launched by the Sparta­ key union officials have sent letters of those like Geronimo, it wiJl aJl the more cist League in order to defend such protest to Garcetti in the past months. readily turn its sights on the workers 'class-war prisoners. In so doing, we look But the members of these organizations movement as a whole. An injury to one to the organized multiracial working have largely not been mobilized in action is an injury to all! Successful workers class which has the ,social power both to to combat this racist frame-up. The inte­ struggle requires a strategic commitment fight for temporary gains under capital­ grated demonstrations outside the court­ to smashing black oppression, and that ism and to end capitalist rule, altogether. house at the March and April hearings requires a political fight against the pre­ With their nationalist outlook, the Black were spirited, but they lacked the neces­ sent pro-Democratic leadership of the Panther Party saw the plebeian ghetto sary social power. On the day of Geron­ unions. It's time to build a working-class masses rather than the working class as imo's second hearing, the union repre­ party which mobilizes its forces indepen­ the agent of revolutionary change. In senting Kaiser Permanente hospital' dent of the capitalist 'state and takes up fact, workers have a compelling interest workers called a protest against the hos­ the battles of the poor and oppressed in in Geronimo's cause, The cops who rush .pital closures which are cutting off med­ this country. Free Geronimo now! in to break one union strike after another ical care for the impoverished black and also beat up immigrants with impunity minority population and slashing hun­ * * * and kill any minority youth who crosses dreds of jobs; the union should have We encourage WV readers to continue them, later whitewashed as "custody marched down Sunset Boulevard to the to support and build the PDC. Become a death syndrome." courthouse to put some muscle behind its monthly sustaining contributor. Send a Beginning with the most vulnerable, support to Geronimo. ' donation of $5 or more and receive a the ruling class is taking aim at the organ­ The lack of mobilization for Geronimo subscription to Class-Struggle Defense ized working class to maximize their is of a piece with the unions' abstention Notes. For a single copy, send $1 to: Par­ competitive edge in the "New World from the struggle in defense of demo­ tisan Defense Committee, P.O. Box 99, Order." From Congress's "counterterror­ cratic rights for·, blacks and Latinos, Canal Street Station, New York, NY ism" bill-whose centerpiece is the cur­ immigrants and women. The fault is with 10013 .• tailment of death row prisoner appeals to the federal courts-to the prohibition of press interviews in an attempt to Marxist Bulle~!~;_ silence prisoners from protesting frame­ up convictions and viciously repressive Includes: and dehumanizing prison conditions, the • For the Materialist Conception of the democratic trappings of the bourgeois WHAT STRATEGY Negro Question state are under bipartisan attack. While FOR BLACK UBERATION? the legislature debates a national anti­ • For Black Trotskyism immigrant Prop. 187, undermining the trotskyIsm • Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the 14th Amendment won through the war vs. Black Power Era against slavery, Clinton has carried out a Black Nationalh~m • Soul Power or Workers Power? high-tech militarization of the border The Rise and Fall of the League of with Mexico unequaled in U.S. history. Revolutionary Black Workers The bourgeoisie has always tried to Key documents and arllcles exploit racial and ethnic divisions within 1955-1978 $1.50 (72 pages) the working class, hoping to distract Make checks payable/mall to: the exploited. while the capitalists pick ..,.. Spartaclst Publishing Co. their pockets. This is particularly evident ~"PJtlllllWlgeo.,b'3I1GPO._VbIII.NV10I!' Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 in Los Angeles, center of the ongoing 32 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 652; 27 September1996 Free R.ide for Klan .in Chicago-Why?

Twenty Klansmen, half of them wear­ when you mess with us." Later a plain­ borhood in downtown Oakland, Cali­ ing the hoods and robes of nightriding clothes cop "casually" ,told a lawyer for fornia, a meeting featuring Hitler apolo': terror, rallied in Chicago's Daley Plaza on some of the anti-Klan defendants that the gist David Irving was defended by goons September 21. Two months ago, when a KKK was planning another rally for Sep­ from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Suit­ gang of KKK thugs tried to stage a simi­ tember 21. and-tie Klansman David Duke has been lar provocation in Daley Plaza they were We smelled a real set-up here, manu­ invited by liberal student bureaucrats trounced by anti-fascist protesters who, factured by the cops and the Klan, where to "debate" affirmative action at Cal had responded to the Partisan Defense the cops would be mobilized in force to State Northridge on September 25. And Committee's call to mobilize against the beat up and arrest anti-Klan protesters in Chicago on September 21, the Klan racist killers. This time the Klan was only two days before the next court hear­ got away with rallying under the pro­ unoAf/osed. Why? Because those who ing for the anti-Klan defendants. Reports tection of a massive cop mobilization. purport to be the leaders of labor and of from the site of the September 21 Klan This was a state-sponsored provocation the black masses are desperate to keep the rally certainly bore out that assessment. against-and a trap intended for-the union ranks and minorities off the streets About 35 Chicago cops-headed by left. for fear of damaging Clinton's re-election police commander McNulty, who led the The fascist nightriders, must be bid. So they leave the streets clear for vicious assault on anti-Klan protesters on stopped! But, unlike organizations like Klan terror! June 29-were visible at Daley Plaza Progressive Labor, we do not seek to While the AFL-CIO bureaucrats ped­ itself. In an adjacent walled-in construc­ substitute our own small forces for the dIe their red-white-and-blue "Vote Clin­ tion site, there were an estimated 30 necessary social power of the multiracial ton/Gore" decals, Jesse Jackson (whose unmarked police cars with four uni­ working class. When we heard that the "Operation PUSH" is based in Chicago) formed cops in each car. There were also Klan was planning to rally again on Sep­ and other black Democrats want blacks two horse trailers and three police wag­ tember 21-a plan that was "leaked" by to ride on the back of Clinton's bus with ons on the north side of the plaza. Thugs the cops and otherwise not publicized­ them. Farrakhan, who plays himself up wearing black T-shirts with "Security" we knew it smelled of a police/Klan trap as the black leader who is "in the face" lettered in white ,on them, standing designed to set up the most effective of the white racist rulers, also calls for across the street from Daley Plaza, later fighters against fascist terror. We consid­ getting out the vote in November. Two put on hoods and sheets to join the Klan ered it our responsibility to call other months earlier, when the PDC put out an rally. organizations in the Chicago area to urgent call on 24 hours' notice to dozens To have prevailed against this deadly inform them of what we had heard and of unions and black organizations to cop/KKK alliance would have taken advise them that we considered this to be mobilize to stop the Klan on June 29, the a powerful, integrated, labor-centered a police trap which we weren't about to response was only from individual left­ mobilization bringing out thousands of walk into. ists and trade unionists. The labor tops trade unionists together with black and This decision was based on the bitter didn't lift a finger, while many black other minority organizations. In 1982, a recognition that the kind of class­ radio stations in Chicago-who buy into gang of Nazi would-be stormtroopers struggle mobilization that was desper­ Farrakhan's message that the black were protected by hundreds of cops in ately needed for the working people and ghetto masses should "atone" for their their bid to stage a provocation against black masses to prevail was blocked by own oppression-refused to even broad­ Gay Pride Day in Chicago. They were the misleaders who would sell their cast appeals to turn out in force ,against met with a 3,OOO-strong mobilization of mother to get Clinton re-elected.' They the Klan.· ' 'unionists, blacks, Jews, gays, leftists and have presided over, the decimation of Some 100 people did respond on June others which was initiated by the organized labor. They, have allowed, and 29-mainly youth, anarchists, leftists Spartacist League/U.S. even encouraged, the racist rulers' war and individual trade-union members. , In J 994, a determined demonstra- on desperate immigrants. They did noth­ These determined anti-fascist militants tion of 500 people-representing the ing when the Democrats and Republi­ gave the Klan a well-deserved lesson. hard core of the Chicago-area union cans axed welfare. But in a uniorr town like Chicago, with movement-came out in Springfield, This devastation-the product of a its huge black and Hispanic population, Illinois to take on a Klan race-hate rally protit-crazed system based on the ex­ there should have been thousands on the against Martin Luther King Day. Fright­ ploitation of the many by the few­ street that day to stop the Klan. ened that the union ranks might be mobi­ nourishes the Klan in its quest for a Since the June 29 protest the' Chicago lized in some actual struggle against "racially pure" America, one in which city authorities and the notorious racist terror, the AFL-CIO bureaucrats there would be no trade unions. Now Chicago police force 'have continued came down hard in trying to knife any these kill-crazed racists are feeling their working hand in hand with the Klan, union support. Now, with the labor and oats, having gotten away with staging waging a legal vendetta against eight of black misleaders keeping their heads a provocation in the heart of labor/black the anti-fascist protesters who were , , down for Clinton, the fascists are seizing Chicago unopposed. Here is the,bit­ arrested and face up to a year behind the opportunity to organize for their pro­ ter ,fruit of shackling labor and the bars. At a court hearing on September 9, " gram of ,genocide. oppressed to their exploiters in its Demo­ a Klansman gloated, "See what happens On September lOin a black neigh- cratic Party face .•

~" " '0 ...... " ..::-' '.~,'. : ...... ~ ...... " ...... '""~~'''' ...'" ". '~'" , "'~"I"'~" ,.,., ..... '~ ...... ~. '! "":I~'i .~,." .. ~ .. '! .,.., •• .." ._ •••• - •••• , ... - •••• - •• ~., •• ~,.",- •••. ~~ , • ~ •••• -- .• --..•••• _ •••••• 33

Chicago cops attacked 29 June 1996 anti-Klan protesters,arresting nine, and protected KKK race-terrorists.

JA/'I(UARY II-Three anti-racist activ­ , the Chicago Labor Black Struggle blackout on the KKK/s' plans' to rally in ists face trumped-up charges of assault League, the united-front anti-Klan protest Chicago. Then-on June 29, police inter­ and battery against pol ice and obstructing drew over 100 trade unionists, leftists and vened to protect the Klansmen, escorting police stemming from a demonstration youth. The Klansmen. were stopped as them behind metal barricades where they against the race-terrorist Ku Klux Klan in they marched in military formation, continued to spew their genocidal filth. Chicago's Daley Plaza on 29 June 1996. armed with bolt-studded shields and long, The' cops later launched a series of at­ Gene Herson, Labor Coordinator of the heavy flagpole "Iances"wielded as weap­ tacks against the anti-Klan protesters, Partisan Defense Committee, and Jeff onsagainst the anti-racist protesters. taking particular aim at black and minor­ Lyons, a supporter of Refuse & Resist, Finding themselves sprawled on the pave­ ity youth. Several demonstrators were hit face up to a year in prison, while Dennis'· ment, the KKKscum were taught a sim­ with clubs, others were. pepper-gassed Glass, a young, black worker, faces up to ple lesson: cross-burners and lynchers and nine were arrested, including union­ two years in prison for having taken part will not be tolerated in Chicago. This was ists and a young organizer in the AFL­ in the June 29 protest in which a violent a victory fot all working people and ClO's "Union Summer" program. While Klan provocation was decisively routed. minorities! charges against six of the protesters have Initiated on less than 24 hours' notice Seeking to stop or limit any protests, been dropped, the continuing victimiza­ by the Partisan Defense .Committee and city officials had kept a virtual news tion of the Anti-Klan Three is the state's blatantly malicious and vindictive retalia­ tion for the trouncing suffered by the Klan. At stake in the defense of the Anti­ Join the Labor Black Leagues! Klan Three is the right to engage in We stand for mobilizing the masses of minority and working people social protest, which is being increas­ for militant integrated struggle against the brutal system of racist ingly abrogated by the "democratic" cap­ oppression that is capitalist America. Initiated by and fraternally italist state. As a defense motion calling for. dropping the charges pointed out: allied with the Spartacist League, a multiracial Marxist organization, "Police approached the June 29 demon­ the Labor Black Leagues are part of the revolutionary movement of stration as a 'test run' of their tactical the workers and oppressed against the bosses and for socialism. methods of suppressing and controlling political expression in the context of the ------Formore information write ------Democratic Convention" held in August. CHICAGO NEW YORK OAKLAND Indeed, five demonstrators arrested out­ Box 6938 Box 3238 Box 751 side the convention continue to face Chicago, IL 60680 Church St. Station Oakland, CA 94604 charges of "inciting to mob action," New York, NY 10008 while six supporters of the. Progressive Labor Party face charges of "armed 34 violence" for protesting against Clinton's blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, Catholics. tions should be sent' to the Partisan axing of welfare just two days before It is vital for the labor movement and all Defense Committee (earmarked "Anti­ the start of the convention. On the basis opponents of racist terror to join the Klan Protesters"). Send protest state­ of the Anti-Klan Three's defense motion, effort to defend the Anti-K'lan Three. If ments demanding that the charges be an evidentiary hearing in their case has the cops and courts get away with pun­ dropped to: Richard Devine, State's been scheduled for January 23. ishing anti-fascist protesters for making Attorney of Cook County, Richard J. The KKK's fascist terror is fed by the a stand against race-hate provocations in Daley Center, 55 W. Randolph Street, attacks of the capitalist rulers and their Chicago. it will give a green light for the Chicago, IL 60602. Mail donations two parties-the Democrats and Repub­ racist terrorists everywhere. Drop the and copies of protest statements to the licans--on welfare recipients, blacks, charges! i' PDC in Chicago at P.O. Box 802867, immigrants, unions. The Klan nightriders Chicago, IL 60680-2867, phone (312) must be stopped, and what's necessary to * * * 454-4931; or in New York at P.O. Box do it are mass mobilizations of all the Funds are urgently needed to cover the 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY Klan's intended victims: trade unionists, legal costs of this defense effort. Dona- 10013-0099. phone (212) 406-4252 .•

reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 650,30 August 1996

On Chicago Anti-Klan Protest Why Cops Protect Racist Terrorists "The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same Now, after the cops protected the KKK, the Cook County basket." State's Attorney, Jack O'Malley, is rushing to lock away - Joseph Conrad, Th(' Secret Agent (1907) those who opposed, and protested them. Over 100 men and women, people of various hues, gather When the "law of the land" protects the Klan, what will it on June 29th, in Chicago's Daley Plaza, to protest a gather­ do to those who oppose them? ing of the KKK-guess who the cops assemble to protect? What can you do? The Arkansas-based Klan found Chi-town inhospitable, Speak out against the prosecutions! as trade unionists, anarchists, socialists and others intro­ Demand that charges against the anti-Klan protesters be duced them to the City'S pavement, and upon doing so, nine dropped! . of them (the anti-racists) found themselves facing serious Join the protests at the Cook County Circuit Court, 1121 felony charges, like assaults on cops, for duking it out with S.,State Street, in Chicago. ~ Klanners. For more information: call the Chicago PDC at (312) Is punching a Klanner the same as 'assaulting a cop? 454-4931. Maybe. © 1996 by Mumia Abu-Jamal' The recent "good ole boy" picnic showed cops,both state and federal, having a public boozefest, with one caveat, ' 'written in bright, bold print on a sign: "No n-----s allowed!" Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia black journalist, is The FBI, according toa rare Jewish agent in the '60s, , on death row at Pennsylvania's Greene state prison. had instructors refer to blacks openly as "n--,---s.", , ,Framed up because of his political views, Jamal faces Why is it that cops always act to defend America's "death for his defiance of the racist, capitalist order., His 'terrorists? , columns appear periodicalJyin Workers Vanguard and When those terrorists are homegrown, American white other newspapers. ' supremacists, these groups which have bombed babies, and To get involved in the tight to save Mumia Abu-Jamal burned churches, find safety and solace in the arms of police. and abolish the death penalty, contact the Partisan

I At the Daley Plaza rally, it was not the terrorists who Defense Committee, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, " were arrested, but the anti-racists, including trade unionists, New York, NY 10013. If you wish to correspond with a youthful organizer from the AFL-CIO's "Union Summer" Jamal, you can write to: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM8335" ' project, anarchists, a "Refuse & Resist!" supporter, and sev­ SCI Greene, 1040 E. Roy Furman Hwy., Waynesburg, eraLPDC (Partisan Defense Committee) supporters. PA 15370. 35 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 653, 11 October 1996

Saba's Court: Racist Capitalist '~ustice" in Action Key Witness for Mumia Abu-Jamal Arrested on the Stand For the many thousands around the world who rallied to stop the execution Free Mumia Now!. of black political prisoner Mumia Abu­ Jamal last year, his continuing persecu­ the stand to testify that in 1982 she was tion by the cops and courts has been an coerced by police to retract her eyewit­ object lesson in the racist American "jus­ ness account of having seen two men run tice" system. The capitalist state's intent from the scene of Faulkner's shooting to silence Mumia and his supporters and while Jamal lay wounded on the ground. to kill this fighter against racism and After two hours of browbeating Jones, oppression was demonstrated again last Assistant District Attorney Arlene Fisk week in the Philadelphia court of "hang­ declared, "I'm promising to lock you up." ing judge" Albert Sabo, who presided Moments later, Jones, while under oath, over Jamal's 1982 frame-up "trial" and was placed under arrest for an outstand­ ,death sentence. ' ing bench warrant issued more than two In a supplemental evidentiary hearing years ago in New Jersey on alleged bad­ on October 1 ordered by the Pennsylvania check charges. Supreme Court, Veronica Jones, an eye­ Although Jones had already testified witness in the 1981 shooting of Philadel· that she was completely unaware of AP phia police officer Daniel Faulkner for the 1994 New Jersey bench warrant, the', .Veronlca Jones, Jailed for which Jamal was falsely convicted, gave D.A. rose to ;"ask that,the sheriffs ,take • telling the truth. ! powerful testimony pointing to Jamal's her into custody ... as a fugitive from jus­ innocence. In retaliation, in front of tice," announcing that two New Jersey be made for her to appear in New Jersey scores of Jamal's supporters who had police officers were waiting outside the to settle the outstanding warrant, Sabo filled the courtroom, Jones was dragged courtroom. Despite pleas by the defense hypocritically argued he had no jurisdic­ from the witness stand and taken to jail. attorneys that Jones be allowed to con­ tion, and Jones was dragged from the Jones, a black mother of three, had taken tinue to testify and that an arrangement court. Later that afternoon, a New Jersey

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,.;. ..:".\i~;~ Jennifer Beach WV Photo August 1995 labor-centered protest In New York City initiated by Partisan. Defense Committee to stop threatened execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. cop testified that they had known Jones' ,side City Hall on·October 1 that Veronica attorneys with removal from the court.' Camden address from the time the bench Jones "came. forward to bravely and The antics of Sabo and Fisk were a warrant was issued, but no action was courageously tell the truth after 14 years replay of Jamal's post-conviction relief taken to arrest her until Assistant D.A. and was set up in a courtroom." What (PCRA) hearing in the summer of 1995,' Fisk phoned the New Jersey police happened to Jones, Weinglass said, illus- when S.abo repeatedly ruled i 'against last week. Following het arrest, Jones trated the continuing "intimidation and every defense motion and objection .and· was not finally released until 5 a.m. on coercion of witnesses who have come for- had Jamal co-counsel Rachel Wolken- $JO,OOO hail. ward on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. It's stein briefly arrested. Asked why she had come forward now, happened in the police station. Today you As Veronica Jones was hauled off to' Jones said that she did not want her saw it happen in open court." jail, Mumia's supporters immediately grandchildren to "think their grandmom From the moment Jones took the stand". began ,collecting funds for her bail. After' was living a lie." Testifying in Mumia's on October I, she was subjected to a, her release, on October 3 Jones returned case for the first time since the 1982 trial, stream of threats and accusations by 'to the hearing, demonstratively sitting Jones described how just days before the Sabo and Fisk. Continuing the pattern of with Jamal's supporters. The evidentiary trial began she was visited in jail. where misconduct by the police and District procedure ended that day, following a she was facing serious felony charge~, by Att)rney"s office in this case, prosecutors morning session in which Sabo, re- Philadelphia police detectives and threat­ again used the threat of arrest in a bla- . sponded to defense appeals for the release ened into retracting her eyewitness tant attempt to coerce Jones to recant her of prison logs from the time Jones was account. Jones was later put on probation testimony, just as they had in 1982. Even imprisoned in 1982 by screaming' at on charges which carried a sentence of up before Jones started her testimony, Sabo Wolkenstein to "shut up" and threatening to 15 years in prison. Jones told the hear­ threatened Jones with back -to-back per- to remove her from the court. From ing, "I Was to name Mr. Jamal as the jury convictions ranging up to seven beginning to end, the latest hearing was shooter." She refused to make such a years' imprisonment each. The prosecu- marked by the same kangaroo-coart statement but did retract her original true tor then dredged up an eight~year-old behavior that has been rampant through- account to avoid imprisonment. In an allegation that Jones had worked for out the IS-year attempt to "legally" lynch anguished voice she said, "It was a big several months while collecting welfare Mumia Abu-Jamal: continuing cover-up decision to make, but this was five or ten for her three children, snidely accusing of evidence showing Jamal's innocence, years away from my kids." When threat­ Jones of "steal[ing] from the' State of intimidation of defense witnesses, mas- ened with arrest by Assistant D.A. Fisk, New 'Jersey."· After' patiently. withstand- si~e cop and prosecutorial misconduct Jones responded, "You think that's going ,ing this gross abuse for more than an to make me change my story. It's not." hour, Jones responded to her persecutors: State Apparatus of '.. "I'm the one on trial now. This court- Racist Repression. , "This Courtroom room is not for justice." In reporting the events last week, even Is Not for Justice" Overruling all defense objections to the Philadelphia, Daily News (2 October) Jamal's lead counsel, Leonard Wein­ the Assistant D.A.'s outrageous persecu- Jeltcompelled to .express. its exaspera- glass, told a midday press conference out- tion of Jones, Sabo threatened Jamal's tion at Saba' for "exhibiting his usual

.. ",,, "111 ." .. 37 prejudice against the defense .... Such . Committee, pointed out at the October I Panther Party. This continued when heavy-handed tactics can only confinn press conference: "Every day, Sabo and Jamal was a widely known journalist suspicions that the court is incapable of the prosecution have made it clear that it who exposed the racist reality of daily giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing." It's not' 'is impossible for Jamal to get a fair trial life in Philly and later became a sup­ as if the pro-cop Daily News has now in the city of Philadelphia. Our legal porter of the MOVE organization. As come out for Jamal. Ever since the papers call not only for a new trial but Wolkenstein said at the October I press beginning of last year's PCRA hearing, call for his freedom based on the history conference: "We have an innocent man the bourgeois media and other ruling­ of prosecutorial misconduct." who's on death row, an innocent man class elements-including "Republican The openly pro-prosecution Sabo sim­ who's been framed up by the police and "law and order" types like Pennsylvania ply exhibits in ,a blatant fashion the real prosecution. Muinia was subject to daily Senator Arlen Spector-have feared that workings of the frame-up system that is surveillance, from the time he was 15 Sabo's flagrantly biased conduct was bourgeois "justice." The cops and their years old by the FBI, part of the COIN­ threatening to undo the state's trumped­ Fraternal Order of Police have waged a TELPRO program," which sought to up "case" against Jamal. In blatantly frenzied 'campaign to kill Jamal. The "neutralize" the Black Panthers and other teaming up with prosecutors and cops in courts on every level have turned a truly black and leftist activists. the face of widespread public attention, blind eye to the overwhelming evidence What saved Jamal from execution last Sabo's actions were serving to tear off of Jamal's innocence. The prisons lock up year was the powerful wave of protest the veil of "impartiality" which is central fighters for black freedom like Jamal and that broke out on his behalf around the to the myth of "blind" bourgeois justice. Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). All of these are world. As we wrote last year in the PDC Many liberals and reformists. who the essential components of the capitalist pamphlet The Frame-Up of Mumia Ahu­ joined the campaign to save Mumia's life state, which is not some "neutral" body Jamal: buy into the illusion that the capitalist but exists to administer the exploitation of "In Clinton/Gingrich's America, what court system can dispense "justice" for the working class by the handful of rulers possibility is there for a valiant fighter who own the wealth of society. From the against oppression like Mumia Abu­ Jamal. Thus, many of them have focused Jamal to find justice in the criminal court on the call for a "fair trial," which they very origins of the U.S., when black system? ... argue would necessarily result in either a enslavement was enshrined in the U.S. "Jamal should not have spent a day in reversal of the 1982 verdict or the voiding Constitution, racial oppression has been , jail in the firstplace, and he should not of the death sentence. A more "radical" built. into the foundations of American be in prison now. He should be allowed economic and social life, enforced by to join his family and to join all those take on this position is offered by Refuse who seek and struggle for a society in & Resist activists, who showed up in the deadly cop terror. At the summit of this which there will be no racist frame-ups Philadelphia court last week with buttons apparatus of racist repression is the and legal lynchings. While Jamal's law­ reading "Sabo Must Go." But then what? institutionalized barbarism of the death yers pull every possible legal lever to , Jamal's defense team has rightly penalty. win his freedom, what's urgently needed is to mobilize millions of workers and called for Sabo's recusal from the case. Mumia Abu-Jamal was targeted by the the oppressed worldwide to demand: But as Rachel Wolkenstein, who is state for death from the time he was a Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the also counsel for the Partisan Defense young leader of the Philadelphia Black racist death penalty!" _

Funds are urgently needed for legal defense! Make a contribution today to the Bill of Rights Foundation (earmarked "Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Defense") and mail it to: Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Ja 163 Amsterdam Ave., No. 115, New York, NY 10023-5001

Organize protest! Pass motions demanding Jamal's freedom in your unions, campus, community and church organizations. Get your union or organization to make a contribution and join rallies and protests for Jamal. Publicize Jamal's case in your union or organization's newsletter. Spread the word! Class-Struggle Defense Notes No. 22 centers on the struggle to save Jamal, and the PDe pamphlet, The Frame-Up of Mumia Abu­ Jamal, exposes in detail the prosecution'S case of lies, the coercion of witnesses and the FBI's eOINTELPRO terror cam­ paign against Mumia and the Black Pan­ ther Party ($1 for both). Order bundles of either publication; 25 copies for $10. The PDC video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, can be purchased for $30 from the address below.

Partisan Defense Committee, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013 • (212) 406-4252 38 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 648,5 July /996

Black Churches" Torched Across the South Mobilize Labor/Black Power· to Smash Racist Terror! The epidemic of church burnings sweeping the South has provoked revul­ sion and outrage among wide layers of the population and is rightly seen as a deadly threat by every black person in the country. In the past 18 months, scores of Southern black churches have been burned down in suspicious circum­ stances. In ten of these cases, the night­ riders underlined their message of race­ hatred by setting the fires around Martin Luther King Day. A number of other burned churches had integrated congre­ gations of black and white believers, making them symbols of "race-mixing" in the eyes of racist terrorists like the Klan. This wave of terror recalls the tar­ geting of black churches during the civil rights movement, such as the infamous 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. It is patently obvious that white­ supremacist organizations, feeding off the climate of racist attacks on blacks and minorities, are involved in a large number of these attacks. A case in; point was the torching last summer of the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina NB News and the Macedonia Church in nearby North Carolina church in flames, one of scores of Southern bJack churches Bloomville. Just before the fires, a Klan torched in past 18 months. rally near the Macedonia Church singled out black churches as places where peo­ while, the KKK has recently raised its Furthermore, as the frequency of ple learned how to get on welfare. A ugly head in several Northern cities. church burnings rises, more and more KKK flyer depicting a hooded Klansman The racists burning down black denials are heard from government and a skull and crossbones was tacked to churches are out to destroy what remains spokesmen that there is any widespread the church door. After the fires, the Klan of the limited rights gained by blacks in "conspiracy" involved. Obviously, we opened a storefront recruiting center in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and have no way of knowing if all the burn­ Greeleyville. '60s. After resisting pressures for months ings of these often old, ramshackle The escalating wave of racist terror is from the NAACP and other black buildings were the result of racist arson. not restricted to the South or to churches. groups, Clinton and his "Justice" Depart­ But the sharp rise in the number of black Last December, three Nazi skinheads ment last month formed a special federal churches burned in the past 18 months is from the U.S. Army's elite 82nd Airborne task force to investigate the church burn­ undeniable. According to the Center for Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina ings, cynically aimed at securing his Democratic Renewal, there were an aver­ wantonly gunned down a black couple in hold on the black vote in the November age of eight burnings per year of South­ nearby Fayetteville. In May, a lynch mob elections. But for months, even as the ern black churches between 1990 and attack led by an off-duty cop in West­ number of black churches burned down 1994. That number increased to 18 in hampton, Long Island almost killed a soared, the leaders of both capitalist par­ 1995. And so far this year, some three young black man, Shane Daniels. Mean- ties maintained'a studious silence. dozen black churches have been torched, Federal Government-No Friend of Labor, Blacks, Poor,

1111111 nil III I 39 even as the overall number of church fires in the U.S. has been declining. Imagine the immediate outcry there would have been if scores of white churches were being reduced to cinders! From the', moment federal·' agents' moved in, they made it clear that their "investigation" :was directed, at.. .the vic­ tims! Pastors w.ere accused ·'Of torching their own churches and forced to take lie detector tests while entire congregations were fingerprinted. Bishop Melvin Tal­ bert,president of the National Council 'Of Churches (NCC), ,declared: "Without exception, the victims of these hate crimes said they felt intimidated by the very forces they had hoped would provide them with protection." In fact, the FBI and other, federal police agencies are racist to the core: the, Bureau of Alcohol, Donna Binder/Impact i I Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) had to Integrated congregation of burned Little Zion Baptist Church in Boligee, remOVl!1;two agents from Clinton's federal Alabama. Klan killers target "race-mixing." task force when it Came out that they had attended a Klan-infested "Good 01' Boys ultimately directed against minorities Janet Reno, the BATF and the FBI incin­ Roundup" last summer, in Tennessee. and working people. erated 86 men" women and children of the Black community leaders and liber­ Today, many black leaders are calling , racially integrated Branch Davidian reli­ als applauded a bill extending federal for greater federal intervention in the' gious sect outside Waco, Texas! authority to investigate and .prosecute South. "If it means the National Guard, so The way to fight race-terror is not church burnings which w.as unanimously be it," declared Mac Charles Jones of the through suicidal appeals for federal inter­ passed in Congress. But a look at its National Council of Churches. "If it vention in the South., The fight against sponsors makes it clear this, legislation " means declaring a' state of emergency, so racial oppression and for black freedom has nothing to do with fighting raoist ter­ be it." Such illusions in,' the "democratic" must be taken up by the only force that ror. A co-sponsor of the House· bill is credentials of the U8. ruling class are can win, the multiracial working class. right-wing Republican Henry Hyde­ truly suicidal. To see what a military The working class has a vested interest in who has spearheaded the assault, on wel­ "state of emergency" would mean' for smashing the Klan-the race-terrorists fare and abortion rights-joined by black black people, look at the National are not 'Only implacably hostile to black Democrat "John Conyers. In the Senate, Guard's indiscriminate gunning down·of rights, but ,are also deadly enemies of liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy joined 'black residents of the Watts area of L.A., labor.This was demonstrated last summer hands with, 'die-hard racist Republican , Detroit, and other cities when black anger when .the KKK burned ,a cross, outside an Lauch Faircloth. Such legislation, like all exploded in the ghetto revolts of the late Alabama poultry processing plant on, the moves ,to strengthen police powers, is 1960s,And don't forget that Bill Clinton, eve ,of a;,union recognition vote. ,As the New York Labor Black League for Social Defense" affiliated with the Spartacist League, dedared in a,June 16 leaflet following the attack on ,Shane Daniels: "The key is revolutionary leadership. To achieve any real victories, provide decent jobs, quality education, health care for all and a futUre for the working people and impoverished ghetto masses requires a fight to break the ties that bind the , unions to the two ruling-classparties, the Democrats and the Republicans. To put a stop to the system that breeds lynch mobs, to avenge all the victims of racist terror, we need to forge a revolutionary workers party, that will. uni te all. workers -black, white, Asian and Hispanic-to sweep away this racist, corrupt capitalist system and build an egalitarian socialist society." Racist Rulers Wage War o~ Black Masses . ~' ; \.~..',' " With the restoration of capitalism in , " . Young ist East Europe and the forri1et Soviet Union, . ' National Guard mobilized against str.klng black sanItation workers In Memphis, the ruling class has' been emooldened'to . 1968. Reliance on federal troops to protect black rights is suicidal. drive back social gains which were won 41 fourteen Klan groups and headed one state organization. At one time in 1965. nearly two thousand of the FBI­ estimated ten thousand Klan members were its own informers." These agents and "informers" acted as loyal dual agents of both organizations. keeping the feds well informed of Klan activity while perpetrating race-terror. The same interpenetration of federal security forces and fascist terror squads was manifested in the November 1979 massacre of five leftists at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro. North Carolina. From the outset the government aided and abetted the KKK/Nazi death squad. from the BATF agent who helped Jrain the killers and plot the assassinations. to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade going to the murder site. to the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. Nevertheless. Sam Marcy's Workers World Party now ca11s for its own ver­ sion,of federal intervention in response New York Times to the church burnings. moaning that Memorial at 16th Street Baptist Church In Birmingham commemorating four Clinton's actions are "not enough" and young girls murdered in 1963 bombing. Heinous bombing was engineered by that the· KKK must be "disarmed" and FBI's Klan "Informant" Gary Rowe. "outlawed" (Workers World. 20 June). Crying for federal marshals or calling to instill in the workers movement the cru­ (SNCC), then the main organization of "Ban the Klan" plays right into the hands cial understanding that the police, army young civil rights activists in the South. of the main 'enemy. the racist ruling and state bureaucracy could not'be made raised the slogan of "black power" in class. Moreover. "anti-terrorist" laws to work in the interests of the exploited, defIance of both the white liberal estab­ supposedly directed against the fascists but had to be smashed. lishment and King and the black invariably end up being used againstthe preachers. left and labor movement. We fight in­ For Organized Self-Defense We wrote at the time: "The concepts stead to mobilize the power of the labor Against Racist Terror! implied in the SNCC slogan of 'Black movement to keep the KKK/Nazis off Self-defense against racist terror is Power' are radical enough to have caused the streets. as· we have in a number of and was a burning necessity for the black the bourgeois press and politicians to united-front actions from~ Detroit in 1979 movement in the South. An example was shower vicious abuse on it. precisely to Springfield. Illinois in i 1994. When the set in 1959 in Monroe, North Carolina because the slogan is a groping for solu­ Klan tried to stage a race-hate provoca­ by Robert F. Williams, whose courage in tions outside the framework of the capi­ tion in Atlanta in 1989. the Partisan De­ organizing armed self-defense against talist society" ("SNCC and Revolution," fense Committee and Spartacist League the Klan earned him the enmity of the Spartacist No.8. November-December built a 3.000-strong labor/black mobi­ liberal NAACP. which disowned him 1966). We sought to give the slogan of lization based on the support of area even as the FBI hounded him ,out of the "black power" and the underlying mood unions and community organizations. country. He found refuge first in Castro's of militancy a working-class axis around In response. the state and local authori­ Cuba and then in Mao's China. such demands as unionization of South­ ties unleashed a literal army of cops At the time, Williams was an exception ern labor, mobilizing the power of labor . and National Guardsmen to protect the among civil rights activists,! who gener­ to defend against racist terror, and a fascists. ally adhered to the program of "nonvio­ break with the Democrats to form a As Marxists. we understand that the lence" preached by King and his SCLC. Freedom-Labor Party. state is an instrument of oppression of However, the movement was -radicalized In the mid-1960s, black militants in one class by another, "an engine of class by, among other factors, repeated federal Lowndes County, Alabama associated despotism"in the words of Marx and interventions under liberal Democrat with SNCC did break with the Demo­ Engels. In the final analysis, the bour~ John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon John­ cratic Party of the racist ruling class and, geois state consists of special bodies of son against black struggle. The organiza­ openly advocating armed self-defense, armed men-the military. police and tion of armed self-defense against the set up the Black Panther Party. In prison guards-which serve to defend KKK took a significant. step forward in response, the feds framed up the SNCC private property and guarantee unfettered 1964 with the rise of the. Louisiana-based leaders on a gamut of phony charges­ exploitation of the working class. The Deacons for Defense and Justice, which arson, conspiracy, criminal syndicalism. true nature of the state is revealed with soon spread to Mississippi and Ala­ Inspired by the Lowndes County organi­ brutal. swift and deadly force when the bama (see "Toward Arming the Negro zation, black radicals in the North set up capitalist class feels its rule is chal­ Struggle," Spartacist No.5, November­ the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, lenged by a revolt of workers and other December 1965). In 1966 the Student centered in California and extending to oppressed. Marx and Engels sought to Nonviolent Coordinating Committee various Northern cities. It was in good 41

fourteen Klan groups and headed one state organization. At one time in 1965. nearly two thousand of the FBI­ estimated ten thousand Klan members were its own informers." These agents and "informers" acted as loyal dual agents of both organizations. keeping the feds well informed of Klan activity while perpetrating race-terror. The same interpenetration of federal security forces and fascist terror squads was manifested in the November 1979 massacre of five leftists at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro. North Carolina. From the outset the government aided and abetted the KKK/Nazi death squad. from the BATF agent who helped Jrain the killers and plot the assassinations. to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade going to the murder site. to the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. Nevertheless. Sam Marcy's Workers World Party now ca11s for its own ver­ sion,of federal intervention in response New York Times to the church burnings. moaning that Memorial at 16th Street Baptist Church In Birmingham commemorating four Clinton's actions are "not enough" and young girls murdered in 1963 bombing. Heinous bombing was engineered by that the· KKK must be "disarmed" and FBI's Klan "Informant" Gary Rowe. "outlawed" (Workers World. 20 June). Crying for federal marshals or calling to instill in the workers movement the cru­ (SNCC), then the main organization of "Ban the Klan" plays right into the hands cial understanding that the police, army young civil rights activists in the South. of the main 'enemy. the racist ruling and state bureaucracy could not'be made raised the slogan of "black power" in class. Moreover. "anti-terrorist" laws to work in the interests of the exploited, defIance of both the white liberal estab­ supposedly directed against the fascists but had to be smashed. lishment and King and the black invariably end up being used againstthe preachers. left and labor movement. We fight in­ For Organized Self-Defense We wrote at the time: "The concepts stead to mobilize the power of the labor Against Racist Terror! implied in the SNCC slogan of 'Black movement to keep the KKK/Nazis off Self-defense against racist terror is Power' are radical enough to have caused the streets. as· we have in a number of and was a burning necessity for the black the bourgeois press and politicians to united-front actions from~ Detroit in 1979 movement in the South. An example was shower vicious abuse on it. precisely

to Springfield. Illinois in i 1994. When the set in 1959 in Monroe, North Carolina because the slogan is a groping for solu­ Klan tried to stage a race-hate provoca­ by Robert F. Williams, whose courage in tions outside the framework of the capi­ tion in Atlanta in 1989. the Partisan De­ organizing armed self-defense against talist society" ("SNCC and Revolution," fense Committee and Spartacist League the Klan earned him the enmity of the Spartacist No.8. November-December built a 3.000-strong labor/black mobi­ liberal NAACP. which disowned him 1966). We sought to give the slogan of lization based on the support of area even as the FBI hounded him ,out of the "black power" and the underlying mood unions and community organizations. country. He found refuge first in Castro's of militancy a working-class axis around In response. the state and local authori­ Cuba and then in Mao's China. such demands as unionization of South­ ties unleashed a literal army of cops At the time, Williams was an exception ern labor, mobilizing the power of labor . and National Guardsmen to protect the among civil rights activists,! who gener­ to defend against racist terror, and a fascists. ally adhered to the program of "nonvio­ break with the Democrats to form a As Marxists. we understand that the lence" preached by King and his SCLC. Freedom-Labor Party. state is an instrument of oppression of However, the movement was -radicalized In the mid-1960s, black militants in one class by another, "an engine of class by, among other factors, repeated federal Lowndes County, Alabama associated despotism"in the words of Marx and interventions under liberal Democrat with SNCC did break with the Demo­ Engels. In the final analysis, the bour~ John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon John­ cratic Party of the racist ruling class and, geois state consists of special bodies of son against black struggle. The organiza­ openly advocating armed self-defense, armed men-the military. police and tion of armed self-defense against the set up the Black Panther Party. In prison guards-which serve to defend KKK took a significant. step forward in response, the feds framed up the SNCC private property and guarantee unfettered 1964 with the rise of the. Louisiana-based leaders on a gamut of phony charges­ exploitation of the working class. The Deacons for Defense and Justice, which arson, conspiracy, criminal syndicalism. true nature of the state is revealed with soon spread to Mississippi and Ala­ Inspired by the Lowndes County organi­ brutal. swift and deadly force when the bama (see "Toward Arming the Negro zation, black radicals in the North set up capitalist class feels its rule is chal­ Struggle," Spartacist No.5, November­ the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, lenged by a revolt of workers and other December 1965). In 1966 the Student centered in California and extending to oppressed. Marx and Engels sought to Nonviolent Coordinating Committee various Northern cities. It was in good 42

measure to suppress such movements that the bourgeois rulers began pushing their drive for gun control-echoed by pacifists and reformists-which is aimed at disarming workers and minorities. The militant Panthers took the full brunt of the FBI's COINTELPRO mur­ der conspiracy. Through nearly 300 FBI operations against black groups in the late 1960s and early I 970s-233 of them against the Panthers alone-virtually every militant black leader was either physically eliminated or slammed in jail. Former Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) is still in prison. framed up'for a murder which the government knows he did not commit. The Panthers represented the most radical-expression of black militancy in Norfolk longshoremen march against segregation, for school busing In 1983. this period. However. they remained con­ Labor movement must champion black rights. fined within the self-defeating frame­ work of ghetto-based black national.ism. finish the Civil War through socialist Southwest. The number of factory work­ glorifying "Iumpen rage" while rejecting revolution. ers in North and South Carolina, taken the racially integrated working class as The KKK is likewise a product of the together, is now greater than in any state the central- agency for social revolution. betrayal of Reconstruction by the North­ in the union except California. Concen­ The Panthers' own political shortcom­ ern capitalists. who after the Civil War trations of integrated industrial workers, ings and the feds' murderous· vendetta­ became the senior partners of the white along with predominantly black ILA wiping out a whole generation of radical Southern landowners and businessmen. longshore and other unions in the South, black leaders-helped bring to the fore Formed in the South by former Confed­ can be the basis for organized workers such a misleader as Louis Farrakhan,' an erate officers, its purpose was the defense guards against the nightriders anti-woman. anti-Semitic bigot ""and destruction of black rights through the and strikebreakers. preacher of "black capitalism" who lynch ropes and torches of white racist The labor tops, with their cringing speaks for those who dream of becoming mobs. The Klan was revived in 1915 acceptance of the bosses' rules-like the the exploiters of "their" people. Far­ with the lynching of an Atlanta Jew, Leo anti-union Taft-Hartley law-are utterly rakhan's Million Man March last year Frank. The fascist terrorists of the KKK incapable of unionizing the growing was a reactionary , appeasement of the are not only implacably hostile to black ranks of industrial workers in the South. racist rulers. laying the blame for condi­ rights and equality; they are also deadly As we stated over a decade ago in the tions in the ghettos on the "personal enemies of working-class struggle. WV special supplement "Labor's Gotta responsibility" of black men and,calling In the South, more so than in other Play Hardball to Win" (March 1984): on them to "atone." regions of the country, it is especially "To organize the open shop South. for clear that the support of the pro-capitalist example, will mean pitched battles with Finish the Civil War! union bureaucracy and black liberals to the Ku Klux Klan and cracker sheriffs. Can anyone imagine the AFL-CIO tops The texture of Southern society was the Democratic Party perpetuates violent involved in, much less leading. this kind formed by the betrayal of Radical racist oppression and the brutal exploita­ of fight? In white racist America the fate Reconstruction (symbolized by the Com­ tion of the working class. A campaign to of organized labor and the oppressed promise of 1877) following the Civil unionize the South in the late I 940s, black masses is closely bound together. War. In the decades following 1877, the called "Operation Dixie," failed because The bureaucracy's accommodation to the racist status quo set the stage for the political and civil rights accorded blacks the union tops would not combat the local union-busting offensive of the Reagan in the aftermath of the' Civil War were Dixiecrat regimes, with their cracker years. And there will be no effective progressively stripped away. And while sheriffs, Iynch-~aw "justice" and nightrid­ defense against this union-busting unless the Civil War destroyed chattel slavery, ing Klansmen. In the subsequent decades, the labor movement becomes a powerful blacks were left economically disenfran­ the AFL-CIO bureaucracy made no seri­ champion of black rights." chised as virtual serfs. toiling as impov­ ous attempt, to organize the large and For this perspective to become a reality erished sharecroppers and rural laborers growing industrial working class in the will mean a sharp political struggle to under the boot of white landowners. region into racially integrated trade oust the sellout labor lieutenants of capi­ Black people constitute an oppressed unions. tal, forging instead a militant, anti-racist race-color caste integrated into American As a consequence, the South has not and anti-capitalist leadership within the society while forcibly segregated at the only remained a bastion of political reac­ unions as part of the fight to build a revo­ bottom of it. The fight for black libera­ tion but has increasingly become a lutionary workers party. As long as capi­ tion, a central question of the American sphere for the superexploitation of labor talism remains, fascist murderers like the revolution. can only be resolved through by American as well as foreign capital. A Klan and Nazis will be coddled and even the program of revolutionary integra­ major factor behind the gutting of the cultivated by the bourgeois rulers, who tionism. requiring the overthrow of the union movement ,in this country over the hold the nightriders in reserve for capitalist system by the working class past few decades is the massive transfer defense of their profits and property. standing at the head of all the oppressed. of industry from the North and Midwest Socialist revolution is the only road to This is why we say that it is necessary to to the "open shop," low-wage South and black freedom .•

'1,"'-----, , .. _ , 43 reprintedJromWorkers Vanguard No. 655,8 November 1996

Robert F. Williams died last month in Orand Rapids, Michi­ gan at the age of 71. Today, his name is little known among black people as a whole or among young activists fighting racial oppression. Yet at a critical moment in modern American history, in the early to mid- 1960s, Robert Williams, like Malcolm x, personified black militancy. By deed and by word, Williams, the author of Negroes with Guns, did much to break' a generation of young civil rights activists from their liberal illu­ sions in American "democracy" at home and U.S. imperialism abroad. And in doing so, he be­ came a target for repression by the capitalist state. Robert Franklin Williams was born in 1925, the son of a boiler­ maker, in Monroe, North Caro-' lina. During World War II, still a teenager, he was drawn along with millions of other Southern blacks into booming war indus~ Militant tries in the North where the acute labor shortage opened up jobs' that had previously been closed· to . them. Williams was later· '. Courageous Fighter drafted into the army, but the war ended before he was shipped overseas. Nonetheless, his brief experience in the armed forces Against Racist Terror awakened him to the yawning gulf between the democratic pre­ tensions of the American govern- ment . and the reality of the pervasive In 1955 in his hometown of Monroe, whole NAACP because of working class racism in the U.S. Williams joined the National Association composition and a leadership that was Wanting an education, Williams used for the Advancement of Colored People not middle class." - Nefvoes withGuns (1962) his benefits under the 0.1. Bill to attend (NAACP). The local chapter was a tiny a number of Southern colleges, which organization made up mostly of black This in itself marked quite a ,radical dif­ Jere, of course, segregated at that time. middle-class professionals, "teachers and ference from the traditional political When the benefits ran out, he had to quit preachers." They elected Williams presi­ organization of a black Southern com­ college and look for work. He found it dent, mainly so that they themselves munity. Even more radical changes were 'difficult to make a decent living in a would not be. in the main line of fire of soon to follow. country where black men were prover­ white racist retaliation. However, the bially "the last hired and the first fired." boilermaker's son and ex-Marine refused Organizing Black Self-Defense 'When the Korean War broke out in the . to play by the accepted rules for Southern Williams joined the NAACP ata time early 1950s, Williams decided to enlist in black community leaders. In his own when mass black protest was erupting the Marines, not out of patriotism but words: throughout the South against legalized' because thearmed forces offered him bet­ segregation, the so-called Jim Crow sys­ "One day I walk'ed into 'a'Negro pool· ter economic opportunities than he had in room in our town, interrupted a game by tem. A main target for desegregation in civilian life. However, his outspoken putting NAACP literature on the table Monroe was the town'5 only public swim­ opposition to racism in the Marine Corps and made a pitch. I recruited half of ming pool, which only whites could use. antagonized his white officers and after a those present. This got our chapter off to Black children had to swim in local year he was given a "dishonorable dis­ a new start. We began a recruiting drive creeks, where some drowned. The pros­ , among laborers, farmers, domestic work· charge." This bitter experience impelled .ers, the unemployed and any and all pect of an integrated swimming pool Williams into political struggle, which Negro people in the area. We ended up touched the very core of racist pathology would dominate the rest of his life. with a chapter· that was unique in the in the South-"race-mixing," particularly 44

the fear that white women might become sexually attracted to black males. Klans­ men from the surrounding area descended Journal anh~uibe on Monroe to protect the racial "purity" of the swimming pool. Motorcades of Klansmen, firing out of their car win­ dows, sped through black neighborhoods. Williams and his supporters responded in a way hitherto unheard of for a South­ ern black organization. They organized a defense guard, many of whose members were veterans of the armed forces. These were people, as Williams put it, "who didn't scare easy." The first encounter, in 1957, between the guard and the Klan is Armed black described by Robert Carl Cohen in his self-defense guards In Monroe, biography of Williams, Black Crusader North Carolina (1972): beat back Klan "The Klansmen had driven into the attack in 1957. Black areas to terrorize them, but when they suddenly found themselves sur­ Marzani & Munsell rounded by armed Blacks they started smashing into each other's cars in a for being kissed by a white girl in weaken our resolve in order to placate rush to get away. Instead of acting like the infamous North Carolina "Kissing their racist employers." At one point the 'n[ -----]s,' hiding in their houses with the shutters closed and the lights out, the Case." This, too, offended the "moder­ national leadership of the NAACP sus­ Blacks were roaming the streets with ate" NAACP national leadership, which pended him from the organization for guns, shooting out the tires of the KKK initially refused to come to the defense "advocating violence." Yet the effect of cars, shattering their windshields with of the children because it was deemed a these political attacks on a man who had buckshot, and beating up those racists "sex case"! stood up to Klan violence was to enhance who tried to escape on foot. "While there were no reports of anyone The effectiveness of Williams' actions Williams' .authority among blacks who being killed or badly wounded. the Klan in Monroe between 1957 and 1961 was a were beginning to revolt against King's suffered a severe defeat." powerful answer to the argument by lib­ "turn the other cheek" pacifism and Williams' efforts in organiZIng armed erals and reformists that for blacks to Wilkins' groveling before the white racist self-defense against.racist terror.blazed a resort to armed self-defense could only ruling class. trail for others active in the struggle for be suicidal adventurism. The Spartacist black rights in the South., One example League originated in that period as the Taking Refuge in was the formation of the Deacons for Revolutionary Tendency in the Socialist Castro's Cuba Defense and Justice, which originated in Workers Party, in opposition to the Since neither the KKK nightriders nor Louisiana in 1964 as an armed defense SWP's centrist departure from Trotsky~ the "respectable" black leaders could guard for civil rights workers. ism, marked by its adulation of the Sta­ stop Williams, this country's racist ruling Those too young to have lived through linist Castro regime in Cuba and its capit­ class resorted to its ultimate weapon: the the civil rights movementc,an"scarcely ulation to black nationalism. The RT armed power of the state. In the summer appreciate the dramatic impact of what fought for the SWP to intervene in the of 1961, Monroe became a major focus Williams and his supporters we're doing civil rights struggle with a Marxist pro­ of the Freedom Rides, a South-wide in Monroe. All of the major black organ­ gram, raising a series of demands which campaign to integrate restaurants and izations, those sections of the Demo­ would challenge the bourgeois order, other public facilities. Thousands of cratic and Republican parties which gave including: "For organized self-defense Klansmen and other white-supremacists, lip-service to black equality, the mass movements in southern cities-for the many from out of state, converged on media-all were preaching incessantly tactics of Robert F. Williams" ("The Monroe, savagely attacking the Freedom that "nonviolent resistance" was the only Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leader­ Riders and any local black people they acceptable way for blacks to oppose ship" [August 1963], reprinted in "What got their hands on. racist oppression, police brutality and Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotsky­ As the white racists were rioting in Klan terror. Martin Luther King Jr. was ism vs. Black Nationalism," Marxist downtown Monroe, an elderly white cou­ already being elevated to the status of Bulletin No.5 (Revised]). ple happened to mistakenly drive into sainthood among blacks and white liber­ Williams faced not only open and the black neighborhood. Their car was als. Thus it took not only physical cou­ declared enemies in the KKK but also stopped by angry blacks who took them rage but also great moral courage for insidious enemies on his "own" side, for Klan supporters. Williams intervened Robert Williams to openly organize those whom Malcolm X called "the and escorted the couple into his house to black self-defense in defiance of King, white man's puppet Negro 'leaders'." protect them as angry blacks were de­ the NAACP's Roy Wilkins and the other National and state officials of the NAACP fending themselves against whites who "official" leaders of the civil rights attacked Williams for supposedly pro­ roared past with guns blazing. At this movement. voking racist violence and for running a point, he got a phone call from the local In late 1958, Williams played a cen­ "personal dictatorship" in Monroe. To chief of police, who threatened Williams tral role, along with radical black attor­ this hereplied: "The bourgeois elements that in 30 minutes he would be hanging ney Conrad Lynn, in defending David who have complained about me aren't in the courthouse square. Simpson and Hanover Thompson, two offering constructive, alternative ways to Fearing for his life, Williams and his young black children charged with rape end segregation. Their sole purpose is to family fled Monroe using back roads and

I.~------~------45 made their way North. The FBI now got Although Williams was treated well Leninist" posture. Under the guns of into the act, as Williams was charged in China, he keenly felt the distance murderous FBI/cop repression, some with kidnapping the white couple whom from his homeland, then in the throes of Panther leaders, like Bobby Seale and he had, in fact, rescued from a nasty situ­ mass black radicalization. In 1969, Wil­ Eldridge Cleaver, soon sold out to the ation. After living underground for sev­ liams decided to return to the United white racist rulers while some, like Huey eral months, Williams and his family States despite the legal threat hanging Newton, dropped out of politics. Others, managed to get to· Cuba. In the face of over him. North Carolina authorities like Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) and Mumia unremitting U.S. imperialist hostility in attempted to extradite him from Michi­ Abu-Jamal, were framed up and thrown the aftermath of the 1959 overthrow of gan, where he had settled, on the old kid­ into prison .. In the climate of growing the corrupt Batista dictatorship by Cas­ napping charges. This entailed a court racist reaction of the late 1970s-'80s, tro's petty-bourgeois guerrilla forces, in battle lasting several years. Finally, the Williams remained a principled cham­ 1960-61 the Castro regime expropriated charges were dropped. In the course of pion of black rights. He involved himself the domestic and foreign capitalists. Wil­ defending him at the time, Workers Van­ in a wide range of causes, and consis­ liams had previously visited Castro's guard ran an interview with Williams, tently supported united-front laborlblack Cuba, where he was "made to feel that I publicizing his activities in Monroe mobilizations which were initiated and was a member of the human race for the (see "Black Self-Defense and the Civil organized by the Spartacist League and first time in my life." Rights Movement," WV No. 92, 16 Janu­ Partisan Defense Committee against the Shortly after Williams and his family ary 1976). Klan, Nazis and other racist terrorists. fled to Cuba, an independent left-wing At the time Williams fled to Cuba, he Like other black radicals of the 1960s, publishing company, Marzani & .Mun­ had been in the vanguard of black mili­ Williams' political consciousness was sell, brought out Negroes with Guns, tancy. When he returned eight years shaped by the deep and deepening racial Williams' account of his experiences in later, his views had become far more divide in American society, which he Monroe and his general political views. widely accepted among black activists, regarded as unchangeable. While in From Cuba he continued to publish the finding their most significant organiza­ Havana, he expressed the opinion to a Crusader, a newsletter he had begun in tional expression in the Black Panther senior Cuban official that as long as North Carolina. And through Castro's Party for Self-Defense. Furthermore, by white workers "have jobs and can buy personal intervention, Williams was given a radio program, Radio Free Dixie, with which to broadcast his message of "Moderate" civil rights leader Martin Luther WANTED FSHi King Jr. hobnobbed with Robert Kennedy black liberation back into the United anlalTAft ...... T - K_AIIIMe States. _MIRY nANKUN WILLIAMS and Democratic president Lyndon Johnson while Robert F. Williams was in exile In Williams' activities in Havana were in Cuba to escape FBI vendetta. their own way just as significant as his work in Monroe. The liberal idealistic youth-black and white-who rallied to the civil rights movement were still largely imbued with the anti-Communist ~.~ ... -.>~. attitudes of the Cold War/McCarthyite .. M ...... ' .. , ... .,.,,', •• ,.,".,.... period of the 1950s. That a man of Williams' background and experience, who had never professed a belief in Com­ munism, could find in Castro's Cuba not only a refuge from U.S. government per­ secution but also a platform to attack racist American society helped dispel such anti-Communist prejudices. Ameri­ can radicals who visited Cuba at this time could look forward to meeting and talking with Robert Williams, an interesting and rewarding experience. In the mid-1960s, Castro's Cuba, fol­ lowing the lead of the Brezhnev regime in the late 1960s it was common for Ameri­ automobiles and homes, they've no real the USSR, its main protector, was push­ can radicals of the most diverse tenden­ reason to rise up against the capitalists. ing for better relations with Washington cies to claim the authority of "Marxism­ Only those, like us Blacks, who are the in the name of "detente." Williams' scath­ Leninism" for whatever program they victims of severe economic discrimina­ ing attacks on liberal Democrats and 'espoused. tion and racism, have the motivation to mainstream black leaders like King thus Williams was a mature activist who want to overthrow the system" (quoted in became an embarrassment for the Cuban was not concerned with political trendi­ Black Crusader). The idea that in the Stalinist regime. Cuban officials began to ness.' Though he was always willing to course of class struggle white workers obstruct his activities and demanded that work with communists, he described could overcome their racist prejudices they be allowed to censor his newsletter 'himself as a "revolutionary black nation­ and recognize their common interests and radio program. Fed up with battling alist" but not a Marxist. This ideological with blacks was alien to Williams' the Cuban bureaucracy, in 1966 Williams position limited Williams' influence outlook. Yet within the limits of that out­ went to China where'the Mao Zedong among the most left-wing black militants look, Robert F. Williams was a heroic regime was still posturing as a militant in the early 1970s, but it was more seri­ and honorable fighter against black opponent of American imperialism. ously held than the Panthers' "Marxist- oppression .• reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 652, 27 September 1996

...ra'·i: ..... :' Enslaving the Poor, Busting the Unions

On September 18, the New York City A lot of the TWU ranks understand Transit Authority (TA) and the Transport the danger of the latest contract proposal, Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 lead­ and they're making that clear at ,angry ership announced a new contract pro­ meetings in subway barns and bus depots posal in which hundreds of unionized around the city. But they also know that cleaners will be replaced by desperately they can expect nothing from the union poor welfare recipients forced into slave­ tops. From Sonny Hall and Willie James labor "workfare." This betrayal by the on, up to the "new voice" AFL-CIO Local 100 tops is not only a vicious leadership of John Sweeney and their attack on overwhelmingly minority wel­ predecessors, the labor, bureaucracy has ruin. The question is one of life or death fare recipients but is a dagger pointed presided over and pushed through large­ of the only creative and, progressive straight at. the heart of the TWU-and all scale destruction of jobs, massive c,utsin class, and by that token, of the future of NYC municipal unions. real wages and the dec.imation of the ma~ki~d. If capitalism is incapable of In reporting the "workfare" deal, the unions themselves. Now the union mis­ satisfYing the d~~ands inevitably ari~ing leaders have also taken on the role of from the calamities generated by itself New York Times carried a front-page then let it perish." " feature on Local 100 president Willie overseers for the capitalist rulers' union­ James, who was recently appointed by busting slave-labor programs. Rip Up the ,Sellout! Any serious effort to be'at back the all­ TWU International president (and former James & Co. are trying to sell the pro­ Local 100 head) Sonny Hall. The Times sided attacks on workers, minorities and the poor necessarily entails a political posed contract by pointing to a purported pl'ayed up the fact that James is the "no layoffs" clause. But the agreement local's first black president and that his struggle to oust the pro-capitalist union ?ureaucracy which "demands" only what e~plicitly states that 500 cleaners' jobs mother had worked her way off welfare. Will be slashed through attrition. Particu­ This cynical "pull yourself up ,by the IS acceptable to the racist ruling class. What is required is a fight for jobs for larly in the Stations Department, where bootstraps:' them'e is constantly being hundreds of token booth clerk and other hammered at the ghetto and barrio all-for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay-and full cost-of-living escalator jobs are already threatened with elimi­ masses by America's;' racist rUlers as they natio?, ~~nageri::ient has been stepping prepare to eliminate the last shreds of clauses in union contracts. New York needs a massive program of public works up dlsclphnary actions-victimizations any social "safety net" for the poor. : -aimed at driving out workers. The new 'From the standpoint of the American at u~ion wages-for' quality, integrated housmg and schools" for free quality deal would come 'down hardest on the ruling class, ··communism is dead" and most vulnerable sectors of the TA's work­ the unions are toothless. With the union health care for all, for massive recon­ struction of roads, bridges and tunnels, force, particularly women and younger leaders acting more like low~wage labor for everything we need for a decent life. black and Hispanic workers for whom contractors than even labor lieutenants of It is necessary to demand equal pay for cleaners' positions are often the avenue capital, the capitalist rulers see no need equal work. The, city wants to bring into better-paying transit jobs. It would for "New Deal" or "Great Society" enti­ in hundreds of poor people to clean also place some TWU members 'in the tlement programs and other' "welfare the filthy subway stations? Fine. They position of being straw bosses over the state" sops tei workers, blacks and other should be hired at ,union wages with full slave-labor crews/ under a contractprovi­ minorities. Except instead of a Reagan or union protection! The TWO: should lead sion creating a new union job category of Bush leading the attacks, it's the racist, afight to,organize the unorganized! "lead cleaner" at higher pay than other cop-lovi'ng "law and order" Democrat Even to d,efend the most basic right of TWU cleaners. . Clinton, working hand in hand with Dole the working class-to a job at decent We have warned that "the widespread and Gingrich, who just consigned mil­ pay-leads directly to challenging, the creation of phony •workfare' programs , lions of babies and mothers, poor people capitalist profit system. As, revolutionary ha~ m~~nt a direct attack on municipal and immigrants, to starvation, sickness, leader Leon Trotsky wrote in the Transi­ umons (WV No. 649, 2 August). This " homeless ness and death. And the AFL­ tional Program (1938) during the devas­ could not be clearer than, with the latest CIO tops devote all their efforts and mil­ tation of the Great Depression. TWU deal. The effect of the contract lions of dollars in union funds to get "The, question is one of guarding the pro­ wou~d be to pit the union against pre­ Clinton re-elected. letanat from decay, demoralization and dommantly black and Hispanic welfare recipients. This would inflame racist gerous cutback in conductors' jobs which off thousands of nurses and other work­ reaction, which the capitalist rulers have management had sought for years. ers, and the public schools are abysmally long used to divide the working class in Some TWU members look to the overcrowded and in dangerous disrepair. order to drive down wages and increase "New Directions" caucus in Local 100 as There is plenty of seething anger among the rate of, exploitation of all workers. an opposition to the Hall/James leader­ city workers, teachers and hospital work­ The labor movement must be mobilized ship. After maintaining a stony silence ers over the state of New York City. on behalf of all the oppressed: union on the "workfare" deal in workplace But particularly in this election year, rights and black rights either march for­ meetings last week, New Directions has the labor traitors, who are shelling out ward together or fall back separately. now come out with a leaflet calling for a tens of millions of dollars for the re­ This is particularly obvious in the case "No" vote on the contract. But then election of welfare-basher Clinton, intend of Local 100, with its heavily black what? New Directions is itself an inte­ to make sure the union ranks don't do and Hispanic membership. Moreover, the gral part of the Local 100 bureaucracy, anything which could embarrass the TWU is potentially one of the most pow­ controlling a significant section of the Democrats. Reflecting pressure from out­ erful unions in the U.S. Local 100 can union executive board. They have consis­ raged union members, Stanley Hill is now shut down the finance center of Ameri­ tently cringed from calling for strikes pleading for a "moratorium" on "work­ can capitalism by stopping the subways. over past contract battles. Moreover, fare." But all the DC 37 tops can offer This puts the union in a strategic position New Directions has repeatedly hauled to back this up is a "threat" to support to fight not only for its own membership the union into the bosses' courts to settle Giuliani's Democratic opponent in next but to lead all of city labor and the mil­ what should be internal union affairs, year's NYC mayoral election. And the lions of unorganized working people and while supporting a "job action" by sadis­ public employees unions have announced minorities who are aU being slammed by tic Riker's Island prison guards. a moratorium on even their pitiful hospital closings, school cutbacks and This is a violation of the most elemen­ efforts to beg ("lobby") Congress to the axing of social services., tary principles of the labor, movement. "amend" the anti"welfare law until after The unions should be in the forefront Labor must clean its o~n !house--cops November. of organizing mass protests against the and courts out of the union movement! Labor needs a leadership that knows epidemic of cop terror in the ghettos 'and The cops and courts are central institu­ workers' interests are counterposed to barrios which accompanies the racist cut­ tions of the racist capi taUst state, which is those of their exploiters: that the Demo­ backs. The racist cops who cut down nothing other than an, apparatus of re­ crats are no "friends of labor" but repre­ black and Hispanic youth also attack pression of the work~g class and the sent the bosses just as much as the more Teamsters' and other workers' picket oppressed. The precondition for any real openly anti-union Republicans; that the lines. Labor must demand full citizenship struggle by the unions against the bosses government-with its arsenal of anti­ rights for immigrants, who have been at is the complete independence of the labor labor weapons like New York State's Tay­ the top of the government's hit list under movement from the capitalist state. New lor Law banning public workers strikes­ the anti-welfare and "counter-terrorism" Directions, like the various other refor­ is nothing but the executive committee of laws. And it is necessary to combat any mist "oppositions" within the unions, the capitalist class. The fight to mobilize manifestations of racist backwardness share the same,pro-capitalist outlook as unions and the oppressed' in struggle within the unions. In the case of the the AFL-CIO tops, squabbling only over needs a political expression: not a phony TWU, that means fighting to put a stop to the spoils of power. To transform the "Labor Party" of the sort now being the racist ethnic-baiting on the rise inside unions from secondary 'instruments of the touted by sections of the AFL-CIO transit workplaces, promoted by the TA's capitalist class for the subordination and bureaucracy, which acts as a shill for the divide-and-rule policies which pit blacks disciplining of the workers into organiza­ Democrats, but a revolutionary workers and Hispanics against Jews, South Asians tions that actually defend the interests of party. A successful fight to defend and against West Indians, and U.S.-born the working class, it is necessary to forge improve the present conditions of the workers against immigrants. This is poi­ a class-struggle leadership of the labor working class can only be waged as part son to the cause of labor! movement. of the struggle to get rid of the entire cap­ Transit workers are being told to vote italist system. on the contract by mail. This is a stan­ For a Revolutionary ','" The destruction of social welfare sys­ Workers Partyl dard procedure by the union bureaucrats .. ,', tems is occurring not only in the U.S . to diffuse anger over the sellout which City and state governments around the but around the world, as the capital­ undermines the whole purpose of the country are watching what happens with ists attempt to cut "overhead" expenses union. There should be a mass meeting the transit "workfare" agreeme~t. If a and drive down wages to sharpen their of the entire Local 100 membership to powerful union like the TWU accepts it, competitive edge against each other. But vote down the sellout and begin to pre­ then everyone else is fair game. Republi­ these policies are creating enormous pres­ pare union action against TA threats of can New York City mayor Giuliani, who sure at the base of society: people don't widespread layoffs and "privatization" of has waged his own brutal war ort the like the idea that there is no future for everything from bus maintenance to tran­ homeless and welfare recipients, reacted themselves and their kids. As Leon sit construction. angrily to the proposal because it" blew Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Pro­ The decisive question is one of leader­ the cover off the sweetheart deal cooked gram, by fighting for demands like a ship. It is clear what Hall and James up with AFSCME District Council 137 shorter workweek at no loss in pay and a have to offer-more givebacks and con­ city workers chief, Stanley Hill, which sliding scale of wages, "the workers will cessions. Before the "workfare" deal, the' pretends that union jobs will not be sacri­ best come to understand the necessity of Local 100 tops had already caved in on ficed to "workfare." The truth is that liquidating capitalist slavery." The need speed-up and safety conditions. Most more than 20,000 formerly unionized for socialist revolution to break the power recent was the beginning of "one person city jobs are now being done by "work~\' of the' corrupt, racist ruling class and train operation" (OPTO) on September 1 , fare" crews getting miserly welfare bene­ rebuild this society for the benefit of all is on selected subway lines-a deadly dan- fits. Meanwhile" city hospitals are laying, posed ever more sharply today.• "New World Order" NeocoloniaU&m in Africa

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